Symposium Introduction

The traditional definition of ideology—socially necessary false belief—exhibits an intellectualist orientation ripe for rethinking. In The Mind-Body Politic (hereafter MBP) Michelle Maiese and Robert Hanna (hereafter M&H) draw explicit political-critical consequences from their earlier work on essentially embodied cognition to argue that social institutions necessarily engage in the mind-shaping of its members, not merely doxastically but above all somatically and emotionally, instilling habitual skills and modes of comportment that perceive, respond to, and reproduce learned saliences and affordances in their environment. M&H understand social institution as any group of people whose “affective orientation” (subjective experiences, emotions, beliefs, intentional actions, etc.) is collectively organized and guided by shared principles or rules that function as norms. Such an “embodied objective spirit” (my formulation) can then be evaluated according to what M&H describe as “true human needs” such as autonomy, self-realization, empathy and solidarity, and so on. By these criteria M&H handily demonstrate that social institutions that operate according to the principles of neoliberalism—which they summarize as Hobbesian liberalism, the valorization of capitalism, and technocracy—are coercive and enslaving of its members, fundamentally thwarting human flourishing. Their two emblematic case studies are higher education and mental health practice.

Not only do M&H vivisect the deforming effects of neoliberal social institutions, they describe and advocate for specific remedies and actions in order to create, refashion, and sustain genuinely emancipatory social institutions. Anscombe famously suggested that we cannot have a proper theory of ethics until we have a proper philosophy of mind. This book tacitly takes up that challenge by presenting an emancipatory political theory grounded in a sophisticated philosophy of embodied mind and affective, enactive cognition.

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The picture of embodied mind in MBP was developed and defended by Maiese (Embodiment, Emotion and Cognition[2010]; Embodied Selves and Divided Minds [2015]) and in her earlier collaboration with Hanna (Embodied Minds in Action [2009]). Its key features are that human minds are dynamically emergent, irreducibly interdependent with their biologically and physically mattered bodies (no dualism or supervenience relation), and that we act by intentionally moving our bodies by means of desire-based emotions that ground mental causation in our neurophysiology as living organisms. M&H draw the social- and political-philosophical consequences that motivate their book. The result is a naturalistic, neo-Aristotelian picture of embodied minds always already existing in socially and culturally mediated and affectively situated activities responsive to similarly mediated environmental affordances: “affective scaffolding” that implicitly shape selective and value-laden, response-dependent attention and attunements (“affective framing”). In other words, Hegel’s objective spirit is naturalized for us “minded animals”: our sense-making, and hence our susceptibility to mind-shaping by social institutions, occurs primarily through the affective framing of our social, second nature, a preeminently political matter.

M&H provide eight political criteria for determining that a given social institution is pernicious in its mind-shaping of its members, that it enacts “collective sociopathy,” thwarting human flourishing: commodification (e.g., commodity fetishism, reification, capitalism’s value theory), mechanization (e.g., instrumentalism, rationalization, mini-max optimization, etc.), coercion (including governmentality, self-disciplining, etc.), divided mind (e.g., Dubois’s “double-consciousness”), reversal of affect (inversion of pro- and contra-attitudes as the subject adopts the institutional affective framing), loss of autonomy (inculcated volitional passivity and heteronomous self-perception), incentivization of desires (the subject’s motivational set becomes rigid and instrumentalist, conforming to the instrumental goals of institutions), and false consciousness (the subject’s acceptance of the institutional affective framings as a natural given).

M&H then demonstrate how neoliberalism (as state policy, as political ideology, and as individuals’ self-disciplining practices of governmentality) as expressed in two case-study institutions—higher education and mental health practice—exemplify these destructive criteria in regards to all participants. Instructors pursuing tenure/financial security become “credentialing providers” to tuition-paying customers seeking market exchange value for their degree, a structure that—as M&H presciently outline in this pre-pandemic book—is only reinforced by the recent shift to and intensification of online education. The neoliberal policies and practices of pharmacological and “managed” health care companies conceives mental disease as caused and therefore potentially cured by neurobiological intervention, thereby removing from consideration and critique the social-institutional affective framing contributing factors and the rhetoric of “responsibilization,” self-reliance, resilience, and individual entrepreneurial self-management that subserves market forces and proleptically blames the inevitable victims of those forces.

In the final chapters of the book M&H outline the contours that any constructive, enabling institution must take. Such an institution must fulfill criteria that are the negative image of those that characterize destructive and deforming institutions: an enabling institution will foster self-realization, autonomy, authenticity (including the recognition of genuine desires), an organicist understanding of individual development and social-institutional relations, promote dignity in the Kantian sense, and an integrated and critical consciousness. Unlike the overly intellectualist or cognitivist philosophies of mind that they reject, M&H hold that the right and effective affective framing will cultivate pre-reflective, embodied and enactivist (that is, complex, dynamically evolving systems of elements that yield emergent higher-order behavioral dispositions and tendencies) habits of mind such as empathy, curiosity, flexibility, imagination, and humility, which in turn, and in essential reciprocal interaction with enabling institutions, will develop into the virtues of solidarity, mutual aid, collective (democratic) decision-making, and so on. Suggestively interweaving John Dewey and Paolo Freire, they identify the primary function of a constructive, enabling institution to be enactive-transformative learning, by which these habits will be cultivated through embodied, affective (re)framing that can alter a person’s environmental attunements (what they care about), self-relation (how they care about it, hence who they take themselves to be), practical agency (how they manifest these attitudes of care in desires and volitional actions), and ultimately cognitive mindset (what they think, how they reason). The authors show how affective framing patterns can be instilled through bodily practices including participatory art forms (dance, music, interactive exhibitions), lived learning activities (experiments in modes, members, structures of pedagogy), expressive activities rather than those aiming to transfer or “bank” information, disrupting accustomed habits of attention, introducing new, affectively charged concepts; similarly, mental health practices like cognitive behavioral therapy and expressive arts therapy can reframe affective patterns and induce enactive transformation that can fulfill the criteria of a constructive, enabling institution.

In this way M&H leave traditional ideology critique to those who, according to the psychological literature they cite, will run headlong into “cognitive walls” that are impenetrable to rational persuasion among those whose affective self-identities are at stake; instead, M&H advocate a “cognitive-affective revolution” because “in addition to various modes of critical thought and self-reflection, subjects need to be prepared to have certain kinds of affective, aesthetic, and spiritual experiences that productively disrupt their existing habits of mind” (308), and therefore need institutions that will inculcate and cultivate our best embodied selves.

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Among the illustrious respondents to MBP are leading thinkers working in “4E cognition,” premised on the mind’s being embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended into its environment, and those scholars well versed in political philosophy on the other. Together they offer a wide range of observations, extensions and criticisms of the project, indicative of the provocative innovations contained in the book.

Jan Slaby faults M&H for framing their proposed remedy in problematic proximity to traditional Enlightenment and humanist motifs of individual virtues such as dignity, autonomy, authenticity, and self-realization that have themselves become conduits of neoliberal subjectivation in Foucault’s sense. Missing for Slaby is a more thoroughgoing critique of the ongoing co-variance and co-activation between institutional arrangements and minds that undermines the normative force of the notions of “true human needs” and the Western humanist idea of “subject” that animate MBP.Slaby’s remedy to the remedy entails expanding the list of foundational texts in emancipatory political philosophy proposed by M&H to include seminal works in postcolonial and critical race theory.

In his precise but far-reaching response Shaun Gallagher raises elementary questions regarding M&H’s characterization of neoliberal mind-shaping, their notion of autonomy, and their conception of institutional design. Gallagher complicates their ostensible account of hierarchical, top-down institutional authority by emphasizing that institutions exert their influence in diverse, complex, and even self-undermining ways: lateral, nested, overlapping and mutually contravening relations among institutions, and conflicting rules and communicative practices within a single institution yield a messier picture of affective scaffolding as well as opportunities for protest and reform. Likewise Gallagher claims that M&H work with two notions of autonomy—the classical humanist notion of agential autonomy and the post-classical notion of relational autonomy—yet they do not give sufficient attention to the implicit tension, to the point of potential heteronomy, between these two notions. Given the ideological distortions of mind-shaping even upon second-order volitions in a Frankfurt-style procedural autonomy, it seems that M&H must opt for a substantive notion of the good life sustained by a proper relational autonomy, that is, a thicker notion of authenticity than their Enlightenment sketch affords. Gallagher’s final comment identifies and develops a means-end ambiguity and dilemma in M&H’s account of how to design a constructive enabling institution. Either their pedagogy of enactive-transformative learning already incorporates the positive virtues and dispositions it is intended to foster institutionally, in which case it is otiose, or the pedagogy functions as means, but could in principle enact any kind of institution, virtuous or vicious. Missing for Gallagher is an explicit argument for their claim that constructive, enabling institutions are best grounded on and realized in embodied-enactive precepts. Here too, apparently, a tension obtains between thin, Kantian conceptions on the one hand, and substantive, Aristotelian ones on the other.

Gent Carrabregu also raises three fundamental questions for M&H that arise from their innovative engagement with both political philosophy and philosophy of mind. First, he finds an implicit tension between their adherence to a Kantian “dignitarian” notion of human nature from the political-philosophical tradition on the one hand, and their advocacy of a thoroughgoing environmental, if not behaviorist, conception of embodied and enactive minds on the other. Second, he strikes a cautionary note regarding the scientific status of their theory, given epistemological doubts about the extent and definiteness of knowledge of human cognition on the one hand, and about the verifiability of social-scientific methods on the other. Lastly, he raises a fundamental worry about the very cogency of the classical mind-body problem, which M&H’s “essential embodiment theory” seeks to resolve, by invoking Chomsky’s claim that with the demise of a causal-mechanistic conception of interaction we lack an intelligible concept of the body along physicalist, Cartesian lines. Unlike other respondents, who are themselves embedded within the research program of 4E, Carrabregu raises questions that address the very framing of the problems M&H tackle.

Joel Krueger presents a concise and elegant description of M&H’s conception of embodied mind within the larger context of research on 4E cognition. His presentation, however, is preface to his argument that the premier site of contestation between “constructive and enabling” and “destructive and deforming” institutions is the Internet itself, a thesis even more momentous since Covid, after MBP was already completed. The consequences of the “online institutions” thesis for the project of MBP are still coming into view, and cry out for a sequel from M&H.

Both Maiese and Hanna responded individually to each response, an act of intellectual generosity—and perhaps Internet-mediated relational autonomy—for which we are most grateful.

Jan Slaby

Response

Philosophy of Mind for Dystopic Times

If philosophy “is its own time, apprehended in thoughts,” as Hegel said, then Maiese’s and Hanna’s The Mind-Body Politic is doubly philosophical. First, the book is reflective—in both tone and content—of the downward spiral that has befallen the United States in the last two or so decades, as the country has been ravaged by neoliberal deregulation, massive inequality, declining middle classes, racial violence, and a general eroding and dismantling of the institutions and mindsets of the mid-twentieth-century social democratic era. In this key, the book rhymes with works such as George Packer’s The Unwinding (2013), Henry Giroux’s America at War with Itself (2016), or, on a slightly broader plane, Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine (2007), Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (2009), and David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs (2018)—to name just a few entries from a growing stack of recent Untergang literature. Second, Hegel’s catchphrase resonates through the book even more acutely when one reads it during the long summer of 2020, a time at which the Covid-19 pandemic wreaks havoc across the globe and in the United States quite especially. Those who found the authors’ readiness to call many staple institutions of late-liberal Western societies “dystopic” a little exaggerated will no longer think so. In fact, you might find the word too weak given the devastation and dereliction that has befallen large swathes of the land of the free. Uncanny echoes come back from recent magazine articles with titles like “Death at the Dollar Store” or “Back to the Jungle” (New Yorker).1 In view of these texts that read like dispatches from a nearly failed state, The Mind-Body Politic feels eminently like a philosophy of our very present moment.

I offer this prelude to convey why I am a staunch advocate of the broader project that Maiese and Hanna pursue in their book. It is high time that philosophy of mind catches up to the madness out there, to the collective political funk that gnaws at our sanity. The classical riddles of the field have paled next to conspiracy theories, populist affect and neo-authoritarian modes of governance. Musing abstractly over “consciousness’ place in nature” in 2020 seems beside the point when consciousness’s place in public life has become most questionable. Ours is a time in which a TV show entitled BrainDead, mocking congressional Republicans, has inadvertently changed genre from satire to forensic documentary in just a couple of years.2

The sad urgency of our current moment contributes to my reasons for cheering on Maiese’s and Hanna’s program of a “political philosophy of mind” and I congratulate them on their convincing elaboration of key components of this endeavor. The book clears a path for others to follow, showing how the philosophical study of mental capacities can catch up with the mind-forming and deforming powers of the current social and political landscape. But I also have reservations about the authors’ too simplistic and optimistic framing of an alternative to our mind-deforming and soul-crushing status quo. The well-known enlightenment mold to which the authors want us to return in the later chapters of the book—perhaps Hanna a tad more than Maiese—is too much of a piece with what the authors so convincingly criticize. The list of “mandatory readings” they provide towards the end not only skews decidedly old, white, and male, but also rather canon-confirming. Accordingly, in the second half of this commentary, I provide a different take on the present dialectical situation, one that is more complicated, more critical of enlightenment humanism and less hopeful than the positive narrative Maiese and Hanna leave us with. And, to be sure, I will offer several additions to that reading list, so stay tuned.

The chief merit of The Mind-Body Politic is that it powerfully reorients philosophy of mind towards a study of the formative nexus of social institutions and mental capacities. It sheds a lot of light on prevalent political economies of the mind, both in a developmental perspective and with regard to the actualization and expression of mental capacities in various socio-material settings. The book’s central concept is that of a mind-shaping institution. This is a purposefully designed social arrangement that exerts massive formative influence on the mental makeup of institutional agents, where “institutional agents” are both, an institution’s authorized operatives and the institution’s designated addressees or clients, who often have little choice but to enter the institution’s mind-molding fray. Drawing competently on more than three decades of work on 4E situated cognition, in particular approaches to the embodied mind and enactivism, on philosophy of emotion and the affective sciences, and on empirical as well as phenomenological work on social interaction, the authors continue and invigorate a legacy begun by authors such as Francisco Varela, Shaun Gallagher, and John Protevi to effect a political turn in the study of mind, as they bring all this work into fruitful connection with both old and new studies in social and political theory, Frankfurt school critical theory, including its forerunners in Marx and Kropotkin, and, a bit less centrally, Foucault-inspired studies of power and governmentality and recent works in critical pedagogy.

Among the many analytical forays the book has to offer, two things strike me as particularly convincing. First, the authors chart a fascinating inventory of mental capacities very different from what has been in the center of attention of previous philosophers of mind. This array of capacities and their explication in terms of development and expression is an excellent first go at a catalogue of subtasks for a political philosophy of mind. The place of context-free qualia and arid debates about intentional states is now taken by the likes of participatory sense-making, situated normativity and “affective framing.” There is ample emphasis on affective resonance at the earliest levels of ontogenetic development, and a lot of detailed engagement with work on social affordances and situated normativity, affective niche construction and institutional “mind hacking.” Philosophy of mind gets showcased in a fresh guise as not only an exciting interdisciplinary endeavor but also as a sociopolitical battleground. The message is clear: The human mind, in its present iteration and rampaged as it is by a freakishly deformed institutional landscape, needs to be safeguarded and nourished as much as it needs to be understood and theoretically elucidated.

Second, while not explicitly stated in these terms, I think the book drives towards a powerful thesis concerning the fulcrum of the mental, what one might call the “affective core” thesis. This is the claim that a bundle of affective capacities—capacities to affect and be affected, in Spinoza’s words—form the backbone of an individual’s self-conscious perspective on the world. Maiese and Hanna suggest the notion of “affective framing,” hinting at the notorious frame problem in classical AI and cognitive science. Affect, they contend, is what effectively precludes a frame problem from arising in the case of sentient animals, as affect always already orients the organism—and the human subject in particular—towards matters of existential significance. Embodied affectivity is the corporeal-cum-mental backdrop through which agents process reality from their unique vantage points. Part of the point is that whatever else you might consider noteworthy among human mental capacities, affective framing is already in place, embedding and enabling all other mental feats. Overlook this dimension, or even only underestimate its importance, and your attempt to understand the human mind is imperiled from the start. By foregrounding the affective core of the politically shaped mind, the authors put their cards on the table: Not only do they consider the mind, and most everything “in” or about it, as essentially affective, but they consider the formative powers of social arrangements likewise to operate mainly through the mediating and motivating powers of affect.

Drawing in part on my own work on relational affect and affective mind invasion, Maiese and Hanna show how the contemporary mind might be affectively “framed” also in the not so flattering sense of the word. The affective arrangements of institutions lure individuals into modes of attachment, patterns of interaction and mental habits quite detrimental, in the longer run, to the well-being, flourishing and social relatedness of the agents in question. Institutions become affective traps and machines of extraction, hacking the minds of those who dwell in their spaces. Such institutions showcase outward appeal—the thrill of connection, the pleasures of being “on the inside” of an exciting endeavor, a marked sense of belonging—while their arrangements in the longer run both exploit their adherents and habituate them in ways contrary to their own self-avowed purposes and orientations.3 Such institutional “framing” is so tough to notice and so hard to shake exactly because it works via the affective connectedness to social and material environments that people cannot help but seek out and, at least initially, often enjoy. In virtue of the various affective channels that connect an institutional milieu with the embodied comportment of its target subjects, all sorts of contents and modes of conduct can be “uploaded” into the mindset and habitual demeanor of institutional agents. This is so because embodied affective relatedness originates in earliest ontogenetic stages and thus unfolds at a mostly pre-conscious level that is hard to bring into critical focus. The two authors do an excellent job in conveying how this affective manufacturing of institutional buy-in works in detail. Particularly—and also sadly—convincing in this regard are their two case studies on the neoliberal university and on the mental health sector in the United States, respectively.

Given that these case studies circle in on the ongoing entanglement of institution and mental makeup, I found it a little disappointing that this dimension received relatively short shrift in the last two chapters of the book. There, considerably more space is devoted to the individual mind at the point where affective frames have already been firmly and finally deposited within it. By focusing mostly on individual minds in these outlook chapters, the authors stay on a well-trodden mainstream track in describing mental habits and virtues. Billed as a part about the deliberate design of “constructive, enabling institutions,” chapter 7 in particular devotes little attention to the insidious entre-deux between institutional structures and individual minds. While the authors wisely steer clear of the more radical positions in the extended mind spectrum, one would think that what they drive at is more than a developmental view. Their point must be that institutional arrangements make and break minds also in processes of continued synchronic co-variance and co-activation. Alleviating interventions accordingly need to happen on the side of the institutional arrangements, including the broader discursive surround in which these institutions are set, whereas the authors work mostly in the mold of classical “protestant” anglophone philosophy with its emphasis on the education or entrainment of individual virtues and traits of character (not to mention the all too bourgeois dance and drama exercises, of all things, among their favored means to do so). The book’s theoretical starting point thus struck me as more forward-looking and radical than its later chapters. But I do not want to dwell on this at length, because this problematic is related to a larger worry that applies at the level of the overall intellectual positioning of The Mind-Body Politic.

Convinced as I am by Maiese’s and Hanna’s programmatic and critical interventions, why am I less on board with what they offer as a progressive move forward? The authors’ blueprint for what they call “constructive, enabling institutions” built from “collective wisdom” stems from the classical Enlightenment canon. The central chapter 6 is a box-ticking exercise in Enlightenment feel-good notions such as dignity, autonomy, authenticity, self-realization, and the like, problematically grounded in the authors’ confident assertion of a universal list of “true human values.” As a philosopher fondly cognizant of an intellectual upbringing in the vicinity of Critical Theory and Post-Marxism, I cannot help to greet much of this with warm fellow-feelings, at least initially. But is this a learning history we can unreservedly be proud of? Foucault, who figures among the authors’ sources but fades from attention rather rapidly, should have made us cautious. For him, the figure of the subject and much of enlightenment philosophical discourse are ruses for power to operate and invade the innermost citadel of the modern self. On a more superficial plane, it surely didn’t escape the authors’ notice that many of the core values from their wish list have long been hijacked by the spin doctors of Post-Fordist capitalism. Self-expression, authenticity, autonomous choice, process-oriented participation instead of coercive top-down governance, organic integration instead of mechanical fragmentation, are fixtures in the neoliberal arsenal of soft power. While we have reason to assume that the authors are aware of this, they inexplicably skate beneath the dialectical bar set by Boltanski and Chiapello in their study on the—by now not so—New Spirit of Capitalism.4

But these are all just preludes to my central worry. The humanist fray that Maiese and Hanna try to refresh has a problematic legacy that much predates the sense-twisting newspeak of Post-Fordism. One way to bring this out is to probe the notion of the subject in the double sense of locus of accountability (“subject” in the active sense of responsible agent) and entity primed for being governed (“subject” in the passive sense of being subjected to power). The dialectic between subjection to authority, on the one hand, and self-assertive empowerment, on the other, has been construed rather one-sidedly by the enlightenment mainstream. For the bourgeois philosophers of the early modern period this was surely much in evidence. The philosophical elaboration of the autonomous subject coincided with the unprecedented rise of the European bourgeoisie to economic power, moral authority, and cultural hegemony. The reservoir of ideas, aesthetic energies, and political visions laid down in that period can seem both inescapable and inexhaustible. The picture changes drastically, however, once the dark undertow—literally!—of the European enlightenment is brought adequately into view. From the perspective of the colonized, the violently displaced and enslaved, the modern figuration of the human subject is doubly pernicious, to say the very least: At first, their subject-status was withheld on the grounds of alleged natural inferiority, and later, after that status had been reluctantly granted, it was itself used as an instrument of oppression. Devoid of property and without bearings in the dominant social order, les damnes’ newly won legal status as “free” agents and autonomous, responsible subjects imposed heavy burdens upon them. Being a subject, for these individuals, became an imposition of responsibility for their own plight. Being “free” for them amounted, in the memorable double sense of the word pointed out by Marx, to being free to sell their labor-power while being free of material resources.5 Under the guise of the Enlightenment conception of the subject, an objective lack of options could conveniently be read as a habit of poor choices. At any rate, this was the narrative pushed by those who held firm in their possession of propertied privilege. The “burdened individuality of freedom,” to use Saidiya Hartman’s searing phrase, is the flip side to the noble-sounding humanist discourse of the emancipated subject.6

I cannot go into the kind of detail required to bring out the full dialectic; what I want to point to here is merely the extent to which the Western humanist idea of “the subject” itself would merit a critical analysis as an institution with pervasive mind-molding powers, and that its legacy is, mildly put, decidedly ambivalent. This is why the full story is much more complicated than the neatly organized positive/negative framing—dystopic versus enabling institutions—that Maiese and Hanna often fall back upon. The enabling, nourishing, solidarity- and empathy-fostering qualities of social institutions have by no means been distributed equally. The insidious backside, the ruses, the small-printed exclusions in the text of the European enlightenment are well-studied by now. Besides Saidiya Hartman’s pathbreaking work on the continued subjection of the formerly enslaved in the name of freedom, I especially recommend Sylvia Wynter’s genealogical critique of the macro patterns of Western sociocultural intelligibility.7 Wynter brings into focus the historical roots of a racial order centered on the white liberal norm subject in its two main iterations, renaissance humanist (“rational man”) and biocentric-Darwinian (“homo oeconomicus”). In Wynter’s broad optic appears a decisive rift between these successive hegemonic elaborations of the Western figure of “man,” mostly exclusionary and repressive, and the broader humanist fray, whose autopoietic potentials are still largely untapped. While such a macro-critique of the Western order would be by and large in accord with Maiese’s and Hanna’s critique of the prevailing late-liberal status quo, it breaks company with their project at the point where “rational man” again sets out to monopolize the domain of the human. This “overrepresentation of man,” in Wynter’s parlance, crowds out the truly emancipatory potentials that the human symbolic species possesses in virtue of its auto-instituting powers.8 My point is not so much that Maiese’s and Hanna’s forward-looking proposal falls short in this regard (although it likely does), but that this broader framing of the issues does not nearly figure in their narrative. By refusing to distinguish at all between “human” and “man,” and by all too confidently and imposingly speaking of “true human needs” (when what is in fact at issue is a parochial Western list of hollowed-out values at best), the authors inadvertently, and despite their best intentions, return us to a mode of thinking that is of a piece with what they have set out to critique.

What alternative would I recommend given this broader, more complicated dialectical picture? Most importantly, I think we should refrain from offering facile visions, let alone blueprints of a “better world,” and instead stay with the thorough and detailed critique of the dystopic status quo. This would much aid the urgent task of performing a rigorous deconstructive critique of the Western order and its deep history; it would help it by bringing out, gripping analysis after gripping analysis, this order’s utter unbearableness. In this endeavor, those of us who have just recently arrived in the barren lands of “progressive dystopia”9 can learn quite a bit from the ones who have been forced to reside in ravaged, hostile, and utterly derelict territories for so much longer.

