Thinking with the Body: How Morphine, Alcohol, and Other Intoxicants Intersected Bodies and Minds in the Emergence of the Biological Subject

Abstract

Substances of intoxication can be found quietly skulking in every nook and cranny of our society, not only guests of honour in the peaks and troughs of our cultural imaginary, but constant companions in the everydayness of modern living.. Yet, little thought has been given to their formative role in the shaping of the modern body, of the biological subject. This is the untold story of how substances of intoxication interceded in shifting perceptions of “embodiment” found in the emerging sciences of the body and mind toward the end of the 19th century, giving rise to a dynamic conception of the biologistic subject within the scientific, philosophical, and sociological milieu of the late 19th century. Specifically, I posit that the history of the modern subject relied on a novel epistemic modality, which I have termed “intoxicated ways of knowing.” With this, I identify the state of intoxication as a tacit form of thinking and knowing with the body. Intoxicants force us to feel, intervening directly in our perceptional awareness. Here, they bring conceptual associations concerning the nature of the body and mind into the foreground of our awareness, where these concepts are made real in our perceptions. Framing Brunonianism as a response to the demands for reformation in both medicine and pharmacy, I identify John Brown’s own intoxicated experiences with the development of the “vital substance” concept, which quickly takes hold among late-18th and early-19th century German physicians and Naturphilosophen. As intoxicating substances were deeply intertwined with both Romantic science and vitalism, neo-mechanistic revolutionaries in physiology would make a concerted effort to undermine the validity of scientific encounters with intoxicants, both attacking Romantic Brunonians and invalidating the methods of perceptional science. By the time that the neo-mechanistic doctrine takes hold in neurophysiology, this emphasis on the physiological body as the singular locus of the real is realized as a forgetting of the lived experience of embodiment, as “brain-psychiatrists” strive, and fail, to equate mental states with neural states. This is what makes space for the parallelistic concept of the mind as the foundation of Wundtian experimental psychology, as a new science of embodiment. Here, Emil Kraepelin’s extensive pharmapsychological research program overcomes parallelistic ambiguities by mobilizing the experimental methods and concepts of psychology to understand the structures of the mind as reflected in different states of intoxication, making the physicality of the body real in the perceptional world of the mind. Ultimately, it is the Kraepelinian connection between mental life and intoxication that is taken up in the works of Nietzsche, Weber, and Freud, bringing the biological subject out of the lab and into the world.