Commentary
Embodied Cognition in Dark Times
Lee Wilson
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, NL
Wilson, Lee. 2024. “Embodied Cognition in Dark Times.”
Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 6, no. 1: 51-58. https://doi.org/10.33497/2024.summer.7.
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Abstract: Michelle Maiese and Robert Hanna’s The Mind-Body Politic sets out to combine both the philosophy of essentially embodied cognition (EEM) and emancipatory political theory to put forth a “new critique of contemporary social institutions.” There remains, however, an explanatory gap between the general, normative foundations of their approach in EEM, and the particular critiques of neoliberalism and the alternative presented. This paper explores an alternative totalitarian pathway (as understood by Arendt) that such general EEM normativity might lead us, as a friendly invitation for further elaboration on the normative basis of MBP’s critiques of—and proposed alternative to—neoliberal institutions.
Keywords: embodied cognition, emancipatory political theory, totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, Dark Room Problem, enactive normativity
Michelle Maiese and Robert Hanna’s The Mind-Body Politic (2019) ambitiously sets out to combine both the philosophy of “essentially embodied minds” (EEM) and emancipatory political theory (EPT) in order to put forth “a new critique of contemporary social institutions,” as well as “concrete, positive proposals for radically changing both these social institutions and our essentially embodied lives, for the better” (2). There is much to admire in the way in which MBP articulates its coupling of EEM and EPT, thereafter detailing how neoliberalism affects the lives of people for worse, specifically in its expression in Anglo-European institutions of higher education and mental health practices.
However, I argue that there remains an explanatory gap between the general, normative foundations of their approach in EEM and the particular critiques and the alternative presented. Specifically, EEM normativity faces a political analogue of the Dark Room Problem in what MBP calls “computational enactivism” (29n10). And if this is not addressed, EEM may well support totalitarian institutions (as theorised by Hannah Arendt), which has been the general motivation for post-WWII Anglo-European political theory (cf. Verovšek 2018), and otherwise assumed to be incompatible with EEM norms in MBP. Consequently, EEM normativity would not only be insufficient but also unnecessary for EPT.
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EEM NORMATIVITY AND THE DARK ROOM
The overall project of MBP is premised on “the enactive-transformative principle”:
Enacting salient or even radical changes in the structure and complex dynamics of a social institution produces corresponding salient or even radical changes in the structure and complex dynamics of the essentially embodied minds of the people belonging to, participating in, or falling under the jurisdiction of, that institution, thereby fundamentally affecting their lives, for worse or better. (10)
That is, social institutions are problematic or well-functioning inasmuch as they effect salient or radical changes in the structure and dynamics of individuals under such institutions for worse or better, and EEM+EPT is meant to offer an account of such effects and changes, the relationship between the two, as well as how the lives of such individuals are therewith worse or better. That is, the EPT critique of neoliberalism set out in MBP is meant to be grounded in EEM norms, on the basis of which such lives are determined to be worse or better.
As I understand MBP’s account of EEM, there are two key characteristics of the systemic processes of well-functioning organisms, in virtue of which lacks and breakdowns in such processes are intelligible:
Conservation: An organic system O “produce[s] the components necessary for the continuance of those same processes” (Thompson 2007, 98); and “manage[s] its own flow of matter and energy so that it can regulate and control both its own internal, self-constructive processes, as well as its processes of exchange with the environment” (Maiese and Hannah 2019, 16–17).
Adaptivity: O’s regulation of its processes of exchange with the environment are sufficiently responsive to the latter, such that Conservation “admits of graded notions such as lacks and breakdowns” (Di Paolo 2005, 439), where O “regulate[s] [its] environmental engagement so as to best serve [its] needs” (Maiese and Hannah 2019, 17).