In this spirit, I would like to add the following recommendations to the list of “mandatory readings” offered by Maiese and Hanna: Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950); Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952); Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987); Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection (1997); Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (1997); Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom” (2003), Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons (2013). This body of texts—and many more I cannot list here—brings us closer to a place from which central issues of the Western intellectual heritage will appear in a clearer, if much less favorable, light. Maiese’ and Hanna’s energetic reorientation of the philosophy of mind is already thrusting in this direction. Given these promising beginnings, it is all the more important not to stop at the half-way point and instead push on further into a discursive realm that prepares us to confront our present dystopic moment head-on.

 

Works Cited

Boltanski, Luc, and Eve Chiapello. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso, 2006.

Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: New York University Press, 2000 (1950).

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skins, White Masks. New York: Pluto, 2008 (1952).

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester, UK: Zero, 2009.

Giroux, Henry A. America at War with Itself. San Francisco: City Lights, 2016.

Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2013.

Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2007.

MacGillis, Alec. “Death at the Dollar Store.” New Yorker, July 6 & 13, 2020.

Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1977 (1867).

Mayer, Jane. “Back to the Jungle: A Meat-Processing Company Puts Its Workers at Risk.” New Yorker, July 20, 2020.

Mills, Charles. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Packer, George. The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.

Shange, Savannah. Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

Slaby, Jan. “Mind Invasion: Situated Affectivity and the Corporate Life-Hack.” Frontiers in Psychology 7 (2016). https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00266/full.

Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17.2 (1987): 64–81.

Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—an Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3.3 (2003): 257–337.


  1. Alec MacGillis, “Death at the Dollar Store,” New Yorker, July 6 & 13, 2020; Jane Mayer, “Back to the Jungle: A Meat-Processing Company Puts Its Workers at Risk,” New Yorker, July 20, 2020, 28–39.

  2. BrainDead, TV show on CBS, https://www.cbs.com/shows/braindead/.

  3. See Jan Slaby, “Mind Invasion: Situated Affectivity and the Corporate Life-Hack,” Frontiers in Psychology 7 (2016), https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00266/full.

  4. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso 2006).

  5. Marx verbatim: “The owner of money must meet in the market with the free labourer, free in the double sense, that as a free man he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale, is short of everything necessary for the realisation of his labour-power” (Capital, vol. 1, book 1, ch. 6, available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch06.htm).

  6. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 115–24.

  7. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—an Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3.3 (2003): 257–337.

  8. See Wynter, “Unsettling,” 260.

  9. See Savannah Shange, Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

  • Robert Hanna

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    Reply

    The Mind-Body Politic and Beyond: A Response to Jan Slaby

    I’m very grateful to have Jan Slaby’s broadly supportive, and yet also critically challenging, comments on The Mind-Body Politic (henceforth MBP), for the opportunity they give me to elaborate and extend my/our views1 on (i) the synchronic and contextually-embedded social-institutional dynamics of essentially embodied minds in processes of mind-shaping, (ii) the critical contrast and opposition between, on the one hand, the classical Enlightenment, and on the other, the project of radical enlightenment, (iii) the critical contrast and opposition between, on the one hand, a permanent process of post-colonialist/multiculturalist/neo-neo-marxist social critique, and on the other hand, a radically enlightened process of social-institutional design and creation, as the be-all and the end-all of political philosophy of mind.

    Re (i), the synchronic and contextually-embedded social-institutional dynamics of essentially embodied minds in processes of mind-shaping.

    JS writes that

    [Maiese’s and Hanna’s] point must be that institutional arrangements make and break minds also in processes of continued synchronic co-variance and co-activation. Alleviating interventions accordingly need to happen on the side of the institutional arrangements, including the broader discursive surround in which these institutions are set, whereas the authors work mostly in the mold of classical “protestant” anglophone philosophy with its emphasis on the education or entrainment of individual virtues and traits of character (not to mention the all too bourgeois dance and drama exercises, of all things, among their favored means to do so).

    One small and half-serious point: if I were able to rewrite MBP, I’d specifically recommended engaging in Dionysian dancing exercises, which is an altogether different and not-so-very bourgeois thing. But more generally, constructively, and fully seriously, I want now to present an outline of what I call a radically enlightened, realistically optimistic dignitarian humanist, or anarcho-socialist2 theory of the synchronic and contextually-embedded social-institutional dynamics of essentially embodied minds in processes of mind-shaping.

    This theory of social-institutional dynamics has six sources of philosophical inspiration:

    (i) Plato’s Socratic dialogues,

    (ii) Kant’s ethics and theory of radical enlightenment,

    (iii) Bertrand Russell’s little-known 1918 book, Proposed Roads to Freedom (Cornwall Press, 1918),

    (iv) the Brazilian neo-Marxist philosopher of education Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (trans. M. Ramos; Continuum, 2007),

    (v) Rebecca Solnit’s brilliant 2009 book on disaster communities and social anarchism, A Paradise Built in Hell (Penguin, 2009), and

    (vi) a series of classic books on facilitation, principled negotiation, and participatory decision-making, including Roger Fisher’s and William Ury’s Getting to YES (1981; 3rd ed., Penguin, 2011); Samuel Kaner’s “What Can Organizational Design Professionals Learn from Grassroots Political Activists?” (Vision/Action [1987]); Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 1990); Allan Kaplan’s Development Practitioners and Social Process: Artists of the Invisible (Pluto, 2002); Kaner’s Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making (2nd ed., Wiley, 2007); and Peter Block’s Community: The Structure of Belonging (Berrett-Koehler, 2008).[/footnote]

    In part 2 of Proposed Roads to Freedom, Russell discusses many concrete social and political issues, and proposes a number of concrete solutions, in line with his favored doctrine, Guild Socialism,” which is a federalist development of Kropotkin-style social anarchism. And in the last chapter, “The World as It Could Be Made,” he quite lyrically describes a normative vision of a categorically politically better world: as it were, John Lennon’s “Imagine” for 1918. In fact, it turns out that Lennon’s political views were actually strongly influenced by Russell’s views, via Paul McCartney.3 One thing that’s very striking about Russell’s arguments in this 1918 political book is his consistent avoidance of a priori reasoning, abstraction, and even minimal formalization. It is as if, in this book, he found great intellectual relief from the relentless abstractions and formal-logical reasoning patterns of Principles of Mathematics (1903), Principia Mathematica (1910), Problems of Philosophy (1912), the aborted Theory of Knowledge project (1913), Our Knowledge of the External World (1914), and even An Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1918), written in Brixton Prison, about which he later wrote in his Autobiography:

    I found prison in many ways quite agreeable. I had no engagements, no difficult decisions to make, no fear of callers, no interruptions to my work. I read enormously; I wrote a book, “Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy” . . . and began the work for “Analysis of Mind.”4

    As a consequence, however, Russell’s political solutions in Proposed Roads to Freedom are in fact too concrete—too much embedded in a certain historical-social context: Europe and England, circa 1918, at the end of the Great War. This fact makes Russell’s excellent ideas less generalizable, less directly applicable, and less relevant to the United States and the rest of the world, one hundred years later, circa 2018, not to mention the future world, than they should be. But here I can help Russell out with a basic procedural principle of social-institutional design, as follows:

    First, by an institutional structure, I mean an ordered set of ethical principles shared in common by a group of people, with a collective aim, guiding their mutual interactions.

    Or, in other words, an institutional structure is a social network of ethical principles designed to further some collective aim.

    Second, by oppression, I mean this:

    A person or a group of people are oppressed if and only if their actual condition falls below what would be minimally sufficient to meet the ethical demands of respect for their human dignity.

    Third, by oppression with respect to X, I mean this:

    A person or group of people are oppressed with respect to X if and only if their actual condition falls below what would be minimally sufficient to meet the ethical demands of respect for their human dignity with respect to X.

    So, for example, as the Black Lives Matter movement clearly demonstrates, young Black men in the United States have been and still are being oppressed with respect to treatment by the police: the police historically and systematically have been and still are treating young Black men violently in ways that fall substantially below what would be minimally sufficient to meet the moral demands of their human dignity with respect to police treatment.5

    Fourth, Federalism says:

    States should introduce a series of mediating institutional structures between government and the individual, each of which and all of which have specifically moral aims and adequate rational justifications.

    Fifth, Quasi-Federalism says:

    Humanity should introduce a series of mediating institutional structures between government and the individual, each of which and all of which have specifically radically enlightened, realistically optimist dignitarian humanist, or anarcho-socialist, moral aims and adequate rational justifications.

    Sixth, Quasi-Federalism operates according to a recursive6 basic procedural principle that I call the principle of Devolutionary and Dynamic Anti-Oppression, aka DDAO:

    Suppose that a State or Statelike institutional structure S exists. Then S should be replaced by a series of new institutional structures, each one of which simultaneously represents a definite step in the direction of the devolutionary deconstruction of S and also a definite step in the direction of the dynamic construction of a non-oppressive condition, in a post-big-capitalist, post-State, post-State-like institutional world, for all the people affected by S.

    According to DDAO, in a normative sense, each new institutional structure simultaneously represents a definite “left to right” decrease in big-capitalist alienation, commodification, and economic oppression more generally, and in Statist and State-like institutional coercion and authoritarian oppression more generally, and also a definite “right to left” increase in individual and collective non-alienation, non-commodification, non-coercion, and overall non-oppression. So each new structure is dual and enantiomorphic (mirror-reflected) in a categorically normative sense. More generally, we should always be looking to design and create new institutional structures that have this normatively dual, enantiomorphic character, namely, they satisfy DDAO.

    Here’s a brief example of how DDAO can be applied, also partially inspired by Alex Vitale’s breakthrough book, The End of Policing (Verso, 2017). For each armed police force in the United States, we create a new devolutionary/dynamic Police Force Regime 1 in which no police officers normally carry guns or ever use other violent solutions to policing problems (left to right devolution of the State) and all police officers consistently practice nonviolent solutions to policing problems, although they still carry nightsticks and have some training in the martial arts (right to left construction of a non-oppressive condition for young black men, and others, in a post-big-capitalist, post-State, post-State-like social-institutional world). Then, as soon as it can be implemented, for each armed police force in the United States, starting with Police Force Regime 1, we create should be a new devolutionary/dynamic Police Force Regime 2 in which no police officers normally carry nightsticks or ever use other violent solutions to policing problems (left to right devolution of the State) and consistently practice nonviolent solutions to policing problems, although they still have some training in the martial arts (right to left construction of a non-oppressive condition for young black men, and others, in a post-big-capitalist, post-State, post-State-like social-institutional world). And so-on, set-by-step, until Police Regime Null is reached, in which there is, in effect, the end of policing in the United States, because whatever social-institutional structure remains in place, fully meets or exceeds the minimal demands of sufficient respect for human dignity, in a post-big-capitalist, post-State, post-State-like social-institutional world.

    And here are two crucial further points about real-world applications of DDAO. First, in applying DDAO, we are always drawing directly on fully embedded social know-how about the actual operations of the relevant institutional structures,7 to guide us in knowing how each new institutional structure simultaneously represents a definite decrease in Statist and State-like institutional coercion and also a definite increase in individual and collective non-oppression.

    Second, obviously, no change in institutional structures occurs independently of simultaneous changes in other institutional structures, since there are multiple dependency relations not only within institutional structures but also between and among institutional structures. So, for example, in the police oppression example, obviously, in order to make each recursive change in the institutional structures constituting police forces, until, in effect, we reach the end of policing in the United States, we would also simultaneously have to make corresponding, relevant changes in other institutional structures, for example, in the local government administration regimes that control police forces.

    A few paragraphs above, I defined “institutions” in terms of shared ordered sets of ethical principles and collective aims. What is a collective aim? By that, I mean an essentially embodied, action-oriented, desire-based emotive8 shared set of basic ideals and values, or what the Brazilians call concordar: a shared heart. It is also what Samuel Alexander calls “sociality” and what JS calls “relational affect.”9 The basic idea is that once we realize that, from the standpoint of the philosophy of mind, emotions are neither merely “in the head” nor inherently passive, but on the contrary are essentially embodied, first-person experiences of desiderative caring, directly expressed as dispositions spontaneously and creatively to move one’s body intentionally in various ways, then we can also clearly see that all emotions are immediately manifest in the world and fully shareable with others. Concordar is vividly obvious in the deeply important yet still everyday human phenomena of sexuality and love, religious rituals, revivalist meetings, team sports, rock music concerts, and all kinds of dancing, for example, dionysian dancing. In all of these group activities, concordar exists not only among and between active participants or performers, but also among and between audiences or viewers, and also among and between active participants or performers and audiences or viewers. These phenomena clearly show that concordar can be the source of tremendous personal and social liberation, intense bodily and spiritual enjoyment, and morally authentic happiness—as well, of course, as considerable amounts of shallow or morally trivial happiness, “just having fun.” Concordar is equally vividly obvious, however, in the bonding rituals of business corporations, cults, and terrorist oganizations, in angry political demonstrations and protests, in jingoistic political spectacles, in military rituals and spectacles, in mob hysteria, and in mob violence. The latter phenomena all clearly show that concordar can also be the source of tremendous psychological and social oppression, and evil. This is why concordar must be nurtured and sustained only in accordance with DDAO.

    Re (ii), the critical contrast and opposition between, on the one hand, the classical Enlightenment, and on the other, the project of radical enlightenment.

    JS writes that

    [I] have reservations about the authors’ too simplistic and optimistic framing of an alternative to our mind-deforming and soul-crushing status quo. The well-known enlightenment mold to which the authors want us to return in the later chapters of the book–perhaps Hanna a tad more than Maiese—is too much of a piece with what the authors so convincingly criticize. The list of “mandatory readings” they provide towards the end not only skews decidedly old, white and male, but also rather canon-confirming.

    As I’ve indicated above, I’m fully committed to a radically enlightened, realistically optimistic dignitarian humanist, or anarcho-socialist, morality and politics, as the source of our guiding normative principles in political philosophy of mind. Therefore, I also fully reject the classical Enlightenment, broadly in accordance with the well-known Horkheimer/Adorno critique of classical Enlightenment in The Dialectic of Enlightenment,10 and instead defend what I and others have called radical enlightenment.11 As I construe radical enlightenment, according to that view we owe it to ourselves and to all others, in order to respect their human dignity sufficiently, to screw up our moral courage, and try our wholehearted best to grow out of our personal immaturity and inauthenticity, and to change our lives for the better, by criticizing, rejecting, and exiting the State and all other State-like institutions alike, in order to create and sustain a radically better world in which there are no States or other State-like institutions, hence no destructive, deforming social institutions. Radical enlightenment in this sense is a maximalist version of enlightenment, motivated by what I call “Left Kantian” ideas,12 that sharply contrasts with other everyday, familiar “minimalist” versions of enlightenment, whether Kantian13 or non-Kantian.

    Re (iii), the critical contrast and opposition between, on the one hand, a permanent process of post-colonialist/multiculturalist/neo-neo-marxist social critique, and on the other, a radically enlightened process of social-institutional design and creation, as the be-all and end-all of political philosophy of mind.

    JS writes that

    on a more superficial plane, it surely didn’t escape the authors’ notice that many of the core values from their wish list have long been hijacked by the spin doctors of Post-Fordist capitalism. Self-expression, authenticity, autonomous choice, process-oriented participation instead of coercive top-down governance, organic integration instead of mechanical fragmentation, are fixtures in the neoliberal arsenal of soft power. While we have reason to assume that the authors are aware of this, they inexplicably skate beneath the dialectical bar set by Boltanski and Chiapello in their study on the—by now not so—New Spirit of Capitalism.

    The insidious backside, the ruses, the small-printed exclusions in the text of the European enlightenment are well-studied by now. Besides Saidiya Hartman’s freedom, I especially recommend Sylvia Wynter’s genealogical critique of the macro patterns of Western socio-cultural intelligibility. Wynter brings into focus the historical roots of a racial order centered on the white liberal norm subject in its two main iterations, renaissance humanist (“rational man”) and biocentric-Darwinian (“homo oeconomicus”). In Wynter’s broad optic appears a decisive rift between these successive hegemonic elaborations of the Western figure of “man,” mostly exclusionary and repressive, and the broader humanist fray, whose autopoietic potentials are still largely untapped. While such a macro-critique of the Western order would be by and large in accord with Maiese’s and Hanna’s critique of the prevailing late-liberal status quo, it breaks company with their project at the point where “rational man” again sets out to monopolize the domain of the human. This “overrepresentation of man,” in Wynter’s parlance, crowds out the truly emancipatory potentials that the human symbolic species possesses in virtue of its auto-instituting powers.

    What alternative would I recommend given this broader, more complicated dialectical picture? Most importantly, I think we should refrain from offering facile visions, let alone blueprints of a “better world,” and instead stay with the thorough and detailed critique of the dystopic status quo. This would much aid the urgent task of performing a rigorous deconstructive critique of the Western order and its deep history; it would help it by bringing out, gripping analysis after gripping analysis, this order’s utter unbearableness. In this endeavor, those of us who have just recently arrived in the barren lands of “progressive dystopia” can learn quite a bit from the ones who have been forced to reside in ravaged, hostile and utterly derelict territories for so much longer.

    I’m fully on board with pessimistic post-colonialist/multiculturalist/neo-neo-marxist social critiques of the sort that JS describes, in order to identify and glaringly to spotlight the sources and mechanisms of human oppression, but only as a necessary precursor to radically enlightened, realistically optimistic dignitarian humanist, aka anarcho-socialist, social-institutional design and creation. And here’s why. I believe that if it were pursued permanently, and not merely as a necessary precursor to designing and creating social institutions that sufficiently respect human dignity, then pessimistic post-colonialist/multiculturalist/neo-neo-marxist social critique would become nothing but an endless exploration of victimhood and dystopia, that’s explicitly or implicitly deterministic, and either (i) cynically quietist and morally/politically passive or else (ii) inherently prone to “internalize the oppressor” and turn into a monster of counter-oppression. Pursued permanently, then, it itself becomes a destructive, deforming social institution—the very thing it set out to criticize, reject, and take down—and therefore it’s existentially, morally, and politically self-defeating. Far better a so-called “facile” and “simplistic” activist neo-Utopianism, that ends at least some forms of oppression and radically improves at least some people’s lives, than a tragically inert or tragically terrorist social-institutional snake that ends no forms of oppression, radically improves no one’s lives, and ultimately immolates itself by swallowing its own tail. Or to switch metaphors, from self-immolating snakes to ladders, I think that post-colonialist/multiculturalist/neo-neo-marxist critique is only a necessary ladder that’s meant to be kicked away after we’ve climbed up out of the sewer and into the bright light of day, where there’s endless constructive, enabling social-institutional work still to do, and not the be-all and end-all of political philosophy of mind.

     


    1. As coauthors, Michelle and I of course agree about what we published in the book, but as anyone who has done coauthored work knows, there’s always a certain amount of compromise, negotiation, and fusion or synthesis in the finished product. So it’s possible that our views might differ slightly in our replies to these comments. In order to accommodate that possibility, I’ll use the following protocol: (i) I’ll use the first-person plural form whenever I can be pretty confident that we’ll agree, (ii) I’ll use the first-person singular form whenever I think it’s likely that our views will differ somewhat, and (iii) I’ll use the neologism “my/our” when I’m not sure whether our views will be essentially the same or somewhat different.

    2. See, e.g., R. Hanna, “Radical Enlightenment: Existential Kantian Cosmopolitan Anarchism, with a Concluding Quasi-Federalist Postscript,” in D. Heidemann and K. Stoppenbrink, eds., Join, or Die: Philosophical Foundations of Federalism (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016), 63–90; R. Hanna, Kant, Agnosticism, and Anarchism: A Theological-Political Treatise, Rational Human Condition 4 (New York: Nova Science, 2018); R. Hanna and O. Paans, “On the Permissible Use of Force in a Kantian Dignitarian Moral and Political Setting, or, Seven Kantian Samurai,” Journal of Philosophical Investigations 13 (2019): 75–93, available online at https://philosophy.tabrizu.ac.ir/article_9431.html; and R. Hanna, “On Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: Optimism for Realists, or, Neither Hobbes Nor Rousseau” (unpublished manuscript, September 2020 version), available online at https://www.academia.edu/43631182/On_Rutger_Bregmans_Humankind_Minor_revisions_22_September_2020_.

    3. See S. Michaels, “Sir Paul McCartney: I Politicised The Beatles,” Guardian, December 15, 2008, available online at https://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/dec/15/paulmccartney-thebeatles, and also this interview with McCartney, available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3m2r0Ln0rU.

    4. Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, ch. 8.

    5. Sadly and tragically, as is well-known, this is only the tip of the iceberg of “structural racist” oppression of Black people in the United States. See, e.g., C. Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016).

    6. A recursive principle is a principle that, starting with a “ground level” or “zero” case as input, is successively applied to the result of each prior application until a certain desired output is constructed. So, for example, the arithmetic principle that determines counting to ten in the natural number series is a recursive principle.

    7. This is also what J. C. Scott, borrowing the Greek term for Odysseus’s non-discursive social and political insight in the Odyssey and the Iliad, calls “metis” in Seeing Like a State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

    8. See R. Hanna and M. Maiese, Embodied Minds in Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), ch. 5; and M. Maiese, Embodiment, Emotion, and Cognition (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

    9. See S. Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity (2 vols., London: Macmillan, 1920), 2:31–37, available online at https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Alexander/Alexander_toc.html; and J. Slaby, “Relational Affect,” Academia.edu, available online at https://www.academia.edu/25728787/Relational_Affect.

    10. M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. E. Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

    11. In his excellent but also highly controversial Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), and its two sequel volumes, Jonathan Israel traces the origins of the very idea of a radical enlightenment project back to Spinoza, pantheism, and metaphysical monism. I certainly agree with Israel that Spinozism is at least one important source of the radical enlightenment tradition, but am also strongly inclined to think that Kant’s role is actually greater and more profound. See, e.g., F. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).

    12. See, e.g., R. Hanna, “Exiting the State and Debunking the State of Nature,” Con-Textos Kantianos 5 (2017), available online at https://www.con-textoskantianos.net/index.php/revista/article/view/228; and R. Hanna, “Kant, Adorno, and Autonomy,” Critique (2017), available online at https://virtualcritique.wordpress.com/2017/07/05/robert-hanna-on-martin-shusters-autonomy-after-auschwitz/.

    13. I borrow the helpful label “maximalist” from S. Fleischacker, What Is Enlightenment? (London: Routledge, 2013), 7. Fleischacker himself defends a “minimalist” version of Kantian enlightenment; see What Is Enlightenment?, 169–93.

    • Michelle Maiese

      Michelle Maiese

      Reply

      The Mind-Body Politic and Beyond: A Response to Jan Slaby

      I’ve very grateful for Slaby’s insightful and perceptive remarks about some lingering questions raised by the book, in particular how to understand the relationship between institutional change and change at the individual level. In addition, these comments allowed for further reflection on what it would mean to devise social institutions that are constructive and enabling.

      Slaby notes that while our case studies highlight the entanglement of social institutions and individual minds, the last two chapters of The Mind-Body Politic focus primarily on individual minds. This is problematic given that any needed interventions will need to target not just the mental habits of individuals, but also institutional arrangements as well as the broader discursive surround that forms the backdrop for these institutions. The institution of higher education could be improved significantly, I suspect, by treating it as a well-funded public good, altering labor and publishing practices, and expanding opportunities for genuine faculty governance. Still, it is individuals who will push for such changes and bring about institutional transformation. In my view, the question of which to prioritize, structural/ institutional change or individual change, is not very helpful; we need both kinds of changes, and they operate in reciprocal interaction with each other. To be stable and effective, structural-level interventions will need to be accompanied by individual-level interventions, and vice versa. What is more, since various social structures are entangled with each other, change at the institutional level will need to proceed on multiple fronts. Individuals need to take personal responsibility for unjust structures, but this needs to occur collectively if any sort of significant structural change is to occur. And changing structures, in turns, can allow people to recognize that new ways of doing things are possible, so that new modes of life begin to become “second-nature” and viewed as “natural” or “inevitable.” Insofar as “institutional habits and the habits of individuals are co-constitutive,” what is needed is a “transactional back and forth between public policy and the attitudes and beliefs of individual persons whereby each has its turn in constituting the other” (Noe 2020, 299).

      The need to change both institutions as well as individual minds comes into even sharper focus when we consider the various challenges of our dystopic times. Neoliberal discourse and values no doubt have helped to shape the way in which people in capitalist societies, especially the United States, have framed and understood the pandemic, as well as intensified the suffering of those at the bottom of the economic hierarchy. It is not surprising that people in the United States frequently have said “we have no choice” but to lift lockdowns, open up the economy, and get people back to school and work. Because there are no other supports in place for guaranteed income and economic relief has been channeled primarily toward the already-wealthy rather than ordinary workers, people are forced to choose between risking illness and their financial livelihood. Some of the discourse surrounding our collective hesitance to extend and increase unemployment benefits or establish a universal basic income (even temporarily), e.g., the claim that such benefits disincentivize work and constitute a “handout,” clearly resonate with and reinforce our neoliberal mental habits.

