Dædalus - American Academy of Arts and Sciences

coming up in Dædalus:

Marilyn A. Brown,Benjamin K. Sovacool& Richard F. Hirsh Assessing U.S. energy policy 5

Jorie Graham Incarnation: 9:30 am to 9:36 am 12

Antonio Damasio& Hanna Damasio Minding the body 15

Gerald M. Edelman The embodiment of mind 23

Arne Öhman Making sense of emotion 33

Mark Johnson A philosophical overview 46

Carol Gilligan When the mind leaves the body 55

William E. Connolly Experience & experiment 67

Jacques d’Amboise A dancer’s experience 76

Ray Dolan The body in the brain 78

Jerry Fodor What we still don’t know 86

Dorian Gossy The Door in the Woods 95

Stanley Rosen Leo Strauss in Chicago 104

Joel F. Handler on welfare reform’s hollow victory 114William A. Galston on pluralism 118

on historiography, Israel & Palestine, European students &c. 123

DædalusJournal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Summer 2006

Dæ

dalusSum

mer 20

06: on body in m

ind

U.S. $13; www.amacad.org

plus poetry by Kevin Carrizo di Camillo, John Kinsella, CharlesSimic, Lawrence Dugan &c.; and notes by Michael Cook, RichardMorris, Susan T. Fiske, Daniel G. Nocera, Omer Bartov, Robert I.Rotberg, Samuel Weber, Harriet Ritvo &c.

Akeel Bilgrami, Wendy Doniger, Amartya Sen, Stephen Greenblatt,Kwame Anthony Appiah, Sydney Shoemaker, Joseph Koerner,Susan Green½eld, David A. Hollinger, Carol Rovane, Ian Hacking,Todd E. Feinberg, and Courtney Jung

on identity

William H. McNeill, Adam Michnik, Jonathan Schell, James Carroll,Breyten Breytenbach, Mark Juergensmeyer, Steven LeBlanc, JamesBlight, Cindy Ness, Neil L. Whitehead, Mia Bloom, and TzvetanTodorov

on nonviolence& violence

Joan Roughgarden, Terry Castle, Steven Marcus, Elizabeth Benedict,Brian Charlesworth, Lawrence Cohen, Anne Fausto-Sterling, TimBirkhead, Catharine MacKinnon, Margo Jefferson, and Stanley A.Corngold

on sex

Joyce Appleby, John C. Bogle, Lucian Bebchuk, Robert W. Fogel,Jerry Z. Muller, Richard Epstein, Benjamin M. Friedman, JohnDunn, and Robin Blackburn

on capitalism& democracy

Anthony Kenny, Thomas Laqueur, Shai Lavi, Lorraine Daston, PaulRabinow, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Robert George, Robert J. Richards,Jeff McMahan, Nikolas Rose, John Broome, and Adrian Woolfson

on life

on the public interest William Galston, E. J. Dionne, Jr., Seyla Benhabib, Jagdish Bhagwati,Adam Wolfson, Lance Taylor, Gary Hart, Nathan Glazer, Robert N.Bellah, Michael Schudson, and Nancy Rosenblum

comment

on body in mind

½ction

memoir

notes

letters

Inside front cover: Some of the main human brainstructures involved in the representation, simula-tion, and modulation signals from the body-proper.The structures are shown in color in a 3-D brainreconstruction obtained with magnetic resonanceimaging (mri) and the brainvox technique. Thesurface of the cerebral cortex (light blue) has beenmade transparent to reveal hidden structures (theinsular cortex, in darker blue; the cingulate gyri,in cardinal red; the hypothalamus and brainstemtegmentum, in magenta; and the somatosensorycortices, in orange yellow). See Antonio Damasio & Hanna Damasio on Minding the body, pages 15–22: “The body in mind helps us construct ourselves and then allows us to understand others,which is nothing short of astounding.” Photographcourtesy of Hanna Damasio, MD, and the DornsifeCognitive Neuroimaging Center, University ofSouthern California.

James Miller, Editor of Dædalus

Antonio Damasio, Consulting Editorfor essays on body in mind

Phyllis S. Bendell, Managing Editorand Director of Publications

Esther Yoo, Assistant Editor

Board of editors

Steven Marcus, Editor of the Academy

Russell Banks, Fiction Adviser

Rosanna Warren, Poetry Adviser

Joyce Appleby (u.s. history, ucla), Stanley Hoffmann (government, Harvard),Donald Kennedy (environmental science, Stanford), Martha C. Nussbaum (lawand philosophy, Chicago), Neil J. Smelser (sociology, Berkeley), Steven Weinberg(physics, University of Texas at Austin); ex of½cio: Patricia Meyer Spacks (Presidentof the Academy), Leslie Cohen Berlowitz (Chief Executive Of½cer)

Editorial advisers

Daniel Bell (sociology, Harvard), Michael Boudin (law, u.s. Court of Appeals),Wendy Doniger (religion, Chicago), Howard Gardner (education, Harvard),Clifford Geertz (anthropology, Institute for Advanced Study), Carol Gluck (Asianhistory, Columbia), Stephen Greenblatt (English, Harvard), Thomas Laqueur(European history, Berkeley), Alan Lightman (English and physics, mit), StevenPinker (psychology, Harvard), Diane Ravitch (education, nyu), Amartya Sen(economics, Harvard), Richard Shweder (human development, Chicago), FrankWilczek (physics, mit)

Contributing Editors

Robert S. Boynton, D. Graham Burnett, Peter Pesic, Danny Postel

Dædalus is designed by Alvin Eisenman

Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Dædalus

Dædalus was founded in 1955 and established as a quarterly in 1958.The journal’s namesake was renowned in ancient Greece as an inventor, scientist, and unriddler of riddles. Its emblem, a maze seen from above,symbolizes the aspiration of its founders to “lift each of us above his cell inthe labyrinth of learning in order that he may see the entire structure as iffrom above, where each separate part loses its comfortable separateness.”

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences, like its journal, bringstogether distinguished individuals from every ½eld of human endeavor. Itwas chartered in 1780 as a forum “to cultivate every art and science whichmay tend to advance the interest, honour, dignity, and happiness of a free,independent, and virtuous people.” Now in its third century, the Academy,with its more than four thousand elected members, continues to provideintellectual leadership to meet the critical challenges facing our world.

Nineteenth-century depiction of a Roman mosaic labyrinth, now lost,found in Villa di Diomede, Pompeii

Dædalus Summer 2006Issued as Volume 135, Number 3

© 2006 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Incarnation: 9:30 am to 9:36 am© 2006 by Jorie Graham

The Door in the Woods© 2006 by Dorian Gossy

Leo Strauss in Chicago© 2006 by Stanley Rosen

Editorial of½ces: Dædalus, Norton’s Woods,136 Irving Street, Cambridge ma 02138.Phone: 617 491 2600. Fax: 617 576 5088.Email: [email protected].

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Dædalus publishes by invitation only and as-sumes no responsibility for unsolicited manu-scripts. The views expressed are those of theauthor of each article, and not necessarily ofthe American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

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For decades, our political leaders havetold us that we need to use energy moreef½ciently and derive more of it fromdomestic sources.1 Since the energy cri-sis of 1973, U.S. presidents have declaredthe need to gain independence from un-stable foreign energy suppliers and to doso with the same moral fortitude as if

½ghting a war. Some politicians haveproposed massive government programsto achieve the goals of their energy poli-cies; others have sought to unleash free-market forces that would encouragecompanies to develop novel sources ofenergy and motivate consumers to useenergy more wisely.

Despite more than three decades ofsuch efforts, the United States has notachieved the goal of energy indepen-dence. While progress in adopting moreenergy-ef½cient technologies has savedbillions of dollars throughout the econo-my, most other indicators of energy au-tonomy–such as the percentage of im-ported fuel–demonstrate that the coun-try has become less independent thanever. President Bush acknowledged thisfact in his recent State of the Union ad-dress, telling Americans that the coun-try has become “addicted to oil” andurging citizens to ½nd alternative waysto satisfy their energy needs. For thosewith a sense of history, Bush’s clarioncall sounded eerily familiar.

Even though energy ef½ciency has tak-en root in some sectors of the economy,

Dædalus Summer 2006 5

Marilyn A. Brown is interim director of OakRidge National Laboratory’s Engineering Scienceand Technology Division. An expert on the com-mercialization of new energy and environmentaltechnologies and the evaluation of governmentprograms and policies, she has authored morethan 140 publications.

Benjamin K. Sovacool is a Eugene P. WignerPostdoctoral Fellow at the Oak Ridge NationalLaboratory. Through the National Science Foun-dation’s Electric Power Networks Ef½ciency andSecurity Program, he has investigated the socialimpediments to distributed and renewable energysystems.

Richard F. Hirsh is professor of History and Sci-ence & Technology Studies at Virginia Polytech-nic Institute and State University. The author of“Technology and Transformation in the Ameri-can Electric Utility Industry” (1989) and “PowerLoss: The Origins of Deregulation and Restruc-turing in the American Electric Utility System”(1999), he currently manages Virginia Tech’sConsortium on Energy Restructuring.

Comment by Marilyn A. Brown, Benjamin K. Sovacool & Richard F. Hirsh

Assessing U.S. energy policy


1 The authors are grateful to Oak Ridge Na-tional Laboratory (operated by ut-Battelle,llc, for the U.S. Department of Energy) andthe National Science Foundation for supportingelements of the work reported here. Any opin-ions, ½ndings, conclusions, or recommenda-tions expressed in this material are those of theauthors and do not necessarily reflect the viewsof Oak Ridge National Laboratory or the Na-tional Science Foundation.

it has not compensated for the growth inenergy consumption that has occurredsince 1973, nor will it (if current trendscontinue) accommodate the growth that forecasters anticipate in comingdecades. Moreover, America’s depen-dence on oil from insecure or politicallyunstable countries has required exten-sive diplomatic and military efforts thatincur huge costs borne by energy usersand taxpayers. Today’s informationeconomy also remains inextricably tiedto reliable power and to just-in-timemanufacturing and distribution process-es that depend on fleets of petroleum-guzzling trucks and airplanes.

Disruptions in increasingly fragileenergy systems can cause havoc to thenation’s economy and to everyday life.We have already had a taste of such dis-ruptions in the form of the Californiaelectricity crisis of 2000 to 2001, the2003 Northeast blackout, and the fuel-supply interruptions resulting from theGulf Coast hurricanes in 2005. Thesedisruptions may be trivial preludes towhat could be more substantial futurecatastrophes. Indeed, the country facesat least ½ve immense and interconnectedenergy challenges due to (1) the risk ofoil-supply disruptions; (2) increasingelectricity usage; (3) a fragile electric-power (and overall energy) infrastruc-ture; (4) the lack of sustained efforts topush energy-ef½ciency practices; and (5) the growing environmental impactsof increasing energy consumption.

First, the United States remains vul-nerable to the risk of oil-supply disrup-tions, despite plenty of warnings overthe past three decades. In 1973 the Arabmembers of the Organization of Petro-leum Exporting Countries (opec) or-chestrated an oil embargo, the ½rst sup-ply disruption to cause major price in-creases and a worldwide energy crisis. In unadjusted terms, the price of oil on

world markets rose from $2.90 per barrelin September 1973 to $11.65 per barrel inDecember 1973. Further price hikes andeconomic repercussions accompaniedthe Iranian revolution in 1979. Elevenyears later–in 1990–when Iraqi forcesinvaded Kuwait, opec controlled rough-ly 5.5 million barrels per day (mbd) ofspare capacity, enough to replace the oil from the combatant countries and to supply about 8 percent of global de-mand. Even so, the elimination of Iraqiand Kuwaiti shipments contributed tooil prices jumping from around $21.50per barrel in January 1991 to $28.30 inFebruary 1991.

In 2005, opec’s spare production ca-pacity stood at only 2 percent of worlddemand, with roughly 90 percent of thisspare capacity located in Saudi Arabia.The rapidly growing demand for oil byChina and India to fuel their expandingeconomies has placed unprecedentedpressure on the world supply of oil, lead-ing to recent prices of crude oil at $70per barrel and higher. Because spare pro-duction capacity is both extremely limit-ed and concentrated in one volatile re-gion, world oil markets remain vulnera-ble to short-term disruptions. This situa-tion will not likely improve since almosthalf of the world’s proven reserves ofconventional oil are in Saudi Arabia,Iraq, and Iran.

The United States remains more sus-ceptible today to oil-supply disruptionsand price spikes than at any time in therecent past. It has grown to become theworld’s largest oil consumer by a consid-erable margin while its domestic oil pro-duction has rapidly diminished. Oil im-ports have ½lled the expanding gap andaccounted for 58 percent of total U.S. oilconsumption in 2005–up from 22 per-cent in 1970.

To obtain a sense of the consequencesof a disruption in a constrained world

6 Dædalus Summer 2006

Comment by MarilynA. Brown,Benjamin K.Sovacool &Richard F.Hirsh

oil market, the National Commission onEnergy Policy, a bipartisan group of six-teen leading energy experts, simulatedan ‘oil-supply shockwave’ in 2005. Un-rest in oil-producing Nigeria, an attackon an Alaskan oil facility, and the emer-gency evacuation of foreign nationalsfrom Saudi Arabia precipitated theimagined shockwave, which removedthree mbd from the world’s market ofoil. As result of these events, the price of gasoline in the United States rose to$5.75 per gallon, two million Americanslost their jobs, and the consumer priceindex jumped 13 percent. Worse, pan-elists who participated in the study con-cluded that we could do nothing to avoidthese impacts after the hypothetical dis-ruptions began.

The stagnating fuel economy of carshas contributed to America’s vulnerabil-ity to oil disruptions. Corporate AverageFuel Economy (cafe) standards for carspeaked in 1985 at 27.5 miles per gallon.For the past two decades, consumer (andmanufacturer) preferences for larger andmore powerful autos have negated tech-nological advances in front-wheel drivetransmissions, electronic fuel injection,enhanced power-train con½gurations,and computer-controlled engines, whichwould improve gas mileage even if noth-ing else were changed in cars. New-vehi-cle fuel economy therefore remains nohigher today than in 1981, but automo-bile weight has increased by 24 percentand horsepower has almost doubled. Inaddition, more cars populate the roads,and are driven more miles each year. Thenet result of these trends has been grow-ing demand for oil in the transportationsector and greater imports to meet thatdemand.

Second, the United States continues tosee increasing demand for electricity in away that threatens its ability to produceit. The country consumed about 167 per-

cent more electricity in 2004 than it didin 1970, with power usage growing from25 percent of the nation’s total energyuse in 1970 to 40 percent in 2004. Andthis demand for electricity will continueto grow: the Energy Information Admin-istration forecasted in 2005 that electric-ity use will increase at a rate of 1.9 per-cent annually through 2025. Thoughmuch lower than the 7 percent annualgrowth rate experienced before the 1973energy crisis, the current rate would stillrequire a doubling of electricity produc-tion in about thirty-seven years.

Increased demand for power in thepast decade has been met almost exclu-sively through the use of quickly builtand increasingly ef½cient natural-gascombustion turbines or combined-cycleequipment. Indeed, more than 150 giga-watts (gw) of gas-½red power genera-tion have been added to the power gridbetween 1999 and 2004, which totaledabout 1,000 gw for the nation in 2004.Despite the high price of this clean-burning gas in the last few years, its usein new power plants seems likely to in-crease.

But energy analysts see problems with this trend. The National PetroleumCouncil predicts that current NorthAmerican sources will be able to satisfyonly 75 percent of domestic demand for natural gas. Questions of securitywill likely emerge as the trend of natu-ral-gas imports begins to emulate theincreasing trend of petroleum imports.Aggravating this concern is the possi-bility that today’s nuclear-power plantscould be retired over the next ½fty yearsas current licenses expire, depriving thenation of one of its key noncarbon ener-gy sources and pushing up demand fornatural gas if that fuel replaces nuclearenergy for electricity production.

What about other sources of power?Coal’s high carbon content and added


AssessingU.S. energypolicy

cost of pollution abatement will con-tinue to pose challenges for power pro-viders. Clean coal technologies such asintegrated gasi½cation combined cycleand fluidized bed combustion offer policymakers a way to capture concen-trated streams of carbon dioxide, butthey still remain years away from com-mercial viability. Because of securityproblems related to fuel sources andwaste disposal, as well as potential pub-lic opposition, new nuclear technologyalso cannot be counted on for wide-spread near-term use. And despite someimpressive federal and state efforts topromote them, non-hydro renewables(such as biomass, geothermal, wind, and solar) have gained only a 2 percentshare of electricity generation over thepast thirty years. Reductions in the costof power produced from renewables inthis time have been impressive, makingthem look increasingly attractive for fu-ture use. Yet the intermittence of renew-ables–especially the most cost-effectivewind turbines–coupled with high capi-tal costs, a host of lingering utility-mo-nopoly rules, and public opposition tolocal siting will likely prevent such tech-nologies from taking over the bulk ofthe generation burden, at least in thenext thirty years. Overall, it appears thatmeeting future demand for electricitywill become an increasingly arduous un-dertaking.

Third, the electric-power-transmissioninfrastructure remains precarious andbrittle, despite its increasing use. Datafrom the Edison Electric Institute andthe Electric Power Research Institutenote that utility investment in transmis-sion peaked at almost $10 billion in 1970,but declined to an inadequate level of$2.2 billion in 1998 (in 2003 dollars).Spending grew to $3.8 billion in 2002and $4.1 billion in 2003, though manyanalysts still feel more investment is

necessary to transmit power to the grow-ing wholesale and retail markets thathave been created since utility-industryrestructuring began in the 1990s.

But much higher spending may not be forthcoming, given that (as noted in a 2003 rand Corporation study) incen-tives in the partially deregulated utilityindustry favor minimal investments intransmission facilities. Because federalregulators generally limit rates of returnon transmission investments, compa-nies often prefer to construct and oper-ate new generation facilities, whose un-capped rates of return depend only onmarket conditions. To complicate mat-ters more, local opposition to new pow-er lines has grown over the years as thecountry has become more populated, re-sulting in delayed construction (or can-cellation) of some transmission facili-ties. Taken together, these trends haveresulted in a decreasingly reliable trans-mission network in many regions of theUnited States, with grid components be-ing operated close to (or at) their techni-cal limits.

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 includesprovisions to respond to some infra-structural problems, such as incentivesto increase investment in transmissionlines and to simplify the planning andpermitting process for building them.These measures may help, as thousandsof miles of new transmission lines maybe required if the electric-utility systemexpands along the same lines as it has for the past several decades. Increasingdemand for other forms of energy in the future may also stress the country’sinfrastructure. Numerous new port ter-minals will be required to handle in-creased imports of lique½ed natural gasand oil, for example. At the same time,new carbon-sequestration sites, bio-energy facilities, and hydrogen reposito-ries and pipelines may be needed, espe-



cially as efforts increase to reduce envi-ronmental pollution. But these needswill not be easily met. Carbon seques-tration, for example, may require use of depleted oil and gas ½elds, unmine-able deep coal seams, or cavernous sa-line formations. The successful use ofthese geological formations will dependon techniques that resist operator andequipment failure, extreme weather, and malicious interference or attacks.Similar concerns over technical errorsand assaults arise when considering theneed for expansion of natural-gas andpetroleum facilities. Opposition to con-struction of these new infrastructuralelements has already become evident.Put simply, the future health of thecountry’s energy infrastructure may bein peril.

Fourth, the country faces immensechallenges in promoting more energy-ef½cient technologies. Before the 1973opec oil embargo, U.S. energy con-sumption grew in lockstep with the na-tion’s gross domestic product (gdp).Measured in terms of energy consump-tion per dollar of gdp, the energy inten-sity of the nation remained constant.Economic growth appeared to requireconsuming more energy.

This trend changed in the period afterthe 1973 energy crisis, when the econo-my (as measured by the inflation-adjust-ed gdp) grew by 148 percent (from 1973to 2004). Total U.S. energy consump-tion, meanwhile, grew from about sev-enty-six quadrillion British ThermalUnits of energy (quads) to almost onehundred quads in the same period, anincrease of 32 percent. The energy in-tensity of the economy, in other words,dropped considerably.

What accounted for the change? In-dividuals purchased more fuel-ef½cientcars and appliances; they insulated andweatherproofed their homes; and they

adjusted thermostats to reduce energyconsumption. These measures led to adecrease in per capita residential ener-gy use of 27 percent (and 37 percent perhousehold) despite a 50 percent increasein new home size since 1970 and thegrowing use of air conditioning, elec-tronic equipment, and a multitude of‘plug loads.’ Businesses retro½tted theirbuildings with more ef½cient heatingand cooling equipment and installed en-ergy management and control systems,accounting for a 25 percent decline in en-ergy use per square foot of commercialbuilding space. Factories adopted more‘energy-stingy’ manufacturing processesand employed more ef½cient motors forconveyors, pumps, fans, and compres-sors. These gains in energy productivi-ty, prompted by high fuel costs and gov-ernment policies, represent one of thegreat economic success stories of thiscentury. If the nation’s energy intensityremained the same today as it stood in1970, the United States would be con-suming twice as much energy, and itsenergy bill would be approximately $1billion higher per day.

While such data suggest that energy-ef½ciency investments provide an eco-nomic and relatively rapid strategy formeeting the growing demand for ener-gy services, many experts assert thatef½ciency can only play a limited poli-cy role. For example, Hans Blix, the for-mer director of the International AtomicEnergy Agency, has argued, “The moreef½cient use of energy will only partiallyslow down the expanding use of energy.Although our light bulbs will save elec-tricity, we shall have more lights.” Simi-larly, Vice President Dick Cheney statedin 2001 that “conservation may be a signof personal virtue, but it is not a suf½-cient basis for a sound, comprehensive,energy policy.” And Spencer Abraham,President Bush’s Secretary of Energy



from 2001 to 2005, reiterated this viewwhen he told senators that “improvedenergy ef½ciency cannot do the wholejob . . . . [T]he United States will needmore energy supply.” In short, ef½ciencymay help the nation overcome some ofits energy woes, but policymakers do not feel it will be the ultimate solution.As a result, the potential for improvedenergy ef½ciency is not being vigorouslytapped.

Fifth and ½nally, the trend towardmore energy consumption will exacer-bate already prominent concerns aboutthe environment. Since the 1960s, tech-nically trained people, politicians, andthe public have become aware of thehealth consequences of the exploration,extraction, transportation, and combus-tion of fuels used for making energy.They have also become alert to possibledangers of living near high-voltage pow-er lines and radioactive-waste sites.More recently, people have pointed tothe ecological damage created by hydro-electric dams and wind turbines, whilealso noting that the use of biomass fromenergy crops may promote agriculturalmonocultures that can pose severe risksto ecological diversity.

Efforts resulting from three decades of clean-air legislation have decreasedsulfur-dioxide emissions from electricgenerators in the United States. Never-theless, air pollution remains a seriousthreat to human and ecosystem health.Americans have experienced a rise inrespiratory illnesses, and visibility con-tinues to degrade in formerly pristineareas as a result of pollution from ve-hicles and coal-burning power plants.Rarely, for example, does visibility in the Great Smoky Mountains NationalPark achieve its ‘natural’ limit of nine-ty-three miles. Instead, average annualvisibility has decreased to twenty-½vemiles in the winter and to twelve miles

in the summer. Beyond air-pollutionissues, current energy trends will lead to expanded emissions of greenhousegases, which appear to be contributingto increased global temperatures, reces-sion of glaciers, and more frequent andpowerful weather events such as hurri-canes.

The pollution associated with elec-tric-power production was vividly doc-umented by the August 14, 2003, North-east blackout. Not only did the eventshut off electricity for 50 million peoplein the United States and Canada, it alsohalted emissions from many fossil-½redpower plants across the Ohio Valley andthe Northeast. In effect, the power out-age served as an inadvertent demonstra-tion of the environmental consequencesof electricity generation: twenty-fourhours after the blackout, New YorkCity’s sulfur-dioxide concentrationsdropped 90 percent; particulate matterfell by 70 percent; and ozone concentra-tions slipped to half.

Beyond federal clean-air initiatives,state-government policies have, in cer-tain cases, made positive inroads to pol-lution abatement. Due to legislative andregulatory initiatives, California–whichgenerates roughly one-fourth of its elec-tricity from ef½ciently distributed andrenewable energy technologies–emittedonly 493 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2002, a mere 12 percent increase fromits emission levels in 1990, despite an in-crease in electricity demand of almost 25percent.

Though making impressive inroads inpollution abatement efforts, California(and a few other states) remains the ex-ception, not the rule. Few people disputethe fact that total U.S. emissions of car-bon dioxide from energy consumptionhave increased signi½cantly: from 4.3billion metric tons in 1970 to 5.9 billionmetric tons in 2004. Moreover, the Ener-



gy Information Administration forecast-ed in 2005 that carbon-dioxide emis-sions from energy use will grow an aver-age 1.5 percent annually for the nexttwenty years, resulting in 8.1 billion met-ric tons of carbon-dioxide emissions in2025. Clearly, the last thirty years havenot seen the adoption of the low-carbonpower and fuels needed to help stabilizeatmospheric concentrations of green-house gases. Continued growth in ener-gy usage will likely exacerbate environ-mental problems.

To conclude, despite three decades of‘progress’ since the 1973 energy crisis,the United States faces a host of energychallenges that threaten the nation’seconomy, security, and lifestyle. Becauseof its huge dependence on imported oilto fuel a transportation sector that hasseen little improvement in energy ef½-ciency, the nation could be ravaged bydisruptions to oil supplies due to weath-er, war, or terrorist attacks. At the sametime, growing electricity consumptionand reliance on power plants employingnatural gas, along with a constrainedtransmission grid, make the electric-utility infrastructure increasingly vul-nerable to service disruptions. Andwhile ef½ciency efforts have successful-ly stemmed the growth rate of fuel con-sumption in the last few decades, popu-lation increases and economic expan-sion have forced up the nation’s overalluse of energy, exacerbating the country’senvironmental problems.

As a consequence of these trends, thegoal of energy independence seemsmore distant in 2006 than it did in 1974,when President Nixon ½rst proposed itas a way to deal with the oil embargo.While one can fruitfully debate whethercomplete reliance on domestic energysources should be the objective of gov-ernment policy, the fact remains that theUnited States cannot continue upon its

present course. The country has becomeprogressively vulnerable to economic,political, and military threats because of its growing fuel consumption and anincreasingly challenged energy infra-structure. The nation’s policymakers inbusiness and government, as well as thecitizenry, need to realize that the recenttrends in energy consumption, produc-tion, and distribution reflected in thisenergy assessment cannot be sustainedinde½nitely. Americans must confrontenergy concerns as a top priority andlearn to overcome the social, political,and technical obstacles that have hin-dered true progress for more than threedecades.




She sits on the straightback chair in the room.A ray of sun is calling across the slatwood floor.

I say she because my body is so stillin the folds of daylight

through which the one beam slants.I say calling because it lays itself down

with a twang and a licking monosyllable

across the pine floor-boards–making a meaning like a wide sharp thought–

an unrobed thing we can see the inside of–less place than time–

less time than the shedding skin of time, the thoughtof time,

the yellow swath it cutson the continuum–

now to the continuumwhat she is to me,

a ceremonial form, an intransigent puissant corridornothing will intersect,

and yet nothing really–dust, a little heat . . .

She waits.Her leg extended, she waits for it–

foot, instep, calf–the I, the beam

of sun–the now and now–

Jorie Graham

Incarnation: 9:30 am to 9:36 am

it moving like a destiny across,neither lured-on nor pushed-forward,

without architecture,without

beginning,over the book lying in the dust,

over the cracked plank–down into the crack–across–

not animalnothing that can be deduced-from or built-upon,

aswarm with dust and yetnot entered by the dust,

not touched–smearing everything with a small warm gaiety–

over the pillow-seam over the water glass–

cracking and bending but not cracking or bending–

over the instep now, holding the foot–

her waiting to feel the warmth then beginningto feel it–

the motion of it and the warmth of it not identical–the one-way-motion of it, the slow sweep,

approaching her as a fate approaches, inhuman butresembling

feeling,

without deviation,turning each instant a notch deeper towards

the only forwards,but without beginning,

and never–not ever–not moving

forwards . . .

Meanwhile the knowledge of things lies round,over which the beam–

Meanwhile the transparent airthrough or into which the beam–

over the virtual and the material–over the world and over the world of the beholder–

glides:

Incarnation:9:30 am to9:36 am


it does not change, crawler, but things arechanged–

the mantle, the cotton-denim bunched at the knees–

diamonds appearing on the tips of things then disappearing–each edge voluble with the plushnesses of silence–

now up to her folded arms–warm under the elbow–almost a sad smell in the honeyed yellow–

(the ridge of the collarbone) (the tuck of the neck)till suddenly (as if by

accident)

she is inside–(ear, cheek)–the slice of time

now on the chin, now onthe lips, making her rise up into me,

forcing me to close my eyes,the whole of the rest feeling broken off,

it all being my face, my being inside the beam of sun,

and the sensation of how it falls unevenly,

how the wholeness I felt in the shadow is lifted,broken, this tip lit, this other dark–and strati½ed,

analysed, chosen-round, formed–


Jorie Graham, a Fellow of the American Academy since 1999, is Boylston Professor of Rhetoric andOratory at Harvard University. She has published numerous collections of poetry, including “Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts” (1980), “The End of Beauty” (1987), “The Dream of the Uni½ed Field: Se-lected Poems 1974–1994” (1995), which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, “Never” (2002), and,most recently, “Overlord” (2005). She has also edited two anthologies, “Earth Took of Earth: 100Great Poems of the English Language” (1996) and “The Best American Poetry 1990.” Graham servedas a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003.

© 2006 by Jorie Graham

Jorie Graham on bodyin mind

We spend a good part of our lives at-tending to the sights and sounds of theworld outside of us, oblivious to the fact that we (mentally speaking) exist in our bodies, and that our bodies existin our minds.1 This neglect is both goodand bad: good when it allows us to letour own physical suffering go undetect-ed, bad when it screens us from the bio-logical roots of our selves. Be that as itmay, the body does come to mind, in nouncertain terms, when injury or diseasebreaks down its integrity and causes

pain. The body also comes to mind,somewhat less demandingly, in mo-ments of joy, when physical lightnessand ease of function inevitably make us aware of the body.

What we would like to address in thisessay, however, is not the obvious factthat the state of our bodies can be con-veyed to our minds, but rather the neu-rological mechanisms that enable thisspectacular phenomenon. How can thebody, with its myriad physical compart-ments and complicated operations,show up in our minds and be felt?

The most common perspective on this question assumes that there is a‘mind-body problem,’ which is best re-solved using the tools of analytic philos-ophy. Our perspective here, however, ismore restricted, focusing instead on thebiological scaffolding without which thebody certainly cannot be present in themind. We are convinced, incidentally,that this perspective and its facts are rel-evant to the mind-body problem and goa long way toward solving it. Elsewherewe have addressed the connection,2 but


Antonio Damasio & Hanna Damasio

Minding the body

Antonio Damasio, a Fellow of the AmericanAcademy since 1997, is David Dornsife Professorof Neuroscience and director of the Brain andCreativity Institute at the University of SouthernCalifornia. He is the author of “Descartes’ Error”(1994), “The Feeling of What Happens” (1999),and “Looking for Spinoza” (2003).

Hanna Damasio, a Fellow of the AmericanAcademy since 1997, is Dana Dornsife Professorof Neuroscience and director of the Dornsife Cog-nitive Neuroscience Imaging Center at the Univer-sity of Southern California. She is the author of“Lesion Analysis in Neuropsychology” (1989)and “Human Brain Anatomy in ComputerizedImages” (1995), the new edition of which waspublished in 2005.


1 The work discussed in this essay has beensupported by a grant from The Mathers Foun-dation.

2 See Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of WhatHappens (New York: Harcourt, 1999), for anoverview of the argument.

here we simply wish to discuss the latestin the nuts and bolts of how the bodycomes to mind.

In attempting to answer this question,we will use, as a stepping stone, the sameassumptions William James made whenhe tried to explain how we perceive ouremotions, a process he thought requireda mental representation of the body:perceptions, any perception, occur in the brain; and perceptions of the bodyinclude, of necessity, brain processesthat depend on a particular object–thebody-proper.

James, along with a host of contempo-rary physiologists, already knew for afact that there were nerve pathways con-ducting impulses from the body to thebrain. He also had an inkling, given thethen-emerging evidence for brain spe-cialization, that the parts of the brainrelated to bodily perception would bedistinct from those linked to visual orauditory perceptions. Today, we have no reason to doubt James’s conjecture,and plenty of evidence to show that hisaccount is fundamentally correct.

We have, however, many new devel-opments to report on this score.3 First,we now know that the details of James’sbasic arrangement are far more intricatethan what might have been imagined acentury ago. For example, the body useschemical signals as well as neural signalsto communicate with the brain; and therange of information conveyed to thebrain is wider than expected, from theconcentration of chemical molecules tothe contractions of muscles anywhere inthe body.

Second, while the brain does repre-sent, with ½delity, body states that areactually occurring, it can do far more

than that: it can also modify the repre-sentation of an ongoing state, and, mostdramatically, it can simulate body statesbefore they occur or body states that donot occur at all.

Third, the new knowledge has pro-found implications for our understand-ing of consciousness and of social behav-ior.

In what follows, we will address eachof these developments in order.

Let us begin by clarifying that when-ever we use the term ‘body,’ we mean‘body-proper,’ so as to leave aside thebrain. The brain is also a part of thebody, of course, but it happens to have a particular status: it is the part of thebody toward which every other bodypart is communicating, and that cancommunicate to every other part.

Misconceptions abound regardinghow the body talks to the brain. Forinstance, those who are unacquaintedwith neuroscience (and, regrettably,some who are) assume incorrectly thatthe body operates as a single unit, a lump of flesh connected to the brain by live wires called nerves. Many alsomistakenly believe that the main com-munication occurs between the body’sorgans–the viscera–and the brain, viathe autonomic nervous system. Anoth-er erroneous belief is that the body-brain communication goes one way,from body to brain, but not in the re-verse direction.

The reality is quite different.First, rather than being one unit, the

body has numerous separate compart-ments. To be sure, the viscera to whichso much attention is paid–the heart, thelungs, the gut, the mouth, the tongue,the throat, and the equally vital but lessrecognized organ, the skin, which envel-ops our entire organism–are essential,but all of the body’s compartments are


AntonioDamasio & HannaDamasio on body in mind

3 See Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza(New York: Harcourt, 2003), for an overview.

indispensable for its normal operation.And the communication between vis-cera and brain is not con½ned to the au-tonomic nervous system. There are oth-er neural channels. This communicationis not even con½ned to nerves alone:there is a chemical channel as well.

The chemical bath in which all bodycells live and of which the blood is anexpression–the internal milieu–alsoends up sending signals to the brain, not via nerves but via chemical mole-cules, which impinge directly on cer-tain parts of the brain designed to re-ceive their messages. The range of in-formation conveyed to the brain in thismanner is extremely wide. It includes,for example, the state of contraction ordilation of smooth muscles (the musclesthat form the walls of the arteries, thegut, and the bronchi); the amount of ox-ygen and carbon dioxide concentratedlocally in any region of the body; thetemperature and the pH at various loca-tions; the local presence of toxic chemi-cal molecules; and so forth.

There is more to the body, however,than viscera and internal milieu. Thereare also striated muscles. When thesemuscles are connected to two bonesarticulated by a joint, the shortening of these muscles generates movement.Picking up an object, walking, talking,breathing, and eating are all actions that depend on muscular contraction.But note that whenever those contrac-tions occur, the con½guration of thebody changes: except for moments ofcomplete immobility, the image of thebody in space is changing continuously.

The secret behind the changes is sim-ple. In order to control movement withprecision, the body must instantly con-vey information on the state of everystriated muscle to the brain, using ef½-cient nerve pathways, which are evolu-tionarily more modern than those that

convey signals from the viscera and in-ternal milieu. These pathways arrive inbrain regions dedicated to sensing thestate of these muscles. (The only partialexception to this scheme of things has todo with the heart, which is also made ofstriated muscles, and whose contrac-tions serve to pump blood, but whosesignals are segregated to brain sites dedi-cated to the viscera.)

However, just as important as thebody-to-brain inputs described above is the fact that the brain also sends mes-sages to the body. This fact is often for-gotten. While body states are being con-tinuously mapped in the brain, many as-pects of those body states were causedby brain signals to the body in the ½rstplace. Just as with the communicationfrom the body to the brain, the braincommunicates with the body via neuralchannels–nerves whose messages leadto the contraction of muscles and theexecution of actions–and via chemicalchannels. Examples of the latter includehormones, such as cortisol, testosterone,or estrogen. The release of hormones re-sults in different modes of operation forthe internal milieu and the viscera.

The idea here is that the body andbrain are engaged in a continuous inter-action that unfolds in time, within dif-ferent regions of the body and withinmental space as well. Mental states causebrain states, which cause body states;body states are then mapped in the brainand incorporated into the ongoing men-tal states. A small change on the brainside of the system can have major conse-quences for the body state (think of therelease of a hormone); likewise, a smallchange on the body side (think of a knifecut, or a tooth infection, or the ruptureof an ulcer) can have a major effect onthe mind once the change is mapped as anociceptive state and perceived as acutepain.


Minding the body

Curiously, German and British physi-ologists described the outlines of thisbasic arrangement over a century ago,but its importance for the understand-ing of both neurobiology and cognitivescience was largely ignored until recent-ly. And its intricate neuroanatomical and neurophysiological details have onlybeen uncovered in the past few years.4

Those details reveal that the state ofthe body’s interior is conveyed via neu-ral channels dedicated to speci½c brainregions. Speci½c nerve-½ber types–C-½bers–bring signals from every nookand cranny of the body into speci½cparts of the central nervous system, such as the lamina-I section of the pos-terior horn of the spinal cord, at everylevel of its length, or the pars caudalis of the trigeminal nerve. The brain re-gions charged with handling the signalsas they march toward the higher levelsof the brain are also speci½c. Togetherwith chemical information available inthe bloodstream, these messages con-vey to the brain the state of a good partof the body’s interior–all the visceral/chemical body components beneath theskin’s outer perimeter. Complementingthis interior sense, or interoception, isinformation regarding the state of striat-ed muscles anywhere in the body. Mes-sages from the striated muscles use dif-ferent kinds of nerve ½bers and differentstations of the central nervous system all the way into the higher levels of thebrain. The upshot of all this signaling is a multidimensional picture of the bodyin the brain and in the mind.

