Darwin’s language about instinct is softer than either Schopenhauer’s or Dawkins’s. In The Descent of Man, Darwin writes, “As man possesses the same senses with the lower animals, his fundamental intuitions must be the same. Man has also some few instincts in common, as that of self-preservation, sexual love, the love of the mother for her new-born offspring, the power possessed by the latter of sucking, and so forth. But man, perhaps, has somewhat fewer instincts than those possessed by the animals which come next to him in the series.” He goes on to muse about instinct as opposed to learning. He acknowledges that apes avoid poisonous fruits but concedes that it may not be instinct that leads them to do so: “We cannot feel sure that apes do not learn from their own experience or from that of their parents what fruits to select.”169 What is instinct and what is learned is not conclusive in this passage, although Darwin distinguishes between the two.
Schopenhauer’s will to power and Darwin’s evolutionary theory both influenced Sigmund Freud, whose model of the mind included units of heredity and inborn biological drives. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud cites the contemporary idea of “germ cells” as “potentially immortal.”170 These germs, like Darwin’s gemmules and what would become the gene, travel from body to body through reproduction. Freud shared Schopenhauer’s belief in a powerful sexual instinct, and he was wholly convinced by Darwin’s arguments about evolution. He maintained that Copernicus, Darwin, and psychoanalysis had dealt formidable blows to the “self-love of men.” Copernicus taught us that we are not the center of the galaxy, Darwin that we are animals like other animals, and psychoanalysis that much of what goes on in us is wholly unknown to us, hidden in our unconscious minds.171
Freud’s drives figure prominently in his theory, and they are not the same as instincts, which he also discussed. The drives are rather loosely defined. At one point, he referred to them as “our mythology.” He never stopped insisting, however, that psychoanalysis was a “biological psychology.”172 Freud’s drives are not deterministic forces. They may be thought of as urges and needs, which in human beings are directed at other people and things in the world to find satisfaction, but whether they are thwarted or satisfied is a narrative that unfolds in relation to a particular person’s particular story. For Freud, the abstract idea of “the drives” inevitably finds a concrete and highly variable expression in the individual. Some neuroscientists have returned to Freud’s neurobiology and theories of the psyche to see how it relates to contemporary work in their discipline. Mark Solms, Karl Friston, Georg Northoff, Aikaterini Fotopoulou, Maggie Zellner, and a number of others have explored Freud’s ideas in their research, both confirming and rejecting aspects of his model of the mind or, rather, his models of the mind because Freud continually modified and altered his ideas over the course of his lifetime. These scientists are involved, to one degree or another, in the growing field of neuropsychoanalysis, founded by Solms, which hopes to link the discoveries of neuroscience, psychoanalytic theory, and the complex subjective reality of a particular person under its unique umbrella.173
In a paper called “The ‘Id’ Knows More than the ‘Ego’ Admits,” Solms and fellow neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp propose a “neuro-psycho-evolutionary vision of the emergence of mind . . . in relation to classical psychoanalytical models.”174 Freud did not question evolution, and neither do Solms and Panksepp. The human brain is the product of evolution, something the neuroscientist Paul MacLean made famous with his idea of “the triune brain.” He saw it as divided into three parts, each of which represented a moment in its evolutionary history. The oldest, lower parts of the brain he called the protoreptilian brain, the middle not-as-old parts, the paleomammalian or limbic brain, and the higher and most recently evolved part of the organ, the neocortex, the neomammalian brain.
