Cultivating Embodied Virtues: Radical Enactivism meets East Asian Philosophy

Daniel D. Hutto, Jesús Ilundáin-Agurruza and Raúl Sánchez-García

Daniel D. Hutto School of Humanities and Social Inquiry Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts

University of Wollongong NSW 2522, Australia Tel: +61 2 4221 3987 Fax: +61 2 4221 5341

Email: ddhutto@uow.edu.au

Jesús Ilundáin-Agurruza Department of Philosophy

Linfield College 900 SE Baker Street, Unit 580

McMinnville, Oregon, USA 97128-6894 Tel. 503.883.2367

jilunda@linfield.edu

Raúl Sánchez-García Sports Science

Universidad Europea de Madrid 28670 Villaviciosa de Odón, Madrid, Spain

Email: raul.sanchez@uem.es Abstract: People face many situations in which their emotions are deeply intertwined with their ability to act intelligently in richly context sensitive ways. Western and Eastern philosophical traditions have long considered the development of emotional responsiveness in performance to be a matter of cultivating embodied virtues. Yet knowing how to cultivate embodied virtues still raises serious challenges. A theoretical challenge: how is intelligent emotional responsiveness even possible? A practical challenge: How can such responsiveness be best trained? This paper considers how these challenges might be met by building on recent developments in enactive philosophy of mind and cognitive science. An enactive take on the emotions, enhanced by the wisdom of East Asian traditions of thought, promises to deepen our understanding of the nature of embodied virtues, to better understand their broader significance and provide fresh insights into how to cultivate them in practice.

 

Cultivating Embodied Virtues:

Radical Enactivism meets East Asian Philosophy

Daniel D. Hutto, Jesús Ilundáin-Agurruza and Raúl Sánchez-García

excellences we get by first exercising them … for the things we have to learn before we do, we learn by doing.

- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1103a, 31, 32

1. Introduction: Embedding Emotions in Training and Performance Emotions pervade intelligent activity. Our capacity to seize opportunities is inherently emotional, especially when the actions in question do not rest on conscious inference or decision but are spontaneously drawn from us in response to situations.

Venerable traditions in philosophy equate the development of emotional responsiveness in performance with the cultivation of embodied virtues. For Aristotle, any virtue (arête) or excellent performance requires habituating emotions so as to have them “at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right aim, and in the right way” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1106b 21-24). Becoming virtuous, in the Aristotelian sense, necessitates attuning one’s emotions properly to situations; a process inseparably bound up with situated embodied practice until it becomes second nature.

Successful performance in affectively charged situations depends on responding in emotionally appropriate ways. Those working in the police, armed forces, emergency services, performing arts and sports regularly find themselves in such circumstances. In the extreme, the stakes are life or death and split-second responses are required. Consider police work. The police are sometimes confronted with life-threatening challenges in which they are in fear of their lives. In response to a rise in fatal police shootings it has been asked whether officers are adequately trained to deal with their emotions in such situations. What form should such training take given that “instinct takes over for police in situations like this [sic] … [T]here is no time to think through training scenarios; your reactions must be second nature” (Goldsworthy 2014)?

Prima facie, it would seem that the only way to develop this second nature is to embed emotional attunement directly within the training of specific skills. This claim has empirical backing. Consider recent findings about marksmanship training (Nieuwenhuys and Oudejans 2011). Oudejans (2008) conducted a study involving 27 Dutch police officers in which half practiced by shooting at cardboard targets and half by shooting directly at one another, using soap cartridges. Officers who practised shooting at cardboard targets did not maintain the same levels of accuracy when shooting at live targets, as compared with those who practised with live targets. The latter were equally good “when aiming at the live individuals as they were when aiming at the stationary cut-outs” (Beilock 2011, p. 43). When tested four months after training, only those in the live target group retained their levels of accuracy in both conditions. These data are consistent with evidence that USA police officers have hit percentages above 90% when

 

dealing with paper targets but perform significantly worse, with hit percentages dropping below 50%, when they are in the line of duty (Morrison and Vila 1998).

Although embodied virtues need to be cultivated in many contexts, competitive sport is an ideal domain for exploring the links between skill training, emotional responsiveness and performance. Athletes are deeply invested in outcomes; success and failure can be easily determined; and the emotions involved can be measured in naturalistic settings. What is surprising is that often, at least in the West, the training of emotions and skills in sports and other domains are often kept separate, with the emotion training occurring prior to or after skill training as add-on extras (McCarthy et al. 2013): in such cases emotions are sidelined, if not wholly benched, while learning technical skills. Against this trend, some sport psychologists have begun to develop methods for incorporating emotions directly into skill training – putting learners into scenarios that closely resemble affectively charged performance environments, giving them the opportunity to attune emotionally to key features of such situations (Headrick et al. 2014).

The Affective Learning Design (ALD) approach to training conceives of learners as dynamical systems that refine their responses to possibilities for action afforded by their environments (Davids et al. 2008, Renshaw et al. 2010, Pinder et al. 2011). For example, ALD assumes that a batter in cricket needs to attune emotionally to the intentional attitudes of a bowler and that replacing bowlers with ball projection machines during training is a barrier to successfully developing the emotional aspects of performance. Importantly, ALD training shapes development, not through explicit instruction, but by selectively modifying specific bodily, environmental and task constraints – for example, changing the size of the playing field, adjusting distances between players, fatiguing players (Hutto and Sánchez-García 2015).

To fully understand how embodied virtues can be cultivated requires understanding how emotions can relate to and integrate with other forms of cognition. Put otherwise, it is necessary to understand how it is possible for emotions to feature in smooth performances that occur in fast-paced contexts and how they can be, for want of a better word, educated. This paper takes the first steps towards answering these questions, laying the ground for further work that can enrich our understanding of embodied virtues and how we come by them.

Section 1 explicates the radically enactive take on embodied expertise and how it is best acquired. Developing a skill is a matter of honing capacities to respond in richly context sensitive ways – ways that do not reduce to coping mindlessly or automatically. Yet, at the same time, the intelligence exhibited in such cases is not best conceived of as based in the manipulation and processing of contentful representations, as many today hold. Deliberation, articulation, and representation are still possible but are assumed not to lie at the roots of training skills or skilful performances. Section 2 provides a brief sketch of a radically enactive vision of the emotions – one that overcomes the limitations of standard cognitivist and somatic theories, while making room for basic emotions that are inherently enactive, dynamic and interactive. This provides a necessary platform for understanding the sort of intentionality, intelligence and emergence of emotional responsiveness exhibited when acquiring and exercising embodied virtues. Finally, Section 3 identifies some potentially strong links between the radically enactive understanding of the tight weave between skill and emotion in training and performance and the wisdom of certain ancient East Asian traditions of thought. Both strongly agree that performers need not rely on mental rules and representations, or any kind of contentful calculations but that emotionally attuned expert performers are instead mindful and spontaneous agents (Ilundáin-Agurruza 2015a,

 

b). By investigating these links it is possible to see how theory and practice can be successfully bridged in this domain, setting the stage for future research and collaboration. 2. Radically Enactive Expertise A Radically Enactive, Embodied account of Cognition, REC for short, argues against the idea that cognition is based in the processing of informational contents and the manipulations of mental representations (see Hutto and Myin 2013). In this, REC breaks faith with what has been a longstanding staple in the Western sciences of the mind. REC is revolutionary in this respect in that, as Barandiaran and DiPaolo (2014) remind us, “For over 60 years the most basic theoretical concept in psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science has been the processing of information and the associated notion of “mental representation’” (p. 1).