That the body, in most of its aspects, iscontinuously represented in the brain is

thus a well-proven fact. The organismrequires that sort of ongoing represen-tation for rather transparent reasons: inorder for the brain to coordinate physio-logical states in the body-proper, whichit does without our being consciouslyaware of what is going on, the brainmust be informed about the variousphysiological parameters at differentregions of the body. The informationmust be faithful and current if it is topermit optimal controlling responses:call this information-processing net-work the ‘body loop.’

But this is not the only network thatlinks mind and body–there is anotherwe call the ‘as-if body loop.’ Some ½f-teen years ago, Antonio proposed that in certain circumstances, as an emotionunfolds, the brain rapidly constructsmaps of the body comparable to thosethat would result were the body actual-ly changed by that emotion. The con-struction can occur well ahead of theemotional change, or even instead ofthe change. In other words, the brain can simulate a certain body state as ifit were occurring; and because our per-ception of any body state is rooted in the body maps of the somatosensing re-gions, we perceive the body state as ac-tually occurring even if it is not. (Thisfunctional arrangement can work foremotion because there is no need for½delity of information concerning thebody states that de½ne an emotion pro-vided the kind of emotion in questioncan be detected without ambiguity.)

At the time the ‘as-if body loop’hypothesis was ½rst advanced, the evi-dence we could muster in its favor wascircumstantial. First, it made sense forthe brain to know about the body state it was about to produce. The advantagesof this sort of ‘advance simulation’ wereobvious in the phenomenon of ‘efferenz-copie.’ Efferenz-copie is what allows



4 A. D. Craig, “How Do You Feel? Interocep-tors: The Sense of the Physiological Conditionof the Body,” Nature Reviews 3 (2002): 655–666;Damasio, Looking for Spinoza.

motor structures that are about to com-mand the execution of a certain move-ment, to inform visual structures of thelikely result of that forthcoming move-ment. For example, when our eyes areabout to move toward an object at theperiphery of our vision, the visual re-gion of the brain is forewarned of theimpending movement and is ready tosmooth the transition to the new objectwithout creating a blur.

Second, it seemed obvious that simu-lating a body state without actually pro-ducing it reduces processing time andsaves energy.

Third, the neuroanatomical structuresneeded for the as-if body loop to workwere known to exist. The hypothesisrequired that the brain structures incharge of triggering a particular emo-tion be able to connect to the structuresin which the body state correspondingto the emotion would be mapped. Forexample, the amygdala (a triggering sitefor fear) and the ventromedial prefrontalcortex (a triggering site for compassion)would have to connect to somatosensingregions such as the insular cortex, sii,and si, where ongoing body states arecontinuously represented. We knew thatsuch connections existed, thereby ren-dering possible the implementation ofthe hypothetical mechanism.

In recent years, more support for thishypothesis has come from several quar-ters, for example, from a series of re-markable experiments by Giacomo Riz-zolatti and his colleagues. These experi-ments identi½ed a class of nerve cells,known as ‘mirror neurons,’ by means of implanted electrodes in monkeys. In these experiments, a monkey wouldwatch an investigator perform a varie-ty of actions.5 When a monkey saw the

investigator move his hand or mouth,neurons in the monkey’s brain regionsrelated to hand or mouth movementsbecame active, ‘as if’ the monkey wereperforming the action. But in reality, themonkey remained immobile.

Mirror neurons are, in effect, the ul-timate ‘as-if body’ device. The mirror-neuron system achieves conceptuallywhat we hypothesized as the ‘as-if bodyloop’ system: the simulation, in thebrain’s body maps, of a body state that is not actually taking place in the organ-ism. The fact that the body state the mir-ror neurons are simulating is not thesubject’s does not minimize the powerof this functional resemblance. On thecontrary, it stands to reason that if acomplex brain can simulate someoneelse’s body state, it can simulate one ofits own body states. Take, for example, a state that has already occurred in theorganism: it should be easier to simulatesince it has already been mapped by pre-cisely the same somatosensing struc-tures that are now responsible for simu-lating it. In fact, we suggest that the as-if system applied to others would nothave developed had there not been anas-if system applied to the brain’s ownorganism.

The nature of the brain structures in-volved in the process reinforces the sug-gestive functional resemblance betweenthe as-if body loop and mirror neurons.For the as-if body loop, we hypothesizedthat neurons in areas engaging emotion–the premotor/prefrontal cortex (in thecase of compassion), the anterior insularcortex (in the case of disgust), and theamygdala (in the case of fear)–wouldactivate regions that normally map thestate of the body and, in turn, move it


Minding the body

5 G. Rizzolatti, L. Fadiga, L. Fogassi, and V. Gallese, “Resonance Behaviors and Mirror

Neurons,” Archives Italiennes de Biologie 137(1999): 85–100; V. Gallese, “The Shared Mani-fold Hypothesis,” Journal of Consciousness Stud-ies 8 (2001): 33–50.

to action. In humans such regions in-clude the somatomotor complex in therolandic and parietal operculum as wellas the insular cortex. All of these regionshave a dual somatomotor role, the insu-lar cortex providing an especially goodexample of this functional duality. Thatis, these regions can hold a map of thebody state, a sensory role, and they canparticipate in an action as well. By andlarge, this is what Rizzolatti’s neuro-physiologic experiments with monkeysuncovered. This discovery is quite con-sonant as well with human studies usingmagnetoencephalography (the studies of Rita Haari) and functional neuroima-ging (again by the Rizzolatti group andby Tania Singer and her colleagues). Ourown studies based on neurologic lesionspoint in the same direction.6

Explanations of the existence of mir-ror neurons have emphasized, quite ap-propriately, the role that mirror neuronscan play in allowing us to understand theactions of others by placing us in a com-parable body state. As we witness an ac-tion in another, our body-sensing brainadopts the body state we would havewere we ourselves moving, and it doesso, in all probability, not by passive sen-sory patterns, but rather by a preactiva-tion of motor structures–ready for ac-tion yet not quite allowed to act–and insome cases by actual motor activation.

We must wonder, however, how such a complex physiologic system evolved.We doubt it arose de novo, simply be-cause of the manifest advantage of bet-ter knowing the body state of othersand, through it, the mind state of oth-ers. Instead, we suspect that the mirrorsystem developed from an earlier ‘as-if body loop’ system, which complexbrains used to simulate their own bodystates for a clear and immediate advan-tage: rapid and energy-saving activa-tion of the maps of certain body states,which were, in turn, associated with relevant past knowledge and cognitivestrategies. Eventually, the as-if systemwas applied to others and prevailed be-cause of the equally obvious social ad-vantages one could derive from know-ing the body states of others, which areconnected, of course, to their mentalstates.

In brief, we regard the remarkable evi-dence for mirror neurons as support forthe ‘as-if body loop’ mechanism of plac-ing the body in mind. In turn, we con-sider the ‘as-if body loop’ system with-in each organism as the precursor to themirror-neuron system.

The as-if body loop, the body loop, and mirror neurons all point to a fewremarkable features regarding the per-ception of the body during the experi-ence of an emotion: The emotion endsup felt in our flesh. The process unfoldsin time and is both sensory and motor.The sensing of body changes leads tomotor activations that, in turn, can besensed. All of these steps have the pow-er to evoke related knowledge held inmemory.

There is a peculiar relationship be-tween the object perceived, our body,and the brain. The body and brain in-habit the same organism, and the rela-tionship between the two can be entire-



6 R. Haari, N. Forss, S. Avikainen, E. Kirves-kari, S. Salenius, and G. Rizzolatti, “Activa-tion of Human Primary Motor Cortex DuringAction Observation: A Neuromagnetic Study,”Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences95 (1998): 15061–15065; T. Singer et al., “Em-pathy for Pain Involves the Affective but notSensory Components of Pain,” Science 303(2004): 1157–1162; R. Adolphs, H. Damasio, D. Tranel, G. Cooper, and A. Damasio, “A Rolefor Somatosensory Cortices in the Visual Rec-ognition of Emotion as Revealed by Three-Di-mensional Lesion Mapping,” Journal of Neuro-science 20 (2000): 2683–2690.

ly circular. Feelings of emotions can helpillustrate the situation.

Feelings of emotions are perceptions.They are, in the general scheme ofthings, comparable to other perceptions.For example, actual visual perceptionscorrespond to external objects whosephysical characteristics impinge on ourretinas and modify transiently the sen-sory maps in the visual system. Feelingsof emotions also have an object at theorigin of the process, and the physicalcharacteristics of the object also prompta chain of signals that impinges on mapsinside the brain.

In other words, just as in the case ofvisual perception, a part of feelings ofemotion is due to the object, and a partis due to the internal construction thebrain makes of it. But something is quitedifferent in the case of feelings, and thedifference is not trivial. In feelings, theobject at the origin of the process is in-side the body rather than outside. Feel-ings of emotion are just as mental as anyother perception, but a sizable part ofthe objects being mapped are states ofthe living organism in which the feelingsarise.

As if this difference does not compli-cate things enough, there is anotherwrinkle in the process: feelings of emo-tion are linked to an object called thebody, but they are also linked to theemotionally competent object that ini-tiated the emotion-feeling cycle. A spec-tacular seascape is an object, but so is the body state that results from behold-ing that seascape, and it is the latter ob-ject at the origin of the emotional pro-cess that we perceive in the resultingfeeling state.

In feeling, the brain can act directly onthe very object that it is perceiving, be-cause the object at the origin is insidethe body. It can do so by modifying thestate of the body, or by altering the

transmission signals from it. Thus, theobject at the origin, on the one hand,and the brain map of that object, on theother, can exert mutual influences in asort of reverberative process that is notto be found in the perception of an ex-ternal object. We can look at a paintingwe admire as intensely as we wish, for as long as we wish, and react emotional-ly to it. But nothing will happen to thepainting itself. Our thoughts about itwill change, but the object remains in-tact.

By contrast, in the feeling of emo-tion, the object itself–the body–can be changed radically. In other words, the feeling of emotion is not merely apassive perception or a flash in time. For a period of seconds or even minutesafter a feeling begins, a dynamic engage-ment of the body, conducted almost cer-tainly in a reiterative fashion, leads to a dynamic variation of the perception.Part of the variation may even be due tothe homeostatic necessity of controllingthe motor upheaval caused by the emo-tive process.7 In brief, the body in themind undergoes continuous transitions.

The fact that the body of a given organ-ism can be fully represented in the brainof that organism opens important pos-sibilities. The ½rst relates to conscious-ness, speci½cally with the part of theprocess called the self. Elsewhere wehave argued that the construction ofthe self would simply not be possible if the brain did not have available a dy-namic representation of its body.8 Con-


Minding the body

7 D. Rudrauf and A. Damasio, “A ConjectureRegarding the Biological Mechanism of Subjec-tivity and Feeling,” Journal of ConsciousnessStudies 12 (8–10) (2005): 236–262.

8 Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens; J. Par-vizi and A. Damasio, “Consciousness and theBrainstem,” Cognition 79 (2001): 135–160.

sciousness is about the relation betweena given organism and the objects per-ceived in its mind. In the mental processdepicting the self, the integrated bodyrepresentation serves as a stand-in forthe organism. There is an invariant as-pect to the body representation–itscomponents and the schema accordingto which they are interconnected–and a variable aspect–the dynamic changesthe components constantly undergo.Eventually the body representation be-haves as an anchor for the constructionof the self–a mental stand-in for the in-dividual, for his or her personhood andidentity.

These body representations haveanother major implication: after allow-ing us to represent our own actions andemotional states, actual or simulated,they allow us to simulate the equivalentstates of others. And because we haveestablished a prior connection betweenour own body states and their signi½-cance, we can subsequently attribute thesame signi½cance to the states of othersthat we come to simulate. The body inmind helps us construct our selves andthen allows us to understand others,which is nothing short of astounding.



The word ‘mind’ is a loose one withmany applications in use. As I use ithere, I am restricting it to one de½nitionin Webster’s Third International Dictionary:“Mind–the sum total of the consciousstates of an individual.” I want to sug-gest a way of looking at consciousness in tune with, and responsive to, a state-ment on the subject by the Americanphilosopher Willard van Orman Quine.1With his usual ironic candor, Quine said,

I have been accused of denying conscious-ness, but I am not conscious of havingdone so. Consciousness is to me a mys-tery, and not one to be dismissed. Weknow what it is like to be conscious, butnot how to put it into satisfactory scien-ti½c terms. Whatever it precisely may be,consciousness is a state of the body, a stateof nerves.

The line I am urging as today’s conven-tional wisdom is not a denial of conscious-ness. It is often called, with more reason, a repudiation of mind. It is called a repudi-ation of mind as a second substance, overand above body. It can be described lessharshly as an identi½cation of mind withsome of the faculties, states, and activitiesof the body. Mental states and events are aspecial subclass of the states and events ofthe human or animal body.

Philosophers have wrestled with theso-called mind-body problem for mil-lennia. Their efforts to explore how consciousness arises were intensi½edfollowing René Descartes’ espousal ofdualism. The notion that there are twosubstances–extended substances (resextensa), which are susceptible to phys-ics, and thinking substances (res cogi-tans), which are unavailable to physics–still haunts us. This substance dualismforced confrontation with a key ques-tion: how could the mind arise in thematerial order? Attempts to answer thisquestion have ranged widely. In additionto the various forms of dualism, a fewproposals we might mention are panpsy-chism (consciousness inheres in all mat-


Gerald M. Edelman

The embodiment of mind

Gerald M. Edelman, a Fellow of the AmericanAcademy since 1968, is director of the Neuro-sciences Institute as well as chair of, and profes-sor in, the Department of Neurobiology at theScripps Research Institute. His publications in-clude “The Mindful Brain” (1978), “The Re-membered Present” (1989), and “Wider Thanthe Sky” (2004). He received the Nobel Prize inPhysiology or Medicine in 1972.


1 W. V. Quine, Quiddities: An Intermittently Phi-losophical Dictionary (Cambridge, Mass.: Bel-knap Press, Harvard University Press, 1987),132–133.

ter in varying degrees), mind-body iden-tity (the mind is nothing but the opera-tion of neurons in the brain), and, morerecently, the proposal that the under-standing of quantum gravity will ulti-mately reveal the nature of conscious-ness.2 There are many more proposals,but aside from the extremes of idealismespoused by Bishop Berkeley and GeorgHegel, they all wrestle with one ques-tion: how can we explain consciousnessin bodily terms?

Attempts to answer this question of-ten begin by examining the features ofconsciousness to generate a number ofmore pointed questions. I shall followthat path here. But I don’t wish to con-sider the subject from a philosophicalpoint of view. Rather, I will describe atheory of consciousness based on somesigni½cant advances in neuroscience.

Features of consciousness: Con-sciousness is a process, not a thing. Weexperience it as an ongoing series ofmyriad states, each different but at thesame time each unitary. In other words,we do not experience ‘just this pencil’ or ‘just the color red.’ Instead, within a period I have called the rememberedpresent,3 consciousness consists of com-binations of external perceptions andvarious feelings that may include vision,hearing, smell, and other senses such as proprioception, as well as imagery,memory, mood, and emotion. The com-binations in which these may participateare usually not fragmented, but insteadform a whole ‘scene.’ Consciousness hasthe property of intentionality or ‘about-ness’–it usually refers to objects, events,

images, or ideas, but it doesn’t exhaustthe characteristics of the objects towardwhich it is directed. Furthermore, con-sciousness is qualitative, subjective, andtherefore, to a large degree, private. Itsdetails and actual feel are not obvious-ly accessible to others as they are to theconscious individual who has wide-rang-ing ½rst-person access to ongoing phe-nomenal experience.

This brief summary prompts me tosingle out three challenging questions:1) How can the qualitative features ofconsciousness be reconciled with theactivity of the material body and brain(the qualia question)? 2) Does the con-scious process itself have effects? In oth-er words, is the process of consciousnesscausal (the question of mental causa-tion)? 3) How can conscious activity re-fer to, or be about, objects, even thosethat have no existence, such as unicorns(the intentionality question)?

Body, brain, and environment–the scientific approach: There is a voluminous body of philosophicalthought that attempts to answer thesequestions. The efforts of nineteenth-century scientists in this regard were relatively sketchy. But a new turn datingfrom the 1950s has invigorated the scien-ti½c approach to consciousness.4 Neuro-scienti½c investigation has uncovered arich store of anatomical, physiological,chemical, and behavioral informationabout our brains. It has become possibleto lay the groundwork for a biological-ly based theory of consciousness, and Ibelieve we are now in a position to re-duce Quine’s mystery. In this brief essay,


Gerald M.Edelman on body in mind

2 R. Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1989).

3 G. M. Edelman, The Remembered Present: ABiological Theory of Consciousness (New York:Basic Books, 1989).

4 T. C. Dalton and B. J. Baars, “ConsciousnessRegained: The Scienti½c Restoration of Mindand Brain” in The Life Cycle of PsychologicalIdeas, ed. T. C. Dalton and R. B. Evans (NewYork: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers,2004), 203–247.

I want to lay out some thoughts that beardirectly on the nature of consciousness,as well as on how we know, how we dis-cover and create, and how we search fortruth. There is nature, and there is hu-man nature. How do they intersect?

In the ½rst place, we must recognizethat consciousness is experienced interms of a triadic relationship among the brain, the body, and the environ-ment. Of course, the brain is the organwe wish to examine. But the brain isembodied, and the body and brain areembedded in the world. They act in theworld and are acted upon by it.

We know that in vertebrate species,and speci½cally in humans, the devel-opment of the brain (for example, theorganization of its sensory maps) de-pends on how our eyes, ears, and limbsreceive sensory input from the environ-ment. Change the sequence of actionsand inputs to the brain, and the bound-aries and response properties of brainmaps change, even in adult life. More-over, we sense our whole body (proprio-ception) and our limbs (kinesthesia), aswell as our balance (vestibular function),and this tells us how we are interacting,consciously or not. We also know thatdamage to the brain–for example, fromstrokes involving the cerebral cortex–can radically change how we consciously‘sense’ the world and interpret our bod-ies. Finally, through memory acting incertain sleep states, the brain can giverise to dreams in which our body seemsto carry out actions of an unusual kind.The dreams of rem sleep, however fan-tastic, are in fact conscious states.5

Neurology essential for con-sciousness: What can we say about thebrain structures whose interactions areresponsible for such states? One suchinteractive structure is the cerebral cor-tex.6 Most people are familiar with thecerebral cortex as the wrinkled mantleseen in pictures of the human brain. It is a thin six-layered structure, which, ifunfolded, would be about the size of alarge table napkin and about as thick. Itcontains approximately 30 billion neu-rons or nerve cells, and one million bil-lion synapses connecting them. More-over, its regions receive inputs from oth-er parts of the brain and send outputs to other portions of the central nervoussystem such as the spinal cord. There arecortical regions receiving signals fromsensory receptors that are functionallysegregated for vision, hearing, touch,and smell, for example. There are othercortical regions, more frontally located,which interact mainly with each otherand with more posterior regions. Thereare also regions concerned with move-ment, for example, the so-called motorcortex.

A key feature of the cortex is that it has many massively parallel nerve ½bersconnecting its various regions to eachother. These cortico-cortical tracts me-diate the interactions that are critical forbinding and coordinating different corti-cal activities.

Another structure that is critical forconsciousness is the thalamus. This is a relatively small, centrally located col-lection of so-called nuclei that mediateinputs to, and outputs from, various re-gions of the cortex. For example, thethalamus processes inputs coming fromthe eyes via the optic nerves and sends½bers called axons to a posterior corti-


The em-bodiment of mind

5 Rapid eye movement (rem) sleep is charac-terized by fast jerky eye movements, dreams,and the absence in the electroencephalogramof so-called delta waves that are seen in so-called slow-wave or non-rem sleep.

6 G. M. Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: Onthe Matter of the Mind (New York: Basic Books,1992).

cal region called V1. V1, in turn, sendsreciprocal ½bers back to the thalamus.Similar thalamo-cortical and cortico-thalamic connections exist for all othersenses except for smell; each sense ismediated by a speci½c thalamic nucleus.

It is known that strokes damaging acortical area such as V1 lead to blind-ness. Similar losses of function in oth-er regions can lead to paralysis, loss ofspeech function (aphasia), and evenmore bizarre syndromes in which, forexample, a patient pays attention only to the right half of his perceptual world(hemineglect). Damage to particularportions of the cortex can thus lead tochanges in the contents of conscious-ness.

The thalamus projects ½bers from cer-tain of its nuclei in a diffuse fashion towidespread cortical areas. Damage tothese nuclei of the thalamus can haveeven more devastating effects than cor-tical strokes, including the complete and permanent loss of consciousness, in what has been called a persistent veg-etative state. These thalamic nuclei thusappear to be necessary to set the thresh-old for the activity of the cortical neu-rons underlying conscious responses.

The thalamocortical system is essen-tial for the integration of brain actionacross a widely distributed set of brainregions. It is a highly active and dynam-ic system–and its complex activity, instimulating and coordinating dispersedpopulations of neuronal groups, has ledto its designation as a dynamic core. Thedynamic core is essential for conscious-ness and for conscious learning.7 Inter-actions mainly within the core itself leadto integration of signals, but it also hasconnections to subcortical regions that

are critical for nonconscious activities. It is these regions that enable you, forexample, to ride a bicycle without con-scious attention after having consciouslylearned how.

The structures I have mentioned thusfar function dynamically by strengthen-ing or weakening the synapses that in-terconnect them. These changes result in the activation of particular pathwaysafter signals are received from the body,the world, and the brain itself. Thesedynamics allow the development of per-ceptual categories in the short term andmemory in the long term.

In addition to changes that result fromand accompany an individual’s behavior,the brain also has inherited value sys-tems selected for and shaped during evo-lution that constrain particular behav-iors. These systems consist of variouslylocated groups of neurons that send as-cending axons diffusely into variousbrain areas. For example, the locus coe-ruleus consists of several thousand neu-rons on each side of the brain stem,sending ½bers up to the higher brain.Like a leaky garden hose, the ½bers re-lease noradrenaline when a salient sig-nal, such as a loud noise, is received.This substance modulates or changes the responses of neurons by changingtheir thresholds of activity.

Another important value system isknown as the dopaminergic system. Insituations of reward learning, neurons inthis system release dopamine. This com-pound modulates the response thresholdof large numbers of target neurons–forexample, those in the cerebral cortex.Without such a value system, the brainwould not function ef½ciently to relatebehavior to the need for survival, i.e., toassure adaptive bodily behavior. Noticethat ‘value’ as I discuss it here is not ‘cat-egory.’ While value systems constrainrewards or punishments, an individual’s



7 G. M. Edelman, Wider Than the Sky: The Phe-nomenal Gift of Consciousness (New Haven andLondon: Yale University Press, 2004).

behavior, learning, perception of objectsand events, and memory all derive fromactions that occur during that individ-ual’s lifetime by means of ongoing selec-tion from the brain’s vast neuronal rep-ertoires.

A word about the vastness of theserepertoires may be in order. Taken to-gether with the intricacy of brain ana-tomy, the dynamics of synaptic changecan give rise to a huge number of pos-sible functional circuits. For example,synaptic change acting on the millionbillion synapses of the cerebral cortexcan provide hyperastronomical num-bers of circuits subject to selection dur-ing behavior.

The need for a brain theory: Thebackground for a theory of conscious-ness that I have presented so far puts astrong emphasis not just on the action of brain regions but also on their inter-action. Some scientists have been tempt-ed to speculate in the opposite direction,claiming that there are ‘consciousnessneurons’ or ‘consciousness areas’ in thebrain. It seems to me more fruitful to askabout the interactions among brain re-gions that are essential for conscious-ness.

To explain consciousness in biologi-cal terms requires a theory of brain ac-tion and a linked theory of conscious-ness, and both must be framed within an evolutionary perspective. To putthese theories in such a perspective, it is useful to distinguish between prima-ry consciousness and higher-order con-sciousness.8 Primary consciousness (asseen, for example, in monkeys and dogs)is awareness of the present scene. It hasno explicit conscious awareness of beingconscious, little or no conscious narra-tive concept of the past and future, and

no explicit awareness of a socially con-structed self. Higher-order conscious-ness, which yields these concepts, de-pends on primary consciousness, butincludes semantic capabilities that arepossessed by apes, such as chimpanzees,and, in their highest reaches, by humanswho have true language.

To simplify matters, let us focus on theevolutionary emergence of primary con-sciousness. Why do I insist that we baseour explanation on an underlying braintheory? One reason stems from the ideathat the neural structures underlyingconsciousness must integrate an enor-mous variety of inputs and actions. Aparsimonious hypothesis assumes thatthe mechanism of integration of thisgreat diversity of inputs and outputs iscentral and not multifarious. A contrast-ing hypothesis would require separatemechanisms for each conscious state–perception, image, feeling, emotion, etc.

What kind of theory can account forthe unity in diversity of these states? Ihave suggested elsewhere that such atheory must rest on Darwin’s idea ofpopulation thinking applied to individ-ual vertebrate brains. The resultant the-ory, Neural Darwinism, or the theory ofneuronal group selection (tngs), statesthat the brain is a selectional system,unlike an instructional system such as a computer.9 In a selectional system, arepertoire of diverse elements preexists,and inputs then choose the elementsthat match those inputs. The enormousdiversity in the microscopic anatomy of the brain is created by a selectionalrule during the brain’s development:neurons that ½re together wire together.This rule acts epigenetically, i.e., it doesnot depend primarily on genes. Over-lapping this developmental selection isexperiential selection: even after brain



9 Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire.8 Edelman, The Remembered Present.

anatomy is developed, the connectionstrengths at the so-called synapseschange as a result of an individual’s ex-perience. This alters the dynamic signal-ing across neuronal pathways. By thesemeans, vast–indeed, hyperastronomi-cal–repertoires of circuits, consisting ofneuronal groups or populations, are cre-ated, upon which further selection canoccur and upon which memory is based.As a result, no two brains are identical intheir ½ne details.

The existence of these repertoires isessential as a basis for the selection ofcircuits leading to behavior. However,their existence cannot in itself accountfor the integration of the brain’s re-sponses in space and time. For this, a speci½c anatomically based dynamicfeature of higher brains had to evolve.This critical feature is reentry: the recur-sive signaling between brain regions andmaps across massively parallel arrange-ments of neural ½bers called axons. Re-entrant activity synchronizes and coor-dinates the activity of the brain regionslinked by these axonal ½bers. An out-standing example of such parallel con-nections is the so-called corpus callo-sum. This tract consists of millions ofaxons going in both directions to con-nect the right and left cerebral cortices.Reentrant activity across such a struc-ture will change with behavior and alsoact to integrate and synchronize the dy-namic activity of ½ring neurons. Thisintegrative synchronization allows vari-ous brain maps to coordinate their activ-ity by selection. No superordinate or ex-ecutive area is required. This means thatdifferent maps of the brain can be func-tionally segregated–e.g., for sight, audi-tion, touch, etc.–but, nonetheless, canbecome integrated, as reflected in theunitary scene of primary consciousness.

What might be useful at this point isan image or metaphor to capture how

the reentrant thalamocortical system–the dynamic core–binds or integratesthe complex activities of the variousfunctionally segregated areas of the cortex in a manner consistent with theunitary scenes of primary conscious-ness. One such image is that of a dense-ly coupled mass of numerous springs.Disturbance within one region of such a structure will be propagated throughthe whole structure, but certain of itsdistributed vibrational states will be in-tegrated and favored over others. Lessdense and looser coupling to othersprings would correspond to interac-tions of the core with subcortical brainstructures. The main point here is thatthe myriad interactions in such a dense-ly connected mass will yield certain fa-vored states, integrating various localchanges in a more coherent fashion.This is, of course, only a gross mechani-cal analogy, but I hope it will help pro-vide a grasp of the subtle electrochemi-cal interactions of core neurons mediat-ed by reentry that can yield such a greatvariety of distinct states.

Reentry is the central organizing prin-ciple in selectionistic vertebrate brains.It is of some interest that the underlyingstructures necessary for dynamic reen-try appear to be missing from insectbrains. For our purposes, reentry willturn out to provide an essential basis for the evolutionary emergence of con-sciousness. The implication is clear: ani-mals lacking wide-scale reentrant activi-ty are not expected to be conscious as weare.

Abiological theory of conscious-ness: We are now in a position to relatethese observations of anatomy and neu-ral dynamics to an analysis of conscious-ness. As I have suggested, a theory ofconsciousness based on interactions of the brain, body, and environment



must be grounded in an evolutionaryframework.10 According to the extend-ed tngs, primary consciousness ½rstappeared several hundred million yearsago at the time of the emergence of birdsand mammals from their therapsid rep-tile ancestors. At these junctures, thereappears to have been a large increase inthe number and types of thalamic nu-clei. Even more to the point, new andmassive reentrant connectivity appearedamong cortical regions responsible forperceptual categorization, and moreanterior brain regions mediating value-category memory. This is the memoryenabled by selective synaptic plasticity,which is constrained overall by value-system responses to reward or to a lackof reward. The integration achieved bythis reentrant system, including thewidely distributed thalamic connec-tions, gave rise to unitary conscious orphenomenal experience.

Now we must confront an issuelabored over by students of the mind-body problem. How can one relate theintegrated ½ring of the dynamic core to the subjective experience of qualia?The term ‘qualia’ has been applied nar-rowly to the warmness of warmth, thegreenness of green, etc. In view of thepresent theory, all conscious experi-ences–especially the various integratedunitary experiences accompanying corestates–are qualia. How can they be ex-plained in neural terms?

The answer harks back to evolution.According to the theory, animals pos-sessing a dynamic core are able to dis-criminate and distinguish among themyriad interactions of different percep-tions, memories, and emotional states.11

This enormous enhancement of dis-

criminatory capability is of obviousadaptive advantage. Animals lacking adynamic core can make relatively fewdiscriminations. In contrast, animalspossessing primary consciousness canrehearse, plan, and generally increasetheir chances of survival through theirability to make the vast numbers of dis-criminations necessary for the planningof behavior.

This provides a key answer to ourquestion concerning the relationship of neural states to qualia. Qualia are thediscriminations afforded by the variouscore states. Thus, although each corestate is unitary, reflecting integration of its activity, it changes or differentiatesto a new state over fractions of a second,depending on outer and inner circum-stances and signals. Still, you might ask:how can we connect neural activity toqualitative experience? The answer isthat particular dynamic core states faith-fully entail particular combinations ofdiscriminations or qualia. Core states do not cause qualia any more than thestructure of hemoglobin in your bloodcauses its characteristic spectrum–thequantum mechanical structure entailsthis spectrum. In this view, consciousstates are not causal. The underlyingbrain and core activity is both causal andfaithful. This reconciles the theory withphysics–no readjustments for spookyforces need to be made to the laws ofthermodynamics to account for con-sciousness.

What I have not emphasized is therelationship of this model of conscious-ness to the subjective self. Briefly, thisrelationship depends on the value sys-tems–the agencies of the brain control-ling endocrine and movement responsesas well as emotions.12 In the reentrantinteractions of the core, the earliest and



10 Edelman, Wider Than the Sky.

11 A. R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999). 12 Ibid.

most inherent activities of these systemsoften supersede other inputs. There is, in fetuses as well as in babies and adults,constant proprioceptive and kinesthet-ic input to the core from the body andlimbs. It is inevitable that elements ofself-reference arise under these circum-stances.

This account provides a backgroundfor certain features of higher-order con-sciousness present in humans. With theemergence of higher-order conscious-ness, through the evolution of largerbrains with a new set of reentrant con-nections allowing semantic exchange, asocially de½ned self could appear. Narra-tion of the past and extensive planningof future scenarios became possible. Soarose the consciousness of being con-scious.

Some ½nd it a retreat to an abhorrentepiphenomenalism to assume that con-sciousness is not itself causal. But uponreflection, one sees that core processesare faithful ones–so much so that wecan speak as if our discriminations orqualia are causal. Besides the ½delity ofthe proposed mechanism, we may pointout its universality: all discriminations–whether sensory, abstract, emotional,or fantasy-ridden–are integrated by thesame reentrant mechanisms operating in the thalamocortical core. This lays the burden of differences among qualiaon their prior neural origins in regionssending inputs to the core. Qualia aredifferent because the neural receptorsand circuits for each differ. Touch recep-tors and circuits differ from visual recep-tors and circuits, as do neural circuitsgoverning hormonal and movement re-sponses. Each quale is distinguished byits position within the universe of otherqualia, and there is, in general, no placefor isolated qualia, except perhaps in thelinguistic references of philosophers.

We may now encapsulate the pictureput forth here.

According to Neural Darwinism, thebrain is a selectional system, not an in-structional one. As such, it contains vastrepertoires of neurons and their connec-tions, giving rise to enormous numbersof dynamic states. Behavior is the resultof selection from these diverse states.While the brain responds epigeneticallyto signals from the body and the world,both in development and in behavior, italso has inherited constraints. These in-clude not only morphological and func-tional aspects of the body, but also theoperation of the brain’s value systems.Such structures and systems were select-ed during evolutionary time. It is the in-terplay between evolutionary selectionand somatic selection that leads to adap-tive behavior.

To provide for this behavior, the com-binatorial richness and uniqueness ofeach human brain are coordinated andintegrated by the dynamic process ofreentry. Indeed, it was the evolution ofnew reentrant circuitry in the dynamicthalamocortical core that allowed theemergence of the myriad discrimina-tions among successive integrated states,which comprise the process of primaryconsciousness. The rich combinations of qualia constituting phenomenal ex-perience are precisely these discrimina-tions, which are faithfully entailed bycore activity. The possession of primaryconsciousness allows for the planning of behavior, conferring adaptive advan-tages on the vertebrate species havingthis capability.

It is the activity of neuronal groups inthe reentrant dynamic core that is caus-al, for it provides the means for planningadaptive responses. Consciousness as aphenomenal process cannot be causal in the physical world, which is causallyclosed to anything but the interactions



of matter-energy. Nonetheless, speakingas if conscious states are causal usuallymirrors the truly causal core states.

Inasmuch as the set of historic selec-tive events accompanying each individ-ual’s development is a function of theunique triadic interactions of body,brain, and world, no two selves or sets of brain states are identical. The priva-cy and subjectivity of conscious statesand selves are an obligate outcome ofbody-brain interactions. In hominineevolution, a more sophisticated selfemerged as a result of social interactionsfacilitated by the appearance of new re-entrant core circuits that permitted theemergence of higher-order conscious-ness and, ultimately, language. As pow-erful as this system of higher-order con-sciousness is, it still depends critically on the operation of primary conscious-ness. In any event, the proposed reen-trant core mechanism is universal, i.e., it applies to all mental states, wheth-er they concern emotions or abstractthoughts.

As a result of higher-order conscious-ness enhanced by language, humanshave concepts of the past, the future,and social identity. These enormouslyimportant capabilities derive from theactivity of the reentrant dynamic coreresponding to a multiplicity of inputsfrom the body and the world, as well asthe brain’s use of linguistic tokens. Theembodiment of mind that results is cer-tainly one of the most remarkable conse-quences of natural selection.

These considerations provide provi-sional answers to both the qualia ques-tion and the question of mental causa-tion. In this brief compass, I cannotdelve deeply into the intentionalityquestion.13 But the framework I have

described posits that consciousness re-quires reentry between systems of per-ceptual categorization and systems ofmemory. Perceptual systems, by theirnature, depend upon interactions be-tween the brain and signals from thebody and the world. In one sense theyare systems of referral. Moreover, mem-ory systems allow the brain to speak toitself, providing a means for referral towhat have been called ‘inexistent ob-jects,’ such as unicorns or zombies. With the emergence of higher-orderconsciousness and language, intention-ality achieves a range that is, for all in-tents and purposes, limitless.

Significance: I have described a theo-ry, the testing of which will depend ontwo factors. The ½rst is the self-consis-tency of its underlying concepts. Thesecond is the provision of support byexperimental means. Clearly, it is im-portant to search for neural correlates of conscious processes. There is alreadyevidence that reentry plays a role in aperson’s becoming aware of an object.14

What is required additionally is evi-dence of how the reentrant activity ofthe dynamic core changes when a per-son goes from an unconscious state to a conscious one. And, of course, weshould welcome a variety of experi-ments exploring neural correlates ofconsciousness in the hope that someunforeseen correlation will either sup-port or change our theoretical views.

For the present, it is useful to ask whatconsequences this theory would have,



13 John Searle considers intentionality exten-sively in J. R. Searle, Consciousness and Language

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2002).

14 R. Srinivasan, D. P. Russell, G. M. Edel-man, and G. Tononi, “Increased Synchroniza-tion of Magnetic Responses During ConsciousPerception,” Journal of Neuroscience 19 (1999):5435–5448.

if we assume it is correct. If the theoryholds up, we would no longer have toconsider dualism, panpsychism, mys-terianism, or spooky forces as explana-tions of our phenomenal experience. We would have a better view of our placein the world order. Indeed, we would½nally be able to corroborate Darwin’sview that the brain and mind of man arethe outcome of natural selection.

Clearly such a theory, linking body,brain, and environment in terms of con-scious responses, would, if correct, be ofgreat use in gaining an understanding ofpsychiatric and neuropsychological syn-dromes and diseases. Even in the normalsphere, such a theory might give us abetter picture of the bases of human illu-sions, useful and otherwise.

Tangent to these matters, such a brain-based theory might allow us to obtain aclearer understanding of the connectionbetween the objective descriptions ofhard science and the subjective, norma-tive issues that arise in ethics and aes-thetics. Theory pursued in this fashionmight avoid silly reductionism whilehelping to undo the divorce between sci-ence and the humanities.

Quine, with whose quote this essaybegan, suggested that epistemology, thetheory of knowledge, be naturalized bylinking it to empirical science, particu-larly psychology.15 His proposal encom-passed physics, but restricted itself tosensory receptors, a position he justi½edby claiming that one could, by this re-striction, maintain the extensionality ofphysics. His position, unfortunately, wasallied to philosophical behaviorism, andto that extent it skirted the importantissue of consciousness. The present ex-cursions, if validated, are more expan-

sive–they would allow the formulationof a biologically based epistemology,which would include the analysis ofintentionality. While remaining consis-tent with physics, this would representan accounting of knowledge in termsthat relate truth to opinion and belief, as well as thought to emotion. Such anaccounting would include aspects ofbrain-based subjectivity in its analysis of human knowledge. Intrinsic to such a study would be the understanding thatknowledge, conscious or unconscious,depends on action in the world.

Finally, one must seriously considerthe future possibility of an arti½cial em-bodiment of mind: we may someday beable to construct a conscious artifact.Brain-based devices capable of acting in the environment and able to developconditioned responses and autonomous-ly locate targets already exist.16 None-theless, we are still very far from realiz-ing a conscious artifact. To be sure thatwe had achieved this would require, Ibelieve, that such a device have the abili-ty to report its phenomenal states whilewe measured its neural and bodily per-formance. Would such a device sense theworld in ways we cannot imagine? Onlythe receipt of extraterrestrial messageswould exceed this enterprise in excite-ment.