Along with enactivists such as Evan Thompson and Ezequiel Di Paolo, MBP understands conservation and adaptivity to occur in three modes of embodied cognition: organic “self-regulation, sensorimotor coupling with the world, and intersubjective interaction” (Maiese and Hannah 2019, 17). As such, MBP analyses institutional sociopathy in terms of the lacks and breakdowns of the relevant social institutions and practices, as well as their human constituents. However, as Nathaniel Barrett points out, such normativity—even with adaptivity—“is just proscriptive normativity plus fortuitous change” (Barrett 2017, 441). That is, it “aims only at the restoration of an underdetermined and therefore somewhat open form of identity, and by chance this restoration involves a restructuring that constitutes a favorable alteration of identity” (441). There would, thus, be no internal reason for an organism, or social institution, that has achieved equilibrium to adapt.
This lack of internal reason to undergo change presents us with a political version of the Dark Room Problem that famously plagues the sort of computational enactivism that “centers on predictive processing and the free energy principle” (Maiese and Hanna 2019, 29n10): if what grounds an organism’s management of its own flow of matter and energy is a certain homeostasis about its experiences, then an organism would rather remain in a highly predictable and unsurprising environment such as a dark room (Sun and Firestone 2020). Analogously, the normativity that grounds the enactive-transformative principle would on its own entail that human organisms, as well as the complex dynamics of their social institutions, would tend to equilibria that undergo
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radical changes only when encountering chance environmental changes, without reason in themselves to seek such changes, if equilibria is already met.
One prominent response to the Dark Room Problem as such is the argument that “phylogenetic and ontogenetic development of the interactions of embodied human organisms and their environment shapes action policies that are targeted at the minimisation of surprisal” in a way that provides reason to leave the dark room (e.g., “explore the environment to minimize costly prediction error”) (Fabry 2020, 700; cf. Friston 2013). Similarly, conservation and adaptivity can be thought to provide internal reasons for human organisms and social institutions, to undergo radical changes, given their respective phylogenetic and ontogenetic developments, i.e., for such organisms and institutions to achieve equilibria not otherwise present, as seen in MBP’s critique of neoliberal higher education institutions and mental health practices.
Yet, as Regine Fabry observes, the Dark Room Problem does have psychopathological expression and explanatory purchase in cases of major depressive disorder, given that “[d]epressive experiences can be associated with specific dysfunctions of the prediction error minimization mechanism” in spite of shared phylogeny and ontogeny (Fabry 2020, 699). That is, the Dark Room Problem might not be necessitated by conservation and adaptivity, but it would at least be possibly supported by them under certain conditions. Similarly, in what follows, I suggest that Arendt’s close phenomenological attention to totalitarian institutions, and how they co-opt the aforementioned three modes of embodied cognition ( organic self-regulation, sensorimotor coupling with the world, and intersubjective interaction), can be similarly supported by the norms of conservation and adaptivity, such that the enactive-transformative principle would be at best insufficient as the normative basis of MBP’s EPT critiques, if not unnecessary.
THE SPECTRE OF TOTALITARIANISM
Unlike those “extreme, pathological cases” briefly mentioned in MBP, where “affective framing patterns become more engrained and a minded animal gets ‘locked into’ particular modes of movement and response,” major depressive disorder is often characterised precisely by an adaptivity to social environments aimed at maintaining cognitive equilibrium, i.e. conservation (Badcock et al. 2017). Similarly, following Arendt’s (1958) analysis in the second edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism, totalitarian institutions and their contributory participants are also characterised by an adaptivity to political environments aimed at maintaining cognitive equilibria through the distinct operations of terror and ideology. While these are neither equivalent to conservation and adaptivity nor necessitated by enactive normativity, enactive normativity nevertheless provides crucial normative support for them.
