Stronger than an Atom: Anatomy of a prejudice

Péguy’s Lucidity or the Enigma of Our “Guilty Absent‑Mindedness”

The thinker Charles Péguy, in a sharply observed passage cited by Francine Lenne, pinpoints a fundamental yet widespread error of human reasoning:
“Speaking of what one does not know (…) will always remain man’s favorite occupation.”

With a clinical edge of irony, he notes that while the “boldness of incompetence” seems to defer, almost reflexively, before formalized knowledges   high mathematics or exact sciences   it advances with disconcerting surety in everyday life. There, in familiar conversations about politics, the arts, literature or even fashion, we utter “follies as enormous” as those we might commit in a mathematical proof.

The difference and it is a large one is that in the latter case, the error smacks us in the face, it shocks us; in the former, “no pain wakes us up.” We are shielded, anesthetized by what Péguy calls the “shell” of “sufficiency,” a psychic armor that keeps us at a safe distance from the “clashes we would otherwise suffer from reality.”

These passages are taken from Le chevêtre, une lecture de Charles Péguy by Francine Lenne, Presses Universitaires du Septentrion. An article elaborating on them is here:

(From the reflections of Charles Péguy)

This poignant inquiry into our structural blindness, into comfortable ignorance, will serve as the guiding thread of our analysis as we probe our best‑established certainties.

1. The scholars’ paradox : when cognitive intelligence collides with prejudice

The riddle sketched by Péguy finds a powerful and paradoxical echo in a famous quotation attributed to Albert Einstein:

“It is easier to disintegrate an atom than a prejudice.”

This phrase, now an aphorism, stages a fundamental opposition: on one side, the demiurgic power of scientific intellect, capable of probing and fracturing the core of matter; on the other, its apparent impotence in the face of the fortress of irrational belief.

However, and this is where the paradox deepens: the greatest agents of that cognitive power, the so‑called masters of physical rationality, are not immune to this second force. Their own blind spots, their own prejudices, are the most ironic demonstration. For Planck, the great Planck, and Einstein, the immense Einstein, hold prejudices beyond their domain, especially concerning the human psyche…

1.1 Max Planck’s pessimism: A scientific truth tested by generations

First, let us consider Planck’s famous principle:

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents, but because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

Here we see Planck’s apparent pessimism, since he does not trust that scientific discourse or empirical or logical proof can persuade adherents of a nascent, controversial theory.

Behind the caustic pessimism of this witticism, which rings like a mocking farewell to the obstinate colleagues of his generation, lies Planck’s real prejudice. His mistake is not in the pessimism itself, but in the diagnosis. He attributes resistance to new knowledge simply to generational divide   to a conflict of intellectual habit that only death can resolve.

This is a deep misrecognition of the nature of the obstacle. It is not “the captain’s age” that makes the ship resist, but its very structure. Planck reasons as though the new generation is perfectly permeable to the new idea, so malleable that it will adopt it simply because it is emergent.

He denies the fact that when that generation reaches adulthood, it is no more permeable nor malleable than a very young child faced with adult speech. Alongside the cognitive identification that gives that child part of humanity’s intellectual legacy, there deposits in them, from very early on, layers and layers of a subjective identification tied to parental discourse, which becomes repressed, hence unconscious.

This subjective identification forms the bedrock of beliefs that resist refutation by reason or experience even in the most committed atheist who imagines themselves “non‑believing.”

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Thus:

• one may find among the young a mentality more “reactionary,” “retrograde,” conservative and dismissive of scientific discoveries than in older generations;
• the permeability or malleability, when visible among hysterical personalities, means “one idea chases another,” “we listen to the latest speaker,” or “to the loudest”   in clinical terms, “the hysteric follows fashion,” is a “fashion victim,” so that the idea most recently circulating in their mind here and now is not necessarily the best grounded scientifically.

History of physics would, in fact, prove Planck wrong: the acceptance of general relativity was spectacularly accelerated by Eddington’s empirical expeditions in 1919; the factual proof could indeed convince even the most recalcitrant.

The major turning point in the public and scientific acceptance of general relativity came with Eddington’s 1919 expeditions measuring light deflection near the Sun; subsequent media coverage made Einstein famous and helped the broad adoption of his theory in the scientific community (though technical and philosophical debates continued).

Planck’s error is thus twofold:

• he ignores the power of proof and experiment; and more fundamentally,
• he reasons as if the new generation were a blank slate, whereas they enter the world already burdened by a subjective, unconscious structure far more stubborn than simple opinion.

1.2 Albert Einstein’s misstep: spinal cord over subjectivity

Einstein himself, this giant who reshaped our vision of the universe, falls into a conceptual trap of surprising naivety when he ventures into the terrain of psyche and society. To explain the fanatic obedience of Wehrmacht soldiers, he writes:

“I deeply despise those who enjoy marching in ranks to music (…) it must be by mistake that they were given a brain; a spinal cord would have served them adequately.”