In the meantime, we can take comfortin the fact that such a device, which willnot have our body, will neither destroynor challenge the uniqueness of our phe-nomenal experience.



15 W. V. Quine, Ontological Relativity and OtherEssays (New York: Columbia University Press,1969), chap. 3.

16 J. L. Krichmar and G. M. Edelman, “Ma-chine Psychology: Autonomous Behavior, Per-ceptual Categorization and Conditioning in aBrain-based Device,” Cerebral Cortex 12 (2002):818–830.

We often de½ne the basic goals ofhuman striving in terms of emotion: we yearn for happiness and do our ut-most to avoid misery.1 But making thedistinction between positive and nega-tive emotions is not as simple as sayingthat we seek the former and shun the lat-ter. Emotions often have a will of theirown and may resist attempts to be dis-ciplined. Victims of wartime atrocitiesand natural disasters, for example, mayunwillingly suffer from involuntaryflashbacks in which they re-experiencethe trauma, eliciting intense fright thatthreatens or undermines adjustment.But some individuals–such as journal-ists, photographers, and Peace Corpsworkers–are willfully drawn to thosevery fear-ridden circumstances, not tomention people who ½nd their (some-

times compulsive) joy in activities mostof us fear–parachute jumping, moun-tain climbing, or extreme skiing. Like-wise, our lives may become devastatedby the prototypical emotion we all de-sire, passionate love, and we may ruinour health with the delights of food anddrink. Still, for most of us, life withoutemotion would not be worth living. Butat the same time, others have regardedemotion as a dark, alien force to whichwe helplessly succumb, to our own detri-ment.

Clearly, emotions resist simple inter-pretation. The purpose of this essay is to discuss the conflicting nature of emo-tion in light of modern research in psy-chology and neuroscience. I start withsome philosophical considerations thatlead to a conceptualization of emotionthat ties emotion to the body via evolu-tionary biology and neuroscience. I thenreview how contemporary science hasaddressed some of the classic questionsof emotion research.

The conflict-ridden nature of emotionhas been evident throughout recordedintellectual history. Almost 2,500 years


Arne Öhman

Making sense of emotion: evolution, reason & the brain

Arne Öhman is professor of psychology in the De-partment of Clinical Neuroscience at KarolinskaInstitutet. He has published close to two hundredjournal articles and book chapters and coeditedthree books, including “Psychopathology: An In-teractional Perspective” (with David Magnusson,1987) and “The Structure of Emotion: Psycho-physiological, Cognitive, and Clinical Aspects”(with Niels Birbaumer, 1993).


1 This essay was completed while the authorwas a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studyin the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, Califor-nia.

ago, at the birth of Greek philosophy,Demokritos said that we need wisdom to cure the mind of emotion the way weneed medicine to cure bodily ailments.2This idea was central to the Epicureanand Stoic philosophical movements,which predicated their notions of thegood life on the insight that we are dis-turbed not by things themselves but bywhat we make of them. Reason tells usthat we need not fear death because weshall not be there to experience it. Weshould enjoy food, drink, and intellectu-al exchange in the context of cultivatingfriendship. But we should not let emo-tions associated with insatiable desiresfor ephemeral things–such as wealth,fame, and power–seduce us. In contrast,the early Christians did not trust thepower of reason to control emotion, butmade a handful of problematic emotionscentral to the deadly sins (the commit-ting of which did make death somethingto fear): avarice, lust, envy, gluttony, in-difference, pride, and wrath.

The Stoics made an interesting dis-tinction–between the ½rst and second‘movements’ of an emotion. The ½rstmovement is reflexive, such as when weinstinctively duck for a swooping bird orstop dead when confronted by a snake.The second movement is what we makeof this instinctive response: How dan-gerous is the situation? Will the birdattack again? Is the snake poisonous?This process of evaluation depends onvoluntary mental activity. For example,after the initial surge of erotic excite-ment upon encountering an overwhelm-ingly attractive potential partner, onemight then rationally analyze the situ-ation, which may result in emotional

deactivation by shifting one’s attentionto something less evocative. By makingthe second movement the essence ofemotion, the Stoics changed the mean-ing of emotion from an automatic andinvoluntary response to something indi-viduals could consciously control andtake responsibility for.

The enigmatic nature of emotion maybe one reason science has long neglectedit. But there are other reasons as well.The way we normally know emotions is through feelings, which are elusive,capricious, and probably changed by thevery act of observing them. Above all,they are observable only in the mind’seye of the emoter. Feelings, therefore,elude science, which aspires for an ob-jective database in which observers canagree on raw data accessible to many ob-servers. Accordingly, some have arguedthat the subjective nature of feelings ex-cludes them from the realm of science.

However, few deny that they have feel-ings, and therefore a science of emotionremains incomplete without them. AsJeffrey Gray pointed out, feelings are the raw data of emotion for each of us,which we can use to test theories ofemotion in our own mind.3 Of course,such an exercise does not constitute ascience, but it may help achieve one ofthe goals of science–helping people tounderstand the world in which they live.

Indeed, emotions are observable by an outsider, but only if we reject the no-tion of feelings as the raw data of emo-tion. The uniquely human ability of lan-guage provides a means for people tomake their feelings known to the outsideworld, even though putting words toemotional experience poses challenges


ArneÖhmanon body in mind

2 This part on the history of emotion is verymuch inspired by Keith Oatley, Emotions: ABrief History (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Pub-lishing, 2005).

3 Jeffrey Gray, “The Content of Consciousness:A Neuropsychological Conjecture,” Behavioraland Brain Sciences 18 (1995): 659–722.

for the verbal community. As behavior-ist pioneers Edward C. Tolman and B. F.Skinner pointed out, language describ-ing emotion is necessarily less precisethan language depicting the outsideworld. Since an object or event in theworld is available both to the languagelearner and the supervising verbal com-munity, the community can reinforcethe correct naming of objects and theircharacteristics. On the other hand, whentrying to teach children to talk abouttheir emotions, the verbal communitycan only interpret a child’s body lan-guage as indicating fear rather than an-ger, for instance. Nevertheless, in theend, adults are reasonably good at label-ing the emotion they feel, sometimes tothe point of providing meaningful quan-titative estimates of its intensity.

Evolutionary theory, in contendingthat humans have speci½cally evolvedthe capacity to sense the emotions ofothers, points to an even stronger argu-ment for the possibility of objectivelyobserving emotion. Evolutionary sci-entists commonly assume that the pres-sure of complex social organization cat-alyzed the rapid enlargement of the hu-man brain during the last million years.Robinson Crusoe, as Nicholas Hum-phrey once remarked, illustrates thismodel of human evolution: the realchallenge for Crusoe was not to sur-vive alone on the island, but came withman Friday.4 (Had Monday, Tuesday,Wednesday, and Thursday made theirpresence known as well, Crusoe reallywould have been put to the test.) Suc-cessful social navigation demanded notonly that individuals could recognizemany group members but also accurate-ly decode their emotional states, in or-

der to understand, predict, and exploittheir actions. One could even claim that we have a special organ that allows(and sometimes impedes) emotion rec-ognition: the face. Darwin himself pro-vided a compelling argument that a pri-mary function of the face is to commu-nicate emotion. Indeed, a substantialresearch body attests to the fact that hu-mans from diverse cultures are quiteadept at distinguishing a set of apparent-ly universal emotions from facial expres-sions.5

We have more than the movement of facial muscles to help us discern theemotional state of a fellow human. In a very real sense, emotions reside in the body, since they mobilize the body’smetabolic resources for potentially vig-orous action. Many of us have noticedthe racing heart, the dry mouth, the cold sweat, and the ‘butterflies in thestomach’ in anticipation of a fearful en-counter. These bodily changes are con-trolled by the autonomic nervous sys-tem, which is primarily responsible formatching metabolic resources to themuscular–and, to some extent, themental–needs of the body.

Subtler physiological changes indica-tive of emotion, of which even the emot-er may not be consciously aware, mayalso be readily apparent to observers. A blushing face reveals embarrassment;an opponent’s pupils widened in fear can inspire con½dence in a combatant; a date’s pupil size can also help a per-son gauge the progress of his seductiveefforts. Whereas some physiologicalchanges, such as blushing, are speci½c to a particular emotion, the majority of them, like pupil size, indicates someunspeci½c emotional activation. In anycase, physiological changes of this type


Makingsense of emotion

4 Nicholas Humphrey, Consciousness Regained:Chapters in the Development of Mind (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1983).

5 Paul Ekman, Emotions Revealed (New York:Times Books, Henry Holt & Co., 2004).

are relatively easy to measure. In fact, an interdisciplinary ½eld called psycho-physiology6 has developed a body ofknowledge recording and interpretingperipheral bodily changes to psycho-logically meaningful stimuli, includingemotional events.7 Thus, psychophysi-ology provides one avenue for makingemotions objects for scienti½c scrutiny.

Actions are another good indicator ofemotion, since an important function of emotion is to prime and add urgencyto action.8 Thus, we can infer emotionfrom different aspects of action, bothexpressive and instrumental. As we haveseen, we can detect and interpret emo-tion from facial responses, the primaryexample of expressive behavior. Butemotion can also charge instrumentalaction by giving value to stimuli: whatwe like we will approach, what we dis-like we will avoid.9 We can observe thisapproach-avoidance dimension at manylevels. For example, gaze direction is in-formative because we tend to look atthings we like and avert our eyes fromthings that we dislike. General posturealso gives clues to emotion; fear createsa tense posture, revealing an obviousreadiness to escape. Then there is grosslocomotion, which modulates the dis-

tance between ourselves and surround-ing objects (including people). Someapproach-avoidance is subtle, such aswhen we read new e-mails instead ofanswering the disturbing ones in ourfolders denoted ‘urgent.’

Finally, we are often also aware of thestimulus situation eliciting an emotion,which provides abundant cues for likelyemotional reactions and thus places use-ful constraints on the interpretation ofbodily and behavioral responses as well.

In concert, all of these different do-mains of observation help supply an ob-jective delineation of emotion accessibleto scienti½c study. Furthermore, we cancorrelate these domains with neuralevents in brain imaging studies, thus ad-vancing our understanding of the brainmechanisms of emotion.

Connecting emotion to different out-puts–verbal reports as well as physio-logical and behavioral changes–doesmore than merely provide an operation-al de½nition of emotion. It provides aconceptual perspective on emotion thatis easy to integrate with psychobiologi-cal considerations, which incorporateboth evolutionary theory and neurosci-ence.

First, this scheme stands in oppositionto the common notion of an emotion asa uni½ed entity that is isomorphic withthe felt emotion. Rather, felt emotion is one of several ways in which an emo-tion may manifest itself; an emotion isactually a complex reaction composed of several loosely coupled response com-ponents, none of which is necessary orsuf½cient to infer the emotion.10 This



6 John Cacioppo, Lou Tassinary, and Gary G.Berntson, eds., Handbook of Psychophysiology(New York: Cambridge University Press,2000).

7 Arne Öhman and Stefan Wiens, “On the Au-tomaticity of Autonomic Responses in Emo-tion: An Evolutionary Perspective,” in Hand-book of Affective Sciences, ed. R. Davidson, K.Scherer, and H. Hill (New York: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 2003), 256–275.

8 Nico Frijda, The Emotions (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1986).

9 P. J. Lang, M. M. Bradley, and B. N. Cuth-bert, “Emotion, Attention, and the Startle Re-flex,” Psychological Review 97 (1990): 377–398.

10 P. J. Lang, “Anxiety: Toward a Psychophys-iological De½nition,” in Psychiatric Diagnosis:Exploration of Biological Predictors, ed. H. S.Akiskal and W. L. Webb (New York: Spec-trum, 1978).

approach sees emotions as fuzzy con-cepts, best de½ned in terms of the de-gree of overlap with a prototype of a full-blown emotion, which includes an emo-tional stimulus, a reported feeling, a fa-cial expression, psychophysiological ac-tivation, and emotional behavior.11

Second, this approach establishes be-havioral and psychophysiological linksbetween human and animal emotion,paving the way for an evolutionary anal-ysis of emotion. Because evolutionaryanalyses center on adaptive function,they offer an interesting perspective onthe long-standing belief that emotionundermines wisdom. If we think thatcultivating wisdom is the uniquely hu-man approach to bettering our positionin the world, then it follows that naturalselection must have favored human rea-soning ability, and if so, emotion musthave assisted, rather than undermined,wisdom. Indeed, a phenomenon as ubiq-uitous in mammalian life as emotionsimply must have an important func-tion; otherwise it would not have sur-vived the natural selection process.

Yet, historically, psychology has been skeptical about emotion not on-ly because of its subjective nature, butbecause of its questionable functionalstatus as well. In fact, some investiga-tors surmised that the primary effect of emotion was to disorganize behavior.But while we have all been pressed byoverwhelming emotion to act stupidly,emotion would not have evolved haddisorganizing behavior been its primaryfunction. It would have been unlikely inanimals as well, remaining a curious hu-man ability with the obscure purpose ofundermining higher cognition.

Using neuropsychological data on theeffect of frontal-lobe lesion, AntonioDamasio built a strong case that emo-tions are critical to humans and humancognition.12 Persons with lesions in theventromedial prefrontal cortex (at thebottom of the frontal brain, just abovethe nasal cavity) show few obvious de½-cits (as revealed by psychological tests)in functions like perception, attention,memory, and language. Nonetheless,their lives fall apart. Even individualswho functioned at a high level before the lesion destroy their circumstancesthrough a series of ill-advised economicand social decisions.

Damasio reasoned that their decisionmaking had become dissociated fromtheir emotions, which normally serve as“biasing devices” that assist in makingdecisions. When we are faced with a de-cision, positive associations (consciousor unconscious) surrounding somechoices make them seem more appeal-ing, while negative emotions surround-ing others make them more or less im-possible to choose. The ventromedialprefrontal cortex provides the interfacebetween the cognitive and the emotionalbrain by evaluating “somatic markers”that convey information about emotion-related bodily changes. In the absence of the emotional backdrop provided bythese somatic markers, the person with a lesion in the ventromedial prefrontalcortex is likely to get stuck pondering amultitude of alternatives, eventuallymaking a bad choice.

This proposal ½ts into a broader per-spective that views emotions as helpingestablish priorities for action.13 Signi½-cant events in our world elicit different



11 P. Shaver, J. Schwartz, D. Kirson, and C. O’Connor, “Emotion Knowledge: FurtherExploration of a Prototype Approach,” Journalof Personality and Social Psychology 52 (1987):1061–1086.

12 A. R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion,Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: G. P.Putnam, 1994).

13 Frijda, The Emotions.

emotions, and these emotions guide ac-tion by highlighting important goals. An approach-avoidance dimension per-vades the neural organization control-ling goals and their emotional valence.14

Some goals are negatively de½ned–thatis, they are avoided because they are re-lated to pain, fear, and loss–and othersare positively de½ned because they ac-tivate powerful appetitive motivation-al states.

Evolution has equipped our brainswith a system that is activated when wereach valued goals. It extends from themidbrain through the central parts ofthe brain, which control basic life func-tions, to the frontal cortex; it is servedby dopamine neurons; and it modulatesneural activity in large parts of the brain.It is activated by food and water, sexualactivity and orgasm, defeating a rival,collecting resources, and so on.15 Impor-tantly, the neurons of this system areeasily conditioned to ½re to stimuli thatsignal reward.16 It is this system thatproduces the kick we feel when reachinga goal (“Yeah, I did it, didn’t I!”). It isalso a system that can be co-opted bychemicals to produce addiction. In fact,all known addictive substances act atvarious receptor sites of the reward sys-tem.17

From an evolutionary point of view,this system is a clever device to makeorganisms honor goals vital to survivaland procreation. Thus, we can see emo-tions as grounded in evolutionarily de-½ned systems–i.e., reward, defense–which make us want to do what our fore-fathers had to do in order to make surethat their genes were represented in thenext generation.18

This evolutionary analysis provides an explanation for one aspect of the in-herently conflictual nature of emotionsalluded to in the opening of this essay: atleast the basic emotions operate accord-ing to an evolutionary agenda that maydiffer from our culturally de½ned agen-da. The evolutionary agenda wants,above all, for genes to be propagated;therefore, the central task for humans(and other animals) is to mate, procre-ate, and take care of offspring. Hence,even though his Victorian imprintingprecluded an explicit statement, Darwinwould have agreed with Freud that sex is the most powerful source of motiva-tion, bound to generate conflicts with-in and between the sexes, and within any group of people. Other emotionallycharged basic motives that can produceconflict include dominance as well ascompetition for, and the hoarding of,resources.

From this perspective, an importantpriority for any culture is to domesticateemotions that are likely to generate con-flicts and threaten group cohesion. Anessential component of socialization,therefore, is to acquire the ability to reg-ulate emotion. As a result, the success-



14 Lang et al., “Emotion, Attention, and theStartle Reflex,” 377–398.

15 Trevor Robbins and Barry Everitt, “Motiva-tion and Reward,” in L. Squire et al., eds., Fun-damental Neuroscience, 2nd ed. (San Diego: Aca-demic Press, 2003).

16 W. Schultz, “Multiple Reward Signals in theBrain,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 1 (2000):199–207.

17 George Koob, “Drug Reward and Addic-tion,” in Squire et al., eds., Fundamental Neu-roscience.

18 Arne Öhman, Anders Flykt, and DanielLundqvist, “Unconscious Emotion: Evolution-ary Perspectives, Psychophysiological Data, and Neuropsychological Mechanisms,” in TheCognitive Neuroscience of Emotion, ed. R. Laneand L. Nadel (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2000), 296–327.

fully socialized individual has a culturalself with goals that may differ from (butare likely to be less evocative than) thegoals of the evolutionary agenda. Thus,as philosophers realized long ago, we aremore or less designed to get stuck on thehorn of the dilemma between (culturallyde½ned) reason and emotion.

The modern science of emotion hasrevived the Stoic distinction between a ½rst and a second movement of emo-tion. The research literature has exten-sively documented the ½rst, reflexivemotion in particular. Here, Robert Za-jonc’s pioneering work demonstratedthe “mere exposure effect.”19 In thiscritical experiment, participants wereexposed to a set of Chinese ideogramsvery briefly–so briefly that they couldnot distinguish the ideograms. Theywere then shown and asked to rate thestimuli they had already viewed as wellas stimuli to which they had not beenexposed. Participants rated the previous-ly exposed Chinese ideograms as morelikable than similar nonexposed controlideograms.

Joseph LeDoux provided a potentialneural underpinning for this effect bydemonstrating that stimuli could reachthe amygdala, a collection of nuclei inthe temporal lobe and the hub of thebrain’s emotional network, by a directand fast “low road” that did not passthrough the cortex.20 Through his work

with animals, LeDoux argued that thisdirect route to the amygdala enabledrapid activation of defense in threaten-ing situations.

LeDoux’s work showed that emotionscould be activated without fully process-ing the stimulus in the sensory cortices.Consequently, because evolution hasbeen likely to retain this functional orga-nization, it should be possible to evokeemotions in a person even if he or she isunaware of the stimulus. Studies usingmasking techniques to conceal an emo-tional stimulus have con½rmed this sup-position. In these studies, an emotion-ally evocative stimulus, such as a pic-ture of a snake for individuals who areintensely afraid of snakes, is presentedfor hundredths of a second and thenimmediately masked by another stimu-lus. The experimental subject perceivesonly the masking stimulus consciously,remaining unaware of the preceding target stimulus. Psychophysiological re-cordings demonstrate that individualsspeci½cally afraid of snakes show largerresponses to the stimuli masking snakesthan to the stiumuli masking spiders,and vice versa for individuals speci½callyafraid of spiders.21

Furthermore, humans spontaneouslyimitate emotional facial expressions (asassessed by electrophysiological mea-surements). Experimenters using mask-ing stimuli have observed an uncon-scious imitation response to both angryand happy faces.22 Without knowing it,we respond to miniscule facial gestures,



19 W. Kunst-Wilson and R. Zajonc, “Affec-tive Discrimination of Stimuli That Cannot Be Recognized,” Science 207 (1980): 557–558; R. Zajonc, “Exposure Effects,” in Feelings andEmotions: The Amsterdam Symposium, ed. A. Manstead, N. Frijda, and A. Fischer (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),194–203.

20 Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain (NewYork: Simon and Schuster, 1996).

21 A. Öhman and J. Soares, “‘Unconscious An-xiety’: Phobic Responses to Masked Stimuli,”Journal of Abnormal Psychology 103 (1994): 231–240.

22 U. Dimberg, M. Thunberg, and K. Elmehed,“Unconscious Facial Reactions to EmotionalFacial Expressions,” Psychological Science 11(2000): 86–89.

which add emotional color to our socialinteractions. Whether we feel relaxed oruncomfortable with some people maythus depend on nonconscious emotion-al cues. This implicit level of emotionalgive-and-take–which lies hidden be-hind explicit intentions, interpretations,and verbal statements–plays an impor-tant role in determining the outcome of human encounters. In addition, it is open to conditioning: when a mildelectric shock to the ½ngers followed the presentation of a masked angry face,participants subsequently exhibited anelevated physiological response to theangry face when it was presented with-out the masking stimulus.23 These ½nd-ings imply that we not only respondemotionally to stimuli of which we areunaware, but we may also come to im-bue such stimuli with a negative emo-tional valence through nonconsciousconditioning.

These studies using peripheral physi-ological indices of emotion are supple-mented by brain-imaging studies.24

Consistent with the “low road” notion,these brain-imaging studies show thatthe nonconscious activation of the

amygdala by emotional stimuli takes a subcortical route. For example, theamygdala can be activated by visualstimuli presented in a blind cortical½eld, that is, a lesioned part of the vi-sual cortex that gives rise to blindness in the corresponding visual ½eld.25

Essentially, the research reviewed heregives substance to the Stoic conceptionof a ‘½rst movement’ of emotion, whichis automatic and reflexive in nature butcan still respond to quite complex stim-uli. This automatic emotional activationsets the stage for further emotional pro-cessing. In a sense, these data demon-strate that emotions are in the body be-fore they are in the mind.

Damasio’s somatic-marker hypothesisrevives a central idea in the history ofemotion, which was independently for-mulated more than a hundred years agoby Carl Lange, a Danish physiologist,and William James, the famous Ameri-can philosopher and psychologist.26 Itsuggests that feedback from the body’sresponse to emotional circumstances is a central determinant of felt emotion.While Lange emphasized the role ofthe cardiovascular system as a stimulussource, James included both autonomicand motor responses in his formulation.But they agreed on reverting intuition:we do not cry because we feel sorry; wefeel sorry because we cry.



23 F. Esteves, U. Dimberg, C. Parra, and A.Öhman, “Nonconscious Associative Learning:Pavlovian Conditioning of Skin ConductanceResponses to Masked Fear-Relevant FacialStimuli,” Psychophysiology 31 (1994): 375–385;A. Öhman and S. Mineka, “Fear, Phobias andPreparedness: Toward an Evolved Module ofFear and Fear Learning,” Psychological Review108 (2001): 483–522.

24 K. Carlsson, K. M. Petersson, D. Lundqvist,A. Karlsson, M. Ingvar, and A. Öhman, “Fearand the Amygdala: Manipulation of AwarenessGenerates Differential Cerebral Responses toPhobic and Fear-Relevant (But Non-Feared)Stimuli,” Emotion 4 (2004): 340–353; J. Morris,A. Öhman, and R. J. Dolan, “Conscious and Un-conscious Emotional Learning in the HumanAmygdala,” Nature 393 (1998): 467–470.

25 J. S. Morris, B. DeGelder, L. Weiskrantz,and R. J. Dolan, “Differential Extrageniculo-striate and Amygdala Responses to Presenta-tion of Emotional Faces in a Cortically BlindField,” Brain 124 (2001): 1241–1252; A. Pegna,A. Khateb, F. Lazeyras, and M. Seqhier, “Dis-criminating Emotional Faces Without PrimaryVisual Cortices Involves the Right Amygdala,”Nature Neuroscience 8 (2005): 24–25.

26 W. James, “What Is An Emotion?” Mind 9(1885): 188–205.

Of course, an idea as radically break-ing with common sense as this one didnot go uncontested. The famous physi-ologist Walter Cannon launched whatwas taken as a devastating critique ofthe James-Lange position.27 His basicargument was that the physiological ac-tivation seen in intense emotion is toocrude and too slow to account for therichness and nuance of emotional expe-rience. Indeed, Cannon himself demon-strated that the patterns of physiologicalresponses observed in anger and fear areindistinguishable and that it takes sever-al seconds (sometimes even tens of sec-onds) for the autonomic response toreach its maximum after an emotionalprovocation.

However, given what we know today,this critique is not as damaging as com-monly thought. Emotional informationmay reach the amygdala and start acti-vating the bodily response within someten milliseconds after reaching sensoryreceptors, and before reaching the ade-quate cortical areas for identi½cation.The feeling may then take several hun-dreds of milliseconds to develop. Mean-while, it is amenable to changes in thestimulus situation. For example, feed-back from facial responses is highly patterned and available within a fewhundred milliseconds. Furthermore, this feedback remains available evenafter surgery that blocks informationfrom the body from reaching the brain,which may help explain why animalswith such surgery (or humans with spi-nal cord damage that block feedbackfrom the body) still appear to have emo-tion–another of Cannon’s critiques ofthe James-Lange theory.

Feedback from the slow autonomicresponses may not have to await the full-blown peripheral responses but maystart coming in as soon as the relevantbrain nuclei are activated. As Damasiopointed out, “as-if body loops” providesimulations of previously experienced‘real’ emotional body loops in a com-pressed time.28 Thus, the brain mayhave quite speci½c information from thebody early enough to make it a factor inshaping emotional experience. Indeed,Damasio and his colleagues have shownthat simply recalling certain emotionalepisodes sets off distinct patterns of ac-tivity in brain structures that regulateand represent bodily states–patternsthat differ between emotions.29

Feelings are mental images arisingfrom changes in “neural maps” that represent bodily activations.30 Experi-mental data show that the anterior in-sula, located in the convoluted cortexbetween the temporal and frontal lobes,was activated when participants “lis-tened for their heart beats,” and that this activation correlated with the par-ticipants’ emotional characteristics.31

Furthermore, masking studies suggestthat the insula is one of the brain areasexclusively correlated with conscious



27 W. Cannon, “The James-Lange Theory ofEmotions: A Critical Examination and an Al-ternative Theory,” American Journal of Psycholo-gy 39 (1927): 106–124.

28 Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Hap-pens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Con-sciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999).

29 Antonio Damasio et al., “Subcortical andCortical Brain Activity During the Feeling ofSelf-Generated Emotions,” Nature Neuroscience3 (2000): 1049–1056.

30 Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens.

31 H. D. Critchley et al., “Neural Systems Sup-porting Interoceptive Awareness: Evidencefrom Functional and Structural Magnetic Reso-nance Imaging,” Nature Neuroscience 7 (2004):189–195.

recognition of emotional stimuli.32

Thus, there is good reason to associatethe insula both with the registration ofbodily responses in emotion and withemotional experience itself.33

So much for reflexive emotion–emo-tion is also a matter for reflection. It isobvious that people to a considerableextent construct their emotions. De-pending on who we are, we may respondin vastly different ways to the same emo-tional stimulus. Many investigators havesuggested that the perceived meaning ofthe situation is the central determinantof the emotional response. And emo-tional meaning, they claim, results froman appraisal process.

Appraisal theory is one of the domi-nant schools in the psychology of emo-tion.34 An influential attempt to insu-late the James-Lange idea about neces-sary bodily input in emotion from Can-non’s critique proposed that cognition(i.e., appraisal processes) gives the spe-ci½c emotional quality to an experience,while physiological activation deter-mines its intensity.35 For example, run-ning up stairs produces an unquestion-able activation of the cardiovascular sys-

tem. The emotional rami½cation of thisactivation, however, is very different if we do it for exercise, to meet a loverwaiting at the top of the stairs, or to es-cape from a maniac chasing us with anaxe. These appraisal processes corre-spond to what the Stoics called the sec-ond movement of emotion.

Appraisal theory is too extensive atopic to go into detail here. The gener-al idea is that a series of appraisal pro-cesses evaluates emotional stimuli andthat the emotion is the outcome of theappraisal. The most basic evaluation isrelevance. ‘Relevant’ in this context ty-pically refers to whether the stimulushas any consequences for one’s currentgoal scenario. If it has no goal relevance,there is no emotion. But if the stimulushas the potential to enhance or impedeone’s prospects of reaching a valuedgoal, it will evoke positive or negativeemotions, respectively. Goal-congru-ent stimuli basically induce happiness: if one can attribute the enhanced goalprospects to one’s own effort the likelyemotion is pride; if they are attributableto another person the likely emotion ismutual affection or gratitude.

To further differentiate negative emo-tion, the involvement of one’s self is cru-cial. If the event impeding goal prospectsdamages one’s self esteem, the result isanger, particularly if another agent is in-volved. A threat to one’s self results infear; a loss to self, sadness. In this way,different emotions can be explained interms of different appraisals. Indeed, the strong assumption is that a uniqueappraisal lies behind each emotionalepisode.

Another important dimension ofappraisal concerns potential actions:“What can be done about the situa-tion?” Here, controllability and its pre-requisite, the stimuli’s predictability, are critical: predictable and controllable



32 H. Critchley, C. Mathias, and R. Dolan,“Fear Conditioning in Humans: The Influenceof Awareness and Autonomic Arousal on Func-tional Neuroanatomy,” Neuron 33 (2002): 653–663; Carlsson et al., “Fear and the Amygdala.”

33 A. (Bud) Craig, “Human Feelings: Why AreSome More Aware Than Others?” Trends inCognitive Sciences 8 (2004): 239–241.

34 Klaus Scherer, Angela Schorr, and TomJohnstone, eds., Appraisal Processes in Emotion(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

35 S. Schachter and J. Singer, “Cognitive, So-cial, and Physiological Determinants of Emo-tional State,” Psychological Review 69 (1962):379–399.

adverse stimuli generate less fear, anxi-ety, and pain than unpredictable anduncontrollable stimuli.

Although we discuss appraisal pro-cesses in terms of explicit mental activ-ity, they need not be conscious. Whileoriginally conscious, appraisals, partic-ularly immediate ones, may eventuallybecome automatic.

Appraisal processes are also of differ-ent importance for different classes ofemotion–primary versus complex orsecondary emotions.36 Basic emotionsare hardwired and include a handful ofuniversal emotions such as happiness,sadness, fear, and anger–and are trig-gered more or less automatically by bio-logically given sign stimuli. Indeed, aswe have seen, we need not even con-sciously perceive these sign stimuli forthem to elicit an emotion.

There are two classes of complex emo-tions. One class of complex emotions–which include attachment, caregiving,sexual desire, jealousy, and social rejec-tion–is ‘object oriented.’ That is, onecannot consciously experience theseemotions unless one is aware of the ob-ject. Another class of complex emotionsbuilds on basic or even object-orientedones, but is cognitively elaborated to re-flect cultural and social influences and ispredicated on a self-concept. For exam-ple, the culturally cultivated fear of nu-clear holocaust or terrorism involves thebasic emotion of fear, but woven into it is a network of objects–the military,‘the bomb,’ ‘evil others’–as well as so-cially determined beliefs about how theworld is organized, characteristics ofother nations and ethnic groups, and

the perceived vulnerability of oneselfand the group to which one belongs.

In terms of neural mechanisms, basicemotions primarily depend on the lowroad to the amygdala, whereas complexemotions require cortical processes. Thelink between the amygdala and the ven-tromedial prefrontal cortex is essentialfor transforming primary emotions in-to secondary ones.37 In fact, the frontalcortex is central for the regulation ofemotion. In order for study participantsto succeed in inhibiting amygdala re-sponses to gory pictures, the upper later-al areas of the frontal cortex, which areassociated with executive cognitive con-trol, were activated.38 Similarly, theseareas appeared to inhibit the enhancedamygdala response of ‘nonprejudiced’white participants exposed to maskedblack faces (indicating an implicit racialbias) when the masking interval wasextended to allow conscious recogni-tion.39

So far the assumption has been that ap-praisal is a central determinant of emo-tion. However, the causal chain may bereversed. Phobias are intense, cripplingfears of speci½c objects or situations.Most sufferers agree that their fear is out of proportion to the real danger in-volved. Nevertheless, when asked to ratethe danger conveyed by a set of objectsthat includes the object of the phobia,



36 P. Johnson-Laird and K. Oatley, “Cognitiveand Social Construction in Emotions,” in M.Lewis and J. M. Haviland-Jones, eds., Handbookof Emotions, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford Press,2000), 458–475; Damasio, Descartes’ Error.

37 Damasio, Descartes’ Error.

38 K. Ochsner, S. Bunge, J. Gross, and J. Gabri-eli, “Rethinking Feelings: An fmri Study of theCognitive Regulation of Emotion,” Journal ofCognitive Neuroscience 14 (2002): 1215–1229.

39 W. Cunningham, M. Johnson, C. Raye, C. Gatenby, J. Gore, and M. Banaji, “SeparableNeural Components in the Processing of Blackand White Faces,” Psychological Science 15(2004): 806–813.

they rate the objects as more dangerousthan do nonphobic individuals. This canbe taken as evidence that the phobic fearreflects faulty appraisals. Alternatively,however, it may be an effect, rather thana determinant, of the phobic response,an attempt to make sense of, or justify,the irrational fear.40

Humans are prone to retrospectivejusti½cations. As dramatically stated byV. S. Ramachandran: “Your consciouslife, in short, is nothing but an elaboratepost-hoc rationalization of things youreally do for other reasons.”41 Famousexamples of this process were inspiredby Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitivedissonance, which stated that humansseek balance and consistency in theirbelief systems. As a consequence, we aremotivated to restore balance when thereare conflicts between beliefs or betweenbelief and action. For example, whenpersuaded by shrewd social psycholo-gists to publicly express a view that wasinconsistent with their beliefs, researchparticipants were more likely to actuallychange their beliefs if paid a small rath-er than a large sum of money. With a big reward, participants could explainaway the dissonant action as ‘I only didit for the money,’ whereas, with a trivialreward, justifying the action was morelikely to require a change in convic-tion.42

Similar processes may be at work inemotion. Even though speci½c stimuliautomatically activate emotions, thisautomatic response often merely sets the constructive mind to work. We feelpressed to understand and to justify our emotions (‘the man was so scary, sowhat could I do but try to escape?’ or ‘as adorable as she was, I just fell help-lessly in love’), and we retrospectivelymanipulate emotion to justify our action(‘I hit him because he made me so mad’or ‘I certainly must be madly in love toact this stupidly’). Indeed, one attractiveaspect of emotion may be that it pro-vides a sanctuary from the social pres-sure on humans to make sense.

Largely based on his research on split-brain patients, who have had their twocerebral hemispheres surgically discon-nected from each other as a treatmentfor epilepsy, Michael Gazzaniga arguedthat the pressure to justify one’s actionsreflects the operation of “an interpretersystem” housed in the left frontal cere-bral hemisphere.43 According to thisview, the brain automatically takes careof most of the exigencies raised by theinteraction of person and environment.The fundamental interpretive compo-nent of the human mind comes in late to make sense of the unfolding scenariomindlessly managed by the brain, to ½t it into one’s worldview and self-image,and to keep constructing the narrativethat we take to be our lives. Unlike allother creatures, humans can, by theiraccess to language, keep a running commentary on their lives. As a conse-quence, we are prone to mixing up thecommentary and the commented-on



40 A. Öhman and S. Wiens, “The Concept ofan Evolved Fear Module and Cognitive Theo-ries of Anxiety,” in Feelings and Emotions. TheAmsterdam Symposium, ed. A. Manstead, N.Frijda, and A. Fischer (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2004).

41 V. S. Ramachandran, A Brief Tour of HumanConsciousness (New York: Pi Press, 2004), 1.

42 L. Festinger and C. Carlsmith, “CognitiveConsequences of Forced Compliance,” Jour-nal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 58 (1959):203–210.

43 Michael Gazzaniga, The Mind’s Past (Berke-ley: The University of California Press, 1998);Michael Gazzaniga, “Cerebral Specializationand Interhemispheric Communication: Doesthe Corpus Callosum Enable the Human Con-dition?” Brain 123 (2000): 1293–1326.

events in our memories, which mayexplain the unreliability of our memo-ries.44 But the commentary is not mere-ly epiphenomenal activity. Rather, itgives consistency to the world and to our actions in it, and it helps us to copewith new situations by time-proven (and largely culturally and socially de-termined) formulas. In doing its work,the interpreter tries hard to be rational.Indeed, Gazzaniga claims that the inter-preter is behind the human adoration ofreason.

It appears that science is about to out-line the neural geography of the eternalhuman struggle between emotion andreason inside our brains. Reason appearsto reside in the left frontal cortex; its pri-mary opponents, the basic emotions, arelocated in subcortical nuclei, includingthe amygdala; and the ½eld of the strug-gle may be housed in the medial frontalcortex. However, as military analystsknow, the geography in which battlestake place is an important factor in theiroutcome, but it is far from a suf½cientone. We must know the availability andquality of supporting forces and allies,the weaponry, the morale of the troops,and last but not least, the connectivityamong the involved units in order toprovide informed guesses about the bat-tle’s outcome. Similarly, knowing thelocation of certain functions in the brainis merely a ½rst step in understanding ascomplex a phenomenon as emotion. Butjudging from the progress made duringthe last decade, there is reason to hopethat the collective efforts of philoso-phers, anthropologists, psychologists,and neuroscientists may eventually payoff in a considerably improved scienti½cgrasp of emotion’s enigmas.



44 Elizabeth Loftus, “Planting Misinformationin the Human Mind: A 30-Year Investigation ofthe Malleability of Memory,” Learning & Memo-ry 12 (2005): 361–366.


To be a human being requires a func-tioning human brain, in a living humanbody, interacting with complex physical,social, and cultural environments, in anongoing flow of experience. What couldbe more self-evident than the fact thatthe human mind is intrinsically incar-nate?

And yet, most people do not believethis. Traditional Western philosophi-cal and religious traditions routinely as-sume the transcendence of mind overbody. They assume that our inmost es-sence is mental and spiritual, which theyregard as distinct from the bodily. To livein our culture is to unwittingly soak upthe metaphysical mind-body dualismthat pervades our commonsense viewsof cognition, knowledge, language, andvalues.

