The prevalence of the physical fact over the psychic fact as frenzy

Abstract

The possibility of subordinating the ego to a function of the brain, and under these circumstances reducing the emergence of consciousness to the limits of the processes of this material substrate, are not issues that has emerged in contemporary times. In fact, the problem has been updated since ancient Greece, and in our times, it externalizes its revival in the promise that neurosciences will finally demonstrate the causality and identity between consciousness and neuronal activity. The power of these promises lies in the popularity of the epistemic conception that drives them: every psychic fact necessarily derives from a physical fact. In his lessons on psychology and metaphysics at the Clermont-Ferrand secondary school, Bergson already suspects of the foundations of this unidirectional relationship, which would end up leading to psychophysical parallelism or epiphenomenalism. Despite countless attempts to prove it, this conception remains unproven, but the conviction underlying it does not cease to exert its pathic effect on us: more than an epistemological position, the belief in the spatialization of the psyche has become an ontological position, which fascinates to the point of being able to hide its own artificiality. From this perspective, we can think of expressions of materialism that ensure and encourage this transformation as a kind of frenzy, through which a totalizing tendency in our relationship to the world becomes evident. In the path of this apparently scientific discourse, what stands out is a metaphysics that is unconscious of itself. This permanent denunciation in Bergson’s works will serve as a starting point for this paper, while the laws of dichotomy and double frenzy will be our guides in questioning this reduction of the psychic to matter