Author’s Replies

From The Mind-Body Politic to The Shape of Lives to Come

Maiese, Michelle and Robert Hanna. 2024. “From The Mind-Body Politic to The Shape of Lives to Come.”

Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 6, no. 1: 69-82. https://doi.org/10.33497/2024.summer.9. 

Abstract:  In accordance with the constructive, enabling approach to responding to critical commentaries,  we’ve identified eleven more-or-less distinct “worries” that the commentators have expressed about MBP, and have attributed each such worry to one or more of the commentators; correspondingly, we’ve responded to the worries one-by-one, by construing them as  critical inputs to the work that we’ve been doing, both before and after the publication of MBP, for the purposes of grounding, elaborating, and extending that work toward The Shape of Lives to Come project. Then, we conclude by briefly describing The Shape of Lives To Come project and how our commentators’ worries have made creative contributions to this  new work-in-progress, by shaping our philosophical thinking in organic, generative ways.

Keywords:  embodiment; enactivism; mind; political philosophy; social philosophy

We’re extremely grateful to Mason Cash, Alan Jurgens, Josephine Pascoe and Miguel Segundo Ortin, Joseph Shieber, Ali Teymoori, Lee Wilson, and Leor Zmigrod, for their uniformly incisive and insightful critical comments on our recent book, The Mind-Body Politic (MBP) (Maiese and Hanna 2019). In view of the philosophical excellence of their commentaries, we’ve decided that the best way of approaching our co-authored response is to construe the commentaries as providing a set of critical inputs to our co-authored work, not only as it began in Embodied Minds in Action (Hanna and Maiese 2009) (EMA) and was continued ten years later in MBP, as a sequel to EMA, but also as it was developed between 2009 and 2019 in our individual work, and has continuously developed over the last three years from 2019 to 2022. That is, we approach their commentaries as a set of creative contributions to our new work-in-progress in political philosophy of mind, a project we call The Shape of Lives To Come (Maiese et al. 2022). 

More specifically, The Shape of Lives To Come project has four parts: 

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(i) a fusion of philosophy of mind-&-cognition and sociopolitical theory, called the mind-body politic, (ii) a philosophy of human civilization since 1900, which defends a categorical distinction between the mechanistic worldview and the organicist worldview, (iii) a dual application of the mind-body politic, together with the mechanistic worldview vs. organicist worldview distinction, to the philosophy and psychology of human thinking, called the theory of thought-shapers (TTS), and (iv) the dual possibility that TTS is empirically testable by means of scientific psychological studies, and that, if confirmed, it could be implemented to bring about some genuine improvement and progress in human thinking and human lives. (Maiese et al. 2022)

We think that approaching these commentaries as a set of creative contributions to this new work-in-progress—let’s call it the constructive, enabling approach to responding to critical commentaries—is essentially more philosophically interesting and fruitful, all-around and for everyone involved, than the standard defensive counterattack approach to criticism.

In accordance with the constructive, enabling approach to responding to critical commentaries, then, we’ve identified eleven more-or-less distinct “worries” that the commentators have expressed about MBP, and have attributed each such worry to one or more of the commentators. Correspondingly, we’ve responded to the worries one-by-one, by construing them as  critical inputs to the work that we’ve been doing, both before and after the publication of MBP, for the purposes of grounding, elaborating, and extending that work toward The Shape of Lives to Come project. Finally, we conclude by briefly describing The Shape of Lives To Come project and how our commentators’ worries have made creative contributions to this  new work-in-progress, by shaping our philosophical thinking in organic, generative ways.

In addition to the other convenient acronyms and initials we’ve mentioned in the first paragraph, we’ll also refer to ourselves henceforth as “M&H,” “MM,” or “RH.”

ELEVEN WORRIES, CONSTRUED AS CRITICAL INPUTS

 TO OUR NEW WORK-IN-PROGRESS

Worry #1: Distributed Cognition. Mason Cash worries that we do not recognize the fundamental fact or phenomenon of distributed cognition and agency, in addition to the first three Es of the contemporary 4E approach to human cognition—namely, that all human cognition is embodied, embedded, and enacted). As a consequence, their metaphysics of mind and theory of cognition is overly internalist, and thus counterproductive to their larger project of resisting neoliberal individualism. Another, more fruitful way to defend claims about the “mindshaping” power of social institutions is to embrace a “distributed” conception of cognition. 