Rejecting information-processing and representational approaches, REC characterizes the most fundamental forms of cognition as a kind of organismic activity that occurs in the form of sensitive interactions stretching across the brain, body and environment (see also Thompson 2007, Chemero 2009). Originally inspired by scientific developments in robotics (e.g. Brooks 1991), dynamical systems theory (e.g. Beer 1998), and ecological psychology (Gibson 1979/1986), fans of REC hold that cognition is literally constituted by embodied activity. Moving away from the idea that the work of minds is always that of representing and computing, REC approaches fundamentally challenge traditional accounts of cognition that “take representation as their central notion” (Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991, p. 172).

In developing this view, Hutto and Myin (2013) offer an alternative account of the way we master our basic manual skills as children, one which provides a useful template for understanding how embodied expertise might be engendered through practice without the need for any explicit instruction.

Nor, with rare exceptions, is it credible that humans learn how to use their hands … by means of explicit, contentfully mediated instruction, the rules for which only later becoming submerged and tacit. It is not as if the children are taught by their caregivers through explicit description how to grasp or reach for items. A far more plausible hypothesis is that we become handy through a prolonged history of interactive encounters-through practice and habit. An individual’s manual know-how and skills are best explained entirely by appealing to a history of previous engagements and not by the acquisition of some set of internally stored mental rules and representations. This looks, essentially, to be as clear a case as any of a process of “laying down a path in walking, or, in this case, ‘handling’” (Hutto and Myin 2013, pp. 46-47, see also Araújo and Davids 2011).

This basic insight can be extended to skills that are actively trained to provide a deeper

understanding of the kind of cognitive capacities that novices may be employing when mastering skills without relying heavily on explicit instruction. Supporting this general line of thought, Davids, Button and Bennett (2008) claim that even “most complex movement routines involve some elements of fundamental movement patterns that are explored only in infancy, including grasping, gripping, hitting, intercepting, stepping, postural control, balance and locomotion” (p. 87). Explaining how different capacities for basic or fundamental movement patterns become integrated into more complex repertories is at the core of a REC-based explanation of how some embodied skills are acquired without the aid and internalization of explicit instructions.

 

In developing a more nuanced account of embodied expertise REC finds its natural partner in ecological-based approaches to the study of skill acquisition, those which build on Gibson’s ecological psychology. Gibson’s (1979/1986) critique of the information-processing computational paradigm (that understands perceiving as the receipt and further manipulation of informational contents), takes to heart embracing an alternative account of perceiving, according to which it is a matter of responding directly to the information in the optic flow and invariants related to the animal. For Gibson there is a tight functional fit between animal and environment without the need to posit mental representations in further cognitive process (what Chemero 2009 calls ‘mental gymnastics’) in order to engage effectively with features of the environment.

On this model, individuals are always interacting with their environments in dynamic, informationally sensitive ways. Accordingly, perception and action are not conceived of as separate cognitive faculties but are rather deeply intertwined. Skilled expertise of a radically embodied, enactive sort emerges through processes of continuous interaction between individuals with certain abilities and their surrounding environments.

The great advantage of the ecological paradigm over classical cognitivism is that it shifts the primary unit of analysis from that of the inner workings of the isolated individual to the indissoluble pair of individual-environment in interaction. This makes for a more realistic “experimental design” (Brunswik, 1956) – one that enables investigation of skilled activities and games (Araujo, Davids, and Passos, 2007). The basic Gibsonian approach has been significantly enhanced in recent years by adding the resources of dynamical systems theory (for a developed statement of this view see Chemero, 2009). This augmentation opened the way for investigating complex self-organizing dynamics of subject-environment systems in sport and physical activities – a program which currently trades under the name of ecological dynamics.

REC fits perfectly with dynamical systems methodology. For example, Dynamical systems theory conceives of sporting events in terms of a number of variables that change pattern in a continuous, diachronic and interdependent way according to unfolding laws that can be expressed in mathematical equations. The laws of the theory try to convey the dynamics of the non-linear couplings that emerge between subject and environment in a formal and principled way (García-González et al, 2011, p. 652). Thus, the basic unit of study for ecological dynamics is the nonlinearly coupled animal-environment system. Embodied skills are acquired and emerge as a consequence of a history of interactions between learners and the environment (Chow, Davids, Hristovski, Araújo and Passos, 2011; Davids, Button and Bennett, 2008). REC processes are essentially interactional and dynamic. Fundamental forms of cognition – attention, perception, making on-the-fly adjustments – are processes that emerge from and within these dynamic interactions (Araújo et al., 2009). Importantly, such dynamic interactions are affected by different constraints (Newell, 1986). This idea has been pivotal in the development of the constraints-led perspective on learning based on a non-linear pedagogy.

Non-linear pedagogies, based on a constraints-led perspective depart fundamentally from this type of approach (Davids, Button and Bennett, 2008; Renshaw, Chow, Davids and Hammond, 2010; Davids, Araújo, Hristovski, Passos and Chow, 2012; Button, Lee, Mazumder, Tan and Chow, 2012; Button et al., 2013). From this perspective learners are regarded as dynamical systems with self-organization properties. The aim of training is to attain new functional coordination patterns when interacting with the surrounding environment. As Davids et al. emphasise “from a constraints-led perspective, we can characterize skill acquisition as a learner (a dynamical movement system) searching for stable and functional states of coordination or attractors during a goal oriented activity” (2008, p. 82).

 

On this view allowing for variability and openness in the training of skills is to be encouraged. This runs contrary to the idea that skills are best learnt by modeling the training steps on already well-established if not ideal technical solutions to the tasks at hand. This idea pervades traditional linear pedagogies that see variability as noise or error. From a non-linear perspective what learners need is enough flexibility to adapt to rich and diverse performance contexts.

Solutions for dealing with novel tasks can be promoted through the manipulation of suitable constraints. In a study of the emergent behavior on boxing research, Hristovski, Davids, Passos and Araújo (2012) discovered that a novel action (back-fist punch) emerged when exploratory behavior was boosted by altering certain task constraints, for instance by moving the punch-bag laterally. Creative performer-environment systems afford new possibilities for action. The learner’s ability to adapt to novel problems depends on their capacity to bring their previously acquired repertoires, acquired in previous exploratory behavior, to the new context. As Davids et al (2008) observe, “positive transfer occurs when a functional coordination pattern (attractor) that already exists in the landscape is functionally adapted for another task, rather like a multipurpose tool” (p. 86). Thus a non-linear pedagogy encourages change and adaptation in learners instead of trying to structure the training by appeal to a fixed, correct solution or model.

Fostering innovative, creative ways of solving problems is a main future of what Bernstein (1967) calls ‘dexterity’. Dexterity is achieved by solving a problem again and again with relevant variation (‘practice is repetition without repetition’). In this fashion, stability and adaptability, the landmarks of true expertise, are achieved. That is why from a non-linear pedagogy, the encouragement of change and adaptation during learning is key; what must be avoided is training for an overly narrow, idealized solution.

Consider the much-discussed question in the skill acquisition literature: where best to direct learners’ attention? Where should learners be oriented during training and performance? What is the right focus for their attention – features of the surrounding area, attendant sensations, effects or outcomes? Basically, this debate divides the possibilities into two main types, internal foci of attention (e.g., one’s own movements and actions) and external foci of attention (e.g., the tools and effects of one’s actions). The main conclusion reached so far is that providing instructions and feedback that direct learners towards external as opposed to internal foci is more beneficial for learning.

