Digression: Cadell Last, Lacan, and Genesis

On language, psychoanalysis, and Stephen Hawking at the mercy of Cadell Last

In a recent (excellent) conference on Lacan at Philosophy Portal (https://philosophyportal.online) Cadell Last, its founder, began his opening lecture introducing the Ecrits with an extended quotation from the physicist Stephen Hawking. At the end of his book A Brief History of Time, Hawking concludes:

“Philosophers have reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of [the twentieth] century, said that the sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language. What a comedown from the great tradition of Western philosophy from Aristotle to Kant.” Stephen Hawking A Brief History of Time 1989. Chapter 12.

Hawking goes on in another place to say:

“If however we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, ….not just a handful of scientists. Then we all shall be able to take part in the discussion of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find that it will be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we would know the mind of God.” Stephen Hawking, In a Nutshell,

Cadell Last deconstructs these statements in terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis, pointing out that this desire for completeness is a nostalgia for a fancied imaginary wholeness that is embedded in the human psyche but that is — thank heavens, because otherwise we would never grow up - forever debarred to us as adults called to a mature life. His respect for Hawking is evident, but he notes that the latter’s evocation of a line of thought “from Aristotle to Kant” stops short of the full trajectory, where inclusion of Hegel would have dissolved the quandary and presumably have helped Hawking reinscribe himself more accurately and with greater awareness and, it is to be hoped, more salutary effect in the grand tradition of western thought.

I’m not sure of that happy ending courtesy of the Hegelian dialectic, but I do agree with Cadell that this breathtakingly un self-reflective passage in Hawking’s book not only ignores the category error to which I have been drawing attention but also, while attempting with unbelievable hubris to hold up a stop sign in the face of the whole tradition of western philosophy, fails to respond to one of its founding adages: know thyself. If we add a theological imperative to know God, as does Hawking by implication (though he is not perhaps quite in good faith here), then the denegation is even more obvious. As Cadell points out, the question of God is not one that can be deferred until we have all swallowed a some heady and impressive grand unified theory and are jazzed up for an all-night bull session. Among other things, to paraphrase Keynes’s quip, by the time we get around to this little talk-fest we probably all be dead.

Furthermore, Hawking never contemplates the real issue here, which is that the search for a ‘complete theory of everything’ is precisely what philosophy and in particular psychoanalytic philosophy takes not as a self-evident aspiration but as itself a problem worthy of study. As such a problem it can be studied in a way productive for science, even physics, as well as for other forms of the pursuit of truth. In other words, why do we even want such a unified theory — because obviously given the interest in Hawkin’s work we do want it? and how does our desire for this explanation of all things in scientific terms further or occlude our working, loving, curious, knowing, and always experimental lives, not up in heaven or in some supposed future but right here and now on earth?

The nature and operations of language in the extended sense are the key to such a study, for it is only in and through these operations that we can form the intention to undertake such a search in the first place, and only through them that we can draw on the collective, on both its blindness and its wisdom, in its pursuit. Through language we refine our search and ultimately our desire itself, by passing from failure through failure to new paradigms, new constructs and indeed new languages. If language is at the heart of the matter here, however, so then must be its aspects, especially its aspects of relationality, power and limit. If nothing else, language is inter-subjective and creative, not just subjective and reflective. It is also in many ways more powerful than we are. Among other things, as Cadell notes, it exists both before and after the individual life and it constitutes as much as it mirrors our experience. We are born into it and it is reborn in us in what are potentially new and singular ways. But we get nowhere if we regard it as ever and always simply an idiolect, which seems often to be the premise of much philosophy, science and religion as well.

I cannot due full justice to Cadell’s presentation on science, Lacan and psychoanalysis here, but let me give you a bit more of the flavor of it as an invitation to check out his lecture, as well as the many good presentations at that conference. By way of knowing ourselves, and perhaps by way of invitation to Hawking to think again, Last wants to turn our attention to the subject of science, rather than its object. Who or what is doing science here? The answer is by no mean is by no means the unified, rational conscious self subject that Hawking presumes, but is rather an uncertain and wavering point of reference, forever oscillating between and among imaginary, real, and symbolic registers and governed by a pre-conscious egoic desire for auto-genesis and androgyny beyond difference and dependence.

For Last, here again following Lacan, the unconscious aspiration of this volatile self, always under construction and alway under threat, is to achieve some sort of lamella-like identity of masculine and feminine polarities that will mirror and/or restore a lost wholeness and completion. The terror and fascination of this imaginary amalgam, which recalls or repeats the terror and fascination of the primal scene, can blind as much as it motivates, and it can do so especially for the scientist who fails to reckon with its illusions. There is, then, much to be gained for physicists in paying attention to psychoanalysis and metaphysics — and I would include to ethics, politics and even theology — both to the way in which these are embedded in their own discourses and to the existing and extensive body of thought about them, which includes, allow us to say, continental philosophy.