We’ll start by quickly reminding our readers that “the 4Es” are: (i) embodied (i.e., minds are necessarily realized in organismic animal bodies), (ii) embedded (i.e., minds are necessarily external-context-sensitive or indexical), (iii) enacted (i.e., minds are  necessarily dynamically and practically implemented), and (iv) extended (i.e., minds necessarily have external vehicles of consciousness or intentionality, a.k.a. “the extended mind” thesis). It’s worth noting that Mason Cash claims that an enactivist view inherently excludes the thesis that cognition is extended; however, there is no single, well-established enactivist position, and some enactivists have argued that cognition, affectivity, and agency are extended (Colombetti 2017; Di Paolo 2009). In previous work, we’ve argued against the extended-mind component and in support of what we call the body-bounded mind thesis (Hanna 2011).  Moreover, although many 4E theorists are anti-representationalists, by contrast we affirm a dual-capacity and dual-content version of representationalism, involving the categorical and irreducible distinction between (i) 

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essentially non-conceptual cognitive capacities and representational contents, and (ii) essentially conceptual capacities and representational contents (refer to Hanna 2015: esp. chs. 1-3).

In any case, it’s absolutely true that the essential embodiment theory, the body-bounded mind thesis, and the dual capacity/dual content theory of mental representation all inherently belong to a larger dynamicist mind-body metaphysics and neo-organicist cosmology that RH has presented, defended, and elaborated, both before and after MBP’s publication (Hanna 2018a; Hanna 2022a). So, for better or worse, our metaphysics of mind and theory of cognition can’t be coherently detached from the political philosophy of mind we present and defend in MBP.

Cash holds that in order to avoid individualistic assumptions, we should view cognition and agency as distributed across wider dynamic emergent systems. For example, if one installs a garbage disposal, there’s a system (consisting of various tools, instruction books, social conventions, and people) that has enabled that agent to do this. All these components are essentially involved, in the sense that the agent could not have done this without them. Credit for the installation is, therefore, distributed across this social and technological system. But is there a cognitive process that constitutively includes these various components, or do the components simply make a significant causal contribution to cognition? We argue that it’s more reasonable to suppose that these components are all crucial scaffolds, i.e., fundamental parts of the social setting in which an agent is deeply causally embedded. In our view, whether cognition and agency are “distributed” or not depends on whether this notion is understood in causal or constitutive terms.

Questions about how to understand what it means for cognition and agency to be “distributed” are closely related to the question of whether agential autonomy is best understood as either (deeply/organically or shallowly/mechanically) causally relational or constitutively relational, which MM discusses in her new book, Autonomy, Enactivism, and Mental Disorder (Maiese 2022a). According to proponents of causally relational accounts, relationships and social environments operate as background conditions or contributory factors to the realization of autonomy. However, autonomy itself is understood in an individualistic fashion: “being autonomous means that certain psychological states obtain or that a person has and effectively exercises relevant psychological capacities or competences” (Baumann 2008, 447). According to proponents of constitutively relational accounts, in contrast, requirements concerning the agent’s interpersonal or social environment are among the defining conditions of autonomy. That is, social conditions must be mentioned in the definition of autonomy, so that what it means to be autonomous cannot be spelled out without direct reference to a person’s social environment, position, or standing. 

On the one hand, the claim that autonomy is shallowly/mechanically causally relational seems too weak. If autonomy is conceptualized in a purely internal way, and as relational in a shallowly/mechanically causal sense, we will lose sight of how the exercise of autonomous agency over time depends on various social resources, such as interpersonal relations of trust and friendship. And on the other hand, a constitutively relational account is unable to make sense of how persons can resist and emancipate themselves from oppressive social environments. If a person’s autonomy is constituted by facts about their social environment, then it becomes impossible to describe them as autonomous if they live in an oppressive environment (Baumann 2008, 465). But if slaves and/or subservient wives who live in deeply racist and/or sexist societies automatically fail to qualify as autonomous agents, this leads to the counterintuitive and problematic implication that they’re incapable of effectively and robustly resisting their oppressive social environment and emancipating themselves. It appears, then, that autonomy is not purely an internal or individual matter; and yet, it seems false that autonomous agency is constituted by social relations. What is needed is an account that conceptualizes autonomous agency as causally relational in a deep/organic way, and also leaves open the real possibility that individual agents can effectively and robustly resist ideologically or morally oppressive social influences, and thereby play an active role 

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in radically reshaping their social world. In Autonomy, Enactivism, and Mental Disorder (Maiese 2022a), MM presents and defends such an account; correspondingly, this account is also metaphysically supported by RH’s natural libertarian theory of free agency in Deep Freedom and Real Persons (Hanna 2018a, esp. chs. 1-5), and by his anti-mechanistic, neo-organicist approach to physics and cosmology in The Philosophy of the Future (Hanna 2022a, esp. chs. 2 and 4).

