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...to the creative dimension of culture. Cultural theorists, on the other hand, sometimes minimize the role of biology in human life in order to preserve space for creativity in thought, emotion, and culture. Even culturalists who study bodily representations seldom examine the body as a site of biocultural dispositions and relay point for political mobilization. The anxiety is that to do so would be to play up the importance of genetic determination. In fact, cultural reductionism--that is, the minimization of how biology and culture are always mixed together in human life--threatens to generate the result its practitioners fear. It depreciates the layered character of the body/brain/culture network and thus ignores some aspects of that network implicated in cultural creativity.
The contemporary revolution in neuroscience offers the possibility of opening a new dialogue between advocates of a science of society and those of cultural interpretation. The most promising route, in my judgment, is to forge links between neuroscience--the observational and experimental study of body-brain processes--and phenomenology, understood as the explication of implicit structures of experience that infuse perception, desire, and culture. But what philosophy of mind and body can inform such inquiries without lapsing into either cultural or biological reductionism?
The approach that inspires me is a descendant of Baruch Spinoza's doctrine of parallelism. (1) His philosophy has gone through several modifications by those indebted to him. I will present some of them, trying to make my own position plausible as I proceed.
Spinoza projects a world of one substance without embracing mind-body reductionism. He asserts that each change of the body is matched by a parallel change of mind (and vice versa), even though neither body nor mind can be understood through the concepts appropriate to the other. There is, rather, one substance with two attributes: extension and ideas. A few formulations in Spinoza suggest that while God possesses the concepts to subsume ideas and extension under one rubric, human beings are capable of knowing that substance is univocal but incapable of understanding bodies and ideas through the same concepts.
In Spinoza's system, efficient causality gives way to immanent causality. The model of efficient causality, in which B is fully separate from A and follows from A in a predictable (in principle) pattern of succession, morphs into one in which new patterns of regularity come into being as 'expressions' of heretofore unrealized possibilities implicit in substance. His system--where for every change in thinking there is a corollary change in bodily state (and vice versa)--thus inspires several recent philosophies--best known through the work of Michel Foucault, Stuart Hampshire, and Gilles Deleuze. They emphasize the importance of techniques, "arts of the self," and "micropolitics" applied to bodies to alter established patterns of thought, judgment, and feeling. Spinoza thus sets the stage for modern encounters between experiment and experience.
Spinoza's theory faces several questions and challenges, however. One is the place of responsibility and freedom in the system. I will bracket that issue here. (2) Another is what it means to say that mind and body are parallel. If the process of thinking is incommensurate with the movement of body-brain processes, how could you know that the two attributes run on parallel tracks? Some theorists indebted to Spinoza bypass this issue. Others respond by modifying his claim.
The former response is found in the philosophy of "anomalous monism," a position advanced by Donald Davidson and taken by some to provide a useful updating of Spinoza. The latter response is what I will call "immanent naturalism," a position that emerges from the conjunction of the English philosopher Stuart Hampshire and the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, two recently deceased thinkers inspired by Spinoza.
Davidson is a monist in one sense. He says that though body and mind belong to one world, the explanation of bodily processes and the interpretation of thought processes...
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More articles from Daedalus
The mind in dance.(Ballet dancers), June 22, 2006
On peace in the Middle East.(Letter to the editor), June 22, 2006
On teaching in European universities.(Letter to the editor), June 22, 2006
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