Précis

The Mind-Body Politic

Maiese, Michelle and Robert Hanna. 2024. “Précis: The Mind-Body Politic.” 

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

Abstract: The Mind-Body Politic is a study in the new discipline of political philosophy of mind, that  aims to develop an embodied and enactive theory of social institutions, building on our 2009 study of the mind-body relation and mental causation, Embodied Minds in Action. In this sequel, we distinguish between (i) destructive, deforming social institutions–characteristic of contemporary neoliberal nation-states, and (ii) constructive, enabling social institutions, and defend what we call the mindshaping thesis and the enactive-transformative principle.  The upshot is an activist, transformative philosophical theory.

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

TWO BASIC AIMS

Our co-authored book, The Mind-Body Politic (MBP) (Maiese and Hanna 2019), has two basic aims:

First, we aim to integrate philosophy of mind and emancipatory political theory by developing a new sub-field called political philosophy of mind, which bears a close affinity to what some have called “critical neuroscience.” On the philosophy of mind side, we expand on existing work in situated, cognitive affectivity that emphasizes the role of scaffolding, and examines how aspects of the material and social environment operate to support and augment cognition, affectivity, and agency. In our view, it is important to consider how aspects of the surrounding environment also can have a distorting/detrimental impact on cognition, affectivity, and agency. In addition, we draw from contemporary research on collective intelligence (refer to, for example, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence 2018), John Dewey’s notion of “habit,” Bourdieu’s (1977) notion of “habitus,” and J. J. Gibson’s notion of “affordances.” 

On the emancipatory political theory side, we draw significantly from Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of enlightenment, Marx’s existential humanism, the Frankfurt School’s critical theory, Foucault’s notion of 

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governmentality, and Robert Hanna’s (2018) Kant, Agnosticism, and Anarchism. Our discussion of this existing work paves the way for a new critique of contemporary social institutions by deploying a special standpoint of the philosophy of mind, and in particular, the special standpoint of the philosophy of what we call essentially embodied minds. 

Second, we aim to provide a critical analysis of the selective, formative, and mind-shaping impact of social institutions on our human subjective experiences, cognitions, self-consciousness, selfhood, affects, agency, and agential interactions. To accomplish this, we (i) critically consider how neoliberal social institutions (and corresponding ideology) have a pernicious “mind-shaping” impact via a consideration of two case studies: (ia) higher education, and (ib) mental health; and we (ii) critically discuss how such institutions might be radically changed so that they become more empowering for the people who inhabit them, allowing them to satisfy their true human needs. 

THE MINDSHAPING THESIS

One core doctrine of MBP is The Mindshaping Thesis, which says that human agents are fully and essentially embodied, and that their sense-making processes and habits are partially causally determined, formed, and normatively guided, i.e., shaped, by the social institutions they belong to or inhabit. This “shaping” of our embodied minds is not only itself partially causally determined or formed by means of self-reflexive feedback loops, but also irreducibly normative.

In this connection, it’s essential to note that there are reciprocal feedback relations between individuals and social activity. This means that the individual agent is not simply shaped, but also is an active shaper of herself, other people, and her social environment. Agents have the power to mold their social environments via their active and reactive contributions and responses. By way of what Protevi (2009) calls “mutual presupposition,” the behavior of individuals is “patterned by the social group to which they belong; and it is this very patterning [of individuals] that allows the functioning of the social group” (39). The unique contributions of individuals can influence the workings of social institutions, either reinforcing or resisting these socializing practices, and to varying degrees. Consider, for example, a subordinated immigrant within a xenophobic culture and observe that although she is molded by the culture’s ideological structures, she does not internalize ideology and social expectations wholesale (Higgins 2019). The way she engages with these expectations makes an important difference to her ongoing habit formation. That is, it makes a significant difference whether she reluctantly complies with them, more actively polices/governs herself in accordance with them, or challenges and resists them.

Another thing that’s essential to note in this connection is that the causal influence of the social environment is irreducibly normative; it directly concerns or expresses human evaluative standards, ideals, codes of conduct, expectations, and/or imperatives. And this normative influence cannot be adequately explained by anything that is not itself already normative. Here we draw from the enactivist approach in philosophy of mind, which emphasizes that at a basic biological level, living organisms gauge meaning and value in relation to norms of self-maintenance and adaptivity. We discuss how, at a more sophisticated level, social norms and values come into play. These norms are underdetermined by biology and their source does not lie fully within the individual; instead, these normative constraints are acquired via interaction with the sociocultural environment. 