      But our current dystopia obviously encompasses not just neoliberalism, but also race relations and unjust criminal justice institutions—problems that have been around for a long time but have grabbed people’s increased attention in recent months. Addressing these sorts of problems is challenging precisely because we need to both transform our institutions as well as change individual minds. If we changed the institution of policing, for example, people might begin to see that we don’t need traditional mechanisms of “law and order” to keep people in line, that there are other ways to deal with many social problems, and that human needs are better served through other avenues. This would better position us to move to a system in which mental health crises, substance abuse, and domestic abuse are addressed by trained clinicians rather than police officers. We might cultivate increased collective resistance to the privatization of prisons and the prevalence of overly strict drug laws. But how can we find the political will to change our institutions if we can’t first change people’s perspectives? How do we convince people that the transformation or abolition of the institution of policing and the broader criminal justice system is not only possible, but also worthy of pursuit?

      It seems as if education has some significant potential when it comes to exposing people to new perspectives and ways of thinking. By enlarging their perspective, it can help them to question customary practices, imagine things otherwise, and develop new habits of behavior and attention. This often is a first step toward becoming attuned to relevant facts, understanding the workings of oppression, and imagining things otherwise. What some theorists refer to as “counter-publics” can be understood as the sorts of spaces in which subjects begin to challenge and resist prevailing habits of mind and develop new behavioral “scripts” and forms of life. In The Mind-Body Politic, we point to expressive arts as one powerful way to tap into subject’s cognitive/affective framings and shift their mental habits. However, these efforts to cultivate more flexible habits of mind and promote individuals’ capacity for autonomous agency need to be combined with efforts to change institutional arrangements and transform discourse. I envision this as a reciprocal back-and-forth where we simultaneously endeavor to bring about change at both the individual and structural level. We need to change institutional arrangements so as to promote the exercise of autonomy; but at the same time, we need to support people’s capacity for autonomous agency in order to challenge and resist oppressive institutions.

      Slaby is not convinced by our recommendations for how to move forward largely because we have drawn from the classical Enlightenment canon to devise our blueprint for “constructive, enabling institutions.” He notes that notions of dignity, autonomy, authenticity, and self-realization can be reinterpreted within a neoliberal framework and thereby hijacked. Self-expression can be construed as the ability to buy products that express one’s unique personal tastes, I take it, and process-oriented participation at a corporate tech firm in Silicon Valley might be emphasized only because it leads to productivity maximization. But Slaby’s central worry, he states, is that Enlightenment humanism has a problematic legacy. Colonized and enslaved people initially were denied status as autonomous agents and “free persons” on the grounds that they were naturally inferior. Later, after that status had been granted, it was used as an instrument of oppression. Once autonomy was interpreted in terms of the freedom to sell one’s labor, subjects who lacked material resources were deemed as responsible for their plight. Indeed, the “burdened individuality of freedom” that Slaby highlights, drawing from the work of Saidya Hartman (1997), is central to the discourse of “personal responsibility” and “responsibilization” that we highlight as a cornerstone of neoliberalism in the book.

      However, in The Mind-Body Politic, we do not explicitly acknowledge that “the enabling, nourishing, solidarity- and empathy-fostering qualities of social institutions” have not been distributed equally. Educational opportunities, transformative or otherwise, certainly have not been distributed equally. And yet in our discussion of constructive, enabling institutions, we say nothing about the need to rectify historical racial injustice or take it into account while designing such institutions. Our idealized model of constructive, enabling institutions abstracts away from the particularities of people, including their different backgrounds and experiences. As Slaby notes, the account rests on idealized human capacities and a notion of “true human needs”; it remains rather silent on various forms of oppression and people’s experiences of injustice and exclusion. Although we do mention racism as an example of destructive mind-shaping, our recommendations regarding constructive and enabling institutions do not explicitly take into account the history of European domination, racial slavery, Jim Crow, and the establishment of white supremacist states.

      Building upon ideas from feminist and anti-racist theorists, one might say that The Mind-Body Politic engaged in a bit of “ideal theorizing,” and that what we need is some more “nonideal” political philosophy of mind. What I mean is that we have set aside considerations of race and used white experience as the foundation on which to build “a purportedly representative socio-political imaginary and subsequent roadmaps for prescriptive redress” (Noe 2020, 281). As a result, our recommendations may qualify as an example of what Charles Mills (2018) calls a “whitopia,” an imaginary utopian site that is shaped by “whiteness.” A nonideal approach would have done more to describe the world as it actually is. It would have more carefully acknowledged, for example, the prevalence of “real-world moral disputes in which people lack shared cultural assumptions and/or are unequal in social power” (Tobin and Jaggar 2013, 409). And it would have commented on the difficulties of advancing transformative education in environments where white supremacist attitudes continue to dominate. There is a danger, for example, that the kinds of dance, music, or drama exercises that we recommend will end up being very “white,” bourgeois versions of the expressive arts; however, this need not be the case. To be truly transformative, education needs to take into account cultural dynamics, prevailing educational practices, and facts about who has access to which schooling opportunities. It needs to recognize that those coming into an educational setting have different racial, ethnic, religious, and economic backgrounds, different gender identities, different sexual orientations, and different abilities; and it should acknowledge that these differences amount to different degrees of privileges and power that impact who has a voice and who is viewed as having epistemic authority.

      This is all to say that I think Slaby’s concern that our blueprint of a better world smuggles in Western conceptions of “man,” “freedom,” and “true human needs” is worthy of careful consideration. After all, there may be no Archimedean point or “view from nowhere” from which we can identify distorting institutions as well as true human needs (McGeer 2019); the institutions that we inhabit are likely to distort our understanding of things and blind us to relevant considerations. What counts as a “constructive, enabling” institution versus a “deforming, distorting” one is contestable terrain, and it is likely that our normative views will continue to evolve. Therefore, rather than setting out a list of our true human needs in advance, perhaps it is better that we continue to engage in reason-giving and dialogue with one another to broaden our understanding of what is valuable. This stance of epistemic humility might open us up to recognizing the importance of human needs whose significance currently is not well understood from the standpoint of our Western socio-cultural perspective.

      This incorporation of a nonideal stance is, I believe, fully consistent with, and supportive of, the sort of “radical Enlightenment” approach that Hanna recommends. In order to respect people’s human dignity, grow out of our own personal immaturity and inauthenticity, and devise truly constructive and enabling institutions, we need to recognize our own blind spots and the ways in which our theorizing may be influenced by bias. I deeply appreciate Slaby’s comments and the opportunity for personal reflection they have provided.

      Works Cited

      Hartman, S. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford University Press on Demand, 1997.

      McGeer, V. “Mindshaping Is Inescapable, Social Injustice Is Not: Reflections on Haslanger’s Critical Social Theory.” Australasian Philosophical Review 3 (2019): 48–59.

      Mills, C. “Through a Glass, Whitely: Ideal Theory as Epistemic Injustice.” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 92 (Fall 2018): 43–77.

      Noe, K. “White Habits, Anti-Racism, and Philosophy as a Way of Life.” Southern Journal of Philosophy 58.2 (2020): 279–301.

      Tobin, T., A. Jaggar. “Naturalizing Moral Justification: Rethinking the Method of Moral Epistemology.” Metaphilosophy 44.4 (2013): 409–39.

Shaun Gallagher

Response

Neoliberalism, Autonomy, and Institutional Design

Until recently much of the energy of embodied cognition (EC) approaches has been spent in launching full-scale attacks on traditional cognitivist views of the mind, and then engaging in smaller skirmishes about some minor differences in different versions of EC. One typically thinks of EC as an approach taken in philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences. One thing that Maiese and Hanna (2019) demonstrate is a more extensive range for EC by pointing to a large variety of issues to which it can contribute, from the basics of human development to the construction of large-scale human institutions, from questions about basic empathy to issues that concern justice. Let me first note that I’m in agreement with the broad strokes of their project, namely, showing how deep insights about embodied cognition, especially about affective processes, can be relevant to thinking about how we organize our social institutions. Having said that, I do have some questions, and instead of focusing on some of the small philosophical issues that pertain to embodied cognition per se (such as why we need to assume a strict distinction between causality and constitution in understanding relations between cognition, body and environment), I’ll focus on the larger project. Specifically, I’ll ask three questions. The first is about a hierarchical view of the neoliberal political landscape; the second is about autonomy; and the third is about institutional design.

Neoliberal Hierarchy

Maiese and Hanna propose a conception of neoliberalism that, on the one hand, pervasively and implicitly infiltrates into everyday thinking and behavior, and on the other hand, manifests itself explicitly in a set of dysfunctional structures. Their analysis of the latter strikes me as somewhat top-heavy. They propose that neoliberalism forms a kind of collective sociopathy as a result of a set of systematic relations between:[NL i–iii]

  1. neoliberal ideology,
  2. a scientistic worldview, when it is specifically applied to the administrative organization and control of society, which we call socio-scientism, and
  3. the coercive authoritarianism of contemporary neoliberal nation-states. (2019, 103).[/NL]

These relations all seem to be superstructural (in a Marxist sense)—ideology, form of social consciousness, and the legal-political authority—all working from the top down. Maiese and Hanna link this structure to James Scott’s (1998) more nuanced fourfold set of relations that includes the authoritarian state (iii), and combines neoliberal ideology (i) and a faith in science (ii) into a concept of “high-modern ideology,” and then adds (coming down from the heights) the notion of “administrative ordering,” and the nuanced ingredient: a “prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist.” Should we trace all problems to this arrangement of factors? Authoritarian states are very real, but I question how closely they mesh with high-modern ideology. Clearly highly authoritarian regimes of the theocratic sort present their own set of problems, but certainly not because they embody high-modernist ideology. Even the authoritarian states of so-called advanced societies, however, don’t pay much heed to science, at least if the ignorant and anti-scientific leadership and legislation we see at every level of government in the US and some European countries is any evidence. There are too many examples to list in areas that involve education, the food industry, climate, pandemic management, etc.

Maiese and Hanna rightly reject reductionist and mechanistic explanations (e.g., explanations of mental health purely in terms of the brain or explaining human behavior purely in terms of market logic); at the same time, they seem to want to reduce every problem to the same mechanistic formula: specifically, problems of education and problems in mental health care are seemingly reducible to the colonization of civil society by authoritarian forces following a neoliberal ideology. On this view, individuals are zero-intelligence cogs in the machine. “Because neoliberal ideas have become so sedimented in people’s habits of mind and imagination, they lack any alternative and organized way of viewing the world that is not beholden to market norms and values” (219). Try telling that to the variety of protesters who have recently ventured out during a pandemic; the capacity to resist, of late, seems to have regained health, even as it ignores the little bit of health science that does try to constrain it. Is that really a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist?

If we admit that some form of top-down neoliberal mechanism may cause some problems, but resist the idea that this is the explanation of all problems, then where else can we look? Maiese and Hanna don’t ignore complexity, but they see this too as falling under the same top-down power arrangement (even granted their endorsement of Foucault’s notion of subjectivation). But complexity is more complicated. With respect to how institutions work, complexity in and of itself (without any direct superstructural influence) can cause significant problems. These problems, rather than being imposed top down by hierarchical structure are generated laterally. Some are due to the fact that institutions are always related to or embedded in other institutions (Slaby & Gallagher 2017) or that there exist what one might call complexly nested institutions. Consider, for example, the issue of international trade justice. Although the overarching World Trade Organization (WTO) rules on services, investment, intellectual property, and specific areas of, for example, agriculture and textiles, and supports nondiscriminatory practices and principles of reciprocity, regional free trade agreements, custom unions and common markets, fair trade organizations, and cartels replace or compete with WTO rules. In addition, there are international organizations designed to foster multilateral trade cooperation, for example, the International Monetary Fund, the International Labor Organization, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the UN Conference on Trade and Development, the UN Development Program, the UN Economic Commissions, the Bank for International Settlements, the World Customs Organization, the International Telecommunications Union, the International Organization for Standardization, and the World International Property Organization. There are a number of issues that one could consider in this situation, but one of them is simply the constraints imposed by the complexity of conflicting rules. If one subtracts what one might consider top-down effects of these different regimes (and I don’t mean to deny such top-down effects), the complexity itself can distort or undermine trade justice (see Risse & Wollner 2019). Problems arise because overlapping institutions just get in each other’s way. Likewise, on more local levels, the complexity, and specifically, the lack of adequate communication systems to deal with the complexity, within some institutions can lead to unjust results. A large bank can agree to an amicable resolution with a particular customer one day, and send out a notice of foreclosure to the same customer the next simply because one department is not communicating with another. Similar problems exist within large hospital systems. Even in bottom-up grass roots organizations complexity can always derail good intentions.

An Impossible Autonomy?

Aside from basic autonomy understood as a characteristic of autopoietic systems (16), Maiese and Hanna discuss two forms of autonomy. The first is a relatively standard Kantian self-legislation view, which they call agential autonomy; the second is relational autonomy which they find developed in feminist authors. As I understand relational autonomy it includes the idea that in real social and pragmatic situations, autonomy, as a matter of degree, is either enabled or constrained through my interactions with others, or within the various structures of social practices and institutions (Gallagher 2017). Maiese and Hanna characterize it more formally as “the coordinated practical agency of each of the members of a group of people, according to shared principles of their own choosing, aka multiply self-legislated principles” (2019, 6; see 69–70). Generally speaking, the notion of autonomy involves some difficult ambiguities.

On the one hand one might think that an individual’s ability to self-monitor and make choices is just what agentive autonomy is. Not infrequently, for example, Harry Frankfurt’s analysis of second-order volitions is used as a model of agentive autonomy and critical reflection. On the other hand, as reflected in Foucault’s notion of subjectivation, self-monitoring and self-governing is suspect since subjects are primed to do such processes through a subtle coercion and their subjection to larger powers (Maiese and Hanna, 196). Here Maiese and Hanna reference Frankfurt’s analysis to suggest that second-order volitions may not be autonomous. Such second-order volitions may be “culturally influenced and emerge partly as a result of the literal mind-shaping influence of social-institutional forces and structures. More generally, in a social-institutional context, precisely which desires are granted preference, and precisely which are rejected as unworthy of satisfaction, will be partially determined by what other people in that social-institutional context find desirable” (197). It is certainly possible that we get a form of heteronomy emerging in such cases—but then what should we think of relational autonomy, which seems to suggest that to some degree autonomy depends on interacting with others and with social forces, and that since we are always social creatures, our critical reflective decisions are always socially enhanced or constrained.

There are important debates about this issue, nicely summarized by Mackenzie and Stoljar (2000), in the distinction between content-neutral procedural (which includes Frankfurt’s approach) versus substantive forms of autonomy. Maiese and Hanna, it seems to me, would have to defend a substantive form of autonomy. This means that it is not enough that someone simply has the ability to critically reflect, Frankfurt style, to make their life decisions, since, as Gary Watson (1975) has pointed out, critical reflection (or second-order volitions) may not be autonomous but rather already constrained by external power structures. Given that we are all raised in a particular culture and are members of various social institutions, how precisely are we to tell whether our second-order volitions are critical enough? Clearly, if when living in a consumption-oriented, market-driven society we have “freely” bought into the “false” neoliberal way of over-consumption, etc., then our second-order volitions have already succumbed to the system. We can’t make that choice and be considered agentively autonomous. Accordingly, it seems that the measure of autonomy (or an autonomy-promoting lifestyle) can only be that the person has chosen the right way to live, which is to say, not life as her neoliberal culture defines it. Isn’t it the case, however, that we need to address this issue in terms of relational autonomy rather than in terms of the “in-the-head” individual decision types of processes described by Frankfurt? Maiese and Hanna often mention the limits of individual responsibility and the importance of collective responsibility. At the same time, the ambiguity involved in thinking about autonomy seems to be reinforced by their concept of “deep responsibility,” where the decision “flows from the agent herself, that is, from the real person she is” (233). At this point one strategy would be to provide a developed concept of authenticity, a concept which Maiese and Hanna mention only once in passing (25).

Institutional Design

Maiese and Hanna address the issue of “How to Design a Constructive, Enabling Institution” in chapter 7. In earlier chapters they develop a description of basic and human-realizing needs, the fulfillment of which would define a constructive enabling institution. At the beginning of chapter 7 Maiese and Hanna defend a reverse social engineering that “starts out with a concept of a way of human life that actually satisfies true human needs, especially humanity-realizing needs, and then, bottom-up, one designs social institutions whose structure and dynamics are such that they do in fact bring about the satisfaction of those needs” (2019, 246). One would think, then, that they would start with their list of basic and human-realizing needs, and reverse engineer to them. Instead they “propose that the best way to design a constructive, enabling institution is to reverse social engineer it from the concept of enactive-transformative learning” (246). There are three possibilities that we have to consider in this regard. Either (1) what they describe as the pedagogy of enactive-transformative learning is already front-loaded with just the goods they are trying to engineer, in which case there is some question begging going on; or (2) there are some different elements in the pedagogy that will productively lead us to a design that will deliver the goods; or (3) the described pedagogy is actually such that it could support any kind of institution. Ideally we would want it to be the second case, and specifically, the elements found in the pedagogy would be just the embodied-enactive elements we need for our successful engineering project. After all, the central claim of their book, as I understand it, is that constructive enabling institutions are grounded on these embodied-enactive principles. Instead, the worry is that what we find is a combination of (1) and (3). In the first instance the pedagogy is described in general terms as democratic, with “less emphasis on hierarchical authority and more on participatory decision-making,” such that it involves “the elimination of corporate culture and the nourishing of self-government,” with due emphasis given to social analysis, critical reflection, and social justice (2019, 246). None of this is bad, but isn’t it already what we’re looking for? If the claim is that we can reverse engineer to a democratic society by starting with democracy, or to a society that places less emphasis on hierarchical authority by starting with less emphasis on hierarchical authority, then what is reverse engineering adding? If we set such goods aside and look at what else the pedagogy offers, we find, again, something good: an emphasis on embodied-enactive-affective processes—and perhaps these are just the elements we want to plug into our reverse engineering project. But I think this leads us to the third option. Specifically, it seems to me that one could reverse social engineer, starting with these elements of the pedagogy, to design any functioning institution, not just a constructive enabling one. That is, these pedagogical principles could equally be stated in a training manual for clever white supremacists, who are no less embodied and strongly affective agents than anyone else. It’s not clear, for example, why white supremacists would object to forming radically new habits of mind if such habits could equally serve white supremacist goals. Solidarity can serve the white supremacist in-group as much as any other group. Affective-reframing, which is central to this pedagogy, can equally serve love or hate. If that is the case, then the following claims do not follow:

Transformative learning environments can serve as a model for the reverse engineering of constructive, enabling institutions more generally. . . . Gaining a better understanding of how social institutions can scaffold positive self-transformation and affective reframing puts us in a better position to reverse engineer constructive and enabling institutions that meet people’s true human needs. (259)

Consider, for example, the virtue of flexibility. I don’t think white supremacists would object to developing flexible ways of thinking or problem-solving. Isn’t flexibility just as good for the white supremacist as it is for participants in a constructive enabling institution? “By developing flexible habits of mind via affective reframing, subjects become capable of critical self-awareness and autonomous agency” (299). Who wouldn’t value the kind of flexibility on offer here? But that implies that we can’t reverse engineer flexibility to create a model of a good institution. Aristotle made this point a long time ago. He distinguished between cleverness (which seems close to flexibility) and phronesis (practical wisdom). A criminal or terrorist can be clever; but neither of them have phronesis. Phronesis involves knowledge of the good, which may be just what the criminal or terrorist lacks no matter how clever they are. This would lead us back to option (1). That is, we would have to add specification about the good—which Maiese and Hanna think involve democracy, the elimination of corporate culture, etc. But then are these goods necessarily tied to embodied-enactive principles, or are they simply assumed to be what we want, in which case no reverse engineering is necessary.

At one point Maiese and Hanna admit that transformative education could lead in any direction: “the enactive-transformative principle tells us simply that changing social institutions literally changes the globally dominant structures of the essentially embodied minds of the people inside them. Of course, this change could be either in the direction of destructive, deforming social institutions, or in the direction of constructive, enabling institutions; hence, it could be change either for the worse or for the better” (2019, 306) Yet, they immediately (in the very next sentence) conclude: “A transformative process of essentially embodied critical self-education, via reverse social engineering, therefore, is precisely that application of the enactive-transformative principle which specifically guides it towards the better and the best.” I’m not sure what justifies this conclusion.

Again, this is worrying if Maiese and Hanna’s central claim is that constructive, enabling institutions are best grounded on embodied-enactive principles (in contrast to Cartesian or computational models). We would want arguments for that rather than a manifesto. Let me also say again that I’m in agreement with the broad strokes of their project, namely, the idea of showing how deep insights about embodied cognition, especially about affective processes, can be relevant to thinking about how we organize our social institutions. I think it makes sense, for example, to look closely at what enactivist approaches say about how social interaction develops in infancy, how it gets organized in social practices and institutions, how such processes relate to questions about recognition, autonomy, and justice (see Gallagher 2020 for this kind of analysis). On this basis one can ask how such processes sometimes lead to social pathologies, alienation, reification, and injustice, and what we can do about it. In this regard Maiese and Hanna’s endorsement of enactive-transformative learning is an important move, and their analysis sets a good direction for showing how enactivism can be relevant to what they call a political philosophy of mind.

 

Works Cited

Frankfurt, Harry G. The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Gallagher, S. Action and Interaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

———. “Social Interaction, Autonomy and Recognition.” In Body/Self/Other: The Phenomenology of Social Encounters, edited by L. Dolezal and D. Petherbridge, 133–60. London: Routledge, 2017.

Mackenzie, C., and N. Stoljar. Introduction to Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self, 3–33. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Maiese, M., and R. Hanna, R. The Mind-Body Politic. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2019.

Risse, M., and G. Wollner. On Trade Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Scott, J. C. Seeing Like a State. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

Slaby J., and S. Gallagher. “Critical Neuroscience and the Socially Extended Mind.” Theory, Culture & Society 32.1 (2015): 33–59.

Watson, G. “Free Agency.” Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975): 205–20.

  • Michelle Maiese

    Michelle Maiese

    Reply

    The Mind-Body Politic and Beyond: A Response to Shaun Gallagher

    I’m very grateful for Gallagher’s astute and thought-provoking comments and for the opportunity to elaborate on some of the key claims raised in the book. His three central questions concern (1) our hierarchical view of the neoliberal political landscape, (2) autonomy, and (3) institutional design.

    Gallagher begins by questioning our apparent commitment to the claim that every societal problem is reducible to the colonization of civil society by authoritarian forces following a neoliberal ideology. As he notes, complexity in and of itself can cause significant difficulties within social institutions. Even on a small scale, actors can get in each other’s way; for example, having four faculty members on a committee sometimes allows for more efficiency and better results than having thirty people on that committee. The problems with big committees often are not imposed top down by hierarchical structure but rather generated laterally, via poor communication among faculty members of the same rank.

    Moreover, it would be a mistake to suppose that neoliberal ideology is responsible for all of society’s problems. There are numerous other pernicious ideologies (resulting, for example, in racist, sexist, and homophobic habits of mind), and while these ideological forces may be entangled with neoliberalism, they are not reducible to it. To explain the destructive, deforming impact of the institution of policing in the United States, for instance, it won’t be enough to point to the colonization of civil society by authoritarian forces following a neoliberal ideology. It is worth emphasizing that the notion of mindshaping that we develop in the book might be used to deepen our understanding of other pernicious forms of ideology (e.g., white supremacy) and engage in various forms of “ideology critique.” In addition, the notion of reciprocal influences and feedback loops between individuals and social forces might help to shed light on the different ways in which these various ideologies and their mindshaping influences are entangled. As Bourdieu (1977) points out in his description of the habitus, the individual, school, family, and state are all embedded within a still larger social system, and all these subsystems mutually influence one another.

    It also would be a mistake to suppose that once neoliberal ideas become sedimented in people’s habits of mind, they will lack any alternative way of viewing the world that is not beholden to market values. Even as we highlight the sort of distorting mindshaping that often takes place, we should acknowledge people’s capacity to challenge social norms. Although individuals are mindshaped by the social institutions that they inhabit, they typically retain their agency and their capacity for critical consciousness and resistance. The social world is pre-given in the sense that it exists before a particular agent comes on the scene; however, embodied-enactive principles emphasize that the individual agent “brings forth” their world and that this active process of meaning-making can serve to reshape the social world. Consider a young woman growing up in a sexist culture. She is molded by the ideological structures of the social institutions she inhabits, but she is not a mere passive vessel for these structures; instead, “she brings to bear her unique history and presence in her enactment of these ideological structures and thereby contributes to the collective modulation of the very persistence of these structures” (Higgins 2019, 83). Feedback between individual and social activity is reciprocal, such that each is both shaping and shaped with respect to cognition.

    The notion that agents are capable of challenging social forces and values is connected to the issue of autonomy, which is Gallagher’s second focus. Given the extent to which human psychology and action are influenced by social and relational factors, there is a sense in which all desires, beliefs, and second-order volitions are socially molded. We embrace some desires rather than others partly due to social-institutional norms and values, and both our actions and reflective decisions are always socially enhanced or constrained. However, surely this does not mean that all human agency fails to be autonomous. An adequate account of mindshaping needs to be able to distinguish between more benign or beneficial forms of heteronomy (which are at the center of social life and amplify our cognitive capacities) and oppressive forms of heteronomy that distort our understandings and restrict our agency in harmful ways.