Until quite recently, only a handful ofintellectually courageous philosophers

have outspokenly embraced a nondualis-tic view of mind and pursued the radicalimplications of such a view. Baruch Spi-noza stands out in this regard, followedmuch later by Friederich Nietzsche andthen the pragmatic naturalists CharlesSanders Peirce, William James, and JohnDewey in America, and also the phe-nomenologist Maurice Merleau-Pontyin France.

Over the past twenty years, the situa-tion in philosophy has begun to change.The terms ‘embodied mind’ and ‘em-bodied cognition’ have become buzz-words in psychology and the other cog-nitive sciences–and also, increasingly,in philosophy itself. Taking this changeseriously is no small matter. If we giveup the notion of a transcendent soul anda disembodied mind, then we must giveup as well some of our most commonlycherished assumptions about what itmeans to be human.

Whenever philosophers want to chal-lenge mind-body dualism, they nearlyalways criticize René Descartes (1596–1650)–with good reason. Descartesclaimed that reflection on our inner ex-perience demonstrates that bodies arephysical substances, extended in spaceand time, whereas minds are mentalsubstances, having no spatial extension.

Mark Johnson

Mind incarnate: from Dewey to Damasio

Mark Johnson is Knight Professor of Liberal Artsand Sciences in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. He is the author of“The Body in the Mind” (1987), “Moral Imag-ination: Implications of Cognitive Science forEthics” (1993), and, with George Lakoff, “Met-aphors We Live By” (1980) and “Philosophy inthe Flesh” (1999).


Bodily substance exhibits and supportsone set of ‘attributes’ (e.g., digestion,perception, body movement, locomo-tion), whereas mental substance sup-ports a quite different set of characteris-tics (e.g., thinking, willing, reasoning).

The appeal of the idea of disembodiedmind–to Descartes and to many peopletoday–appears to be based on three con-siderations.

First, if the mind exists apart from the body, then life after death would be metaphysically plausible because a‘mind-soul’ might be able to survive thedeath of our fragile human bodies.

Second, mind-body dualism seems toexplain how human freedom and mor-al responsibility might be possible in aphysical world governed by cause andeffect. If the seat of our moral reason-ing and willing lies in nonphysical sub-stance, then, indeed, a part of us (i.e.,our moral personality) may not be caus-ally determined and could be the sourceof free choice and action. This idea un-derlies the great appeal of Kant’s as-sumption of a transcendent ego–thelocus of rational willing that is not sub-ject to the laws of nature governing allphenomenal beings and things. Kanteschewed Cartesian substance dualism,but his notion of the transcendent ego(as a “transcendental unity of apper-ception”) is his substitute for Cartesianmental substance.

Third, our everyday experience ap-pears to con½rm the disembodied char-acter of our thinking. We often seem toexperience our minds as different from,and even independent of, our bodies. Forexample, at this very moment, as I writethese words, I am going to will myselfnot to reach over to pick up my cup oftea that calls out to me to take a drink. ‘I’must control ‘myself,’ so it would seemthat the ‘I’ that does the controllingmust be different from and independent

of the ‘self’ that is controlled. Our con-ceptual system and therefore our lan-guage incorporate this ostensible dual-ism.

Merleau-Ponty attributed this appar-ent experience of disembodied mindpartly to the fact that in perception weare not aware of our bodily organs do-ing the perceiving: “The moment per-ception comes my body effaces itselfbefore it and never does the perceptiongrasp the body in the act of perceiving.”1

More recently, the American philoso-pher Drew Leder, in his intriguing book,The Absent Body, has catalogued the manyways in which the very nature of ourbodily capacities causes us to experienceperception and thinking as disembodied.In a chapter on what he calls the “ecstat-ic body,” for example, Leder shows howthe structure of bodily perception hidesthe activity of the organs and processesof perception, as we attend only to whatis being perceived and not to the condi-tions of that perception.

Scientists on the other hand do attendto the conditions of perception–and thegrowth of cognitive neuroscience overthe past twenty years has provoked arevolution in our thinking about mind.Philosophers who have been followingthe remarkable recent work in neuro-science ½nd the notion of disembodiedthought increasingly implausible. Forthem as for most cognitive scientists, thenew mantra is ‘No body, never mind.’

For a dualist like Descartes, a funda-mental problem was how mental sub-stance could hook up or interact withmere bodily substance. Descartes wasscienti½cally sophisticated enough torealize that such a connection would

Mindincarnate

1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and theInvisible, trans. Alphonso Lingus (Evanston, Ill.:Northwestern University Press, 1968), 9.



MarkJohnsonon body in mind

somehow have to occur somewhere inthe brain, and he speculated, quite mis-takenly, that the pineal gland was the lo-cus of this mental-physical interaction.

For a nondualist, this very ‘mind-bodyproblem’ is a mistake because it presup-poses that there are two distinct entities–body and mind–that must get yokedtogether. Consequently, the nondualistneeds to reframe the problem entirely,asking not how two different metaphys-ical substances can interact, but ratherhow characteristics traditionally attrib-uted to mind–the capacity to conceptu-alize, to understand, to reason, to know,and to will–emerge from physical pro-cesses.

The most popular nondualisticapproach today is naturalism. To be a naturalist is to explain everything in nature–from the movements andchanges of physical objects, to the emer-gence of living things, to the operationsof mind–in terms of natural processes,that is, without reference to anything su-pernatural that might allegedly enter in-to and affect nature from beyond natureitself.

I regard American pragmatist philoso-phy, which came to prominence early inthe twentieth century, as the most scien-ti½cally and philosophically sophisticat-ed naturalistic, nondualistic approach to mind available to us even today. Thepragmatists (especially Peirce, James,and Dewey) appreciated the critical im-portance of modern evolutionary theoryfor our understanding of human nature,and they realized that philosophy mustgrow hand in hand with the best scienceavailable. Consequently, the pragmatistsgave us a model for how to develop anempirically responsible philosophy ofmind.

Pragmatic naturalism starts with theassumption that human beings are nat-

ural organisms in ongoing interactionwith their environments.2 In otherwords, everything we attribute to ‘mind’–perceiving, conceptualizing, imagin-ing, reasoning, desiring, willing, dream-ing–has emerged (and continues to de-velop) as part of an ongoing evolution-ary process in which organisms seek tosurvive, grow, and flourish within vari-ous environments. As James remarks:

Mental facts cannot be properly studiedapart from the physical environment ofwhich they take cognizance. The greatfault of the older rational psychology wasto set up the soul as an absolute spiritualbeing with certain faculties of its own bywhich the several activities of remember-ing, imagining, reasoning, and willing, etc. were explained, almost without refer-ence to the peculiarities of the world withwhich these activities deal. But the richerinsight of modern days perceives that ourinner faculties are adapted in advance to the features of the world in which wedwell, adapted, I mean, so as to secure oursafety and prosperity in its midst.3

In James’s account, we do not have twoentities or substances–body and mind–that somehow have to come into relationto each other for a human being to exist.Instead, ‘mind’ is an emergent process,never separate from body. Thus, experi-ence is a series of purposive bodily activ-ities immersed in the ongoing flow oforganism-environment interactions.

Another way of expressing this rooted-ness of thinking in bodily experience isto say that there is no rupture in experi-

2 Part of the account of pragmatic naturalismthat follows is taken, with minor changes, fromMark Johnson and Tim Rohrer, “We are LiveCreatures,” in Body, Language, and Mind (forth-coming).

3 William James, Psychology (Briefer Course)(New York: Holt, 1892), 3.

ence between such processes as perceiv-ing, feeling, moving, and thinking. Morecomplex levels of organic functioningare just that–levels–and nothing more,although within each level there ariseemergent properties of ‘higher’ levels of functioning. John Dewey names thisconnectedness of all cognition the prin-ciple of continuity, a principle that deniesany ontological gaps between variouslevels of functional complexity. Accord-ing to Dewey:

There is no breach of continuity betweenoperations of inquiry and biological op-erations and physical operations. “Conti-nuity”. . . means that rational operationsgrow out of organic activities, without be-ing identical with that from which theyemerge.4

The continuity thesis implies that anyexplanation of the nature and workingsof mind, even of abstract conceptuali-zation and reasoning, must have its ba-sis in an organism’s capacities for per-ception, feeling, object manipulation,and bodily movement. Dewey describedat least three primary levels of organiza-tion that are relevant to an account ofmind. First, there are inanimate materi-al processes (the physical level). Second,there are living things that have needs,interests, and satisfactions (the psycho-physical level). Third, there are organ-isms that possess mind (the mental lev-el). From this perspective, the problemfor the naturalist is to explain howchanges in organization and complexitygive rise to ever more impressive func-tional processes, without introducingnew ontological entities, structures, orforces. Dewey explains,

The distinction between physical, psycho-physical, and mental is thus one of levelsof increasing complexity and intimacy of interaction among natural events. Theidea that matter, life and mind representseparate kinds of Being is a doctrine thatsprings, as so many philosophic errorshave sprung, from a substantiation ofeventual functions.5

In other words, the error of splitting off‘mind’ from ‘body’ (or the animate fromthe inanimate, or the mental from themerely living) is a result of treating func-tional events and processes (Dewey’s“eventual functions”) as if they were dif-ferent kinds of beings or entities.

For a naturalist like Dewey then, neworganization is responsible for the factthat living organisms (the psycho-phys-ical) have properties and can do thingsthat are not possible for inanimate phys-ical entities and structures:

In the compound word [psycho-phys-ical], the pre½x “psycho” denotes thatphysical activity has acquired additionalproperties, those of ability to procure apeculiar kind of interactive support ofneeds from surrounding media. Psycho-physical does not denote an abrogation of the physico-chemical; nor a peculiarmixture of something physical with some-thing psychical (as a centaur is half manand half horse); it denotes the possessionof certain qualities and ef½cacies not dis-played by the inanimate.6

Many people who might accept thiscontinuous development from the inan-imate to the animate will resist the ideathat a similar continuity applies equally

4 John Dewey, John Dewey, The Later Works,1925–1953, vol. 12, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry(1938) (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Universi-ty Press, 1991), 26.

5 John Dewey, John Dewey, The Later Works,1925–1953, vol. 1, Experience and Nature (1925)(Carbondale: Southern Illinois UniversityPress, 1981), 200.

6 Ibid., 195–196.


Mindincarnate



to the emergence of mind. However, hisprinciple of continuity demands that wetreat mind not as a thing, but as anotheremerging process of interactions. Someorganisms develop what we call mindwhen they achieve levels of functionalorganization that make communicationand shared meaning possible for them,thereby opening up a host of unprece-dented possibilities for dealing with thelife problems they encounter.

As life is a character of events in a pecu-liar condition of organization, and “feel-ing” is a quality of life-forms marked bycomplexly mobile and discriminating re-sponses, so “mind” is an added propertyassumed by a feeling creature, when itreaches that organized interaction withother living creatures which is language,communication.7

To say that I have a ‘mind’ is to say that Iam an organism whose potential for verycomplex interactions has risen to thelevel where I can share meanings, engagein various modes of inquiry and reason-ing, and coordinate activities with othercreatures who have minds, using sym-bols that have meaning for us.

Once we understand that mind is afunctional achievement, it ceases to besurprising that mind is always continu-ous with body and could not exist with-out body. That is why Dewey alwaysspeaks of the “body-mind,” and not of body and mind. Other philosophershave famously offered their own non-dualistic accounts of the interfusion ofmind and body. Spinoza avoided Carte-sian mind-body substance dualism byarguing that there was but one sub-stance, which he called Nature or God,and that ‘body’ and ‘mind’ are simply‘attributes’ of that substance. Antonio

Damasio’s fondness for Spinoza’s non-dualistic metaphysics stems especiallyfrom Spinoza’s view of mind as the ideaof the human body (“The object of theidea constituting the human Mind is the Body,” Ethics II, Prop. 13). Damasioshows how this conception of mind iscompatible with recent empirical re-search in the neuroscience of emotions,consciousness, and thought.8

I began this essay by boldly proclaim-ing that acknowledging the embodimentof mind requires us to rethink some ofour most cherished assumptions abouthuman nature. Let us consider brieflysome of the most signi½cant implica-tions that follow from the conception of the ‘body-mind’ that I have sketchedabove.

No mind without a body: Nobody canprove indisputably that a disembodiedmind or soul cannot exist. However, cognitive neuroscience teaches us that,without certain bodily conditions, func-tions such as breathing, moving, per-ceiving, reasoning, feeling, and talkingare not possible. So, if there is a ‘body-less’ soul that survives after death, wecan make no sense of how it could feel,experience, think, or value like we hu-mans do. If you had a disembodied soul,that soul would not be you, for it wouldlack your body, and thus your thoughts,your memories, your feelings, and youremotions. Consequently, the doctrine of embodied cognition has very much a‘this-worldly’ orientation–a philosophi-cal perspective grounded in the experi-ences, thoughts, values, and actions ofan intrinsically embodied consciousnessthat appears to be a tiny part of a sweep-ing and continual (if somewhat slow)evolutionary process.

7 Ibid., 198.

8 Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy,Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York: Har-court, Inc., 2003).

Mind is not a thing: Although we areborn with many cognitive capacitiesnecessary for human experiencing andthinking, it is a bit misleading to say that we are born ‘with a mind,’ asthough that were some entity or givenstructure. To ‘have a mind’ is to rise tothe level of being able to sustain a com-plex ensemble of functions that charac-teristically involve thinking, deciding,feeling, and communicating with others.When a person ceases to be able to exe-cute these functions, it is fair to say thathe has ‘lost his mind,’ which is not theloss of a thing, but rather a failure to sus-tain a certain dynamic process of higher-level functioning. (This is precisely whathappens in cases of dementia.)

Neither is consciousness a ½xed thingor a simple property. According to cog-nitive neuroscientists Gerald Edelmanand Giulio Tononi, consciousness is anemergent dynamic unity that resultsfrom “a special kind of morphology–the reentrant meshwork of the thalamo-cortical system–as it interacts with theenvironment.”9 Consciousness is thetemporary achievement of a “dynam-ic core,” in which emerges an integra-tion, within a certain narrow window of time, of various functional neuronalclusters that are highly differentiatedfunctionally.

Body in mind/mind in body: The body isnot just the seat of the mind, a mere rest-ing place for a disembodied mind. ‘Body’and ‘mind’ are just different aspects ofan ongoing interactional process of ex-perience. Thus, the nature of our humanbodies determines both what we canexperience and think and also how wethink, that is, how we conceptualize andreason. The body is in (that is, working

in) the mind, just as much as the mind isin the body. Damasio states this ground-ing hypothesis as follows:

. . . the body, as represented in the brain,may constitute the indispensable form ofreference for the neural processes that weexperience as the mind.10

[T]he apparatus of rationality, tradition-ally presumed to be neocortical, does notseem to work without that of biologicalregulation, traditionally presumed to besubcortical. Nature appears to have builtthe apparatus of rationality not just on topof the apparatus of biological regulation,but also from it and with it.11

The lower levels in the neural edi½ce orreason are the same ones that regulate the processing of emotions and feelings,along with the body functions necessaryfor an organism’s survival. In turn, theselower levels maintain direct and mutualrelationships with virtually every bodilyorgan, thus placing the body directly with-in the chain of operations that generatethe highest reaches of reasoning, decisionmaking, and, by extension, social behaviorand creativity.12

The recruitment of sensory-motor ca-pacities to perform concrete and abstractconceptualizing and reasoning, and thecrucial role of emotion in reasoning arefoundational hypotheses of many con-temporary naturalistic theories of mind,thought, and language. The challenge for‘embodied cognition’ theories is thus toexplain how all of our most marvelousacts of language, communication, ab-stract conceptualization and reasoning,

9 Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi, A Uni-verse of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imag-ination (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 216.

10 Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion,Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: G. P.Putnam’s Sons, 1994), xvi.

11 Ibid., 128.

12 Ibid., xiii.


Mindincarnate



and creativity involve the recruiting ofsensory-motor functions for ‘higher’cognitive functions.

Logic is a matter of body: In common-sense models and in philosophical andmathematical theories alike, logic hasvirtually always been thought of as theessence of rational thought, thus tran-scending the body. Like mathematics, it is supposed to be pure (disembodied),universal, and absolute. But if the waysof the body are actually constitutive ofwhat and how we think, then logics(plural) have only as much validity asthe shared patterns of bodily experienceupon which they rest. Logic doesn’tdrop down from the heavens of pure rea-son; rather, it rises up from recurringpatterns of embodied inquiry. Already in1890, James in his Principles of Psychologyargued that logic is tied to felt relationswithin bodily experience:

If there be such things as feelings at all,then so surely as relations between objects existin rerum natura, so surely, and more surely, dofeelings exist to which these relations are known. . . . We ought to say a feeling of and, a feel-ing of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of byquite as readily as we say a feeling of blueor a feeling of cold.13

A hundred years later, Damasio mar-shalled clinical and experimental neu-roscienti½c evidence to argue for the role of emotion in certain types of rea-soning.14 Damasio’s work has openedthe door to a serious reconsideration ofJames’s then seemingly preposterousclaim that what we call logic requires anintact and functioning emotional sys-tem, and that our bodies play a crucial

role in what makes sense to us and howwe reason about it.

Language and symbolic interactions arealso matters of body: What has come to be known as cognitive linguistics seeksto explain language as a result of manygeneral cognitive capacities acting inconsort, rather than as the result of ‘au-tonomous’ language modules. Further-more, embodied approaches to cognitivelinguistics present empirical evidencethat patterns and processes of sensory-motor experience underlie linguisticmeaning and other forms of symbolicinteraction. Such evidence includes de-tailed analyses of how the words we useto talk about mind, and the mental ac-tivities of feeling, perceiving, thinking,deciding, and willing, are de½ned rela-tive to cognitive models that are basedeither directly on structures of sensory-motor experience or else on systematicconceptual metaphors that are them-selves indirectly based on aspects of sen-sory-motor experience. Within this em-bodied-meaning framework, GeorgeLakoff and I have presented empiricalresearch from psychology, linguistics,and other cognitive sciences, showinghow patterns of sensory-motor experi-ence (e.g., containment, balance, forcedmotion, iteration, motion along a path,increase/decrease in intensity, and verti-cality) structure both our concrete andabstract concepts.15 These image-likepatterns of body-based meaning (calledimage schemas) are then metaphoricallyelaborated to de½ne abstract concepts.

Take, for example, the conventionalmetaphor, ‘understanding is seeing.’Here, we conceptualize the abstract no-tion of understanding or knowing in

13 William James, Principles of Psychology, vol. I(New York: Dover Publications, 1950), 245–246.

14 Damasio, Descartes’ Error.

15 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophyin the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challengeto Western Thought (New York: Basic Books,1999).

terms of our sensory-motor conceptionof seeing. This metaphorical concept,operating mostly beneath the level ofconscious awareness, gives rise to ex-pressions such as ‘I see what you mean,’‘What you said was quite illuminating,’‘She’s blind to everything I say,’ and‘From which point of view are you speak-ing?’ In this way, most cognitive lin-guists seek to explain how patterns oforganism-environment coupling andinteraction–including perception,manipulation of objects, emotional re-sponses, and body movements–can bethe basis for patterns of abstract thoughtand language.

George Lakoff and Jerome Feldman’sNeural Theory of Language (ntl) proj-ect carries this embodiment explana-tion further by trying to construct real-istic models of the neural processes thatmake thought and language possible.They are developing “constrained” or“structured” connectionist neurocom-putational models–models that utilizeknown neural architectures–of theworkings of various body-based sche-mas, images, and concepts.16 Both cog-nitive linguistics and the ntl paradigmtypically argue that abstract conceptual-ization is based on metaphorical exten-sions of body-based concrete conceptsand sensory-motor capacities. All of thiswork on the bodily basis of meaning,imagination, and reasoning is admitted-ly speculative at the neural level, but theneural models show how it is at leastplausible that the mind could work insuch a bodily fashion.

The body is more than flesh: In all ofthese developing accounts, it should beclear that ‘the mind’ cannot be reducedto ‘the brain.’ Likewise, ‘the body’ is

never merely a material lump of skin andbones. The bodily aspect of ‘body-mind’shows itself in many ways. First, there is the body as a physiological organismmade of flesh, bones, blood, muscles,nerves, and the many organs of percep-tion and life-maintenance, all organizedinto complex interactive functional sys-tems. Second, there is the body that thebrain and central nervous system permitus to experience–and to monitor andmodify as we interact with our environ-ment. Third, and quite importantly,there is ‘the body’ that does not termi-nate merely with the fleshy boundary ofour skin but rather extends out into itsenvironment, such that organism andenvironment are not independent, butrather interdependent aspects of the ba-sic flow of (bodily) experience. That iswhy no account of the body can excludean explanation of the recurring affor-dances of the environment–the physi-cal settings, cultural artifacts, institu-tions, rituals, and shared practices–thatgive the body its medium for action anddetermine its meaning for members ofthat culture. Consequently, scienti½c and philosophical notions of the bodymust encompass all of these aspects ofembodiment; they cannot limit them-selves to our narrow commonsense ideaof the body as merely a thing consistingof flesh, blood, and bones.

Embodied values: One of the most un-derdeveloped areas within the embod-ied-cognition paradigm is the origin andnature of values. In his latest book, Look-ing for Spinoza, Damasio has speculatedon where embodied creatures like us getour values. Naturalistic views of mindtypically see values as emerging from the needs of organisms to survive, grow,flourish, and, for humans, ½nd meaningwithin the types of environments theyinhabit. Those human environments areat once physical, social, cultural, moral,

16 Terry Regier, The Human Semantic Potential:Spatial Language and Constrained Connectionism(Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1996).


Mindincarnate

economic, political, gendered, racial-ized, and spiritual. So, while many ofour values are a fairly direct result ofour bodies’ instincts for survival andgrowth–we need air, water, food, shel-ter, warmth, and a host of biologicalconditions–other values will form as aconsequence of our nature as social andpolitical creatures, as gendered animals,and as purpose-seeking beings. It hasbecome evident to those who look care-fully at the range and variety of valuesfound throughout cultures and acrosshistory that no one set of values can becerti½ed as absolute, universal, and eter-nal. Although cultures will share manyvalues because of the commonalities ofour bodies and the recurring features ofthe environments we inhabit, value plu-ralism is an inescapable fact of the hu-man condition.

The multidimensionality of the body-mind also explains why no single meth-od or approach could ever capture theworkings of mind. We need what Patri-cia Churchland has called the “co-evolu-tion of theories”17–the dialectical col-laboration of multiple strategies andmethods from many disciplines. Weneed cognitive neuroscience to study the neurochemical bases of experience,thought, feeling, consciousness, and val-uation. We need physiology to explorethe whole-body perceptual and motorprocesses that underlie thought. Weneed phenomenology to describe thestructures and qualities of experience.We need cognitive linguistics, psychol-ogy, and anthropology to investigate the bodily schemas and sensory-motoroperations that underlie all aspects ofcognition and symbolic interaction. We

need developmental psychology to pro-vide an account of the emergence ofthe self, of thought, and of language. We need all the humanistic disciplinesto study the meaning humans makethrough literature, music, dance, and the plastic arts. And we even need phi-losophers of embodied cognition whotry to see how all of these various ac-counts of embodied mind hang together–and what they tell us about who we areand how we should live.



17 Patricia Churchland, Neurophilosophy: To-ward a Uni½ed Science of the Mind/Brain (Cam-bridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1986).

I am sitting with a colleague on a plat-form at the front of a large universitylecture hall. We are psychologists teach-ing in the same department, broughttogether on this occasion by studentswho want to hear how we converse. It is a Monday evening in the middle ofthe term, and the lecture hall is ½lled.We each speak briefly about our workand then begin the conversation. I no-tice that when I say “voice,” my col-league, who studies cognition and intel-ligence, responds by saying “the notionof voice” or “the metaphor of voice.” Imove my chair away from his to signal

the gap that has opened between us. Thenext morning, in class, my students wantto talk about what happened. I write the word ‘voice’ on the blackboard, thesound sibilant in the still, morning air.One after another the students respond:“The notion of voice, the metaphor ofvoice.” We talk about what happenswhen the body drops out of the conver-sation.

I am sitting with Sundi at a small tablein an empty classroom of her publicschool. She is eleven, in the sixth grade,and a member of the writing and theaterclub that meets on Tuesday afternoons,part of a three-year project designed tostrengthen healthy resistance and cour-age in girls. It is spring in the second yearof the project, and I am interviewingSundi. I place a photograph on the tablein front of her and ask her to tell a storyabout what is happening. She stares in-to the face of the girl in the picture andsays the girl has just had a ½ght with herfriend–she is angry and sad. “Where isthe anger?” I ask. Sundi replies: “In thepit of her stomach and in her throat.”And the sadness? “The sadness is in herheart.”

At age nine, Judy says that she knowshow her friend will feel because “I justfeel it in my mind.” When she sees


Carol Gilligan

When the mind leaves the body . . . and returns

Carol Gilligan is University Professor at New York University and currently a visiting profes-sor at the University of Cambridge. Best knownfor her landmark book “In a Different Voice”(1982), Gilligan has since published numerousother books, including “Meeting at the Cross-roads” (with Lyn Mikel Brown, 1992), named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and “The Birth of Pleasure” (2002). Her adap-tation of “The Scarlet Letter” was presented at the 2005 Women Center Stage Festival in NewYork and will be produced by The Culture Projectnext year.


someone walking away from her bestfriend, leaving her alone “just talkinginto space,” she does not infer how her friend will feel or put herself in herfriend’s place. Instead, she says, “Youcan just kind of see them walking awayor getting sad or something, but youcan’t tell right then and there she’s go-ing to get hurt or anything–but you justfeel it. It’s hard to explain.” There is lit-tle language for this emotional connect-edness and the knowing to which it givesrise.

By the age of thirteen, however, Judyhas learned that knowing and feeling are “two different things.” Striving toreconcile this distinction with her expe-rience of knowing through feeling, shedivides her mind, which she locates inher gut, from her brain, which is in herhead:

The knowing sort of comes from thebrain, like your intelligence part. Like your smartness, your brightness, youreducation part. And your feeling is some-thing that it doesn’t matter if you have an education or not. It’s just like some-thing that you can’t put into words, thatyou can’t really explain, but it’s not, Idon’t know, it’s just like a deeper sort ofknowing than intelligence knowing.

In following her disclaimer (“I don’tknow”) by speaking of “a deeper sort of knowing,” Judy elaborates a split, notbetween mind and body but between an embodied mind and a disembodiedbrain:

The mind sort of has your real thoughtsand a brain sort of has the intelligence . . .what you learn in school . . . but your mindis sort of associated with your heart andyour soul and your internal feeling andyour real feelings.

Separating her mind–her real thoughtsand feelings–from her intelligence and

her education, she offers an observationabout development: “Children,” shesays, “have the most mind, but they arestarting to lose it actually.”

I begin with Judy to illustrate the ½nd-ings of a ½ve-year study of developmentinvolving girls between the ages of sevenand eighteen. Prior to this research, ado-lescent girls, in the words of the 1980Handbook of Adolescent Psychology, had“simply not been much studied.” By lis-tening to girls narrate their experiencesin coming of age–½rst in yearly inter-views and then in the more intensivewriting and theater clubs that met week-ly or in week-long sessions over a peri-od of three years–my colleagues and I came to see girls as messengers, likecanaries in a mine.1 They alerted us to aprocess of initiation that required themto separate their minds from their bod-ies, their thoughts from their emotions,themselves from their relationships. Theinitiation entailed a paradoxical sacri½ceof relationship for the sake of having ‘re-lationships,’ a sacri½ce that was at onceculturally sanctioned and psychological-ly incoherent. The resistance of Judy andother girls to making this sacri½ce ledme to zero in on the question: what hap-pens when the mind leaves the body andreturns?

In The Feeling of What Happens: Bodyand Emotion in the Making of Conscious-ness, Antonio Damasio describes coreconsciousness, or a core sense of self, as our ability to register our experiencefrom moment to moment, like a ½lmrunning continually inside us, as well as our awareness of watching the ½lm,which extends the sense of self throughtime and history, leading to memory


CarolGilligan on body in mind

1 The Harvard Project on Women’s Psychologyand Girls’ Development began in 1981 and con-tinued for twenty years, expanding in the 1990sto include studies of boys’ development and theculture of manhood.

and identity. He contrasts the core self,grounded in the body and in emotion,with what he calls “the autobiographi-cal self,” the self that is wedded to a sto-ry about itself. I have found this distinc-tion helpful in thinking about dissocia-tion: how we can know and also notknow what we know; how it is possiblefor our experience not to become part ofour story.

For example, in the years between nine and thirteen, Judy begins to tell astory about herself that is at odds withwhat she knows within herself to betrue. At the age of ten, she says withpride, “I hardly ever get into ½ghts withmy friends because usually we like theexact same things and we do the exactsame things.” Yet she knows that dis-agreement is a natural if upsetting partof relationships, integral to the processof rupture and repair. In the absence of the ability to address the inevitablebreaks in connection, relationships losetheir resilience and become fragile, re-duced to sameness, a matter of likingand doing “the exact same things.” Judyat ten is aware of a change in her rela-tionships. Heeding an injunction to benice, she backs off from conflict, fear-ful that if she says what she is feeling and thinking, people will leave her or“move out.”

The impetus to rein herself in alsocomes from a growing awareness of dan-ger in the world at large and a fear thatacting on impulse will lead her to gethurt. Signs of dissociation accompanythis appraisal of reality, as Judy begins tohave dif½culty remembering her experi-ence. The presence of an impediment toaccessing what has happened becomesevident when she tells her interviewerabout something that sounded fun andexciting, something she recalls but can’tquite remember:

[My friend and I] were deciding whetheror not to do something, and, I don’t know,it might have been–I guess it was–kindof dangerous because both of us were notsure whether to do it or not. [“You can’tremember what it was?”] No, I have a shortmemory. It was recently, too.

The phrase ‘I don’t know,’ spoken fourtimes by Judy at age nine, once after sheimplied a connection between her broth-er’s anger and her hamster’s death, oc-curs twenty-four times a year later whenshe is ten, in an interview of comparablelength. Rather than an admission of ig-norance or an expression of uncertaintyabout something she has said, it seemsmore literally to indicate a barrier tospeaking–the injunction ‘don’t’ stand-ing between ‘I’ and ‘know.’ Associatingknowing now only with her intellect,what goes on in her head, Judy begins totalk about, rather than to speak, her feel-ings–and the ground of experience slipsaway. As the interview draws to a close,she confesses her sense of a problem: “Idon’t know what’s wrong here; I keepstuttering here. It was tough . . . . I knowwhat the question was, but as soon asyou asked me, my mind went blank.”

When the mind leaves the body,thought becomes divided from emotion,and we lose an inner compass for navi-gating the world. Judy registers this loss,but staying in connection with her bodynow means owning desires that are, atonce, exciting and dangerous. Holdingthoughts and feelings together, she canread beneath the surface and pick upwhat is going on around her. She knowsthat the ½ght at the dinner table over eat-ing the carrots is not really about the car-rots. Yet she fears that saying what sheknows would only heighten conflict andlead to trouble.

Except in dreams and flights of fanta-sy, the mind leaves the body when it be-


When themind leavesthe body . . .and returns

comes, for whatever reason, unbearableor untenable to know what in our bodiesand our emotions we know. The returnof the mind to the body then undoes adissociation that however adaptive orculturally valued is psychologically prob-lematic. With the approach of adoles-cence, girls often hover between know-ing and not knowing, as if testing the cli-mate they are now entering. Is it possiblefor them to say what they know withoutlosing relationships and jeopardizingtheir future? The phrases ‘I don’t know’and ‘you know’ rose exponentially in ourinterview transcripts, implicitly asking:Can I know? Do you know? Do youneed me not to know?

When Judy is interviewed at eleven,the lines of her dilemma sharpen. A newframework is evident as she responds to the opening question, “Looking backover the past year, what stands out foryou?” with “Well, this was the ½rst yearthat I started meeting boys, just recent-ly, because someone had a boy/girl par-ty, and I started meeting boys.” Theparameters of this shift into a differentkind of encounter with boys becomeclear when she is asked about a time shehad to make a decision but wasn’t surewhat she should do. She begins by say-ing, “Lots of decisions are really simplethings,” yet the decision she chooses totalk about is anything but simple: “Myparents are divorced, and like, next year,I have a choice of which one to live with,and I have just been thinking over that a lot recently. I haven’t really decided. Ihave kind of made up my mind to stayhere [with my mom].”

Exploring the choice to stay with hermom, Judy thinks, “I’m getting a reallygood education, and education means a lot to me now; and I like where I live,where my mom lives . . . and I like theway I am living right now.” But she alsomeasures her life against the standard

of what she calls “the typical life of achild,” by which she means, “just grow-ing up with a regular family, and like, I think I would get a regular family at my dad’s because there are two parents;they are a two-parent family with al-ready two kids.” Asked how she feelsabout this issue, she says, “I don’t know.I feel like either my mom or my dad willfeel bad, whichever decision I make.”

She moves to resolve the dilemma byprivileging her father’s feelings:

My dad . . . would feel bad, because hewould feel like I really didn’t want to livewith him, but it wouldn’t be that big athing if I left my mom instead of stayingwith my mom; just the feelings, I think,would be different toward the parent, myparents, and it’s a hard decision to make.It’s like . . . whatever I do, it depends on myfuture.

In dismissing her own and her moth-er’s feelings, she minimizes the loss (“Itwouldn’t be that big a thing”) and dis-tances herself by speaking of “the feel-ings” and “the parent.” Her grammaticalincoherence (“it depends on my future”)mirrors her psychological confusion.

Yet, in fact, she is planning to do whatshe wants and stay with her mom.

I am thinking I am pretty much going tostay here . . . I think I’d be just as happythere, but it’s hard to explain–I just thinklike . . . this is what I want to do, so I thinkjust me wanting to do this makes it right,because there is no really wrong answerunless I make it wrong.

The issue then centers on judgment:Does her wanting to live with her mommake it right? Is there a wrong choice inthis situation? Or more pointedly, canshe avoid making what feels right to herwrong?

Thus, Judy guides us through an initia-tion into ways of seeing and speaking



about herself and the world that wouldrequire her, in the name of morality andfor the sake of her future, to dissociateherself from what she wants and knows.In resisting this initiation, she combatsinternalized voices that call her ‘a trou-blemaker’ and ‘childish,’ that enjoin herto be nice and to have ‘a good attitude,’that encourage her to leave the life shewants and values in order to have ‘thetypical life of a child.’ Sent to her roomand grounded for getting “really mad” at her mom, she thinks, “If I had justkept my mouth shut and didn’t say any-thing . . . that would have been the end ofit.” Yet, she says, “in my mind I was stillangry.”

In ½tting herself into a framework thatleads her to silence her expression ofanger, her honest voice, and her sexuali-ty, Judy internalizes an honor code thatdivides girls and women into the goodand the bad. She worries that in conceal-ing the “bad” parts of herself, she is cre-ating a false impression. She wonders if this is lying, but she decides it is not.She knows that falsity has entered herrelationships and wrestles with the ques-tion of integrity. She does not want to be“sel½sh” or “rude,” like girls who do not“think about anyone but themselves.”Holding herself apart from her relation-ships, she strives to put herself in theplace of others, attending to their feel-ings by asking herself, “How would Ifeel?” She wants to be a good ratherthan a bad girl, to have a good ratherthan a bad attitude. Yet this entails los-ing relationship–her connectednesswith others and also with vital parts ofherself.

The dilemma she faces is one of rela-tionship, and it appears insoluble: eitherway she anticipates losing relationship,whether by withholding herself fromothers or being left by them. Thus an initiation, mandating dissociation and

enforced through codes and scripts ofgender, leads Judy to what psychoana-lysts have called a compromise forma-tion. By splitting her mind, which is con-nected to her heart and her soul, fromher brain, which she associates with herintelligence and her education, Judy, incoming of age, is resisting losing her em-bodied mind.2

Tracy, her classmate, reveals how thisloss can come to seem inconsequential.“When we were nine, we were stupid,”she says. The ½ve-year study has ended,and I have come to ask the girls how theywant to be involved now that my col-leagues and I are presenting our ½ndingsand preparing to publish them in a book.The thirteen-year-olds respond withouthesitation: “We want you to tell themeverything we said, and we want ournames in the book.” Tracy then voicesher concern that their nine-year-oldselves will sound stupid. I say it wouldnever have occurred to me to use theword ‘stupid’ because what struck memost about them when they were ninewas how much they knew. “I mean,”Tracy says, “when we were nine, wewere honest.”

When the mind is forced to leave thebody in the name of intelligence and forthe sake of education, when thought be-comes divorced from emotion as a wayof avoiding conflict and trouble, whenthe self moves out of relationship in or-der to have ‘relationships,’ an honestvoice–the voice of the core self that reg-isters experience–comes to sound stu-pid. Thus we become wedded to whatwithin ourselves we know is a false story.



2 A more extensive discussion of Judy as wellas additional excerpts from her interview tran-scripts can be found in Lyn Mikel Brown andCarol Gilligan, Meeting at the Crossroads: Wom-en’s Psychology and Girls’ Development (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).

At a time when research in neurobiol-ogy has exposed Descartes’ error, whenattention to girls and women has re-vealed a systematic bias in psychologi-cal theory, the question arises: how dowe come to tell a story about ourselvesthat is at odds with our human nature,neurologically unfounded, and psycho-logically untrue?

Damasio has shown that the severingof thought from emotion is a result ofbrain injury or trauma.3 Psychologists½lming infants with their mothers havediscovered that the baby’s world is aninterpersonal world.4 As the psychoana-lyst Donald Winnicott observed, “Thereis no such thing as a human baby”; thehuman infant is a member of a couple.We are, male and female alike, inherent-ly relational, responsive beings, bornwith a voice and into relationship. Theseparation of the self from relationships,once considered a milestone of develop-ment, is a sign of dissociation. It signalsa rift in the psyche, a split in conscious-ness, a need to shelter parts of ourselves.

Studying girls ½rst led me to recognizethat separations long associated with de-velopment bear some of the hallmarks oftrauma: a loss of voice, gaps in memory,the inability to tell one’s story. The privi-leging of mind over body, thought overemotion, self over relationships reflectsa culture that elevates qualities associat-ed with masculinity over those genderedas feminine. What seemed at one time a problematic resistance on the part ofgirls and women to taking what wereconsidered crucial steps on the road tomaturity, leading to rationality and au-

tonomy, now appears as a healthy resis-tance to psychologically and politicallycostly losses of voice and relationship–losses that would compromise their abil-ity to love and to function as citizens in a democratic society. Yet this healthy re-sistance is often met with surprising op-position or force.

