A biological machine with no “instincts,” much less an immortal soul

It was Mary Shelley’s vision of Frankenstein purged of all of the humanist misgivings and the sad lessons which the sexual revolutionaries of eighty years before had learned in the expensive school of experience. Since man was a biological machine with no “instincts,” much less an immortal soul, he was a complete tabula rasa, completely formed by the intersection of his experiences with his biology. Man had gone from a being informed by a rational soul, whose potentialities developed by exposure to the world as received by the senses, a being which could discern the order in the universe and thereby order his own life according to that reason, to being an organic machine, completely plastic, whose impulses were a direct response to stimuli outside his control. Since man possessed no soul, no mind, and eventually -according to Watson, at least - not even consciousness and since his biological make-up was a given, man was nothing but what his environment made him. From there it was only a short step to concluding that he who controlled the environment controlled the man. Given this radically truncated view of man, the key issue was understanding the mechanism whereby the imperatives of the environment were transformed into the imperatives of the mind. The man who unlocked that secret would become the ultimate pragmatist; he would know the science of controlling his fellow man.

The preceding worldview takes into account both the thought of the early Watson and the intellectual milieu he imbibed from his teachers. Watson’s ability to embody and advance the spirit of his age was either enviable or unfortunate depending on your point of view. If he were time-bound and his faith in science now sounds hopelessly dated, that very same quality allowed him to move with ease to the forefront of a new profession which thought it was going to finally unlock the age-old secrets about human behavior and regulate them in a way which had proven impossible to both philosophy and religion. Like Dr. Frankenstein, like Shelley upon whom Frankenstein was modeled, modem Prometheans like Watson hoped to create the galvanized corpse of the new man out of unacknowledged body parts pilfered surreptitiously from the graveyard of their own personal and (more often than not) sexual biographies. Since Watson would eventually go on to assert that there was no such thing as consciousness, it isn’t all that surprising that he would have a dim view of autobiography. “I don’t see how anyone but a very naive person,” Watson wrote at the height of his fame in 1928, “could write up his own life.”

Everyone has entirely too much to conceal to write an honest [autobiography] - too much he has never learned to put into words even if he would conceal nothing. Thinking of chronicling your adolescent acts day by day - your four years of college - your selfishness - the way you treat other people - your pettiness - your daydreams of sex! Autobiographies are written either to sell the good points about oneself or to vanquish one’s critics. If an autobiographer honestly turned himself inside out day by day for six months, he would either commit suicide at the end of the time or else go into a blissful oblivescent depression.

E. Michael Jones