Abstract: This paper critically investigates the aim of post-Darwinian theories of embod-iment to offer a non-dualistic theory of the ‘natural’ and ‘mental’ aspects of human cog-nition. Traditionally, the belief in genuine human agency (the ability to distance our-selves from natural instincts in the name of genuine moral and epistemic norms) has led to dualistic views of the relation between humans and nature that supposedly have to be overcome in post-Darwinian approaches. A short typology of options is sketched:
pre-Darwinian Optimism is distinguished from Dualistic Naturalistic Pessimism. Against this background, Thompson’s theory of embodied cognition is analyzed. Thompson’s still unrivaled account puts the organism right ‘in the gap’ between the ‘physical’ and the
‘mental realm’. Autopoiesis-theories offer, it is argued, the necessary categories to dis-tinguish organic bodies from physical bodies, while at the same time (via the concepts of sense-making and organic agency) establishing a deep continuity and connection between
‘life and mind’. Further, a brain-centrist view of ‘disembodied cognition’ can be rejected.
However, three important questions remain. How exactly does organic interiority relate to awareness? How does organic and cultural sense-making relate to genuine epistemic and ethical normativity? What method and philosophical outlook should be adopted to clarify these non-empirical conceptual questions? As long as these three questions remain unanswered, the gap between mind and nature remains open for further investigations.
Introduction: Are There Good Reasons for a “Bad Dualism” of Humans and Nature?
Although Darwin’s theory is a biological account of the origin and transfor-mation of species, it has served repeatedly as a starting point for a “Darwinian world view”: the expansion of “Darwinian ideas” from biology to human life and human culture as such.1
2 Historically, at least four different phases and variations of this expansion can be distin-guished (for a typological overview see Illies 2006, 27 – 43): (1) Early, more ideological and phil-osophical (and sometimes pseudo-)Darwinian interpretations of “culture as such”: one thinks esp. of Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel, critically see Bowler (1988, 2009). (2) Ethological explanations of human behavior (Tinbergen 1952, Lorenz 1963). (3) Sociobiology (Trivers 1971, 1972, Wilson 1975, Dawkins [1976] 2006) and (4) Evolutionary Psychology (Tooby and Cos-mides 1992), for an overview see further Spahn (2010).
Such a temptation to expand “Darwin’s ideas” from biology to culture seems natural for at least three reasons: firstly, it can hardly be denied that humans belong to the realm of organisms and are at least partly determined by biologi-cal instincts. If we want to understand human life, we must understand organic life as such, of which humans are only a part. And it is Darwin’s theory that offers the framework for any modern interpretation of “life as such.” Secondly, Darwin’s theory provides a causal explanation of evolution in terms of natural selection. Such a theory offers, at least implicitly, a general structural explanation of events that unfold under conditions of scarcity, competition, and replication.
As such, it seems that it could easily be extended to the realm of economic com-petition, or even to cultural history: companies may be viewed as competing against each other for customers and profit by modifying their products; cul-tures, groups and institutions may be said to compete for “survival and influ-ence”; even ideas are thought to compete for attention and “replication” (see the theory of the evolution of ‘memes’ in Dawkins [(1976) 2006, 189 – 201], and see Blackmore [1999]). It is noteworthy that this kind of expansion is not necessarily based on a “biologistic view” of culture: the structural aspects of competition, variation and replication seem to give some aspects of Darwin’s theory a more than biological universality (see Hösle and Illies 1998). Thus, especially within sociobiology, many insights from economics and game theory are integrated into an evolutionary view of animal and human behavior (Trivers 1971, 1972, Axelrod and Hamilton 1981, Axelrod 1984, Maynard Smith 1982, Wilson 1975, Dawkins [1976] 2006). Thirdly, Darwin offers an explanation of the origin of complexity and adaptation along the lines of “descent with modification.” More complex and elaborate organic structures and behaviors are a result of a slow gradual evo-lution. Such a theory, it seems, stresses continuity over discontinuity and seems to be compatible with a reductive account of reality that explains “higher” or
“more complex” phenomena by referring to more simple phenomena and causal mechanisms which are not goal-directed (see Hösle 2001). Such a reduction of complexity and the broad range of explanatory power of the mechanisms of evo-lution are certainly appealing for anyone who is searching for a unified world-view (see Wilson’s emphasis on “consilience” in Wilson [1998]).