In summary, our main concern with a constitutive reading of the “distributed” approach is that it’s in tension with the notion of individual autonomy and effective, robust resistance to oppression. If we understand cognition and agency as scaffolded and deeply causally embedded, this better accounts for individual autonomy, which enactivist theorists rightly hold remains intact during participatory sense-making. 

Worry #2: Ideological Oppression. Cash worries that we do not adequately address mindshaping involving ideological oppression (Cash 2024, 10; this issue). Since MBP, we’ve also developed The Theory of Thought-Shapers (TTS), which subsumes the theory of ideology under a broader cognitive framework; more specifically, we believe that our distinction between (i) bad, false, and wrong mechanical, constrictive thought-shaping and (ii) good, true, and right organic, generative thought-shaping, covers the relevant phenomena (Hanna and Paans 2021c; Hanna 2022a: ch. 3). Therefore, in view of TTS, we also think that what Haslanger is calling “ideological oppression” can be understood as a sub-species of destructive, deforming mindshaping in social institutions, which inherently involves mechanical, constrictive thought-shaping of a specifically racist, sexist, ableist, xenophobic, etc., kind. Furthermore, we argue that this kind of destructive, deforming mindshaping/mechanical, constrictive thought-shaping must also be understood against the background moral theory informing MBP, which is a broadly and radically Kantian nonideal dignitarianism. On this view, all oppression (including ideological oppression) is rooted in treating people like mere means or things, and/or in other failures to treat people with sufficient respect for their human dignity, i.e., the absolute, non-denumerably infinite, intrinsic, objective value of all rational human animals, a.k.a human real persons (Hanna 2018b, 2021a). 

Worry #3: Top-Down Design. Cash also worries that we overemphasize top-down social-institutional design and, therefore, neglect distributed mindshaping. He argues that insofar as our  account focuses primarily on the use of coercive, top-down power via the imposition of various structures, it overlooks or downplays the importance of the power that is distributed in social communities and their normative and discursive practices over the course of everyday social engagement (Cash 2024, 10; this issue). Moreover, he notes that  while M&H depict constructive social change as a matter of the top-down design of constructive and enabling social institutions, it is often more a matter of the shared practices of these distributed communities. In addition to that, society is constituted by a diverse range of normative communities, just as social institutions are inhabited by a diverse range of people who might support some of the institution’s norms and values, while resisting others (Cash 2024, 12; this issue).

We think that our working definition of “social institutions” is explicitly broad enough to cover all the relevant facts or phenomena of distributed mindshaping; and while it’s certainly true that our theory of social-institutional design and construction in MBP is not fully worked out, nevertheless both before and after MBP, we’ve also (i) done work on bottom-up anarcho-socialist social-institutional dynamics in RH’s Kant, Agnosticism, and Anarchism (Hanna, 2018c: esp. part 3) and (ii) treated distributed social relations in some detail in RH’s postscript to MBP, “Our Sociable Sociality” (Hanna 2021b). This, in turn, means that for the purposes of The Shape of Lives To Come project we’re proposing an approach to mindshaping in social institutions that’s complementarily and simultaneously both top-down and bottom-up, hence also complementarily and simultaneously attentive both to hierarchical and distributed sociality.

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In “Mindshaping, Enactivism, and Ideological Oppression,” MM argues that although autonomous agency is socially scaffolded, it also centrally involves the ability to resist adverse social influences (Maiese 2022b). Autonomy is exercised by an individual agent who is differentiated from the social environment and can endeavor to reform and reshape their patterns of bodily engagement with that environment. While environmental settings do often funnel activities into a few constrained behavioral options, they don’t undermine the real possibility of an agent breaking away from these activities (Di Paolo et al. 2017, 169). 

Cash rightly notes that the structures that play a strong role in ideological oppression (i.e., as per TTS, mechanical, constrictive thought-shaping) are not just structures of institutionalized coercive power, but also sets of interconnected normative practices.  Although many of our examples in MBP center around larger-scale social institutions, we do also touch upon mindshaping within informal communities with shared normative practices; and these informal communities do count as smaller-scale “social institutions” under our broad use of that term.

