The Thinking Body

THE THINKING BODY

Exploring the Relation of the Body to Reality,

the Mind and the Socio

First published in 2018 by OrtonRoad Books

16 Salisbury Gardens

Newcastle upon Tyne, NE2 1HP

ISBN 978-1-9993086-0-5

Copyright © 2018 by Roy Sturgess

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any way whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, Part III

                              ‘…no one has yet determined what the body can do, that is, experience has not yet taught anyone what the body can do from the laws of Nature alone, insofar as Nature is only considered to be corporeal, and what the body can do only if it is determined by the mind. For no one has yet come to know the structure of the body so accurately  that he could explain all its functions…This shows well enough that the body itself, simply from the laws of its own nature, can do many things which its mind wonders at.’ 

PREFACE

This book has grown out of a 20 years-long friendship with Joel Yoeli. His ideas helped me to realise how the method of philosophy applies directly to everyday living. I’ve taken these ideas up and added to them as an emphasis grew within them that neither of us foresaw. Because the ideas were discussed by word of mouth, copied during a talk or from memory afterwards or in written correspondence I have let them merge into one authorial voice. The object was always to be true to the ideas themselves. The irony is that these ideas are no secret; they are all in the public domain. But I know of no single work that spells them out in their entirety. There is something of a parallel development of these ideas in the works of a disparate group of thinkers that I identify in the Introduction. Joel’s and their journeys might have overlapped but he remains unfamiliar with some of their work. In brief, what I was exposed to was not so much a set of ideas as a method. It involves searching lightly and convivially (in a one-to-one conversation or group) for meta-concepts in order to bridge splits; working through and past intellectual positions, while allowing for and letting go of the grip of personality as and when it tightens. It puts a conversation at the heart of philosophy. This is a place where new thinking arises as people start to accept each other. It is public philosophy at its most vibrant.

I need to stress at the outset that no philosophical language has yet emerged to help us revise the concept of mind. I refer to mind over and again in later pages. It is conventionally used today as a synonym for thought. At school and college we are exhorted to develop ‘a mind of your own.’ I take this to be one of the blighting features of the world we live in. I define it to mean the opposite: non-thinking, an impediment to free thought. My use of the word ‘mind’ in this way might appear to be counter-intuitive, bloody-minded or just wrong. I am aware that it risks throwing the reader into some confusion. I can only ask the reader at the outset to ‘be prepared!’

I’ve been immensely fortunate to make new friends in groups who met in one café or another over many years. I have to select from among them for special thanks those who nudged, queried and supported me as I ploughed through earlier drafts - Mary Whitby, Ian Patience, Leigh Rooney, Mike Boggon, Tony Ward, Nigel Collins, Mike Spencer, and of course Joel.  For generally keeping me up to the mark a very warm thank-you to Jen Thomas, Janet Darbyshire, Lucian Peterca and Trevor Leonard. I owe a big debt of gratitude to my children Andrew, Judy and Penny for their sustained support, and to Andrew for his IT expertise.  I greatly benefited from the clarity George Dimitri, Leigh Rooney and Ian Patience brought to issues that at one time appeared intractable - warmest thanks.  I am grateful to Anthony Morgan for letting me read his correspondence with Joel. I can only repeat to Joel, heartfelt thanks. Mary made my task immeasurably easier by giving up so many warm summer days without complaint. All mistakes, omissions and infelicities are my own.