    Under what conditions, then, does mindshaping pose a threat to autonomy? Are we committed to a substantive conception of autonomy according to which someone acts autonomously only if she chooses the “right” way to live, i.e., not as her neoliberal culture dictates? I myself am in favor of adopting a content-neutral procedural account according to which it is possible for someone to make an autonomous decision to live as her neoliberal culture demands (e.g., lead a life of overconsumption)—just as it is possible for a woman to make an autonomous choice to conform to beauty norms that many people would consider oppressive. The question becomes whether the person in question has been over-determined by social forces. Ordinarily, subjects have the ability to reshape their habits of behavior and modify their habitual modes of engagement; however, in cases of social over-determination, the feedback loops between the individual and the social world are quite lopsided and one-sided, and there is little in the way of active contribution or experimentation on the part of the individual.

    I propose that social institutions are overdetermining to the extent that their influence (1) depends on the covert operation of mindshaping, and (2) threatens the flexibility of agency. First, the covert operation of mindshaping renders individuals less capable of engaging critically and recognizing avenues for change. Patterns of thinking, acting, and understanding increasingly become a matter of automated frames of reference (Thompson 2013, 306). Subjects are seemingly unaware that particular social norms and meanings can be contested and revised in the event that they conflict with one’s interests and needs or are in deep tension with one or more of one’s social roles/regional identities. When subjects over-identify with social norms and structures and lose the capacity to take up critical distance from them, they are unlikely to recognize the extent to which social structures pose moral, interactional, and existential problems for them. As a result of such over-determination, subjects lack of awareness of (a) their having been shaped by social forces and normative terms that are not their own (and may very well be in deep tension with their enduring concerns and regional identities), and (b) the meaning and consequences of such shaping.

    In the event that all action-possibilities are apprehended against the backdrop of a fixed and inflexible “script,” subjects lose the ability to judge for themselves which forms of social life they see as legitimate (Thompson 2013) and are relatively unable to call into question or reflect upon the social norms and forces that have shaped their lives. This results in inflexible habits: agents lose sight of relevant possibilities and a socially inculcated set of habits comes to dominate their practical and cognitive identity. Because the scripts associated with the social institution are enacted unthinkingly, outside of conscious awareness, subjects become less capable of gauging the relevance of a broad range of considerations and being appropriately responsive to available options. Rigid patterns of behavior and attention overrule or inhibit the expression of other situationally relevant actions and agents become blind to relevant considerations and closed off to alternative ways of making sense of things. As the subject becomes “stuck” in particular patterns of engagement and response, the usual possibilities for dynamic movement and change may be forestalled; agents may not even apprehend particular interactive and interpretive possibilities as genuine options and will find it difficult to gain an “optimal grip” on available affordances. This makes it difficult for subjects to maintain some of the regional identities that are central to their lives. The rigid habits associated with gender scripts, for example, may make it more difficult for women to navigate the institutions of professional philosophy.

    One key component of addressing this sort of pernicious over-determination is the cultivation of social institutions that are more constructive and enabling. Regarding institutional design, we propose that the best way to design a constructive, enabling institution is to reverse social engineer it from the concept of enactive-transformative learning (MBP, 246). For our account to be successful, Gallagher maintains, we need to explain how the elements found in the pedagogy would be just the embodied-enactive elements we need for our successful engineering project. What are these elements?

    Here I draw from Michael Thompson’s (2013) discussion of autonomous moral reasoning. First, enactive/embodied transformative pedagogies target the cathectic dimension of sense-making and make it more grounded. This dimension shapes our emotive investment in our interpretations and enactments of meaning. When subjects are intuitively related to their enactments of meaning, they will react immediately without reflecting on their sense-making, many times to defend beliefs and attitudes that they regard as congruent with those exhibited by others in the community. Gut reactions that have not been investigated or questioned will guide their interpretations and outlook. Grounded cathexis, in contrast, allows agents to reason through their reactions and critically reflect on how they feel about their world. The capacity to adopt a certain distance from their own sense-making makes agents “more open to adapt or revise their value or belief system in light of more reasoned values” (Thompson 2013, 312) or available evidence.

    Second, these pedagogies target the conceptual dimension of sense-making and render it more synthetic/ holistic rather than analytic. Subjects whose sense-making processes rely primarily on analytic concepts are prone to seeing only partial elements of the world, whereas synthetic concepts are able to bring together more elements of a phenomenon or reality to consciousness (Thompson 2013, 312–13). For example, someone who sees the world in a more fragmented, unrelated way won’t see interrelationships between the concept of race, the phenomenon of mass incarceration, and the social and institutional processes that are play in producing racial disparities. Someone who views the world in a more holistic way, in contrast, will be responsive to a wider array of considerations and more attuned to the ways in which these matters are interrelated.

    Third, such pedagogies target the epistemic dimension of sense-making and make it less diffuse and more integrated. Diffuse styles of thinking and interpreting render subjects unable to bring information about the world together in ways that are coherent and may; they also may ignore any evidence or information that goes against the value system they already possess. A more integrative epistemic style, in contrast, allow individuals to think in more complex ways, integrating different kinds of information and revising their beliefs and attitudes in light of new evidence (Thompson 2013, 313).

    All these dimensions arguably have an affective component and can be cashed out in terms of a general capacity for affective framing and the ability to focus on relevant considerations. Institutions that foster this sort of engagement will, I think, lead to the sort of flexible habits of mind that are characteristic of constructive, enabling institutions. In broad terms, these flexible habits comprise a capacity for critical engagement, a sensitivity to nuance, and a willingness to change course in response to available evidence. What is more, it is unlikely that these elements could be utilized to design a destructive, deforming institution. The adoption of a more integrative epistemic style, for example, solicits someone to acknowledge complexity and seek out a wide range of perspectives. This would make it less likely for someone to latch onto white supremacist ideology or develop racist habits, given that such attitudes and mental habits reflect a fragmentary set of enactments that do not take into account relevant considerations or attune the subject to how the world actually is.

    A great deal more needs to be said, though, to address Gallagher’s questions. I look forward to elaborating on some of these ideas about autonomous agency and the over-determining influence of destructive social institutions in future work (including a forthcoming book manuscript entitled Autonomy, Enactivism, and Mental Disorder, to be published by Routledge).

     

    Works Cited

    Bourdieu, P. Outline of a Theory of Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

    Higgins, J. “Giving Flesh to Culture: An Enactivist Interpretation of Haslanger.” Australasian Philosophical Review 3.1 (2019): 81–85.

    Thompson, M. “Alienation as Atrophied Moral Cognition and Its Implications for Social Behavior.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 43.3 (2013): 301–22.

    • Robert Hanna

      Robert Hanna

      Reply

      The Mind-Body Politic and Beyond: A Response to Shaun Gallagher

      I’m very grateful to have Shaun Gallagher’s cogent and thought-provoking comments on The Mind-Body Politic (henceforth MBP), for the opportunity they offer me to elaborate and extend my/our views1 on (i) various structural features of the MBP-style analysis of destructive, deforming social institutions, (ii) autonomy and authenticity, and (iii) social-institutional design.

      Re (i), various structural features of the MBP-style analysis of destructive, deforming social institutions.

      SG writes that

      Maiese and Hanna propose a conception of neoliberalism that, on the one hand, pervasively and implicitly infiltrates into everyday thinking and behavior, and on the other hand, manifests itself explicitly in a set of dysfunctional structures. Their analysis of the latter strikes me as somewhat top-heavy.

      Interestingly and happily, perhaps the most crisp, cogent, and direct response to this worry can be found in the remarks of another commentator, Joel Krueger:

      Maiese and Hanna offer a . . . dystopian vision of our current predicament, one in which constructive and enabling institutions are the exception rather than the rule. They argue that we are routinely caught up in neoliberal institutions—whether at work, play, or rest—that nurture very different kinds of habits of mind. These are “destructive and deforming” institutions. Destructive and deforming institutions make it difficult or even impossible for those who inhabit them to satisfy “true human needs,” as Maiese and Hanna refer to them, such as intimate personal relationships, social and political solidarity, creative self-expression, free thought, and meaningful work. . . . Again, the key point—and by my lights, one of the most important theoretical contributions of the book—is that destructive and deforming institutions do not simply have a top-down constraining effect. As Maiese and Hanna continually remind us, they also drive the bottom-up cultivation—often without our full awareness or consent—of pernicious habits of mind that distort our capacities for self-development and self-understanding, and breed a “collective sociopathy” enslaving us (both individually and as groups) in webs of inauthentic values, desires, and affective frames that undermine our mental health and wellbeing. These pernicious habits of mind take many forms and operate at multiple levels and timescales. They include, among other things, alienation from our true needs and desires; loss of autonomy and a diminished sense of creativity, experimentation, and exploration; and forms of false consciousness impeding our ability to see the destructive and deforming framing effects such institutions have on us.

      For my purposes here, I fully endorse and reiterate the crucial core of JK’s friendly gloss, namely, the part I’ve underlined.

      SG also writes that

      authoritarian states are very real, but I question how closely they mesh with high-modern ideology. Clearly highly authoritarian regimes of the theocratic sort present their own set of problems, but certainly not because they embody high-modernist ideology.

      Yes, I fully agree about coercive authoritarian yet non-neoliberal States—say, theocratic States. Now in MBP we’re focusing specifically on neoliberal coercive authoritarian States within a high modernist framework, but not offering an analysis of all coercive authoritarian social institutions. Nevertheless, the core of the analysis is intended to generalize to all States and all State-like institutions. Indeed, that’s an essential feature of my argument for philosophical and political anarchism—and more generally, for radically enlightened, realistically optimist dignitarian humanism, aka anarcho-socialism—in other essays and books.2

      Relatedly, SG also writes that

      even the authoritarian states of so-called advanced societies, however, don’t pay much heed to science, at least if the ignorant and anti-scientific leadership and legislation we see at every level of government in the United States and some European countries is any evidence. There are too many examples to list in areas that involve education, the food industry, climate, pandemic management, etc.

      I completely agree that there are strong anti-science tendencies in contemporary neoliberal States like the United States, and elsewhere. But these tendencies also seem to me to be merely the dialectical flip side of scientism and science-worship, together with a vigorous push-back rejection of political correctness, as presented in the form of (in my opinion) a highly moralistic, sanctimonious, and uncritical all-caps-bumpersticker/lawnsign-style “SCIENCE IS REAL” ideology.3 Moreover, the very same self-described science-haters themselves also ride fully piggyback on advanced or big capitalism, its technocracy, and what I call scientistic Statism:4 hence their anti-science views are, at the very least, not altogether coherent and consistent, and at the worst, simply hypocritical and mendacious.

      Also relatedly, SG writes that

      if we admit that some form of top-down neoliberal mechanism may cause some problems, but resist the idea that this is the explanation of all problems, then where else can we look? Maiese and Hanna don’t ignore complexity, but they see this too as falling under the same top-down power arrangement (even granted their endorsement of Foucault’s notion of subjectivation). But complexity is more complicated. With respect to how institutions work, complexity in and of itself (without any direct superstructural influence) can cause significant problems. These problems, rather than being imposed top down by hierarchical structure are generated laterally. Some are due to the fact that institutions are always related to or embedded in other institutions (Slaby & Gallagher 2017) or that there exist what one might call complexly nested institutions.

      I don’t think that we meant to imply that “some form of top-down neoliberal mechanism” is “the explanation of all problems”; but if we unintentionally did—or if we presented our view in such a way as to make it seem that we did—then I completely agree that it’s important to stress that there are other important factors driving destructive, deforming social institutions. In particular, I think that SG’s points about various problems deriving from lateral complexity and nested complexity in social institutional arrangements are bang-on-target. Invasive, malign, and/or threatening lateral or nested complexity, undermining homeostatic balances along several different endogenous/exogenous individual or social-institutional boundaries, is a primary cause of problems of various kinds, especially including mental health issues. Correspondingly, as regards mental health specifically as a case-in-point, here’s a ten-part line of thought that Michelle and I spelled out recently in an online dialogue about “philosophy and mental health during the new apocalypse.”

      1. By “The New Apocalypse” we mean the fourfold contemporary and global impacts of

      (i) global technocratic corporate capitalism, aka “advanced” or “big” capitalism,

      (ii) political neoliberalism, especially neofascist neoliberalism,

      (iii) the digitalization of world culture via information technology, continuous surveillance, social media, and

      (iv) an all-encompassing scientistic, technocratic, materialist or physicalist, ecologically-devastating, philosophical conception of non-human nature and human nature alike: formal and natural mechanism, aka “The Four Horsemen of the New Apocalypse,” plus the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020.

      1. In Embodied Minds in Action, Michelle and I argued (i) that creatures like us have irreducibly conscious and cognitive minds, and that the basic layer of our consciousness is emotional (desire, feeling, passion) and sensible, not intellectual, which is built on top of the emotional/sensible layer and (ii) that minds like ours are necessarily and completely embodied in our living animal bodies. That is, it isn’t possible to reduce a rational minded human animal, or human person, to either a brain or a body: the human person is a metaphysical and biological fusion of her mind and her living animal body.
      2. And in MBP, Michelle and I argued (i) that the lives of rational essentially embodied emotional/sensible minds like ours are shaped by the social institutions we belong to, for better or worse, and (ii) in the contemporary world (i.e., during the New Apocalypse) it’s often or even generally for the worse, i.e., many or even most contemporary social institutions are in various ways experienced as destructive and deforming by the people who belong to those institutions.
      3. Correspondingly, in chapter 5 of MBP, we also argued that mental health, whether good/unproblematic or bad/problematic, is at least as much an existential and/or social-institutional issue as it is a biophysical issue, although of course we don’t deny that there’s a biophysical component: but we sharply criticize and reject the “medical model” of mental health treatment.
      4. Given the New Apocalypse, it’s arguably contemporary civilization and its many deeply messed-up social institutions that are first and foremost literally insane, not primarily people with mental health problems, although of course it’s the people who end up suffering.
      5. Michelle pointed out to me recently that at least some people with mental health problems are finding the lockdown/quarantine period calming and helpful, precisely because it detaches them somewhat from the messed-up social institutions they normally belong to, for example, their jobs.
      6. But many other people are experiencing painful emotional and cognitive dissonance as the literally insane character of many or even most contemporary social institutions becomes glaringly evident during the New Apocalypse.
      7. And someone else observed to me recently that real philosophers are actually in a better position than most people to be/remain mentally healthy, or even flourish, during the New Apocalypse, precisely because (i) real philosophers are generally intellectually and/or practically at odds with, and highly critical of, the conventional wisdom/messed-up ideology of many or even most contemporary social institutions, and (ii) their critical and reflective practices, and their philosophical writing, conversation, teaching, etc., have an existential and even spiritual component that sustains them.
      8. So, using that conception of real philosophy as a clue, it makes sense to try to formulate a clear working conception of “mental health” and then say that anything that falls significantly short of that, or somehow inherently violates that conception, is in some sense mentally unhealthy or problematic.
      9. To that end, we think that mental health is as much an existential issue and social-institutional issue, as it is a neurophysiological issue. Moreover, we think that the existential notion of authenticity can provide a working model of mental health.

      Authenticity, in turn, we think of as (i) a coherence among a person’s inner states (desires, feelings, passions, beliefs, memories, imagination, action-plans, acts, theories about the world, etc., etc.), including moral principles, and including basic and true needs of various kinds, for autonomously-chosen/freely-chosen and self-created meaningfulness and purpose, together with (ii) a coherence between the person herself and other people and the larger social world of social institutions, including political ones, together with (iii) a coherence between the person herself and the larger natural world, and also (iv) a global coherence across or among all those other kinds of coherence. More generally, our view is that authenticity in this sense provides a working model of good/flourishing mental health.

      Re (iii), autonomy and authenticity.

      That last remark about authenticity was also a segue to this part of my response to SG. He writes that

      Maiese and Hanna, it seems to me, would have to defend a substantive form of autonomy. This means that it is not enough that someone simply has the ability to critically reflect, Frankfurt style, to make their life decisions, since, as Gary Watson (1975) has pointed out, critical reflection (or second-order volitions) may not be autonomous but rather already constrained by external power structures. Given that we are all raised in a particular culture and are members of various social institutions, how precisely are we to tell whether our second-order volitions are critical enough? Clearly, if when living in a consumption-oriented, market-driven society we have “freely” bought into the “false” neoliberal way of over-consumption, etc., then our second-order volitions have already succumbed to the system. We can’t make that choice and be considered agentively autonomous. Accordingly, it seems that the measure of autonomy (or an autonomy-promoting lifestyle) can only be that the person has chosen the right way to live, which is to say, not life as her neoliberal culture defines it. Isn’t it the case, however, that we need to address this issue in terms of relational autonomy rather than in terms of the “in-the-head” individual decision types of processes described by Frankfurt? Maiese and Hanna often mention the limits of individual responsibility and the importance of collective responsibility. At the same time, the ambiguity involved in thinking about autonomy seems to be reinforced by their concept of “deep responsibility,” where the decision “flows from the agent herself, that is, from the real person she is” (2019, 233). At this point one strategy would be to provide a developed concept of authenticity, a concept which Maiese and Hanna mention only once in passing (25).

      I completely agree that the conception of autonomy we’re using is substantive, and also that there’s much more to be said about autonomy, especially in its connection with authenticity, than we say explicitly in MBP. Indeed, Michelle’s current book project is about autonomy, with a special focus on relational autonomy. And I’ve already said some things about authenticity a few paragraphs above. Moreover and more generally, I also I think that autonomy, in a broadly Kantian sense, and authenticity in a broadly existentialist sense, need to be systematically merged into a single notion of free agency; and in fact that’s what I have tried to do in other work, by means of postulating that all biophysically normal and fairly healthy rational human animals are innately committed to the categorically normative ideal of what I call principled authenticity.5

      Moreover, I think that there’s generally a false dichotomy in thinking about autonomy between (i) excessively individualist approaches, which overlook the social dimension altogether, for example, classical liberal and politically libertarian conceptions of autonomy, and (ii) excessively communitarian approaches, which make the individual’s autonomy fundamentally dependent on social relations of various kinds. Often Kant is associated with the first ultra-individualist kind of autonomy, and Hegel associated with the second ultra-communitarian kind of autonomy. My own view, as regards the picture of Kant as an ultra-individualist and classical liberal/political-libertarian about autonomy, is that this is essentially an anti-Kantian caricature, or at best an orthodox Kantian misrepresentation, of Kant’s deepest philosophical commitments,6 and that a “Left Kantian,”7 radically enlightened, realistically optimist dignitarian humanist, aka anarcho-socialist, version of autonomy-and-authenticity, together with a generalization of the later Kant’s notion of an ethical community,8 collectively provide a real and plausible alternative to the ultra-individualist and ultra-communitarian views alike, according to which the primary locus of freedom/autonomy is the free agent, but the agent is also necessarily and significantly scaffolded/shaped by social relationships/institutions. Moreover, because the background normative ethics is robustly dignitarian, then human free agents pursuing autonomy-and-authenticity, insofar as they do satisfy their guiding norms, simply can’t (kant) fall into heteronomy, inauthenticity, or immorality, whether at the individual level or the social-institutional level.

      As I’ve indicated above in my remarks about mental health and authenticity, I’m also deeply interested in the broadly Kantian and neo-organicist idea9 that when our lives fall significantly short of, or violate, the non-instrumental principles/norms governing autonomy and principled authenticity, and when the homeostatic balances that characterize ordinary human flourishing and successful “sociably social” living in accordance with those norms, are threatened, undermined, or more generally put out of whack, then that’s essentially the same as bad mental health.

      Re (iii), social-institutional design.

      SG writes:

      One would think, then, that [Maiese & Hanna] would start with their list of basic and human-realizing needs, and reverse engineer to them. Instead they “propose that the best way to design a constructive, enabling institution is to reverse social engineer it from the concept of enactive/transformative learning” (246). There are three possibilities that we have to consider in this regard. Either (1) what they describe as the pedagogy of enactive-transformative learning is already front-loaded with just the goods they are trying to engineer, in which case there is some question begging going on; or (2) there are some different elements in the pedagogy that will productively lead us to a design that will deliver the goods; or (3) the described pedagogy is actually such that it could support any kind of institution. Ideally we would want it to be the second case, and specifically, the elements found in the pedagogy would be just the embodied/enactive elements we need for our successful engineering project. After all, the central claim of their book, as I understand it, is that constructive enabling institutions are grounded on these embodied-enactive principles. Instead, the worry is that what we find is a combination of (1) and (3).

      At one point Maiese and Hanna admit that transformative education could lead in any direction: “the enactive-transformative principle tells us simply that changing social institutions literally changes the globally dominant structures of the essentially embodied minds of the people inside them. Of course, this change could be either in the direction of destructive, deforming social institutions, or in the direction of constructive, enabling institutions; hence, it could be change either for the worse or for the better” (2019, 306) Yet, they immediately (in the very next sentence) conclude: “A transformative process of essentially embodied critical self-education, via reverse social engineering, therefore, is precisely that application of the enactive-transformative principle which specifically guides it towards the better and the best.” I’m not sure what justifies this conclusion.

      I fully agree that the method of what we call “reverse social engineering” requires further elaboration and extension. The notion of reverse engineering, aka “back engineering,” in general, means that (i) the analyst starts with an artificial object of some sort (whether abstract or physically real) that’s presupposed to perform a certain function successfully (let’s call that object 1), then (ii) the analyst theoretically or physically decomposes or deconstructs object 1 into its basic elements, then, (iii) using those basic elements, the analyst creates a new artificial object that’s intended to perform either the very same or else a significantly enhanced/super-charged version of the original function successfully performed by object 1 (let’s call that object 2). SG is absolutely correct that in MBP, we presupposed, but never actually proved, that transformative education (as object 1) is a constructive, enabling social institution, in order to be able to reverse social engineer to the enactive-transformative principle10 and its specific applications to other constructive, enabling social institutions (as object 2). Now in one sense, the presupposition of the successful performance of a certain function by a social-institutional object 1 (in this case, transformative education), is simply a legitimate part of the methodology of reverse social engineering. But of course, and to coin a phrase, one philosopher’s legitimate methodological presupposition, is another philosopher’s fallacy of circular argument, aka “begging the question.” So if I had it in my power to revise MBP substantially now, in order to preempt that criticism, what I’d do is to start with radically enlightened, realistically optimist dignitarian humanist, aka anarcho-socialist, morality and politics as object 1, and then proceed to justify it rationally, before applying reverse social engineering to it, and then deriving a unified set of specific design-principles for constructive, enabling social institutions as object 2. That’s because I think that not only is radically enlightened, realistically optimist dignitarian humanist, aka anarcho-socialist, morality and politics independently rationally defensible as a source of various specific design-principles for creating and sustaining constructive, enabling social institutions under the general enactive-transformative principle, but also that it’s far easier to demonstrate this philosophically than in the more special case of transformative education. Then, in turn, a real-world-relevant unified set of specific design-principles for creating and sustaining constructive, enabling social institutions, reverse engineered from radically enlightened, realistically optimist dignitarian humanist, aka anarcho-socialist, morality and politics, would basically follow these section headings in part 3 of Kant, Agnosticism, and Anarchism, aspirationally entitled “Utopia Now,” and the specific proposals they make:

      3.3 Poverty, Economic Oppression, and Universal Basic Income  a universal system for truly generous, poverty-ending basic income

      3.4 The Job Dilemma, a 15-Hour Workweek, and Universal Basic Jobs  a universal system for 15-hours-per-week, robustly ecologically-sensitive jobs

      3.5 Higher Education without Commodification  a universal system for free higher education outside the current neoliberalized professional academy

      3.6 Healthcare Hell and Universal Free Healthcare  a universal system for free adequate healthcare

      3.7 Cultural Conflict, Identity Politics, Borders, and Empathy Politics  a universal system of open borders for freedom of movement, work, and residency

      3.8 The Second “Peculiar Institution,” Gun Violence, and Universal No-Guns  a universal system for gun abolitionism, including the abolition of not only private gun possession and use, but also the abolition of police/security forces/military possession and use[/NL]

      Our collectively creating and sustaining real-world social institutions that implement these specific design-principles would necessarily lead us all towards the better and the best. Or so I wholeheartedly believe.

       


      1. As coauthors, Michelle and I of course agree about what we published in the book; but as anyone who has done coauthored work knows, there’s always a certain amount of compromise, negotiation, and fusion or synthesis in the finished product. So it’s possible that our views might differ slightly in our replies to these comments. In order to accommodate that possibility, I’ll use the following protocol: (i) I’ll use the first-person plural form whenever I can be pretty confident that we’ll agree, (ii) I’ll use the first-person singular form whenever I think it’s likely that our views will differ somewhat, and (iii) I’ll use the neologism “my/our” when I’m not sure whether our views will be essentially the same or somewhat different.