From the vantage of ecological dynamics, there is reason to suspect that the internal-external dichotomy is too simple in any case. It is better to think more neutrally in terms of different attentional anchors – these are pivots related to various other points in a wider dynamical system. In an interview on skateboarding, Rodney Mullen (2002), known for his technical innovation in the sport, provides a useful example of a dynamical attentional anchor:

So you have these motions that you know in your head … I know what a flip feels like. But what actually will make the trick for you is … finally you pack all the stuff for granted [sic] and forget about it and you are focusing only on … or I am at least … you are focusing on only one aspect of where my eye is and my back shoulder is at … at the time I see the edge of the table and then everything else is taken for granted and runs auto pilot. But as long as I can control that one and get a good nose with it from the start, I’ve got it, and that’s how it works for me. Stack, stack, stack, stack, stack, bracket, put like a table cloth over and focus on this last little bit and that’s what does it.

 

In this case the attentional anchor of his focus is a feature of where the eye and back shoulder connect when he sees the edge of the table. Mullen is dynamically relating to internal and external points of attention at the same time – and a specific moment in time. Apparently, he is paying attention to key relational points in the coupling of his individual-environment system. This example makes no sense if we insist on the classical, static and exclusive distinction between external and internal foci of attention. Performers use attentional anchors to reduce their degrees of perceptual freedom – to help them ‘zero in’ on what is important in performance, wherever that may be (Savelsbergh, Kamp, Oudejans and Scott, 2004). Reducing the degrees of freedom in appropriate ways is the outcome of a successful process of skill acquisition. Thus the kinds of attentional anchors one can focus on will depend heavily on one’s level of expertise. The attentional anchors Mullen focuses on when skateboarding would not be appropriate for a beginner in the sport – for someone who has yet to master the dynamics of easier situations.

What are the main assumptions of the constraints-led model used in non-linear pedagogies? Primarily that the relevant dynamics, when performing in contexts or when learning a new skill, are constrained by key features of the performer–environment system. Following Newell’s (1986) conceptualization of such constraints, we can differentiate organismic, environmental and task constraints.

Organismic constraints refer to those properties of the individual such as weight, height, and body shape as well as cognitive and emotional attributes. One of the principal challenges for organisms is to delimit the tenable patterns of movement from the full range of possibilities for movement. Environmental constraints are external to the individual and can be understood in terms of the affordances and ambient information to be responded to in the environment. Task constraints include the goals of an activity, the norms and rules that govern it, and the tools available and used for performing it.

From a constraints-led perspective, teachers and trainers adopt a strategy of a relatively ‘hands-off’ discovery-based learning. Still, training is structured in certain ways: trainers provide some constraints to encourage learners’ exploratory behaviors so they can find their own individual solutions to the task at hand. Such constraints can be introduced by: changing rules or conditions of the activity or task; changing – e.g. restricting – the space; modifying the equipment; increasing gradually the complexity of the task or simplifying it (Davids et al. 2008, pp. 161-67). The main purpose of these adjustments to the various constraints is to provide enough variability for individual learners to find their own solutions in different situations. The point is that these trainers should not be attempting to get learners to imitate the exact, correct technique but provide support and guidance that appropriately aids and fosters the exploratory activities of the learners (Davids et al. 2008, p. 144). The same applies to verbal instructions: it is no use giving precise instructions and detailing all of the steps composing an idealized technique. Verbal communication should be used to direct the learner’s attentional focus and to convey looser and more general ideas about appropriate actions and movement patterns so as to facilitate self-organized coupling processes (Davids et al. 2008, pp. 178-180).

Relating a constraints-led approach to training to a REC approach, the types of pedagogical and training strategies described above can be understood as employing different kinds of scaffolding. We can distinguish between (a) scaffolding that is not representationally mediated (for example the direct adjustment of environmental conditions or certain task constraints) and (b) scaffolding that involves contentful representations. The former sort of scaffolding aims to promote skillful responding by encouraging the sort of exploratory behavior that boosts the flexible mastery of skills. Learners’ skillful repertoires are extended as they find new ways of

 

coupling with the environment through enactive, embodied engagements that involve no representations.

Some forms of scaffolding mentioned above do make use of contentful representations. Yet, as already noted, from a non-linear pedagogical perspective, the use of these representations does not take the form of conveying a set of rules derived from idealized models for performing a skill. Rather, representations should be used to direct “the learner’s attentional focus to facilitate self-organized processes” (Davids, Button & Bennet 2008, p. 178). Importantly, even when training techniques make use of representations, the scaffolding strategies they employ have the express aim of enabling learners to improve their non-representational, embodied coupling with the environment.

All of these cases show that certain forms of scaffolded training, which direct and guide it by means of contentful representations, can help the self-organization of the learner, restricting his or her dynamics and helping to decrease the degrees of freedom by providing guidance through the use of metaphor and direction about appropriate attentional anchors and attentional strategies. Nonetheless, we should not lose sight of the fact that the use of representations in such training does not aim at providing instructions on idealized techniques. Individual self-exploratory solutions to skill mastery should be fostered, not hindered.

It might be worried REC somehow fails to make proper room for the idea of genuinely embodied intelligence. In eschewing mental contents and representations, does REC render embodied expertise mindless? It may be thought that REC goes wrong in endorsing some familiar Dreyfusian claims about embodied expertise (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1980, 1986; Dreyfus 2002, 2012). According to the Dreyfus model expertise requires responding in a way that is automatic, implicit, unconscious – embodied responses that involve no mindfulness. That, anyway, is one way that Dreyfus’s official line is often read. Yet understanding the nature of expert minds in this way has been criticized for systematically neglecting and obscuring the fact that skilled coping is actually a form of “highly disciplined mental activity” (Sutton et al. 2011, p. 78). Absorbed coping that is the mark of expertise looks to be a far cry from mere ‘automatic’ responding to situations (Sutton et al. 2011, p. 95).

Thus Sutton et al. (2011) regard the Dreyfus characterization of skillful embodied coping as ‘mindless’ as an unwarranted “over-reaction to intellectualism” (p. 79). These authors hold, as do RECers, that the lure of classical rules-and-representation cognitivism, which they brand ‘ultra-cognitivism’, must be resisted (p. 87). But, at the same time, they warn against swinging too far the other way in making expertise too unintellectual. They regard this as another equally attractive but wrongheaded and “unnecessarily anti-psychological tendency” (ibid, p. 79). To be sure, we must avoid buying into a crude mind/body dichotomy that merely reverses the standard values so that expert coping is thought of as embodied but essentially mindless in anything like a crude mechanical sense (ibid, p. 90). The lesson is that in avoiding one familiar brand of intellectualism one must be careful not to fall into the error of mischaracterizing “what mindedness must involve … lumbering it with heavy duty computational and individualist baggage which a more dynamical, fleet-footed, improvisatory, collaborative conception of the psychological can jettison” (ibid, p. 79).

In contrast to the standard cognitivist picture of cognition, it is possible to accept that “the kind of mental operations in question are not reflective or considered deliberations, not intellectual instructions sent to the body, and yet they are in the realm of the psychological, both complex and mindful” (Sutton et al. 2011, p. 78). RECers wholeheartedly agree that this is an important corrective. Undoubtedly what must be resisted are “anti-psychological approaches in

 

which awareness, attention, and memory are entirely evacuated from the skillful body” (ibid, p. 79). Sutton et al (2011) are surely correct that between the two extreme poles of explicit, contentful deliberate thought and merely automatic, fairly mindless bodily reflexes lies a “rich unexplored space” (p. 81).