It is no wonder then, that ever since Darwin’s publication in 1859 an expan-sion of Darwinian ideas into the study of culture has often been promoted. In this context it has become a standard view to claim that, after Darwin, we have to overcome the traditional Western dualisms of humans and animals, nature and culture.2 An extension of Darwinian ideas is thus coupled with a call for a nat-uralistic monism that should replace the age-old dualism of mind and nature. At
3 Recently Thomas Nagel (2012) has attacked evolutionary biological reductionism from an atheistic perspective, while at the same time embracing some arguments from the Creationists.
4 Wolfgang Welsch critically analyses the history of dualistic “anthropical thinking” in mod-ern Westmod-ern philosophy (“anthropische Denkform”) and embraces an evolutionary perspective in order to overcome this human-centered dualism, see Welsch (2012).
5 See the challenges to the body-mind dualism in Thompson (2007, 221 – 242), and see in general Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991).
6 For the notion of a ‘second nature,’ see Aristotle, Nicomachian Ethics, 1152a30 ff. In con-nection with modern biological considerations see famously Gehlen ([1940] 2009, 338 – 348). For a forceful defense of the notion of rational freedom as the ability to take a self-distancing stance towards one’s “first nature,” see recently McDowell (1996, 79 – 85, 1998, 193 f.).
7 Victor Frankl ([1940] 2006) puts Nietzsche’s idea of a “reason to live and survive” at the center of his reflection: the why of surviving makes the how, and sometimes even the if, a sec-ondary concern.
the same time, such approaches to cultural studies and the humanities have trig-gered numerous controversial debates and counter-reactions. Thus, a wide range of different stances towards a “Darwinian worldview” can be distinguished – reaching from a complete rejection of Darwin’s theory or at least of its rele-vance for the humanities at one end of the spectrum, up to a biological reduction-ism that views humans as mere “survival machines” (for this term see Dawkins [1976] / 2006, xxi, 19 – 20, 46 – 65) or human culture as a mere variation of animal behavior at the other end.3
Since it is, however, a tautology to say that anything in nature (understood here as the realm of spatio-temporal events) is a part of nature, one might ask why there is even a controversy when it comes to the application of Darwinian ideas to human culture. In other words, why is there one part of nature that has been, according to the Darwinian view, brought forth and shaped by nature, that finds it hard to accept itself as a mere part of nature? Why is this age-old dualism of man and nature – contrary to the aforementioned tautology – so appealing?4 Why was the idea of separating “mind” and “nature” that is so strongly chal-lenged in the recent debate about embodiment5 so successful in the first place?
It is not enough to point to historical religious or philosophical traditions that were allegedly able to evoke a feeling of dignity merely by denying that humans have a natural origin or are only a part of nature. The question is deeper than that. Why is the very idea of not being merely a part of nature so appealing for self-conscious organisms that are born, live and die in nature?
Regardless of any religious considerations, it seems that almost all traditional Western philosophical views since Socrates and Aristotle more or less accept that it is a defining part of our human nature to have something like a “second nature.”
We are able to control and distance ourselves from mere biological impulses and instincts. Culture, understood in this way as an act of self-distancing from the
“merely natural realm” (“first nature”), seems to be a uniquely human feature.6 Animals and plants, according to this view, aim at survival and replication, they
“aim” at life. Humans search for meaning, higher goals or for an expression of their autonomy: they look for something to “live for.” Life is a goal in the first case; it is a means to other goals in the second case.7 According to this view, the
8 A powerful and poetic sketch of the rise of dualism can be found in Jonas ([1973] 1997, 32 – 34).
9 See McDowell (1998, 171, 179 f.), for the necessary separation of the “logical space of rea-sons” from the “logical space of nature.”
10 See for example Ayer’s influential rejection of rationalism in ethics, Ayer ([1936] 1952, chap. VI). Questions about what is good or bad cannot simply be conflated with questions about what is factually real or not, because we can reasonably think of good things that are not real, and there are certainly real or “natural” things that we can reasonably call bad.
