THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE 'LAST MAN': COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND MODERN NIHILISM

摘要

The tendency in cognitive psychology is to identify cognition with computational process and then to use these processes to explain our "competence" in perception, language comprehension, and other mental activities. In describing this tendency, I provide a historical sketch of cognitive psychology and a sustained critical examination of representative texts in that field. This critical examination reveals that cognitive psychology accounts for our cognitive competence only by tacitly appealing to a non-computational and more basic intimacy between subjects and their milieu. Thus cognitive psychology undermines its own account of cognitive competence and mental activity.;I also show that cognitive psychology's appeal to independent support from scientific method for its theories is circular, and that the experimental results of cognitive psychology are artefacts of the experimental tasks and situation rather than indicators of a universal, computational form of cognition.;Utilizing clues from both cognitive psychology and phenomenology, I characterize the underlying intimacy between subjects and their milieu in terms of "social discourse." Besides mediating between members of the linguistic community and their surroundings, social discourse establishes an intrinsic relation between mental activities and their objects, thereby accounting for our cognitive competence.;I also demonstrate that social discourse is reciprocally related to "voices" and "images." In modern society, these voices are progressively reduced to a monological system or code, images to a set of technical problems, and creativity to the endless intervention of more such problems in order to keep this "technocratic rationality or logos" in circuit and hegemonic in modern society. Because cognitive psychology depicts the mind as a set of computational processes, that is, as a "proto-technocrat," it is both a product and a promoter of the domination of modern society by technocratic rationality, that is, by what Nietzsche called "passive nihilism" and the "last man." Challenging cognitive psychology's view of mind is one of the tactics required for incorporating technocratic rationality within an ascending "transfigurative rationality" and thereby reestablishing a "creative tension of voices and an open play of images.".