William E. Connolly has in a recent book addressed relations between current brain science and philosophy. In this text he brings a short summery relating to the 0.5 seconds that we live after life...

Now I say that mind and anima are held in union with the other, and form of themselves a single nature, but that the head, as it were, and lord in the whole body is the reason which we call mind or understanding, and it is firmly seated in the middle region of the breast. For here it is that fear and terror throb, around these parts are soothing joys; there, then is the understanding and the mind. The rest of the anima, spread abroad, throughout the body, obeys and is moved at the will and inclination of the understanding.

The naturalism of Lucretius has long seemed by many to be too crude and full of perplexities to muster serious support. It construes the most basic units in the world as moving so fast and chaotically that they cannot be the objects of perception and precise explanation; it treats the mind, the `animus', as made up of the material of the same type - though not the same quality - as the rest of the body; it links thinking closely to the instabilities of sense experience; it locates the mind in the middle region of the breast rather than in the head; it has difficulty in making sense of free will and responsibility, even while acknowledging the need to do so; its naturalism gives no powers to divinity; it can generate no authoritative basis for morality in the last instance beyond attachment to the world; and it counsels its followers to work on those subconscious dispositions that project life forward after death in order to make peace with death as oblivion. Its speculations were too disconnected from the project of deep explanation to gain support from early modern science and too committed to naturalism to inspire praise from the Christian philosophies of Augustine, Kant, Hegel and Kierkegaard. Besides, most of the Epicurean texts to which Lucretius is indebted have been lost through a long history of cultural war against that philosophy.

Things may be changing. Today, several brain researchers conclude that the middle region of the breast, while not as complex as several brains in the head, does house a simple cortical complex capable of generating intense feelings of disgust, anxiety, fear, terror and joy. Moreover, the fast, imperceptible units Lucretius called `primordia' bear a family resemblance not only to atoms but to the electrical fields that carry thinking. As Tor Norretranders says in his review of recent brain research, `a stimulus can be so short that we never become conscious of it but react to it nevertheless.' Finally, tactical work on dispositional traits installed below consciousness, while ignored by neo-Kantian philosophies in the tradition of Rawls and Habermas, retains a robust presence both in religions of the Book and in nontheistic philosophies pursued by figures as diverse as Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Stuart Hampshire and Pierre Hadot.

Recent neurophysiological research on the brain is highly suggestive, both in its presentation of the nonconscious operations that precede consciousness by a half second and in its suggestions about the role technique plays in thinking and judgement. Take the case of the blind man who could not form images of objects within the range of normal vision. He, nonetheless, like others with this particular malady, was able to carry out numerous activities, such as riding a bike, usually reserved for those with vision. When presented in a test with a series of arrows pointing in different directions, he was able to identify the correct direction in which the arrow pointed almost every time. He thought he was inordinately lucky. He, however, had `blindsight': the part of the brain that forms images is damaged, while `the other links between the eye and the brain' function well. Here is a dramatic illustration of how large chunks of perception are organized below the level of perceptual awareness. Or consider the 16-year-old girl who a team of neurophysiologists at the University of California, Los Angeles, studied to identify the causes of her epileptic seizures. Applying an electric probe to eighty-five separate spots of the left frontal lobe, they eventually hit by chance upon a patch of brain where application of the probe made her laugh. They found that the `duration and intensity of the laughter increased with the level of stimulation current.... At low currents only a smile was present, while at higher currents a robust, contagious laughter was induced.' The young girl, following time-ordered principles of retrospective interpretation, decided that these researchers were extremely funny guys. These two cases suggest that a lot of thinking and interpretation goes on during the `half-second delay' between the reception of sensory material and conscious interpretation of it. They further point to the gaps that often open up between first-person, phenomenological interpretations of experience and third-person accounts of it.

The half-second delay

It seems that `incomprehensible quantities of unconscious calculation' take place during the interval of the half-second delay, subtracting some sensory material and crunching the rest to project a set of perceptions and thought-imbued intensities into consciousness, upon which it can then do its own work. Immanuel Kant, let us say, projects an inscrutable transcendental field into this temporal gap. We presuppose this transcendental, supersensible field, he claims, when we explain things according to laws of the understanding; but we cannot inquire further into the concepts of time, space and causality which it sanctions.