Recognizing that embodied, enactive accounts of cognition provide the required framework for ‘a live research programme’ for exploring this fertile terrain, Sutton et al (2011) maintain that “central forms of flexible and adaptive action which are clearly not the product of deliberation or explicit reflection can nonetheless be best understood as involving certain sorts of (dynamic, embodied) intelligence” (p. 79).

Illustrating this point, Sutton et al. (2011) provide a wonderfully revealing example of mindful expert coping in action:

An elite cricketer, for example, with less than half a second to execute an ambitious cover drive to a hard ball honing directly in at 140 km/h, draws not only on smoothly-practised strokeplay, but somehow also on experience of playing this fast bowler in these conditions, and on dynamically-updated awareness of the current state of the match and of the opposition’s deployments, to thread an elegant shot with extraordinary precision through a slim gap in the field. It’s fast enough to be a reflex, yet it is perfectly context-sensitive (p. 80).

Considering the details of this type of case, Sutton et al (2011) conclude that, “this kind of

context-sensitivity … requires some forms of mindedness … [because these are] open skills, where salient features of the environment are tracked and accommodated in an ongoing manner” (p. 80). Once again RECers agree, but they resist the now popular move of positing special kinds of contentful action-oriented representations in order to explain the spontaneous responsiveness that characterizes the sort dynamic minds we see at work in embodied training and performance (for detailed arguments see Hutto 2013a, under review). In unpacking the nature of embodied mindedness we must take care to keep two ideas quite separate: On the one hand the idea that (1) embodied coping is a form of mindful cognition and, on the other hand, the idea that (2) mindedness – even in fully embodied, enactive forms – must involve the manipulation of informational or representational contents of some kind. REC fully endorses (1) while steadfastly denying (2). The REC proposal about basic, non-representational cognition promotes the possibility that there can be genuinely intelligent yet contentless cognition while rejecting any attempt to equate such skilled coping with mindless, unconscious and merely automatic responding.

When thinking about the resources REC can bring to bear on this issue it is important to recall that, “Before the advent of cognitivism in the 1950s one of the most prominent concepts for the study of mind was that of Habit” (Barandiaran and DiPaolo 2014, p. 1). The development of skills and habit through extended training need not be seen as the instilling of mindless or inflexible routines. Indeed, those who constantly call on some version of the notion of mental representation to do the work of understanding what is distilled from a history of interactions should be cautious about so readily abandoning that ancient tradition of thinking of intelligence as rooted in habit of some sort. At the very least they ought to be aware that “the richness and polysemy of the notion of habit and its transformations since ancient Greece to the present day, all militate against the naïve idea of producing an off-the-shelf alternative theoretical primitive for psychology and neuroscience.” (Barandiaran and DiPaolo 2014, p.1)

 

A REC approach is especially well suited to help us understand the unique skills that sports and martial arts require and how they develop. The skill set of elite performers in sports and like practices is much richer than that of average performers; let alone novices or non-practitioners. This is so in terms of skill repertoire and refinement: the average club tennis player or skier, literally, have no sense of what it would be like and what it takes to serve or respond to a 140 mph volley or to ski down 60-degree slopes in back country mountain faces. In fact, it is in considering risk sports and traditional martial arts (koryū,古流, as opposed to kakutogi, 格闘技, sportified martial arts) that the suitability and superiority of REC comes to the fore.

The refined skills of high-performance sports are difficult to account for theoretically. Such expertise is explored from many perspectives in sport psychology and cognitive science. Commonly mental representations are invoked as the main theoretical tool for doing such exploration: At some level or another, expert performance is to be explained in terms of the manipulation of mental representations.1

A thorough critique of the mental representation construct is not feasible in the space of this article (but see Hutto and Myin 2013, Ilundáin-Agurruza 2014a). Even so, focusing on risk sports highlights a key issue that helps emphasize REC’s theoretical relevance in this domain. In all such sports—whitewater kayaking, backcountry skiing, free-diving, big wave surfing—the danger of serious injury or death is a constitutive element and not merely a possible incidence. This courting of risk, and the insights to be gained therein, is shared by the traditional martial arts of East Asia: the varied Japanese jutsu 術, warfare techniques (literally skills), the original Chinese martial arts, zhōngguó wǔshù, 中國武術, or the skills of the Korean Hwarang, 화랑 - 花郎 (in Korean hangul and Chinese hanja characters to avoid confusions). In their heyday, practitioners of these arts developed and cultivated their lethal techniques in the fields of battle and the arena of duels. With so much at stake, Western risk sports and these ancient martial arts require extremely fast and accurate adaptations to possibly deadly challenges in extreme conditions. This presents formidable challenges to classic versions of computational and representational accounts of mind and cognition. The processing speed and bandwidth that performing on the edge requires defies classical computational modeling (Eriksen 2010); it also preempts deliberative, declarative, and explicit processing and representation (Ilundáin-Agurruza 2014a). In sum, there is no time for explicit representational thinking typical of scaffolded minds and it is far from clear that any non-classical, sub-personal notion of a mental representation – such as, action-orientated representations, for example – have any non-redundant explanatory part to play in the more properly enactive, dynamic accounts of such embodied expertise (see Hutto 2013a, Under review).

In this context REC advances a view of basic minds without content in place of the idea that such minds are essentially representational and contentful: “it is not knowledge (embodied know-how) that gives perceptual experiences their intentionality and phenomenal character; rather; it is the concrete ways in which organisms actively engage with their environments” (Hutto and Myin 2013, 30). The late Francisco Varela, one of the first to espouse enactive and embodied views, helps emphasize and highlight the key idea that the “proper units of knowledge are primarily concrete, embodied, incorporated, lived; knowledge is about situatedness” (1994, p. 7, emphasis added). Importantly, without ignoring that cognition can be contentful, Hutto and Myin write that “creatures are capable of dealing with aspects of their environments, sometimes in quite remarkable and sophisticated ways (ways that count as properly mental and cognitive), even if the capacity for content-involving deliberation or planning never develops” (2013, p. 14). Risk sports and martial arts are precisely the sort of sophisticated activities that REC’s

 

contentless account of cognition best explains. This is not because planning or deliberation never takes place prior to performance, but because content-based planning does not explain the kind of intelligence at work while the performance is taking place.

It is surely the case that in do-or-die situations superb performers are not encumbered by re-presentations, rules, calculations, or any kind of explicit contentful ruminations. They ‘simply’ and concretely exercise their capacities to effect spontaneous action. On a REC vision of mind there is no problem with regard to processing speeds or such like since there is literally nothing to process. This also means that, for the well-trained, attendant concerns and fears relating to the self and performance —of losing, or harming oneself — also disappear. The performers’ past ingrained history of movements takes care of itself. Again, this does not mean that there is no room for control, deliberation or articulation. But, the transparent rather than opaque magic happens in the empty spaces that basic minds open up. 3. Getting Emotions in on the Act This last point highlights something important for anyone hoping to cultivate embodied virtues since it raises questions of how and where emotions can get in on the act with respect to performance and training. For the REC line creates a mystery for anyone attracted to the idea, promoted by some philosophers and psychologists, that emotions just are contentful cognitive attitudes of some kind or other: that emotions are nothing but evaluative judgements or appraisals (Armon-Jones 1986; Nussbaum, 2001; Solomon, 1976). For pure cognitivists being a contentful attitude of this kind is thought to exhaust the nature of emotions.