What is meaningful for my discussion is not Solms’s and Panksepp’s complex analysis of Freud’s theories in relation to contemporary neurobiology, but rather that while fully embracing Darwin, they do not equate the brain-mind or consciousness with a physical symbol system or with mind as a technology. Rather, they root consciousness in an affective or “felt” foundation in subcortical regions of the brain and borrow Freud’s term “primary process” to describe its functions. For Freud, primary process was nonverbal, dream-like mental energy that was driven by the pleasure principle toward discharge. This process characterized the id. Freud, like most neurologists of his time, assumed that consciousness was neocortical, that it belonged to the “higher” part of our brains, the part that is most recently evolved. Therefore, Solms departs from Freud by assigning consciousness to a lower region. In Solms’s tweaked Freudian model of the mind, the id is conscious. Solms and Panksepp also make important distinctions among levels of consciousness. Like Vico, they distinguish between wakeful sensual consciousness, a consciousness that may be full of feeling but not feelings that are known as such, and higher degrees of reflective self-awareness. In this model, all mammals are conscious beings.
In her book Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics and Art, Elizabeth Grosz takes Darwin into other territory altogether. For Grosz, Darwin’s discussions of the differences in degree rather than differences in kind among species become vehicles of liberation. Our similarity to other creatures, she argues, “anticipates one of the most profound and motivating of concepts in twentieth-century thought and beyond: the idea of difference, of differences without the central organizing principle of identity.”175 In this view, the fact that Darwin did not draw rigid borders between one species and another, that evolution is by its very nature the creation of one form out of another, is what is most interesting about his work. In other words, the determinism Dawkins attributes to Darwin by adding atomistic genetics to the equation becomes its opposite in Grosz: indeterminism.
To put it in a simple way, in this view of evolution the borders between human beings and other primates or between humans and all other mammals or reptiles or any living creature are not hard and fast. Grosz takes Darwin down another philosophical road, one she explicitly identifies with the names of philosophers—Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, and Luce Irigaray. These catalysts for her thought could not be more different from those that motivated Dawkins. In these philosophies of “difference,” boundaries blur, category is destabilized, and hybrids are created. Grosz gives us the postmodern Darwin.
In a section labeled “Nature and Culture,” Grosz draws on Luce Irigaray’s feminist ideas. She explains that for Irigaray, “sexual difference is what characterizes the natural world, the multiple forms of culture, and the varieties of transition from nature to culture. This is why, for Irigaray, sexual difference is a given, not constructed.”176 Irigaray’s thought is influenced by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who directly links human subjectivity to language. Before language, there is a fragmented being but no subject. From this position, Irigaray argues that the whole Western philosophical tradition has prevented women from becoming subjects by silencing them. Moreover, she has suggested that women need a new language that is not the language of patriarchy. I have never understood exactly what that language would be, nor do I understand well what “nature” means in this thought.177 There are few feminists who would deny chromosomal difference between the sexes or that, despite the fact that some people are born with the chromosomes of one sex and the bodies of the other or born with ambiguous or intersex genitalia, or feel that they have the mind of one sex and the body of the other, most vertebrates, including human beings, are born physiologically male or female.
The agreement on the matter in feminist theory pretty much ends there. It is easy to see why. Sexual difference, including (perhaps) the ability to perform spatial rotation tasks, has meant that women are both inferior and defective. Difference has been used to argue that women are polluted, stupid, weak, chaotic, and the work of the devil. From the Greeks into the seventeenth century, female genitals
were regarded as inverted versions of male genitalia and therefore inferior. In the eighteenth century, the female body was understood as a thing wholly and completely different from the male body, and therefore inferior: female skeletons, brains, and cells, all different, and all worse. Instead of men and women as beings who are a lot more the same than different, they became polar opposites.178
The refrain Just because the sexes are fundamentally different does not mean one is superior and the other inferior is alive and well today, and it is a refrain wisely regarded with suspicion. Feminist theory has been locked in its own nature/nurture debates for years, usually framed as an argument between essentialism (women are naturally different from men and we should celebrate and think through those differences) and constructivism (women and men are different because culture or “nurture” makes them that way).179 The question “What is a woman?” has not been answered. Like so many scholars in many fields, with notable exceptions, feminists have had difficulty articulating what biology is and what it means. The fact that women have been reduced to a crude version of the biological body or to matter because they theoretically can become mothers, even if they are not mothers, in ways men never are, created an alarm about “biology” in general. In recent years, however, a number of feminist scholars in various fields, including Grosz, have taken a renewed and vigorous look at biological bodies.