In MBP, chapter 2, for example, we note that social disapproval, even when expressed simply by way of facial expressions or intonation, often functions as an effective sanction. Becoming attuned to the environment and receptive to relevant affordances has to do with improving one’s situation, and because we are essentially social creatures who yearn for acceptance and human connection, it’s inevitable that the views and opinions of others will have significant impact and allure. As a result of these strong social influences, “engaged, active collectives are capable of exerting a forceful affective pull on individuals” (Slaby 2016a: 10). A bit later on, we give the example of “colleagues,” who predominantly act as “mutual normative enforcers, keeping one another in line” (Slaby 2016b: 25).  In the context of higher education, just this sort of social conditioning is at work, in which members of a normative community reinforce, sanction, and influence one another, so that they come to have specific shared forms of life. It’s absolutely true, then, that power operates at the lowest extremities of the social body and is distributed throughout social communities. But in our view, these social communities are themselves social institutions. To be sure, more needs to be said about how smaller-scale and larger-scale social institutions are related, and we’ve done some of that work in RH’s “Our Sociable Sociality” (Hanna 2021b). We fully agree with Mason Cash that social change does often occur through low-level interactions, in the context of smaller-scale social institutions. There are communities of dominated people who together, create alternative communities and accomplish things that a mere aggregate of individuals could not; but this occurs, in part, by individuals coordinating their actions and sense-making with other individuals. We can effectively and robustly resist ideological oppression/mechanical, constrictive thought-shaping only by working together with others, but we remain autonomous individuals in so doing.  

In addition, when Cash says that he is reluctant to view higher education as a “destructive deforming institution,” he seems to overlook some of the key points he raised. Suppose it’s true, as we argue in MBP, that the large-scale institution of higher education is so permeated by neoliberal ideology that it counts as a destructive, deforming institution? This still leaves open the possibility there are some sub-communities that can effectively and robustly resist this ideological oppression/mechanical, constrictive thought-shaping. In our view, these sub-communities should be viewed as small-scale constructive, enabling institutions that play an integral role in bringing about social change. 

Worry #4a: Narrativity. Alan Jurgens worries that we neglect a narrative approach to mindshaping. More specifically, Alan Jurgens proposes that the sociocultural narratives which shape how we come to perceive and experience the world must each involve a synthesis of conceptual and affective knowledge (Jurgens 2024, 21; this issue).

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We fully agree that the notion of a “master narrative” can help to elaborate and extend the idea that we’re oppressively mindshaped—and more specifically, mechanically and constrictively thought-shaped—by ideology: narratives shape how we organize, process, and attend to information. However, habits and what we call affective framings also operate at an essentially non-conceptual, pre-reflectively conscious level, even when no narratives come into play (Hanna and Maiese 2009; Maiese 2011). This gives rise to interesting questions about how affective framings relate to narratives. We think that affective framings are more basic, in an essentially embodied cognitive sense, and that narratives represent only one mechanism via which both framing and mindshaping occur. In any case, while it’s quite true that we don't emphasize or highlight a narrative approach, it’s certainly consistent with our view, and not only can be, but also should be explicitly added to it.

Worry 4b: Narrative Practices. Josephine Pascoe and Miguel Segundo Ortin worry that  we  neglect the role of narrative practices in embodied and affective change. According to Pascoe and Segundo Ortin, more should be said about the role that narratives play in shaping our embodied minds, and how they can be a useful tool for constructive and enabling mindshaping. Self-narrative, in particular, can be a useful tool insofar it allows agents to actively shape themselves and their behavior. The way in which people narrate themselves shapes their embodied relationship with the world and can open them up to new, previously hidden options. What is more, narrative practices offer a means of linking together affective framing with more sophisticated, conceptual modes of deliberation and reflection. But, according to Pascoe and Segundo Ortin, our  account seems to downplay the role that conceptual thinking plays in meaning-making (Pascoe and Segundo Ortin 2024; this issue). 

We agree that conceptual, propositional reframing has an important role to play in enactive-transformative learning and other forms of consciousness-raising. We opted to focus on the embodied, affective dimensions of reframing because we think that this dimension of meaning-making has been overlooked by many philosophers. Because people’s narrative habits and linguistic sensitivities are intertwined with their patterns of attention and other habits of mind, shifting self-narratives can contribute to personal transformation. Still, because these self-narratives are comprised partly of embodied, internalized frames of reference that frequently operate at a pre-reflective, affective level, it may be difficult to transform them simply through dialogue, self-reflection, or the provision of factual information; instead, an even more fully embodied intervention that also targets people’s emotions and affective habits will be needed. According to our view, enactive-transformative learning and consciousness-raising involve a dynamic, coordinated interplay between linguistic engagement, self-reflection, and affectivity.

