Recovering the Conscious Agent

Abstract

The theories I have discussed have, directly or indirectly, had an enormous influence on contemporary thought about what it is to be human. They have in common a tendency to discredit the notion of the self-possessed individual choosing at least some aspects of his or her life, and to downplay the role of conscious decision-making, deliberation, and indeed consciousness itself, in everyday life and behaviour. A specific consequence of this is a sceptical attitude towards the role of reason in personal and public life — in behaviour tout court. My avowed reasons for actions or beliefs or principles are taken to be rooted in self-deception or self-misrecognition: they are mere rationalisations of behaviour whose true origin lies in some place hidden from me. According to Marxist thinking, the hidden hand that shapes my behaviour — my political beliefs, my sense of morality, my choice of ends in life — is a largely unconscious, historically determined class consciousness, created by the objective conditions of production. For Durkheim and his sociological successors, the hidden hand is the society to which I belong and whose larger outline and deepest tendency is concealed from me. For the Freudians, the ultimate source of my behaviour is to be found in the asocial instincts refracted through the ancient repressive structures of civilisation — an origin I could not fully acknowledge, even if it were revealed to me. Much of my most reasonable, civil, practically useful activity is in fact the enactment of buried damage sustained in the battle during my infancy between the warring imperatives of natural instinct and cultural constraint. For the post-Saussureans, it is the system of signs that gives my behaviour its meaning; and this is so deeply buried that only the smallest part of it has been revealed even to semiologists. And so I am simply unconscious of the true significance of what I do, say or think.