The norm of conservation would support totalitarian institutions in the operation of terror, which involves the totalitarian state’s identification of its laws with the supposed laws of an unfolding (putative) History or Nature, aimed at fabricating humanity as a transhistorical, superorganic singularity. Unlike the authoritarianism specifically criticised in MBP, which stabilises the complex dynamics of social institutions by curbing radical change with positive, coercive laws, totalitarian terror’s stabilisation of such dynamics is carried out by eradicating those very laws that individuate and simultaneously relate human beings as individuals to each other. While, say, authoritarian property laws may coercively limit the human organism’s environment, such individuals can nevertheless retain their unique manifestations of the various modes of embodied cognition within those limits, yet under totalitarianism, all property is at the disposal of the state. The laws of totalitarian terror function to relate individuals by de-individuating them into mere specimen, merging human plurality into a single (putative) Humanity: from the internal point of view of a totalitarian system, non-conforming individuals are to be removed by coercive mechanisms as disequilibrants. In this way, intersubjective interaction, which relies on the participatory sense-making of unique organisms (and whose uniqueness are precisely a
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function of such sense-making), would be reduced to how parts of a singular body politic relate to each other for the sake of conserving that body politic—and the regulation of the systemic processes of such specimen are thereby taken over and equilibrated by the teleological aim of producing the overarching superorganism. That is, intersubjective interaction would be phenomenologically conflated with a sensorimotor coupling with the world aimed at collectively producing artefacts of a (putative) Humanity.
Conservation is thereby normatively crucial, since the relevant regulation and control is understood as being performed by the (super)organism itself. Hope for emancipatory politics is lost without the possibility of individual human organisms disclosing themselves to each other as unique sense-makers in the intersubjective mode of embodied cognition. The co-opting of intersubjective interaction prevents a who from emerging, as all relations between human beings under totalitarian conditions are mediated by the laws of a (putative) History or Nature, reducing every human being to a mere specimen, a what, and confining sense-making between individuals to continuing the processes of producing and maintaining a (putative) Humanity.[1]
Intersubjective interaction under non-totalitarian contexts, on the other hand, consists in an interrelational network of individuals that manifest to each other in speech and action, under which organisms act and make sense of themselves with reference to the particular demands governing the activity, which issue from the founding event wherein the sense-making network is initially formed by a plurality of individuals relating to each other on the basis of self-sense-making undetermined by sensorimotor (or organic self-regulation) demands.Hence such organisms are obliged by freedom rather than power or persuasion. The internal stability of this intersubjective network is a result of the persistence of the materiality and organisation of speech and action in the exchange of these self-presentations, maintained by feedback loops of participatory sense-making (Arendt 1998; cf. De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007). Norms that govern intersubjective interaction (e.g., the laws governing a non-totalitarian state) have their relevant normativity inasmuch as they are 1) justified by the participation of their individual actors, sans coercion and persuasion within the relevant institution and practices; 2) relate one back to the founding event of those institutions and practices; and 3) are seen as encoding the testimony of those who witnessed, created, and subsequently augmented the founding event in standards and models (Arendt 1968).
At the same time, adaptivity would support totalitarian institutions in the operation 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 (Arendt 1976, 469). Such a development is thought of as “the consequence of the ‘idea’ itself and needs no outside factor to set it into motion,” being able to explain every historical and natural event as the unfolding of its own dialectic (469). This extremely plastic and responsive process, which is more fundamental a concern for a totalitarian state than the particular idea itself (e.g., Aryanism for Nazi Germany or Bolshevism for Stalinist Russia), is achieved by the application of dialectical logic to every idea, such that each idea “is transformed into a premise” (469). This results in environmental entities always already being understood and experienced as mere resources to be utilized, or obstacles to be overcome, for ends external to them (i.e., for the ends of the totalitarian system) whenever necessary. That is, the unique sense-making of an individual human organism’s sensorimotor coupling with the world, which involves the transformation of environmental entities into corollary artefacts (and whose uniqueness are a function of such sense-making), would be, operating alongside terror, reduced to how such products are merely to be consumed in the superorganic self-regulation of the totalitarian system.
