Mind incarnate: from Dewey to Damasio

Abstract

Daedalus Summer 2006 To be a human being requires a functioning human brain, in a living human body, interacting with complex physical, social, and cultural environments, in an ongoing flow of experience. What could be more self-evident than the fact that the human mind is intrinsically incarnate? And yet, most people do not believe this. Traditional Western philosophical and religious traditions routinely assume the transcendence of mind over body. They assume that our inmost essence is mental and spiritual, which they regard as distinct from the bodily. To live in our culture is to unwittingly soak up the metaphysical mind-body dualism that pervades our commonsense views of cognition, knowledge, language, and values. Until quite recently, only a handful of intellectually courageous philosophers have outspokenly embraced a nondualistic view of mind and pursued the radical implications of such a view. Baruch Spinoza stands out in this regard, followed much later by Friederich Nietzsche and then the pragmatic naturalists Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey in America, and also the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty in France. Over the past twenty years, the situation in philosophy has begun to change. The terms ‘embodied mind’ and ‘embodied cognition’ have become buzzwords in psychology and the other cognitive sciences–and also, increasingly, in philosophy itself. Taking this change seriously is no small matter. If we give up the notion of a transcendent soul and a disembodied mind, then we must give up as well some of our most commonly cherished assumptions about what it means to be human.