Worry #5: Human Needs and Ideology. Joseph Shieber worries that we  do not have a theory of human needs that’s sufficiently attentive to the ideological mindshaping of our needs (Shieber 2024, 39; this issue). Correspondingly, Shieber offers a three-step argument for pessimism:

1. Persons are often ill-equipped to identify the social forces that shape their values, desires, and attitudes. 

2. Even if people are able to identify these social forces, it is unlikely that they will be capable of examining how these forces shape their values, desires, and attitudes. This is because these forces are quite complex and their workings are difficult to predict. 

3. Therefore, it is implausible to suppose that people will be in a position to endorse some of these social influences, while resisting others. (Shieber 2024, 39-40; this issue)

In order to support this argument, Shieber distinguishes between two different readings of “false human needs” (the repression reading and the heteronomy reading). But why not suppose that false needs are ones which both

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(a) perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, and misery, and also (b) are not at all under the agent’s control?  It is true that persons are often ill-equipped to identify the social forces that shape their values/desires/attitudes? Is this not what critical self-reflection, collective consciousness-raising, and various therapeutic processes are all about?  Gaining insight into the ways one has been mindshaped is difficult, to be sure, but far from unachievable. We’ve claimed that transformative education is one important way to make people better equipped to do this. Also, it is important to distinguish between social forces that operate outside of someone’s immediate awareness or control, and social forces that operate necessarily covertly. In cases of necessarily covert influence, the mindshaping must remain outside of someone’s awareness in order for the ideological/mechanical, constrictive thought-shaping to continue to exert its influence. By way of consciousness-raising, constrictive thought-shaping can be brought into focal attention, which is an important part of resisting destructive, deforming social influences. 

Shieber also raises a further worry, to the effect that it’s possible to imagine the existence of a social institution–for example, the Athenian city-state–that satisfies all the conditions that we lay out, but whose existence depends on the prevalence of widespread unjust conditions outside of the “real-world utopia” of the institution itself (Shieber, 2024, 42).

As regards Shieber’s Athenian city-state example, if such social institutions depended on the existence of a “slave class,” would they truly count as “collectively wise”? Wouldn’t members of the privileged class inevitably be suffering from cognitive walls if they could not understand that there is no adequate moral justification for the existence of a slave class? More generally, such social institutions would clearly violate the broadly and radically Kantian nonideal dignitarian moral demand to treat all people with sufficient respect for their innate human dignity. Likewise, the insurrectionists of January 6 could not possibly qualify as an example of robust solidarity, since they were fully prepared to use violent coercion in order to achieve their goals, and were, thereby, treating other people as mere means or things, while violating their human dignity.

Worry #6: False or Needless Dualism. Mason Cash and Ali Teymoori worry that we have a false or at least needlessly dualistic account of sociopolitics, more in line with early humanist Marx than with later dialectical Marx (Cash 2024, 11-12; Teymoori 2024, 46-47; in this issue).

It’s quite true that we use dual categories; but at the same time, we’re also fully open to acknowledging mixed social institutional facts or phenomena, in varying degrees/ranges, when applying those dual categories in actual contexts. A particular individual might be more or less involved or actively engaged, at various times, in an anti-racist community, so we agree that actual social institutions are not simply destructive and deforming, or constructive and enabling, period: there’s always room for nuance. Moreover, we strongly favor early Marx over later Marx, for broadly and radically Kantian nonideal dignitarian reasons (Hanna 2018c, 2020, 2021a), so in that case, the dual moral categories are grounded in a moral theory that’s specifically framed so as to build in thoroughgoing nonideality: that is, under this theory, compliance with dignitarian categorical moral norms is neither universal nor strict, and also fully allows for the existence of genuine moral dilemmas (Hanna 2018b: ch. 2). More generally, a duality, that is, a categorical, irreducible distinction between two different kinds of facts or phenomena, properties, concepts, propositions, or principles, doesn’t necessarily entail a dualism, that is, mutual contradiction or exclusion, between two different kinds of facts or phenomena, properties, concepts, propositions, or principles. This is because duality can also be smoothly combined with complementarity, as, for example, in our solution to the mind-body problem (Hanna and Maiese 2009), and also our view about the complementarity of top-down and bottom-up sociality, as we framed it in our response to Worry #3.

Worry #7: Governmentality and Ideology. Ali Teymoori worries that we do not have sufficiently clear and distinct conceptions of Foucauldian governmentality or Marxian ideology in relation to neoliberalism. Teymoori 

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questions how neoliberalism, as a form of governmentality, is related to neoliberalism as an ideology (Teymoori 2024, 47). 

