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Editorial
Introduction to The Mind-Body Politic Book Symposium
Michael Deckard
Lenoir-Rhyne University, NC, USA
Deckard, Michael. 2024. “Introduction to The Mind-Body Politic Book Symposium.”
Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 6, no. 1: iii-viii. https://doi.org/10.33497/2024.summer.0ii.
Keywords: editorial, The Mind-Body Politic, political philosophy of mind, Michelle Maiese, Robert Hanna
There have been two world-dividing splits in Western culture since the 16th century, for which reparations are yet to be made. The first split is that between the mind (or soul) and the body (or material nature), which originated with René Descartes (1596-1650). The second split is between philosophical anthropology, or what might now be called philosophy of mind, and politics (Macdonald 2003, 2006). A definition of philosophy as “science of the soul” has been utterly erased from our memory and our consciousness—there are no longer souls or spirits within the political sphere, unless one is speaking of antiquated fields of learning. Inasmuch as philosophers, psychologists, and political thinkers nowadays believe that the three worlds of mind, body, and politics are one, there are still very few writers and researchers truly contributing to the reparations of these two splits from which we still suffer. For at least 500 years, our culture has yet to heal these rifts. To even say “Western culture” is problematic. What do we refer to as “Western” and what do we refer to as “culture”? This issue on The Mind-Body Politic is an attempt at reparations within this split in Western culture. Our commentators have each looked at this split through the lens of Michelle Maiese and Robert Hanna’s book, entitled The Mind-Body Politic. Each author is attuning the mind and the body to politics, to recover the double breach that needs to be repaired, thus attempting to repair Western culture in the process.
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The way in which Hanna and Maiese in their earlier work explore the rift of mind and body in their co-written Embodied Minds in Action (2009) signals the first reparation in order to build a culture of the embodied work of action. Their epigraph to that book began with Descartes’ claim regarding not being “present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship,” and thus what it is like “to be a creature with a conscious, intentional mind like ours” (Hanna and Maiese 2009, 1, emphases in the original). Hanna and Maiese were explicit there when they discussed “mainstream contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience” as having been “significantly distorted and misled by the modern-classical idea, deriving from Descartes that disembodied counterparts of our own minds (a.k.a. ‘spirits’) and mindless counterparts of our own living bodies (a.k.a. ‘zombies’) are logically possible” (Hanna and Maiese 2009, 2). Tracing the mind-body problem at least to the seventeenth century, but possibly even to Aristotle as Hanna and Maiese do in their earlier work, and as other scholars such as Deborah Brown (2006) on Descartes and David Charles (2021) on Aristotle have done, can contribute to an undivided self (Hanna and Maiese 2009, 5-6). Both their case studies (of higher education and mental health) reveal destructive deforming institutions due to the ideology of neoliberalism and eight criteria of “collective sociopathy”: commodification, mechanization, coercion, divided mind, reversal of affect, loss of autonomy, incentivization of desires, and false consciousness (Maiese and Hanna 2019, 135-156). Topics such as online education are furthering the split of our minds and bodies (Maiese and Hanna 2019, 156-162; Maiese 2021). Without being explicitly mentioned in the text of Maiese and Hanna, I cannot help but see the notion of colonization, especially since 1492, as constructing and enabling this neoliberal ideology in contemporary nation states (Schelkshorn 2024). Furthermore, how we think of mental health disorders are equally subject to the same ideological split (Maiese 2022).
The second great split between politics and the mind-body relationship might even hold greater weight than the first. How does power or sovereignty relate to the mind-body relationship? Most importantly, as discussed in Mason Cash’s commentary on The Mind-Body Politic below, how does “the use of top-down power over others” contribute to “destructive deforming institutions” (Cash 2024, 10)? Oppression and coercion have gone hand in hand in Western cultures’ relationship to the other, especially concerning the arrogance of certain forms of colonial thought. How Maiese and Hanna develop a new sub-field called political philosophy of mind that integrates a philosophy of mind and emancipatory political theory is what this special issue is all about (Maiese and Hanna 2024, 1-2). Maiese and Hanna look in particular at two institutions, “Higher Education in Neoliberal Nation-States” (2019, 117-170; 2024, 2-4) and “Mental Health Treatment in Neoliberal Nation States” (2019, 171-223; 2024, 2). Their contribution to this discussion is to label institutions in two categories: i) constructive, enabling institutions vs. ii) destructive, deforming social institutions. Whether in the classroom setting in which “sense-making” can be a coordinated effort which may contribute to “a process of joint cognition” or in social institutions that “alienate us, mentally enslave us, or even undermine our mental health,” the mindshaping of institutions is continuous (Maiese and Hanna 2024, 3). The process by which Neoliberal institutions influence practices and identities, training “people to view themselves as essentially self-interested, atomic, isolated agents, motivated at all times by instrumental rationality, and to regard everything as a competition,” Maiese and Hanna (2024, 4) call this latter view destructive, deforming social institutions.