      2. See, e.g., R. Hanna, “Radical Enlightenment: Existential Kantian Cosmopolitan Anarchism, with a Concluding Quasi-Federalist Postscript,” in D. Heidemann and K. Stoppenbrink, eds., Join, or Die: Philosophical Foundations of Federalism (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016), 63–90; R. Hanna, Kant, Agnosticism, and Anarchism: A Theological-Political Treatise, Rational Human Condition 4 (New York: Nova Science, 2018); R. Hanna and O. Paans, “On the Permissible Use of Force in a Kantian Dignitarian Moral and Political Setting, or, Seven Kantian Samurai,” Journal of Philosophical Investigations 13 (2019): 75–93, available online at https://philosophy.tabrizu.ac.ir/article_9431.html; and R. Hanna, “On Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: Optimism for Realists, or, Neither Hobbes Nor Rousseau” (unpublished manuscript, September 2020 version), available online at https://www.academia.edu/43631182/On_Rutger_Bregmans_Humankind_Minor_revisions_22_September_2020_.

      3. See, e.g., R. Hanna, “Science Is Real, but Not So Damned Real” (unpublished manuscript, July 2020 version), available online at https://www.academia.edu/43580881/Science_Is_Real_But_Not_So_Damned_Real_July_2020_version_.

      4. See, e.g., R. Hanna, The End of Mechanism: A Neo-Organicist Novum Organum (2020 version), section 22, available online at https://www.academia.edu/44630033/THE_END_OF_MECHANISM_A_Neo_Organicist_Novum_Organum_With_contributions_by_Michael_Cifone_Emre_Kazim_Andreas_Keller_and_Otto_Paans_2020_.

      5. See, e.g., R. Hanna, Deep Freedom and Real Persons: A Study in Metaphysics, Rational Human Condition 2 (New York: Nova Science, 2018), esp. ch. 5; R. Hanna, Kantian Ethics and Human Existence: A Study in Moral Philosophy (Rational Human Condition 3) (New York: Nova Science, 2018), esp. chs. 1–2; and R. Hanna, Kant, Agnosticism, and Anarchism: A Theological-Political Treatise (Rational Human Condition 4), esp. parts 1 and 2.

      6. See R. Hanna, “The Kant Wars and the Three Faces of Kant,” Contemporary Studies in Kantian Philosophy 5 (2020): 73–94, available online at https://www.cckp.space/single-post/2020/06/15/CSKP5-2020-The-Kant-Wars-and-The-Three-Faces-of-Kant.

      7. See, e.g., R. Hanna, “Exiting the State and Debunking the State of Nature,” Con-Textos Kantianos 5 (2017), available online at https://www.con-textoskantianos.net/index.php/revista/article/view/228; and R. Hanna, “Kant, Adorno, and Autonomy,” Critique (2017), available online at https://virtualcritique.wordpress.com/2017/07/05/robert-hanna-on-martin-shusters-autonomy-after-auschwitz/.

      8. See, e.g., Hanna, “Radical Enlightenment: Existential Kantian Cosmopolitan Anarchism, with a Concluding Quasi-Federalist Postscript”; Hanna, Kant, Agnosticism, and Anarchism: A Theological-Political Treatise (Rational Human Condition 4); Hanna and Paans, “On the Permissible Use of Force in a Kantian Dignitarian Moral and Political Setting, or, Seven Kantian Samurai”; and Hanna, “On Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: Optimism for Realists, or, Neither Hobbes Nor Rousseau.”

      9. See, e.g., Hanna, The End of Mechanism: A Neo-Organicist Novum Organum, section 22.

      10. As a quick reminder, the enactive-transformative principle says that “enacting salient or even radical changes in the structure and complex dynamics of a social institution produces corresponding salient or even radical changes in the structure and complex dynamics of the essentially embodied minds of the people belonging to, participating in, or falling under the jurisdiction of, that institution, thereby fundamentally affecting their lives, for worse or better” (MBP, 9–10).

Gent Carrabregu

Response

A Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body Politic

The Mind-Body Politic is an ambitious book. The number of topics it touches upon, as well as the breadth of philosophical and scientific references it makes, distinguish it from the conventional academic monograph. The advantages that follow from this bold and ambitious intellectual trespassing are evident: new and exciting paths of interdisciplinary inquiry that conventional monographs tend to block are suddenly opened up. On the other hand, the disadvantages are also quite clear: breadth comes at the cost of depth. Aware of the typical pitfalls associated with the approach they have chosen, Michelle Maiese and Robert Hanna nevertheless do a commendable job at making the most of the gains while minimizing the drawbacks.

I find their book especially meritorious in those aspects of its overall programmatic orientation that tend to refute two predominant views in modern and contemporary ethical thought. The first of these is especially prevalent among so-called Kantian constructivists (e.g., Rawls, Habermas, and their followers). According to such thinkers, the question of the human good is not to be elucidated philosophically at all. We should instead treat it as a matter of idiosyncratic decision-making on the part of each individual, about which virtually nothing of philosophical significance may be said. Philosophy may deal only with the question of the right, which admits of objective standards that may be philosophically clarified. The study by Maiese and Hanna shows why this is neither a defensible philosophical position nor a plausible interpretation of Kant’s thought.

The second widespread view that is successfully challenged by Maiese and Hanna is one that has been traditionally popular among humanists. According to this popular opinion, any attempt to elucidate human nature by means of natural-scientific inquiry is bound to undermine what is unique about human beings, namely, their freedom, creativity, and morality. In the opinion of these traditional humanists, this follows from the reductive materialism of the natural-scientific method. Such a method tends to reduce unique human capacities to mere effects of physiological or neurological phenomena, thereby robbing them of their significance to our lives and self-understanding. Following in the footsteps of Peter Kropotkin, Maiese and Hanna show why this need not be the case. Indeed, their book is a powerful plea for ridding ourselves of this deeply rooted humanist prejudice. Contrary to this widespread prejudice, the authors remind us that natural-scientific inquiry into human nature may actually serve to corroborate our self-understanding as free, creative, and altruistic beings by finding evidence in its favor.1

In addition, and from a substantive viewpoint, I am also inclined to agree with most of the authors’ observations on the ills of contemporary neoliberal institutions and the political ethics that could help us think of adequate remedies. Even though other critics of neoliberalism might have voiced criticism similar to theirs, Maiese and Hanna make an original contribution in both the diagnostic and the remedial part of their critique. Their original contribution consists in “the political philosophy of mind” that articulates the background theory of human flourishing, which in turn provides them with both the yardstick by which to measure the performance of contemporary neoliberal institutions and the blueprint for their reformation. While other critics of neoliberalism might have also had some such theory in the back of their minds, rarely have they thematized it explicitly or made a case for it as persuasively as Maiese and Hanna have done in this book.

The basic finding of The Mind-Body Politic, namely, that neoliberal institutions are life-corroding and as such pose a significant threat to our overall well-being as “essentially embodied minds” is well-taken. The two institutions that the authors offer as case studies to illustrate their basic finding are quite aptly chosen: the university as the institution trusted with the cultivation of young minds (chapter 4), on the one hand, and the mental health institution, responsible for helping people recover from mental illnesses, on the other (chapter 5). The first serves to illustrate what happens to us as essentially embodied minds when an institution that is supposed to foster free, creative thinking and solidarity turns into one that promotes the opposite of those virtues, that is, conformity and silly competition. The second illustrates what happens when those who have fallen ill, often due to having spent their lives inside a sociopathic neoliberal institution, will have to turn to yet another such institution to seek help with their recovery. The results are predictable: young healthy minds are atrophied; mentally struggling minds are further incapacitated. To deal with the problems caused by contemporary neoliberal institutions, the authors propose a return to some basic ethical-political insights common to radical Enlightenment liberalism, Romanticism, the young Marx, anarcho-syndicalism, and twentieth-century critical social theory; they find such insights to have been corroborated not only by mankind’s historical experience but also by recent work in the sciences of human nature (e.g., neuroscience, cognitive psychology). The shared political ethics of these different strands of Western thought states that human beings are free and creative creatures whose flourishing depends on freely self-undertaken work in solidarity with others. It follows for Maiese and Hanna that the social institutions fostering these characteristics of human beings may be considered “constructive, enabling institutions” (chapters 6 and 7); those obstructing them, “destructive, deforming institutions” (chapter 3). I find all of this discussion to be quite plausible, both from a philosophical and an ethical-political viewpoint.

My agreement with much of the authors’ methodological orientation and substantive discussion notwithstanding, I remain somewhat skeptical on three key issues that I shall try to elaborate below.

Radical Environmentalism about Human Nature

Radical environmentalism about human nature holds that human beings are indefinitely malleable creatures who lack a fixed natural endowment, whose minds are pretty much a blank slate (tabula rasa) when they are born, and whose nature is almost entirely determined by their environment. That the environment is crucial for stimulating the growth and development of all organic creatures, human beings included, is beyond dispute. However, the radical environmentalist goes beyond this: he denies that there is anything else to human nature except environmental influences. This view on human nature has been traditionally popular with progressive thinkers and movements. John Locke famously upheld a variant of such a view, as did many Marxists, including unorthodox ones, such as Antonio Gramsci. This curious fact of intellectual history might be partially explained by reference to the views of powerful groups or oppressive institutions that Locke and Gramsci were struggling against. Such institutions (e.g., the church, the absolutist state) would argue that human beings are by nature servile and obedient, and that this was an unchangeable fact about them. Locke’s or Gramsci’s radical environmentalism may then make sense as a reaction to such views. In opposition to such oppressive institutions, they were seeking to affirm the possibility of a different kind of society; hence, they were inclined to underline the indefinite perfectibility of human nature under different environmental conditions. While this may explain what pushed these thinkers in a radical environmentalist direction, it is undeniable that their outlook on human nature overshot its target.

Now, Maiese and Hanna claim to be Kantian “dignitarians” about human nature (24), and they occasionally affirm the capacity of human individuals to break free from pathological sociopolitical environments (40, 254). This might indicate that they are opposed to a strong version of the environmentalist thesis. Yet for the most part their book reads like an implicit defense of some sort of environmentalism about human nature. Constantly recurring themes throughout the book are the idea of the radical dependence of our well-being and dignity on the social institutions with which we interact and the fundamental role of culture in shaping our nature (45–60). In addition, the whole book is suffused with behaviorist language (e.g., feedback loops, habits, affordances), suggesting that the authors endorse another idea typically associated with radical environmentalism, namely, the one that considers the study of behavior—as opposed to the innate internal mechanisms of the mind—to be the royal path to understanding human nature. What is not so clear is how far the environmentalism of Maiese and Hanna actually goes, which is something I would be interested to hear more about. On the one hand, the authors claim that our minds are “partially determined” and “literally shaped” by the social institutions within which we spend our lives (8-9, 37–38). On the other hand, they also claim that because of the “spontaneity of consciousness,” social institutions may not fully determine “either the phenomenal characters or the intentional contents of our conscious minds, or our intentional actions” (39); indeed, as they put it, “each conscious subject has the potential to resist these [i.e., institutional] influences and to act so as to reshape that social institution and its corresponding ‘rules,’ and thus each subject’s behavior over time is not fully determined by the social institution” (40). Stated in such general terms, this sounds like a truism. However, and especially in these fine matters about which we understand so little, the devil is in the detail. So, where do Maiese and Hanna stand then? Is their position close to the radical environmentalist thesis I have described above or not?

If it is as close as I suspect it to be, then I would say that it stands in tension with their commitment to “emancipatory political theory,” radical environmentalism’s historical association with progressive or liberal currents of thought notwithstanding. It seems to me that an emancipatory political theory ought to insist in a robust philosophical anthropology that ascribes to human beings a fixed species-invariant biological endowment that distinguishes them from the rest of the organic world. It is such an endowment that makes the members of our species free and creative, and therefore ends in themselves. Moreover, it better be the case that that these features are grounded at a deeper, pre- or non-conscious biological level; for only that would put them not only beyond the reach of manipulative others, but also beyond one’s own capacity for self-deception. It seems to me that only such a philosophical anthropology can ground something like the classical liberal idea of inalienable rights, defined as those rights whose alienation is not possible even with the consent of their bearer. By contrast, a behaviorist anthropology such as that of Maiese and Hanna, which locates the distinctive features of the human species at the superficial level of “phenomenal characters or the intentional contents of our conscious minds” may not be able to provide the foundation for such an ambitious idea. That is because the contents of our conscious minds are quite manipulable, by others as well as by ourselves. It might be that what pushes Maiese and Hanna in this particular direction is the influence of the long-standing Western philosophical practice of treating accessibility to consciousness or introspection as the criterion of the mental. But I see no reason why we should abide by such a tradition. As research in modern cognitive science has shown over and over again, much of what goes on in our mind is as open to introspection as the workings of our liver.

On the Possibility of a Political Philosophy of Mind

Maiese and Hanna seem to believe that it is meaningful to talk about “political philosophy of mind” as a field of study (7, 63, 266). In their view, we already know enough about the nature of the human mind and the nature of sociopolitical orders to be able to unify these two fields of inquiry (i.e., philosophy of mind and political philosophy) into one single discipline, namely, political philosophy of mind. However, it seems to me that this is an unwarranted assumption. Researchers in the various fields of cognitive science admit that we still know very little about the nature of the human mind by way of verifiable and organized knowledge. Even less is known by way of such knowledge in the social sciences, which never underwent a Galilean revolution. While I agree that proposals for social and political reform ought to be informed by our knowledge of human nature, I think we are still quite far from being able to establish any kind of meaningful connection between the two fields. Hence, all talk of a “political philosophy of mind” strikes me as premature, though this is not the only problem I have with it. A still greater problem is that it sometimes tempts the authors to give a veneer of scientific or philosophical respectability to highly speculative propositions, mere stipulations, and truisms by treating them as well-established results of “political philosophy of mind” or couching them in philosophical jargon. Though I have nothing against the occasional indulgence in hopeful speculation, I think that intellectual responsibility requires that scholars and scientists help the public distinguish what is speculative in their discourse from what is scientifically well established.

On the Mind-Body Problem

The mind-body problem is a classical topic of philosophical inquiry. As political philosophers of mind, Maiese and Hanna feel the pressure to articulate their own position on it. They dub their own take on such a problem “the essential embodiment theory” (10–18). However, in what follows this is not what I want to take issue with; rather, I am more interested in questioning the very intelligibility of the mind-body problem. My views on this matter have been influenced by Noam Chomsky’s take on it. Admittedly, Chomsky’s view on this topic is not widely shared among contemporary philosophers; quite the contrary, his seems to be a minority view. Nevertheless, it strikes me as quite plausible. I offer it below out of curiosity for hearing what Maiese and Hanna would have to say about it, especially given the radical challenge it poses to their own view on this matter.

In Chomsky’s view, we may no longer talk of a mind-body problem simply because we no longer possess an intelligible concept of the body. This has been our predicament since Newton’s discovery of gravity, which demolished the only intelligible concept of the body modern science has ever had, namely, the Cartesian one. In Chomsky’s reading, Descartes’s concept of the body was not a metaphysical construct. It should rather be understood as a respectable scientific hypothesis that turned out to be wrong. The hypothesis stated that certain things in the world called bodies were machine-like: that is, they worked on the principles of contact mechanics, through the shifting of gears and levers. Another substance, namely, the mind, or as Gilbert Ryle liked to call it, “the ghost in the machine,” was postulated by Descartes with the intention of marking those entities whose functioning could not be accounted for by the principles of contact mechanics. In Descartes’s view, as Chomsky interprets it, key capacities of those entities that could not be thus explained included such human faculties as freedom of the will, action appropriate to circumstances (that is, neither completely determined by them nor random), and the creative use of language.2 To demarcate this domain from the rest of the body (below the neck), he called it mind. Within such a framework, it made sense to speak of a mind-body problem. However, Chomsky argues (and I agree) that ever since Newton’s discovery of the “mysterious” property of bodies, namely, action at a distance, which refuted the Cartesian concept of the body, we no longer have an intelligible concept of the body. Accordingly, all talk of a mind-body problem is incoherent.

Far from questioning its achievements, these critical remarks only go to show the richness and complexity of The Mind-Body Politic. Maiese and Hanna have offered us a thought-provoking study that is going to generate much needed discussions across many different fields. Philosophers of mind, political philosophers, as well as students of such great movements of thought as the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Marxism, and twentieth-century critical social theory, will all stand to benefit from grappling with the arguments made in this book.

Works Cited

Chomsky, Noam. Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009 [1966].

——. “Science, Mind, and the Limits of Understanding.” Transcript of talk given at the Science and Faith Foundation (STOQ), The Vatican, January 2014. https://chomsky.info/201401__/.

Chomsky, Noam, and Michel Foucault. The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature. New York: New Press, 2006 [1974].

Maiese, Michelle, and Robert Hanna. The Mind-Body Politic. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2019.


  1. A contemporary scientist who has made a strong case for this view is Noam Chomsky, though Maiese and Hanna do not mention him in this respect. As Chomsky has argued, our ability to master a human language under the conditions of “poverty of stimulus” reveals an elementary creativity that is intrinsic to human nature as such. Chomsky has made this argument in many of his works, but for a concise and informal statement, see Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature (New York: New Press, 2006).

  2. See Noam Chomsky, “Science, Mind, and the Limits of Understanding,” transcript of talk given at the Science and Faith Foundation (STOQ), The Vatican, January 2014, accessible at https://chomsky.info/201401__/. See also Chomsky’s Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009 [1966]).

  • Robert Hanna

    Robert Hanna

    Reply

    The Mind-Body Politic and Beyond: A Response to Gent Carrabregu

    I’m very grateful to have Gent Carrabregu’s interesting and insightful comments on The Mind-Body Politic (henceforth MBP), for the opportunity they afford me to elaborate and extend my/our views1 on (i) the nature and strength of our externalism in MBP, (ii) “political philosophy of mind” as a distinctive and rationally defensible line of inquiry, and (iii) the conceptual and ontological status of the classical “mind-body problem.”

    Re (i), the nature and strength of our externalism in MBP.

    GC writes that

    Maiese and Hanna claim to be Kantian “dignitarians” about human nature (24), and they occasionally affirm the capacity of human individuals to break free from pathological sociopolitical environments (40, 254). This might indicate that they are opposed to a strong version of the environmentalist thesis. Yet for the most part their book reads like an implicit defense of some sort of environmentalism about human nature. Constantly recurring themes throughout the book are the idea of the radical dependence of our well-being and dignity on the social institutions with which we interact and the fundamental role of culture in shaping our nature (45–60). In addition, the whole book is suffused with behaviorist language (e.g., feedback loops, habits, affordances), suggesting that the authors endorse another idea typically associated with radical environmentalism, namely, the one that considers the study of behavior—as opposed to the innate internal mechanisms of the mind—to be the royal path to understanding human nature. What is not so clear is how far the environmentalism of Maiese and Hanna actually goes, which is something I would be interested to hear more about. . . . However, and especially in these fine matters about which we understand so little, the devil is in the detail. So, where do Maiese and Hanna stand then? Is their position close to the radical environmentalist thesis I have described above or not?

    The 4E view says that mind is embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. Let’s call that externalism in a broad sense. Are we externalists? Yes and no. We’re certainly committed to a radical view about the mind-body relation: essential embodiment, which posits the necessary complementarity of the mental and the physical, and also rejects dualism, materialism, and the classical framing of the “mind-body problem” altogether2—more on that shortly. We’re also committed to robust but not extreme or reductive versions of the embeddedness and enaction theses—we hold that they involve partial but not complete determination. Nevertheless, we also reject mind extension: for us, the mind ends where the minded animal’s living body does. Moreover, we’re also committed to the mind-shaping thesis, which says that

    essentially embodied minds are neither merely brains nor over-extended “extended minds,” yet all social institutions saliently constrain, frame, and partially determine the social-dynamic patterns of our essentially embodied consciousness, self-consciousness, affect (including feelings, desires, and emotions), cognition, and agency—that is, they literally shape our essentially embodied minds, and thereby fundamentally affect our lives, for worse or better, mostly without our self-conscious awareness. (MBP, 8)

    and the enactive-transformative principle, which says that

    enacting salient or even radical changes in the structure and complex dynamics of a social institution produces corresponding salient or even radical changes in the structure and complex dynamics of the essentially embodied minds of the people belonging to, participating in, or falling under the jurisdiction of, that institution, thereby fundamentally affecting their lives, for worse or better. (MBP, 9–10)

    Now when that thesis and that principle are placed against the backdrop of an all-out dignitarian moral and political framework I’ve called radically enlightened, realistically optimistic dignitarian humanism, aka anarcho-socialism,3 this conjunction yields a highly robust view in the philosophy of mind that’s also radically political in character. So, in effect, I’m/we’re committed to a 4EERP (i.e., essentially embodied, embedded, enactive, and radically political) program.

    How strong are these commitments, and do they entail radical environmentalism? They’re highly robust, but not extreme, since they’re not only fully consistent with, but also fully conjoined with, a broadly Kantian and broadly Chomskian capacity-innatist4 view in the philosophy of logic that I’ve call “logical cognitivism,”5 a capacity-innatist view in the philosophy of mind and knowledge more generally,6 another capacity-innatist view in the philosophy of free will and practical agency,7 and also an affective capacity-innatism in social philosophy that I call the theory of our sociable sociality, which consists in postulating seven basic innate dispositions to satisfy needs for different kinds of social relationships, as the explanatory and ontological ground of our social lives.

    This affective capacity-innatist social theory is of direct relevance to MBP, and constitutes an important extension of the theory that Michelle and I worked out there.8 Our sociable sociality, as I’m construing it, consists in a set of innate dispositions or powers that naturally manifest themselves as needs for social relationships of a certain fixed number of distinct types. Moreover, these needs naturally vary in level of intensity and broadness or narrowness of scope across individuals, over time, and in different contexts. And in this way, the capacity-innatist theory of sociality I am proposing is fine-grained: not only does it apply directly to individuals and to a fixed number of distinct types of social relationships, but it also allows me to distinguish in various systematic ways between different individuals and their corresponding personal lives, based on the levels of intensity and scopes of their needs for precisely these types of social relationships.

    More specifically, then, what I’m claiming—leaving aside for the present purposes, as important topics for further investigation, the immensely complicating factors of ideology, especially including mores, that is, moralistic normative expectations, and pathological cases—is (i) that all healthy, sane rational human animals are, necessarily, social animals (although that is not all that we are), (ii) that all healthy, sane rational human animals thereby possess sociality, and (iii) that sociality naturally manifests itself as needs that naturally vary in level of intensity and broadness or narrowness of scope across individuals, over time, and in different contexts, for seven distinct types of social relationships, as follows: (iii1) family relationships, (iii2) intimate relationships, that is, romantic (especially including erotic) relationships, (iii3) relationships with close friends, (iii4) relationships with a wider circle of friends and more-or-less-casual but still friendly acquaintances, (iii5) relationships involving camaraderie and solidarity, or what the Brazilians call concordar, or “shared heart,” that is, non-instrumental group projects of various kinds with like-minded comrades who are working or playing together towards shared goals—for example, collective intellectual projects such as co-authorship, collective artistic endeavors, team-sports, clubs of all various kinds, and especially certain kinds of political movements, (iii6) identitarian relationships, that is, relationships with other people defined solely by the sharing of some more-or-less adventitious, more-or-less involuntary physical, mental, or social attributes, I’ll call identity-attributes: namely, human attributes that pick out various non-essential features of people (non-essential to their rational human agency or human personhood, that is), over whose original possession they had little or no freely-chosen control, for example, race, biological sex, birth order, height, weight, body shape, specific abilities/disabilities, living in the same region or neighborhood, common language, nationality, ethnicity, economic class, religious upbringing, etc., etc., and finally (iii7) relationships in the social marketplace, that is, instrumental relationships of all sorts. Correspondingly, I will say that a social relationship is instrumental if and only if it is entered into for the purposes of furthering, as a means, the self-interested (egoistic) ends of rational human animals.

    It’s especially to be noted that when I say that each one of the seven types of social relationships is “distinct” from the others, I don’t mean that they are mutually exclusive types. Instead, what we mean is that they are non-equivalent, although sometimes or even often partially overlapping, classes of social relationships, each of which has its own characteristic phenomenology and guiding principle(s). Thus it’s quite possible to enter into a social relationship with someone who is, at one and the same time (although not in the same respect): your lover, your life-partner and co-parent of your children, your closest friend, a comrade, a member of (many of) the same identity-group(s), someone with whom you have an instrumental relationship involving, for example, mutual aid, and someone with whom you have an instrumental economic relationship, for example, a shared bank account. And so on and so forth, with many possible variations for partial overlap. Nevertheless, even allowing for that multiplicity of possible variations, some of the types are mutually exclusive. For example, someone could not be, at one and the same time, your lover and also someone who belonged to your wider circle of friends and more-or-less casual but still friendly acquaintances.