By reducing ideological compliance to a mere reflex of the spinal cord, he commits a remarkable misinterpretation. He lapses into a mechanistic, simplistic explanation worthy of nineteenth‑century biologism.

He is mistaken when he attributes these behaviors the blind obedience of soldiers to the German Führer not to subjective identification, nor even to Pavlovian conditioning, which suppose that these humans still have a brain…

No! He goes so far as to deny them obedience to an instinct (a highly complex mechanism), since he attributes their behavior to a simple reflex involving only the spinal cord!

Let us quote from an article in Topique, in the issue devoted to “Psychoanalysis and Propaganda”:

Fantasme, Discours, Idéologie –  Of a Transmission That Is Not Propaganda

“Let us move quickly past instinct (one sometimes accuses political propaganda of ‘awakening our bas instincts’), often conflated by the layperson with reflex (for example: ‘self‑defense reflex’). The latter, much more elementary, the spinal reflex arc involves only a receptor neuron and an effector neuron and is incapable by itself of aiming toward a fitting goal. Instinct, on the other hand, is an innate, hereditary, specific impulse. It is reputed ‘perfect, highly complex, and adapted,’ whereas the reflex is extremely simple and not especially adapted.”

If Einstein lacks the adequate concept to think this phenomenon, that is

• partly because, though contemporary with Freud, he seems never to have grasped theoretically the discovery of the unconscious;
• partly because he never undertook the practical journey that analysis is the kind of self‑confrontation that would force him to acknowledge his own subjective identifications.

His error lies in ignoring that adherence to Nazism was not a matter of reflex, but a complex psychic construction that involved the brains of prominent philosophers like Heidegger, Nobel laureates in physics like Heisenberg, and the pen of great writers like Céline, Brasillach or Drieu La Rochelle. It was a matter of language, of desire, of belief   in short, of subjectivity, not of the spinal cord.

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🔗 Explore further: Einstein’s brain: Unraveling the genius’s cognitive secrets?

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*** “In the Service of Nazi Propaganda”

[In the early years of the regime] “Heisenberg claimed to be merely a law-abiding citizen of the Reich, with no political engagement.”

However, between 1941 and 1944, Heisenberg participated in several Nazi propaganda missions to Hungary, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Poland. He acted as a cultural ambassador, accompanied by Nazi party officials and celebrated by the military authorities of the occupied countries, with the goal of winning over local elites to collaborate with the regime.

During his conversations with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in September 1941, Heisenberg expressed his “firm conviction that Germany would win the war and that we were foolish to hope for (its defeat) or to reject collaboration.” He left Bohr with the distinct impression that “under his leadership, everything was being done in Germany to build the nuclear weapon.”

That meeting created a deep rift between the two physicists. Bohr was swiftly exfiltrated to Sweden, then to England, and eventually to the United States, where he joined the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos.

In 1943, Heisenberg traveled to the Netherlands, where he reportedly stated that a German victory would be the lesser evil. In occupied Poland, then governed by Hans Frank—an old childhood friend—Heisenberg gave a speech reserved exclusively for German audiences.

2. The theoretical foundation   cognitive identification and subjective identification, the sister enemies

To escape these conceptual impasses and finally understand both the scholar’s error and the inconceivable strength of prejudice, we must employ a very precise theoretical apparatus.

We will not find it in psychologies of consciousness or behaviorism, but in the edifice of psychoanalysis, particularly in the structural reading of Jacques Lacan.

Here one finds, taken up and developed by these lines, the crucial distinction truly the keystone of the psychic edifice between two heterogeneous modes of human identification that are sisters, since both born of language. Still, we shall see that they are sister enemies…

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2.1 Cognitive identification: conscious, revisable knowledge

The first, which we shall call cognitive identification, constitutes the “KNOWLEDGE” side of our relation to the world.

• It is through this that we receive, as a precious inheritance, the knowledge generated over generations by humanity: the knowledge acquired in classrooms, in books, through mathematical proofs and experimental protocols. It gives us memories (dates, formulas, concepts) and logical tools (deduction, proof, calculation) so that we need not, each generation, reinvent the wheel or rediscover the laws of gravity.
• This cognitive side tends toward objectivity. It seeks to describe reality in the least ambiguous way possible. It formalizes the world, shifting from everyday speech (spoken or written) to mathematical equations or logical formulas: the word “logic” itself derives from logos (speech, discourse).
• This knowledge, whether conscious or immediately accessible to consciousness (preconscious), is by nature in perpetual construction, open, dynamic, and revisable (one can question it). It submits, at least in theory, to the test of facts and to refutation through argument. If a new experiment contradicts a well‑established theory, or a more powerful reasoning exposes its flaws, that theory may be questioned, revised, or even abandoned in favor of a better one.
• This is the realm of science, of critical reason, of thought that knows itself and accepts being subject to questioning and fallibility.
• It is also the aspect of our intelligence that, since the first third of the twentieth century, has literally enabled us to “disintegrate an atom…” whether in war (nuclear bomb) or peace (nuclear power plants).

