The Neural Basis of What? Discontents in Defining “Human Nature”

INTRODUCTION Historian Ellenberger (1970) has identifi ed in the history of psychiatry and brain science “the trend that consists in describing and understanding psychological and psychopathological phenomena in terms of real or hypothetical brain structures”, a trend he called a “brain mythology”. The rise of neuroscience in the last two decades has certainly given it a new signifi cance. It is clear that neuroscience is extending its territory toward psychosocial, moral and cultural attitudes. The neuroscientifi c question “how does the human brain work?” has become more and more inseparable from the question “what does it mean to be human?” We may observe how contemporary neuroscience participates in the embodiment of the mind in the brain. Vidal (2009) calls “brainhood” the idea that “the brain is necessarily the location of the modern self ”. This historical and epistemological situation generates confl icting claims and controversies, which are the evidence of the tensed relationship among neuroscience, social sciences and humanities today. Firstly, there is a tension between the neural and the social bases of the human mind (i.e. its competences, behaviours and attitudes) and there is a tension between individual identities and generic categories of people supposed to share neural confi gurations. These controversies are closely linked to the development of brain imaging as a possibility to visualize individual brain processes and construct cerebral types by subtracting and averaging imaging data (Posner and Raichle, 1994). They are also part of the history of understanding what being human means and of the confl ict between “free will” and “biological shaping”. This confl ict has been recently revived by the rise of neuroscience and by some social and political controversies related to the concepts of identity and personhood. In this short article, I would like to suggest that a more specifi c historical contextualization of these tensions and confl icts may help us to better understand the contemporary epistemological debate between neuroscience and social sciences.