Automatic

“self-acting, moving or acting on its own,” 1812 (automatical is from 1580s; automatous from 1640s), from Greek automatos of persons “acting of one’s own will;” of things “self-moving, self-acting,” used of the gates of Olympus and the tripods of Hephaestus (also “without apparent cause, by accident”), from autos “self” (see auto-) + matos “thinking, animated,” *men- (1) “to think.”

Of involuntary animal or human actions, from 1748, first used in this sense by English physician and philosopher David Hartley. Meaning “done by self-acting machinery” is by 1850. In reference to a type of firearm, from 1877; specifically of machinery that imitates human-directed action from 1940.

(etymonline)

In reducing the ideal of a voluntary, self-thinking, self-acting, and self-directed movement to engines of heteronomously determined mechanization, animated, thoughtfull action is subordinated to the management of involuntary and thoughtless work.

David Hartley invokes “atomatic” to differentiate the actions of the “mechanical” organs from the actions of the “will”:

The motions of the body are of two kinds, automatic and voluntary. The automatic motions are those which arise from the mechanism of the body in an evident manner. They are called automatic, from their resemblance to the motions of automata, or machines, whose principle of motion is within themselves. The voluntary motions are those which arise form ideas and affections, and which therefore are referred to the mind; the immediately preceding state of the mind, or of ideas and affections, being termed will.

(Hartley 1834)

But note that the theory of will here is already mechanized. Will is just the antecedent state of the ideas. Ideas are compounds of “inernal feelings of the mind which arise, from the impressions made by external objects upon the several parts of the body”.

The “mechanisms of the body” “are called automatic, from their resemblance to the motions of automata, or machines, whose principle of motion is within themselves”. And yet, in the mind, whence the “voluntary” motions are located, we also find motion that appears to arise from an internal principle:

Sensations are those internal feelings of the mind, which arise from the impressions made by external objects upon the several parts of our bodies.

All our other internal feelings may be called ideas. Some of these appear to spring up in the mind of themselves, some are suggested by words, others arise in other ways.

(Hartley 1834)

The segregation of “voluntary movements” and “automatic movements” is grounded in a mind/body dualism that belied the materialism of so many modern empiricists. The automatic, mechanical actions of the body are opposed to the voluntary, and subordinated to the autonomous, but also mechanical actions of the mind – in the context of a theory of mind which reduces its context to a clockwork of compounded impressions – minus a critical remainder which “appear to spring up in the mind of themselves”.

I suspect a mystification at work here. What allows a mechanistic, and thoroughly materialistic, theory of mind to underwrite the subordination of most bodily organs to “ideas” in the “mind”? Perhaps a clue in the lies in the key characterization of “automatic motions” as those which arise in an “evident manner”:

The automatic motions are those which arise from the mechanism of the body in an evident manner.

What is mysterious and inscrutable from the perspective of an objectifying, mechanistic analysis gets promoted to the voluntary and governing position, and what moves in a way that is (ostensibly) “evident” is subordinated as a mere mechanism.