Grosz’s language has a utopian ring: “We need a new, dynamized conception of nature that acknowledges that nature itself is continually changing, and thus never static or fixed, and is also a mode of production of change . . . This new conception must also recognize that nature is itself always sexed—that sexual difference marks the world of living things, plant, animal, and human—or that nature itself is at least two.”180 I couldn’t agree more that nature is dynamic, but, as she knows and mentions elsewhere in the text, it simply isn’t true that all living things are male and female or “at least two.” There is asexual reproduction in nature. Single-cell organisms—bacteria, for example—produce asexually. The technical term for reproduction without fusion of gametes is “agamogenesis.” There are citrus trees that reproduce through apomixis or budding, and some creatures, such as the sea squirt, can reproduce both sexually and asexually. Parthenogenesis, procreation without fertilization, can occur in vertebrates.
Furthermore, from an evolutionary point of view, no one knows why there are two sexes, which exist in most multicellular organisms (although the two sexes sometimes come in one body). This strange truth stumps contemporary evolutionists. Why have two sexes when it’s much more efficient just to clone yourself? There are ideas about the advantages conferred by the much more difficult route of mating, fertilization, and birth, but there is no agreement. One might argue, in opposition to Grosz, that because our primeval evolutionary cousins are asexual, our origins are sexless, not sexed. Whether this would be a meaningful or important rhetorical strategy in relation to people is another matter. It is also important to recognize that despite chromosomal differences between male and female, the human embryo is physically undifferentiated at the start. Sexual differentiation begins after six to seven weeks of gestation, and it is a process influenced by both genetic and hormonal factors.
Unlike Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, Elizabeth Grosz’s book remains securely inside the academy. She is not invested in making her views comprehensible to a nonprofessional reader. Her thought is directed at fellow academics, most of whom have already embraced social constructivism, the idea that human beings are mostly shaped by culture and language. By the end of the book, I found it hard to know what Grosz means by nature or biology, those endlessly mutating words, perhaps because her conceptions are intended to escape the fixity of definitions. There are people who are attracted to each of these views, to the soft and dynamic and to the hard and mechanical. The interesting question is why. For some people, change sounds nicer than fixity. For others, staying put is good. I daresay the notion of the fixed or programmed must be far more pleasant for those who are satisfied with their lot in the world than those who aren’t: “I can’t help it. I’m a rich, entitled, white guy, full to bursting with testosterone and hardwired for happiness. Blame my genes.”
Survival Stories
When I was a girl in Lutheran Sunday school, I had a difficult time understanding certain biblical characters. Why was I supposed to root for Jacob, who cheats his older brother Esau out of his birthright? Was I supposed to applaud the way Jacob and his mother colluded to trick the boys’ old blind father? Why wasn’t Jacob condemned in the story? Why did he win? Why was his cheating celebrated? When I questioned my teachers about this odd state of affairs, they inevitably looked embarrassed, muttered something wholly unsatisfying to me, and went on with their classes.
Years later, I came to understand that a simple principle of vivacity might be at work. The clever, wily boy who wins the game is a beloved character, and he has a long history. Odysseus and Sinbad are irresistible survivors. Today people rush out to buy memoirs written by people who were beaten by their parents or kidnapped by maniacs or succumbed to heroin addiction or fell ill with cancer or were lured into cults but triumphed over the bad and brutal in the end by sheer willpower. Dawkins’s gene may be selfish and to some degree deterministic, but when the molecule is personified, that selfishness has the admirable appearance of many a clever, heroic figure. Despite Schopenhauer’s gloomy view of humanity in general and his virulent misogyny, his ruthless will has oomph, as does Nietzsche’s later will to power. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and Defoe’s Moll Flanders are female examples of champion survivors. Jane Eyre is a later incarnation of the tough orphan who perseveres and wins in the end. In the United States, popular culture has raised the male version of this character to dramatic heights. The capitalist hero, hoisted up by his proverbial bootstraps, aggressive, selfish, but oh so clever and rich, is a winner admired by many. The late Steve Jobs of the Apple computer company is a recent example. Not a nice fellow by all accounts, but then “nice guys finish last”—to draw from the seemingly endless well of clichés on the subject.