11 Freedom might thus be an illusion of the observer, see Singer (2005) and Dennett (1991).
12 For a systematic discussion of possible relations between ethics and evolutionism, see Kitcher (1993), and for a critique see Illies (2006, 172 – 186).
freedom to distance ourselves from our natural impulses (just as well as from cultural prejudices) makes us search for values that give guidance and orientation to human life. We are measured then by the values we consciously choose to embody. One might therefore picture “mind” as a separated force operating on and hopefully sometimes shaping and controlling our “nature”: a dualistic view of two substances or forces interacting and counteracting each other is therefore tempting.8 One benevolent interpretation of this traditional dualism is thus to say that it captures our intuition that practical reason and human agency are in their very nature “counter-factual” and normative and thereby different from a blind non-directed causal chain of events.9
Following this interpretation, the ultimate underlying reason to evoke a dual-ism of nature and mankind therefore seems rooted in two ideas: a) implicit and reasonable claims about the difference between “Ought” and “Is,” between what is “ideal” and “real” and b) about the difference between agency and passive events, freedom and necessity. Both dualisms are related to our ethical self-un-derstanding. Modern Western philosophy has on the one hand strongly empha-sized the distinction between “facts” and “values.” It is the basis of Hume’s and Moore’s insights into the naturalistic fallacy (and for Kant’s differentiation between the quid juris and the quid factis question) (see Hume [1740] 1978, III.I., 1; Kant 1781, A84; Moore 1903), and it still underlies “ex negativo” the Logical Positivists’ rejection of an ethics based on scientific empirical descrip-tions of reality.10 By contrast, evolutionary naturalism seems to insist upon an integration of mankind into our scientific picture of nature. But by emphasizing such monism the idea of non-empirical ethical objectivity and the idea of free human agency are threatened.11 Any attempt to integrate Darwinian ideas into our worldview will therefore depend on our view of the relation between nor-mative ethics and descriptions of reality.12 Thus the question of how exactly to deal with a dualism of nature and mind understood in this way will likely remain controversial, at least so long as the ethical assumptions that implicitly underlie our picture of “nature” are not made explicit.
13 Thus there are two opposing interpretations of Evolutionary Epistemology: On the one hand there is an optimistic version that argues that evolutionary success guarantees something like a reliability of cognitive patterns that otherwise might have not been selected (see esp. Pop-per). On the other hand there are those views that argue that viability (survival) and accurate representations do not have to coincide at all (see for example the constructivism of Maturana 1980). On both interpretations see Spahn (2011a).
1. The Dualistic Playing Field before Embodiment: Pre-Darwinian Ethical Optimism and Darwinian Naturalistic Pessimism In comparison with standards of culture or normative reasoning, our view of
“nature” is usually not neutral, so that we can now begin to see the outline of a broad matrix of implicit philosophical premises that underlie the debate about any reconciliation of a “Darwinian picture of nature” with our “ethical stance.”
In its most simple form, nature can be understood as either (I), in the more opti-mistic traditions, enabling human goodness and reliable objective knowledge about itself or at least as preparing the ground for such goodness and know-ledge. Pre-Darwinian Optimistic Naturalism assumes a harmony between the true nature of humans and our “goodness” in ethics and our ability to find truth in theoretical contemplation. These days, such a view is often regarded as either a mere religious hope (if we abstract from the sinful part of our nature) or as a bygone pre-modern teleological metaphysical view. Or (II), as the pessimistic tradition sees it, the conception of nature has to be separated from ontological assumptions about “higher goods,” “cultural values,” or “objective truth claims.”
Nature can be understood as the neutral realm of brute facts at best, but at worst it is a reality that is opposed to our ethical ambitions and ideals, such that “in the real world” survival matters more than objective recognition of facts and values.
Here, nature is taken to be the seat of our dark selfish desires, a realm of egoistic and brutal competition that needs to be overcome by culture and “self-domes-tication”. Similarly, cognition is understood as a tool for survival, not for accur-ate representation of objectivity. This Naturalistic Pessimism does justice to the aforementioned difference between what is real on the one hand, and good or true on the other hand, even if this often implies an opposition between “real-ity” and “goodness” or “objectivity.” Given this opposition of nature and human normativity, Naturalistic Pessimism involves two possible interpretations of the relation between (ethical and epistemological) norms and “nature.”
(II a) One way to understand Naturalistic Pessimism is to see it as an attack on moral and epistemological realism. In ethics, from the perspective of a “school of suspicion,” nobler traces of human nature might be considered to be “against our real nature,” whereas in epistemology, cognition is more concerned with survival and thus might even distort reality rather than objectively represent it.13 Goodness or “human happiness” seem not to be included in the “plan of the universe,” as Freud (1930, 58) famously put it. A “call for humility” (see Lorenz 1963, chap. 12), and a downgrading of our epistemological ambitions in the light of evolutionary theory (Maturana 1970, 1980), might thus be obvious consequences of Naturalistic Pessimism. Another – unfortunate – consequence is
14 For a critical view of this urge to develop a “supernatural concept” of cognition in ethics and epistemology, see McDowell (1996, 83 f., 1998, 167).
that one might proclaim biological “values” such as health and strength, survival,
“racial purity,” etc., as the only new “real” or “scientific” values, as Social Dar-winism did. Here, we not only “face,” but embrace the “pessimistic” picture and allow “nature,” understood in this way, to be our new “realistic” guide in ethics.