In our view, ideology provides the norms/rules/values whereby individuals and collectives are governed or self-governed. That is, ideology operates on subjectivities, by way of mindshaping. The policies associated with neoliberalism are concrete implementations and enforcements of some of these norms/rules/values. Thus, when someone sees a professional mental health provider, they are likely to be mindshaped via (i) implemented policies/procedures surrounding how they receive and pay for health care, and (ii) the ideological norms/rules/values surrounding the provision of mental health services, for example, ideas about “taking personal responsibility” for one’s own mental health. 

Worry #8: A Manifesto? Ali Teymoori worries that MBP reads more like a manifesto than a philosophical argument  (Teymoori 2024, 50).

We fully agree that this might seem to be a minor point, but actually is extremely important in understanding what we were trying to do in MBP. We fully concede that MBP is not a philosophical treatise, theoretically armed at all points to repel all actual or possible philosophical critics or opponents, like Marx’s Capital—or, for that matter, like Embodied Minds in Action (Hanna and Maiese 2009), to which MBP is a sequel. On the contrary, MBP explicitly expresses “our radical “philosophy of philosophy,” which unabashedly asserts it to be a critical and reflective enterprise that is at once intellectual, practical, essentially embodied, and fully affective” (Maiese and Hanna 2019: xii). In other words, MBP is fully intended to be an accessible, evocative, and indeed stirring philosophical manifesto in the tradition of Marx’s and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto. As a consequence, MBP is inherently open-ended, progressive, and future-oriented.

Worry #9: Individualism and Self-Help. Ali Teymoori worries that our approach to resisting destructive, deforming social institutions is too individualistic and self-help oriented, and, ironically, directly reflects advanced or late capitalism (Teymoori 2024, 50).

Teymoori, like Cash, makes the important point that many social changes take place through collective actions and social movements and/or political organizations that are inspired by grassroots movements. Indeed, we think that both of them are absolutely correct that there are smaller-scale collectives that play an integral role in bringing about social change and in which individuals are able to develop flexible habits of mind; but these smaller-scale collectives count as social institutions in our broad sense of that term. If we more fully elaborated and extended our discussion of how to create and sustain constructive, enabling social institutions, including how this occurs at the grassroots level, this would help to address Teymoori’s concerns to the effect that our approach is overly individualistic and reflective of advanced or late capitalism. To be sure, although we hold that education or learning is an important part of creating more constructive, enabling institutions, certainly, more emphasis can and should be placed on cultivating communities of collective action and resistance. Indeed, for the purposes of our social-institutional “reverse engineering” strategy, we could substitute broadly radically Kantian dignitarian anarchist cosmopolitan eco-socialist politics, which is explicitly and radically opposed to advanced or late capitalism, and from these politics, reverse-engineer radically new social-institutional designs and creations (Hanna 2018c: parts 2-3, 2022b). Moreover, by way of making concrete, real-world plans for immediate activism in this connection, both individual and collective, we’ve explicitly developed a scheme that we call Global Dignity Days in our new work-in-progress, The Shape of Lives to Come project (Maiese et al. forthcoming).

In any case, however, Teymoori is absolutely correct that changes in habits of mind need to be accompanied by fundamental changes in society; individuals, collectives, and institutions all need to be radically, but also

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non-violently and peacefully, transformed, in order to conform to the emancipatory moral principles and fundamental moral values of broadly and radically Kantian nonideal dignitarian moral theory. To bring about such change, it is important to acknowledge that there are reciprocal feedback relations between individuals and social activity. The basic idea is that the individual agent is not simply shaped, but is also an active shaper of both other people and her social environment. Through their unique contributions, individuals can influence the workings of social institutions (whether small-scale or large-scale) and succumb to or resist these socializing practices to varying degrees. Likewise, smaller-scale social communities/collectives are shaped by dominant ideology, but also can play an important role in resisting, reshaping, or reinforcing that ideology. Given these complex, reciprocal dynamics, radical change needs to occur at multiple scales in order for genuinely constructive and morally good, true, and right sociopolitical change to occur. 

Worry #10: EEM, Totalitarianism, and Oppression. Lee Wilson worries that our autopoietic-biological normative foundations of  essentially embodied mind thesis (EEM)—which in turn grounds our enactive-transformative principle, and therefore also our  emancipatory political theory (EPT)—are not only consistent with totalitarian politics in particular, but also express inherently oppressive post-World War II, Anglo-European moral and sociopolitical norms, more generally. Therefore, EEM is neither sufficient nor necessary for EPT (Wilson 2024, 52, 56-57; this issue ).