What Rietveld and Kiverstein (2014) call “situated normativity” goes beyond mere survival and adaptivity and encompasses norms of adequacy and optimality associated with particular social institutions. Although habits and bodily skills are not governed by explicit rules, they still are subject to a type of normative accountability. The pre-reflective sense of appropriateness or correctness that informs our habits is centered on a “norm of 

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optimality.” For someone’s activity to be sufficiently optimal to cope with the situation at hand, it must be sensitive not only to the structure and organization of their body, but also to the projects or practices in which their body is engaged.  

All our habits are normative insofar as they are acquired through training, instruction, or socialization, and are subject to evaluation or assessment. People comply with the norms of social institutions because there is a sense in which it contributes to their human flourishing, as members of a culture. Some interactions are good for the agent and some are bad; some modes of coupling with the sociocultural world are adaptive insofar as they enable the individual to fare well in that social environment (to gain status and social recognition, for example), and some are maladaptive (insofar as they involve heavy penalties or social disapproval).  

CONSTRUCTIVE, ENABLING SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS VERSUS 

DESTRUCTIVE, DEFORMING SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

A second core doctrine of MBP is the categorical distinction between two essentially different kinds of social institutions: (i) constructive, enabling social institutions, and (ii) destructive, deforming social institutions. 

While mind-shaping has the potential to be constructive and empowering insofar as it augments and expands upon our capacities in various ways, it also can impose pernicious limitations. Via the formation of inflexible habits, destructive social influences can canalize individual behavior, and undermine effective cognition and agency. By a categorical contrast, however, constructive and enabling social institutions help us to self-realize, connect with others in a mutually aiding way, liberate ourselves, and be mentally healthy, authentic, and deeply happy. For example, in a classroom setting with particularly high levels of participation, sense-making becomes a fully coordinated, shared, and multiply self-legislated activity, so that students engage in what might even be described as a process of joint cognition. Likewise, a good brainstorming session unfolds as a highly coordinated interaction in which many actors participate, and there are fluid patterns of communication and response. While engaging in jointly cognizing group work or other forms of genuinely “open” academic collaboration, participants sometimes are able to achieve a completely new vantage point on a problem or interpret results in novel ways. As the participants direct one another’s attention to specific details or brainstorm solutions, they combine cognitive forces, and the collaborative whole clearly is greater than the sum of its individually agential parts. The collective wisdom of constructive, enabling social institutions involves a relatively high level of social group coordination, creativity, problem-solving, and productivity. In collectively wise social institutions, there is robust solidarity, characterized by joint interests, empathy, and trust. 

Unfortunately, however, many social institutions in contemporary neoliberal nation-states literally shape our essentially embodied minds, and thereby our lives, in such a way as to alienate us, mentally enslave us, or even undermine our mental health. They make it difficult for us to satisfy our deepest concerns and interests. Such institutions cultivate collective stupidity or even collective sociopathy. Collective stupidity involves a relatively low level of social group coordination, creativity, problem-solving, and productivity, and correspondingly a relatively high level of group dysfunctionality. Individual members are out of sync and out of step with one another, acting in mutual resistance, covertly or overtly undermining each other, or even maligning each other. Such groups inevitably suffer from blind spots, limited perspective, and blind conformity. Worse even than collective stupidity, collective sociopathy involves especially high degrees of coercion and vanishingly few opportunities for authentic collaboration. Perspective-taking and empathy become very, and sometimes even impossibly, difficult.  Established policies are coercively imposed. 

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NEOLIBERALISM AS A GENERATOR OF DESTRUCTIVE, 

DEFORMING SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

Neoliberalism valorizes advanced or late capitalism and is committed to the classical liberal, Hobbesian idea that all people are essentially egoistic and mutually antagonistic. More generally, neoliberalism can be correctly characterized as

an ensemble of ideological and institutional forces whose primary aim is to construct a specific social reality in which virtually all aspects of human life—including human relations, forms of subjectivity, modes of conduct, and/or personal objectives—are managed and evaluated on the basis of market demands. (Esposito and Perez 2014, 420)  

To unpack what neoliberalism is and how it operates, we approach it as (i) a policy framework, (ii) an ideology, and (iii) a form of “governmentality.” 

In terms of policy, neoliberalism favors deregulation of the market, the globalization of capital, and the “rolling back” of the government’s welfare state activities. The manifestation of these shifts in policy varies depending on country and context, but general trends include an emphasis on market security, privatization, laissez-faire, and minimal government.

Neoliberalism is also an ideology—that is, a system of beliefs, images or symbols, and associated normative values. But the fact that these ideas are loosely-formulated, logically slippery, and vaguely-defined makes them all the more difficult to pinpoint, critique, and resist. 

