What Makes a Body?
Rent from DeepDyve- What Makes a Body?
Rediscovering the Body
Judging from mainstream Anglo-American philosophy, thirty years ago people did not have bodies. But today, it seems like almost everybody has one. They’re a dime a dozen. It is as if a great embodiment tsunami swept over the philosophical landscape and deposited incarnate minds as it receded.
What I mean when I speak of the days of bodies lost is that, were you to survey mainstream logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind and language over the past century, you would not find anything very interesting being said about embodiment. You would find lots of talk about propositions, concepts, reference, truth conditions, justified true belief, logical relations, cognitive meaning, and other intellectualized abstractions, but you would be hard put to show me real flesh, bone, and blood doing the work of being human.
So, what happened to move the body from an afterthought to center stage? How did we get our bodies back from the Body Snatchers? Well, the first thing to acknowledge is that phenomenology, especially as practiced by Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, never lost the body as the dynamic locus of human thought, action, and language. Unfortunately, phenomenology got sat upon and pushed aside for a while by the big gorilla in the room, that is, by philosophical orientations harboring implicit ontological and epistemological dualisms. These dominant perspectives directed attention away from the body by focusing on the justificatory conditions of “X knows that P,” by accepting the computational metaphor for mind, and by assuming rational actor models of thought and action. In other words, the body was ignored in mainstream Anglo-American philosophy of mind, language, and knowledge. There were too many philosophers who thought that logic had nothing to do with our bodies and their environments, who regarded “mind” as computational programs run on bodily wetware, and who thought of reason as universal, pure, and abstract. This marginalization of phenomenology consigned the body to the outer darkness.1
The good news is that phenomenology is creeping back in through the enormous explanatory gaps left by the analytic philosophy of mind and language. [End Page 159] Many younger philosophers are turning to the richer, more profound accounts of bodily experience that they find in classical phenomenology and its more recent offshoots. Other developments have also swelled the incarnation chorus, such as feminist concerns with bodily difference, attention to the body in critical race theory, and cross-cultural studies of bodily comportment. As a result, more people are rediscovering, or discovering for the first time, the riches of phenomenological descriptions of embodiment.
Another major factor in the upsurge of body mania has surely been the rise of the cognitive sciences over the past four decades. The sciences of mind are many and varied, ranging from biology and genetics to neuroscience, psychology, and linguistics. The relatively new field of cognitive neuroscience has made astounding progress in understanding how brains in bodies interacting with environments give rise to human experience, thought, and symbolic communication (Damasio 1999; Edelman 1992; Tucker 2007). Anyone who has paid serious attention to recent research in this field will be struck by the profound role of the brain and the body in shaping what and how we think, feel, and act. Developmental psychology is studying how infants come to grasp the meaning of their world through their bodily looking, listening, tasting, sucking, poking, grasping, and moving (Gibson and Pick 2000; Stern 1985). Cognitive psychology has moved beyond earlier simpleminded information-processing models to embrace the complexity, richness, and bodily depth of human experience and thought (Gibbs 2006; Overton, Muller, and Newman 2008; Wallace et al. 2007). Cognitive linguistics, developed as a principal alternative to formalist Chomsky-type generative approaches, is exploring the bodily roots of meaning, conceptualization, and reasoning in natural languages around the world (Feldman 2006; Gibbs 2006; Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Langacker 1986). This happy convergence of disciplines that give pride of place to the body has even made it possible for there to be a journal, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, that is predicated on the possibility of convergence and cooperation among approaches that hitherto seemed separate travelers...