    Another claim I am making about the seven distinct types, is that they are all both ontologically and explanatorily irreducible to any single further factor or collection of further factors, hence that their existence and differences are basic. If this claim is correct, then, for example, social relations are not all or ultimately about human psychological or ethical egoism and mutual antagonism, as classical Hobbesians and neo-Hobbesians like Kant (at least in his exoteric political philosophy)9 claim. Social relations are not all or ultimately about human gender and sexual orientation, or race and ethnicity, as various kinds of identitarians hold. Social relations are not all or ultimately about subconscious or unconscious (mostly sexual) urges in human animals, as Freudians hold. Social relations are not all or ultimately about human social and political power-relations backed up by coercion or threats of coercion, and overdetermined by hegemonic ideology, and their oppressive application to people who are defined by such identity-classifications as race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, as Foucauldians hold. Social relations are not all or ultimately about deterministic human evolutionary biology, as various kinds of Darwinians hold. Social relations are not all or ultimately about human psychological or ethical egoism and rational choice, as many contemporary economists (and, more generally, decision-theorists) hold. And social relations are not all or ultimately about deterministic capitalist economic relations, class antagonism, and hegemonic ideology, as classical or orthodox Marxists think. Above all, we are not machines!, whether (neo)Hobbesian moist robots, Freudian moist robots, Foucauldian moist robots, Darwinian moist robots, or Marxist moist robots. This in turn allows me not only to provide explanations that do not oversimplify or explain-away the manifestly real facts and phenomena that constitute our sociality and our social lives, but also resolutely to refuse all such reductive explanations, whether asserted by philosophers or non-philosophers, for example, social media pundits or politicians.

    And the final claim I am making in this connection for our purposes here, is that any kind of social relationship under any of the seven types is rationally justifiable, morally permissible, or morally obligatory only if it is also guided by sufficient respect for the human dignity of others and oneself, and by never treating oneself or others merely as means or as mere things, and, more specifically, never coercing other people. That is of course a Kantian ethical/moral thesis.10 And this Kantian ethical/moral thesis, in turn, entails that for social relationships under each of the types, there will be good and right instances, and also bad and wrong instances, to consider when looking at the total set of instances falling under that type, depending on whether they meet that ethical/moral standard of sufficient respect for human dignity and more specifically non-coercion, or not. Correspondingly, one of the most important sources of bad and wrong instances is to impose egoistic, identitarian, or purely instrumental principles, especially when they’re backed up by coercion or threats of coercion, on social relationships whose guiding principles are, other things being equal, inherently non-egoistic, non-instrumental, and non-identitarian, such as family, intimacy, close friendship, and relationships involving camaraderie-and-solidarity.

    Does the fine-grained capacity-innatist theory of sociality I’m proposing have empirical and intuitive force? As regards empirical force, of course I’d/we’d have to test it across a wide variety of cases, and also use well-documented evidence supplied by cultural and political anthropology, social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, history, and so on. So that’s a task I/we still have ahead of me/us. But as regards intuitive force: yes, as I look around at the different healthy, sane people I/we know, they all manifestly have needs and abilities for: (iii1) family relationships, (iii2) intimate relationships, (iii3) relationships with close friends, (iii4) relationships with a wider circle of friends and more-or-less-casual but still friendly acquaintances, (iii5) relationships involving camaraderie-and-solidarity, (iii6) identitarian relationships, and (iii7) relationships in the social marketplace. Moreover, when I/we allow for natural variations in the levels of intensity and scope of individual people’s needs and abilities for different types of social relationships, then that very plausibly explains various interesting and existentially important obvious differences between the different healthy, sane people we know, and between their different individual lives.

    In any case, I think that it’s now clear-and-distinct that no, our commitments in MBP don’t entail radical environmentalism, but instead and on the contrary, they constitute an essentially embodied, and especially inherently affective and sociably social, capacity-innatist rationalism in the broadly Kantian and Chomskyan tradition.

    Re (ii), “political philosophy of mind” as a distinctive and rationally defensible line of inquiry.

    GC writes that

    while I agree that proposals for social and political reform ought to be informed by our knowledge of human nature, I think we are still quite far from being able to establish any kind of meaningful connection between the two fields. Hence, all talk of a “political philosophy of mind” strikes me as premature, though this is not the only problem I have with it. A still greater problem is that it sometimes tempts the authors to give a veneer of scientific or philosophical respectability to highly speculative propositions, mere stipulations, and truisms by treating them as well-established results of “political philosophy of mind” or couching them in philosophical jargon. Though I have nothing against the occasional indulgence in hopeful speculation, I think that intellectual responsibility requires that scholars and scientists help the public distinguish what is speculative in their discourse from what is scientifically well-established.

    Since our view is a new, original, and somewhat unorthodox one, to be sure, it hasn’t yet received official professional academic philosophical, social-scientific, or natural-scientific seals of approval. But at the same time, we’re also fully open to conceptual and more generally philosophical criticism, to social-scientific and natural-scientific criticism and empirical testing, to phenomenological evidence that’s pro or contra, and ultimately, to either confirmation and acceptance, or disconfirmation and refutation. The only thing we’d reject is a dogmatic refusal to take us seriously from the get-go, via for example an unargued a priori skepticism about the very idea of inherently connecting fundamental issues in the philosophy of mind with fundamental social-institutional and political issues, or via an unargued a priori commitment to a scientistic, physicalist, and mechanistic worldview. If the mind-shaping thesis and the enactive-transformative principle are both true, then the mind-body politic is an autonomous (in the sense of being irreducible to any other field of inquiry) and genuine (in the sense of being evidentially well-confirmed) field of inquiry, with its own methodology, that needs to be fully acknowledged and thoroughly explored.

    Re (iii), the conceptual and ontological status of the classical “mind-body problem.”

    GC writes that

    the mind-body problem is a classical topic of philosophical inquiry. . . . As political philosophers of mind, Maiese and Hanna feel the pressure to articulate their own position on it. They dub their own take on such a problem “the essential embodiment theory” (10–18). However, in what follows this is not what I want to take issue with; rather, I am more interested in questioning the very intelligibility of the mind-body problem. My views on this matter have been influenced by Noam Chomsky’s take on it. Admittedly, Chomsky’s view on this topic is not widely shared among contemporary philosophers; quite the contrary, his seems to be a minority view. Nevertheless, it strikes me as quite plausible. I offer it below out of curiosity for hearing what Maiese and Hanna would have to say about it, especially given the radical challenge it poses to their own view on this matter. . . . In Chomsky’s view, we may no longer talk of a mind-body problem simply because we no longer possess an intelligible concept of the body.

    I’ve read and seriously considered Chomsky’s views on this issue,11 and am fully onboard with his important deflationary point about the essentially undercooked concept of “the physical” that’s generally presupposed in recent and contemporary professional academic philosophy and natural science. Moreover, if the essential embodiment theory we spelled out and defended in Embodied Minds in Action is true, then Chomsky’s important deflationary point follows from it as a subsidiary conclusion. Of course, in order to be published in the philosophy of mind by mainstream journals and presses, we’ve had to discuss the classical views even if only to criticize and reject them. But having critically diagnosed and rejected the classical views, we also go beyond Chomsky’s deflationism. For the crucial upshot of the essential embodiment theory is (i) a complete rethinking of the classical concept of the physical from Descartes through Newton and early modern philosophy and natural science, (ii) a thoroughgoing rejection of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century mechanistic, scientistic, and physicalist view of the nature, and (iii) a positive development of early twentieth century organicist and processualist doctrines (for example, A. N. Whitehead’s “philosophy of organism” and process metaphysics)12 that I’ve called neo-organicism.13 So in that triple sense, we’re neo-Chomskyan with an attitude.

     


    1. As coauthors, Michelle and I of course agree about what we published in the book; but as anyone who has done coauthored work knows, there’s always a certain amount of compromise, negotiation, and fusion or synthesis in the finished product. So it’s possible that our views might differ slightly in our replies to these comments. In order to accommodate that possibility, I’ll use the following protocol: (i) I’ll use the first-person plural form whenever I can be pretty confident that we’ll agree, (ii) I’ll use the first-person singular form whenever I think it’s likely that our views will differ somewhat, and (iii) I’ll use the neologism “my/our” when I’m not sure whether our views will be essentially the same or somewhat different.

    2. See, e.g., R. Hanna and M. Maiese, Embodied Minds in Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); and R. Hanna, “Minding the Body,” Philosophical Topics 39 (2011): 15–40.

    3. See, e.g., R. Hanna, “Radical Enlightenment: Existential Kantian Cosmopolitan Anarchism, with a Concluding Quasi-Federalist Postscript,” in D. Heidemann and K. Stoppenbrink, eds., Join, or Die: Philosophical Foundations of Federalism (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016), 63–90; R. Hanna, Kant, Agnosticism, and Anarchism: A Theological-Political Treatise (Rational Human Condition 4) (New York: Nova Science, 2018); R. Hanna and O. Paans, “On the Permissible Use of Force in a Kantian Dignitarian Moral and Political Setting, or, Seven Kantian Samurai,” Journal of Philosophical Investigations 13 (2019): 75–93, available online at https://philosophy.tabrizu.ac.ir/article_9431.html; and R. Hanna, “On Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: Optimism for Realists, or, Neither Hobbes Nor Rousseau” (unpublished manuscript, September 2020 version), available online at https://www.academia.edu/43631182/On_Rutger_Bregmans_Humankind_Minor_revisions_22_September_2020_.

    4. More precisely, the thesis is that all biophysically normal and fairly healthy rational human animals possess a finite set of innately-specified, epigenetic, spontaneous (in the sense of necessarily requiring input, but also necessarily underdetermined in their operations by that input), and creative (in the sense of being able to generate infinite outputs) cognitive, affective, and practical capacities, aka “faculties.”

    5. See R. Hanna, Rationality and Logic (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).

    6. See R. Hanna, Cognition, Content, and the A Priori: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind and Knowledge, Rational Human Condition 5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

    7. See R. Hanna, Deep Freedom and Real Persons: A Study in Metaphysics, Rational Human Condition 2 (New York: Nova Science, 2018).

    8. For a detailed version of this capacity-innatist theory of our sociable sociality, in the larger context of an anti-scientistic, anti-physicalist, and anti-mechanistic metaphysics, epistemology, and theory of the sciences, see R. Hanna, The End of Mechanism: A Neo-Organicist Novum Organum (2020 version), section 20, available online at https://www.academia.edu/44630033/THE_END_OF_MECHANISM_A_Neo_Organicist_Novum_Organum_With_contributions_by_Michael_Cifone_Emre_Kazim_Andreas_Keller_and_Otto_Paans_2020_.

    9. See, e.g., Hanna, “Exiting the State and Debunking the State of Nature.”

    10. See, e.g., R. Hanna, Kantian Ethics and Human Existence: A Study in Moral Philosophy, Rational Human Condition 3 (New York: Nova Science, 2018).

    11. See, e.g., N. Chomsky, “Language and Nature,” Mind 104 (1995): 1–61; and W. Lycan, “Chomsky on the Mind-Body Problem,” in L. Antony, ed., Chomsky and His Critics (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 11–28, also available online at http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/Content_store/Sample_Chapter/0631200215/001.pdf.

    12. See, e.g., A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Free Press / Macmillan, 1967 [1925]); and A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: Free Press / Macmillan, 1969 [1929]).

    13. See, e.g., Hanna and Maiese, Embodied Minds in Action, chs. 6–8; Hanna, Deep Freedom and Real Persons: A Study in Metaphysics, chs. 1–5; and Hanna, The End of Mechanism: A Neo-Organicist Novum Organum.

    • Michelle Maiese

      Michelle Maiese

      Reply

      The Mind-Body Politic and Beyond: A Response to Gent Carrabregu

      I am very grateful for Gent Carrabregu’s insightful remarks and for the opportunity to elaborate on (1) whether the mindshaping thesis involves a commitment to some sort of radical environmentalism, (2) the feasibility and usefulness of engaging in “political philosophy of mind,” and (3) the intelligibility of the mind-body problem.

      Carrabregu begins by questioning whether we are defending some sort of radical environmentalism according to which human nature is entirely a matter of environmental and social influences. Although the account of mind-shaping presented in The Mind-Body Politic does emphasize the fundamental role of culture in shaping our nature, it would be a mistake to suppose that our minds are fully determined by cultural forces, since this would mean we lack the capacity to resist and transform existing social institutions. Indeed, one reason that we resist the claim that the mind is socially extended is that this makes it more difficult to make sense of how individuals can challenge or defy prevailing social norms. In my view, the enactivist approach offers a way to understand the human mind as socially embedded, rather than extended, and without being committed to any sort of radical environmentalism; this view emphasizes that sense-making is relational, and that biology and culture are inseparable. Instead of focusing simply on the way that the social environment modulates individual minds, the enactivist approach further emphasizes the reciprocal feedback relations between individuals and social activity. The basic idea is that the individual agent is not simply shaped, but also is an active shaper of both other people and her social environment. This is captured by the claims that (i) the individual agent actively “brings forth” their world, and (ii) that there are self-reflexive feedback loops between the individual and her environment:

      Regarding (i), enactivism emphasizes that human agents “bring forth” what counts as a relevant affordance or action-possibility on the basis of their concerns and interests. Some possibilities that are offered by the environment will be unimportant to the agent because they have no bearing on the individual’s interests at the time, while others will stand out on the horizon as potentially significant. The field of affordances consists of the relevant possibilities for action that a particular individual is responsive to in a concrete situation and can be understood as the “situation-specific, individual ‘excerpt’ of the general landscape of affordances” (de Haan et al. 2013, 7). This means that the system’s behavior goes beyond a stimulus-response determinism; faced with a myriad of available affordances, it is the agent herself who determines which of these possibilities will be actualized. This results in “systematic (non-random) patterns of behavior” that depend partly on the agent rather than being fully determined or dictated by the environment (Degenaar and O’Regan 2017, 399).

      Regarding (ii), the mindshaping thesis says that humans not only are shaped by the social world, but also mold (and thereby partially determine) their social environment via their active and reactive contributions and responses. For example, while language exists before an individual speaker comes on the scene, a “living” language continually evolves over the course of being produced and reproduced by those who speak it; it is not fixed once and for all (Steiner and Stewart 2009). Individuals and social groups are linked in what John Protevi (2009) calls “mutual presupposition”: the behavior of the individuals is “patterned by the social group to which they belong; and it is this very patterning [of individuals] that allows the functioning of the social group” (39). Through their unique contributions, individuals can influence the workings of social institutions and succumb to or resist these socializing practices to varying degrees. Higgins (2019) asks us to consider a subordinated immigrant within a xenophobic culture and observes that although she is molded by the culture’s ideological structures, she is not a mere vessel for them; ideology and social expectations are not internalized wholesale. The way that she engages with these ideological structures, whether complying with or resisting them, makes an important difference to her own ongoing habit formation.

      Autonomous agency, as I understand it, centrally involves the capacity to adapt to changing environments, engage in self-exploration and self-definition, imagine alternative possibilities, gauge which social expectations are legitimate, and emancipate oneself from particular persons or social environments (Baumann 2008, 466). Such self-modification and emancipation can be understood in terms of a revamping of one’s habits of behavior and attention. Given that such habits initially emerge out the sensorimotor dynamics associated with the human life form, there is likely to be some commonality among creatures like us. At the same time, these habits will be powerfully influenced by culture.

      Carrabregu’s second question concerns whether it is possible or meaningful to talk about “political philosophy of mind” as a viable field of study. Given that we still know very little about the nature of the human mind, and our knowledge in the social sciences is quite limited, is it truly possible to establish any kind of meaningful connection between the two fields? Or is there good reason to think that all talk of “political philosophy of mind” is premature?

      To understand the workings of political systems and ideologies, it is important to understand human psychology and the extent to which cognition and affectivity are socially embedded. Because the human form of life is fundamentally social, we inevitably are molded and shaped by surrounding social institutions and structures. This mind-shaping sometimes is enabling, allowing us to do things that we could not do if we weren’t part of that institution, including participate in civil society and engage in joint political action. In other cases, however, this mind-shaping has a distorting influence, both on individual minds as well our shared forms of life. I envision political philosophy of mind as an effort to bring together philosophical work in subfields that traditionally have not been integrated, but which clearly are interrelated. Although somewhat speculative, both subfields feature a wide array of theoretical approaches that aim to make sense of available empirical findings. The approaches of embodied cognition and enactivism that I favor, for example, draw upon empirical findings about the nature of the human body and brain and the dynamics of living, self-organizing systems. Researchers in philosophy of mind have begun to explore the way in which cognition and affectivity are socially embedded and scaffolded by relationships and institutions. In the realm of political philosophy, theorists have examined the workings of ideology and the infiltration of neoliberal discourse into just about every facet of contemporary life in societies such as the United States.

      In addition, theorists in feminist philosophy have begun to draw from cognitive science to conceptualize the workings of ideology. A special issue of Australasian Review of Philosopher (2019) devoted to Sally Haslanger’s work, for example, looks to Mameli’s (2001) evolutionary conception of “mindshaping” to explain why humans participate so naturally in oppressive patterns of thoughts and action. Although the details of this account differ in important ways from the account of mind-shaping that Hanna and I offer, the working assumption is very much the same: we can bring feminist political theorizing and philosophy of mind into fruitful dialogue to gain a deeper understanding of why some ideology is so difficult to resist, even when it leads to habits of behavior and attention that are in tension with people’s interests and overall well-being. My hope is that by integrating these different strands of conversation, we can begin to deepen our understanding of what it means for social institutions to be harmful to the people who inhabit them, and also consider how we might go about changing them.

      Lastly, Carrabregu draws from the work of Chomsky to question the very intelligibility of the mind-body problem. According to Chomsky, we may no longer talk of a mind-body problem given that we no longer possess an intelligible concept of the body. The only intelligible concept of the body that modern science has ever had is the Cartesian one; however, Descartes’s hypothesis (that the body is machine-like material substance that causally interacts with a non-mechanical, non-physical mental substance) has been disproven. Therefore, we no longer have an intelligible concept of the body, and all talk of a mind-body problem is incoherent.

      In my view, it is a mistake to suppose that that the only intelligible concept of the body that modern science has ever had is the Cartesian one. It is possible, and more plausible, I think, to understand the body as a complex and dynamic living body that cannot be understood in mechanistic terms. Living bodies exhibit nonlinear dynamics, have strongly emergent features, and execute complex behaviors that cannot be reductively explained in the way that the behavior of machines can be explained. If the mind-body problem is understood as the problem of how two distinct substances, one physical and the other fundamentally non-physical, could interact causally, then I agree that the mind-body problem as traditionally formulated does not exist. However, in Embodied Minds in Action, Bob Hanna and I (2009) present and defend a form of neutral monism, i.e., “dynamic neutral monism,” which challenges this traditional formulation and rejects the ontology of Cartesian substance dualism. We believe that this offers a way to reconceptualize the mind-body problem and approach it in a more fruitful way.

      The enactivist approach provides a way to build on these build ideas and resist the notion that the mind and body are two distinct substances. This is because it turns our focus to the relationship between the living body and the lived body, the connection between being alive and being minded, and the ways in which embeddedness in a culture allows for new forms of sense-making that are underdetermined by biology. The enactivist notion of “sense-making” emphasizes that “cognition is a thoroughly relational and action-oriented dynamic process involving an organism’s brain, body, and environment” (Brancazio 2019). Associated neurobiological patterns are physically grounded in “organismic processes of self-regulation aimed at sustaining and enhancing adaptive autonomy in the face of perturbing environmental events” (Thompson and Stapleton 2009, 27).

      In my view, the notion of “habits” serves as possible bridge between biological autonomy and the kind of autonomy exhibited by human agents. The general idea is that through the formation of habits and skills, agents shape their world into a meaningful domain. Repeated behaviors and habits can be understood as “habitual identities or ways of life that organisms strive to sustain” (Ramírez-Vizcaya and Froese 2019). In the case of human agents, what emerges is “an increasingly complex ecology of self-sustaining sensorimotor life-forms” (Egbert and Barandiaran 2014, 13) that allow subjects to carry out a wide range of tasks and navigate a myriad of domains. Taken individually, these habit bundles comprise what Di Paolo (2009) calls “regional identities”; they are characteristic patterns of engagement tailored to specific kinds of circumstances. Examples include being a student, being a piano player, and being an amateur marathoner. The maintenance of these regional identities reflects concerns and goals not directly linked to brute survival, so that the development of such patterns constitutes “a novel process of identity generation underdetermined by metabolism” (Di Paolo 2009, 52).

      These notions of “habit” and “regional identity” helps us begin to make sense of the relationship between the living and lived body as well as the way in which human agents are socially embedded. Mindedness is comprised of the form and structure of a living body that is in continuous, self-sustaining interaction with the surrounding world. It is neither separate from the brain, nor reducible to it. By emphasizing the biological character of mentality as well as the role of the environment, enactivism offers a broadly naturalistic way to understand the body that moves us beyond the Cartesian mind-body problem.

       

      Works Cited

      Baumann, H. “Reconsidering Relational Autonomy: Personal Autonomy for Socially Embedded and Temporally Extended Selves.” Analyse & Kritik 30 (2008): 445–68.

      Brancazio N. “Gender and the Senses of Agency.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 2 (2018).

      De Haan, S., et al. “The Phenomenology of Deep Brain Stimulation-Induced Changes in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Patients: An Enactive Affordance-Based Model.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7 (2013): 1–14.

      Degenaar, J., and J. O’Regan. “Sensorimotor Theory and Enactivism.” Topoi 36.3 (2017): 393–407.

      Di Paolo, E. “Overcoming Autopoiesis: An Enactive Detour on the Way from Life to Society.” In Autopoiesis in Organization Theory and Management, edited by Rodrigo Magalhães and Ron Sanchez, 43–68. Advanced Series in Management. Bingley, UK: Emerald, 2009.

      Egbert, M. D., and X. E. Barandiaran. “Modeling Habits as Self-Sustaining Patterns of Sensorimotor Behavior.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (2014): 590. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00590.

      Haslanger, S. “Cognition as a Social Skill.” Australasian Philosophical Review 3.1 (2019): 5–25.

      Hanna, R., and M. Maiese. Embodied Minds in Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

      Higgins, J. “Giving Flesh to Culture: An Enactivist Interpretation of Haslanger.” Australasian Philosophical Review 3.1 (2019): 81–85.

      Mameli, M. “Mindreading, Mindshaping, and Evolution.” Biology and Philosophy 16 (2001): 597–628.

      Protevi, J. Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

      Ramírez-Vizcaya, S., and T. Froese. “The Enactive Approach to Habits: New Concepts for the Cognitive Science of Bad Habits and Addiction.” Frontiers in Psychology 10 (2019): 301.

      Steiner, P., and J. Stewart. “From Autonomy to Heteronomy (and Back): The Enaction of Social Life.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 8 (2009): 527–50.

      Thompson, E., M. Stapleton. “Making Sense of Sense-Making: Reflections on Enactive and Extended Mind Theories.” Topoi 28 (2009): 23–30.

Joel Krueger

Response

The Mind-Body Politic and Affective Institutions Online

Michelle Maiese and Robert Hanna’s The Mind-Body Politic is ambitious, thoughtful, and wide-ranging. They develop a groundbreaking program for politicizing philosophy of mind. Their contribution to the field is twofold: first, they reinvigorate familiar debates in situated cognition with a new sense of freshness and urgency by situating these debates in the context of our current social and political landscape. Second, they offer a roadmap for further lines of research that will help ensure philosophy of mind remains a vital—and vitally engaged—area of philosophical inquiry for the foreseeable future.

I am broadly in agreement with their main arguments. Moreover, I endorse the authors’ push to politicize contemporary philosophy of mind. Accordingly, in what follows, I will not critically engage with specific claims or arguments. Instead, I will first reconstruct what I take to be the main argument and some key concepts in order to highlight the originality of the book. I will then follow Maiese and Hanna’s horizon-expanding lead by broadening the purview of their analysis to indicate how their framework might be applied to some additional (and currently under-explored) topics—potentially rich and relevant areas of future work that will, I hope, help further expand their discussion and emphasize its theoretical potency.

The general orientation of The Mind-Body Politic is continuous with a flurry of recent work in philosophy and cognitive science advocating a kind of externalism. For these externalist approaches, minds are more than brains. Our psychological capacities are realized not just by neural activity alone but also by the rest of our body, as well as by the complex ways our bodies interact with their material and social environments. Many of these externalist approaches fall under the heading of “4E” cognition. Proponents of 4E cognition argue that our psychological capacities are essentially embodied, embedded, enacted, and maybe even extended into the surrounding environment. 4E cognition is not a neatly unified framework; these “Es” differ in the strength and scope of their respective commitments. Nevertheless, they are united in their rejection of a brain-centric model of the mental. They urge us to instead adopt a more holistic perspective that sees minds as belonging to embodied subjects continually affecting, and being affected by, the social and material contexts that organize our lifeworld.

Work in 4E cognition has primarily focused on traditional topics in philosophy of mind. For example, the recent Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition (Newen, De Bruin, and Gallagher 2018)a massive book that provides the most comprehensive overview of 4E approaches to date—is full of articles on topics like cognition and rationality; language, learning, and memory; action and perception; mental representations; evolution and culture; and emotions, social cognition, and aesthetics. This is an important volume that shows how 4E approaches offer powerful resources for highlighting explanatory deficiencies of brain-centric theories of cognition. It also makes a strong case for broadening the scope of inquiry within philosophy of mind to include topics like psychopathology, animal cognition, robotics design, and legal reasoning.