What is at stake? Seventeen-year-oldIris, the valedictorian of her high schoolclass, observes, “If I were to say what Iwas feeling and thinking, no one wouldwant to be with me, my voice would betoo loud,” and then adds, by way of ex-planation, “but you have to have rela-tionships.” I say, “But if you are not say-ing what you are feeling and thinking,then where are you in these relation-ships?” Iris sees the paradox in what sheis saying: she has given up relationshipin order to have ‘relationships,’ mutingher voice so that ‘she’ could be with oth-er people. The rewards of this adapta-tion are clear; the costs, for the moment,less apparent. In Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, when Miranda asks herfather why he is raising a sea-storm, heresponds by urging her to sleep: “Herecease more questions,” he tells her, “‘Tisa good dullness.” Later in the play, god-desses arrive to bestow “Honor, riches,marriage, blessing,” the gains for enter-ing her father’s order. Miranda will pre-serve that order. When Ferdinand, herhusband-to-be, says he would not “forthe world” play her false, she tells him,“For a score of kingdoms you shouldwrangle, and I would call it fair play.”5

To resist the structures of patriarchy isto challenge long-standing adaptationson the part of both women and men. Itmeans reopening a wound, revivifying a loss, and questioning a sacri½ce madefor the best of reasons. Yet children’s



3 Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emo-tion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1994).

4 See, for example, Daniel N. Stern, The Inter-personal World of the Infant (New York: BasicBooks, 1985).

5 William Shakespeare, The Tempest (NewYork: Washington Square Press, 1961).

reluctance to incorporate these struc-tures into their psyches exposes theirpsychological costs. The initiation intoand enforcement of gender splits andhierarchies typically begin at an earliertime in development for boys than forgirls, in early childhood rather than atadolescence, and are consequently writ-ten more deeply into the stories they tellabout themselves. For this reason, girlsbecome informants. At adolescence,they are mature enough to recognize andreflect on what is happening and alsomore aware of the gap between theirsense of themselves and their stories.

But children are children, and as Irissays, you have to have relationships andlive in the world. Their resistance to aninitiation that is socially rewarded, cul-turally driven, and yoked to gender–which affects feelings about one’s body,one’s desires, oneself, and one’s future–inevitably becomes embattled, leadingto inner conflict, open struggle, andsigns of psychological distress. The dif-ference in the timing of boys’ and girls’initiation can explain what otherwiseappears as a series of psychological puz-zles: why does a heightened risk to re-siliency set into boys’ lives around theages of ½ve, six, and seven; why do boysoften begin at this time to show signs of depression as well as learning andspeech disorders and various forms ofout-of-control and out-of-touch behav-ior; why are boys throughout childhoodmore subject to depression than girls;what protects girls’ resiliency until ado-lescence; why does this hardiness ingirls tend to falter at adolescence, whenthe incidence of depression, eating dis-orders, and destructive behavior sharp-ly rises? The symptoms themselves–at-tention disorders, learning disorders,eating disorders, and depression–re-flect a disturbance in mind and body;and the loss of voice and relationship,

signaling dissociation, leads to behav-ior problems. To the usual explanationsthat vacillate between nature and nur-ture, evolution and socialization, I add a psychological factor. The heightenedrisk to resiliency reveals a threat to psy-chological integrity.

In the years before adolescence, girls,in the absence of severe trauma, tend to hold self and relationship together.The preadolescent years are a time ofhonest voices and shrewd perceptions,recorded across history and culture byartists ranging from Euripides to ToniMorrison. The frank and fearless girls of this age, with their candid voices andopen faces, belie stereotypes of feminin-ity. “We have our voices,” they tell me. It is this directness, this willingness tosay what they see and speak their expe-rience–that older girls and women of-ten come to call stupid or bad or wrongor crazy.

Preschool boys show a similar abilityto read the human emotional world, in-cluding emotions that are being with-held. Four-year-old Sam asks his moth-er one day, “Mommy, why are you sad?”When she, wanting to shield him fromher sadness, says, “I’m not sad,” he tellsher, “Mommy, I know you. I was insideyou.” Five-year-old Nick responds to hisfather’s expression of remorse for hav-ing “lost it” and hit Nick the previousday: “You are afraid that if you hit me,when I grow up, I’ll hit my children.”Alex, Nick’s father, had been hit by hisfather and had vowed to break the cycle.Nick picks up his fear that the patternnow will continue into the next genera-tion.

Yet when manhood is establishedthrough a gender binary and throughhierarchy, when being a man means notbeing a woman and also being on top,boys separate their sense of themselvesfrom feelings associated with women–



sadness and fear–and sacri½ce love forhierarchy. Covering their vulnerabilityand calling an emotionally open voice‘babyish,’ they become less attentive,less direct, less articulate, and less au-thentic. They are turning themselvesinto ‘one of the boys’ and entering acompetitive male hierarchy.6

Violent rituals of shaming enforce this initiation, marked by the internal-ization of and identi½cation with a fath-er’s voice or law, and like the initiationof girls at adolescence with its viciousgames of inclusion and exclusion, it registers internally in the body as a lossof relationship and of pleasure, a lossquickly covered by a voice that labelswhat has been lost ‘babyish’ or ‘stupid.’It is a voice that follows dissociation–the voice of a mind split off from thebody, of a self divorced from relation-ship, telling a story about separation thathas become linked not with betrayal andtrauma but with development and civi-lization. It is a history written after thefact.

It was her lawless passion that releasedher from the iron framework of reason-ing and enabled her to see the frame.7“Is the world then so narrow?” she asksthe anguished minister who had beenher lover, a man who loved the truth butwas living a lie. The Puritan settlement,she observes, was once a forest floor.Built up in one way, it could be torndown and built up anew. She encourageshim to leave “these iron men, and theiropinions.”

Meeting in the forest, alone for the½rst time in seven years, their mindsreturn to their bodies. “Do I feel joyagain?” the minister asks, amazed at this resurrection of himself. “I seem to have flung myself–sick, sin-stained, and sorrow-blackened–down uponthese forest-leaves, and to have risen up all made anew, and with new powersto glorify Him that hath been merciful.This is already the better life!” Hesterundoes the clasp that fastened the scar-let letter and throws it among the with-ered leaves. “She had not known theweight, until she felt the freedom.”

Her sex, her youth, and the whole rich-ness of her beauty, came back from whatmen call the irrevocable past, and clus-tered themselves, with her maiden hope,and a happiness before unknown, withinthe magic circle of this hour . . . . Such wasthe sympathy of Nature–that wild, hea-then Nature of the forest, never subjugat-ed by human law, nor illuminated by high-er truth–with the bliss of these two spir-its! Love, whether newly born, or arousedfrom a deathlike slumber, must alwayscreate a sunshine, ½lling the heart so fullof radiance, that it overflows upon theoutward world.

It was an age, the narrator observes,when “men of the sword had over-thrown nobles and kings. Men bolderthan these had overthrown and rear-ranged–not actually but within thesphere of theory, which was their mostreal abode–the whole system of ancientprejudice, wherewith was linked muchof ancient principle.” Imbibing this spir-it, Hester Prynne, charged with raising a daughter amid a host of dif½culties and seeking to cherish and develop “thegerm and blossom of womanhood,” en-visions what seems a hopeless task:



6 For additional examples of boys’ emotionalastuteness and an extended discussion of theresponses of their fathers and mothers, see Part II, “Regions of Light,” in Carol Gilligan,The Birth of Pleasure (New York: Knopf, 2002).

7 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (NewYork: The Modern Library, 2000).

As a ½rst step, the whole system of socie-ty is to be torn down, and built-up anew.Then, the very nature of the opposite sex,or its long hereditary habit, which has be-come like nature, is to be essentially modi-½ed, before woman can be allowed to as-sume what seems a fair and suitable posi-tion [in the new society]. Finally, all oth-er dif½culties being obviated, woman can-not take advantage of these preliminaryreforms, until she herself shall have un-dergone a still mightier change; in which,perhaps, the ethereal essence, wherein shehas her truest life, will be found to haveevaporated.

It is a prospect more daunting than over-throwing nobles and kings because it in-volves a psychological as well as a politi-cal transformation, a change in what hascome to seem like human nature.

At the end of the story, Hester, havingfreed her daughter, returns to Boston totake up, as a radical ministry, her lover’sfailed mission. She assures the peoplewho come to her for counsel and com-fort that

at some brighter period, when the worldshould have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’sown time, a new truth would be revealedin order to establish the whole relation be-tween man and woman on a surer groundof mutual happiness.

The word ‘patriarchy’ runs throughNathaniel Hawthorne’s astonishingnovel The Scarlet Letter, which he wrotein a heightened state of emotional open-ness and turmoil during the six monthsfollowing his mother’s death. As a boy offour, he had seen his mother scorned byhis father’s family after his father died atsea. Hawthorne places the romance ofHester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdalein seventeenth-century Boston, and withthe exception of Hester, Dimmesdale,Chillingworth, and Pearl, his characters

are historical personages. Most of theaction takes place in 1649, the year theEnglish king was beheaded.

As Hawthorne reminds us, we are inthe vicinity of Anne Hutchinson, in aworld riddled with contradiction: theradical Protestant vision of an unme-diated relationship with God, who iseverywhere and thus able to be wor-shipped at home or in the forest as wellas in church, clashes with the institu-tionalized power of an all-male, clericalhierarchy; the vision of a democraticsociety conflicts with the continuationof patriarchal power and privilege. AnneHutchinson, assuming a direct relation-ship with God, criticized the ministers’sermons. They convicted her of heresyand insubordination and banished herfrom Massachusetts.

Summoning moonlight to illuminatean inner landscape, to show the familiarat once “so distinctly . . . yet so unlike amorning or noontide visibility,” Haw-thorne explores the psychological ten-sions that reflect and magnify these con-tradictions. The antagonism betweendemocracy and patriarchy plays out inthe lives of women and men as a strainbetween passion and Puritanism, loveand hierarchy. It registers as unhappi-ness.

Writing in 1850, at the height of aboli-tionist feminism, Hawthorne, neither an abolitionist nor a feminist, saw intothe heart of a problem. A woman mustbring the new truth, be “the angel andapostle of the coming revelation.” Yetthe very passion that releases a womanfrom the “iron framework” of Puritan-ism and enables her to envision a neworder of living also disables her by lead-ing others to view her as an impurewoman. Midway through the novel,however, the framework shifts. AsHester’s “nature showed itself warm andrich, a well-spring of human tenderness,



unfailing to every real demand, and in-exhaustible by the largest,” many people“refused to interpret the scarlet A by itsoriginal signi½cation. They said it meantAble; so strong was Hester Prynne, witha woman’s strength.”

This ability of the mind to reframe the world on the basis of experienceposes a far greater threat to orthodoxythan sexual transgression because itreveals that the very terms of the ortho-doxy are a human construction, a way of thinking rather than reality. Haw-thorne’s narrator observes that onceHester’s mind, released from “an ironchain,” had “assumed a freedom of spec-ulation . . . which our forefathers, had theyknown of it, would have held [it] to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter.” It is not the sexualtransgression itself as much as the free-ing of a sexual voice, the joining of mindand body, that releases Hester from thepsychic imprisonment signi½ed in thenovel by the term “goodwife.”

Having embroidered her scarlet Awith gold thread, Hester recognizes in her unruly daughter the seeds of anoble woman: “The stedfast principlesof an unflinching courage,–an uncon-trollable will,–a sturdy pride, whichmight be disciplined into self-respect,–and a bitter scorn of many things which,when examined, have the taint of false-hood in them.” Hawthorne was the fath-er of a six-year-old daughter when hewrote The Scarlet Letter, and Pearl has al-ways seemed to me more observed thaninvented. It is seven-year-old Pearl whosees what the Puritans cannot discern:the connection between her mother whowears the scarlet letter and the ministerwho keeps his hand over his heart.

In exploring the connection betweenmind and body and the conversion ofpsychic suffering into physical pain,Hawthorne anticipates Freud by almost

a half century. He also illuminates dis-sociation: in the split names of his twomale characters, Dimmesdale and Chill-ingworth, we see what happens whenconcerns about privilege and honor leadsensitive and intelligent men to concealtheir nature and their worth–they ren-der one dim and the other chilling. Chill-ingworth, moving stealthily to uncoverthe truth in the minister’s heart, tellshim: “You, Sir, of all men whom I haveknown, are he whose body is the closestconjoined, and imbued, and identi½ed,so to speak, with the spirit whereof it is the instrument.” When Dimmesdaleinterrupts to insist on the separation ofhis soul from his body, Chillingworthoverrides the interruption:

Thus, a sickness–a sore place, if we mayso call it, in your spirit, hath immediatelyits appropriate manifestation in your bod-ily frame. Would you, therefore, that yourphysician heal the bodily evil? How maythis be, unless you ½rst lay open to him thewound or trouble in your soul?

In their 1895 Studies on Hysteria, JosefBreuer and Freud reported discoveriesthey had come to in a relatively shorttime by listening to hysterical women:the intimate connection between ourminds and our bodies; the symbolic na-ture of symptoms; the phenomenon ofdissociation and its relation to trauma;and the power of association, the streamof consciousness, and the touch of rela-tionship, to undo dissociation–thepower of the talking and listening cure.For Hawthorne as for Breuer and Freud,myself and others studying psychologi-cal development, the voices of womenand girls have been key to seeing into thepsychological and political structures ofpatriarchy that seem like nature, becausethey are so closely aligned with man-hood and incorporated so early intoboys’ psyches.



Maybe it is simpler than we haveimagined–to recover what we know and free ourselves from a false story. Ifwe are indeed neurologically hardwiredto register our experience in our body,then the body holds the clue. And may-be this is another reason why the body–associated with vulnerability, mortality,sexuality, and women–is so readily sus-pect; why truth becomes aligned with a disembodied intelligence and educa-tion; and why associative methods, longrelied on by artists, lack credibility, al-though their power is repeatedly prov-en. The separation of self from relation-ships, which seems at once objective and protective, leads us to overlook what otherwise would be self-evident:that one cannot exist without the other.But when a healthy resistance, the psy-che’s defense of its integrity like thebody’s immunity against disease, takeson some of the characteristics of a po-litical resistance in its refusal of falseauthority, dissociation offers a kind ofsanctuary: a way of preserving what we know and sheltering ourselves fromharm until such time as we are able toconfront the problem.

I have taken the ‘strengthening heal-thy resistance and courage’ project I be-gan with nine-, ten-, and eleven-year-oldgirls into a law school classroom, teach-ing a seminar on sexuality, voice, and re-sistance with David Richards, a philoso-pher and constitutional law scholar. Thesubject of our seminar is the persistenceof ethical contradictions in the historyof Western democracies along with atradition of ethical resistance. Over theyears of teaching, we have become in-creasingly aware of the role of the bodyas touchstone or wellspring, both em-pirical and democratic, and also of artand the way artists across time and cul-ture have gone into the problem of lossof voice, showing how culture can crush

voice and revealing dissociation frombodily experience as a central, crucialproblem. The repression of sexual voicethus becomes a key to the structure ofdissociation.

Freud saw this in his 1908 essay,“Civilized Sexual Morality and ModernNervous Illness,” when he traced the so-called intellectual inferiority of womento their sexual suppression. Restrictedfrom knowing their sexuality, womenare forced to constrain their intelligence,to keep their minds out of their bodies,not to know what in their bodies theyknow. Sexuality, as Freud discerned inthe early days of psychoanalysis, is anexus of the psychological and the polit-ical, a site of repression and a source ofresistance. The traumatizing of sexuali-ty, interpreted broadly to mean the dis-sociation of mind and self from bodyand relationship, is the caput Nili, thesource of neurotic suffering in the senseof condemning the psyche to live, as itwere, east of desire and knowledge.

Within a political context, the divorc-ing of sexuality from knowledge leads to what David Richards has called “mor-al slavery,” the imprisonment of an ethi-cal voice that would contest injusticeand harm.8 In the book of Genesis, theword ‘da-at,’ referring both to the tree of knowledge and to Adam’s knowing of Eve, signi½es embodied knowledge–the knowledge that comes through expe-rience; what you know in your bones, in your gut, by heart. This knowledge isforbidden or hidden because it poses athreat to the establishment of hierarchy:God over Adam, Adam over Eve, Eveover the serpent, sorrow over joy. Thuswe bind ourselves to a tragic story.



8 David A. J. Richards, Women, Gays, and theConstitution: The Grounds of Feminism and GayRights in Culture and Law (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1998).

The work of our students led me to re-flect on what I ½rst saw as an unintendedconsequence of our teaching: the freeingof a creative voice. The encouragementto overcome dissociations commonlyassumed and even valued in the acade-my–the separation of mind from body,thought from emotion, oneself fromone’s intellectual work–and the teach-ing of associative methods, primarilythrough reading literature but alsothrough writing and theater work, led to papers of exceptional quality. As stu-dents breached the restrictions on voiceand the inner divisions that had limitedtheir intelligence, as they gained accessto experiences they recalled but had for-gotten, the range of their knowledge ex-panded and their insights became sur-prising.

As a psychologist, I asked how a two-hour seminar that met once a week in alaw school could overcome what oftenwere long-standing patterns that inhibit-ed creative work. Reflecting on the ped-agogy of the seminar, I have arrived at aprovisional explanation: it is the combi-nation of providing a psychological mapthat directs attention to times in devel-opment when an embodied voice be-comes muted or silenced, and a politicalmap, dating back to ½fth-century Ath-ens, that illuminates the historical costsof dissociation. A psychological puzzle–why do we wed ourselves to a false sto-ry?–joins with a political puzzle–howdo we come to overlook the obvious? A critical part of our pedagogy then con-sists of legitimizing associative methodsas a means to undo dissociation, andmaking our classroom a resonant spacefor a voice connected with the body.

In a forward to a recent edition of Be-loved, Toni Morrison writes about herexperience in leaving her job. Whileworking as an editor at a publishing

house, she had written four novels, andwriting had become her central work.Yet she was surprised when “a few daysafter my last day at work, sitting in frontof my house on the pier jutting out intothe Hudson River, I began to feel an edgi-ness instead of the calm I had expected.”There was nothing new or unexpected in any of the problem areas of her life,nothing to explain what was “so unex-pectedly troubling on a day that perfect,watching a river that serene.” Yet sheheard her heart “stomping away in mychest like a colt,” felt “this apprehen-sion, even panic” that she knew was dif-ferent from fear.

Then it slapped me: I was happy, free in away I had never been, ever. It was the odd-est sensation. Not ecstasy, not satisfaction,not a surfeit of pleasure or accomplish-ment. It was a purer delight, a rogue antic-ipation with certainty. Enter Beloved.9

Morrison reflects, “I think now it wasthe shock of liberation that drew mythoughts to what ‘free’ could possiblymean to women.” Inevitably, thisthought led her to the different historyof black women in this country and thusto the writing of her novel.

Perhaps collectively we have respond-ed to the shock of liberation with a sim-ilar apprehension, even panic. Perhapsthe Puritanism ingrained in Americanconsciousness leads us to be suspiciousof joy. But picking up Morrison’s ques-tion in light of the new truths revealedby neurobiology and developmental psy-chology, my thoughts lead me to imag-ine what it could mean to free ourselves,men and women, from a false storyabout human nature, to release ourselvesfrom the prison of a rewritten historyand break a cycle of tragedy and trauma.



9 Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: VintageInternational, 2004).

Social scientists and interpretive theo-rists of culture have struggled with the‘mind-body problem’ since the incep-tion of the human sciences. To emulatethe natural sciences as they understandthem, many social scientists pursue apredictive science (‘in principle’) thatcurtails attention to the creative dimen-sion of culture. Cultural theorists, on the other hand, sometimes minimize the role of biology in human life in or-der to preserve a space for creativity inthought, emotion, and culture. Even cul-turalists who study bodily representationsseldom examine the body as a site ofbiocultural dispositions and relay pointfor political mobilization. The anxiety is that to do so would be to play up theimportance of genetic determination. In fact, cultural reductionism–that is,the minimization of how biology andculture are always mixed together in hu-

man life–threatens to generate the re-sult its practitioners fear. It depreciatesthe layered character of the body/brain/culture network and thus ignores someaspects of that network implicated incultural creativity.

The contemporary revolution in neu-roscience offers the possibility of open-ing a new dialogue between advocates of a science of society and those of cul-tural interpretation. The most promis-ing route, in my judgment, is to forgelinks between neuroscience–the ob-servational and experimental study ofbody-brain processes–and phenome-nology, understood as the explication of implicit structures of experience thatinfuse perception, desire, and culture.But what philosophy of mind and bodycan inform such inquiries without laps-ing into either cultural or biological re-ductionism?

The approach that inspires me is a de-scendant of Baruch Spinoza’s doctrineof parallelism.1 His philosophy has gonethrough several modi½cations by thoseindebted to him. I will present some ofthem, trying to make my own positionplausible as I proceed.


William E. Connolly

Experience & experiment

William E. Connolly is Krieger-Eisenhower Pro-fessor at Johns Hopkins University. He has pub-lished numerous books on political theory, includ-ing “Political Theory and Modernity” (1988),“Why I Am Not A Secularist” (1999), “Neuro-politics: Thinking, Culture, and Speed” (2002),and, most recently, “Pluralism” (2005).


1 See Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (with the Trea-tise on the Emendation of the Intellect and SelectedLetters), trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis:Hackett Publishing Co., 1992).

Spinoza projects a world of one sub-stance without embracing mind-bodyreductionism. He asserts that eachchange of the body is matched by a par-allel change of mind (and vice versa),even though neither body nor mind canbe understood through the concepts ap-propriate to the other. There is, rather,one substance with two attributes: ex-tension and ideas. A few formulations in Spinoza suggest that while God pos-sesses the concepts to subsume ideas and extension under one rubric, humanbeings are capable of knowing that sub-stance is univocal but incapable of un-derstanding bodies and ideas throughthe same concepts.

In Spinoza’s system, ef½cient causali-ty gives way to immanent causality. Themodel of ef½cient causality, in which Bis fully separate from A and follows fromA in a predictable (in principle) patternof succession, morphs into one in whichnew patterns of regularity come into be-ing as ‘expressions’ of heretofore unreal-ized possibilities implicit in substance.His system–where for every change inthinking there is a corollary change inbodily state (and vice versa)–thus in-spires several recent philosophies–bestknown through the work of Michel Foucault, Stuart Hampshire, and GillesDeleuze. They emphasize the impor-tance of techniques, “arts of the self,”and “micropolitics” applied to bodies to alter established patterns of thought,judgment, and feeling. Spinoza thus sets the stage for modern encountersbetween experiment and experience.

Spinoza’s theory faces several ques-tions and challenges, however. One isthe place of responsibility and freedomin the system. I will bracket that issuehere.2 Another is what it means to say

that mind and body are parallel. If theprocess of thinking is incommensuratewith the movement of body-brain pro-cesses, how could you know that the twoattributes run on parallel tracks? Sometheorists indebted to Spinoza bypass thisissue. Others respond by modifying hisclaim.

The former response is found in thephilosophy of “anomalous monism,” aposition advanced by Donald Davidsonand taken by some to provide a usefulupdating of Spinoza. The latter responseis what I will call “immanent natural-ism,” a position that emerges from theconjunction of the English philosopherStuart Hampshire and the French phi-losopher Gilles Deleuze, two recentlydeceased thinkers inspired by Spinoza.

Davidson is a monist in one sense. He says that though body and mind be-long to one world, the explanation ofbodily processes and the interpretationof thought processes differ because theyare governed by different aims, roughlyto foster prediction in the ½rst case andto clarify meaning and responsibility in the second. The difference in aim en-ables the two systems to be part of oneworld while differing in their mode ofaccount. But Davidson’s model of phy-sical explanation is too narrow to speakto Spinoza, and it is also not closely at-tuned to developments in physics, neu-roscience, and biology that call intoquestion the suf½ciency of the law-likemodel of explanation.

Davidson says that “if two events arerelated as cause and effect, there is astrict law under which they may be sub-sumed . . . . Thus laws must belong to aclosed system: whatever can affect thesystem must be included within it.”3 He


William E.Connollyon body in mind

2 I address that question in “Spinoza and Us,”Political Theory 29 (4) (August 2001): 583–595.

3 Donald Davidson, “Donald Davidson,” inSamuel Guttenplan, ed., A Companion to the Phi-losophy of Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 231.

might have considered the possibility ofmoving closer to the idea of immanentcausality, coming to terms with systemsin which resonances and feedback loopsroll back and forth between multiplenodes, in which some elements blendinto others, and in which a degree of cre-ativity and unpredictability emerges pe-riodically from these patterns.4 This, atany rate, would move his thinking closerto that of the scientists and philosophersto be engaged here.

Another concern is that while David-son distinguishes between interpreta-tion (applied to “mental events”) andexplanation (applied to “physical sys-tems”), and while he is alert to how re-flexive understanding by an agent ofthe causes of its own bodily state can in-troduce new considerations into futurethought and action, he does not considerhow techniques applied to the body canalter thought and feeling. Anomalousmonism does not experiment with tac-tics of the body that then ½nd expressionin thought, feeling, and desire.

Stuart Hampshire surmounts theselimitations in Davidson’s version ofmonism. He articulates ½ve themes, allrecognizably connected to the Spinozistphilosophy they modify.

First, Hampshire contends that whilesubstance is one, we humans have twoirreducible perspectives on it, what hesometimes calls the ½rst-person and the third-person perspectives. Second,he says that a change in either body orthought is always correlated with somechange in the other, even though we cannot specify the exact shape and ex-tent of that change except through liveexperiments. So he drops the theme ofa strict parallel while retaining that ofan intrinsic connection. Third, he em-phasizes how new ½ndings in neurosci-ence can, once reviewed by the humanobjects of inquiry, be folded into theirown thinking, informing future capaci-ties of thought and action. Fourth, heasserts that coming to terms with suchexternal knowledge can also prompt theinvention of techniques and technologiesto act upon the body/brain network, so as to alter, in turn, future patterns of thought, feeling, and action. (An ex-ample of the latter, unavailable whenHampshire wrote, is neurotherapy. Herethe subject observes a screen that signalsseveral of his own brain states. The sub-ject then tries to move the signals thisway or that according to the instructionsof a therapist. If the body/brain patternsare altered in the speci½ed direction ov-er several sessions, a pattern of depres-sion might be lifted or a new mood cul-tivated.)5 Fifth, Hampshire presents his (neo-)Spinozism as a defensible yetcontestable philosophy: neither it normind-body dualism has been demon-strated to date, though an accumulationof evidence and argument may graduallyincrease its plausibility.


Experience& experi-ment

4 See in biology, for example, Lynn Margulisand Dorion Sagan, What is Life? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), and BrianGoodwin, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots: TheEvolution of Complexity (Princeton, N.J.: Prince-ton University Press, 1994); in paleontology,Stephen Gould, The Structure of EvolutionaryTheory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 2002); in neuroscience, Walter J. Free-man, “Consciousness, Intentionality and Cau-sality,” in Freeman and Rafael Núñez, eds., Re-claiming Cognition (Bowling Green, Ky.: ImprintAcademic Press, 1999); and in chemistry, thethinker who inspired several of the above stud-ies, Ilya Prigogine, The End of Certainty, trans.Odile Jacob (New York: The Free Press, 1996).

5 For one account see Alondra Oubre, “eegNeurofeedback for Treating Psychiatric Dis-orders,” Psychiatric Times, February 2002, athttp://www.neurofeedback-institute.com/cgi-bin/articles.pl.

Here is a formulation, from an essaywritten before the explosion of newwork in neuroscience, in which Hamp-shire indicates how the plausibility ofthis philosophy may become enhanced:

The con½rmation, if it comes, will not belike the con½rmation of an empirical hy-pothesis. Rather the con½rmation wouldbe that some notions closely resemblingSpinoza’s key notions become widely ac-cepted as peculiarly appropriate in study-ing and evaluating human behavior. Newpsychological knowledge might ½t betterinto this framework than into any other.Certainly anyone who altogether rejectsSpinoza’s naturalistic standpoint, andanyone who has some religious and tran-scendental grounds for doing so, wouldremain unpersuaded, and given his prem-ises, justi½ably so. But those of us whohave no such transcendental grounds mayat least pause and consider the possibili-ty that our habitual moralizing about theends of action is altogether mistaken. Cer-tainly we should not deceive ourselves bydismissing Spinoza as the kind of deter-minist who allows no possibility of delib-erative self-improvement, as if this werethe dividing line between him and tradi-tional moralists. It is not.6

Gilles Deleuze, the author of twobooks on Spinoza, augments Hamp-shire’s contribution.7 More than Hamp-shire, Deleuze anticipates modi½cations

in the concept of causality–modi½ca-tions that neuroscience and allied dis-ciplines are currently exploring. He elab-orates a philosophy of immanent natu-ralism. It is naturalistic in refusing to em-brace dualism or supranatural forces. Itis immanent in identifying protean forces–forces that can disturb the “actuality”of relatively stable things, beings, pro-cesses, systems, etc. These forces, whenactivated under the right conditions, pe-riodically introduce, say, a new species,weather system, or human brain/bodypattern into the universe. Deleuze thusradicalizes Spinoza’s idea of immanentcausality and breaks more sharply thanHampshire does with the law-like regu-larity Davidson attributes to physicalsystems. Deleuze and his collaborator,Felix Guattari, ½rst, challenge faith in a transcendence (often associated withmind/body dualism) “lodged in themind of a god, or in the unconscious of life, of the soul, or of language . . . ,always inferred.” Second, they af½rmhistorically “shifting relations of move-ment and rest, speed and slowness be-tween unformed elements, or at leastbetween elements that are relatively un-formed, molecules and particles of allkinds.”8

Such a philosophy of energetic “move-ment and rest” does not reduce theworld to chaos. It suggests, rather, thateach system–when examined in thetimescale appropriate to it–oscillatesbetween periods of relative arrest andheightened imbalance and change, fol-lowed in turn by new stabilizations,some of which may assume a composi-tion never fully manifest before. TheNobel Prize–winning chemist Ilya Pri-gogine summed up a similar thesis more



6 Stuart Hampshire, “Spinoza and the Idea ofFreedom,” in Freedom of Mind and Other Essays(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,1971), 203–204. The ½ve themes are presentedin that essay and its companion piece, “A Kindof Materialism,” ibid., 210–231.

7 Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy:Spinoza, trans. M. Joughin (New York: ZoneBooks, 1990); and Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Prac-tical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Fran-cisco: City Lights Books, 1970).

8 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A ThousandPlateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 266.

briefly, “Our universe is far from equi-librium, nonlinear and full of irrevers-ible processes.”9

The conjunction of Hampshire andDeleuze suggests the value of translatingHampshire’s idea of parallelism and De-leuze’s idea of immanent causality intothat of emergent causality. According to such a conception, neuroscientistscan deploy advanced technologies toobserve and alter body/brain processes.Such technologies may well becomemuch more sophisticated and re½ned inthe future. But to date, and perhaps for-ever, we cannot observe how this com-plex pattern of entries and multiple feed-back loops blends layers of past experi-ence into current encounters, carryingboth into future action.10 Observation

can thus isolate body/brain processes ofentry and reentry, but it takes embodied,mobile beings to absorb and catalyze abody/brain/cultural network into spe-ci½c patterns of thinking, feeling, andjudgment. To replicate thinking, a newtechnology would have to participate inthese emergent patterns. It would haveto become a feeling and thinking agent.

To those who de½ne the physicalworld as a closed system, terms such as‘blend,’ ‘absorb,’ ‘catalyze,’ and ‘emer-gence’ will seem evasive. But they dram-atize a key difference between neo-Spi-nozists in philosophy and neuroscience,on the one hand, and classical models of science, on the other. For, as we sawearlier, neo-Spinozists play up the role of volatile forces in both nonhuman andhuman worlds. And they reduce the dis-tance between human culture and na-ture further by locating a capacity of‘self-organization’ to varying degrees in several zones of nonhuman nature aswell as in human life. Put another way,neo-Spinozists discern an element ofreal creativity in both nature and cul-ture, inviting exploration of selectiveaf½nities between them in a universe inwhich the future is open to an uncertaindegree.

Neo-Spinozists are thus encouraged to examine multiple ways in which cul-ture becomes sedimented into differentlayers of the body/brain network, to in-corporate that knowledge into futurethought and action, and to experimentwith techniques of body/brain inter-vention that might ½nd expression inaltered patterns of thought, feeling, and judgment. The term ‘expression’here means a process of infusion irre-ducible to ef½cient causality, partly be-cause of the multiple entries and reen-tries between different sectors of thebody/brain network and partly becauseof novel capacities of self-organization



9 Ilya Prigogine, Is Future Given? (River Edge,N.J.: World Scienti½c Publishing Company,2003), 65. Here, and in The End of Certainty, Prigogine criticizes the concepts of law andcausality in classical science, including somerecent interpretations of science. Prigogine andDeleuze are connected by at least two streams:the debt each owes to the work of Henri Berg-son on time as alteration, and the debt of Pri-gogine’s collaborator, Isabelle Stengers, to thework of Deleuze. For the latter, see IsabelleStengers, Power and Invention: Situating Science,trans. Paul Bains (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1997).

10 In his posthumously published book, Spi-noza and Spinozism (Oxford: Clarendon Press,2005), Hampshire seems to take another steptoward the position I am attributing to Deleuze.The book consists of his classic 1951 book onSpinoza, the essay on freedom listed above, anda previously unpublished essay, “Spinoza andSpinozism.” In the latter, Hampshire expressesa debt to Antonio Damasio, whose book Look-ing for Spinoza (New York: Harcourt, 2003) isthe ½rst close engagement by a neuroscientistwith the work of Spinoza. I explore this stimu-lating study in “The Radical Enlightenment:Faith, Power, Theory,” Theory & Event 7 (3)(2004).

periodically activated as these processesare underway. When the neuroscientistV. S. Ramachandran speaks of “reverber-ations” rolling back and forth betweensectors of the body/brain network, hepoints to the ½rst phenomenon.11 Whenthe chemist Ilya Prigogine identi½es acapacity for self-organization in relative-ly simple physical systems, he suggeststhat this human endowment is shared,though unevenly, with other systems inthe world.12

Mind and body are intrinsically con-nected, though the experimental knowl-edge and experiential capacities of hu-man beings are not fully commensu-rable. It is through creative movementback and forth among experience, reflec-tion upon it, experimental observation,reflexive awareness of such experiments,and the cautious application of speci½ctechniques to individuals and groupsthat the most promising and dangerouspossibilities emerge. We here note a cou-ple of examples.

Consider lucid dreaming, the processby which people participate in their own dreams, steering them this way or

that. How can nonlucid dreamers verifywhether such dreams occur in others?What are the effects of lucid dreaming, if and when it occurs? Are there ways to amplify lucidity?

One study, drawing upon high-techobservations and the subtle experienceof Buddhist monks, gleaned insight in-to these questions. It turns out that askilled dreamer can signal to an observ-er, by blinking, that he has entered thestate of lucidity. eeg measurements,combined with muscle and skin moni-tors, then make it possible to correlatethat signal with the blinker’s speci½cbody/brain states. In this experiment,rem movement indicated that dreamingwas taking place when the blinking sig-nal was given; and the muscle and skintone of the dreamers indicated that thedreaming was of a particularly intensetype.

The interaction between monks andneuroscientists in this experiment hasalready generated a new technology toprompt and record such experiences,

a compact device to help people devel-op lucid dreaming and remember theirdreams better . . . ; a mask worn on the face while sleeping, with a small signal-ing light so the machine can communi-cate with the sleeper. The mask is attachedto a small computer. Sensors distinguishwhen the user is in rem sleep, and thecomputer gives them a gentle signal. Theuser can then make a conscious effort tobe aware of the dream and remember it.13

Why study lucid dreaming? And whyinvent a technology to prompt it? Thedreamers, its practitioners claim, tap alatent reserve of compassion in them-



11 V. S. Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain:Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (NewYork: William Morrow, 1968). He says, “Brainconnections are extremely labile and dynam-ic. Perceptions emerge as a result of reverbera-tions of signals between different levels of thesensory hierarchy, indeed even across differentsenses.” Ibid., 56. A similar approach appears in Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tonino, A Uni-verse of Consciousness (New York: Basic Books,2000). They theorize patterns of entry and re-entry in the body/brain network, ½nding con-sciousness to be the cumulative result of them.

12 I discuss this dimension of Prigogine’sthought in chapter 3 of Neuropolitics: Thinking,Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University of Min-nesota Press, 2002). Chapter 4 of that book listsnumerous ‘techniques of the self’ that can beapplied to body/brain processes.

13 Francisco J. Varela, ed., Sleeping, Dreamingand Dying: An Exploration of Consciousness withthe Dalai Lama (Boston: Wisdom Publications,1997), 106–107.

selves, a reserve that then ½nds expres-sion in future conduct.14 This effect isalso pertinent to the quality of ethicallife as understood by both Spinozistsand neo-Spinozists. For, as the earlierquotation from Hampshire suggested,we deny that goodness takes the form ofobedience to a universal law, as claimedin the dualist traditions of Augustineand Kant. We also contend that com-mand-and-obedience models of morali-ty too often contain within them a driveto revenge against the human condition,½nding expression in punitive and accu-satory orientations toward the diversityof life. Goodness, to Spinozists and neo-Spinozists, grows out of cultivation ofpositive attachment to this world in con-junction with reflection into the com-plexity of speci½c situations. So, in sug-gesting techniques through which toamplify care for the future of this world,the engagement between monks andneuroscientists in the study of luciddreaming speaks to Spinozists.

The second example comes from thelab of Antonio Damasio, a neuroscien-tist whose work has been influenced bySpinoza. A female patient he names S ishighly intelligent, and she is excellent atlearning new facts. The hippocampus,the brain nodule that launches the sub-system to lay down new memories, isthus in ½ne shape. But her positive atti-

tude toward life is never ruffled by pastexperiences of danger, betrayal, orabuse. Tests to gauge her ability to dis-tinguish between dangerous and benignsituations veri½ed this disposition: “Itwas as if negative emotions such as fearand anger had been removed from heraffective vocabulary, allowing the posi-tive emotions to dominate her life.”Scanning tests then revealed that “bothamygdalae . . . were almost entirely cal-ci½ed.”15 The amygdala is a little brainnodule that both generates rapid, affec-tive responses of fear on its own andsends signals to more re½ned brainzones for slower, more complex process-ing. Using a multidimensional scalingtechnique, Damasio’s colleague showedthat “S cannot consistently tell the ex-pression of fear in another person’s face. . . , she has no problem with the recogni-tion of other facial expressions.”16

S’s case suggests how well-developedthe neuroscientist’s ability is to establishcorrelations between observed body/brain states and the quality of lived ex-perience, even though the observer can-not report actual experience withouthelp from the client. It also reveals howmuch of perception and judgment isprior to consciousness. In another study,for instance, skin-conductance tests ofthe subjects revealed the ability to dis-tinguish between favorable and unfavor-able situations before a conscious judg-ment registered.17 Those of us with flu-ent relays between the amygdala, skin,and other brain regions thus make pre-liminary affect-imbued discriminations



14 The instruments are limited in what theydetect. “If you look at a person’s eeg, you can-not tell if he or she is full of compassion orcompletely oblivious.” Ibid., 104. This bookprovides a model of how the interplay betweenexperience and experiment can work. As a re-searcher says, “In statistical analyses, we foundthat there is more body movement in luciddreams, and more sound. Body balance seemsto be very important. All this leads us to askwhether there are psychological, cognitive pre-dispositions to lucid dreaming. It turns out thatthere are, notably in the realm of spatial skillssuch as body balance.” Ibid., 105.