Of course, there is no universally agreed understanding of what ‘cognitive’ means in such theories but what typically unites the views just mentioned is, as Ratcliffe (2008) observes, that in “describing emotions as cognitive, [these] philosophers tend to mean at least that they are intentional states of some kind.” (p. 20).

Emphasizing this, pure cognitivism about the emotions is attractive because it satisfies “a deep intuition that emotions are meaningful. They … inform us about our relationship to the world, they embody our convictions, and they factor intelligibly into our decisions in life” (Prinz 2004, p. 16). Certainly, if emotions are nothing but cognitive attitudes of some kind then this would explain why they (or their essential components) have world-relating intentional properties. For it is generally supposed that states of mind can only have intentional properties if they possess representational content.

Pure cognitivism comes in different forms depending on which notion of cognitive attitude is in play. For example, the attitudes in question might be thought to be explicitly formed propositional attitudes, such as beliefs or judgements. If so, they have the potential to be revised through dialogue that engages reasoning processes. Accordingly only certain states of mind count as real emotions. Which kinds? Those states of mind that are bound up with contentful states of mind in normatively appropriate ways. So understood, having an emotion requires being in a state of mind that is connected in the right way to a host of other attitudes – beliefs, desires and the like: the propositional attitudes of folk psychology. The reason for insisting on this requirement is that these other contentful states are thought to play defining and individuating roles that determine (a) if an emotion is in play, and also (b) which emotion is in play. To give this idea a name, call it the ‘Folk Network View of Emotions’. Gaut (2003) explains how it informs cognitive-evaluative theory and standard views about the intentionality of emotional states of mind.

 

An emotion … has an intentional object: I am afraid of something. I pity someone. According to the dominant (and I would argue correct) cognitive-evaluative theory of the emotions, an emotion not only has an intentional object, but also essentially incorporates an evaluation of that object. So to be afraid of something essentially involves evaluating that thing as dangerous; to pity someone essentially involves construing her as suffering, [and so on] (Gaut 2003, p. 16, emphases added).

On this reading of cognitive-evaluative theory, having an emotion necessarily requires having a range of other propositional attitudes – most importantly beliefs and desires with the right kinds of content. This is why merely having certain feelings does not suffice for having an emotion. Consider a case in which you feel insulted by a perceived slight. That feeling only suffices for your being emotionally upset as long as you believe that you have been insulted. If that same feeling were to persist after you discover and come to believe I did not insult you it would make no sense. The feeling would not connect with the rest of your contentful attitudes in the right way: hence it would not count as an emotion at all.

The contentful attitudes in the folk network are taken to exist within the rational space of reasons, thus emotional states of mind must have appropriate kinds of contents – they must be contentful evaluations, construals or judgments – so they can stand in normatively constrained relations to other contentful attitudes.

That emotions must be normatively constrained by a constellation of other attitudes comes out most clearly and strongly when the kind of evaluations of which Gaut speaks are understood as involving contentful judgments. Thus “The feelings that we experience when we are ashamed and when we feel guilty, for instance, might well be identical, and what individuates them is the content of the respective evaluative thoughts” (Gaut 2003, p. 17, emphasis added). On the further assumption that such evaluations are judgment-based it is clear why merely having certain feelings (feelings of sexual arousal included) does not suffice for the having of emotions. According to the folk network view of emotions, it isn’t possible to individuate an emotion by “a unique feeling associated with it” (Gaut 2003, p. 17).

Thus, focusing on the necessary connection between having certain beliefs and experiencing shame, Prinz (2004) highlights some important implications of this version of pure cognitivism when it comes to thinking about how we might intervene on the emotions. But pure cognitivism goes much deeper than this. It not just the view that beliefs influence a state of shame but that having the right kinds of contentful attitudes is obligatory for experiencing shame at all. If you do not believe you did anything wrong, you will not feel ashamed. Shame can be caused by beliefs and cured by beliefs. “If you discover that your actions were beneficial rather than harmful, you can trade shame in for pride” (Prinz 2004, p. 83).

Pure cognitivism comes in other stripes too. For example, emotions might be belief-like states that are more basic than the sorts of explicit cognitive attitudes that can enter into our reasoning processes. It is easily conceivable that some cognitive attitudes might be immune to revision by rational means even though they possess representational content.

Is pure cognitivism about the emotions true? Is it credible? It is certainly plausible that one cannot have certain emotions without adopting the right kind of contentful cognitive attitudes, but is this true of all emotions?

There are excellent reasons to doubt the truth of ambitious versions of pure cognitivism as providing an adequate theory of the emotions. For one thing, pure cognitivist accounts of the

 

emotions seem woefully incomplete in that they underrate the importance of feelings. A recognized downside of purely cognitivist accounts of the emotions is that they don’t tell the whole story about emotions. It is easy enough to imagine all of the relevant cognitions taking place in disembodied, entirely “cold,” “detached” and, wholly, “unemotional” ways. To put it mildly purely cognitivist accounts appear to leave out something essential: they are notoriously bad at explaining the phenomenology of emotional responsiveness – the embodied experiences of anger, frustration, happiness and the like – as anything other than mere add-ons to cognition.

This observation is especially pertinent even if we consider quite ordinary cases. Familiarly, even when our emotions are stirred up by having certain beliefs or judgements, the associated feelings seem an essential part of what it is to have the emotion and can often outlast changes in the surrounding contentful beliefs and judgements. Thus my wife’s seething anger and feelings of outrage at what she takes to be some transgression of mine might not immediately subside, even upon her discovery that I am innocent of that of which I am accused. And even if, as a consequence of this discovery, she no longer directs her anger at me it might not follow that her anger entirely dissipates. In such circumstances, it seems that the having of particular feelings does suffice for being in an emotional state.

Considerations of this kind can make some or other somatic feeling theory of emotions appear attractive. According to the classic somatic theory, emotions just are feelings of bodily changes as they occur (James 1884). This basic Jamesian idea has been revamped and updated in the somatic perception theory advocated by Damasio (1994). Accordingly, James’ original account is revised to allow for emotions to occur even without the relevant bodily changes, just in case the relevant brain activity that monitors the bodily changes is present. Hence, “as if” feelings triggered by central processes in the brain suffice for having certain emotions. Such theories are problematic in that they “have little to say about the processes by which external stimuli are evaluated for ecological and social significance” (Hill 2009, p. 199).

Basically, in reducing emotions to bodily feelings or perceptual states exclusively targeting such, “somatic theories have trouble explaining what it is for an emotion to have an intentional object or target” (Hill 2009, p. 200). They lack appropriate reach. Such theories lean too far in the non-intellectualist direction. What is needed is an understanding of emotional intentionality: how there can be attitudes of ‘feeling towards’ in which the objects of emotions target “a particular thing or person (that pudding, this man), an event or an action (the earthquake, your hitting me) or a state of affairs (my being in an aeroplane)” (Goldie 2000, p. 17).

It seems that if we are to have an adequate account of what is essential to being an emotion, we must resist the false choice between pure cognitive theories and pure somatic, bodily feeling theories. Apparently, what is really needed is an account of “how emotions can be sophisticated cognitive states and, at the same time, have bodily feelings as a major component” (Ratcliffe 2008, p. 17). Prima facie, this looks difficult to achieve. Ratcliffe’s diagnosis is that we will only do so by overhauling some deeply entrenched constraining assumptions: “Central to this overhaul is the abandonment of the distinction between cognition and affect” (Ratcliffe 2008, p. 17). RECers concur that this is broadly right – and also that finding a way to adequately revise our assumptions is, if anything is, a job for a philosopher.