Among other things, I would point out, this attention must include a deliberate consideration and cultivation of the virtues particular to scientific discourse, virtues which have been identified, elaborated and laid out ready for activation in and through the long tradition we have inherited of philosophical thought, personal reflection and religious observation. These virtues include patience, openness to intuition, capacity for focussed yet relaxed attention, and, as Isabelle Stengers stresses in her passionate and psychoanalytically aware attempt to explain science and its desire to the rest of us, a willingness to be constrained by and responsible to the data, to acknowledge its and its observers’ parameters and limitations, and to submit one’s work to collective judgment. It is, one supposes, possible in theory to rediscover these values and their applications for oneself beginning from some tabula rasa, but to do so would deprive the enterprise of resources necessary to the hope of even partial success.

Furthermoore, as Stengers goes on to argue, (in the The Virgin Mary and the Neutrino, and elswhere) these virtues and values must be supplemented and nourished by some attention to and respect for those with other primary purposes and concerns than the pursuit of truth in this particular way, including concerns for justice, peace, spiritual awareness, art, and the reconstruction and protection of of life itself. Scientists don’t have to do this work; they have other fish to fry. But they need to attend to and learn from it and to reflect, in their own particular way, on what it can offer them by way of data, of method and even perhaps of conceptual innovation. Among other things only this attention will allow for surprise, repetition with difference, and the capacity to do something new.

In order to foster that attention and break the spell of the illusion of completeness, Lacan insists, following Freud of course, that we must allow something else to speak in the place of the ego and its overly incentivized reasons, something surprising, a-logical, even orthagonal to linear thought and linear concepts of causality. We allow this by attention to the language of dreams, of lingustic slippages, of images and of art. Apprenticing to these helps release the dream of the complete androgyne, whether pursued within the self or sought in the perfect mate, and fosters recognition of the truth that as subjects, we are just one moment in an extended chain of signifiers, that a such our place in is relative and relational, bounded by birth and death. We must recognize the hard truth that the world and the word alike came before we did and will go on without us; that we are not the authors of ourselves but the creatures of something beyond us and perhaps beyond our ken. Only such a recognition will generate the humility, the clarity and the engagement needed to pursue truth and to recognize that the nature of that truth, once achieved, is by the same token always relational and to some extent contingent.

Last goes on to identify three trajectories to such a good end expounded in the Ecrits, though it is important to note that he like Lacan doesn’t see these as a temporal but a logical progression which works both ways. As he lays them out, they are from human subjectivity to the indestructible signifer; from the extended family to self-negativity, and from the truth path to the immortal drive. Involved in these trajectories is a very complex interplay between the imaginary and real, to use the Lacanian terminolgy. And the key to tracing and activating this interplay is language in all its aspect from mental to somatic to spiritual.

I will leave what are in this form somewhat puzzling teasers to lure you into listening to Last’s exposition of these points, and God forbid, perhaps even tackling Lacan’s Ecrits yourself, but let me just conclude by saying here that these three trajectories might be glossed by three points taken from the mainstream tradition of Christian theology: 1) God is Word and Word is more primary and powerful than we are; 2) all worldly identifications, with parents, with lovers, with children, with friends, are relative and relative to that self-emptying which is the precondition of all blessedness; and 3) claims to have found the truth path, the final closure, the Last Word, always fail before the ongoing eternal drive to know God.

For Lacan, such a drive underlies the three registers of the human psyche, symbolic, imaginary and real, which the Abrahamic religions might gloss as study, prayer, and commitment. Language is constituted by the operations and mutual entanglements of this Borromean knot. We do not need the theology of the logos and its constitutive role in creation to tell us the importance of language here, its affordances and limitations. These have been the preoccupation of every search for the divine we know. Such a theology does, however, underwrite that search and that drive, offering the supreme advantage that here the object of study, its subject, and its medium are all eminently suited to and indeed co-constituted each by the others.

It is part of the function of scripture to remind us of such trajectories and their limitations, which these texts both dramatize and deploy as provocations — indeed as mandates — to further exploration. These parallels between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the Abrahamic traditions and their theologies here are imperfect, but of course their imperfection is part of the point to be made. The challenge to this endeavor is evident in these traditions ‘from the beginning,’ in the prompt to consider the creation of God ex nihilo, however we may or may not solve for that aporia, and to do so not simply as a hypothesis to be proved but as a call to celebrate and participate, with all our enabling limitations, in that problematic but absolutely generative and sui generis creativity. How and when they have done so in the work of Deleuze is our next topic.