15 Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Hap-pens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Con-sciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999),65, 62.

16 Ibid., 65.

17 Ibid., 301–302.

before a feeling of fear or annoyancefloods over us.

Mothers, Spinozists, Freudians, Bud-dhist monks, Christian preachers, phe-nomenologists, novelists, ½lmmakers,advertisers, and charismatic leaders haveintervened in nonconscious processingfor centuries. But today more systemat-ic knowledge of body/brain processesattracts corporate advertisers and polit-ical consultants as well. Robert Heath, a highly successful advertiser working in England, draws upon recent work inneuroscience to improve the effective-ness of tv ads. The most successful ads,he says, are “low involvement ads,” inwhich the higher reflective capacities ofthe viewers are either placed on hold ordiverted to a side issue, allowing non-conscious processing to take over. Theadvantage of nonconscious processing isthat “it is on all the time”; it is also auto-matic and inexhaustible in its capacityand more durable in retentive power.18

Such ads can trigger intensive charges of thought-imbued affect that flow intoa consumer’s perception and judgmenteven before they become explicit.

Political leaders, talk show hosts, andproduct advertisers seek to mobilizesuch nonconscious patterns of reso-nance across large constituencies and to encourage the results to flow into consciousness. Some of those patternsdemean particular groups and instillconsumption demands ill suited to thehealth of consumers or the collectivefuture.19 A major contemporary chal-lenge is to devise ways to expose and

respond to such technologies of collec-tive mobilization.

What insights can neo-Spinozism of-fer? It is important, certainly, to publi-cize how such strategies work, drawingupon studies in neuroscience, advertis-ing, political campaigns, and phenome-nology to do so. But it is also critical todevise countertechniques of cultural-corporealinfusion, tactics that work upon individu-als and constituencies at the visceral lev-el as they also engage the higher intellec-tual registers. This is dangerous territo-ry. But it is also unavoidable territory in a media-rich world, in which there isnever a vacuum in the micropolitics ofcorporeal-cultural infusion.

How can you participate in such strat-egies without becoming an envoy of cul-tural manipulation? I support a three-tiered strategy: you expose the tactics of those who do not themselves callattention to them; you introduce coun-terstrategies of cultural-corporeal in-fusion attached to a more generous vi-sion of public life; and you publicize, asyou proceed, how these counterstrate-gies themselves impinge upon the affec-tively rich, nonconscious layers of life.

The way in which Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart mimic and exaggeratethe orchestration of image, voice, music,sound, and rhythm by media stars suchas Bill O’Reilly provides one startingpoint. They do not simply expose fac-tual misstatements–an inadequate re-sponse to influences exerted in part up-on affective states situated below there½ned intellect. Instead, they ½ght ½rewith ½re, reenacting media strategies ofinculcation by parodying them. Clearly,however, much more thought and exper-iment is needed in order to both exposeand respond to the media tactics thatattempt to code the visceral register ofaffect-imbued judgment.



18 Robert Heath, The Hidden Power of Advertis-ing (Henley-on-Thames: Admap Publications,2001), 67.

19 I examine a contemporary instance in “TheEvangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine,”Political Theory 33 (6) (December 2005): 869–886.

Neither the arguments nor examplesprovided here prove the truth of neo-Spinozism. I join Hampshire in doubt-ing that such a de½nitive proof is apt to emerge, either for the neo-Spinozistvision, or for its dualist and reduction-ist competitors. Nonetheless, as newexperiments in neuroscience are linkedto reflection on cultural experience, theplausibility of neo-Spinozism may beenhanced.

Two avenues seem particularly prom-ising to pursue. The ½rst is to place neu-roscience and phenomenology into clos-er communication. In his late work,Nature, Maurice Merleau-Ponty movedclose to neo-Spinozism. If and as weabsorb his experiential accounts of theinterinvolvement of the senses, the es-sential role of the body’s implicit self-image in perception, the intersubjectivedimension of experience, and the layer-ing of bodily dispositions, our awarenessof the imbrications between body/brainobservation and lived experience maybecome more supple.20

The second avenue of inquiry is relat-ed to the ½rst. We should experimentcautiously with bodily techniques thatthen ½nd expression in thought and feeling. This is particularly pertinent tointellectuals who embrace a neo-Spi-nozist image of ethics. Such strategiesmight include visualization, primingdreams by reviewing a perplexing issuebefore going to sleep, lucid dreaming,meditation, and neurotherapy. As wemove back and forth among experien-tial awareness, media studies, knowl-edge of body/brain processes, and sub-

tle technologies of body/brain interven-tion, we may also gain more insight in-to how to confront and counteract thepolitics of cultural revenge that exerts so much power in the media and else-where today.



20 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: CourseNotes from the College de France, trans. RobertVallier (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univer-sity Press, 2003). His classic Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York:Routledge, 1989), should be read in conjunc-tion with that text.


At eighteen years of age, I had alreadybeen a member of the New York CityBallet for three years and had just beenmade a principal dancer. While per-forming at the ballet company’s home,the City Center of Music and Drama on 56th Street in New York City, I devel-oped a system that I believe has maxi-mized and improved the quality of myperformances.

Early in the morning or on my daysoff, I sit in the empty auditorium, gazingat the stage. I am envisioning a variationfrom my repertoire, imagining, in detail,

½rst how I will look in costume, thenhow I will enter the stage and fromwhich wing. As if watching a movie, I then dance the variation in my mindthe very best that I can, or even better–the leaps a foot higher, the space cov-ered double what I have done in the past.I picture the expression on my face, theuse of my arms and hands, and the speedat which I move. A dream of the possi-ble, glori½ed, runs on an imaginary loopthrough my mind, sometimes in slowmotion, sometimes accelerated.

At ½rst, I run this imaginary ½lm torhythmic counting alone (without mu-sic, melody, theme, harmony, etc.)–creating a blueprint of mathematicaltime. For example, I launch into a leapon the ½rst count (or beat), float throughthe second and third counts, and landnoiselessly on the fourth. Next, I rerunthese movements, adding, in my head,the melody of the music in place of thecounts. Each of these processes I repeatmultiple times.

Now I am ready to make the imaginedconcrete. Up on the stage, I rehearsewhat I have envisioned–step by step,count by count, without music, over andover again. Sometimes I spend as muchas two hours on a dance sequence that is perhaps one-and-a-half minutes long.During these repetitions, I count the

Jacques d’Amboise

The mind in dance

Jacques d’Amboise is a well-known dancer andchoreographer. He became a soloist with the NewYork City Ballet in 1953. Best known for his rolesin works such as “Filling Station,” “Stars andStripes,” and “Apollo,” d’Amboise also danced in several movies, including “Seven Brides forSeven Brothers” (1954) and “Carousel” (1956).His own ballets include “The Chase” (1963),“Quatuor” (1964), and “Irish Fantasy” (1964).He also taught at the School of American Balletand the State University of New York. In 1976,d’Amboise founded the National Dance Insti-tute, a nonpro½t organization that introduces the arts into public schools, using dance as a catalyst.


beats out loud as I dance, even rehears-ing how I will breathe. I also practice the dance movements in three differenttempos: slow motion, ideal, and accel-erated (in case the orchestra conductorhas an adrenaline rush during the per-formance). I am now prepared to handleany tempo that may emanate from theorchestra pit.

To end my practice session, I dance theentire variation, singing the melody asthough it were an aria. Sometimes as Idance, I speak out loud to an imaginaryaudience. I comment on what I am doingand sell it to them: “Watch this! Did youlike that? Here comes the biggest leap!”

Many years after creating this process,I read about athletes who demonstrablyenhanced their performances using visu-alization techniques. Scienti½c articleson the mind-body connection con½rmedmy own experiences. Similar anecdotesfrom fellow artists further corroboratedmy belief in the connection between thebody and the mind. Several times, theballerina Suzanne Farrell described howshe would lie in a warm bath and men-tally rehearse a ballet. Conrad Ludlow, aprincipal dancer with the New York CityBallet, would put on his makeup whilewearing a wool skullcap. “Why, Conrad,are you putting your makeup on with awool hat?” His reply: “I’m warming upmy brain. While I’m using the time put-ting on my makeup, I imagine my bodydoing my warm-up. That way, when Iactually have to do them, I don’t have to do as many–or maybe, if I’m lucky, Iwon’t have to do them at all!” I laughedand thought him eccentric. But he wasnot alone: Rudolph Nureyev would alsowear a wool knit cap as he led barre exer-cises. “It all comes from the brain to thefeet,” he told me. “If the brain is warm,it gets to the feet faster.”

Kay Gayner, a National Dance Insti-tute teacher and a performing artist in

the ½elds of dance, theater, and music,once described the exercises she does indrama class: “In order to create a charac-ter, we program pictures in the mind andthen trust that the body will respond.You don’t have to do anything; just trustyour mental pictures.” Her teacher, JohnOsbourne Hughes, also believes thatphysical actions are always a direct resultof mental images or impressions. If youcan create, prepare, and store mentalimages from, say, Lady Macbeth’s life,you will begin to walk, sound, and looklike her, and even think her thoughts.

After thirty-½ve years and many thousands of performances, I can re-call a handful of moments where I ex-perienced a distortion of time and space.Time slowed down markedly–it seemedthat I could create a freeze-frame of themoment–and I became an observer,detached, watching and enjoying everymoment unfold as it was happening. The dancer on stage was my Siamesetwin, parted momentarily–one of uswatching from somewhere above theaudience; the other, on stage, in perfectcontrol of the timing of every movementand gesture in space. I believe this phe-nomenon activates the same brain cen-ter or centers as when one is under greatstress–during a car accident, when youwatch your every action in slow motion;battle; or even death, when some peoplehave described leaving their bodies andwatching themselves die. It is a functionof the brain under stress–at times en-joyable, and at times not.

Oh, what a beautiful thing the humanbeing is, and how extraordinary themind! It is not divorced from the body.Rather, they are entwined, as a success-ful marriage, a union, and a bond.

The mind in dance



In J. M. Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Cos-tello, the protagonist, ½ctional authorElizabeth Costello, delivers a prize lec-ture entitled “The Lives of Animals.”Costello contrasts reason, exempli½edby the Descartian credo Cogito Ergo Sum,with what she describes as

fullness, embodiedness, the sensation ofbeing–not a consciousness of yourselfas a kind of ghostly reasoning machinethinking thoughts, but on the contrary the sensation–a heavily affective sensa-tion–of being a body with limbs that haveextension in space, of being alive to theworld. This fullness contrasts starkly withDescartes’ key state, which has an emptyfeel to it: the feel of a pea rattling aroundin a shell.

Here, Costello radically asserts that con-sciousness is multilayered–and that afundamental layer is ‘embodiedness,’

the representation of our body in ourbrains. She later points out that embod-iedness provides a sentient bridge be-tween human consciousness and that ofanimals.

In making the seemingly paradoxicalclaim that bodily and mental states areintimately conjoined, Coetzee, via his½ctional alter ego, raises a provocativequestion, one that a neuroscienti½c anal-ysis, let alone a de½nition, of conscious-ness has yet to address. His account ofconsciousness echoes a similar challengeWilliam Golding made in The Inheritors,which extensively documents the mentallives of Neanderthals–where thoughtand felt experience, engendered by per-turbed bodily states, are indistinguish-able.

I cannot claim to rise completely to the challenge of explaining the continu-ities between representations of the cor-poreal self and the conscious self. None-theless, I will approach it, starting byaccepting the general premise, articulat-ed most eloquently by Antonio Dama-sio, that the brain’s representations ofbodily states are fundamental to our on-going mental experience.1 As Damasiostated, “We only know that we feel an emo-

Ray Dolan

The body in the brain

Ray Dolan is a professor at and director of theWellcome Department of Imaging Neurosciencein London, England. The author of numerousarticles in cognitive neuroscience, he is also therecipient of the Alexander von Humboldt inter-national research award.


1 Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error (NewYork: G. P. Putnam, 1994).

tion when we sense that emotion is sensed ashappening in our organism.”2 In this essay,I will address what we currently knowabout how our brains generate and, inturn, remap one component of bodilystates, speci½cally those mediated by theautonomic nervous system. My choiceof the autonomic system reflects notonly my own scienti½c interest but alsothe fact that the autonomic nervous sys-tem provides the most dynamic map-ping between the body and brain andvice versa.

Homeostatic regulation is fundamen-tal to the physiological organization ofcomplex organisms. Examples of ho-meostatic control include body temper-ature, acid (pH), and salt regulation. Allphysiological systems operate withinnarrow constraints that must be contin-uously maintained to ensure the viabili-ty of an organism. In turn, any perturba-tion in bodily state, such as altered car-diovascular status, invokes a need forhomeostatic control. This homeostaticcontrol is largely accomplished via mul-tiple feedback loops that include contri-butions from specialized vestibular, pro-prioceptive, and pain afferent signals. In-formation from these diverse systems isintegrated within higher brain centers toprovide an ongoing, continually updatedimage of the state of the body in thebrain.

The importance of maintaining theinternal milieu has been a central organ-izing principle in physiology since thetime of Claude Bernard (1813–1878),who noted,

So far from the higher animal being indif-ferent to the external world, it is on thecontrary in a precise and informed rela-

tion with it, in such a way that its equilib-rium results from a continuous and deli-cate compensation, established as by themost sensitive of balances.

Among the body’s homeostatic systems,the autonomic nervous system is themost flexible and dynamic. Output sig-nals to the body, generated in the brain’scentral autonomic effector sites, give thebody a continuously updated picture ofthe motivational state of the brain. Inturn, afferent signals from the body pro-vide the brain with an updated represen-tation of the current state of the body. In concert, these regulatory signals inte-grate bodily states with short- and long-term motivational needs, which dependon the current and anticipated futureenvironments. My prime focus is toaccount for how such autonomic bodi-ly states, which reflect a dynamic signal-ing between body and brain, are generat-ed and, in turn, remapped within thebrain.

Anatomically and functionally thereare two segregated components to theautonomic nervous system: the sym-pathetic and parasympathetic subdivi-sions. Among its key functions sympa-thetic activity facilitates motor action,increasing cardiac output and reducingblood supply to the gut. In contrast,parasympathetic activity promotes morerecuperative functions such as reducingheart rate, lowering blood pressure, andslowing gut motility. Consequently, bod-ily states associated with survival behav-iors (e.g., the ½ght-or-flight response)are characterized by increased sympa-thetic activity and, in most instances,decreased parasympathetic activity. It is also notable that many autonomic responses, which tend to be outsideone’s conscious control (for example,sweating, piloerection, and vasomotorchange such as blushing), contribute to the emotional expression and subtle

The body inthe brain

2 Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Hap-pens (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999).



Ray Dolanon body in mind

social signaling that guide human inter-action.

Autonomic output is continuously ad-justed to reflect our physical, cognitive,and motivational needs with respect toour environment. This adjustment en-tails homeostatic control, which, in turn,requires feedback from the body to thebrain’s central effector-control mecha-nisms. Central homeostatic autonomiccontrol is supported primarily by a func-tional organization of deep brain nucleiwithin structures such as the hypothala-mus, pons, and medulla. Posterior andlateral hypothalamic nuclei influencesympathetic function via brain-stemcenters such as the tegmentum; raphénuclei; periaqueductal grey; and par-aventricular, parabrachial, and medialreticular nuclei. Meanwhile, the anteri-or hypothalamus influences parasympa-thetic efferent responses via medullarynuclei such as the nucleus ambiguus and dorsal motor nucleus of the vagus,Edinger-Westphal nucleus, and salivato-ry nucleus. Regions such as the centralnucleus of the amygdala, as well as thebed nucleus of the stria terminalis andlocus coeruleus, also contribute to auto-nomic control, as they project directly tobrain-stem autonomic nuclei and sym-pathetic cell bodies in the spinal cord. At the level of the brain stem, afferentfeedback of visceral information is rep-resented in the nucleus of the solitarytract and in hypothalamic nuclei that liein close proximity to these efferent auto-nomic centers.

The default mode for autonomic con-trol of bodily states is autoregulatory.But higher brain centers supporting cog-nitive functions, such as memory andmental imagery, also modulate lower au-toregulatory autonomic control centers.One can gather this from introspectiveobservation alone. For example, recol-lecting a threatening event from the past

can induce changes in respiration, skinconductance, and heart rate despite theabsence of any overt change in the de-mands upon our bodies. The influence of higher centers is also evident in ana-tomical and physiological observations,whereby stimulation of distinct corticaland subcortical regions can evoke auto-nomic responses. These areas of stimu-lation include the insula (implicated insomatic and visceral representations),the motor cortex, the neostriatum andcerebellum (involved in initiation andcontrol of limb movements), the amyg-dala and hippocampus (involved in emo-tion perception, threat responses, andepisodic memory), and the anterior cin-gulate and ventromedial prefrontal cor-tices (implicated in attention, motiva-tion, and decision making). Thus, thereappears to be an obligatory yoking ofautonomic regulatory control in lowerbrain regions to functions mediated byhigher brain centers.

A contemporary approach to under-standing the relationship between bodi-ly and brain states involves using brain-scanning techniques, such as functionalmagnetic resonance imaging (fmri), to measure brain activity noninvasively,close to real time. By scanning the brainsof subjects performing speci½c mental orphysical tasks that alter cardiovascularautonomic responses (e.g., increases inheart rate and blood pressure), it is nowpossible to correlate indices of alteredbodily states with corresponding statesof the brain.

In one of the ½rst investigations ofhigher cortical control of autonomicfunction, my colleagues and I adoptedthis approach. First, we tested for brainactivity common to performance ofeffortful mental and physical tasks. Ourprincipal observation was the correla-tion of activity in the anterior cingulate

cortex and the pons with increased car-diovascular output.3 This ½nding indi-cated that in addition to classical auto-regulatory sites, such as the pons, highercortical regions implicated in cognitivecontrol, such as the anterior cingulatecortex, are important for integrating vo-litional behavior (the sustained effort ofdoing the tasks) with peripheral states ofcardiovascular arousal.

Extending this approach, we then de-termined whether speci½c cortical re-gions contribute to influences on bodilystates mediated by the actions of eitherthe sympathetic or parasympathetic sys-tem. Again, we scanned subjects whilethey performed motor and cognitivetasks to induce variability in heart rate.Measures of heart-rate variability (hrv)were then derived from R-wave inter-vals of the recorded electrocardiogram(ecg), utilizing a power-spectral analy-sis of R-R interbeat intervals. This typeof analysis provides a means for distin-guishing parasympathetic from sympa-thetic nervous control: ‘high-frequen-cy’ spectral power (0.15–0.50 Hz) re-flects parasympathetic nervous control,whereas ‘low-frequency’ spectral power(0.05–0.15 Hz) reflects sympatheticcontrol.

From this study, we inferred that thereare distinct cortical inputs into sympa-thetic and parasympathetic control ofbodily arousal. An increase in the low-frequency sympathetic component ofthe ecg was associated with increasedanterior cingulate, somatomotor, and in-sula cortex activity. Of particular inter-est was the connection between anteriorcingulate cortex activity and influencesexpressed through the autonomic ner-

vous system’s sympathetic axis.4 In-creases in the parasympathetic compo-nent, on the other hand, were expressedin the anterior temporal cortex and deepbrain structures, in particular, the basalganglia.

Altered cardiovascular state is one in-dex of bodily arousal resulting from in-creased autonomic drive; electrodermalactivity (eda), or enhanced electricalconductance of the skin with increasedsweat secretion, is another. eda is gen-erated via the sympathetic system, and,unlike cardiovascular reactivity, its ex-pression is not confounded by concur-rent parasympathetic influences.

To determine how central brain statescontribute to the generation of eda, wedesigned a gambling task in which wepresented subjects with a playing card(with a face value between one and ten)and then had them guess if the value ofthe successive card would be higher orlower.5 We then rewarded a correct de-cision by giving the subject money andpunished a wrong decision by taking thesubject’s money. Each time, we waitedeight seconds to reveal the second card;during this delay subjects exhibited ananticipatory state of autonomic arousalthat reflected the degree of uncertaintyin the outcome. If the ½rst card had aface value of ½ve, there was maximaluncertainty; if its value was one or ten,there was no uncertainty.

3 H. D. Critchley et al., “Cerebral Correlates of Autonomic Cardiovascular Arousal: A Func-tional Neuroimaging Investigation in Humans,”Journal of Physiology (Lond) 523 (1) (2000): 259–270.

4 H. D. Critchley et al., “Human Cingulate Cor-tex and Autonomic Control: Converging Neu-roimaging and Clinical Evidence,” Brain 126(2003): 2139–2152.

5 H. D. Critchley, R. Elliott, C. J. Mathias, andR. J. Dolan, “Neural Activity Relating to Gener-ation and Representation of Galvanic Skin Con-ductance Responses: A Functional MagneticResonance Imaging Study,” Journal of Neurosci-ence 20 (2000): 3033–3040.





Using this game, we could explorewhich brain regions corresponded to asympathetic state of arousal (as indexedby enhanced eda) during the process of appraising each decision’s risk value.Activity in the anterior cingulate anddorsolateral prefrontal cortices correlat-ed with the degree of anticipatory edaresponse, while both risk and arousalmodulated activity in the anterior cin-gulate and insula cortex. These resultsled us to infer that these regions mediatebetween a cognitive state of risk and un-certainty and an associated bodily stateof increased sympathetic arousal.

Although eda changes automaticallyin response to the environment, subjectscan be taught to exert control over theirautonomic responses with biofeedbacktechniques. Using eda as an index ofsympathetic arousal, we trained subjectsto perform a biofeedback relaxationtask. In this study, we presented subjectswith a ‘thermometer’ measuring theirlevel of eda arousal. By scanning thesesubjects as they reduced their eda, weshowed that this decrease in eda corre-lated with increased activity in the an-terior cingulate cortex, inferior parietalcortex, and globus pallidus. We thenconcluded that these regions contrib-uted to intentional influences on sym-pathetically mediated bodily states.

In this study, exteroceptive informa-tion, as provided by the ‘thermometer,’enabled biofeedback control of auto-nomic states. But what happens if thisform of feedback is inaccurate or noisy?In such situations subjects can still ac-complish the task by ignoring the ex-teroceptive signal and focusing insteadon their own interoceptive state (forexample, their state of cardiovasculararousal). In a follow-up experiment weused a similar biofeedback relaxationtask but scrambled the accuracy (by add-ing random ‘noise’) or the sensitivity (by

scalar adjustments of feedback) of thevisual index of electrodermal arousal(eda). These manipulations, as expect-ed, only enhanced the subjects’ relianceon their own interoceptive states.

Performance of biofeedback relaxa-tion tasks activated the anterior cingu-late, insula, thalamus, hypothalamus,and brain stem, as well as the somato-sensory cortex and the dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex. Both accuracy and sen-sitivity of feedback influenced activitywithin the anterior insula in particular.Thus, the perceptual qualities (sensitivi-ty) of the feedback could increase the al-ready enhanced insula response to noisein the feedback signal. These ½ndingsled us to surmise that activity in the an-terior cingulate cortex mediates an in-tentional drive to decrease sympathet-ic activity, whereas the insula supportssensory integration of interoceptive andexteroceptive information, reflecting the current bodily state of autonomicarousal.6

The experimental approach describedso far relies exclusively on studies con-ducted with healthy subjects. Homeosta-sis is crucially dependent on feedbacksignals. Once something perturbs thebody, afferent-feedback circuits providethe brain with a representation of thebody’s altered state (or a metarepresen-tation, meaning a representation thatindexes a disturbance in homeostasis).But where are these states mapped in thebrain? This question should garner wideinterest in view of Damasio’s suggestionthat feedback representations of visceraland somatomotor activity give not onlyemotional color to ongoing experience

6 H. D. Critchley et al., “Volitional Control ofAutonomic Arousal: A Functional MagneticResonance Study,” Neuroimage 16 (2002): 909–919.

but also support a bedrock representa-tion of ‘the self.’

Patients with discrete lesions to effer-ent or afferent limbs of these controlloops can, in theory, provide a means toinvestigate the dynamics of autonomicregulation and, indeed, the wider influ-ence of bodily responses on emotion andcognition. But the neurological literaturelacks any clear lesion that effectivelycompromises feedback for autonomicstates. Even a patient with a high spinalcord lesion that impairs most forms ofsomatic sensory feedback still has intactautonomic feedback through the vagusnerve.

So, instead, my colleagues and I havestudied patients with pure autonomicfailure (paf), an acquired syndrome that results in degeneration of the pe-ripheral autonomic system.7 This syn-drome affects postganglionic sympa-thetic and parasympathetic neurons inthe absence of a central neurologicalpathology. Patients with this disorder no longer generate peripheral autonom-ic responses to stress, supplying a uniqueglimpse into how autonomically gener-ated bodily states are remapped in thebrain.

We reasoned that the primary differ-ence in brain activity between paf andcontrol subjects performing identicalstress tasks would be an absence of af-ferent feedback from the body. Initial-ly, we observed increased activity in thepons in paf subjects, across effortful and effortless cognitive and physicaltasks, which is consistent with the ideathat this region is responsible for contin-uous autoregulatory, autonomic control.The absence of afferent regulatory feed-

back in paf subjects accounts for theirenhanced level of activity in this region.In addition, paf patients demonstratedreduced activity in the insula and pri-mary somatosensory cortices across alltasks, indicating the involvement ofthese areas in a metarepresentation ofaltered bodily states.

Of particular interest was identifyingthe brain areas in which paf patientsand controls exhibited differences dur-ing physically and mentally taxing tasks(accompanied by autonomic arousal incontrols), but not during effortless tasks.Signi½cantly greater anterior cingulateactivity was evident in paf patients, whogenerated no cardiovascular arousal,compared to matched healthy controls.This ½nding is consistent with the ideathat the anterior cingulate is responsiblefor context-speci½c autonomic modu-lation of bodily states to meet ongoingbehavioral demands. In healthy subjects,context-speci½c autonomic responsesprovide a negative feedback signal toregulate the efferent sympathetic drive.Without such feedback, paf subjects donot experience a decrease in anteriorcingulate cortex activity.

In a similar experiment, we exposedboth paf patients and control subjects to a threat stimulus (a face paired with a shock), inducing bodily changes asso-ciated with fear. Again, we could deter-mine how the absence of afferent infor-mation from the body alters brain activ-ity. While paf patients can perceive athreat and generate a central output sig-nal from the brain, they lacked activityin the insula cortex, pointing again tothe insula as providing the map of inter-oceptive states of autonomic arousal.8

7 H. D. Critchley, C. J. Mathias, and R. J. Do-lan, “Neuroanatomical Basis for First- and Sec-ond-Order Representations of Bodily States,”Nature Neuroscience 4 (2001): 207–212.

8 H. D. Critchley, C. J. Mathias, and R. J. Do-lan, “Fear Conditioning in Humans: The Influ-ence of Awareness and Autonomic Arousal onFunctional Neuroanatomy,” Neuron 33 (2002):653–663.





Many of our neuroimaging investiga-tions implicated regions such as the an-terior cingulate and insula cortices inautonomic control, particularly in thecontextual generation and representa-tion of states of bodily arousal, respec-tively. Thus, lesions affecting these re-gions should generate abnormal auto-nomic responses during volitional be-havior. First, we studied three patientswho had acquired damage to the anteri-or cingulate cortex. During the perform-ance of effortful tasks all three patientsdemonstrated an absence of adaptivecardiovascular responses.9 The patients’heart-rate variability (hrv) supplied ad-ditional evidence of an association be-tween anterior cingulate function andcontrol of autonomic-induced change inbodily states. Power-spectral analysis oftheir hrv revealed abnormalities pri-marily in sympathetic power, consistentwith our prior conjecture that the anteri-or cingulate cortex provides an interfacebetween cognitive effort and generationof sympathetic bodily arousal. Indeed,these observations strikingly supportour theory that the anterior cingulatecortex is involved in integrating higherstates of cognition, as required duringvolitional behaviors, and autonomicstates of bodily arousal.

The possibility that the insula cortex is the primary substrate for a second-order mapping of bodily states led us to believe that this region mediates con-scious awareness of bodily states–or,more precisely, feeling states–an ideaalso central to Damasio’s account offeeling states.10 Feeling is the subjective,private, or experiential component ofemotion. In the present context, feeling

refers to the responses of our sense organsand internal milieu, including visceral states,to the environment, and the consequential re-sponses within central mechanisms that moni-tor induced internal change. To address thequestion of whether visceral awarenessis associated with enhanced activity inthis cortical region, we studied a groupof interoceptively aware subjects.

The critical experimental hurdle herewas creating a reliable index of visceralawareness. It turns out that a heartbeat-detection task can test sensitivity to vis-ceral states. In this task, subjects mustindicate the timing of their own heart-beat. The subjects are played back a sig-nal, visual or auditory, triggered by theirown heartbeats–with or without an ex-perimentally manipulated lag. The sub-jects must then determine whether ornot the feedback signal is synchronouswith their interoceptively monitoredheartbeat. Approximately half the pop-ulation is good at detecting their heart-beats; interestingly, these subjects arealso more emotionally aware and ex-pressive.

Our study showed that enhanced at-tention to one’s visceral state was asso-ciated with increased activity in a num-ber of brain regions, in particular, thesomatosensory and insula cortices.11

Furthermore, detecting the desynchro-nization between the feedback signaland one’s own heartbeat, a manipula-tion that places greater demands on interoceptive awareness, involved in-creased activity in the right insula. This½nding converged with recent neuroan-atomical discoveries indicating this re-gion’s importance to awareness of one’sfeelings. In particular, results showingthat this region receives a dedicated lam-

9 Critchley et al., “Human Cingulate Cortexand Autonomic Control.”

10 Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens.

11 H. D. Critchley et al., “Neural Systems Sup-porting Interoceptive Awareness,” Nature Neu-roscience 7 (2004): 189–195.

ina-1 spinothalamic input that convergeswith vagal inputs (a major source of vis-ceral feedback) in the right anterior in-sula, and neuroanatomical evidence re-vealing that this region has a distinctlaminar architecture found only in hu-mans and higher primates, are in keep-ing with this interpretation of our neu-roimaging ½ndings.12

A question arising from these ½ndings,though, is the degree to which neuralmechanisms that mediate awareness of one’s own bodily state contribute toawareness of the bodily states of others.Such awareness is at the core of the psy-chological attribute of empathy, and, ar-guably, this attribute underpins a humandisposition to altruism and compassion.The suggestion here is that our ability toempathize with others relies on neuro-nal systems that underlie a higher-orderrepresentation of our own bodily andemotional states.

We addressed this very question in astudy in which subjects received either a highly painful or not painful stimulus,and then viewed a loved one receive apainful stimulus. The intriguing resultwas that the emotional component ofpain evoked when a subject actually re-ceived a painful stimulus was also trig-gered when the subject witnessed aloved one receive the same pain.13 Theregions of shared activation, for pain toself and to others, involved anterior cin-gulate and insula cortices–areas that Ihave suggested mediate the generation

of sympathetic autonomic output andthe afferent mapping of autonomicallygenerated perturbation in bodily states.

Human neuropsychology has tradi-tionally embraced a dualist model ofbrain and body. The fact that virtually all cognitive states are, to a greater orlesser degree, yoked to bodily statesmeans that our conventional ideas of afundamental division between the men-tal and the corporeal are in need of revi-sion. What we apprehend in the realm of the senses is represented by imagesand concepts that facilitate representa-tion in memory and awareness. What we sense from our bodies is, for the mostpart, only recognized as a vague back-ground state, a current of feeling withinour ongoing mental life, that is largelywithout symbolic mediation and con-ceptual form. However, this absence ofconceptual form arguably provides thebasis for the felt immediacy of experi-ence, and a subjective consciousness,that emerges out of a dynamic mappingbetween brain and body.

12 J. Allman, A. Hakeem, and K. Watson, “TwoPhylogenetic Specializations in the HumanBrain,” Neuroscientist 8 (2002): 335–346; A. D.Craig, “Human Feelings: Why Are Some MoreAware Than Others?” Trends in Cognitive Science8 (2004): 239–241.

13 T. Singer et al., “Empathy for Pain Involvesthe Affective But Not Sensory Components ofPain,” Science 303 (2004): 1157–1162.




One could make a case that the histo-ry of cognitive science, insofar as it’sbeen any sort of success, has consistedlargely of ½nding more and more thingsabout cognition that we didn’t know anddidn’t know that we didn’t. ‘Throwingsome light on how much dark there is,’as I’ve put it elsewhere. The professionalcognitive scientist has a lot of perplexityto endure, but he can be pretty sure thathe’s gotten in on the ground floor.

For example, we don’t know whatmakes some cognitive states conscious.(Indeed, we don’t know what makes anymental state, cognitive or otherwise,conscious, or why any mental state, cog-nitive or otherwise, bothers with beingconscious.) Also, we don’t know muchabout how cognitive states and processesare implemented by neural states and

processes. We don’t even know wheth-er they are (though many of us are pre-pared to assume so faut de mieux). Andwe don’t know how cognition develops(if it does) or how it evolved (if it did),and so forth, very extensively.

In fact, we have every reason to expectthat there are many things about cogni-tion that we don’t even know that wedon’t know, such is our benighted condi-tion.

In what follows, I will describe brieflyhow the notions of mental process andmental representation have developedover the last ½fty years or so in cognitivescience (or ‘cogsci’ for short): where westarted, where we are now, and what as-pects of our current views are most like-ly to be in need of serious alteration. My opinions sometimes differ from themainstream, and where they do, I willstress that fact; those are, no doubt, theparts of my sketch that are least likely tobe true.

The 1950s ‘paradigm shift’ in theoriesof the cognitive mind, initiated largelyby Noam Chomsky’s famous review ofB. F. Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior, isusually described in terms of a conflictbetween ‘behaviorism’ and ‘mentalism,’from which the latter emerged victori-ous. Behaviorists thought something

Jerry Fodor

How the mind works: what we still don’t know

Jerry Fodor is State of New Jersey Professor ofPhilosophy at Rutgers University. He is the authorof several publications in philosophy and cognitivescience, including “Modularity of Mind” (1983),“A Theory of Content and Other Essays” (1990),and “The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way: TheScope and Limits of Computational Psychology”(2000).


was methodologically or ontologicallycontroversial about the claim that we(and, presumably, other advanced kindsof primates) often do the things we dobecause we believe and desire the thingswe do. Chomsky’s reply was, in essence,‘Don’t be silly. Our behavior is charac-teristically caused by our mental states;therefore, a serious psychology must bea theory about what mental states existand what roles they play in causing ourbehavior. You put gas in the tank becauseyou believe that, if you don’t, the car willgrind to a stop, and you don’t want thecar to do so. How could anyone sane be-lieve otherwise?’

That was, to put it mildly, all to thegood. Behaviorism never was a plausibleview of the methodology of psychology,any more than instrumentalism was aplausible view of the methodology ofphysics. Unsurprisingly, the two died ofmuch the same causes. Many of the ar-guments Chomsky brought against theproposed reduction of the mind to beha-vior recall arguments that Carl Hempleand Hilary Putnam brought against theproposed reduction of electrons (to saynothing of tables and chairs) to ‘½ctions’or ‘logical constructions’ out of sensoryexperience. ‘Don’t be silly,’ they said.‘Sensations and the like are mind-depen-dent; tables and chairs are not. You cansit on chairs but not on sensations; a for-tiori, chairs can’t be sensations.’ Chom-sky’s realism about the mental was thuspart of a wider realist agenda in the phi-losophy of science. But it’s important todistinguish (as many of us did not backin those days) Chomsky’s objections toSkinner’s behaviorism from the ones heraised against Skinner’s associationism. In retrospect, the latter seem the moreimportant.

Behaviorism was and remains an aber-ration in the history of psychology. Infact, the mainstream of theorizing about

the mind (including both philosophicalempiricists and philosophical rational-ists, and the ‘sensationist’ tradition ofpsychologists like Wilhelm Wundt andEdward Tichner) wasn’t behavioristic.Rather, it was a mentalistic form of as-sociationism that took the existence ofmental representations (what were thenoften called ‘Ideas’) and their causalpowers entirely for granted. What asso-ciationism mainly cared about was dis-covering the psychological laws thatIdeas fall under. And the central thesis–which, Hume said, was to psycholo-gy what gravitation was to Newtonianphysics–was that Ideas succeed oneanother in cognitive processes accordingto the laws of association.

For nearly three hundred years, asso-ciationism was the consensus theory ofcognition among Anglophone philoso-phers and psychologists. (It’s still theview assumed by advocates of ‘connec-tionism,’ a movement in cognitive sci-ence that hopes to explain human intel-lectual abilities by reference to associ-ations among ‘nodes’ in ‘neural net-works,’ the latter corresponding, moreor less, to Ideas and the former corre-sponding, more or less, to minds thatcontain them. If, in fact, you take awaythe loose talk about ‘neurological plau-sibility,’ the connectionist’s account of cognition is practically indistinguish-able from Hume’s.) Associationism was widely believed to hold, not just for thought but for language and brainprocesses as well: thoughts are chains of associated concepts, sentences arechains of associated words, and brainprocesses are chains of associated neu-ron ½rings. In all three cases, transitionsfrom one link in such a chain to the nextwere supposed to be probabilistic, withpast experience determining the proba-bilities according to whatever Laws ofAssociation happened to be in fashion.

How themind works:what we stilldon’t know



Jerry Fodor on body in mind

These Anglophone theorists notwith-standing, it’s been clear, at least sinceKant, that the associationist picturecan’t be right. Thoughts aren’t mere se-quences of ideas; at a minimum, they are structured sequences of ideas. Tothink ‘there’s a red door’ isn’t to think½rst about red and then about a door;rather, it’s to think about a door that it isred. This is, I suppose, a truism, thoughperhaps not one that the cogsci com-munity has fully assimilated. Likewise,sentences aren’t just lists of words. In-stead, they have a kind of internal struc-ture such that some of their parts aregrouped together in ways that others of their parts are not. Intuitively, thegrouping of the ‘parts’ of ‘the red dooropened’ is: [(the) (red door)] (opened),not (the red) (door opened).