Where should we look? It is best to start by questioning the overly tidy account provided by pure cognitivism, for without warrant, it forecloses on an important possibility for understanding basic, contentless emotions. Importantly, despite the popularity of the folk network view of emotions in philosophy, it is a live question in the sciences whether some emotions exist before, below and quite independently of contentful attitudes. Basic emotions, according to Elkman’s

 

(1999) theory, each have a distinctive ‘affect program’ – they exhibit script-like patterns of physiological and behavioral responses.2 Griffiths (2013) explicates Elkman’s main idea on basic emotions, underscoring the fact that by its lights:

basic emotions are homologues— categories defined by shared evolutionary origins. The basic emotion of fear, for example, exists in many mammalian species and it is the same thing in each just as the femur or the hypothalamus is the same thing—it has a shared evolutionary origin in the common ancestor of those species (p. 2).3

Why take the idea of basic emotions, understood along Elkman’s lines, seriously? Griffiths (2013) hits the nail on the head: “the view that emotions are judgments creates a dilemma. Commonly accepted statements of the content of emotional judgments involve sophisticated social and normative concepts” (p. 2). This mundane fact is apparently at odds with another hard to deny fact: that many sentient beings – those apparently quite capable of emotion, including infants and animals, for example – lack the sorts of concepts that are allegedly needed for having certain standard types of emotions. Indeed, it seems such beings are quite capable of emotion even though, according to some accounts, they lack any concepts or even the capacity to form any contentful judgments at all. As Griffiths (2013) observes, none of this sits well:

with the plausible claim that adult human anger has something deeply in common with anger in frustrated infants, or the anger of a dominant monkey towards a subordinate. Either these agents possess the [relevant] concepts … or they are not angry in the true sense of the word. This problem is made worse by evidence that emotions in adult humans can be produced by low-level processes that seem equally implausible locales for such concepts (Griffiths 2013, p. 2).

We can either (a) deny that such beings – including ourselves in many cases – are capable of having emotions, strictly speaking or (b) accept that such beings – including us in many cases – are capable of real emotion even when the appropriate links to conceptually informed contentful attitudes are absent. Which way should we go? Here it is instructive to consider Goldie’s (2000) proposal about how to understand affect programs – namely, those basic episodes of emotional experience and response that are at once “complex, coordinated and automated” (Griffiths 1997, p. 105). Goldie stresses that such basic modes of response should not be confused with culturally informed, emotions proper (for him the latter can only be understood under the auspices of the folk network view of emotions).

Even so, Goldie (2000) admits that affect programs provide “a good characterization of some short-term episodes of emotional experience involved in the recognition-response tie, which could be a suitable object of study for evolutionary science” (Goldie 2000, p. 105). And, taking this a step further, he insists that despite the importance of distinguishing these ‘episodes of emotional experience’ from ‘emotions proper’, it must be admitted that the former necessarily involve what he calls ‘feeling towards’. Crucially, Goldie understands the latter as “an intentional element which is neither belief nor desire, and which is, in many respects more fundamental to emotional experience than either of these … To reflect the fact that this intentional element is both intentional and involves feelings, I will call it feeling towards” (Goldie 2000, p. 19). The capacity for ‘feeling towards’ something is thus a central feature even of what he classifies as basic episodes of emotional experience.

 

How exactly should we understand this rudimentary kind of intentionality – this feeling towards – that is exhibited by such basic forms of emotional response? Hutto (2012) makes the case that this is best achieved by abandoning representational theories of mind and adopting a Radically Enactivist framework. Doing so involves thinking of basic emotional responses as target-directed instead of as inherently content involving. Another feature of the radically enactive approach is that it requires conceiving of emotional attitudes as embodied attitudes of whole creatures – thus the intentionality of such attitudes is not merely a feature of some functionally specified and semantically individuated mental state internal to emotional beings. Radical Enactivism broadly agrees with DeLancey’s take on the intentionality of basic emotions as understood under the auspices of affect program (See Delancey 2001 pp. 89-98). Summarizing DeLancey’s view Griffiths (2013) tells us:

Basic emotions can be intentionally directed at a state of affairs, so that their content is a proposition. For example, I may be afraid that this dingo will bite me. But the very same emotion may be intentionally directed at what DeLancey calls a “concretum”, meaning an object as such, rather than as an element in a proposition. For example, I may be afraid of this dingo. This is where affect-program theory comes in. Because emotions are intrinsically action-directing, an emotion whose content is a concretum can nevertheless explain action. I flee the dingo because I am afraid of it. In order to flee I do not need a proposition about the dingo, such as that it is dangerous, or that it will bite me, combined with a desire to avoid danger, or not to be bitten. I just need to be afraid, and for the target of my fear to be the dingo. What we have in common with other animals, DeLancey argues, is the ability to have emotions that are intentionally directed at a concretum. What distinguishes us is the ability to have emotions intentionally directed at propositions. This ability introduces a far greater flexibility into our emotional responses (Griffiths 2013, pp. 2-3, emphases added).

Radical Enactivism provides a framework for making sense of these features of basic emotional attitudes, and basic minds more generally. It develops an account of Ur-intentionality that show how it is possible to adopt non-contentful attitudes that are directed at or towards particular worldly objects or states of affairs (Hutto and Myin 2013, Hutto 2013b, Hutto and Satne 2015). Yet, while basic emotional attitudes exhibit intentionality without content, according to Radical Enactivism, emotional attitudes can be also be content involving, at least for beings that have mastered certain discursive, narrative practices; namely, for those whose minds have been socio-culturally scaffolded in the right kind of ways. As such it possible for me to respond with fear to the situation of being confronted by a dingo even if I do not form any contentful attitudes at all. But it is also possible for me to respond with fear to that dingo in ways that are bound up with a range of contentful attitudes – specific thoughts, beliefs, hopes and so on. According to Radical Enactivism, the common denominator in both of these cases is the emotional attitude of fear that is non-contentfully directed at the particular objects and state of affairs (e.g., the dingo facing off against me), usually with attention focused on specific aspects of the object or situation (e.g., the dingo’s snarling, its barred teeth, its glaring eyes). The difference is that in cases of non-basic emotional responding one also forms contentful thoughts about the given states of affairs in addition to having world-directed embodied and emotional responses.

That said Radical Enactivism differs very slightly from Delancy’s official account, as Griffiths construes it. Radical Enactivism breaks faith with a familiar tenet, one taken as axiomatic and cherished by many in analytic philosophy of mind. It is widely assumed that

 

adopting a psychological attitude toward a state of affairs entails adopting an attitude towards a content or a proposition (see, e.g., Fodor and Pylyshyn 2015, pp. 6-7). Radical Enactivism denies this. Why so? Because it is sensitive to the fact that, “Propositions are very different from states of affairs. In particular, propositions are true or false, while states of affairs are not the sort of things that can be either true or false. On many standard ways of thinking about propositions and states of affairs, states of affairs are the things that make propositions true or false” (Bermúdez 2011, p. 404).

