Minding the Body. From Corporeal Mind to Minded Corporeality

Abstract

In recent decades, the embodied approaches to cognition have become increasingly influential in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. However, despite their invaluable contribution to the field, there is some concern that they may have succumbed to what I call the “fetishization of the irrational.” This can be gleaned from a somewhat disconcerting tendency of such approaches to construe mind and reason as secondary phenomena that occlude or even distort the primary level of lived experience. There exists a danger that, if left unqualified, a valid attempt to dispel one group of dualisms (mind vs. body) may bring forth another and perhaps even more pernicious group (rationality vs. experientiality). In the paper, I draw on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a major source of inspiration for the embodiment movement, to show that a more nuanced understanding of the relation between body and mind is called for. More specifically, I argue that, in human beings, the idea that the mind is seamlessly interwoven with the body should be construed as a twofold relation: not only in the sense that human mind is mind embodied, but also in the sense that human body is body minded, a virtual center of behavioral patterns of qualitatively novel kind (i.e., symbolic behavior). Mind, in this view, is a unique dynamic structure that encompasses our whole mode of being.

Keywords

• merleau-ponty
• mindedness
• rationality
• transformativism
• vitality
• embodiment