Is it possible to completely know a human being?

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Do the Impossible: Know Thyself

by Theodore Dalrymple (March 2007)

I attended a fascinating conference on neuropsychiatry recently.

Neuroscience, it seems to me, is the current most hopeful candidate for the role of putative but delusory answer to all Mankind's deepest questions: what is Man's place in Nature, and how should he live. What is the good life, at least in the western world?

The fact that there is no definitive answer to these questions does not mean that we cease to ask them. Some philosophers have argued that a question that is in principle unanswerable is not really a question at all, but the philosophical equivalent of verbigeration, the symptom in which some lunatics make word-like sounds that do not actually correspond to any language. But this strikes me as evasive, a kind of high class magical thinking, in which a person believes that a state of affairs can be brought about merely by wishing it to be brought about.

An equal and opposite temptation is to believe that the questions have already been answered, at least in principle (that is to say, everything but the detail has been worked out). Freudians and Marxists, for example, once believed that they knew not only what had gone wrong with human existence, but how to put it right. They believed this because they thought they had a complete and sufficient explanation and description of Man. This, of course, put them at a great advantage, at least in their own estimation, to the great mass of Mankind that was neither Marxist nor Freudian. They had seen the light as clearly as any Evangelical; and there are few states of mind more delightful than an awareness of superior understanding to that of the great mass of one's fellows.

It will not have escaped the notice of the observant that Marxism and Freudianism have become a little frayed around the edges of late, and that their adherents are reduced to recalcitrant membership of increasingly beleaguered sects. But the attraction of all-embracing worldviews that explain not only who we are but prescribe how we ought to live remains as strong as ever. Some of the neuroscientists to whom I listened at the conference implied that we were on the verge of such a breakthrough in our self-understanding, thanks to neuroimaging, neurochemistry and neurogenetics and so forth, that Man, proud Man, will no longer be a mystery to himself. The heart of all our mysteries will be plucked out wholesale, as it were; and to understand all will then be not so much to forgive all as to control all, especially our bad habits.

Let me not be taken as denying that the neurosciences have advanced stupendously in the last few years. Progress, indeed, has been so rapid that leaders in various fields now talk of the late 1990s as if of an era prehistoric antiquity and ignorance, just as those in the late 1990s used to talk of the late 1980s.

During the conference, I heard one of the best lectures I have ever heard by a professor at the Salpetriere in Paris. (This hospital, of course, has one of the most distinguished histories in neurology of any hospital in the world.) Not only did the professor speak brilliantly, with wit, learning and charm, but he showed astonishing before and after videos of patients treated surgically for a variety of conditions, from Parkinson's disease to Gilles de la Tourette's syndrome. It was difficult then not to succumb to a sort of euphoria, that consisted of the belief that at last we really did understand, at least in principle, what it was to be a human being. This was further reinforced by neuroimaging studies showing the areas of the brain that were active when a man in love perceives his beloved: the neurological basis of romantic love, as it were. Somewhat disappointingly for romantics, the parts of the brain that are activated during the encounter are primitive from the evolutionary point of view, and present in the pigeon and the lizard.

In fact, the professor from the Salpetriere, being a cultivated man, was comparatively circumspect in his estimation of the wider significance of his work. The operations he described were performed on people with gross and relatively discrete pathology, who were abnormal in a very obvious way. In fact, for all the wizardry of the means used, the extension of our knowledge upon the basis of which the operations were performed was not of an order of magnitude greater than previous advances, nor was that knowledge different in kind from that which we had already long possessed.
Nevertheless, several speakers strongly implied that with the exponential growth of neuroscientific research, we were about to understand ourselves to a degree unmatched by any previously living humans. I confess that, whenever I heard this, I thought of the old proverb about Brazil: that it is, and always will be, the country of the future.

More: http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=5863&sec_id=5863