Overdetermination
Cause and effect, those old pillars of western thought—as bad as the individual—are so built-in, so obvious and self-evident as to be one of the foundations of sanity itself. I broke my brain upon first learning that Nietzsche called cause and effect “conventional fictions" and “inventions,” some twenty odd years ago in the Har Mar Barnes and Noble in St. Paul; “How can this be?” I asked, aghast, as if he were questioning the existence of reality itself—which of course, is exactly what he was doing. But, it will be noted, and what I could not have understood at the time, is that the reality Nietzsche was so blithely ripping up, as if it were newspaper, was a certain kind of reality. A certain kind of reality that is perhaps no less foundational to conventional sanity, but that is nevertheless mythological, or even rather delusional, in its own right; as he calls it, “the dominant mechanistic stupidity,” which is of course, scientific reductionism itself.
Science, inheriting the mandate and dogma of religion—a kind of manifest destiny over the entire universe—has, since its inception, assumed without question that reality has been made by God with immutable laws that are knowable by his likeness Man. Even after Father God has been done away with by Richard Dawkins, the laws remain, lest how could there be any science? The law, the ultimate cause, that determines the whole shebang, was taken away from Father God and given to thermodynamics, that big explosion at the dawn of time—of which planet earth is just a weird and minor after-effect. If the universe were not deterministic, if there were no link between an effect and its cause, how then could science know it? Determination then is the supreme predicate of science-world which, unfortunately, is the world that we live in—unfortunate because the law of determination must deny anima (See Daniel Dennett as a prime example of this denial in action).
So it is perhaps no surprise that one of the effects of the enlightenment is psychosis. Reason, as it turns out, can drive people mad and, at the dawn of the age of reason, did so regularly, and we built whole walled cities (the asylum) in which to keep all the crazy people. Dare we ask why reason is crazy-making? To speculate, wildly: does not the belief in knowability, when applied to something that is constitutively unknowable—ie life, the universe, bees—consist of a kind of megalomania?—not to mention paranoid delusion? And is not this megalomania the motive force of positivist science itself? A paranoid and quixotic pursuit of objectivity without remainder? To prove once and for all that the soul does not exist.
Freud could no more discredit determinism than any scientist, and he will at times succumb to the odd machine metaphor, describing a train of thought, running from the unconscious to consciousness and made of discrete parts, that can, with the right analysis, be taken apart and examined. But Freud also spoke often of the soul (seelen) and was likewise well-aware of overdetermination. From the Dora case: “In the world of reality, which I am trying to depict here, a complication of motives, an accumulation and conjunction of mental (seelischer) activities—in a word, overdetermination—is the rule.”
Now, rationally speaking, if we apply a path of determinism to what is overdetermined, our explanation will only ever be half-assed at best, if not a complete paranoid fantasy (not that fantasies are bad mind you, but it’s just nice to know what we are dealing with). So when Freud applied his path of determinism in the form of an interpretation—his great why—to Dora, she was rather nonplussed; “what came of all that?” she asked and soon terminated the analysis.
Since that time psychoanalysis has become more aware of the dangers of both interpretation and “why” questions, for they both implicate the more vulnerable patient in a tangle of overdeterminism that may in fact do nothing more than to smoke their brain—in a bad way. As Bion notes regarding the paranoid-schizoid position, such a situation is “a disaster that is dynamic and not static…Problems, the solution of which depends upon an awareness of causation, cannot therefore be stated, let alone solved.”
To scale up from the dynamic disaster that is the family romance to the accelerating catastrophe that is the world, it is obvious that, here too, overdetermination is the rule; the postwar proliferation of conspiracy theory becoming the very model of overdetermined thinking. Is not the Kennedy assassination the overdetermined historical event par excellence? In the post-war information-era all knowledge becomes suspect. With the advent of AI all knowledge becomes slop.
Likewise, psychiatry capitulates to psychological overdetermination and defers to big pharma with a true brain-in-a-vat solution; the prescription of the daily drug. Our nearly complete surrender to psychotropic medication, more than any other factor, reveals the degree to which determinism must deny the existence of anima; or how else would big pharma get so big?
While I am becoming more aware of my own inclination towards reductionism, I would speculate, contrary to my more explanatory instincts, that the universe, far from being reducible to quanta or gray-matter, is in fact irreducible and unexplainable, and far more overdetermined that we can imagine (what we might call Certain Indeterminacy) and that research of any kind, if taken far enough in any one direction, is endless and will amount to a kind of vertigo, if not madness itself—as the figure of the mad scientist can attest. See also the high instances of mental illness among doctoral students…
