Passions and Emotions: NOMOS LIII

8. Democracy and the Nonsovereign Self

226 8 DEMOCRACY AND THE NONSOVEREIGN SELF SHARON R. KRAUSE George Marcus’s illuminating chapter uses recent findings in neuroscience to put pressure on some of the foundational assumptions of both descriptive and normative democratic theory. In light of his challenges, we need to rethink not only the capabilities that we typically take for granted in democratic citizens but also the ideals to which we believe citizens should aspire. In particular , Marcus calls into question the capacities (and aspirations) for autonomous thought and action and for political judgment that is grounded in truth and guided by universal principles of right. Behind every conscious thought and action—and prior to every conscious political judgment—lie myriad preconscious neural processes. These processes deeply affect what we are capable of as citizens, and Marcus insists that they should also affect the normative standards that guide us in politics. The essay is valuable on several fronts. First, it offers important empirical information about how the human brain works that is highly relevant to judgment and action and hence to the practices of democratic citizenship. In particular, it calls into question the ideal of the sovereign self that stands at the center of so much democratic theory, the autonomous individual whose identity and interests are transparent to herself and whose action is the selfinitiated expression of her rational will. Second, it attempts to spell Democracy and the Nonsovereign Self 227 out the normative significance of its empirical findings and, specifically , to show how these findings should reshape our ideals of citizenship. Marcus is right to think that normative political theory can and should learn from the empirical sciences (both natural and social). Indeed, work that combines empirical and normative methods is currently emerging as an important new mode of political theory.1 Third, Marcus fruitfully reminds us that deliberation is not the only thing that matters in democratic politics, however important it may be. Consequently, the deliberative ideal of citizenship ought not exhaust our standards of civic excellence. We should recognize the value of different forms of excellence among democratic citizens, which are suited to different kinds of political challenge, and we should acknowledge that these diverse virtues may sometimes stand in tension with one another. For all these reasons, Marcus’s essay is a welcome contribution to democratic theory, one that extends and enriches his influential prior work on affective intelligence. Nevertheless, the challenges it poses to our current thinking about democracy are deep. Indeed, they are deeper than Marcus himself acknowledges. Insofar as the theory of affective intelligence disrupts the ideal of the sovereign self, it raises important questions about the basis of political authority , the criteria for political legitimacy, the grounds of political responsibility, and the possibility of political change on behalf of justice. Marcus does not answer these questions; in fact, he hardly asks them. If we are to take affective intelligence seriously, as I think we should do, we will need to come to terms politically with the nonsovereign subject it entails, which means that we will need to articulate a vision of nonsovereign self-government. In what follows , I first raise some questions about Marcus’s theory of affective intelligence, noting some inconsistencies in his account of how the different systems of neural processes are related to one another. I then consider Marcus’s characterization of how the two systems figure in the activities of democratic citizens, showing that the particular model of citizenship he defends is likely to make trouble for justice. Finally, I raise some questions that go beyond the domain of citizenship to highlight deep problems of democratic selfgovernance that follow from the theory of affective intelligence. This final section of the chapter is less critical than exploratory; it means to open up questions for future research, questions that 228 Sharon R. Krause those of us who are convinced about the nonsovereignty of the self but committed to democratic politics must find ways to address. 1. Two Systems of Neural Processing Although the philosophical tradition has long regarded reason and passion as two very different phenomena, frequently at odds with one another, Marcus takes a different view. Drawing on recent findings in neuroscience, he shows the ways in which the mental activities traditionally associated with conscious judgment and decision making (i.e., reason) are in fact inextricably entwined with preconscious “sensory streams.”2 In particular, these preconscious neurological processes are required to generate the...