As a mode of “governmentality,” neoliberalism operates as a system of meaning that constitutes institutions, practices, and identities in contradictory ways. Although neoliberalism favors deregulation of the market, it also involves new forms of governance—namely self-management and self-regulation.  In particular, neoliberalism trains 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. What they originally cared about, in the pre-neoliberal “state of nature,” as it were, shifts: people begin to focus their attention habitually on the economic dimension of human life while downplaying other social and relational values such as empathy, cooperation, and collaboration. 

Higher education, for example, is now focused far more on credentialing and career-building than it is on educating. In our view, higher education is best understood as what we are calling a “standard, dystopian social institution”: a neoliberal mega-machine that literally shapes subjects’ habits of mind, assumptions, mindsets, and learning styles in collectively sociopathic ways. Students, professors, administrators, and staff all are “worked upon” by neoliberal discourses and expectations, and thus their patterns of interpretation and behavior (i.e., their habits) cannot be understood apart from these influences. By way of social coordination, mimicry, affective resonance, rewards, punishments, and self-policing, they all are habituated in accordance with the expectations and demands of this neoliberal institution. This results in patterns of behavior and attention that make it difficult for them to satisfy their true human needs.

THE ENACTIVE-TRANSFORMATIVE PRINCIPLE

The third core doctrine of MBP is The Enactive-Transformative Principle, which says that enacting salient changes in the structure and complex dynamics of a social institution produces corresponding changes in the structure and dynamics of the minds of the people who inhabit that institution. This means that we can 

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significantly change our own and other people’s essentially embodied minds, and in turn, their lives, whether for worse or better, by means of changing the social institutions we and they inhabit. Existing destructive, deforming social institutions thereby can be transformed into new constructive, enabling social institutions. 

In constructive, enabling institutions (i) decision-making is collaborative, (ii) democratic forms of engagement are scaffolded/supported, (iii) participants develop flexible habits of mind and are continually open to new perspectives, and (iv) questioning, critical self-reflection, and imagining things otherwise are all encouraged and primed.

We argue that transformative learning environments can serve as a model for the reverse engineering of constructive, enabling social institutions more generally. Such institutions centrally involve the affordance, realization, and promotion of flexible habits of mind. Flexible habits involve embodied affective framing that is self-realizing, organicist, dignitarian, integrative, authenticating, autonomous, deeply responsible, and critically conscious. These flexible habits allow agents to be sensitive and responsive to relevant considerations and nuanced in a complicated, changing world. So, based on the paradigm case of transformative learning environments, all constructive, enabling institutions allow individuals to develop, flourish, and thereby achieve their full rational human potential, by cultivating and promoting “sympathetic curiosity, unbiased responsiveness, and openness of mind” (Dewey 1916, ch. 4). 

More specifically, we argue that an examination of transformative learning provides us with a working model for how to scaffold the development of capacities for creative and imaginative problem-solving, collective wisdom, and robust solidarity, so that people are in a better position to satisfy their own and others’ true human needs:

Effective learners in an emancipatory, democratic society—a learning society—become a community of cultural critics and social activists, and the dichotomy of individual and society is transcended by understanding knowledge (and learning) as intersubjective. (Fleming 2012, 134) 

Transformative learning environments thereby ground positive self-transformation and affective reframing. We argue that this sort of personal transformation necessarily encompasses changes that occur at a pre-reflectively conscious, affective, bodily level, and that these changes are bound up inextricably with shifts in cognitive functioning and intentional agency. A subject’s new “openness” and attunement to certain features of their surroundings involves a shift that is simultaneously both cognitive and affective; and this change in cognitive-affective orientation brings with it a transformation of an essentially embodied subject’s habits of mind, which should be understood best as a dramatic shift in affective framing patterns. Transformative change at the institutional level, therefore, goes hand in hand with transformative change at the individual level. 

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References

1. Dewey, John. 1916.  Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. New York: The Macmillan Company.

2. Esposito, Luigi. and Fernando M. Perez. 2014. “Neoliberalism and the Commodification of Mental Health.” Humanity and Society 38 (4): 414-422.

3. Fleming, Ted. 2012. “Fromm and Habermas: Allies for Adult Education and Democracy.” Studies in Philosophy and Education 31 (2): 123-136.

4. Hanna, Robert. 2018. Kant, Agnosticism, and Anarchism. Volume 4. The Rational Human Condition. Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers.

5. Higgins, Joe. 2019. “Giving Flesh to Culture: An Enactivist Interpretation of Haslanger.” Australasian Philosophical Review 3(1): 81-85.

6. Maiese, Michelle and Robert A. Hanna. 2019. The Mind-Body Politic. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

7. Protevi, John. 2009. Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

8. Rietveld, Erik and Julien Kiverstein. 2014. “A Rich Landscape of Affordances.” Ecological Psychology 26: 325-352. 

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Michelle Maiese and Robert Hannah © 2024

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

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