Oliver Sacks, Ideology, and Human Essence: The Horror of Equalisation.


The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks is an incredible book, of the greatest value to all those interested in identity formation, and the constitution of meaning. However, this book's value comes down to one's manner of reading it. Oliver Sacks is not your ordinary scientist, he is well read in existential philosophy and literature. One is as likely to see a thought from Nietzsche as a citation of a journal article. This is very interesting, and contributes a pleasant additional level of meaning to his analytic narratives . Unfortunately, Sacks is committed to a thoroughgoing phenomenological humanism, and this position seriously complicates any attempt to make an interpretation of the value of the case studies in this book. Sacks' project is to place the human subject back at the center of the scientific endeavor, and he includes many cogent and heartfelt critiques of the limitations of mechanism in the neurological tradition. The tragedy of this book is that it is this humanist project itself that is problematic; if he chose to make his critique of mechanism and computerism in favor of some idea of meaning/identity which was an advance on what had been asserted in the humanist metaphysical tradition, then it would be an incredible treat to read his book, one could give oneself to it as one melts into a soft chair on opium. This pleasure is denied us because he falls back into classical humanism.

In the chapter entitled 'A Matter of identity' Sacks discusses a type of behaviour that he calls 'equalisation', after the great neuropsychologist Luria. This way of being horrified Luria, and it also appears in a very negative light for Sacks. Sacks repeatedly uses the term 'de-souled' to refer to this type of patient. Equalisation is not precisely defined in the book, but we can make explicit what is implicit there; equalisation is the effacement of any privileged signifier in the field of meaning constitution. This prospect makes Sacks fear, good humanist essentialist that he is, as much for his own theory of identity as for any consequences it may have for his patients. In this chapter, the patient's name is William, a patient who is possessed of an incredible charisma and an irresistible ability to tell stories, but who also has a severe case of amnesia. Sacks begins to discuss equalisation when William nonchalantly inserts the factual assertion that he sees his brother into one of his confabulatory monologues. William 's tone of voice does not change, he does not react to his brother as something special, but continues in the same way as he was proceeding before he noticed his brother walking past.

Sacks then compares William to another patient, Jimmie G. who, despite his amnesia, maintained a healthy sense of religious reverence/despair that proved that he still had a 'soul.' Jimmie had been utterly absorbed during his visits to the chapel, but, William continued to confabulate and make jokes even there. Sacks goes on to write, "But for William-with his brilliant, brassy surface, the unending joke which he substitutes for the world (which if it covers over a desperation it is a desperation he does not feel); for William with his manifest indifference to relation and reality caught in an unending verbosity, there may be nothing 'redeeming' at all-his confabulations, his apparitions, frantic search for meanings being the ultimate barrier to any meaning.(109)"

William does find his moment of peace, and the respect with which Sacks describes this speaks much for his observational integrity, and true generosity of spirit. He writes, "Our efforts to 're-connect' William fail...[b]ut when we abdicate our efforts, and let him be, he sometimes wanders out into the quiet and undemanding garden which surrounds the Home, and there in his quietness he recovers his own quiet...the presence of plants, a quiet garden, the non-human order, making no social or human demands upon him, allow this identity delirium to relax to subside;(110)" Throughout his section, William is the beneficiary of many traditional transcendentalist attacks on immanence, and we can see here that his moment is an immanent one. However, it is disturbing to see the ardor with which Sacks characterizes William in terms of the non-human, on the one hand it makes sense because he seems to enjoy himself only in those moments in which he is free of human contact, but at the same time it is a brutal type of ostracism by definition that Sacks must perform in order to safeguard the 'human essence', and in that sense it is an outrage.

William is particularly disturbing because he destabilizes the time honored humanist trope of the inner narrative as a guarantor of identity. "If we wish to know about a man, we ask, 'what is his story-his real, inmost story?-for each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us-through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations....To be ourselves we must have ourselves-possess, if need be repossess, our life stories...A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self...Deprived of continuity, of a quiet, continuous, inner narrative, he is driven to a sort of narrational frenzy-hence his ceaseless tales, his confabulations, his mythomania.(105-6)" Sacks seems to be very sure of the nature of the we of which he so confidently speaks, and also of the inner nature of the narratives by which the we define our identities. What if it were the case that we have our identities defined for the most part by narratives that do not originate with us but narratives, or semiological co-ordinates imposed from outside that constitute the very idea of interiority within us as a mechanism of power. This is where Sacks' humanism blinds us, it is as though power does not exist at all in this book. What if we defined these aberrations relative to another normality, one which does not take the subject as a self-present given, what if we worked with a post-humanist definition of the situation?

In the next chapter, 'Yes father-Sister' Sacks describes his patient's life-world as follows, "Her world had been voided of feeling and meaning. Nothing any longer felt 'real' (or 'unreal'). Everything was now 'equivalent or 'equal'-the whole world reduced to a facetious insignificance. (112)" Sacks seems to believe that he can make accurate observations, despite his stated horror at the behavior and discourse of this patient, and it seems that he can, it is just the evaluational coloring that is added that can be quite disorienting to one who does not share his value system. He goes on to say, "the world is taken apart, undermined, reduced to anarchy and chaos. There ceases to be any 'center' to the mind, though its formal intellectual powers may be perfectly preserved. The end point of these states is an unfathomable 'silliness', an abyss of superficiality, in which all is ungrounded and afloat and comes apart. (113)" This, especially the last part, can also be read as a re-iteration of the transcendentalist-essentialist critique of immanence; however, it is more to the point to suggest another reading, one that shows the way that Sacks' values permeate his Herculean attempt at observational integrity.

What if we rethink this quotation by questioning a few of its presuppositions. First, is there objectively 'order' present in the world? Is everything grounded, not afloat but together? If we affirm an ontology of becoming, then an affirmative answer to this question is not nearly so clear as Sacks would have us believe. If we affirm the ontology of becoming, then what Sacks refers to is our (ideological) construction of the 'world' in terms of the symbol systems provided by our social groups. These symbol systems are not 'grounded' in anything but themselves, in the eternal 'I said so.' Second, that there is some self-present and immutable center of the mind. This notion of subjectivity has been brought into question by many leading theorists of identity, especially including Freud whom Sacks cites with some frequency. Thus, we can rephrase the quotation as follows:

the humanist construction of the world is taken apart, undermined, reduced in my imagination to its own political devil terms anarchy and chaos. There ceases to be any legitimacy in the humanist definition of human essence according to which there is any
'center' of the mind though its formal intellectual powers may be perfectly preserved...