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Embodied cognition and science criticism: juxtaposing the early Nietzsche and Ingold’s anthropology

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Abstract

Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy introduces an intriguing combination of so-called ‘drives’, seemingly biologically inspired forces behind humanity’s cultural ways of relating to what is, and extensive distrust of science. Despite the Greek mythological context, the insight and the arguments provided by Nietzsche seem relevant to contemporary biologically inspired approaches to cognition found within biosemiotics, as well as the embodied cognition paradigm. Here, I discuss how Nietzsche’s biological conception of our relation to what is, incessantly emphasises a critical approach to our predilections and mindless conventionalist beliefs.

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Notes

  1. Nietzsche alternates between different interpretations of what is meant by ‘drive’. Sometimes drives work inside of an individual and sometimes they work at the level of the species (Burnham and Jesinghausen 2010, p. 34).

  2. Conceptualising that humans relate to the world by the notion ‘drive’ establishes the image of an irresistible impulsive power, an urge that works bottom-up (e.g. Schilhab 2017).

  3. According to Welshon (2014, p. 13), “one of the reasons his views remain so interesting is that they skip right over the last eighty years of computationalist, internalist, and behaviourist philosophy of mind to intersect – in some cases without loss – the contemporary extended mind hypothesis and its various offshoots”.

  4. In Being alive, Ingold never discusses Nietzsche, but refers to Augustine, Kant, Gibson, and Heidegger. Thus, it remains unclear whether Ingold has been inspired directly by Nietzsche.

  5. Due to word limits, the scope of this paper is restricted to the early period. Nietzschean examples are therefore from The birth of tragedy (Nietzsche 2006a), ‘On truths and lies’ (Nietzsche 2006b), and ‘Schopenhauer as educator’ (Nietzsche 2006c), and those of Ingold from Being alive (2011).

  6. Nietzsche’s sense of the natural world is not a form of ‘Naturalism’ endorsing a naive realistic ontology that reduces what is to categories and laws in the spirit of the natural sciences. According to Burnham and Jesinghausen (2010, p. 8), The Birth of Tragedy was a contribution against a naturalistic doctrine prevalent in arts and literature studies. Welshon argues (2014, p. 23), however, that Nietzsche is a naturalist in so far as he holds “that philosophy and empirical science should share the same ontology, where an ontology is the set of categories (e.g., object, property, process, event, state, and system) that an empirical view is prepared to quantify over”.

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  1. Centre for Future Technology, Culture and Learning, Danish School of Education, University of Aarhus, Tuborgvej 164, DK-2400, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Theresa Schilhab

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Schilhab, T. Embodied cognition and science criticism: juxtaposing the early Nietzsche and Ingold’s anthropology. Biosemiotics 10, 469–476 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-017-9305-8

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