So sentences have not just lexical con-tents but also constituent structures,consisting of their semantically inter-pretable parts (‘the red’ doesn’t meananything in ‘the red door opened,’ but‘the red door’ does). One of the mainthings wrong with associationism wasthus its failure to distinguish betweentwo quite different (in fact, orthogonal)relations that Ideas can enter into: asso-ciation (a kind of causal relation) and constituency (a hierarchical kind of geo-metrical relation). Ironically, as far asanybody knows, the ½rst isn’t of muchtheoretical interest. But the second, theconstituency relation, does a lot of theheaviest lifting in our current accountsof cognition.

For example, as Chomsky famouslypointed out, sentences are ‘productive.’The processes that construct sentencesout of their parts must be recursive: theymust be able to apply to their own out-puts, thereby generating in½nite sets. Itturns out that these recursions are de-½ned over the constituent structures ofthe expressions they apply to. Typically,

they work by embedding a constituentof a certain type in another constituentof the same type, like a sentence within a sentence. (For example, the sentence‘John met the guy from Chicago’ is somesort of construction out of the sentences‘John met the guy’ and ‘the guy is fromChicago,’ with the second sentence em-bedded in the ½rst.) The same sort ofstory goes for mental representations,since they are also productive: if thereweren’t boundlessly many thoughts toexpress, we wouldn’t need boundlesslymany sentences to express them.

Their potential for productivity isn’t,of course, the only thing that distin-guishes constituent structures from as-sociative structures. The strength of theassociation between Ideas is traditional-ly supposed to depend largely on the fre-quency and spatiotemporal contiguity oftheir tokenings. In contrast, as Chomskyalso pointed out, the structural relationsamong the constituents of a complexrepresentation hold for novel represen-tations as well as for previously tokenedones, and are typically independent ofthe propinquity of the relata.

In sum, by far the most important dif-ference between the traditional theoriesof mind and the ones those of us whoaren’t connectionists endorse is the shiftfrom an associationist to a constituent,or computational, view of cognition.

Here, then, are the two basic hypothe-ses on which the current computationaltheory of cognition rests:

First, mental representations are sen-tence-like rather than picture-like. Thisstands in sharp contrast to the tradition-al view in which Ideas are some kind ofimages. In sentences, there’s a distinc-tion between mere parts and constitu-ents, of which the latter are the semanti-cally interpretable parts. By contrast, everypart of a picture has an interpretation: itshows part of what the picture shows.

Second, whereas associations are op-erations on parts of mental representa-tions, computations are operations de-½ned on their constituent structures.

So much for a brief (but, I think, rea-sonably accurate) summary of whatmost cognitive scientists now hold as aworking hypothesis about mental repre-sentations and mental processes (except,to repeat, connectionists, who somehownever got beyond Hume). Now, the ques-tion of interest is, for how much of cog-nition is this hypothesis likely to betrue? The available options are none of it, some of it, and all of it.

My guess is: at best, not very much of it. This brings me to the heart of thisessay.

Here’s what I’m worried about. Aswe’ve been seeing, constituent structureis a species of the part/whole relation:all constituents are parts, though notvice versa. It follows that constituency is a local relation: to specify the parts ofa thing you don’t need to mention any-thing that’s outside of the thing. (To spec-ify the part/whole relation between acow and its left leg, you don’t have totalk about anything outside the cow.Even if this cow were the only thing inthe whole world, it would bear the samerelation to its left leg that it bears to itsleft leg in this world. Only, in that world, the cow would be lonelier.) Likewise forrepresentations–mental representationsincluded. Since constituents are parts ofrepresentations, operations de½ned onconstituents apply solely in virtue of theinternal structure of the representations.

The question thus arises: are theremental structures, with mental process-es de½ned on them, that aren’t local inthis sense? If there are, then we are introuble because, association having per-ished, computation is the only notion ofa mental process that we have; and, as

we’ve just seen, computations are de-½ned over local properties of the repre-sentations that they apply to.

Well, I think there’s pretty good rea-son to suppose that many of the mentalprocesses crucial to cognition are indeednot local. So I guess we’re in trouble. Itwouldn’t be the ½rst time.

There are at least two pervasive char-acteristics of cognitive processes thatstrongly suggest their nonlocality. One is their sensitivity to considerations ofrelevance; the other is their sensitivity tothe ‘global’ properties of one’s cognitivecommitments. It is very easy to run thetwo together, and it’s a common practicein cogsci literature to do so. For polemi-cal purposes, perhaps nothing much islost by that. But some differences be-tween them are worth exploring, so I’lltake them one at a time.

Consider the kind of thinking thatgoes on in deciding what one ought tobelieve or what one ought to do (thesame considerations apply both to ‘pure’and to ‘practical’ reason). In both cases,reasoning is typically isotropic. In otherwords, any of one’s cognitive commit-ments (including, of course, currentlyavailable experiential data) is relevant, in principle, to accepting or rejecting theoptions–there is no way to determine,just by inspecting an empirical hypothe-sis, what will be germane to accepting or rejecting it. Relevance isn’t like con-stituency–it’s not a local property ofthoughts.

So how does one ½gure out what’s rele-vant to deciding on a new belief or plan?That question turns out to be very hardto answer. There is an in½nite corpus ofprior cognitive commitments that mightprove germane, but one can actually visitonly some relatively small, ½nite subsetof them in the ‘real time’ during whichproblems get solved. Relevance is long,but life is short. Something, somehow,





must ‘½lter’ what one actually thinksabout when one considers what next tobelieve or what next to do.

Hence the infamous ‘frame problem’in theories of arti½cial intelligence: howdo I decide what I should take to be rele-vant when I compute the level of con½-dence I should invest in a hypothesis or aplan? Any substantive criterion of rele-vance I employ will inevitably risk omit-ting something that is, in fact, germane;and one of the things I want my estimateto do (all else equal) is minimize thisrisk. How on earth am I to arrange that?

I think the frame problem arises be-cause we have to use intrinsically localoperations (computations, as cogsci currently understands that notion) tocalculate an intrinsically nonlocal re-lation (relevance). If that’s right, theframe problem is a symptom of some-thing deeply inadequate about our cur-rent theory of mind.

By contrast, it’s a widely prevalentview among cognitive scientists that theframe problem can be circumvented byresorting to ‘heuristic’ cognitive strate-gies. This suggestion sounds interesting,but it is, in a certain sense, empty be-cause the notion of a heuristic procedureis negatively de½ned–a heuristic is just a procedure that only works from timeto time. Therefore, everything dependson which heuristic procedure is alleged to circumvent the frame problem, andabout this the canonical literature tendsto be, to put it mildly, pretty causal.

Here, for example, is Steven Pinker, in a recent article, explaining what heu-ristics investors use when they play thestock market: “Real people tend to baseinvestment decisions on, among otherthings, what they hear that everyone elseis doing, what their brother-in-law ad-vises, what a cold-calling stranger with a con½dent tone of voice tells them, andwhat the slick brochures from large in-

vesting ½rms recommend. People, inother words, use heuristics.”1

Pinker provides no evidence that thisis, in fact, the way that investors work;it’s a story he’s made up out of wholecloth. At best, it’s hard to see why, if it’strue, some investors make lots moremoney than others. But never mind;what’s really striking about Pinker’s listis that he never considers that thinkingabout the stock market (or paying some-body else to think about it for you, ifyou’re lazy like me) might be one of the‘heuristics’ that investors employ whenthey try to ½gure out whether to buy orsell. Ironically, thinking seems largely tohave dropped out of heuristic accountsof how the mind works. Skinner wouldhave been greatly amused.

There have been, to be sure, caseswhen cognitive scientists have tried totell a story about the use of heuristicstrategies in cognition that amounts to more than the mere waving of hands.To my knowledge, the heuristic mostoften said to guide decisions about whataction to perform or belief to adopt issome version of ‘if things went all rightwith what you did last time, do the sameagain this time.’ We owe a rather opaqueformulation to the philosopher Eric Lor-mand: “A system should assume by de-fault that a fact persists, unless there is an axiom specifying that it is changed by an occurring event . . . . [G]iven that anevent E occurs in situation S, the systemcan use axioms to infer new facts exist-ing in S+1, and then simply ‘copy’ theremainder of its beliefs about S over toS+1.”2 Likewise, Peter Carruthers says

1 Steven Pinker, “So How Does the MindWork?” Mind and Language 20 (1) (February2005): 1–24.

2 Zenon W. Pylyshyn, ed., Robot’s Dilemma: TheFrame Problem in Arti½cial Intelligence (Norwood,N.J.: Ablex, 1987), 66.

that “there’s no reason why the choices[about what to do next] couldn’t bemade by higher-order heuristics, such as‘use the one which worked last time.’”3

The idea, then, is to adopt whicheverplan was successful when this situationlast arose. Cogsci literature refers to thisheuristic as the ‘sleeping dog’ strategy.Last time, I tiptoed past the sleeping dog,and I didn’t get bitten. So if I tiptoe pastthe sleeping dog again now, I probablywon’t get bitten this time either. So theplan I’ll adopt is tiptoe past the sleeping dog.What could be more reasonable? Whatcould be less problematic?

But, on second thought, this sugges-tion is no help since it depends crucial-ly on how one individuates situations,and how one individuates situations de-pends on what one takes as relevant todeciding when situations are of the samekind. Consider: What was it, precisely,that did happen last time? Was it that Itiptoed past a sleeping dog? Or was itthat I tiptoed past a sleeping brown dog?Or that I tiptoed past a sleeping pet ofFarmer Jones? Or that I tiptoed past thatsleeping pet of Farmer Jones? Or that Itiptoed past a creature that Farmer Joneshad thoughtfully sedated so that I couldsafely tiptoe past it? It could well be thatthese are all true of what I did last time.Nor, in the general case, is there any rea-son to suppose that I know, or have everknown, what it is about what I did lasttime that accounts for my success. So,when I try to apply the sleeping dog heu-ristic, I’m faced with ½guring out whichof the true descriptions of the situationlast time is relevant to deciding what Iought to do this time. Keeping that inmind is crucial. If the dog I tiptoed past last time was sedated, I’ve got no

grounds at all for thinking that tippingmy toe will get me past it now. Philoso-phers have gotten bitten that way fromtime to time.4

So I’m back where I started: I want to½gure out what action my previous ex-perience recommends. What I need, inorder to do so, is to discern what aboutmy previous action was relevant to itssuccess. But relevance is a nonlocal rela-tion, and I have only local operations athand with which to compute it. So the‘sleeping dog’ strategy doesn’t solve myrelevance problem; it only begs it. Youmight as well say: ‘Well, you decided onan action that was successful last time;so just decide on a successful action thistime too.’ My stockbroker tells me hehas a sure½re investment heuristic: ‘Buylow and sell high.’ It sounds all right, butsomehow it keeps not making me rich.It’s well-nigh useless to propose thatheuristic processing is the solution to the problem of inductive relevance be-cause deciding how to choose, and how

3 Peter Carruthers, “Keep Taking the ModulesOut,” Times Literary Supplement 5140 (October 5,2001): 30.

4 Another way to put the same point: Whatcounts as the last time this situation arose de-pends on how I describe this situation. Was the last time this happened the last time that I tiptoed past a sleeping dog? Or was it the lasttime that I tiptoed past a brown sleeping dog?Or was it the last time that I tiptoed past a se-dated brown sleeping dog? What determineswhich heuristic I should use in this situationthus depends on what kind of situation I take itto be. And what kind of situation I take it to bedepends on what about my successful attemptsat dog-passing was relevant to their succeeding.We’re very close here to Nelson Goodman’sfamous point that, in inductive inference, howyou generalize your data depends crucially onwhat you take them to have in common–whattheir relevant similarity is. The frame problemis thus an instance of a perfectly general prob-lem about the role of relevant similarity in em-pirical inferences. Lacking an account of that,the advice to do the same as you did last timeis, quite simply, empty.





to apply, a heuristic itself typically in-volves estimating degrees of inductiverelevance.

It’s remarkable, and more than a bitdepressing, how regularly what is takento be a solution of the frame problemproves to be simply one of its formula-tions. The rule of thumb for reading theliterature is: if someone thinks that hehas solved the frame problem, he doesnot understand it; and if someone eventhinks that he understands the frameproblem, he doesn’t understand it. But itdoes seem clear that, whatever the solu-tion of the frame problem turns out tobe, it isn’t going to be computationallylocal. Its constituent structure is all of amental representation that a mental pro-cess can ‘see.’ But you can’t tell from justthe constituent structure of a thoughtwhat tends to (dis)con½rm it. Clearly,you have to look at a lot else as well. Theframe problem is how you tell what elseyou have to look at. I wish I knew. If youknow, I wish you’d tell me.

The frame problem concerns the sizeof a ½eld of cognitive commitments thatone has to search in order to make a suc-cessful decision. But there are also caseswhere the shape of the ½eld is the prob-lem. Many systems of beliefs that aregermane to estimating con½rmation lev-els have ‘global’ parameters; that is, theyare de½ned over the whole system of pri-or cognitive commitments, so computa-tions that are sensitive to such parame-ters are nonlocal on the face of them.

Suppose I have a set of beliefs that I’m considering altering in one way oranother under the pressure of experi-ence. Clearly, I would prefer that, all else equal, the alteration I settle on is thesimplest of the available ways to accom-modate the recalcitrant data. The global-ity problem, however, is that I can’t eval-uate the overall simplicity of a belief sys-tem by summing the intrinsic simplici-

ties of each of the beliefs that belong to it. There is, on the face of it, no suchthing as the ‘intrinsic’ simplicity of a be-lief (just as there is no such thing as theintrinsic relevance of a datum). Nothinglocal about a representation–nothingabout the relations between the repre-sentation and its constituent parts, forexample–determines how much itwould complicate my current cognitivecommitments if I were to endorse it.

Notice that, unlike the problems aboutrelevance, this sort of worry about local-ity holds even for very small systems ofbelief. It holds even for punctate systemsof belief (if, indeed, there can be suchthings). Suppose that all that I believe is P, but that I am now considering al-so adopting either belief Q or belief R.What I therefore want to evaluate, ifI’m to maximize overall simplicity, iswhether the belief P&Q is simpler thanthe belief P&R. But I can’t do that byconsidering P, Q, and R severally–thecomplexity of P&Q isn’t a function ofthe complexity of P and the complexityof Q taken separately. So it appears thatthe operations whereby I compute thesimplicity of P&Q can’t be local.

The same goes for other parametersthat anyone rational would like to max-imize, all else being equal. Take, for ex-ample, the relative conservatism of suchcommitments. Nobody wants to changehis mind unless he has to; and if one hasto, one prefers to opt for the bare mini-mum of change. The trouble is, onceagain, that conservatism is a global prop-erty of belief systems. On the face of it,you can’t estimate how much adding Pwould alter the set of commitments Cby considering P and C separately; onthe face of it, conservatism (unlike, forexample, consistency) isn’t a propertythat beliefs have taken severally.

In short, it appears that many of theprinciples that control (what philoso-

phers call) the nondemonstrative ½xa-tion of beliefs have to be sensitive toparameters of whole systems of cogni-tive commitments.5 Computational ap-plications of these principles have to benonlocal. As a result, they can’t literal-ly be computations in the sense of thatterm that our current cognitive sciencehas in mind.

If you suppose (as I’m inclined to) thatnondemonstrative inference is always aspecies of argument to the best availableexplanation, this sort of considerationwill be seen to apply very broadly in-deed: what’s the best available explana-tion always depends on what alternative

explanations are available; and, by de½-nition, the presence or absence of alter-natives to a hypothesis isn’t a local prop-erty of that hypothesis.

I should, however, enter a caveat. Sup-pose that something you want to meas-ure is a property of complex beliefs butnot of their parts; for example, supposethat you want to assess the simplicity of P&Q relative to that of P&R. My pointhas been that, prima facie, the computa-tions you have to perform aren’t local;they must be sensitive to properties thatthe belief that P&Q has as such. Onecould, however, make the computationslocal by brute force. So while the com-plexity of P&Q isn’t determined by localproperties of P together with the localproperties of Q, it is determined, trivial-ly, by local properties of the representa-tion P&Q. In effect, you can always pre-serve the locality of computations by in-flating the size of the units of computa-tion. The distance between Washingtonand Texas is a nonlocal property of thesestates, but it’s a local property of theNorthern Hemisphere.

That sort of forced reduction of glob-al problems to local problems is, howev-er, cheating since it offers no clue abouthow to solve the local problems that theglobal ones are reduced to. In fact, youwould think that nobody sensible wouldeven consider it. To the contrary: recentdiscussions of con½rmation (from, say,Duhem forward) have increasingly em-phasized the holism of nondemonstrativeinferences by claiming that, in the limit-ing case, whole theories are the properunits for their evaluation. This saves thelocality of the required computations by½at, but only at the cost of making themwildly intractable. More to the point:even if we could somehow take wholetheories as the units in computing thecon½rmation of our hypotheses, thepatent fact is that we don’t. Though we

5 It’s very striking how regularly the problemscognitive psychologists have when they try toprovide an explicit account of the nondemon-strative ½xation of belief exactly parallel theones that inductive logicians have when theytry to understand the (dis)con½rmation of em-pirical theories. Pinker, among many others,objects to conceptualizing individual cognitionas, in effect, scienti½c theorizing writ small.“Granted that several millennia of Western science have given us nonobvious truths involv-ing circuitous connections among ideas; whyshould theories of a single human mind be heldto the same standard?” Pinker, “So How Doesthe Mind Work?” In fact, however, it’s increas-ingly apparent that the philosophy of scienceand the psychology of cognition are beatingtheir heads against the same wall. It is, after all, a truism that, by and large, scientists thinkmuch the same way that we do.

The similarity between the two literaturescan be quite creepy given that they seem large-ly unaware of one another’s existence. Thus,Arthur Fine raises the question: how can some-one who is not a realist about the ontologicalcommitments of scienti½c theories explain theconvergence of the scienti½c community onquite a small number of explanatory options?He says it’s in part because we all follow “theinstrumentally justi½ed rule ‘if it worked welllast time, try it again.’” David Papineau, ed.,The Philosophy of Science, Oxford Readings inPhilosophy (New York: Oxford University Press,1996), 78. He doesn’t, however, even try to ex-plain the consensus about what ‘it’ is.



don’t alter our cognitive commitmentsone by one, it’s also not true that every-thing we believe is up for grabs all ofthe time, which is what the idea that the units of con½rmation are whole the-ories claims if it is taken literally. Thelong and short is: in science and else-where, it appears that the processes bywhich we evaluate nondemonstrativeinferences for simplicity, coherence,conservatism, and the like are both sen-sitive to global properties of our cogni-tive commitments and tractable. Whatcognitive science would like to under-stand, but doesn’t, is how on earth thatcould be so.

There is quite possibly somethingdeeply wrong with the cognitive psy-chology that we currently have avail-able, just as there was something deep-ly wrong with the associative cognitivepsychology that couldn’t acknowledgerecursion or the constituent structure of linguistic and mental representations.What, then, are we to do?

Actually, I don’t know. One possibili-ty is to continue to try for an unvacuousheuristic account of how we might com-pute relevance and globality. I haven’theard of any, but it’s perfectly possiblethat there are some out there somewhere–or that there will be tomorrow, or theday after. I don’t believe it, but hope isnotorious for springing eternal.

Alternatively, what our cognitive psy-chology needs may be a new notion ofcomputation, one that doesn’t have lo-cality built into it. That is, of course, alot easier to say than to provide. The cur-rent computational account of mentalprocesses is at the core of our cognitivescience. The notion of a computation is what connects our theory of mentalrepresentations to our theory of mentalprocesses; it does for our cognitive sci-ence what the laws of association prom-

ised (but failed) to do for our empiricistforebears. As things stand, we have noidea at all how to do without it. But atleast we may be starting to understandits intrinsic limitations. In the long run,that could lead to revising it, or rejectingit, or, best of all, replacing it with sometheory that transcends its limitations–a consummation devoutly to be wished.

So the good news is that our notions of mental representation and mentalprocess are much better than Hume’s.

The bad news is that they aren’t nearlygood enough.

Steven Pinker recently wrote a bookcalled How the Mind Works. It is a longbook. In fact, it is a very long book. Forall that, my view is that he doesn’t actu-ally know how the mind works. Nor doI. Nor does anybody else. And I suspect,such is the state of the art that, if Godwere to tell us how it works, none of uswould understand Him.



The cancer did not so much kill Frie-da’s mother as engulf her like rising wa-ter. Within a week of her death, Frieda’sfather had locked himself in the cabin atthe edge of Frieda’s property. He had theclothes on his back and the few ameni-ties already in the cabin: a tuberculosiscure cot with raising back, a quilt, a doorskin on cinder blocks for a desk. A chair,a functional woodstove, and a spring-fedspigot outside.

John Prade was seventy-eight. Despitethe Prades’ fractious marriage, theirneighbors in Pittsburgh stood ready with casseroles and good cheer after thefuneral. He fended off all generositiesand phoned Frieda to come gather hermother’s things. She drove down fromher house on retired farmland in the Ad-irondacks.

“I want to get the hell out of here,” hesaid when she arrived.

The house had convulsed into unpre-cedented clutter, as though a huge handhad shaken everything off its shelvesand out of drawers.

“Come live with me.” Frieda had notplanned to say it. “My house is bigenough.”

“Hell, no. I’ve seen it. Odd little box of a place. Too much land. Too cold upthere. Here there’s a furnished apart-ment across town.”

“Let’s pack you up today,” Frieda said.Where had she acquired such calm?Neither parent had had any to spare. “I’llhire someone to clean this up and shipus the good stuff. Ralph and Cathy canhelp.”

There would be a ½ght, of course. Daysof cajoling, colluding with her brother,Ralph, on strategy. John Prade had thefurious visage of a demonic Chinesemask. “You always got your way, didn’tyou?”

Frieda suddenly thought of her moth-er, pinched and dying, but strong enoughin the last eight days of her life to banishher husband from her sickroom, point-ing the way out with a waxy ½nger. Atthe time, Frieda imagined this act a kind-ness, though, in retrospect, there wasnothing kind about her mother’s feveredeyes.


Fiction by Dorian Gossy

The Door in the Woods

Dorian Gossy, author of “Household Lies”(2005), was the recipient of the 2004 First BookAward in Fiction from Winnow Press. Her ½ctionhas appeared in a dozen literary journals, includ-ing “North American Review,” “Other Voices,”“Denver Quarterly,” and “The Sun.” She teachescreative writing at Indiana University each spring.

© 2006 by Dorian Gossy

“Well, I got a blue dress one time,” shesaid. “I remember promising everythingfor it.”

Frieda’s house was ten years old, mod-est but solid. Large windows brought herto a startling intimacy with ½rs, whitepines, poplar, beech, maple. Her fortyacres of browning autumnal grassesopened west toward the tower of White-face Mountain like an invitation.

Frieda had moved up from Pittsburghafter Lane, her husband of twenty years,fell in love with a student in one of theSpanish night classes he taught–a wom-an older than Frieda by ten years, withpatrician cheekbones and gleaming sil-ver blonde hair. They now lived in Utah.The whole of it had crept up on Frieda,who had felt the waning of Lane’s atten-tion; ½elded the calls from Stephanie,always so very cordial; and ½nally,marked the passion for stargazing Lanehad evolved out of nowhere, requiringlate nights out and the purchase of a new telescope whose case never seemedto scuff. The stars above her house onthe farmland, so far away from whereshe and Lane had lived, shone in viru-lent profusion on cloudless nights.

“I understand wanting to get away,”Frieda ventured the second night, serv-ing her father pea soup with lamb. He ate steadily, pausing for a swallow ofhis beer. “Coming up here was good forme. I can edit medical textbooks any-where.”

She regretted this last admission. Herfather seldom passed up an opportunityto berate her for dropping out of medicalschool in 1977, when she was just twen-ty-four.

John Prade ½nished his soup. “I waswondering about that cabin out there.”He jerked his head toward the southwindow, beyond which the rough one-room cabin stood a quarter of a mile

away. Frieda guessed that it had beenthrown together as a hunting cabin inthe late nineteenth century. “Show it to me.”

“Dad, it’s night. How about tomor-row?” Frieda said. “It’s pretty primi-tive. Rusted farm junk out there next to it. Broken old bottles.”

“Miss Frieda, you have been good tobring me here.” John Prade put his el-bows on the table and rested his chin on his folded hands. He’d not called herMiss Frieda since she was small enoughto be wrestled into the itchy crinolinedresses thought cute for little girls in1958. The rush of pleasure that swept her felt like shame. “But I don’t think it too much skin off your nose to take me out there right now,” he continued.“Or I’ll ½nd my way by myself.”

Frieda stood and busied herself withcollecting their dishes and tipping theminto the sink.

“All right, I’ll take you out there,” Frie-da said. She tried out a note of exaspera-tion.

He snorted. “Don’t do me any favors,girl.” But after a long time in the bath-room, John Prade appeared at the backdoor with his coat on, shod in an abusedpair of Wellingtons. Frieda readied herbiggest flashlight and led them throughthe ½eld.

Inside the cabin, he squinted at thesooty ceiling joists and walls as if theycaused him pain. When he said he want-ed a minute to look things over, Friedaleft him the flashlight and returned tothe house with only the smoke of theMilky Way for guidance. It wasn’t untilmidnight, while dozing in an overstuffedchair waiting for him, that Frieda beganto worry.

She sweated inside the heavy coatshe’d worn as she walked back down the thin path in the grass with a smallMaglite. “Dad?” she called as she ap-


Fiction by DorianGossy

proached the cabin. All the drapes weredrawn, but the door window had nocover. The door was locked, and she hadno key. She hadn’t known the door couldlock. “Dad–are you in there?”

She shone the flashlight inside. At ½rstthe window threw the beam back intoher own face. Then she could make outthe recliner, the dead cluster flies and la-dybugs piled in the corners, the edge ofthe cure cot. She shifted the light towardthe cot and leaned her cheek against awindowpane. John Prade sat on the endof the cot, eyes on her. He blinked whenthe light struck his face. Frieda knockedon the glass. “Dad? It’s after midnight.Are you all right?”

Without answering, John Prade bentdown and pulled off his battered Wel-lingtons. He drew back the bedclothesand arranged his lean frame on the curecot, pulling the comforter up to his neck.Once he stilled, only the contours of hisbody under the comforter marked any-thing different about the cold disuse ofthe room.

“Dad?” Frieda knocked once more.“I’m leaving my coat on the doorknob.I’ll be back in the morning.” A sensibleperson would have smashed open thedoor window, broken the lock. Friedaturned away coatless toward her housewith inexplicable contentment.

Frieda’s elder brother was a lawyerin Philadelphia. With two reasonable

teenaged children and his nice wife,Cathy, Ralph’s life had the well-craftedappearance of a Christmas crèche. Hewas happy, as he always told Frieda, be-cause he had decided to be happy. Frie-da found this willed happiness a humanmiracle, like a great gift for athletics ormusic.

Ralph approved of their father’s moveas a temporary measure. “He’s still up-set about Mom’s death, of course,” he

told Frieda over the phone. “It’s so new, even though we knew it was com-ing.”

John Prade had been in the cabin aweek. Each night when Ralph asked af-ter him, Frieda said, I think he’s okay,which was the truth. “Ralph, have youever wanted to get away from home?Just up and leave it all behind?”

“Of course not,” Ralph said. “But I’mlucky, you see. And I work at keeping itthat way.”

“Well, what if you did? How wouldyou get away?”

Ralph pushed out a breath. “What do you mean? I just said I never have.”

The bare birches and white pines thatgrew along her land’s rivulets shoul-dered each other irritably in the wind.Frieda turned away from the window,took a fresh tight grip on the phone.“Dad’s locked himself in my old hunt-er’s cabin.”

“He’s done what?” Ralph bellowed.“How is he surviving out there? It’sDecember now, for Pete’s sake! Won’tthat spigot freeze up? What’s he sup-posed to do for water then?”

“I’ve been taking food out and puttingit on the doorstep.” Frieda said. “I takeout blankets, and batteries for the flash-light. I got some clothes from the Cath-olic thrift store in Ausable Forks thatshould ½t him. At least they’re warm. Hehas a saw and a shovel and an axe. He’s½gured out the woodstove. I think he’sthawing snow on the stove for wash wa-ter.”

She could practically hear Ralph shak-ing his head slowly back and forth, as ifat an opposing lawyer’s dim client on thewitness stand. Frieda had seen him dothis–he had cajoled her into watchinghim argue a case before a jury once whenshe and Lane were visiting. “Sis, you saidyou were reeling him back into civiliza-tion.”


The Door inthe Woods

“He’s keeping the place neat, I think.”Frieda tugged hard on the permanentbraid she’d recently made of her longtangled hair. “He writes me thank-younotes for the food. He was never a bigthanker, you know. You remember howhe barked at Mom all the time.”

“Well,” Ralph’s voice rose, “are wetalking about the same man? My fath-er was gracious and sociable. Happilymarried. How do you think I got thisway?”

“You? The self-made happy man?”“Okay. Listen. I’ll come up this week-

end, knock on the door, and if he won’tcome out, we’ll get someone to get himout. You have a local sheriff, right?”

“Ralph, no. Don’t do that–not yet. Let me have some more time with him. I know it sounds idiotic, but I think–”she scrambled for sentences–“I think Ican get him to actually go home if I givehim more time–”

“Really? Why?”“He’s making a sculpture,” Frieda lied

completely. “The sort of lawn ornamentthing Mom used to like in her garden. Ithink it’s a memorial for her.”

“Well, let me know,” Ralph said.“Sounds good, actually.”

It was Frieda who began the sculpture,using things from the old householddump outside the cabin door. She ex-plored the dump in the afternoons,when John Prade was inside the cabin,the tang of his woodstove ½re the onlysign of life. He had ½xed a sheet of news-paper to the door window. Out of thecold ground came bottles: milk of mag-nesia bottles in cobalt blue; amber mo-tor oil and Clorox bottles; and Cra-Rockseltzer bottles, in glass as aqua as riverice. Frieda coaxed these lost things andothers from the pit with lightly glovedhands. A truck license plate from 1940. A jar of Lustre-Creme Hair Dressing.

Warped and rusted gears, severed fromthe machines they had served. Sherinsed everything in the tap from thespring and arranged the items in pyra-mids on the porch, by which, she imag-ined, someone’s mother might havebeen amused. Her own mother had dis-liked clutter, however, so her grave hadonly a low, polished marble marker. Af-ter her death, John Prade had vetoed thesuggestion that the stone also include hisname, or space for it.

Frieda let one editing deadline go by afew days while she dug in the dirt. Andthen another, a week. The medical text-book company liked her–it was allright. She even had bene½ts. At timesshe forgot the deadlines, forgot abouther father inside the cabin while she dug.She had not knocked after the ½rst night.His thank-you notes, scrawled on scrappaper Frieda brought out from her print-er, were left pinched between the door-jamb and the door like a thumb.

Dad, Ralph called. He wants to comeget you out of there.”

Frieda had brought a chair out fromthe house and placed it next to the door,where she sat while scraping her ½ndsfrom the dump. Below the doorknob a crack in the wood ran parallel to thedoor’s length, and it was near this crackthat Frieda put her lips when she spoke.“Ralph always was kind of a meddler,wasn’t he? He used to come into myroom without knocking.”

The snows held off for the ½rst week in December, but the television newspromised the ½rst storm by week’s end.Still the spigot had not frozen. Friedahad bought a new warm coat for her-self from the Catholic resale shop. Shebought extra-heavy gloves from a moun-taineering out½tter in Keene Valley. “I’vefound a Noxema jar out here, Dad, inthat navy blue glass. With Deco letter-


Fiction byDorianGossy

“

ing–isn’t that from the ’30s?” JohnPrade had been an architect in his work-ing life. His language had been ½nelyrendered angles, his stories the blue-prints that bore his name. “You alwaysliked that style,” Frieda said. “I remem-ber not liking it when I was a kid–itspooked me. It reminded me of theWizard of Oz.”

John Prade didn’t answer, but the nextday when she went back, the arrange-ment of tool and bottle she’d been con-structing had changed. A rooster weath-ervane dangled a ringed doorknockerfrom its cockscomb, both balanced on a feed bucket. A dozen of the bottlessnaked nose to tail, no two of the samecolor touching.

“Dad, one time you asked what waswrong with me that made Lane leave.You said I might be–frigid, and maybethat was my problem.” There seemedthe tiniest breath coming from the ½s-sure in the door. Flickering stove light–or was she imagining it? “Do you re-member how I cried when you said it?”

He had commenced his own excava-tion in the dump. Fresh dirt piled upbeside the pit. He’d hit a mother lode of pest-control items. The “Dead Easy”rattrap; a medieval-looking “Nash Mole Trap,” all spikes and collars; and a choker mousetrap, wire guillotines setin a circle atop a square block of wood.These he arranged in a row across thepitted wood of a broken harvester.

A presence manifested on the otherside of the crack in the door. Nothingvisible, but when she inhaled the spacethrough the door, Frieda thought of howone intuits an object or a silent personnearby in jet dark. She rubbed at a ruststain on a cornflower-blue Bromo-Sel-zer bottle.

“I used to–sort of–be attracted toother women, Dad.” Frieda put downthe jar. She scrubbed at a flake of paint

on the doorjamb with a chapped ½nger-tip. “Not that I ever did anything aboutit. But there was a girl in junior high. Hername was Marla. She’d wear dresses outof Qiana, that silky material I’ve notseen since the ’70s. And she was smalland slim, like a caterpillar. I used to wantto take hold of her around the waist.That was it.”

A breeze whistled low in the doorcrack. “I thought about women later,though. When Lane found Stephanie.You know, he had his Spanish class come to the house for a party at the endof the semester that she was in his class.They stayed away from each other thewhole party, but I saw him hand her aglass of wine. Then I knew. And then I started thinking about women andtheir breasts, when I was alone. Themore he disappeared, the more I hadthose thoughts.”

A sound like scurrying. A floorboardcreak. Then a wedge of folded papersqueezed out from under the door. Frie-da retrieved it. Like the other notes JohnPrade pinched in between the door andits jamb, the triangle of paper unfurledbore only the words, thank you.

You’re talking to him.” Ralph had thatruffled tone again.

“Yeah.”“And he’s not talking back.”“Well, no–except with the notes I told

you about.” Frieda dug her ½ngers intoher braid. She knew she should undo thebraid, wash her hair all the way down. Ithad been two weeks.

“And this is conversation?”“Well, he listens,” Frieda said. “And I

tell him things.”Ralph cleared his throat noisily. All

his life, those neglected allergies. Friedacould remember him snoring when shewas still sleeping in a crib. “Whatthings?”



“

“Things I’ve never told anyone. Hedoesn’t respond, but I know he’s listen-ing.”

“So.” Ralph’s voice grew muted.“What have you told him, exactly?”

Occasionally Frieda had gotten the up-per hand with her brother during theirchildhood. Her ability to do so had beenlike predicting the weather–she couldgenerally tell which situations wouldturn to her advantage, but nothing wasguaranteed. She hadn’t sought it much.Ralph seemed to be a good brother. Butshe felt the same change in the timbre of his question that she’d come to recog-nize long ago as the shift of power. “I’vetold him about–my marriage. AboutLane. About a girl from school. Aboutyou, some.”

“What did you tell him?” Ralph’s bigbaritone condensed to a whisper. “Aboutme?”

Under the bridge a mile away fromFrieda’s land the Ausable River furleditself into menacing rapids. Their churntook hold of her and Ralph, as thoughthe craft of their conversation had lostits rudder. “I said you were pushy whenwe were young. I said you came into myroom without knocking.”

“Did you tell him what–happenedone time? You know, that time?”

Frieda searched the dark city of hermemory. Something had happened. Butthen, something had always happened.What you did was knuckle your foreheadand try to forget. She suddenly felt so, sotired, the way she’d worn out from herown grief when Lane left. “I don’t knowwhat you’re talking about,” she said tothe pinprick holes of the phone’s mouth-piece.

“You did tell him. About when–Icame in. I just wanted to see–a girl. Cu-riosity used to be healthy. The hairbrushwas a really bad idea. You know I said Iwas sorry.”

“Ralph, I didn’t–”“I was only thirteen years old!”The recollection as ordinary as that of

breakfast, or a ½shing trip in the sum-mer. Ralph pinning her to the bed, brib-ing her with promises of candy and goodbehavior, so he could look between herlegs and put things up inside her. She’dbeen nine. “Look, Ralph, how do youthink I could tell Dad anything like that?I wouldn’t tell anyone that. I never eventold Lane.”

“I’ll bet you’re lying. I’ll bet you toldDad.”

“Oh, go make yourself happy over thisone,” she said, so weary. “For Christ’ssake.”

Ralph cleared his throat again, sharpand loud. “I’ll come, that’s all. I’ll comeup and explain things to him. I’ll get inthe car tomorrow. You’ll be there, right?Though I guess it doesn’t matter if youare or not. I know the way. You’ve gotthe key to your house under the stairs ona nail.”

“Go to hell, Ralph.”“No joke. I’ll be there by dinner to-

morrow. Don’t say anything to him.”But Frieda had not been joking.

“Okay,” she said.

Back in 1962, Frieda’s mother had dis-covered Ralph at his investigations ofFrieda and punished them both. Thatwas the end of it. “I don’t know if youheard about it,” Frieda continued to the crack in the cabin door. “We weregrounded the same as if we’d beencaught stealing, or gotten bad grades at school.”

Nothing stirred. The ½rst storm hadleft ½ve inches of snow. The spigotworked briefly at midday and then frozeup again in the afternoon. John Pradehad been building ½res to warm it;charred logs spiraled out from the spig-ot’s entry point into the ground.



“Dad, he’s coming tomorrow to ex-plain things to you. He thinks I told youbefore now. You–and me, too, I guess–are standing in the way of his happiness.You know how he feels about happi-ness.”

The evening was so still that the tini-est thing moving in the woods resound-ed like the snap of a leg breaking. Itmight have been a grouse, or a deer. Ared squirrel. “Won’t you explain some-thing to me, Dad?” Frieda said. “It doesn’t have to be why you’re–here inmy cabin. It’s your cabin now. I mean,how about the theory of stresses in askyscraper? Is there a formula you canrely on? How do architects know onebuilding will stand and another won’t? I never paid attention. I was–lookinginto the body. Did you know the body is like a building? That’s what my anat-omy teacher said.”