The most direct and simplest way to respond to Wilson’s highly challenging and ingenious worry is to point out that EEM is not the only normative foundation for the enactive-transformative principle, and therefore also not the only normative foundation for EPT, that’s offered either in MBP, our earlier work, or our subsequent work. On the contrary, in MBP, our earlier work, and our subsequent work, EEM is also explicitly and integrally conjoined with a broadly and radically Kantian dignitarian metaphysical and moral conception of the rational human animal, or person, and also a natural libertarian conception of free agency, which are then naturally developed into an existential Kantian dignitarian anarchist cosmopolitan eco-socialism. All these parts can be compactly expressed by the term radical enlightenment (RE) in order to ground the enactive-transformative principle (Hanna 2018a, 2018b, 2018c, 2020, 2021a, 2022a, 2022b). 

Now, because RE is explicitly a rejection  of not only Anglo-European classical liberal or neoliberal morality and politics specifically, but also totalitarian Statist morality and politics of any kind, and equally an affirmation of existential Kantian dignitarian anarchist cosmopolitan eco-socialist moral and political principles, then we strongly believe (i) that in MBP, our earlier work, and our subsequent work, we have taken amply sufficient care “to avoid the danger of mistaking the needs of a specifically Anglo-European expression of the human organism with that of universal human needs,” and correspondingly avoid the danger of “conflat[ing] the political with the biological,” and also and above all, (ii) that in MBP, our earlier work, and our subsequent work, we are recommending precisely “radically changing Anglo European institutions and practices themselves,” via EEM when it’s integrally conjoined with RE in order to provide a dual grounding for the enactive-transformative principle, in a way that no other contemporary moral or political doctrine is capable of doing. 

Or in other words, although we agree with Wilson that EEM is not, on its own, either sufficient or necessary for EPT, nevertheless, it’s our considered view that the integral conjunction of EEM and RE, and their dual grounding for the enactive-transformative principle, is not only sufficient, but also necessary for EPT. 

Worry #11: Empirical Testability and Concrete Applicability. Leor Zmigrod worries that we approach to mind-shaping and their focus on neoliberal social institutions are formulated at too high a level of generality to be either empirically testable or concretely applicable to individual agents and their lives  (Zmigrod 2024, 67; this issue).

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There’s a remarkable overlap between (i) Zmigrod’s work on “ideological brain-shaping” and (ii) The Theory of Thought Shapers (TTS) when it’s combined with our Shape of Lives to Come project (Maiese et al. 2022). Indeed, what Zmigrod calls "ideological brain-shaping" can be understood as the neurobiological aspect of mechanical, constrictive thought-shaping. In addition, Zmigrod’s emphasis on using empirical results to design therapeutic strategies for self-emancipation is perfectly in line with our life-shaping project. However, in our view, what’s being shaped are not merely neural dynamics, but also essentially embodied habits of behavior and attention. Thus, we would translate “ideological brain-shaping” into “ideological or mechanical, constrictive essentially embodied, embedded, and enactive thought-shaping.” But granting our fully dynamicist and neo-organicist interpretation of the mind-body relation (Hanna and Maiese 2009; Hanna 2022a), then the empirical results that Zmigrod and colleagues have collected and analyzed are clearly consistent with and in confirmation of TTS and the extension of the mind-shaping thesis to the life-shaping thesis. 

As to ideologies themselves, we fully agree that ideologies, as thought-shapers, can adversely shape how adherents perceive the world and themselves, and respond to any decision context. Furthermore, our notion of affective framing (Hanna and Maiese 2009; Maiese 2011) is meant to capture the idea that there are essentially non-conceptual pre-reflectively conscious emotional representations guiding how we filter and make sense of cognitive information, for example, via episodic memory, perception, proprioception, and other action-poised channels.  If affective framing underlies all human cognition, then the depth of its influence would extend beyond the social realm. 

Zmigrod states that it’s nearly impossible empirically to study the psychological origins and effects of an “inescapable” ideology. However, we think it’s a mistake to view neoliberalism as utterly inescapable. As Cash notes, in the context of higher education, there are sub-communities in which individuals try to resist and distance themselves from neoliberal ideology. This is essentially similar to our view about oppressive gender or racial norms. Resisting them is difficult, but not impossible; although we’re constantly buffeted by these social influences, we can self-consciously recognize how the norms affect us in our everyday lives and do our best to push back and resist pernicious mindshaping (Slaby 2016a). Moreover, we think it would be possible to draw comparisons between societies in which neoliberalism’s influence on higher education is more significant (for example, the USA) and societies in which that influence is less prominent (for example, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Norway, or Sweden), and then study the differing psychological origins and effects in these two contexts. It could also then be possible to compare “strong” and “weak” adherents to neoliberal ideology. In short, we think that there are indeed gradients of ideological thought-shaping that can be empirically investigated. 