We give up “ethical illusions” in the name of a better understanding of empirical reality or even remodel our values (while ignoring the well-known philosophi-cal arguments mentioned above against such a naturalistic fallacy) on that (new interpretation of) “reality.”
(II b) Conversely, and more traditionally, one might counter Naturalistic Pessimism by arguing that “cultural self-domestication” and conceptual scien-tific thinking must lead us away from nature and help us to overcome the more
“brutal” instincts as well as the meso-cosmic distortions in our cognition (see Vollmer 1990, 161 ff.): the way to goodness and truth, if such a way there is, must be a way of culture and science, not of embracing “nature.” The bigger the gap between animals and humans, the less “nature” we find in “culture,” it seems, and the greater are the chances for goodness to prevail and for cognition to be trustworthy. Deconstructing the notion of ‘nature’ and emphasizing “freedom”
and the “human-animal gap,” is a tempting ethical and epistemological count-er-reaction to Naturalistic Pessimism. Nevertheless, even this attempt to defend our normative cognitive abilities still implicitly accepts Naturalistic Pessimism insofar as it would be considered true that any close connection and strong con-tinuity between human nature and culture could only lead to a humiliation or de-evaluation of mankind’s cognitive normativity. I interpret such a reaction to the first version (IIa) of Naturalistic Pessimism as a mere variation of Natural-istic Pessimism, since it subscribes to the basic idea of an opposition between
“nature” and “ethics” in the same way that Naturalistic Pessimism does. Also in this view, the idea of a possible reconciliation of the realm of nature and the realm of normativity remains doubtful.
(III) These two variations of Naturalistic Pessimism (simply put, either accepting a disenchanted picture of nature as a sober new guide to ethics and epistemology in order to overcome naïve claims, or conversely emphasizing the difference between man and nature in order to “rescue” our ethical and episte-mological stance) are both based on juxtaposing “nature” and “norms.” They spell out the aforementioned difference between values and facts by equating nature with “facts” and values with “culture” or with a conception of reason that goes beyond or even against nature.14 In both its versions, Naturalistic Pessi-mism, even if it subscribes to evolutionary ideas, remains deeply dualistic. Super-ficially and in its proud self-interpretation, it seems to be more modern than Cartesian dualism, because it claims to accept a monistic Darwinism. But it is profoundly traditional in its axiological dualism (Spahn and Tewes 2011, 169 ff.).
As with any simplistic binary opposition, we should of course not assume that the whole spectrum of reactions to a Darwinian world view is exhausted by these
15 For both words, see Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991).
16 Andy Clark and David Chalmers’ famous paper and many responses are included in Menary (2010); see also Rowlands (2010).
17 See the famous book title of Damasio (1994).
18 For a very short look at the program of an evolutionary epistemology in Tyler Burge, see Spahn (2012).
19 See McDowell’s emphasis on the difference between animal thought and human thought in McDowell (1996, chap. III – VI), see also the debate in Perler and Wild (2005).
two versions of Naturalistic Pessimism. Rather they should be thought of as rep-resenting (however popular) polar ends of a spectrum. Against these implicit or explicit dualistic views, theories of embodiment claim to be beyond the gap and to offer a truly integral perspective that actually reconciles the “natural” and the
“mental” aspects of human life.
2. Hyper Intellectualism (and Hyper Physicalism) in Recent Philosophy and the Turn to Embodiment Theory Given this urge to overcome dualism in all its forms, in recent years more and more approaches in the philosophy of mind and in the cognitive sciences are proclaiming that in order to understand cognition, even in its normative aspects, we now have to focus much more on “the body” and its place in nature, and not just on the mind, let alone the brain. Buzzwords like “Enactivism,” “Embodied
2. Hyper Intellectualism (and Hyper Physicalism) in Recent Philosophy and the Turn to Embodiment Theory Given this urge to overcome dualism in all its forms, in recent years more and more approaches in the philosophy of mind and in the cognitive sciences are proclaiming that in order to understand cognition, even in its normative aspects, we now have to focus much more on “the body” and its place in nature, and not just on the mind, let alone the brain. Buzzwords like “Enactivism,” “Embodied