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For Mason Cash, however, his main criticism of Maiese and Hanna is that all institutions cannot be wholly creative or wholly destructive. Cash’s example of anti-vaxxers points to the peer pressure of neighborhoods and other social groups in which “many communities and institutions are comprised of a multitude of different, intersecting, and overlapping practices…[which] might well be ‘constructive and enabling’ in some ways and also ‘destructive and deforming’ in others” (2024, 12). Sometimes individuals in such anti-vaxxing communities have to secretly become vaccinated in order not to be alienated from their social group. Cash claims that social change needs to be understood in terms of distributed and collective agency (2024, 12). Using Sally Haslanger’s concept of “structures of domination,” Cash believes professors and administrators can challenge the dominant ideology through ways “we conduct classes, design classes, courses, and curricula; in how we interact with students; in how we encourage one another to research and teach; in how we conduct ourselves in allegedly ‘shared governance’ committees.” (2024, 13) The term “communities of resistance” can refer to those within Neoliberal social institutions who challenge the dominant ideologies.
Alan Jurgens responds to Maiese and Hanna in terms of master narratives, and local or personal narratives. While Jurgens agrees with “how the neoliberal university and healthcare institutions deform and harm not only the well-being of individuals, but their cognitive capacities as well” (2024, 21), he believes that a narrative analysis must be added to the seemingly a priori structural analysis. By means of developing habits, affective framing patterns, and the backfire effect, Jurgens explores the transformation of social institutions’ ways and means (i.e. narratives) of mindshaping. His example of the master narrative of the American dream, “where the success is attributed primarily to the individual themselves, reinforcing the beliefs and values of a neoliberal ideology where one is primarily responsible for their own success and must pull themselves up by their bootstraps” (Jurgens 2024, 22), is a matter of local and personal narratives being fed by a master narrative. Aligning himself with narrative thinkers such as Peter Goldie, Daniel Hutto, and Scott Ruston among others, Jurgens’ challenge to Maiese and Hanna is to also take into account narrative identities.
Josephine Pascoe and Miguel Segundo-Ortin also examine narrative practices in which Maiese and Hanna’s enactive proposal claims that “our essentially embodied minds are partially determined, and literally shaped, by the social institutions we belong to, participate in, or fall under the jurisdiction of” (Pascoe and Segundo-Ortin 2024, 30, quoting Maiese and Hanna 2019, 37, emphases in the original). From a very young age, this determining and shaping come from narrative archetypes, that is, “coherent stories about what actions are permitted and expected from particular types of persons” (Pascoe and Segundo-Ortin 2024, 30, referring to Maiese and Hanna 2019, 199). Beyond narrative archetypes, however, Pascoe and Segundo-Ortin claim that narrative practices also have “active, deliberative, and productive functions” as well as a “strong entanglement with our embodiment” (Pascoe and Segundo-Ortin 2024, 30). They emphasize the diachronic element of narrative in which “we understand people, whether ourselves or others, and their actions, in terms of a diachronic, temporally ordered and mostly coherent web of beliefs, reasons, aims, and so on…the term ‘narrative’ evokes the idea that we interpret ourselves and others as characters in a story, where every action can be made sense of only in terms of the coherent whole” (Pascoe and Segundo-Ortin 2024, 31). Taking the lead from such researchers as Nick Brancazio, or Doug McConnell and Anke Snoek’s narrative therapy, who consider
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addictions as enacting a narrative, Pascoe and Segundo-Ortin claim that “we ourselves are prolific narrators” having agency and not just forced upon by archetypes.