CONCLUSION

Here is a brief description of our new work-in-progress, The Shape of Lives to Come project:

“The Shape of Lives to Come” examines how social institutions partially causally determine, form, and normatively guide (i.e., shape) our essentially embodied human minds-&-lives either negatively or positively (the mind-shaping thesis). It aims to investigate the social psychology of human thinking. What we call thought-shapers are mental representations, especially including analogies, images, schemata, stereotypes, symbols, and templates, that specifically shape human thinking processes. The theory of thought-shapers (TTS) asserts that human thinking processes are either, (a) shaped negatively by mechanical, constrictive thought-shapers, or (b) shaped positively by organic, generative thought-shapers. Because language is a social institution and because all thinking is mediated by language, then TTS (i) falls under the mind-shaping thesis, (ii) is empirically testable via scientific

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psychology, and (iii) can be implemented for positively shaping human minds-&-lives. (Maiese et al. 2022)

What, then, have we learned from our commentators that we can incorporate directly into The Shape of Live to Come project? Mason Cash teaches us that we must emphasize the two-way complementarity of (i) the top-down structure and dynamics of hierarchical, large-scale social institutions and (ii) the bottom-up structure of dynamics of distributed, small-scale social institutions, in a way that’s also smoothly consistent with (iii) the individual autonomy of rational human agents. We also must make it clear how ideological oppression is subsumed under The Theory of Thought-Shapers (TTS), in the guise of mechanical, constrictive thought-shaping. Alan Jurgens teaches us that we must highlight the narrative character of mindshaping inside social institutions. Josephine Pascoe and Miguel Segundo Ortin teach us that practices such as self-narration can function as an important tool that links together affective reframing and conceptual modes of self-reflection. Ali Teymoori teaches us that TTS must be fully attentive to the mechanical, constrictive ideological thought-shaping of human needs. Joseph Shieber teaches us that we must make fully explicit the broadly and radically Kantian nonideal dignitarian moral theory that grounds our theory of mindshaping inside social institutions, thought-shaping, and life-shaping alike, as a defensible alternative to Marxian theories. We also need to be more emphatically explicit about how this broadly and radically Kantian nonideal dignitarian moral theory can ground individual and collective action that effectively and robustly resists the destructive, deforming character of neoliberal social institutions under advanced or late capitalism, via radical enlightenment morality and politics. Lee Wilson teaches us specifically that we need to be more emphatically explicit about the integral conjunction of the essentially embodied mind thesis (EEM) and radical enlightenment (RE) morality and politics, and their dual grounding for the enactive-transformative principle. And Leor Zmigrod teaches us that our theory must have testable implications and real-world applications, via empirical investigations of the neurobiological aspect of mechanical, constrictive ideological thought-shaping and life-shaping at the level of individual agents. All the while, we must remember that these neurobiological facts or phenomena are also fully embedded within the larger “3E” framework of essentially embodied mindshaping inside social institutions. 

Finally, as regards neoliberal ideology, Zmigrod asserts that there is little chance of effectively pushing back against it, whereas Cash says that  many people working in higher education can and do resist neoliberal ideology. We do think that it’s really possible to enact effective, robust resistance against neoliberalism, although very difficult, and inherently a long-term process. In this respect, it’s not essentially different from effective, robust resistance against sexist or racist thought-shaping ideology, or indeed against any form of moral oppression. It is problematic to suppose that effective, robust resistance is easy or straightforwardly possible; yet it is equally problematic that such resistance is futile or near-impossible. The truth lies in the middle: it is really possible, but very difficult, and inherently a long-term process. Thus, MBP is best understood as an open-ended philosophical manifesto, not only flowing from our earlier co-authored and individual work, but also wholeheartedly aimed at The Shape of Lives to Come project and beyond.  

Above all, as we noted at the outset, we’re extremely grateful to our commentators for their creative contributions to this project, by shaping our philosophical thinking in organic, generative ways.

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Michelle Maiese and Robert Hanna © 2024

Author email: maiesemi[at]emmanuel[dot]edu

Author email: contemporarykantianphilosophy[at]gmail[dot]com