This schematism of our understanding in regard to appearances and their mere form, is an art, hidden in the depths of the human soul, whose true modes of action we shall only with difficulty discover and unveil.... The image is a product of the empirical faculty of the productive imagination - while the schema of the sensible concepts (of figures in space, for example) is a product of the pure imagination a priori.... It is a transcendental product of the imagination ..., insofar as these representations must be connected a priori in one concept, conformable to the unity of apperception.

The transcendental field provides the understanding with the categories necessary to explanation. That same field operates more directly, but with the same necessity and inscrutability, in Kantian moral judgement. The `objective reality of the moral law' is recognized `as an apodictically certain fact, as it were, of pure reason, a fact of which we are a priori conscious'. It `can be proved through no deduction, through no exertion of the theoretical, speculative, or empirically supported reason....

Nevertheless it is firmly established of itself.' The closure and rigidity many discern in Kantian morality - in, for example, his confident commitment to capital punishment and his refusal to allow someone to lie even to save the life of another - may be bound up with his insistence that the experience of morality as law takes the form of apodictic recognition. Finally, aesthetic judgement also falls under the jurisdiction of the supersensible realm. To judge something to be beautiful is to attain a spontaneous accord of the faculties that expresses the dictates of the supersensible realm without being able to conceptualize them.

Apperception in explanation, recognition in morality, expression in aesthetic judgement: the Kantian models of explanation, morality and aesthetics invoke in different ways an inscrutable supersensible field prior to consciousness that regulates its operations. The introduction of the transcendental field enabled Kant to devise a creative strategy to protect Christian freedom and morality from the corrosive effects of the Newtonian science of mechanics he also endorsed. The crucial move is `to ascribe the existence of a thing so far as it is determinable in time, and accordingly its causality under the law of natural necessity, merely to appearance, and to attribute freedom to the same being as a thing in itself'. The Kantian supersensible field thus subsists below the level of consciousness and above the reach of modification through scientific knowledge, moral decision or technological intervention. Such a philosophy enabled Kant to disparage naturalists such as Epicurus and Lucretius for sinking into a metaphysical dogmatism that pretends to know the contents of the inscrutable transcendental field and for anchoring ethics in something as crude as the sensible realm.

But what happens if the half-second delay is set, not in a supersensible domain, but in the corporealization of culture and the culturization of corporeality? That is, what if many of the messages flowing between multiple brains of differential capacities in the same person are too small and fast to be identified by consciousness but, nonetheless, available, to some degree, to cultural inscription, experimental research and technical intervention? Does this open the door, not to disproof of the Kantian transcendental and proof of the alternative, but to a contending interpretation of the transcendental field that moves a little closer to Lucretius? It may be that Kant's identification of an inscrutable transcendental field is profound, while his insistence that it must be eternal, supersensible and authoritative in the last instance is open to modification. To contest the specific Kantian reading of the transcendental field, while insisting upon its operation in some sense, would be to call into question both the adequacy of Kantian moral philosophy and the strategy of neo-Kantians who often proceed as if they can avoid engagement with such a field altogether.

Neo-Kantians tend to treat arts of the self as if they were simply therapies to deal with neuroses or blockages in the powers of normal rationality, recognition, deliberation and decision, rather than more ubiquitous exercises, tools and techniques that affect the shape of thinking and sensibility in profound ways. The key move is to translate the Kantian transcendental field into a layered, immanent field. If the unconscious dimension of thought is immanent in subsisting below the direct reach of consciousness, effective in influencing conduct on its own and also affecting conscious judgement, material in being coloured by the neurological processes in which it occurs, and cultural in being affected by the inscriptions of experience and experimental interventions, then several theories of morality ranging from the Kantian model of command, through the Habermasian model of deliberative ethics and the Rawlsian model of justice, to the Taylorite model of attunement to a higher purpose in being, may deserve active contestation. From the vantage point pursued here, some of the above theories systematically underestimate the role of technique and artistry in thinking and ethics, while others overestimate the degree to which the cultivation of virtues is linked to an intrinsic purpose susceptible to attunement or recognition.