Human Bodily Ambivalence: Precondition for Social Cognition and Its Disruption in Neuropsychiatric Disorders

Background: Re-Examining the Explanatory Gap Between Mind and Body

Heinze’s contribution is lucid, timely, and, without exaggeration, courageous. It is lucid because it presents a difficult subject in an accessible manner. It is timely because the interface philosophy and cognitive/clinical neuroscience may be ready for the novel ideas it presents. Finally, it is courageous because it attempts to revive philosophic anthropology, a discipline fallen into relative oblivion, even disrepute, for many of the thinkers who first embraced it. Many initial advocates (e.g., Foucault, Habermas, Heidegger, Lacan) turned away from its overly ambitious project of making conceptually precise the nonverbal origins of human meaning in bodily experience by opting for the safer, more solid ground of language/linguistic communication. Moreover, given the rapid, ongoing scientific advances in the field, the effort to philosophically define what is distinctively human versus “other animals” was thought, at best, to be pyrrhic in its chase of an elusive, ever-moving target.¹ Despite these formidable barriers, Heinze turns to Plessner’s philosophic anthropology when asking, “How can we develop a theoretical basis for psychopathology without reducing the social dimension?”

Levine (1983) described an “explanatory gap” between neural processes and qualia, that is, what it is like to experience phenomenal states. This has not impeded a revolution in cognitive neuroscience. After years of silence on consciousness and self, cognitive science/neuroscience have now swung in the opposite direction, and claim to be able to experimentally study these topics, often in an oversimplified manner. These approaches uncritically confuse representational-content about self, or self-awareness in self-referential processing, that is, having a self (a self-enclosed entity), with being a self, prospectively open to its own (yet-to-be-known) future. Ignoring this difference has led to an industry of philosophic and neuroimaging studies that claim to access the first-person perspective by means of reflection and/or experiment, when only able to access higher-order, self-referential judgments.

Little attention has been given to the possibility that the explanatory “gap” itself may be informative. Bloom (2004), however, provides evidence that human cognitive development is characterized by a fundamental “common-sense dualism” between mind and body. Despite well-meaning efforts of researchers and philosophers to view the mind and brain as the same, this tendency is nearly intractable. Plessner’s work provides an alternative solution: the human condition is itself characterized by an ambiguous relationship to one’s own body, which Plessner calls “eccentric” or “broken” positionality. The ongoing shifting back and forth (and thus “hidden unity” [von Weizsäcker 1940]) between “being” a body (Leib) and “having” a body (Körper) makes it possible to study the human ambiguous relationship to body in its own right.

The Ambivalent Core of Being Human

Heinze cites Plessner that “human nature is ‘under-determined.’” Owing to fundamental indeterminacy, we are neither completely at home in our bodily first-person perspective nor are we free from it. It is because we can also visually experience our subjectivity from without, as object, that we are cut off from our own positional-centers in ongoing disequilibrium. This gap, the precondition for vulnerability to breakdown in mental disorder, is not the result of contemplative reflection, hyper-reflexivity, or metacognition, but rather enables reflection. Plessner finds evidence, as formal structure, for the non-coincident relationship between being-a-body-subject and having-a-body-as-object indirectly, as a “negative” phenomenon, that is, in terms of its effects.

In the philosophic anthropological approach, human experience is characterized by an irreducible intentionality of consciousness or openness to world (Weltoffenheit), poverty of instinct, early birth, prolonged period of dependency on caretakers, a need to compensate for an underequipped body (missing fur, claws, etc.²), and the benefits/disadvantages of adjusting to a continuously maintained upright posture. Unlike other animals, who are, as Heinze indicates, “positioned in the center of their relations with the outer world and do not gain a distance from this (their position is ‘centric’),” there is distance...