INTRODUCTION

When the magnificence of the world strikes us we can respond in one of two ways. We can rest our attention lightly on it and leave it unaffected. Or, we can seek to know it. In the former case the mind is at ease, waiting for the world to present itself; in the latter case it is agitated, seeking to know the world and impose a grip on it. (I refer to ‘world’ hereafter to mean all, everything, universe, reality or totality, not only this planet.) The issue matters because the world is a hypothesis. Thus, we must initially hold in suspension questions that ask whether the world is unified or split. Nonetheless, at some point, philosophy has to address the link between mind and the world because we access the latter through the former. And we do know, thanks to Kant, that mind cannot deal with things in their entirety. Indeed Kant and Hegel tell us that mind works by fragmenting or limiting. But with regard to the world as a whole, we can take up William James’ argument for a ‘soft’ unity that incorporates all oppositions. A reasonable view, he deemed it, holds so long as no case against it is proven. It is thus more plausible to consider mind as a part of the world that is prone to split away from reality than to leap to the conclusion that the world is itself split. This is the view I take here and it leads me back to my opening remark: giving attention to the world without wanting to change it requires the use of an ability to reflect that is at ease with itself. Only in this way is it possible to philosophise and only in this way is it possible to quieten the clamour of mind that makes us feel we have let go of our senses; and so finally to accept that we are real.  Thus, my purpose in this book is to show that the way we react to wonder crucially affects our approach to life and philosophy. I declare my allegiance straight away – I am drawn to a strand of philosophy that has persisted in finding magnificence in the unity of all things from the ancients to today. This is an inclusive intellectual project that is confidence that it can stretch to include all fissiparous or antagonistic tendencies.  It starts with the Greeks who by all accounts lived lives of fearless immediacy, culminating intellectually in Plato’s oblique message of an a priori monism. They were allied with Jewish theologians in the Axial Age quest to determine what was distinctive about humankind. The medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides interpreted this as a search for a simple absolute unity which manifests when God reaches out to people. Benedict Spinoza brought Plato’s and Maimonides’ insight into modern times by showing how joy arises from a sense that all things connect. Striving to develop this message in the shadow of Kant and Hegel, Franz Rosenzweig explained what magnificence amounts to, while Martin Buber clarified what it means to have an enriching relationship with another human being. Nearer the present, Ivan Illich showed how a harmonious communal life can be organised. Then there are the thinkers from disparate intellectual backgrounds who developed systems theory and helped us to understand the fluid patterns of human interaction. The socio (of which more later) develops an idea about human interconnectivity initiated by Gilles Deleuze. Finally, I include Irvin Yalom because he was able to discern philosophical import in the dynamics of groups. All but Plato, Spinoza and Deleuze of the aforementioned arguably stand outside the mainstream of philosophy¹. I am particularly attracted to this mix of thinkers and emphases because they conceive of critical thinking and thereby philosophy as arising in the very moment of human encounter. Philosophy, they are saying, is lived rather than made objective. They converge around other themes too. For example, they took everything in the world to be connected; life to be about a readiness to hear the call of reality; philosophy to be a meeting between people; an always-already Other waits ready to puncture one’s pretensions to be a self. Remarkably heterodox, often Jewish, of a continental philosophical leaning and deriving from an implicit Socratic-Platonic monism, this loose grouping has persisted as a presence on the outer edge of the canon, even though they are truly heirs of Plato and Spinoza. 

In the following pages I draw on the ideas of the grouping mentioned above to ask four questions. One, why have particularity and theory ofmind come to dominate philosophy? I will argue that modern philosophy’s failure to build on the classical insight of givenness has created a fascination with mind (in the way I have defined in the Preface, as non-thinking) that has severed philosophy’s connection to people at large and taken away its ability to reduce human suffering. The concepts of givenness and a priori point to a world that precedes our thinking about it. Moreover, what is accepted as the tool of thinking about the world – the mind – misleads us; it has become a tainted idea. When it encounters the complexity of the world it responds by perceiving dualisms. It expresses a commitment to particularity and theories of mind that predictably produce mind-body splits. Two, why turn to mind as a tool in philosophy when it is becoming clear that mind is the child of a greater force with the power to undermine freedom of  thought and human wellbeing – the socio? Three, why place especial emphasis on mind when it is itself an idea that only evolved in the first place in order to understand the body?  The body is part of the world; the mind is only (by now) a discredited attempt to understand it. The body is the key human connection to the world. It is material in the sense that a pebble is material; this is an issue for science. Its materiality is not an issue for philosophy, for which mind is the problem. By acting as an anchor the body moderates the mind’s disposition to impose structures on thought. Mind, as Nietzsche tells us, should remember its necessary modesty and its humble place with regard to the ‘formation of a superior body.’² Four, why has the potential of metaphysics and philosophical method to understand the ways that mind and the socio impose structures on thinking been so long neglected? To follow where the mind takes us prevents us from challenging the suppositions that sustain the very concept of mind. The same is true of the socio. Philosophical method, long neglected during the ascendancy of mind, bridges dichotomies by carrying thinking to the universal. Even the seeming ubiquity of the socio, I suggest, is not beyond the reach of philosophical method. 