For Ali Teymoori, Maiese and Hanna criticize the Cartesian mind-body duality while nevertheless maintaining a dualism about the way society works, “opposing the current dystopian world with their own vision of a utopian society” (2024, 45). Teymoori further criticizes their conceptual structure of neoliberalism in which the classical Hobbesian doctrine of “individuals as egoist seeking their own self-interested goals” is connected to big capitalism and scientifically minded technocracy (2024, 46). Teymoori asks Maiese and Hanna what they mean by neoliberalism and whether it is a policy framework, an ideology, or a form of governmentality. Can these different understandings of neoliberalism be integrated? While Teymoori points to some specific social changes that are not part of Maiese and Hanna’s account, such as addressing unemployment, his real concern appears to be with the therapeutic and self-help culture of our neoliberal era. Can the dystopian/utopian Manichean framework for understanding social institutions be overcome?
Lee Wilson in her commentary examines how the Mind-Body Politic’s three modes of embodied cognition (i.e. organic self-regulation, sensorimotor coupling with the world, and intersubjective interaction) can be co-opted in totalitarian regimes (2024, 53, discussing Maiese and Hanna 2019, 17). In a brilliant use of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which is not often discussed in the enactivism literature, she applies Maiese and Hanna’s “norm of conservation [as] support[ing] totalitarian institutions in the operation of terror…the laws of totalitarian terror function to relate individuals by de-individuating them into mere specimen, merging human plurality into a single (putative) Humanity” (Wilson 2024, 53, emphases in the original). Furthermore, the other main element of Wilson’s reading of Maiese and Hanna besides conservation is adaptivity. Her application of this term applies to Arendt’s understanding of ideology (the “logic of an idea”), “which involves the totalitarian state’s identification of the development of an idea with the movement of History and Nature” (Wilson 2024, 54, using Arendt 1979, 469). Building upon the two splits I mention at the beginning of this editorial, she believes that emancipatory political theory need not necessarily be based on Maiese and Hanna’s understanding of essentially embodied minds. Both neoliberal institutions and totalitarian institutions can create disequilibria between the organic, sensorimotor, and intersubjective spheres.
Leor Zmigrod’s contribution to this special issue concerns “how human bodies become politicized from the top down” rather than “how the body politic emerges from the bottom up” (2024, 59). Zmigrod’s more sociological perspective, following the analyses of Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Frantz Fanon as well as contemporary authors such as Sally Haslanger, Victoria McGeer, and Alia Al-Saji, builds a “neurocognitive model of ideological thinking” in which perception and cognition are penetrated by neoliberal ideological ways of thinking. The mechanistic natural sciences of biology and neuroscience do not appear to question themselves as to their ideological antecedents. Zmigrod, following empirical studies, identifies how adherents and non-adherents of ideologies such as “nationalism, social conservatism, or religious ideologies” can be subject to both cognitive and affective habits of neoliberalism. Her critique takes up William James’s (1896) terminology of a “genuine option” in which “1) there are multiple plausible options for belief and action, (2) choosing belief or non-belief cannot be avoided, and (3) the option is momentous such that the stakes are significant and the choice is not easily
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reversible” (Zmigrod 2024, 64, using James 1896, 2). The result for Zmigrod is that adopting or rejecting neoliberal ideology is not a “genuine option.”
Maiese and Hanna reply to these commentaries with eleven worries collating many of the criticisms. By not only pointing backwards to their collective work in Embodied Minds in Action (Hanna and Maiese 2009), they also point forwards to their future work, a project they call The Shape of Lives to Come. They respond to each of the commentators in turn and continue the collective work of thinking through a political philosophy of mind. Their belief that it is possible to push back against neoliberalism is the repair work necessary for bridging the two splits mentioned above. In their words, “effective, robust resistance against neoliberalism [is not] essentially different from effective, robust resistance against sexist or racist thought-shaping ideology, or against any form of moral oppression” (Maiese and Hanna 2024, 80). While speaking to its inherently difficult nature, they believe it is a long-term process and need not be abandoned.
