The desire machines

Alex Jurek lays into the conclusion of my essay yesterday on Gerald Graff’s Literature Against Itself. [Update: For some reason Jurek has deleted both his original counterpost and the reply to my refutation here.] An apologist for realism, Graff holds that reality presents man with certain “unrefusable facts,” which (in a phrase borrowed from Henry James) he “cannot possibly not know, sooner or later, in one way or another.” But Jurek denies all this, arguing that “There are no facts outside of an interpretative scheme.”

Now, Graff himself easily dispatched this objection earlier in the same book: “That we cannot conceive of a fact without some interpretive paradigm does not mean that this fact can have no independent status outside the particular paradigm we happen to be testing at the moment.” (The emphasis is his. Oddly enough, I turned this passage back on Graff himself fifteen years ago in questioning his call to teach the conflicts.)

But this is not the most interesting part of his attack. “If anything is irrefutably real,” Jurek asserts, “it is that our existence as conscious beings is defined by our desires as well as our aversions. Humans are desire machines: All that most people think and do is defined by their cravings and aversions rather than true choice.”

Thus Jurek announces himself as a determinist. And thus it is not merely Graff’s “unrefusable facts” that he denies; he also denies the several defenses of freedom that I have mounted, such as here and here and here and here.

I have two questions for Jurek (or any other sociobiologist or Freudian or Marxist within earshot). If humans are desire machines (or evolutionarily adaptive machines or repression and sublimation machines or economic-class machines or what have you) is that a statement of the truth about the human condition or merely another expression of the machine’s desire (or adaptive behavior or sublimation or class)? If the latter, why should I credit it? Why should I think that it is true? If you genuinely were a machine, as Hilary Putnam points out, you would have no way to know it. Nevertheless, if your claim to be a desire machine is a statement of truth rather than an expression of desire there is then at least one human action outside the machine’s scope (namely, the machine’s unmachine-like assertion that it is a machine). And if there is one, how can you be sure there aren’t more?

More significantly, why is determinism appealing? What is it about the thought of being a desire machine that makes you want to reduce yourself to one?