Working Minds

Pamela H. Smith. The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. 367. $35.

Mind in its purest play is like some bat
That beats about in caverns all alone.
Contriving by a kind of senseless wit
Not to conclude against a wall of stone.
It has no need to falter or explore,
Darkly it knows what obstacles are there.
And so may weave and flitter, dip and soar
In perfect courses through the darkest air.
And has this simile a light perfection,
The mind is like a bat. Precisely.
Save in the very happiest intellection,
A graceful error may correct the cave.

—Richard Wilbur, "Mind" (1968)

Philosophers have long wrestled with the notion that human beings are an uneasy composite of body, mind, and spirit. While the proportions assigned to each of these components have varied widely—or have even collapsed—from, say, Plato to Aquinas to LaMettrie, solving the problem of the mind-brain continuum endures. To what degree are thought, multimodal sensory experience, and world born together and sustained through continuous interweaving? Putting the question otherwise: what is cognitively lost when imagination and creativity are abstracted from the actions that realize them, such as craft expertise and tool manipulation?

One of the chief mysteries haunting both neurology and technology is the extent to which intellectual work and physical operations or mechanical skills are inextricably bound together. Does the circling, autopoietic brain-bat need to brush against or break out of the stony walls of the cave in order to know? Is it a self-referencing observing system which, in the now classic definition of Maturana and Varela (1980) is closed, dynamic, and in which all phenomena "are subordinated to its autopoiesis and all its states are states in autopoiesis" (pp. 37– 38)? Or is it a living hybrid forever under construction, always in an open state of reciprocal becoming in tandem with the evolving environment? Do we discern our individual subjectivity only through our entire repertoire of bodily actions as we encounter or shape resisting materials?

The idea that there are no ideas but in things—a Modernist conviction stretching back to William James and forward to William Carlos Williams—has obliquely resurfaced in recent neuroscientific research that tantalizingly intertwines self-awareness with metabolism and/or ambient (Brown 2004). Here I can mention only two different but complementary efforts at integrating intellectual states with deep-seated physiological processes that either continue unabated or are constantly modified by objects in the environment: those of Antonio Damasio and Andy Clark.

Damasio's (2004) widely discussed neurophysiological and neuroanatomical investigations embed the emotions within the self-regulating homeostatic system. Feelings operate at a higher level, but they, too, are sunk within a mind that is rooted in the brain's body. By affirming the biological necessity of such complex collections of chemical and neural responses to reasoning, Damasio seems to endow these patterns of response with a doubleness akin to the "senseless wit" of Richard Wilbur's poem "Mind" (1968). Reason is affect-suffused because the emotions originate as bodily strivings that we subsequently feel, or of which we become cognitively aware. For Damasio, our entire body brings forth the emotions and, ultimately, consciousness. Consquently, the human organism is literally and profoundly unified. It might be helpful to visualize it as a type of intricate, integrated, multilevel emblem or tightly compressed formal unit. This bio-conceptual amalgam—made up of dynamic brain states, involuntary visceral sensations, and the proprioceptor senses quietly informing us of the condition of our muscles and the position of our limbs—fuses into body-based mental life.

Conversely, Clark's (1997) phenomenological and enactive approach to cognitive science rests on the feedback theory that brain, body, and world can at times be participants in "dense, reciprocal causal influence" (p. 116). In these temporally rich moments of...