However—to return to Maiese and Hanna—a surprising omission from this volume and 4E debates more generally is a consideration of the political mind, that is, a careful look at the interdependence between our psychological capacities and the social and political institutions within which these capacities arise and acquire their distinctive shape and character.1 The Mind-Body Politic fills in this lacuna. It does so in a theoretically rich and integrative way. In addition to drawing upon the resources of 4E cognition, Maiese and Hanna also incorporate work from other sources including classic and contemporary political and social theory, Frankfurt School critical theory, Marx, Kropotkin, Thoreau, Mill, and Foucault.

As I read it, the core argument of The Mind-Body Politic is this: as (essentially) embodied and embedded subjects, we are also (essentially) social subjects. And as essentially social subjects, we use social institutions—collections of evaluative standards, ideals, codes of conduct, imperatives, and shared rules; norm-governed practices, rituals, and artifacts, etc.—to regulate our emotions, attention, and behavior. Crucially, however, social institutions do more than exert a top-down influence over these things—for example, by limiting behavioral possibilities in different contexts (e.g., social norms that discourage dancing on tables during business meetings or laughing loudly during funerals). Over time, they also exert a more subtle and pervasive bottom-up influence. In other words, they become concretely embodied in “habits of mind”—our characteristic ways of attending to, interpreting, and engaging with the world—that determine both what we think and feel and how we think and feel it. This is, Maiese and Hanna tell us, the “mind-shaping” power of social institutions. In virtue of their vast mind-shaping power, social institutions can promote or hinder human development and wellbeing. The novelty of Maiese and Hanna’s proposal comes from the application of their 4E-inspired framework to specific case studies such as higher education and mental health treatment in the United States. Via a critical look at the contemporary neoliberal context informing these mind-shaping institutions—followed by a prescriptive vision of how to build more effective alternatives—we are given a rich and compelling political philosophy of mind: a 4EP approach.

This argument rests on several key ideas. Two of them are “affective scaffolding” and “affective framing.” The former has received much attention in recent 4E treatments of affectivity (e.g., Colombetti and Roberts 2015; Krueger 2014; Krueger and Szanto 2016; Stephan et al. 2014; Saarinen 2020; Tate 2019). What is new in The Mind-Body Politic is a consideration of its political significance. “Affective scaffolding” refers to the way that our moods and emotions are synchronically and diachronically driven, shaped, and regulated—scaffolded—by social and material resources within our environment. Some of these resources reflect our own choices and values such as designing the spaces of our home or office, or gravitating toward certain social groups, because they make us feel a certain way. However, as Maiese and Hanna demonstrate, other affect-regulating resources—including those at the heart of many everyday neoliberal institutions—reflect choices and values beyond our control.

This leads to a second key concept: “affective framing.” This concept picks out the interrelation between feeling and selective attention. Its theoretical significance is to show us that subjects do not merely manipulate their environmental scaffolding to manipulate their emotions; the latter, in fact, often manipulates us. The idea here is that discriminating, filtering, and selecting information in our environment—deciding what to pay attention to and how to pay attention to it—is not a “cold” or purely rational process. It is, rather, a process infused with feeling. Embodied subjects always experience and evaluate their world in affectively nuanced ways; the people and things we notice, remember, or take an interest are salient because they have a felt existential significance for us (Colombetti 2014). In short, when it comes to mind and self, it’s feeling all the way down. And the affective frames at the heart of mind and self—affective frames articulated and sustained by our habits of mind—are socially acquired insofar as they are nurtured and shaped by environmental scaffolding, including the mind-shaping scaffolding provided by neoliberal institutions.

These interrelated concepts together support what Maiese and Hanna term “the enactive-transformative principle” (ETP):

Enacting salient or even radical changes in the structure and complex dynamics of a social institution produces corresponding salient or even radical changes in the structure and complex dynamics of the essentially embodied minds of the people belonging to, and participating in, or falling under the jurisdiction of, that institution, thereby fundamentally affecting their lives, for worse or for better. (9)

ETP can be seen as a good thing if subjects routinely inhabit social institutions that scaffold habits of mind like empathy, imagination, curiosity, and humility. For Maiese and Hannah, such institutions are “constructive and enabling.” They ought to be encouraged and emulated. Examples include what Mezirow (2009) terms “transformative and emancipatory learning environments” for adult education. Transformative learning environments conceive of learning not primarily in terms of acquiring new information, such as memorizing historical facts, but rather as a process of personal transformation: an existential and affective reorientation that alters an individual’s perspectives, interpretations, and habitual responses to the world, thereby rendering them more open and receptive to the interests and needs of others.

However, our present social and political landscape is not, alas, quite so constructive and enabling. Maiese and Hanna offer a more dystopian vision of our current predicament, one in which constructive and enabling institutions are the exception rather than the rule. They argue that we are routinely caught up in neoliberal institutions—whether at work, play, or rest—that nurture very different kinds of habits of mind. These are “destructive and deforming” institutions. Destructive and deforming institutions make it difficult or even impossible for those who inhabit them to satisfy “true human needs,” as Maiese and Hanna refer to them, such as intimate personal relationships, social and political solidarity, creative self-expression, free thought, and meaningful work.

Again, the key point—and by my lights, one of the most important theoretical contributions of the book—is that destructive and deforming institutions do not simply have a top-down constraining effect. As Maiese and Hanna continually remind us, they also drive the bottom-up cultivation—often without our full awareness or consent—of pernicious habits of mind that distort our capacities for self-development and self-understanding and breed a “collective sociopathy” enslaving us (both individually and as groups) in webs of inauthentic values, desires, and affective frames that undermine our mental health and wellbeing. These pernicious habits of mind take many forms and operate at multiple levels and timescales. They include, among other things, alienation from our true needs and desires; loss of autonomy and a diminished sense of creativity, experimentation, and exploration; and forms of false consciousness impeding our ability to see the destructive and deforming framing effects such institutions have on us.

With this background in place, I now want to indicate how some of these ideas relate to a topic Maiese and Hanna do not discuss: the Internet and online institutions. This is a somewhat curious oversight. No one book can address everything relevant to its main theme, of course—not even one as rich as The Mind-Body Politic. Nevertheless, this omission feels like a lost opportunity. For one thing, many of us now spend much of our lives moving through online spaces like social media spaces (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok); communication spaces (WhatsApp, Snapchat; Google Meet, Zoom); streaming entertainment spaces (Netflix, YouTube, Spotify); and real-time collaborative spaces (Slack, Google Docs). We work, play, learn, and connect with others within these spaces. COVID-19 has only accelerated this trend. More of our relationships and activities than ever before are moving online—perhaps permanently—including educational practices at all levels and mental health treatments.

Additionally, despite the increasingly important role the Internet plays in everyday life, online spaces are undertheorized in philosophy of mind—including 4E cognition—and are therefore ripe for the 4EP approach Maiese and Hanna advocate. Existing treatments mainly focus on the informational nature of the Internet and how it might augment decision-making and memory (see Smart et al. 2017 for an overview). But the Internet is now more than an informational resource. It has evolved into a rich and complex environment—or rather, many environments composed of many different spaces—that function as norm-governed institutions, each with distinctive mind-shaping powers.

I want to develop these thoughts further by first observing that The Mind-Body Politic never answers what might appear to be a crucial foundational question: what are mind-shaping social institutions, exactly? This reluctance seems to be an intentional—and ultimately useful—move; Maiese and Hanna are content to work with a “maximally broad” (5) definition. What seems to matter for them is not so much the ontological status of social institutions but rather the manner by which they are formed and maintained. For Maiese and Hanna, social institutions are collective practices that are governed by norms. Social institutions arise wherever groups of people use different practices to regulate the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of their members in ways that reflect that group’s values, ideals, and standards. Consequently, social institutions potentially range from local institutions like families, religious organizations, sports teams, schools, and workplace environments, all the way to large-scale institutions like legal systems, economic systems, and military and political organizations (including government and nation-states).

This maximally broad definition acknowledges that social institutions can form in new and hitherto unexpected domains and spaces. This is true of online spaces. To see how so, first consider how the Internet and Internet-enabled technologies function as affective scaffolding (Krueger and Osler 2019).2 We routinely use the Internet for the synchronic and diachronic regulation of moods and emotions; it is now so ubiquitous, portable, and readily accessible via a range of different devices (smartphones, digital assistants, wearable devices, smart appliances, etc.) that it can be reliably incorporated into our repertoire of everyday emotion regulation practices. Additionally, these same properties mean that the Internet—as a kind of affective scaffolding—is deeply embedded within the contours of our lifeworld. The ease and regularity with which we move between online and offline spaces—and often inhabit both simultaneously—is making this distinction increasingly untenable (Miller 2012; Osler 2020; Valentini, Lorusso, and Stephan 2020). Finally, the hyper-portable and, crucially, hyper-social nature of the Internet means that others are often intensely present with the real-time dynamics of our emotion-regulative practices; and our practices, in turn, directly feed back onto the regulative practices of others.

By functioning as persistent affective scaffolding, online spaces shape the development of norm-governed habits of mind and the affective frames behind them—habits that we take with us into our offline encounters. Some of these habits reflect time spent in constructive and enabling online spaces. For example, online spaces can be empathic spaces: they may facilitate intense forms of shared experience and social connection that make us more attuned and responsive to others (Osler 2020). By participating in blogs, discussion forums, and social media spaces to manage and share intense experiences—publicly mourning the loss of a child, for instance—we may not only use these spaces to scaffold the contours of our own experience but also to develop a deeper sensitivity for the ways that others negotiate their unique experiences and lifeworlds.

However, online spaces can also be destructive and deforming. They can persistently scaffold users into the development of affective frames that disrupt or impede their relationships and wellbeing. Let me close my discussion by giving an example that lends itself well to the 4EP framework Maiese and Hanna give us.

Consider Snapchat, a popular instant-messaging app primarily used by individuals aged eighteen to twenty-four (roughly 70 percent of users are female). Snapchat was initially a person-to-person communication app that allowed users to create and share multimedia messages (“snaps”). But it quickly evolved into a richer and more interactive social media space. Users—including brands, influencers, and celebrities posting ad-supported content—can still privately share photos with one another. However, they can also create public “stories” (photo narratives and short videos) that disappear after a set amount of time.

A particular draw of Snapchat is that it encourages users to manipulate the images and videos users share with filters, virtual stickers, and augmented reality objects. One such filter is a popular “beautifying” filter. These filters allow users to manipulate their image by removing “imperfections”: they can remove blemishes, wrinkles, or discoloration; change or soften skin tone; and even manipulate the physical structure of their face by slimming cheeks, nose, or forehead or increasing eye size. This technology allows users to experiment with unrealistic ideals of beauty and thinness—manipulating their cheekbones or eye size to anatomically impossible configurations—in order to make themselves feel better and receive mood-elevating affirmation from others.

However, these practices can also have a deleterious mind-shaping effect. They can scaffold affective dysregulation and nurture habits of negative self-evaluation (i.e., destructive and deforming affective frames). For example, there is evidence that these manipulated images can “take a toll on one’s self-esteem, make one feel inadequate for not looking a certain way in the real world, and even act as a trigger and lead to body dysmorphic disorder (BDD),” an obsessive-compulsive preoccupation with a perceived flaw in one’s appearance (Rajanala et al. 2018, 443). These online practices have significant offline affective consequences. A new phenomenon dubbed “Snapchat dysmorphia” refers to an increasing number of patients seeking out cosmetic surgery to look like a filtered version of themselves (Ramphul and Mejias 2018).

These observations are continuous with other work indicating that the kinds of social media posts users are exposed to influences their affective states (Kramer et al. 2014); the hyper-social nature of the Internet means that the significance and impact of our online practices are rarely confined to a single user. Snapchat makes it easy to share our manipulated images and, in so doing, rapidly propagate harmful representations of beauty and thinness that can nurture destructive and deforming affective frames in others. These filters are fun to use and clearly serve Snapchat’s moneymaking interests in driving user engagement and creating an addictive online space users want to return to repeatedly. However, they also feed into much larger networks of technosocial scaffolding that reinforce unhealthy narratives of femininity and beauty that, along with a sea of other gendered content in media and online spaces, nudge users toward forming unhealthy narratives and practices of disordered eating in order to embody these narratives (Krueger and Osler 2020). By inhabiting these sorts of online spaces, users are, in this way, potentially opening themselves up to being manipulated—affectively invaded (Slaby 2016)—by norm-governed institutions that do not necessarily reflect their authentic values and needs.

To conclude, Maiese and Hanna’s 4EP approach is well equipped to analyze the development and dynamics of affective institutions online—an emerging area of research that will continue to demand more attention. With its theoretical power and range of potential application, The Mind-Body Politic is a welcome gift to the philosophical community.

 

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Saarinen, Jussi A. “What Can the Concept of Affective Scaffolding Do for Us?” Philosophical Psychology 33.6 (2020): 820–39.

Slaby, Jan. “Mind Invasion: Situated Affectivity and the Corporate Life Hack.” Frontiers in Psychology 7.266 (2016): 1–13.

Smart, Paul, et al. “The Cognitive Ecology of the Internet.” In Cognition Beyond the Brain: Computation, Interactivity and Human Artifice, edited by Stephen J. Cowley and Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau, 251–82. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2017.

Stephan, Achim, et al. “Emotions beyond Brain and Body.” Philosophical Psychology 27.1 (2014): 65–81.

Tate, Alexander James Miller. “Anhedonia and the Affectively Scaffolded Mind.” Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy 6.20191108 (2019): 647–80.

Valentini, Daniele, et al. “Onlife Extremism: Dynamic Integration of Digital and Physical Spaces in Radicalization.” Frontiers in Psychology 11.524 (2020): 1–15.


  1. There are some few exceptions. See, e.g., Cash (2013), De Jaegher (2013), Gallagher and Crisafi (2009), Krueger and Maiese (2018), Merritt (2013), Protevi (2009), and Slaby (2016).

  2. When I speak of “the Internet” here, I mean this as a catch-all term for the Internet (the global network of interconnected servers, computer, and other information-sharing hardware), the Web (applications built on top of the Internet like browsers and email programs), and technologies that grant access to the Web (smartphones, digital assistants, etc.).

  • Michelle Maiese

    Michelle Maiese

    Reply

    The Mind-Body Politic and Beyond: A Response to Joel Krueger

    I am very grateful for Krueger’s collaborative suggestions about how to extend ideas about mindshaping to the domain of online social institutions, where many people now spend a great deal of time. I wholeheartedly agree that online spaces and their associated technology can have a powerful and sometimes pernicious mindshaping impact; Krueger has pointed to one very interesting and important way in which some of the central ideas of the book can be expounded and applied in a new context.

    As Krueger notes, The Mind-Body Politic characterizes social institutions in broad terms, as comprised of collective practices governed by norms: “Social institutions arise wherever groups of people use different practices to regulate the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of their members in ways that reflect that group’s values, ideals, and standards” (Krueger, 6). Given this broad characterization, it absolutely makes sense to suppose that institutions can form in new and unexpected spaces, such as online environments. The internet is comprised of many spaces that function as norm-governed institutions, each with its own distinctive mindshaping powers. Online spaces are readily accessible, hyper-portable, and hyper-social. They involve emotion-regulative practices whereby we engage socially with others, and these practices, in turn, directly feed back into the practices and attitudes of other agents. These online spaces therefore can function as “persistent affective scaffolding” that support and solicit certain kinds of emotional engagement. Krueger provides the example of the technology associated with Snapchat, which allows users to experiment with unrealistic ideals of beauty and thinness. He rightly notes that engaging with this technology may have a pernicious mindshaping impact insofar as it nurtures habits of negative self-evaluation and a hyper-focus on certain beauty ideals/norms.

    Another example that springs to mind is the prevalence of online “echo chambers.” Because many social media sites and online search engines are tailored to what the user has looked at in the past, online spaces can be incredibly powerful in terms of building up cognitive walls. In The Mind-Body Politic, we describe a cognitive wall as an entrenched or habitual belief, memory, stereotypical mental image, feeling, or emotion that acts as an effective screen against manifest reality and truth as it actually is presented by sense perception, reliable testimonial evidence, or rational argument. At the neurobiological level, such walls consist in rigid mental habits and a relatively fixed pattern of dynamics. Cognitive walls that result from oppressive social institutions or ideologies are not only extremely hard to correct, but also morally malignant because their operation is covert and they consist in rigid, inflexible habits. People tend to unthinkingly reproduce these habits of mind rather than reflectively adjusting their actions and attitudes with the aid of critical thought (Burkitt 2002). Racist habits, for example, often are so deeply ingrained and automatic that they do not occupy a reasons-responsive position with respect to an agent’s practical deliberations. This helps to explain why especially harmful habits of mind tend not only to persist, but also to go unnoticed or unrecognized. Cognitive walls are, to an important extent, a matter of an embodied subject’s simply being stuck in certain habits of behavior and attention that have formed via her engagement with the sociocultural world, but without her being aware of being stuck.

    Online spaces can help to create this sort of blindness and inflexibility insofar as they generate a kind of tunnel vision: by focusing people’s attention on a narrow set of considerations or viewpoints, their habits of mind become ever more rigidly engrained. Because subjects are not even exposed to relevant facts, considerations, and perspectives, there is little chance they will modify their viewpoint. As existing habits of mind become more entrenched, subjects’ patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting stagnate. In the event that they do encounter information that challenges these engrained modes of engagement, they may very well reject it as false information or “fake news”; or, they may double down on their existing beliefs in an instance of the so-called “backfire effect.”

    Yet another example, one which brings together Krueger’s focus on online social institutions and our focus on neoliberalism, is the way in which the technology associated with online education can solicit people to think about and engage with higher education in distorted, limiting ways. Insofar as they involve a particular set of “rules, procedures, pr/actices and participants” (Slaby & Gallagher, 2014, 15), online learning environments can be understood as social institutions. The tools for learning and communication that course management software provides afford particular kinds of thinking and engagement and thereby impact what and how students learn. In addition, the technology and implicit rules associated with such settings impact how people understand the value and fundamental aims of learning; and because many of these online spaces both reflect and perpetuate neoliberal aims and values, they are in danger of encouraging students and professors to think about education in distorted ways (Maiese 2020). Here I focus specifically on asynchronous online learning, though some of these concerns may also apply to the kind of learning that takes place in real-time via Zoom (or some other video conferencing technology).

    The most prevalent use of educational technology in higher education (prior to pandemic times, at least) involves asynchronous online courses; such classes are not automated, but they lack a face-to-face dimension, and all interactions are mediated, largely via text-based discussions (Rose 2017, 375). The asynchronous online learning environment centers around web-based technology, course management software, online communication, and distance learning. Many course management systems involve “course modules” that allow students to move progressively through a course day by day and week by week. Much of the material is conveyed via recorded lectures and written text that a student can engage with at a place and time of her choosing. While some communication takes place in real-time, via chat rooms, most interaction is asynchronous; indeed, the fact that learning does not take place in real time may be viewed as a key advantage of such educational environments: students can engage with the course materials at any time that suits them. One central concern is that increased reliance on such technologies is especially likely to foster consumerist “habits of mind” and solicit students to view and value their education in overly narrow ways, in accordance with a neoliberal stance. This results in what might be understood as an “online learning habitus”—that is, an emergent set of dispositions acquired over the course of learning how to navigate and successfully utilize online education. Such dispositions go on to inform subsequent learning practices, the expectations for those practices, and the values that students ascribe to such learning.

    Why think that online learning environments solicit people to view higher education in relation to market values? Embedded in online learning environments is the expectation that students will enroll in these courses in order to get the skills and the degree they need for a particular job and thereby maximize their earning potential. Although such expectations are often conveyed in traditional, face-to-face settings as well, they are especially pronounced in the context of online learning. Advertisements for online course frequently emphasize efficiency, cost effectiveness, and the prospect of speedy career advancement, and promotional materials highlight flexibility and “value for the money.” In addition, these courses often are accelerated and take place over several weeks rather than several months. Students navigate through self-contained course modules, listen to recorded lectures, and complete the necessary assignments; the means and ends are clearly defined. Many students report they have opted for online classes not because they believe that they will learn more (or even as much), but instead because they have come to regard such classes as a quick and cost-effective way to fulfill degree requirements while working full-time. Students “jump on the idea that online learning allows them to maximize their profits” (Chau 2010, 186), thereby reinforcing the notion that the central purpose of education is job training. Thus, while neoliberal ideology has pervaded all of higher education, consumerism is even more clearly the prevailing “culture of use” in online settings.

    In addition, rather than emphasizing the fundamentally relational dynamics of learning, online environments generate an impression that education is primarily an individualistic pursuit. Embedded in the format of online courses is the expectation that students will be able to work through the course modules at their own pace and on their own time, and that they will not need to engage or collaborate very much with embodied others in order to complete the course requirements. As a student sits alone at her kitchen table reading, viewing recorded lectures, and posting to discussion forums, she comes to expect that learning and self-development are individual pursuits. This may make it especially difficult for her to see herself as part of a “community of inquiry.”

    In large part this is due to the kinds of communicative practices afforded by the technology of asynchronous online settings. The online substitutes for face-to-face instruction typically are comprised of various online discussion forums that “often lack the insight-producing spontaneity and continuous feedback of in-depth face-to-face interaction” (Darabi et al. 2011, 217). Frequently there are substantial delays between posts and replies, and it is not uncommon for someone to post something thoughtful and receive no reply or questions from other students. Because many students are not “drawn in” by mediated online discussions, they may participate only just enough to satisfy the demands of a graded rubric; or they may very well wait until the last minute to post anything. Such dynamics make it difficult to simulate anything even closely resembling a sustained dialogue.

    Moreover, when students respond to isolated questions and express their agreement and disagreement with others’ posts, they have limited opportunities to see, hear, and feel the alternative perspectives of other students, and to have those points of view become proximate and subjectively potent. This is because while face-to-face interaction that engages students at an affective, bodily level affords many opportunities for collaboration and critical inquiry, the online learning environment makes this kind of engagement far more difficult (Maiese 2013). Although individual participants do not leave their bodies behind when they interact online, the relation that exists between them is disembodied. They are cut off from subtle modulations in tone of voice, gesture, and posture that ordinarily help to signify the thoughts and feelings of other students and facilitate interpersonal understanding. What is more, it is easier for students to respond to any feelings of discomfort by closing a browser window, turning off their computer, or otherwise disengaging. For these reasons, the online learning environment tends to solicit a more distant, less fully embodied mode of communication and interpersonal engagement.

    As a result, interactions among a “community of learners” typically are far more difficult to achieve online, particularly in asynchronous formats. This is especially troublesome in the context of a liberal arts education and fields in the humanities, such as Philosophy. Part of the aim of such courses, I take it, is to help students develop aptitudes associated with critical thinking, cross-cultural dialogue, an appreciation of diverse perspectives, and mutual understanding (Ess 2003, 119). While joint inquiry and engaged dialogue surely is not impossible online, it is far more time-consuming and difficult to sustain. Hands-on activities, in-class debates, creative small-group exercises, and student writing workshops become far less likely. Meanwhile, the online environment is extremely well-suited for recorded lectures that students can listen to passively and absorb, as well as fact-based assignments that can be graded quickly. As a result, online settings are more likely to center on trivial and repetitive learning exercises, rote memorization of facts, or routine modes of problem-solving. There is a danger that as learning experiences become “more encased in repetitive behavior and routine conduct” (Carden, 2006, p. 33), students will become less capable of self-growth and less open to new forms of knowledge and experience. Instead, they are far more likely to view higher education as exclusively instrumentally valuable, whether as (a) an add-on to employment and other activities, (b) a quick and easy way to satisfy general education requirements, or (c) a means to career advancement.

    These are just a few ways in which the notion of mindshaping might help to shed light on the influence of online institutions. I look forward to considering further applications of these ideas.

     

    Works Cited

    Burkitt, I. “Technologies of the Self: Habitus and Capacities.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 32.2 (2002): 219–37.

    Carden, S. Virtue Ethics: Dewey and Macintyre. New York: Continuum, 2006.

    Chau, P. “Online Higher Education Commodity.” Journal of Computing in Higher Education 22.3 (2010): 177–91.

    Darabi, A., et al. “Cognitive Presence in Asynchronous Online Learning: A Comparison of Four Discussion Strategies.” Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 27.3 (2011): 216–27.

    Ess, C. “Liberal Arts and Distance Education: Can Socratic Virtue and Confucius’ Exemplary Person Be Taught Online?” Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 2.2 (2003): 117–37.

    Maiese, M. “Embodied Social Cognition, Participatory Sense-Making, and Online Learning.” Social Philosophy Today 29 (2013): 103–19.

    ———. “Online Education as a Mental Institution.” Philosophical Psychology (2020). https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2020.1828573.

    Rose, E. “Cause for Optimism: Engaging in a Vital Conversation about Online Learning.” Foundations of Science 22.2 (2017): 373–76.