Last but not least, in special remembrance, I’d like to highlight Joseph Shieber’s (1970-2024) contribution. He passed away as this issue of the Journal of the Philosophy of Emotion was going to press. Many of his students and colleagues spoke to his brilliance and kindness (Weinberg 2024). His work on the epistemology of testimony (Shieber 2015) and his commentary here on Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man in conversation with Maiese and Hanna (Shieber 2024) speak to the depth of how the rifts between mind and body and political solidarity can possibly be repaired. Shieber, following Marcuse, describes how individuals are “indoctrinated and manipulated (down to their very instincts),” and thus there is a need for understanding how liberatory social institutions are necessary. To use one example from Shieber’s own commentary, there are times when the “only adequate housing that I can obtain is constructed out of environmentally harmful materials and under unfair labor conditions” and that the social institutions we adhere to only further enable a need such as housing to become “deformed…[due to the] societal conditions in which I live” (2024, 41). Shieber’s defense of the solidarity thesis (Maiese and Hanna 2019, 73) speaks to how it is possible “both for an institution to manifest robust solidarity and for that institution to consist of individuals suffering from what Maiese and Hanna term ‘cognitive walls’ (i.e., ‘effective screens against manifest reality and truth’)” (2024, 42, emphases in the original). His defense of cognitive, emotional, and experiential goals that get beyond our cognitive walls and support robust solidarity address the reparations necessary to heal the rift between divisive and soul-destroying aspects embodied and embedded in our Western culture still alive today. We dedicate this issue to his memory. He will be missed.
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References
Arendt, Hannah. 1979. The Origins of Totalitarianism, second edition. New York: Harcourt.
Brown, Deborah J. 2006 Descartes and the Passionate Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cash, Mason. 2024. “Enactivist Distributed Cognition, and the Role of Distributed Social Practices in Social Change.” Journal of the Philosophy of Emotion 6, no. 1: 7-19. https://doi.org/10.33497/2024.summer.2.
Charles, David. 2021. The Undivided Self: Aristotle and the ‘Mind-Body Problem’. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hanna, Robert and Michelle Maiese. 2009. Embodied Minds in Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
James, William. 1896. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Jurgens, Alan. 2024. “Master Narratives: Embodying Ideology.” Journal of the Philosophy of Emotion 6, no. 1: 20-28. https://doi.org/10.33497/2024.summer.3.
Macdonald, Paul S. 2003. History of the Concept of Mind: Speculations About Soul, Mind, and Spirit from Homer to Hume. London: Ashgate.
______. 2007. History of the Concept of Mind Volume 2: The Heterodox and Occult Tradition. London: Ashgate.
Maiese, Michelle and Robert Hanna. 2019. The Mind-Body Politic. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Maiese, Michelle and Robert Hanna. 2024. “Authors’ Replies on Mind-Body Politic.” Journal of the Philosophy of Emotion 6, no. 1: . https://doi.org/10.33497/2024.summer.9.
Maiese, Michelle. 2021. “Online Education as a ‘Mental Institution’.” Philosophical Psychology 34, no. 2: 277-299. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2020.1828573
Maiese, Michelle. 2022. Autonomy, Enactivism, and Mental Disorder: A Philosophical Account. New York: Routledge.
Pascoe, Josephine, and Miguel Segundo Ortin. 2024. “The Role of Narrative Practices in Embodied and Affective Change.” Journal of the Philosophy of Emotion 6, no. 1: 29-36. https://doi.org/10.33497/2024.summer.4.
Schelkshorn, Hans. 2024. Rethinking European Modernity: Reason, Power, and Coloniality in Early Modern Thought. London: Bloomsbury.
Shieber, Joseph. 2015. Testimony: A Philosophical Introduction. London: Routledge.
Shieber, Joseph. 2024. “Heteronomy, Repression, and Collective Wisdom.” Journal of the Philosophy of Emotion 6, no. 1: 37-43. https://doi.org/10.33497/2024.summer.5.
Teymoori, Ali. 2024. “The Mind and the Political.” Journal of the Philosophy of Emotion 6, no. 1: 44-50. https://doi.org/10.33497/2024.summer.6.
Weinberg, Justin. 2024. “Joseph H. Shieber (1970-2024).” Daily Nous. Available online at URL = <https://dailynous.com/2024/04/15/joseph-h-shieber-1970-2024/>
Wilson, Lee. 2024. “Embodied Cognition in Dark Times.” Journal of the Philosophy of Emotion 6, no. 1: 51-58. https://doi.org/10.33497/2024.summer.7.
Zmigrod, Leor. 2024. “Ideological Mind-Shaping or Brain-Shaping: Fusing Empirical Biopolitics and Political Philosophy of Mind.” Journal of the Philosophy of Emotion 6, no. 1: 59-68. https://doi.org/10.33497/2024.summer.8.
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Michael Deckard © 2024
Author email: michael.deckard[at]lr[dot]edu