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Again, adaptivity is thereby normatively crucial for the totalitarian system’s response to environmental changes and foreclosing the possibility of responses that would result in the radical restructuring of those human organisms and institutions of a totalitarian state. The co-opting of sensorimotor coupling with the world prevents the organism from developing a unique coupling with its environment, inasmuch as it extends the same necessity governing any organism’s production in organic self-regulation, insensitive to its unique position in its concrete environment.[2]
Sensorimotor coupling with the world under non-totalitarian contexts, on the other hand, involves an interrelational network of transformed environmental artefacts (and participants), under which human beings act and make sense of themselves with specific reference to the demands governing the activity, that themselves issue from the overarching organisation of such a network. The internal stability of this sensorimotor network is a result of the persistence of the materiality and organisation of the environmental network, which are maintained by feedback loops between the activities of the organism and their corresponding environmental artefacts. The norms that govern such a world (e.g., the norms governing building construction, such as always ensure a firm foundation with wooden beams), then, would have the relevant normativity inasmuch as they are 1) justified by the demands of the particular activity (e.g., to support heavy bricks); 2) relate participating human organisms back to the initiation of the cooperative activity (e.g., in terms of its motivation and goal-orientation, like the formation of the construction company); and 3) can be seen as standards and models that encode the initiation of the cooperative activity, even if augmented by recognised representatives of the cooperative (e.g., always ensure a firm foundation with steel beams).
Each mode of embodied cognition has its own kind of norms irreducible to each other and, importantly, irreducible to the autopoietic-biological ones, just as the modes are themselves irreducible to each other. The worry here, to summarise, is that grounding politics on EEM’s norms of conservation and adaptivity phenomenologically conflates sensorimotor coupling with the world with organic self-regulation, and also, transitively, with intersubjective interaction with organic self-regulation. As Arendt would underscore, it is precisely because the normativity of the intersubjective and sensorimotor modes of embodied cognition are distinct from organic normativity that the former’s norms are experienced as norms of political and practical freedoms, respectively. The totalitarian operations of terror and ideology are precisely achieved through an understanding of intersubjective interaction and sensorimotor coupling with the world as grounded in the norms of conservation and adaptivity, such that failures of the latter two modes of cognition are mistakenly understood as failures of organic self-regulation. Given enactive normativity, there can be no internal reason for a totalitarian system, as well as those given to totalitarian modes of cognition, to change, to leave the dark room of politics, as it were. EPT, as such, cannot be dependent on EEM.
CONCLUSION
In the foregoing, I have argued that the EEM norms presented in MBP are at least insufficient, if not unnecessary, for the particular kind of EPT critiques it hopes to mount against neoliberal institutions, and, a fortiori, for its characterisations of non-sociopathic institutions. Given that EEM normativity “is just proscriptive normativity plus fortuitous change” (Barrett 2017, 441), and that this can be in principle co-opted to support totalitarian institutions, a possible alternative to neoliberal disequilibria might well be a totalitarian equilibrium. Further attention to this possibility may perhaps also contribute to understanding the appeal of (neo-)fascist movements as recent responses to the failures of neoliberalism, the latter otherwise articulated by MBP in admirable detail.
The present exploration of an alternative totalitarian pathway that EEM might lead us politically would be best understood as a friendly invitation for further elaboration on the normative basis of MBP’s critiques of and
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proposed alternative to neoliberal institutions (cf. Wilson 2021). But such an elaboration, importantly, should also account for why the “philosophico-political clarion call” of the enactive-transformative principle should be sounded through particularly Anglo-European instruments, while purportedly resulting in characterisations for any non-sociopathic institution (Maiese and Hanna 2019, 10). Many Confucian political theorists, for example, understand the pathology of neoliberal institutions in terms of the lack of demophilic leadership (S. Kim 2020); while Confucian theorists of well-being dispute the centrality of autonomy to the well-functioning of human beings and institutions, and the realisation of humanity (R. Kim 2020). That is, care should also be taken to avoid the danger of mistaking the needs of a specifically Anglo-European expression of the human organism with that of universal human needs (cf. Allen 2016). Otherwise, this would thereby again conflate the political with the biological, and foreclose the possibility of radically changing Anglo-European institutions and practices themselves, giving us no reason to leave the dark room of Western bourgeois ideology. For, as Sylvia Wynter warns, “[a]s long as you accept that ‘Man’ is a biological being, the bourgeoisie always wins; because this is its description” (Wynter 2006, 26).
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Notes
[1] In Arendtian terms (Arendt 1976, 1998): action is reduced to work.
[2] In Arendtian terms (Arendt 1976, 1998): work is further reduced to labour.
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______. 1976. The Origins of Totalitarianism, Second Edition. New York: Harcourt, Inc.
______. 1998. The Human Condition, Second Edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
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