My point here is that Dawkins’s personified gene fits an old type. I am well aware that the zoologist later rethought his adjective “selfish,” that his view of genes is not a wholly deterministic one, and that he admits in his preface to the thirtieth-anniversary edition of the book that he had not thought carefully enough about “ ‘vehicles’ (usually organisms) and the ‘replicators’ that ride inside them.”181 He also popularized the idea of memes, traveling idea bits that spread in the culture from one person to another. None of this, however, alters his essential tale of a robot waltzing, running, or just walking along the highway of life with a gene at the controls. I am posing the question again: Aside from the obvious truth that there is hereditary material in organisms, why is the metaphor of a human being as a programmed robot vehicle seductive to so many?
In The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Dawkins reveals his foundational assumptions. In the blunt form typical of him, he writes, “If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.”182 This often-quoted sentence could never have belonged to Darwin, not only because the father of evolution could not have understood information technology in the way Dawkins does, but because he did not characterize natural processes in mechanistic terms. But what exactly are Dawkins’s vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes? I couldn’t help thinking of familiar images from science fiction movies, in which bubbling, brilliantly colored concoctions are intended to depict life being created artificially. Is Dawkins referring here to biology in general? Are these vibrant throbbing gels and oozes shorthand for our bones and tissues and blood and organs, our cellular makeup? Or is this throbbing gel, as I suspect, an embryo encased in the uterus, what we think of as life’s beginning? Is he telling his reader, if you believe life begins as a yucky, messy, slimy, wet business inside a woman’s body, think again? Or is this a latter-day ve
rsion of the Aristotelian distinction between form and matter?
In one of the essays collected in Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think, edited by Alan Grafen and Mark Ridley, Steven Pinker approvingly quotes Dawkins’s sentence about gels and oozes and explains why conceptualizing the question of life in terms of information is superior to discussions of the workings of actual molecules:
Dawkins’ emphasis on the ethereal commodity called “information” in an age of biology dominated by the concrete molecular mechanisms is another courageous stance. There is no contradiction, of course, between a system being understood in terms of its information content and it being understood in terms of its material substrate. But when it comes down to the deepest understanding of what life is, how it works, and what forms it is likely to take elsewhere in the universe, Dawkins implies that it is abstract conceptions of information, computation, and feedback, and not nucleic acids, sugars, lipids, and proteins, that will lie at the route of the explanation.183
Notice Pinker admires Dawkins for his courage. He is a brave figure who courageously resists those biologists who resort to purely concrete descriptions of life. (Dawkins here becomes rather like his own description of the cowboy gene.) Nevertheless, Pinker is invested in harmonious levels of description. He argues that the “ethereal commodity,” “information content,” is not in conflict with its “material substrate.” In this view, information is on top as a concept and matter lies below it as its substrate, the actual molecular material stuff. Information is an abstraction that covers the biological reality, which in a figurative sense lies somewhere underneath it but is not at odds with it. However, in the next sentence, the metaphor “deepest understanding” appears, which moves the reader from one hierarchy into another, effectively flipping what is on top and putting it on the bottom. Now information, computation, and feedback occupy the depths of true knowledge, not the gels and oozes that may appear under the biologist’s microscope. Why? Because life may not be like that elsewhere in the universe, but information processing and computation will as they are embedded in the very nature of the physical universe. Information is at once superior to and deeper than biology because it can encompass other life-forms on other planets that may indeed exist somewhere. Information appears to be less like Aristotle’s form and more like Plato’s eternal idea.
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