Essentially, according to Radical Enactivism, basic emotions possess the same sort of core structure as emotions proper – the sort of structure that cognitive-evaluative theory assigns to them. However, as just highlighted, the intentionality of basic emotions is neither based in nor entails having propositional attitudes. Consequently, the evaluative aspect of basic emotions – on this view – should not be understood as rooted in contentful and conceptually grounded judgments. Rather the so-called ‘evaluations’ of basic emotions are best understood as enactive, embodied responses rooted in our biological history but educated through training and culture. When fearful a creature typically responds to and treats some X as if it were dangerous – e.g. by approaching with caution, avoiding it where possible, and so on. Of course, through training, this natural reaction can be modified. What explains this? The fact that we and many other creatures are, thanks to our evolutionary histories, naturally set up to be set off by certain types of things and situations as opposed to others. Since our embodied evaluations are not contentful judgments of any kind, rational or otherwise, these basic emotional modes of response are not to be understood as always already tied up with some kind of norm-bound content or linked, in the first instance, to a constellation of other propositional attitudes that exist in the space of reasons. Yet such embodied, emotional responding still counts – for all that – as a bona fide kind of basic, emoting.

REC’s two-tiered framework of basic and scaffolded minds permits recognition that (i) our most fundamental, non-contentful, enactive emotional attitudes as well as (ii) emotions that are bound up with other contentful attitudes count as genuine emotions. This gives us the space to properly acknowledge what we share – emotionally speaking – with other animals – namely, a tendency toward script-like responding to certain worldly triggers. But this is a basic, embodied way of responding that can be trained and developed through participation in purely embodied practices. Happily, REC also acknowledges that some emotional beings can also have emotions that are bound up with a host of contentful attitudes – it denies, however, that these are basic. On this analysis, we are not faced with an unpalatable either/or choice when it comes to thinking about emotions. 4. East Asian Philosophy, Embodiment and REC There are rich and mutually reinforcing affinities between REC and traditional practices and schools of thought from East Asia (China, Japan, Korea). Here we find a thick understanding of embodiment and robust bodily practices, both central to successful virtuous and cognitive worldly engagements. Looking to the traditions of thought of East Asia helps explore such spaces and further clarify the link between REC and high-performance activities. Asian views of ethical action present a unique and largely untapped resource for models of embodied virtues and approaches to cognition that readily fit with the vision of basic cognition and emotion promoted by Radical Enactivism. In contrast to either rational or intuitionist approaches to ethical choice and cultivation associated with pure cognitivism, East Asian philosophy offers rich and deep

 

traditions where performance, self-realization, and emotional attunement and refinement are genuinely embodied and enactive. Therein we find: 1) a sophisticated phenomenology of expert performance in extreme situations—insights were obtained from life-threatening situations—where emotional and performative unflappability are paramount, and 2) the techniques to develop requisite skills for 1. Put otherwise, they afford insight regarding theory and praxis. In fact, both are but two sides of the same coin, and inseparable as soteriological paths (ways to salvation through self-refinement).

Theoretically, these Asian traditions deem the cultivation of virtue to be a thoroughly embodied process in which self-realization, performance, and emotional attunement intertwine. All three major East Asian schools of thought—Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism—partake of this and have left indelible marks on religious and martial practices. Confucianism, which to this day has the most overt influence on East Asian everyday life, advances a virtue theory of ethics that is not based on rational disquisition but rather on emotional attunement and embodiment (Seok 2013). Mengzi’s example of how we are immediately predisposed to be distressed by and moved to help a small child that falls in a well illustrates this. Contexts in which we act swiftly and emotionally in control do not necessarily or mostly, if we adhere to Varela (1994), go through rational thinking but rather emotional attunement to the situation. Successful action bypasses explicit articulation, contentful thinking and evaluation; oftentimes taking the time to calculate either algorithmically or heuristically already means failure. REC’s lack of content, or ‘performative emptiness’ allows explaining how such immediate responsiveness works cognitively. From an enactive stance, of interest is the emphasis these venerable traditions place on lived, embodied experience whose goal is skill refinement and virtuous growth through performative practices. Japanese dō 道, practices of self-cultivation such as kuydō 弓道 (way of the bow), offer a diaphanous example because of textual evidence and uninterrupted direct transmission.

Dō are above all lifelong paths to self-realization through performative practice. In tune with the Asian cultural paradigm, they seek emotional attunement through performance, and aim to achieve an integrated bodymind (Ilundáin-Agurruza 2014b). Crucially for a REC stance and the cultivation of virtue, these techniques nurture and train the emotional dimension of praxis. In other words, through disciplined engagement they are designed to build finely attuned emotional responsiveness that permeates successful and superior execution. While we find the most overt, continuous, and refined expression in Japan, its roots can be found earlier in other East Asian cultures, specifically those of China and Korea. Rather than delving further into this theoretically, it is best now to adopt a more concrete approach that shows how practice and theory actually mix. 4.1. Integrated Theory/Practice and Body/Mind - Swordsmanship (剣術, kenjutsu). The overt practical aim in Asian soteriological practices is excellent performance not for its sake alone but because it is the mark of a disciplined, emotionally harmonious, and superior, viz. virtuous, character. Subtending this, the further means and end is achieving an integrated bodymind 心 (Jap., shin; Chin., xin). This integrated bodymind, if achieved, consummately blends our socio and psychophysical capacities and leads to excellence in performance and of character. Masters who perform flawlessly do so in the state known in Japanese as mushin—no mind, 無心 (Chin., wuxin). Mindful awareness is perhaps a more fitting, or less misleading, translation (Ilundáin-Agurruza 2014b). This is the phenomenon that correlates most directly with REC. In contrast to usual explanations of superior performance as mindless and automatic, the

 

kind of performance that denotes mushin is achieved through unbroken concentration, spontaneity, emotional temperance, and fluid action in synchrony with the situation.4 Because a swordsmanship’s insights were honed on the lethal edge of a blade, it is the most suitable practice to explain how this works in other martial art and risk sports. Seventeenth century legendary Samurai Yagyū Munenori wrote in his sophisticated and complex Heihō Kadensho (兵法家伝書) that through proper technical and emotional training eventually “there will be actions in your arms, legs, and body but none in your mind” (1993). Thus we act unperturbed and unfettered, responding directly and effectively to changing circumstances. In his Fudōchi Shinmyōroku (不動智神妙録) coetaneous Buddhist Monk Takuan Soho explained to Munenori that:

If we put this in terms of your martial art [swordsmanship], the mind is not detained by the hand that brandishes the sword. Completely oblivious to the hand that wields the sword, one strikes and cuts his opponent down. He does not put his mind in his adversary. The opponent is Emptiness. I am Emptiness. The hand that holds the sword, the sword itself, is Emptiness. Understand this, but do not let your mind be taken by emptiness (1986, p. 37, my emphasis).

This emptiness is contentless cognition by any other name. When superb performers act in dire situations effectively and with aplomb, they become empty at all levels. There is nothing left but action in their legs and arms; they become selfless, with no concern for their self or thoughts of victory, life or death. It is not a matter of merely not articulating such thoughts propositionally. It goes much deeper than that cognitively—all the way down. Such performance that erases all and leaves nothing but the movement itself must needs be done with no representation at any level. It is done without neural codings or subpersonal ghosts. It is a basic bodymind concretely responding to the environment as part of it. In samurai Issai Chozansi’s Tengu Geijutsuron (天狗芸術論), a meditation on superior performance and character through swordsmanship, the Demon swordmaster that gives the title to the book explains:

Following the perceptions of the mind, the speed of practical application is like opening a door and the moonlight immediately shining in […] Victory and defeat are the traces of practical application. But if you don’t have conceptualization, form will not have aspect. Aspect is the shadow of concept, and is what manifests form. If there is no aspect to form, the opponent you are supposed to face will not exist (2006, p. 118, our emphasis).