2.2 Subjective identification: unconscious misknowledge and structure

Alongside this royal road of objective knowledge, received through current interactions with the world, operates another, more subterranean logic much older (indeed, “anachronistic”) and of incomparable power. Grasping it requires going back to the dawn of every speaking being’s life.

• A child does not learn to speak from a dictionary or grammar; they are immersed in what Lacan calls the “language bath” of their parents (or the adults raising them), a discourse in which knowledge and desire become inextricably intertwined.
• Consider the infant: their very survival depends on another (an adult human, usually parents) who feeds them, cares for them, and names them. They receive not neutral words but words charged with the other’s desire, anxieties, hopes, and prejudices. The tone of voice, silences, stresses on certain terms shape the child’s first relationship to the world.
• From this vital dependence and linguistic immersion arises subjective identification. As Lacan strikingly puts it, “The ‘first‑said’ decrees, legislates, aphorizes, is oracle,” somewhat like the supposed infallible speech of pontiffs. Parental discourse is not a source of information to be verified; it is an authority, a constitutive “truth.”
• This foundational speech, because it is received at a stage when criticism is impossible, because it is intimately sealed to the most fundamental affects (love for the parent, fear of losing them), and finally because it becomes unconscious, constitutes the “MISKNOWLEDGE” side of identification.
• Unlike the first, this subjective knowledge is rebel to experience and criticism; it is un‐questionable and non‑revisable. It is a kind of knowing that does not know itself as knowing, a belief felt as absolute evidence. It is the invisible framework of our psyche, the support of our sense of identity (“I am this,” “I am not that”), the source of our deepest desires and our most ineradicable fantasies. It is the soil of all dogmatic belief, of unbreakable socio‐political allegiances, of our tastes and disgusts most deeply rooted… of our prejudices, of which it forms the very substance. Except through special techniques, such as psychoanalysis, this knowledge is virtually impossible to “disintegrate….”

These two identifications are “sister enemies”: the second constantly obstructs the first, which explains the fierce resistance that subjective prejudices oppose even to figures of knowledge such as Galileo in astronomy, Darwin in biology, or Freud in his revelation of the unconscious.

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From Misrecognition to Recognition

Our line of reasoning has now come full circle.

Péguy’s “guilty absent‐mindedness,” the resistance to disintegrating the “prejudice” that Einstein judged far stronger than the atom, and the surprising conceptual blind spots of Planck and Einstein themselves   all of this becomes clear in light of the fundamental distinction between cognition and subjectivity.

A prejudice is not a mere residue of thought, an error which more rationality alone could sweep away. It is the surfacing of an unconscious structure that constitutes us at the deepest level.

Our task of clarification, born from an initial draft and refined by questioning, leads to a triple conclusion.

First, it is an appeal for lucidity about our own prejudices. No one, not even the greatest scientific genius, escapes the effects of their subjective identification. Acknowledging this is not an admission of weakness, but the first and decisive step toward a truly critical thinking, one that begins by questioning itself in a continuing process of self‑analysis.

Second, it is a compelling demonstration of the explanatory power of psychoanalysis, Freudian then Lacanian. Where other approaches settle for superficial description or fall into mechanistic dead ends, psychoanalysis offers a structured and powerful grid of reading to understand the enigmas of human behavior, from the most blind ideological adherence to the resistance to the best‑established knowledge.

Finally, and perhaps most essentially… this analysis invites meditation on the nature of intelligence itself.

Intelligence does not reside solely in the cognitive power to transform the material world, but in the far more arduous and far less common capacity to question one’s own subjectivity, to uncover the logic of one’s desire, to challenge one’s most cherished evidences. Only thus does real progress occur.

At a time when we are striving to build artificial intelligences, a goal in many respects admirable, it would be wise to recall that the greatest intelligence may be the one that knows it does not know everything especially about itself. We should remember the duality between the conscious side of identification, enabled by language, and its unconscious side, through the connection of words with affects felt in the body. The true issue is not creating super‑powerful calculators, but modeling this conflictual articulation between the cognitive and the subjective.

The movement toward A.I. is already launched and appears to be accelerating, so it is too late to declare: “Before seeking to create another intelligence, it would be wise to begin by understanding our own, in all its wondrous and disorienting complexity.” But nothing prevents riding this wave, using the power and talents of “Generative Artificial Intelligences” (GAIs) to model and simulate certain aspects of subjective identification not to create consciousness, but to forge a heuristic tool capable of shedding light on our own fantasmal functioning. This ambition is precisely at the heart of our draft project of an Artificial Subjectivity.