24. Body and mind

A tenacious tradition in western thought, under the influence of Plato, religion and Descartes, is that body and soul are separate and thereby reason and passion, knowing and feeling are separate. For redemption and eternal life it is needed that the soul or mind is not inseparately tied to the perishable body. Also for true knowledge and for rationality the mind must transcend the body and matter. Only universal ideas, abstracted from chaotic, differentiated and mutable reality give certain and stable knowledge, such was the idea of Plato. Also for transparency of the self to the self the mind must stand apart from the body.

On the basis of neural science and social psychology we increasingly understand how and to what extent body and mind, and thinking and feeling are entangled. The embodiment of cognition not only robs us of the illusion of life after death, but also of a free, autonomous self that hovers, as it were, above the body and its limitations. Our self is chained to the body and that gives a feeling of being locked up, and a will to escape from the self. The self wants to escape from imprisonment in itself and for that directs itself to the other human being. That is a basic idea of Emmanuel Levinas (in his early work).

Because of embodiment of thought we should not only consider thought in the reflective, intellectual sense. We should also consider cognition in a wider sense, including perception, interpretation, sense making, feelings and emotions. We undergo, experience much without understanding. The greatest part of our mental activity is unconscious, and intuitive, unconscious ‘thought’ governs many of our choices, and often does it better than rational evaluation would have done. I discussed this earlier in a piece on free will.

A fundamental idea is that cognitive functions (perception, interpretation, explanation, valuation, judgment, language) build on feelings and underlying bodily functions. That idea is not new but becomes more tangible in terms of neural structures and processes. A second fundamental idea, which has by now been widely accepted, is that cognition arises from interaction with the environment, especially the social environment.

As infants develop, reaching for something develops in pointing and calling for something develops into a linguistic capability of reference. The construction of mental categories to a large extent is accompanied by proprioception (motor activities of groping and handling). Maxine Sheets-Johnstone showed the importance of movement, and the feeling and perception of movement (kinaesthetics) of the body in the development of cognition and meaning, in evolution and individual development. The grasp of intentions, goals, emotions of others is narrowly associated with the feeling of one’s own body and comparison of it, and its movement and gestures, with those of others. From that congruence between movement and feeling, bodily, kinetic attunement leads on to empathy of attuned emotions, in ‘emotional resonance’. We recognize emotions because we recognize the kinetic expression of them. That is important for trust, for example.