    Slaby, J., and S. Gallagher. “Critical Neuroscience and Socially Extended Minds.” Theory, Culture & Society (2014): 1–27.

    • Robert Hanna

      Robert Hanna

      Reply

      The Mind-Body Politic and Beyond: A Response to Joel Krueger

      I’m very grateful to have Joel Krueger’s sympathetic and indeed creatively collaborative comments on The Mind-Body Politic (henceforth MBP), for the opportunity they provide me to work out my/our views1 on mind-shaping via the Internet and online social institutions.

      JK writes:

      I now want to indicate how some of these ideas relate to a topic Maiese and Hanna do not discuss: the Internet and online institutions. This is a somewhat curious oversight. No one book can address everything relevant to its main theme, of course—not even one as rich as The Mind-Body Politic. Nevertheless, this omission feels like a lost opportunity. For one thing, many of us now spend much of our lives moving through online spaces like social media spaces (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok); communication spaces (WhatsApp, Snapchat; Google Meet, Zoom); streaming entertainment spaces (Netflix, YouTube, Spotify); and real-time collaborative spaces (Slack, Google Docs). We work, play, learn, and connect with others within these spaces. COVID-19 has only accelerated this trend. More of our relationships and activities than ever before are moving online—perhaps permanently—including educational practices at all levels and mental health treatments.

      By functioning as persistent affective scaffolding, online spaces shape the development of norm-governed habits of mind and the affective frames behind them—habits that we take with us into our offline encounters. Some of these habits reflect time spent in constructive and enabling online spaces. For example, online spaces can be empathic spaces: they may facilitate intense forms of shared experience and social connection that make us more attuned and responsive to others (Osler 2020, forthcoming). By participating in blogs, discussion forums, and social media spaces to manage and share intense experiences—publicly mourning the loss of a child, for instance—we may not only use these spaces to scaffold the contours of our own experience but also to develop a deeper sensitivity for the ways that others negotiate their unique experiences and lifeworlds. However, online spaces can also be destructive and deforming. They can persistently scaffold users into the development of affective frames that disrupt or impede their relationships and wellbeing.

      I strongly agree with all of this—and, correspondingly, I also want to use it here as an invitation and springboard for working out a new line of thinking in the same direction. Michelle has also done new work in this direction since the publication of MBP,2 but she can speak in her own voice about that in her response to JK.

      I’m going to start with a recent critical analysis of social media by Benjamin Y. Fong in the American democratic socialist journal, Jacobin. Fong writes:

      For the Left, . . . social media presents an imminent threat: it attracts people who are natural fodder for socialist politics and then absorbs them in the unthinking narcissism of pseudo-political statement pronouncement, where they enter the negative feedback loop that distances them from the reality of everyday human engagement. Twitter is thus not just a medium of expression for the “psychic pathologies” of what Mark Fisher described so well as the “Vampire Castle.”3 It is the Vampire Castle, doing capitalism’s work by further atomizing and distancing people from the kinds of conversations required for real political engagement. The sooner we realize this about social media, the sooner we can get to the work of dismantling it.4

      Here, in turn, is a four-step rational reconstruction of Fong’s argument:

      1. Socialism—whether democratic socialism or social anarchism (aka anarcho-socialism, libertarian socialism, etc.)—is fundamentally concerned with respect for universal human dignity; with human freedom of thought, expression, choice, and action; with individual and collective creativity and flourishing; and with the universal satisfaction of true human needs.
      2. Internet-based social media may appear to be highly promising and legitimate vehicles for the realization of socialist aims.
      3. But in fact, social media are an essential part of the “military-industrial-university-digital complex” that not only produces widespread mind-control and mental slavery, but has also enabled a worldwide mental health crisis of social media addiction.5
      4. Therefore, anyone who recognizes the value of the fundamental concerns of socialism should (i) engage in a serious critical analysis of social media, (ii) “log the fuck off” on a regular basis, in order to resist their largely malign influence, and also (iii) wholeheartedly individually and collectively commit to subverting and dismantling the entire system of social media.

      I think that this argument is sound. Moreover, I also think that its conclusion should be generalized so as to apply to all digital media controlled by other parts of what I’ll call the military-industrial-university-digital complex, not just social media, therefore to all digital media, including all parts of the internet, that are controlled by (i) the governments of contemporary nation-States, especially including their coercive authoritarian enforcement-specialists, the military and the police, and/or (ii) global corporate capitalists, and/or (iii) universities and professional academic organizations. The rationale for this generalization is that premises 1, 2, and 3 of the above argument apply just as correctly and directly to all digital media controlled by the military-industrial-university-digital complex, as they do to social media in particular. Therefore, the generalized conclusion of the rationally reconstructed version of Fong’s argument should be a starting point for all of us, including all philosophers, which in turn includes all radically enlightened, realistically optimist dignitarian humanist, aka anarcho-socialist, political philosophers of mind.6 For terminological convenience, let’s call these radical political philosophers of mind.

      In view of MBP, clearly, the proper positive task for radical political philosophers of mind is to design constructive, enabling social institutions, including specifically online institutions. What I’m going to do now is to sketch a design for an online social institution that’s also specifically intended for use by radical political philosophers of mind. I call this online social institution phildialogues.

      In the real-world originals of the Socratic dialogues, ancient Athens, all participants met face-to-face and in real space and real time in a leisurely setting.7 But nowadays, in a world that is fundamentally driven from above by the military-industrial-university-digital complex, hence fundamentally threatened all around by what by what I call the New Apocalypse,8 and currently gripped from below in the rollout and fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, this is often difficult, or even practically impossible, to manage. Moreover, because it is often difficult, or even practically impossible, for spatially widely-distributed groups of people in many different time zones to meet in person, even by means of face-to-face conversation technologies like Skype or Zoom or Teams (although this would be the ideal case), therefore, in order to liberate ourselves and others in a contemporary context, we as political philosophers of mind not only can but also should be conducting philosophically-enabled and philosophically-guided dialogues, either face-to-face or non-face-to-face, and either real-space-and-time or online, with people living in any place and in any time-zone, about issues that really matter.

      This is what I call phildialogues. Phildialogues are the precise opposite of angry, anxious people clustering in their digital echo chambers on social media, or shouting insults at each other over the internet. A phildialogue uses classical critical reasoning and discussion methods drawn from

      • ancient Greek philosophy (especially Plato’s Socratic dialogues, especially insofar as Socratic method has been constructively reinterpreted by Nelson),
      • from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century radical Enlightenment (especially as found in the works of Spinoza, the French philosophes, and Kant),
      • from mid-twentieth-century emancipatory pedagogy, especially the Brazilian philosopher of education Paulo Freire’s classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed,9 and
      • from late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century work on facilitation and principled-negotiation-and-participatory-decision-making (aka “direct democracy”), including Roger Fisher’s and William Ury’s Getting to YES (1981; 3rd ed., Penguin, 2011); Samuel Kaner’s “What Can Organizational Design Professionals Learn from Grassroots Political Activists?” (Vision/Action [1987]); Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 1990); Allan Kaplan’s Development Practitioners and Social Process: Artists of the Invisible (Pluto, 2002); Kaner’s Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making (2nd ed., Wiley, 2007); and Peter Block’s Community: The Structure of Belonging (Berrett-Koehler, 2008).

      in order to work towards humanity’s individual and collective radical enlightenment.

      How do phildialogues work? As I indicated above, nowadays phildialogues are rarely conducted face-to-face in real space and time, often widely distributed over the spatial locations and time-zones of many participants, conducted online, and often extended over some non-trivial duration in time, for example, several days, several weeks, or a month. Ideally, they are conducted face-to-face online in real time (aka synchronously), by means of technologies like Skype or Zoom or Teams; but failing that, they’re conducted by means of synchronous non-face-to-face interactive group text-messaging, or by asynchronous non-face-to-face interactive group text-messaging +/- decision-making tools of some sort, for example, facilitated meeting-and-decision-making technologies such as Loomio. In any case, each phildialogue would be facilitated by two radical political philosophers of mind:

      • an enabler, who acts as a more-or-less neutral (i.e., more-or-less non-participant) editor of the discussion, and
      • a guide, who acts as a participant leader of the discussion.

      In turn there are five simple rules for conducting a phildialogue:10

      • The unpacking rule for participants: unpack each of your contributions (posts) into a single issue, idea, or argument, that does not replicate a point that has already been made elsewhere in that phildialogue.
      • The disagreement rule for participants: if you disagree with an idea or argument, then create new contributions (posts) that present your alternative ideas or counterarguments.
      • The live-and-let-live rule for enablers/editors: existing contributions (posts) should be edited by the editor only to strengthen them.
      • The honest broker rule for enabler/editors: the role of the enabler/editor is not primarily to evaluate the merits of a contribution (post), but instead primarily to help phildialogue participants ensure that each of their contributions (posts) is framed in a way that makes it most helpful to the entire phildialogue community.
      • The procedural rule for editors and participants: each phildialogue is aimed at collective learning, collective wisdom, and ultimately collective action, which in turn unfolds according to a general procedure for principled-negotiation-and-participatory-decision-making.

      Now principled negotiation is negotiation in which all members of a group of people sincerely try to reach agreement about some controverted (and often highly controversial) issue, in such a way that everyone’s basic interests are mutually satisfied to the greatest possible extent. And participatory decision-making is principled negotiation for groups of any size, leading to collective decisions about proposals for group action. Against that backdrop, what follows now is the description of a general procedure for principled-negotiation-and-participatory-decision-making via phildialogues. For purposes of convenience, however, I will just call it collective decision-making via phildialogues from here on in. So every such process of collective decision-making in this sense is a phildialogue with all members of a group of people discussing various proposals for group action, one proposal at a time, with the following features:

      • the group uses a five-valued array of options for taking a position on any given proposal, including two degrees of agreement, one neutral or as-yet-uncommitted value, and two degrees of disagreement, namely—
        • Strongly Agree
        • Mildly Agree
        • Abstain
        • Mildly Disagree
        • Block or Walk

      any of which is registered by each member of a group at any point in a given dialogue about a given proposal being considered by that group,

      • every registration of a position carries with it the option to change or update your position at any time in the dialogue,
      • everyone follows the basic principle of mutual respect and tolerance:
        • no one is ever coerced in any particular sub-cycle or overall process of decision-making, either with respect to their own position or with respect to their other contributions to the dialogue, and more specifically, no one is ever forced to walk, or punished for blocking or walking,
      • mild disagreement always entails going forward with the current proposal if there is sufficiently strong support for it,
      • sufficiently strong support means that there is close to or more than 50 percent strong or mild agreement with the proposal within the group, and no blocks,
      • blocking means not merely a strong disagreement with a given proposal, but also that one block is enough to defeat a given proposal in any given sub-cycle of a particular process of collective decision-making,
      • every blocker must also offer, or support, or at least refrain from blocking, an alternative proposal in the next sub-cycle of the same collective decision-making process,
      • every participant is permitted only a fairly small finite number (e.g., 5) blocks in a particular collective decision-making process, and if s/he uses up all his or her blocks, then s/he must also walk away from that collective decision-making process and thereby exit it, and
      • walking away from/exiting a particular collective decision-making process can be done at any point in the process, not only after the permitted maximum number of blocks.

      That’s my general description of the online social institution of phildialogues, and my general proposal is that radical political philosophers of mind not only can but should be conducting phildialogues. But will they actually work in the digital-dog-eat-digital-dog “real” world of the Internet and the military-industrial-university-digital complex? That’s a very hard question I’ll now try to answer, at least in part.

      Recently, I wrote up a revised-and-updated version of my lecture notes for an introductory course on moral philosophy and existentialism that I taught for almost twenty-five years, for universal free-sharing, as a “short book for philosophically-minded people.”11 As I was writing it up, I was also vividly reminded of the face-to-face real space and real time class- or smaller-group discussions I had conducted or facilitated over two-and-a-half decades. And then it suddenly became clear to me that this experience had direct implications for phildialogues. During the first few years I taught the course, I included sections on the standard controversial or otherwise hot-button applied ethics issues of the day—abortion, animal ethics/vegetarianism, capital punishment, gun-abolitionism or gun-control, etc., etc.—but eventually it became clear to me that, due to at least seven persistent problems in our class discussions of these issues, this was mostly wasted effort, so I switched the focus of the course to more-or-less the version that I recently revised and updated.

      But what’s of central importance for our purposes here, is that I think that these seven persistent problems also have direct application to all discussions of controversial or otherwise hot-button issues, whether publicly or privately organized, whether face-to-face in real space and real time, or whether via online open discussion platform or via online facilitated meeting-and-decision-making technology, or whether online face-to-face and synchronous, online non-face-to-face and synchronous, or online non-face-to-face and asynchronous. Hence these seven persistent problems also apply directly to phildialogues as potential problems for them.

      The first persistent problem is the backfire effect, although it did not actually have a handy social-scientific label during the first two decades of my teaching. The backfire effect is that presenting ideologically-blinkered and mind-manacled people (true-believers, trolls, yahoos, zealots, etc.) with adequate evidence or cogent counterarguments to their claims only hardens their commitment to their false beliefs, increases their cognitive resistance to rational correction, and makes them angry (or even angrier) to boot.12

      A second persistent problem that, unlike the backfire effect, is not often described or even notice, is what I will call the amnesia problem. Even if you manage, by means of cognitive debiasing techniques together with phildialogue, to get people to open their minds somewhat in the course of a given dialogue/discussion, nevertheless, as soon as they go away from the actual discussion for a few days, and sometimes even only for a few hours, when they come to resume the discussion, it is as if their memories had been entirely wiped clean in the meantime, flipping them back to their previously-held views: therefore, basically you have to start from ground zero in every single discussion that involves controversial or hot-button issues.

      Now as the diagram directly below this paragraph shows, it is in fact really possible to design and implement rational techniques for successful cognitive debiasing, thus overcoming the backfire effect, by “affirming worldview” and “affirming identity,” and then proceeding to phildialogues. But the further persistent problem in this connection is that any such process of successful cognitive debiasing within the framework of effective phildialogues, is slow, time-consuming, and energy-absorbing.

      Techniques for successful cognitive debiasing.13

      A third persistent problem is what I will call the know-it-all-windbag problem. Many or even most discussions are dominated by a few know-it-all-windbags, who not only relentlessly draw attention to themselves and their own agendas, thereby using up valuable time, but they also frighten away other possible contributors by mocking them, etc., unless you take serious steps to rein them in, or even (as politely as possible) shut them up, and include other voices. But the process by which you curate and guide the discussions in order to ensure that it is not taken over by the know-it-all-windbags puts everyone on edge, and at the same time, as soon as they recognize that you are reining them in or trying to shut them up, the know-it-all-windbags also tend to become even more conversationally aggressive.

      A fourth persistent problem is what Plato’s Socrates aptly called misology. Misology is an unreasonable prejudice against, and even the outright hatred of, logic and logical reasoning. Misology goes radically beyond Emerson’s rationally legitimate and witty worry about logical consistency at all costs:

      A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.14

      A foolish consistency above all ignores or overlooks the genuine logical phenomena of paradoxes, and correspondingly, it ignores or overlooks what is nowadays called paraconsistent logic and dialetheic logic,15 and also the nature and rational role of logical reasoning based on the principle of reductio ad absurdum. In any case, in the context of the introductory ethics course I taught for all those years, since I had also taught formal logic and informal logic to undergraduates when I was a graduate student, and because I had even written a book about rationality and the morality of logic,16 I always included a short section on basic principles of logical reasoning, formal fallacies, informal fallacies, and (in effect) argument-mapping. But when, in the course of our class discussions on controversial or hot-button issues, I would lay out arguments step-by-step (either mine, or those of classical philosophers, or arguments offered by students) for critical analysis, I was all-too-often met with the (sincerely intended) objection: “Oh, you’re just tricking us into agreeing by using logic!” as if logic and logical reasoning, and sophistry, were one and the same.

      A fifth persistent problem is the confusion between dialogue and debate. The express purpose of the social institution of phildialogues is for all participants to learn something from each other, and to make collective rational progress towards radical enlightenment—and above all, when collective decision-making is also on the agenda, towards collective decisions and effective action that are inherently guided by dignitarian moral and political principles. But people engaged in class discussions about controversial or hot-button issues found it almost impossible to understand that we were engaging in philosophical dialogues in that sense, and not engaging in debates, where the purpose is to score debating points, “win” the debate, dialectically crush your opponents, and ultimately impose your own ideas (or your own will) on everyone else. And this was so, even when I repeatedly explicitly distinguished between philosophical dialogues and debates.

      A sixth persistent problem is the intellectually deadly combination of what I will call dialogue-fatigue and dialogue-attention deficit disorder, aka DADD. If the discussion of some controversial or hot-button issue is taking longer than just a few (say, thirty or forty-five) minutes, and perhaps is even extended over several days, and a simple resolution of the issue, as it were, a take-away, is not delivered immediately, or is not delivered at all—as is often the case with truly complex issues—many or even most participants in the dialogue simply get tired, stop paying attention, lose interest, and are either distracted by irrelevant trivia on the internet (say, sneaking looks at their Facebook pages, or Twitter, even when they have been asked to lay aside all their electronic gear until the class ends), or else check out of the discussion altogether. And, once dialogue-fatigue and DADD have set in and erstwhile participants have gone over to The Dark Side of irrelevant trivia on the internet, or have even checked out altogether, then it is practically impossible to get them to rejoin the dialogue.

      Seventh and finally, specifically in relation to the internet and non-face-to-face or asynchronous online discussions—as opposed to face-to-face discussions, whether in real space and time or synchronously online—there is another persistently problematic factor that’s not often noticed, although it did recently (and rightly) receive some attention in Evan Mandery’s excellent article, “What Teaching Ethics in Appalachia Taught Me about Bridging America’s Partisan Divide.”17 I will call this the face-to-face vs. Facebook effect. When people are actually in the same real space and same real time together, or even synchronously face-to-face online together, talking, they tend to be quite sensitive to how everyone else is viewing them, and are therefore usually not only quite cautious-and-polite, but also, and what is even more important, are overtly quite sensitive to collective moral norms and principles. Except for the inevitable know-it-all-windbags (aka KIA-windbags), of course, but then usually everyone despises them, and rolls their eyes, or just starts doodling or fantasizing about something else, whenever the KIA-windbags go into their blah-blah-blah-me-me-me-blah-blah-blah ad nauseam. And that’s bad enough, but at least no one is being oppressed, even if they’re bored stuffless and turned off for further participation. Nevertheless, as has often been noticed, in online non-face-to-face/asynchronous contexts, especially on social media and in Twitter-like or Facebook-like contexts, and even more so when the individual identities of the non-face-to-face contributors or discussants are further occluded behind pseudonymous user-names, then ordinary and normally quite reasonable people very often become disembodied debater-monsters, lose the caution-and-politeness and moral sensitivity they would typically have in face-to-face conversational encounters, and turn into morally insensitive, sophistical trolls, Internet bullies, and coercive moralist screamers.

      As I indicated earlier, I think that the seven persistent problems about discussing controversial or otherwise hot-button issues in introductory moral philosophy and existentialism classes are equally persistent and problematic for all discussions of similarly controversial or otherwise hot-button issues, whether publicly or privately organized, whether face-to-face in real space and real time, or whether via online open discussion platform or via online facilitated meeting-and-decision-making technology, or whether online face-to-face and synchronous, online non-face-to-face and synchronous, or online non-face-to-face and asynchronous. Hence they also apply directly to my proposed social institution of phildialogues as potential serious problems for it.

      But, to conclude this response to JK’s comments in a rationally hopeful spirit, I do also think that a fully self-critical awareness of these seven potential serious problems for phildialogues, along with sufficient time, sufficient energy, and several intellectual, emotional, and practical virtues, including tolerance, patience, a robust sense of humor, and sheer rational resilience, can carry radical political philosophers of mind and their dialogical communities around these problems, past them, over them, and beyond them, towards individual and collective radical enlightenment. Therefore, again, and even in the face of such potential serious problems, I think that we not only can but also should be conducting phildialogues.


      1. As coauthors, Michelle and I of course agree about what we published in the book; but as anyone who has done coauthored work knows, there’s always a certain amount of compromise, negotiation, and fusion or synthesis in the finished product. So it’s possible that our views might differ slightly in our replies to these comments. In order to accommodate that possibility, I’ll use the following protocol: (i) I’ll use the first-person plural form whenever I can be pretty confident that we’ll agree, (ii) I’ll use the first-person singular form whenever I think it’s likely that our views will differ somewhat, and (iii) I’ll use the neologism “my/our” when I’m not sure whether our views will be essentially the same or somewhat different.

      2. M. Maiese, “Online Education as a ‘Mental Institution,’” Philosophical Psychology, October 13, 2020, available online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09515089.2020.1828573.

      3. See M. Fisher, “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” Open Democracy UK, November 24, 2013, available online at https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/mark-fisher/exiting-vampire-castle.

      4. B. Y. Fong, “Log Off,” Jacobin, November 29, 2018, available online at https://jacobinmag.com/2018/11/log-off-facebook-twitter-social-media-addiction.

      5. See, e.g., M. D. Griffiths, “Addicted to Social Media?,” Psychology Today, May 7, 2018, available online at https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-excess/201805/addicted-social-media; C. T. Nguyen, “Escape the Echo Chamber: Why It’s as Hard to Escape an Echo Chamber as It Is to Flee a Cult,” Aeon, April 9, 2018, available online at https://aeon.co/essays/why-its-as-hard-to-escape-an-echo-chamber-as-it-is-to-flee-a-cult; and M. Schulson, “User Behavior: If the Internet Is Additive, Why Don’t We Regulate It?,” Aeon, November 24, 2015, available online at https://aeon.co/essays/if-the-internet-is-addictive-why-don-t-we-regulate-it.

      6. See, e.g., R. Hanna, “Radical Enlightenment: Existential Kantian Cosmopolitan Anarchism, with a Concluding Quasi-Federalist Postscript,” in D. Heidemann and K. Stoppenbrink, eds., Join, or Die: Philosophical Foundations of Federalism (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016), 63–90; R. Hanna, Kant, Agnosticism, and Anarchism: A Theological-Political Treatise (Rational Human Condition 4) (New York: Nova Science, 2018); R. Hanna and O. Paans, “On the Permissible Use of Force in a Kantian Dignitarian Moral and Political Setting, or, Seven Kantian Samurai,Journal of Philosophical Investigations 13 (2019): 75–93, available online at https://philosophy.tabrizu.ac.ir/article_9431.html; and R. Hanna, “On Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: Optimism for Realists, or, Neither Hobbes Nor Rousseau” (unpublished manuscript, September 2020 version), available online at https://www.academia.edu/43631182/On_Rutger_Bregmans_Humankind_Minor_revisions_22_September_2020_.

      7. Made possible, of course, by Statism and chattel slavery; but that’s another story for another day.

      8. See, e.g., R. Hanna and O. Paans, “This Is the Way the World Ends: A Philosophy of Civilization since 1900, and a Philosophy of the Future,” Cosmos and History 16, 2 (2020): 1–53, available online at http://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/viewFile/865/1510; and R. Hanna, The End of Mechanism:A Neo-Organicist Novum Organum (2020 version), esp. the introduction and sections 22–23, available online at https://www.academia.edu/44630033/THE_END_OF_MECHANISM_A_Neo_Organicist_Novum_Organum_With_contributions_by_Michael_Cifone_Emre_Kazim_Andreas_Keller_and_Otto_Paans_2020_.

      9. P. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. M. Ramos (New York: Continuum, 2007).

      10. See also M. Klein, “How to Harvest Collective Wisdom for Complex Problems: An Introduction to the MIT Deliberatorium,” MIT Center for Collective Intelligence—Publications (CCI Working Paper 2012-004), available online at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316659681_How_to_Harvest_Collective_Wisdom_for_Complex_Problems_An_Introduction_to_the_MIT_Deliberatorium.

      11. R. Hanna, Morality and the Human Condition: A Short Book for Philosophically-Minded People (2020 version), available online at https://www.academia.edu/41451992/Morality_and_the_Human_Condition_A_Short_Course_For_Philosophically-Minded_People_2020_version_.

      12. See, e.g., B. Nyhan and J. Reifler, “When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions,” Journal of Political Behavior 32 (2010): 303–30, available online at https://www.unc.edu/~fbaum/teaching/articles/PolBehavior-2010-Nyhan.pdf; and S. Lewandowsky et al., “Misinformation and Its Correction: Continued Influence and Successful Debiasing,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 13 (2012): 106–31, available online at https://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/780/docs/12_pspi_lewandowsky_et_al_misinformation.pdf.

      13. Lewandowsky et al., “Misinformation and Its Correction,” 122.

      14. R. W. Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in S. E. Whicher, ed., Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 147–68, at 153.

      15. See, e.g., S. Haack, Deviant Logic, Fuzzy Logic: Beyond the Formalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), esp. xiv–xv; and G. Priest, An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), esp. 151 and 159.

      16. R. Hanna, Rationality and Logic (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).

      17. E. Mandery, Politico magazine, October 13, 2019, available online at https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/10/13/america-cultural-divide-red-state-blue-state-228111.

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