This lack of conceptualization and immediacy of reaction is readily incorporated into a radically enactive framework. It does away with concepts that manifest form and discriminations. In swordsmanship, there are techniques that require total commitment. At the time of their conception, it meant that one was willing to be cut down if not performed correctly. For these techniques “require the swordsman to stay directly on the line of attack” and thus present a target to draw the opponent and wait until he has “committed his swing,” Kim Taylor explains (2010, p. 133). The import is that “once this happens, there is little time to react and defeat him […] everything is bet on a single swing and response. There is no room for error or adjustment. They either work or they do not” (Taylor 2010, p. 133.). If he failed, the swordsman could expect to die. Risk sports are not dissimilar structurally (phenomenologically they differ, however, see Krein & Ilundáin-Agurruza 2014). When big wave surfer Garrett McNamara broke the world record riding an 80-foot wave off the Nazaré coast in Portugal in 2013, he acted just as the

 

swordsman, making countless micro-adjustments that adapted to the changing shape of the wave and the surface area of his board in contact with the water. Falling could likely end in his drowning, as a wave that big would pin him beneath for several minutes.

In this state, in flawless performances with no room for error, there is no contentful thinking. Because mushin lacks representational cognitive content—being capacities-in-the-happening—both sides of the equation remain empty. Action happens without explicit rules, representations, articulated thoughts, or specified conditions of satisfaction either reflectively or subpersonally. Hence, successful performers just act: the swordswoman becomes one with her sword; the surfer becomes one with board and wave. They act spontaneously, fully engaged, fluid, and empty. The additional contribution from Asia is the focus on moral development and emotional harmony. Seeking mushin states in their path to enlightenment, virtuous character, and emotional maturity through disciplined practice, they develop the abilities and capacities proper of basic minds without cognition.

If samurai culture presents the oldest continuous case, Korea has one of the oldest manifestations of such cultivation of bodymind refinement: the Hwarang (flower knights) of the Silla Kingdom (57 BCE to 935 CE). Uniquely at the time, the Hwarang were educated and trained not just as fearsome and lethal fighters but also as refined and cultured persons. They were selected for martial prowess and their versatility in terms of artistic talent. In fact, martial, performing, literary, and visual arts were studied for their own sake as well as to develop a deep appreciation of order and harmony in the world and for themselves (Harmon 2007). This preoccupation with a holistic cultivation of the person was unprecedented in any martial culture; it predates the samurai’s bunbu ryodō 文武両道, two ways of the pen and the sword, by several centuries. Over time, and from an educational program that emphasized the artistic and cultural facet, the Hwarang developed a warrior code of its own that had five commandments comprised of Confucian elements.5 For example, loyalty to one’s lord, respect to parents and teachers, never retreating in battle, or not taking lives unjustly. And, as pointed out earlier, a Confucian paradigm implies embodied moral action rather than thinking. As such, we are on enactive terrain. 4.2. REC’s Contentless Cognition and Asian Performative Emptiness There are three concepts that align with enactivism and underlie the Asian framework behind mushin states and disciplined performance: wu 無 , nothing; xū 虛, void or empty; and kōng 空, emptiness. All three profitably relate and there is much to say of each in regards to REC, particularly the first two (Ilundáin-Agurruza 2014c). We briefly focus on kōng for the sake of expediency, and because it has the clearest connection to Korea and its direct influence on the development of Zen and the samurai ethos just discussed.

Kōng has a long history with two senses of emptiness, Buddhist and Daoist. As for the first sense, Buddhism exerts the most influence with its conception of emptiness as śūnyatā, शून्यता. Ignoring doctrinal differences, this basically refers to the emptiness underlying the worldly phenomena that cause the dependent origination that Buddhist practice intends to overcome. A second sense of emptiness seeks a path to salvation through cultivation of an empty state awareness to help us realize that all is illusion. Its aim is nirvāṇa निर्वाण (cessation). Daoism adapts this second sense for the consummate performer and virtuous person, the zhēnrén 真人. As superb performer, she acts with(in) the Daoist and Buddhist view of emptiness. She roams the

 

world acting spontaneously, being compassionate and selfless, without attachment to worldly affairs. As we see in Zhuangzi’s eponymous Daoist work the Zhuangzi (Zhuangzi and Watson, 1968), when she acts, the consummate person’s superior performance is not weighed down by categorization and judgment values of any kind, by intellectual, moral, or aesthetic concepts and assessments. She is empty of representations of any kind and of representational cognitive processes. She simply and emptily acts.

Korea is a rich soil that fed Daoism from its very beginning, and where Buddhism took deep root, particularly during the development of the Three Kingdom’s Culture (Koguryō, Paechke, and Silla) that predated the unified Silla establishment. In fact, as Yu documents, kōng was the primary concern of the major Madhyamika Buddhist sect to be found in Koguryō (Yu 2012). Of further import is that Paechke was the source of monks that introduced Buddhism to Japan in the mid sixth century (Yu 2012). This is relevant because from these immigrant monks who brought Buddhism and Daoist ideas to Japan, Zen Buddhism arose. Zen laid emphasis on emptiness, embraced the present moment, shunned discourse to embrace action, and advocated personal spontaneity to solve its kōan 公案 riddles. (The connection between these and a REC account of cognition and emotion should be apparent in light of the foregoing). The samurai chose Zen as their spiritual path when trying to confront the possibility of death at any moment (or perhaps it was Zen that chose the samurai). It offered a way, a path (dō) to cultivate true selflessness, and actual meditative practices to instill mushin. 5. Conclusion In conclusion, we see how REC best explains how we cognitively perform and emotionally attune when skills are refined with no room to hide, whether it be in risk sports or ancient and lethal martial arts. And, East Asian practices and thinking show how this can be built practically besides helping interpret phenomenologically such experiences.

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University Press.                                                                                                                1 These would be: Newell and Simon’s (1972) information-processing model, Anders Ericsson’s (2003)

deliberate practice account, Hoffman’s (1992) computer based approach, Beilock’s (2008) endorsement of embodied cognition, or Jeannerod’s (1997) advancement of a neuroscience of action.

 2 Affect programs have script-like structures with the following standard steps: “Step 1: paradigmatic

recognitional element involved in X; Step 2: paradigmatic outward expression of X; Step 3: paradigmatic bodily changes and feeling of those changes; Step 4: paradigmatic motivational response involved in X; Step 5: paradigmatic action out of X” (Goldie 2000, p. 94).

3 In developing this idea we could follow another lead supplied by Griffiths. He notes, “Jason A. Clark

… has argued that basic emotions and more cognitively sophisticated forms of the same emotion may be homologous to one another (Clark 2010a, 2010b)” (Griffiths 2013, p. 3). Expanding on this, he emphasizes, “Clark’s innovation is to propose that simple and complex emotions in the same species may be homologous. The same evolved developmental patterns are used twice, just as the developmental patterns that produce skeletal elements are used twice in our arms and legs (serial homology). Clark proposes that a form of shame similar to that in other primates and a more cognitively sophisticated form unique to humans are both found in humans” (Griffiths 2013, p. 4).    

 4 This fluidity does not mean that there cannot be turmoil. Rather, the idea is that even when havoc

breaks all around, the person in mushin remains emotionally and performatively calm and responds in synchrony with the needs of the situation (See Ilundáin-Agurruza 2014b).

5 This again predates similar injunctions found, expanded, and refined in the samurai moral code of

Bushidō (武士道).