My claim is twofold. Firstly, that philosophy seeks to discover and remove obstructions to thinking. Until we do this we do not think and thus struggle to accept that we are real. Secondly, the mind and the socio are the very obstructions that make it impossible for us to recognise that we are real. They persuade us that we are thinking when we are not. Philosophy cannot be concerned with discovering reality while it is embroiled with the mind and the socio. When we appreciate the classical insight that reality is a given, we see that reality is not an object to be reached or connected to, as if it is ‘out there.’ It is an always-already state in which we inhere. Philosophy arises when we use our capability to think about this state, and then to continue further by thinking about our thinking. Philosophy helps us to make sense of things – issues in daily life; strong feelings like love, hate and fear - in these ways.³ It does this by helping us avoid falling into the dichotomising disposition of the mind. It comes as no surprise that attacks on the notion of givenness start from an acceptance that mind is to be relied upon.⁴ Only philosophical method, I suggest, has the power fully to demolish obstructions to our understanding, and, as yet, it awaits practitioners who will take up the baton carried by AW Moore.⁵ The requisite first step is to recognise the unity of the world. Heraclitus spelled out the rudiments near the dawn of philosophy. He explained how things come to be by arguing that reason presents nature in two aspects, the visible and invisible, both of which are seeking unity. Opposites are not in conflict; they are linked by common ground. There is thus an emergent monism in all oppositions. Furthermore, as Gilbert Ryle reminded us with regard to the body-mind issue, when we talk about a person’s mind we are not talking of an entity distinct from the body. This is not to deny that dualisms frequently appear. They indicate a cessation of thinking and the adoption of a position. But the limitlessness of the world allows for all possible splits, fractures, oppositions, limitations and cessations to be included without the world itself becoming split. 

A second question then arises: how does the unity of the world manifest in life? One response to this question is Emmanuel Levinas’ idea of the Other. The Other constitutes one as a subject, Levinas says; it stands in for all reality. This idea enables a form of subjectivity to be sustained. But I take the question to mean more than this: that the observing mind can be shown to be redundant. It is as a response to this question that the human body is being ‘rediscovered’ as a microcosm that replicates the macrocosm of the world. The task of philosophy, I take it, is to return the mind to the body whence, as a thought-experiment, it was ‘detached’ 2500 years ago. Only after we have completed this move can we fully return the body to the world where its position vis-à-vis other beings can be situated. I will argue in later pages that distress occurs when our thinking is dualist (non-thinking in my terms), and further that the latter arises when thinking is said to dissociate from the body. Presently we mistakenly treat mind as if it is an out-of-the-body faculty with which we somehow mysteriously connect. The dualist and materialist origins of neuroscience determine that it goes further and locates mind in a single bodily organ, the brain.⁶ The monism for which Spinoza cogently argued has come down intact to our times. But it is still a small voice crowded out by vociferous supporters of particularisation and theories of mind. Recognition of the central place of the body in mainstream philosophical discourse today derives primarily from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. But Deleuze’s remark, ‘Not that the body thinks…’ represents the ultimate position of both.⁷ Is this the final word? The purpose of this book is to present a thorough-going philosophical case for a thinking body. 

The dualism that underlies German idealism and analytic philosophy and the relativism that is expressed in postmodernism have meant that resolution of the body-mind dilemma has most recently been consigned to art, aesthetic styles of living, or the cognitive sciences. Academic discourse today is largely dualist and eschews wholeness. It is little wonder that human relationship is prone to excitation and agitation and to arguments that lead to lose-lose situations, and that philosophy is widely perceived to be detached from matters of public concern other than morality and politics. Marx’s spectre of alienation pales in comparison. Indeed, the failure to appreciate the implications of the way we misunderstand mind requires a major re-assessment of the intellectual canon. Only when the mind is anchored in the body and is no longer able to constrict thought can we abandon the illusion that we are agents of