Frieda was about to rest her foreheadagainst the doorjamb when the dooropened with a ripping sound. She jerkedback and stood up. Inside, the orangelights of a ½re pulsed through the slits inthe woodstove door. She waited, frozenon her feet. It had begun to snow. JohnPrade appeared and motioned her tocome in.

The smell of the room was chaoticwith extremes: unwashed body and bal-sam ½r. Food beginning to turn, and thethick, sweet odor of hot wax from a fewstruggling candles. Crushed old newspa-per, clothing from the last century, pineneedles, mouse and squirrel shit spilledout of a fresh opening in the south wall.Charred drips streaked the flanks of thewoodstove, and the floorboards blurredunder a new layer of grime.

Her father stood like a stake in thecenter of the room. His new beard wasstone white, his eyes glassy, and his bear-ing absolutely erect. When he tugged off his black knit cap, as an antique ges-

ture of respect, Frieda supposed, his hair whorled around his head as if wind-whipped. She had not seen him face toface in a month.

“I have in mind my last design,” JohnPrade said. His terrible glance swept theroom. “Engineering the end of futurity.”

There was no precedent for this mo-ment. The most Frieda had ever directlyaddressed with her father were calculusproblems when she was in high school,and that had not gone well. “That’s–well, that’s just crazy sounding, Dad.”

When he swung his gaze to her, Friedahad to squint, as if at sun thrown offbright metal.

“You are not the only one who wantsto get away,” he said. “I’m just not com-ing back.”

Their eyes were the same color: bluegray. She stared back. “Why?”

“Look at you, sequestered up here likea nun. And why is that? Because youcan’t abide the smell of your own life.You and that boy-husband. Just try totell me you’ll ever get over it.”

Frieda couldn’t draw a full breath.“You–you and Mom. What a lie–”

A wretched, dry smile. “Exactly cor-rect.”

“And all those years I thought yourdisdain a kind of love.”

“So you see.”Frieda thought her whole body might

fly apart. She felt she could kill and ½ndit good. “So I see what? That you’regiving up on life because you made awreck of it? That you can’t do withoutMom because she gave you someone toblame for your misery?”

“One side of the arch hates the otherand pushes on it like a bull. That keepsthe roof up.”

“What–you and Mom were a roof?”“What do you think, Miss Frieda? Did

we keep the rain away and your brotherout of your drawers?”



Frieda felt the death-chill in oddplaces: the palms of her hands, insideher elbows, deep inside the curving wallsof her hipbones, like cramps from themenstrual periods she’d stopped havingover a year before. “I should never havetold you that.”

A green log in the woodstove hissed along time as its sap boiled. John Pradeconsidered his black knit cap as hecrushed it in his hands. “Only a corrob-orating detail.”

He was on a plane about to crash, alivebut doomed. “I don’t have a mother any-more,” she said. “I’m not ready to giveup a father, too.”

“I’m sorry for that.”“Don’t leave me.” It cut Frieda’s throat

to say it. She’d said it to Lane.“But I will. Sooner or later. It can’t be

helped.” Frieda went to her father and put her

arms around him. He caught her in hisarms like a lover. Never had they huggedso, not at graduation nor wedding daynor funeral. His body was as bony as atree and smelled of rank, wild things.She loathed tears, but they poured down her face. She released him, and he stepped away.

“I still don’t understand,” she said,scrubbing her cheeks with a wool glove.

“I think you do.” John Prade fetchedand drew on another coat–the over-sized one Frieda had given him his ½rst night in the cabin–over the threehe was already wearing. “You could have turned the dogs loose on me longago.”

“I still can, you know,” Frieda said. “Ionly wanted you to be mine.”

John Prade went to the door andopened it. The frigid air poured its lead-en weight into the room. “I will be, fromout there,” he said, pointing at the thick-ening snowfall and to the blurring treesbeyond. “If you’ll let it.”

Frieda dove into her parka and foundher footing on the snowy porch. “I’ll getRalph. I’ll get searchers.”

But her father had already shut thedoor behind her.

By the time Ralph arrived three hourslater, the snow was falling fast. Hestooped to kiss his sister but caught him-self and drew away after an awkwardshoulder squeeze. Without removing his coat, he retightened his scarf andturned up his collar, turning to Frieda.“You know, I’m sorry about that–fool-ing around back then. Did I ever apolo-gize?”

“No. But never mind about that now,”Frieda said. She’d ½nally washed herhair, which cascaded damp and loosedown her back. “It doesn’t matter any-more.”

Ralph returned in an hour. John Pradewas gone. “Could he be somewhereelse?” Ralph asked. “Could he be in the house? The garage?” When Friedashook her head, Ralph threw his armswide. “No footprints, of course–notwith snow falling this hard. You gotsnowshoes?”

They searched until thwarted by amuddled, gray twilight boiling withsnowflakes. Inside the house, theysmacked snow off their clothing andkicked it out of their boots. Frieda couldsee Ralph trembling once he shed hisparka. “That place he lived in–did yousee it?”

“Yes.”“How did the walls get all charred like

that? Somebody must have tried to burnit down. The bed scorched. No furniture.All the walls gutted? The insulation tornout? Did he do that?”

Frieda had avoided a direct glance atthe cabin while they were searching, asthough it were a former friend encoun-tered on the street whom she’d badly



failed. “It was never in the greatestshape,” she said.

Ralph found a beer in the refrigerator,one of a six-pack their father had never½nished. He downed it quickly. “Weneed to call rescuers, maybe the sheriff.You got their number?”

The snow had fast laid down a six-inch blanket. In her mind’s eye, Friedawatched her father moving through thefurred quiet of the snowy woods. He’dbe dressed in his tinker’s layers, but histopcoat, the one Frieda had left for himhis ½rst night, would flap around unbut-toned. He’d have his shovel and his axe.He’d go up into the wildest part of herland, beset with blackberry bramblesand willow and infant poplar all strug-gling for daylight. Nothing particularwould mark the place where he woulddig himself the grave that a trespassingdog will discover and bark at for hoursthe following spring. After taking whatmust have been days opening a hole insnow and hard ground only a week fromfreezing, John Prade will lie down in thehole, and cover himself well with dirt. In the spring, defying her attempts toshoo him away, the dog will hover withunmistakable sorrow as Frieda brushesaside the leaves and dirt enough to be-hold her father’s corpse in its hole, hisflesh and clothes merging with loam,before she closes the hole above himagain.

This strange dog, black with whitequestion marks over each eye, will al-ways appear when she approaches thegrave with a weekly offering of riverstone that she will bring in by wheel-barrow through the muddy forest. Thedog will mark the swelling cairn with his urine each time, gazing at her regret-fully as he holds his leg back like a sa-lute. Covered by duff and stone, hisscent masked by dog pee, John Pradewill belong to Frieda at last.

All I want to know is where Dad is,Ralph will say one day to the wide, lush½eld during a visit that summer, drink-ing gin on her porch. He will have had a full menu of law enforcement searchand fail to ½nd from Lake Champlain toMontreal. As Ralph’s wife and teenagersplay badminton on the coarse grass, hewill look heavenward. Can’t I just knowwhere he is?

No, Frieda will think. No, you maynot. And something like bliss will ½llher.




I ½rst met Leo Strauss when I was nine-teen years old and a student in the Col-lege of the University of Chicago. It wasthe spring of 1949–this was during theepoch of the presidency of Robert May-nard Hutchins, when the University wasat the height of its glory. At that time,the College was famous for the eccen-tricity and precociousness of many ofits students, and also for its highly un-usual custom of allowing entering stu-dents to take examinations on the basisof which they were assigned course re-quirements. The intention of this pro-gram was to extend the time we spent in graduate school, provided that we al-ready possessed the necessary founda-tion. It was therefore possible to gradu-ate with a B.A. from the College in lessthan a month of residence. Apparently,

the graduate of a Swiss private lycéeaccomplished this some years after mydeparture. In 1949, though, the recordwas one year, which was matched byeighteen members of my class, includingmyself and my classmate and friend SethBenardete.

Another peculiarity of the College wasthat one could enter it at any age, andamong my classmates were a number ofvirtual children. I still remember a par-ty given by some of the older students.There, I entered into conversation with a man who seemed to be in his mid-thir-ties, a guess that his thick glasses and ad-vanced baldness only strengthened. Heinformed me that he had broken withCatholicism and, thanks to a recent visitto Europe, with existentialism as well. I½rst inquired whether he was an instruc-tor at the University, and then a gradu-ate student. He replied in the negative to both queries and informed me that he was an undergraduate. “How old areyou?” I asked. “Thirteen,” he replied. Ishould add that when I arrived in 1948, I was, relatively speaking, an old man. I had been admitted to the College fol-lowing graduation from high school in1947, but I had chosen to live in NewYork for a semester, under the mistakenimpression that I was a burgeoning nov-elist.

Memoir by Stanley Rosen

Leo Strauss in Chicago

Stanley Rosen is University Professor and BordenParker Bowne Professor of Philosophy at BostonUniversity. He is the author of numerous books,including “Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay”(1969), “The Limits of Analysis” (1985), “TheAncients and the Moderns: Rethinking Moderni-ty” (1989), “The Elusiveness of the Ordinary”(2002), and, most recently, “Plato’s Republic: A Study” (2005). He is currently at work on amemoir of Alexandre Kojève and Leo Strauss.

© 2006 by Stanley Rosen

By the time I arrived in Chicago, myvocation had shifted from ½ction to po-etry. If I am not mistaken, I was the onlyone of Leo Strauss’s long-term studentswho came to him from poetry. I was al-so virtually uninterested at the time inpolitics, unlike the majority of Strauss’sstudents. Instead, I was an avowed meta-physician, who had elaborated a philo-sophical position partly influenced by T. S. Eliot, one of whose main tenets wasthat philosophy and poetry are two dif-ferent languages about the same world.In addition to these intellectual propen-sities, which most of Strauss’s studentsregarded as de½ciencies, I was undisci-plined in the academic sense and spentmost of my time writing poetry, withsome professional success and with rea-sonable hopes for future progress. Thesehopes were sustained by Hayden Car-ruth, who was then the editor of PoetryMagazine, and Henry Rago, who wasabout to assume that position, but alsoby Allen Tate, who taught in the Collegefor a year.

High on my list of things that I had nointention of doing was to become a pro-fessor of philosophy. To my adolescentvision, being a philosopher and a pro-fessor were incompatible, and besides, I regarded myself as already a philoso-pher. Needless to say, this was about tobe changed by my encounter with LeoStrauss.

I had a number of unusual classmatesduring my year in the College. Perhapsthe most interesting was Seth Benardete,who went on to become Strauss’s favor-ite student. Benardete stands out in mymemory as a spirit of genuine distinc-tion and, even at that early age, of rarescholarship. At the time my friends and I assumed that Benardete would go on to a distinguished career as a classicalphilologist, as in a sense he did. But hewrote his books in so oblique a style that

he was widely ignored by the orthodoxclassical establishment, with some im-portant exceptions, including PierreVidal-Naquet.

In 1949 he was for me a formidableexotic. I remember vividly to this day a long conversation we had one night in his dormitory room during whichBenardete informed me that he regardedit immoral to love a human being. As ayouth with a certain proclivity to thisform of immorality, I was incredulousand asked him what we should love. Hereplied in a magisterial tone: “Greekvases.” This struck me as the most so-phisticated view I had ever heard, but aview with one flaw: it was nonsensical.

My friendship with Benardete, whom I saw virtually every day during that ½rstyear in Chicago, was my only real prep-aration for my ½rst meeting with LeoStrauss. I was a poet, a romantic, and ametaphysician, who had somehow wan-dered into the lair of the philosopher,the classicist, and the historian. Therewas for me no quarrel between philos-ophy and poetry, as there apparently was (albeit in a subtle form) for Benar-dete and for Strauss, who both followedPlato. The atmosphere around Benardetewas redolent of Socratic irony and con-tinental sophistication, whereas I repre-sented something quite different. One ofthe entering examinations in the Collegerequired us to write an essay describingour philosophical position. Afterwards,a member of the philosophy departmenttold me that my views were Fichtean,something of which I had never heard. Apoet of Fichtean leanings was not in thebest position to meet either the youngBenardete or the middle-aged Strauss, to say nothing of my distinct deviationfrom the paradigm of the Aristoteliangentleman.

I should say at once that Strauss wasnot at all a snob, and that his conception

Leo Straussin Chicago



Memoir byStanleyRosen

of decorum was quite reasonable. Hewas quite right to note in the margin ofa ½rst draft of my doctoral dissertationthat I liked to épater le bourgeois. His as-tringent follow-up–“I could wish thatthe entire dissertation had been writtenin the style of paragraph 2 on page 153”–taught me more about scholarly writ-ing than a dozen texts on hermeneutics.Strauss’s own style, at its best, comes very close to the appropriate blend ofthe daring of thought veiled by the webof prudence. He was nevertheless capa-ble of flexibility in selecting his students.Many years after I had left Chicago, I en-countered an old professor and formercolleague of Strauss’s who was noted for his elegance and aristocratic tastes.This colleague, a minor Latvian baron,told me that he used to complain toStrauss about my youthful uncouthness,to which Strauss would reply each time:“He’s getting better.” I owe my educa-tion to this willingness to overlook baro-nial standards.

Strauss had recently arrived in Chica-go from New York and was, at the time,unknown to most of the Chicago stu-dent community. This may help to ex-plain his charitable reception of so un-promising a potential student. Strauss’sstepson, who was also a student in theCollege, arranged the meeting. I hadbeen preparing an honors paper on aYiddish writer named Achad Ha’am.Strauss was a professor of political sci-ence, but his son told me that his fatherwas also an expert on Yiddish writers,and asked if I would like to consult himon my paper. I agreed and set out, havingbeen warned that Strauss would proba-bly give me twenty or thirty minutes ofhis time.

It was a warm spring evening, andmosquitoes ½lled the humid air. Straussreceived me in shirtsleeves, gesturingwith a cigarette holder as if it were a ba-

ton. He was a rather short man with athin, high-pitched voice. His initial de-meanor was polite but understandablyreserved. He opened the conversation by asking me what I did. I replied, “I ama poet.” Strauss immediately inquiredwhether I knew what Plato says aboutpoets. To this I answered something like,“I don’t care what Plato says about poet-ry. I am a poet, and I understand it betterthan he does.”

This drove Strauss like an uncoiledspring from the easy chair in which hehad been sitting, and he paced up anddown the room, gesticulating with hiscigarette holder, as if trying desperatelyto bring an unruly orchestra back to or-derly response. I will not attempt to re-produce the entire conversation, whichlasted for at least two hours. At the endof it, he invited me to become his stu-dent.

I respectfully declined, as I was plan-ning to return to New York for anoth-er go at the literary life. When I toldStrauss that I intended to study at theNew School for Social Research, he suggested that I mention his name. I did and was promptly awarded a schol-arship, so great was Strauss’s reputationat the New School. My experience inNew York, however, proved unsatisfac-tory, and I decided to return to Chicagoin 1950 in order to study with Strauss.

In the intervening year, Strauss hadattracted the attention of a number of very gifted students, among themBenardete, Hilail Gildin, Victor Goure-vitch, Muhsin Mahdi, and Allan Bloom.At or shortly after this time, RichardRorty began to attend Strauss’s lectures,but left to take his doctorate at Yale. De-spite his subsequent adventures withanalytical philosophy and postmodern-ism, Rorty had great respect for Straussand the best members of his circle.

I will not attempt to give a completelist of my contemporaries who studiedwith Strauss. Let me say only that thestudents were divided into two maingroups: the political scientists and themembers of the Committee on SocialThought. There were only a few mem-bers of the philosophy department, in-cluding myself (until 1952, when I trans-ferred to the Committee), as well as asteadily increasing selection of visitorsfrom a variety of faculties, both at Chica-go and elsewhere, who had been attract-ed by news of the pied piper of the Mid-way. Eventually Strauss’s audience in-cluded several priests, of whom perhapsthe most interesting was Ernest Fortin.

One could also divide the students in a very general way into those who wereprimarily interested in American poli-tics and those who were students of clas-sics or one of the major periods in thehistory of political philosophy. This is,of course, not a rigid classi½cation, but it is not entirely nebulous. Whereas all of us, I suspect, regarded ourselves asengaged somehow in the pursuit of wis-dom, there is a difference between con-stitutional law, the Federalist Papers, orthe fact-value distinction in contempo-rary political science, on the one hand,and Plato’s analysis of the soul, IbnKhaldun’s philosophy of history, orRousseau’s anthropology, on the other.

In view of the subsequent explosion of interest in Strauss’s politics, it isworth mentioning that several of hisclosest students were originally Com-munists. One of them told me that as a boy scarcely into his teens, he wouldwalk the streets of Manhattan saying,“Someday this will all be mine!” Oth-ers, however, were, and often remained,Socialists or New Deal Democrats.

Strauss made no attempt to alter theirpolitical views. I doubt he was evenaware of most of our political orienta-

tions. What he did was teach us how toread, and how to think about what wehad read. Very far from producing ex-tremist reactionaries, of which he is of-ten accused today, he presented us withthe path of moderation and practicalwisdom. It is a tribute to Strauss’s tol-erance and brilliance as a scholar and a teacher that he could serve to unify aband of investigations as diverse as thosejust mentioned, undertaken by studentsof the most diverse convictions.

Strauss also led private reading groupsdevoted to topics that he could not con-veniently teach in the political sciencedepartment, such as Maimonides’ Guideof the Perplexed or Hegel’s Logic. For ob-vious bureaucratic reasons, most of hisstudents were not writing a dissertationon ‘pure’ philosophy, in the academicsense of that term. Most were of½ciallypolitical scientists, not specialists incausality, ontology, or German idealism,and, of course, not in the philosophy ofscience, epistemology, or the founda-tions of mathematics, which lay outsideStrauss’s (and most of our) competence.Instead, Strauss, the great enemy of his-toricism, was, at ½rst sight, training his-torians of political thought and politicalscientists who were prepared to use thathistory as a foundation for rethinkingthe cardinal tenets of their discipline.From this standpoint, he was engaged in a radically reconceived version of theHeideggerian ‘destruction’ of Westernphilosophy–that is, a radically newclose reading of canonic philosophicaltexts–with two massive quali½cations:First, Strauss was primarily concernedwith politics rather than ontology; and second, his archaeological excava-tions were designed to return us to thethoughts of the heroes of the Westerntradition, that is, to the thoughts as theseheroes had thought them and not, as inHeidegger’s case, to the ostensibly deep-





er and unthought thoughts that consti-tuted the authentic Seinsgeschichte ofWestern metaphysics.

Despite these important differences,both Strauss and Heidegger were en-gaged in the enterprise of ‘uncovering’ a concealed truth. It is not much of anexaggeration to say that for both think-ers the crucial ½gure in this excavationwas Plato. For Strauss as for Heidegger,moreover, the appropriation of Plato forthe reconstitution of late modernity en-tailed a type of strong interpretation thatStrauss did not suf½ciently emphasize,perhaps because doing so might havetied him too closely to Heidegger’s evenmore extreme form of critical interpre-tation. One can surmise that Strauss’sreticence on questions of this sort waspart of his program to inoculate his stu-dents against Heidegger. Nevertheless, itis true that Strauss was deeply impressedby Heidegger, especially by the Heideg-ger of the early and middle period. I amcertain that Strauss learned much fromHeidegger about how to read a Greektext, not to mention that he also assimi-lated through Heidegger Nietzsche’s cri-tique of modernity and nihilism.

Heidegger had radicalized Nietzsche’scritique of Enlightenment by extendingit to Plato; his intention was to go be-hind or above Platonism to another way,a way entirely free of the presumably re-i½ed and subjectivist thinking of West-ern Platonist metaphysics. From thisexalted standpoint, the Enlightenmentwas itself a version of Platonism andsomething to be overcome. Strauss, onthe contrary, took us back through thehistory of philosophy to Plato, not inorder to overcome the modern Enlight-enment but to ½nd its mistakes and tocorrect these in the name of a genuineliberalism and freedom of thought.

Heidegger has sometimes been calleda liberator while Strauss is often de-

nounced for his conservatism. Bothjudgments are largely nonsense unlessthey are given careful quali½cation. Hei-degger’s conception of radical freedomhas nothing to do with Western Euro-pean liberalism. Strauss was, no doubt, a social conservative, but his politicalviews were, in my opinion, designed tocompensate for the exaggerated declineof modern liberalism into nihilism. Hisfundamental goal was to preserve phi-losophy, and it is from this point thatserious arguments about his politicsmust begin. Otherwise stated, he under-took to preserve philosophy with the po-litical tools of classical liberalism.

Strauss’s form of liberalism is per-haps most obvious in his popular writ-ings, which contain an eloquent defenseof modern political freedom and a cri-tique of Marxism. To the extent that thisform of liberalism had deteriorated intowhat we came to call ‘postmodernism,’Strauss of course responded as a con-servative. Perhaps one could say thatStrauss would have preferred to arguewith Georg Lukács than Jacques Derri-da. But he was altogether more flex-ible and more moderate than his closefriend, the radical Alexandre Kojève,who accepted the bankruptcy of theWest up to the Napoleonic counterrev-olution, but who also accepted its pu-ri½cation by his own post-Hegelian fu-sion of Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, andHeidegger.

When I arrived in Chicago for my ‘second sailing’ in the fall of 1950, I en-tered as a graduate student in the de-partment of philosophy. Of½cially mymentor was Richard McKeon. But myserious education took place in Strauss’sseminars or during conversations in hisof½ce or home. As time went by, I beganto detach myself from the philosophydepartment, spending time in the Chi-cago art museum instead of attending

philosophy seminars regularly. But theserious part of the day was devoted tolistening to or speaking with Strauss,and immersing myself in the texts thatwere being analyzed in his graduatecourses. Interestingly enough, my statusin the philosophy department improvedunder this regime, and just when I haddecided to shift to the Committee onSocial Thought, I was offered ½nancialassistance to begin doctoral study in phi-losophy.

The story of my shift from the philos-ophy department to the Committee de-serves mention because it illustrates thedifference in admission procedures be-tween bureaucrats and what would becalled in France the grands seigneurs. I wasa waiter at the University faculty club,where most of my customers were sci-entists like Enrico Fermi, Harold Urey,Edward Teller, and Leo Szilard. Moreimmediately accessible to me was theeminent sociologist Edward Shils, amember of the Committee. I had a num-ber of conversations with Shils, mainlyabout topics like how to cook oxtail soupin a pressure cooker. As a result, he askedme if I would like to join the Committee.Acting on the assumption that an organ-ization with an interest in oxtail soupcould not be all bad, I accepted. The sec-ond stage was an interview with the clas-sicist David Grene, which I began byspilling tea over his orange tweed suit.The net result was a fellowship. At nopoint was I asked to supply references orto ½ll out forms and provide a statementof purpose, nor did Strauss raise theseformalities. Direct contact supervenedover conventional bureaucracy.

During the ½rst two years of my studyat Chicago, then, as a member of thephilosophy department, I was, in a realsense, a man without a country, movingback and forth across the frontier withforged papers. One could call this a prac-

tical application of Strauss’s understand-ing of esotericism.

Recounting my ½rst impressions ofLeo Strauss inevitably raises a questionthat has played a puzzling and, to befrank, irritating role in my professionallife. It is also one of those aspects ofthe relation between teacher and stu-dent that is most dif½cult to explain. But it is important to get right for thesake of the general validity of my por-trait of Strauss. Stated crudely, the ques-tion is whether I was then, or am now, a ‘Straussian.’

My ½rst inclination upon hearing thisquestion is to reply, “Do you refer toJohann or to David Friedrich Strauss?”

In a less frivolous vein, one can saythat the expression ‘Straussian’ hasmany counterparts among academics;one ½nds the students of all charismat-ic teachers being described as ‘Hegeli-ans,’ ‘Marxists,’ ‘Heideggerians,’ ‘Witt-gensteinians,’ even ‘Quineans.’

Strauss himself liked to quote Nietz-sche to the effect that the best thing astudent can do for his teacher is to cutthe umbilical cord that connects them. I will never forget a conversation withStrauss during the last year of my stay at Chicago, when we discussed the ques-tion of my ½nding a teaching position.“Disown me!” Strauss said, smilinghugely and straightening up in his swiv-el chair to facilitate the punctuation ofhis remark with the inevitable flourishof his cigarette holder. By this advice,Strauss did not mean to suggest that Iforget or dishonor everything that I hadlearned from him, but that I do what isnecessary to carry out his deepest teach-ing: live the life of a philosopher.

Let me therefore say at once that therewere no ‘Straussians’ among the innercircle of Strauss’s best students. Thosewho could legitimately be called such





were, to put it bluntly, second-raters.There was, of course, a certain area ofagreement about the solidity of Strauss’sscholarship; if this had not been so, itwould have been folly to study under his supervision. We were all convincedthat he was right about the tradition ofesoteric writing–that is, the fact that agreat many early modern philosophers,writing under conditions of censorshipand persecution, felt compelled to writein a style that had to be carefully decod-ed in order to separate the true mean-ing from the super½cial message of theirtexts. As a corollary, we accepted theneed to read serious philosophical workswritten at least before the French Revo-lution with a kind of Talmudic eye. Evenmore important, we felt as a direct forcethe erotic strength of Strauss’s spirit,and we were ourselves ‘turned around’(to use Socrates’ metaphor of theperiagoge tes psuches) by that strength in a way that goes beyond inspiration to areattunement of the soul and an openingof the eye of the intellect. This is some-thing that does not come from readingbooks, but only from direct contact witha great teacher. And a great teacher isone who encourages critical analysis ofhis own views.

I am myself an example of the fact thatStrauss did not demand unquestioningobedience from his students. I admiredhim enormously, and in due course Icame to revere him as a rare blessing,without whose training and guidancemy life would have been seriously di-minished. But I was not from the outset,nor did I ever become, a ‘Straussian.’ Iput this word in scare-quotes to indicatethat it is a pseudo-term employed by ide-ologues as an excuse to avoid seriousthought, or as a mask for their own igno-rance. No one could deny that Strausshad his own views, and he was not quickto assume that his students knew more

or had thought more deeply than he. Hewas correct in both respects, of course.But he always accepted modi½cations oraddenda to his interpretations when theevidence warranted it, and he welcomedcompetent, or at least sincere and well-argued, disagreement.

In my own case, I developed reserva-tions about Strauss’s general orienta-tion on three main points: his positionon the famous quarrels between philos-ophy and poetry; between the ancientsand the moderns; and, ½nally, betweenAthens and Jerusalem (in other words,between reason and revelation).

On the ½rst point, paradoxicallyenough, I might cite Strauss himself asmy authority: he often interpreted Pla-to to imply that poetry is, in fact, one oftwo necessary components of the phi-losophical nature, the other being math-ematics. If we think this through, it leadsus directly toward the role of strong in-terpretation, and also of Kantian con-structivism, in modern philosophy; this,in turn, reopens the problem of histori-cism, which we cannot resolve simply byrecourse to common sense or the popu-lar af½rmation of natural right.

On the second point, I have alwaysleaned toward the moderns in their fa-mous quarrel with the ancients. Statedas simply as possible, the ancients, andPlato in particular, protect humankindfrom nature whereas the moderns take aprogressively more aggressive stand to-ward freedom. I regret to say that Niet-zsche’s remark, ½rst called to my atten-tion by Strauss, is correct: “Advice whis-pered into the ear of a conservative. Manis not a crab.” In other words, we mustmarch forward through the semidark-ness of nihilism. This forward marchmay fail, but it is inevitable. The seriousquestion is how to keep up the morale ofthe marchers.

At this juncture, I want to interject arelevant observation about Strauss’s cri-tique of modernity. Although it is similarto that of Heidegger, it differs from his in a signi½cant respect. There is virtuallyno emphasis upon the problem of tech-nology, certainly none in the style ofHeideggerian ontology. Instead, we aregiven numerous criticisms of methodolo-gy, particularly of the methodology ofmodern social science, with its mathe-matical model of rationality. A critiqueof methodology is useful, but it does notgo to the heart of the matter. Whateverwe may think of it, Heidegger’s analysisof techne does go to the heart of the mat-ter. I am certainly no Heideggerian, but I have studied him closely for ½fty years,and I have been sometimes surprisedand always struck by how much Strausslearned from Heidegger, but also by howmuch Heideggerian depth he sacri½ced.It was, of course, part of Strauss’s decon-struction of Heidegger to move back tothe surface as a preparation for the de-scent into the depths. But one must infact descend, and this Strauss did not do,whether from conviction or lack of theo-retical strength.

With respect to the third quarrel, I have always found questionableStrauss’s statement on the mutual irre-futability of reason and revelation. Topose the question of irrefutability al-ready gives an edge to philosophy: theevaluation of arguments for and againstreligion is not so much religious as phil-osophical. At the same time, to repudiatereason is not to refute it. (I am remindedof Strauss’s regular reference to an ob-servation of Plutarch, that whoever asks,“What is a god?” is already an atheist.)

Perhaps Strauss’s greatest accomplish-ment, at least for me, is that he inocu-lates the young against Heidegger’s spec-ulative excesses and hermeneutical bru-tality. His major shortcoming is that he

is neither a metaphysician nor a poet.Many will regard this as a compliment. I shall not debate the point, but simplyrecord it as a difference between Straussand me that did not at all interfere withmy great admiration for him nor dimin-ish all that I have learned from him. Hecertainly understood this difference. Al-so, there is no doubt that he tried to mit-igate my own metaphysical and poeticalexcesses, just as there is no doubt that he was right to do so. What needs to beemphasized is that, whereas my contem-poraries and I would not have chosen tostudy with Strauss had there not beenunmistakable evidence of his superiorgifts, this choice was never in the bestcases a passport to discipleship.

And yet, in the 1950s, there was alreadysomething like a Strauss ‘school.’ I havealready noted that this phenomenon isnot at all uncommon among philoso-phers, and it is simply bad faith to criti-cize Strauss because he had many stu-dents who admired him enormously.The animus addressed toward Strauss,and, in a general sense, ‘Straussians,’ had to do with the substance of histeaching, not with his success in attract-ing students. Strauss was disliked for hiscritique of the sacred cows of modernsocial and political science, in particular,Max Weber (whom he highly admired),and because of his rediscovery of the tra-dition of esotericism, a tradition knownto every well-educated scholar until thelate nineteenth century, and one that isreferred to by thinkers of the rank ofDescartes, Leibniz, Condorcet, Hume,Kant, Lessing, Renan, and Nietzsche, tomention only a few of the most promi-nent examples from modern times. Toomany professors, in a radical distortionof genuine liberalism, condemnedStrauss’s views on esotericism becausethey were ignorant of the evidence.





In speaking of Strauss’s bad reputa-tion, I have to come back to the ques-tion of conservatism. Strauss was wide-ly condemned as a conservative, where-as someone like W. V. Quine, who was at least as conservative as Strauss, wasnot. I still remember a full-page ad in theNew York Times shortly before the deci-sive outbreak of the Watergate scandal,defending then-president Nixon, andsigned by a large array of well-knownacademics, including Strauss–andQuine. It was not self-evident then thatsupport for Nixon was the equivalent of a declaration of fascism, as people sowidely assume today. I say this as onewho was at the time a New Deal Demo-crat who despised Nixon. Be that as itmay, I never heard Quine being accusedof fascism, nor, indeed, was his politicalposition widely discussed in academiccircles, although it was certainly known.The key, of course, is that Quine was a‘technical’ philosopher. One could sep-arate his logical views from his politics,just as, to move to the other end of thepolitical spectrum, one could do in thecase of Noam Chomsky’s linguistics. Inother words, Strauss’s reserve with re-spect to the application of scienti½cmodels to the study and interpretationof human life struck his critics as a reac-tionary repudiation of modernity in away that was not associated with conser-vative logicians or, say, physicists.

As a result, Strauss became an imme-diate target of opprobrium for the liber-al academic establishment. He was chal-lenging the theoretical and methodolog-ical soundness of modern social science,which claimed to represent the scienti½cEnlightenment and the progress of thehuman race. This challenge, incidental-ly, was the attenuated or surface versionof Heidegger’s critique of technicism. In Strauss’s version, the challenge wasmanifestly political, whereas in Heideg-

ger’s case, one could claim to speak as an ontologist or seeker after Being, andthereby be permitted to detach the on-tological question from contingent po-litical appropriations. This is very muchlike saying that the attempt to reduce the study of human nature to a branch of mathematics and physics–or, in to-day’s idiom, neurophysiology and elec-trical engineering–has no political im-plications and is leading us to a radicallyextended form of Enlightenment–as ifthat were not itself a political position of utmost force and seriousness. By anal-ogous reasoning, Heidegger’s French fol-lowers associated his attack on moderni-ty in general, and the Enlightenment inparticular, with a doctrine of liberationand creativity, two of the favorite prin-ciples of the majority of late-modernthinkers. Thus, Heidegger was assimilat-ed into the left-wing interpretation ofNietzsche. This camouflage could neverbe sustained in Strauss’s case.

One more remark on this topic. Just as Quine was forgiven his conservatismbecause of his technical orientation inlogic, so Heidegger was often forgivenhis obnoxious political views on thegrounds that he was an ontologist, or‘thinker,’ and so naive in practical af-fairs. Some of his students went so far as to blame Heidegger’s politics on the influence of his wife, who was thedaughter of a Nazi general. Those whodispense such nonsense are neverthe-less touching the surface of a seriousproblem, that of the relation betweentheory and practice. Strauss attributes to Lessing the ‘concealed’ view that “allpractical or political life is essentiallyinferior to contemplative life, or that all works, and therefore also all goodworks, are ‘superfluous’ insofar as thelevel of theoretical life, which is self-suf½cient, is reached.” Speaking aboutThucydides, Strauss says, apparently

in his own voice, that “wise men willalways be inclined to see in political life an element of childishness.”1 Onecan reply that evil works are also super-fluous for theoretical life, but this doesnot answer the question of the ground of good works. The decency of the phi-losopher seems to be a contingent char-acter trait. If morality is exoteric, couldone not argue that philosophy is themost dangerous of all gifts?

Rather than develop further the tan-gled motives for Strauss’s great unpop-ularity as the rediscoverer of esoteri-cism, let me close by raising the ques-tion of whether he used the right rheto-ric for his own time and place. On bal-ance, I prefer Hegel’s treatment of thesame question in his lectures on the his-tory of philosophy. Hegel, we recall, de-nies the claims, current in his own time,that Plato practiced esotericism, on theground that the philosopher cannot phi-losophize with his ideas in his pockets.Immediately after, however, Hegel saysthat philosophy is, by its nature, eso-teric. In order to show the truth of thisjudgment, however, one must actuallyphilosophize, and this means with one’sideas on the table, not concealed in one’spockets.

This is especially true in times duringwhich one need not employ esotericismin order to preserve one’s life or liberty.In such a time, it is incumbent upon thephilosopher to present as forceful anddetailed a statement of his or her doc-trines as is humanly possible. Only thiswill attract the best young minds to agenuine philosophical encounter, as-

suming, as did Strauss, that philosophywas in radical decline. Perhaps one maysuggest that Strauss, very far from prac-ticing esotericism himself, as is widelybelieved today, was on all crucial pointsextraordinarily frank. Straussian frank-ness, of course, is not the same as Niet-zsche’s. In Strauss’s case, frankness canitself be a form of esotericism.

1 The ½rst quotation is from Leo Strauss, “Ex-oteric Teaching,” in The Rebirth of Classical Po-litical Rationalism, selected and introduced byThomas L. Pangle (Chicago and London: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 1989), 64. The secondis from Leo Strauss, “Thucydides: The Meaningof Political History,” in ibid., 74.




Almost a decade has passed since Pres-ident Clinton ful½lled his pledge to “end welfare as we know it” by signingthe Personal Responsibility and WorkOpportunity Reconciliation Act of1996 (prwora). prwora, commonlyknown as ‘welfare reform,’ replaced Aidto Families with Dependent Children(afdc), a government cash-aid programthat primarily supported single mothersand their children, with Temporary Aid

for Needy Families (tanf), a block-grant program that increased state dis-cretion substantially.

The goal of the reform was to promotework in the paid labor force among wel-fare recipients. Within ½ve years, 80 per-cent of the states’ caseloads had to beworking or searching for jobs. And forthe ½rst time in welfare history, stricttime limits were imposed on individualaid: a two-year limit on continuous aidand a cumulative lifetime limit of ½veyears.

Most states adopted a ‘work ½rst’strategy–recipients had to take any job, even a low-wage, entry-level one–rather than providing recipients op-portunities for education and training½rst. The assumption was that workingwould improve the economic and socialoutcomes of poor families: even workerswho started at low-wage jobs would beable to work their way up the economicladder. Policymakers believed that thesemandatory requirements were necessaryto move recipients off the rolls. Further-more, they thought that the children ofwelfare recipients would gain a sense ofpride and direction from seeing theirparents working.

Everyone has declared the reform asuccess. Caseloads have declined from12.2 million to 5.3 million recipients.Labor-force participation has increased15 to 20 percentage points among singlemothers with children under the age of½ve–the population most likely to bewelfare recipients. Welfare reform, aburning political issue since the 1970s,has disappeared from the radar screenfor almost a decade.

But this reform has actually resulted ina hollow victory. While caseloads havedeclined and work participation has in-creased, most families are still living inpoverty and enduring signi½cant hard-ship.

Joel F. Handler, a Fellow of the American Acad-emy since 2004, is Richard C. Maxwell Profes-sor of Law and professor of policy studies at theUniversity of California, Los Angeles. An author-ity on social-welfare law and poverty, he has con-ducted numerous studies on poverty, political par-ticipation, and administration of justice. He is the author of “The Poverty of Welfare Reform”(1995), “Down From Bureaucracy” (1996), “So-cial Citizenship and Workfare in the United Statesand Western Europe” (2004), and, most recently,“Blame Welfare, Ignore Poverty and Inequality”(with Yeheskel Hasenfeld, 2006).

Joel F. Handler

on welfare reform’s hollow victory


Studies of ‘leavers,’ recipients whohave left welfare, have shown that be-tween half and two-thirds of leavers ½ndjobs shortly after leaving the rolls, pri-marily in sales, food preparation, cleri-cal support, and other service-sectorjobs. Their wages range from $5.67 to$8.42 per hour, though, leaving manyfull-time working families impover-ished. Bene½t loss is also a signi½cantproblem. Although leavers still qualifyfor other government programs, includ-ing food stamps and Medicaid, they haveto go to separate of½ces and make sepa-rate appointments (often available onlyduring working hours) to obtain them.Thus, the majority who are eligible arenot enrolled.

As a result, leavers, despite earnings,are not better off than when they wereon welfare. Evaluations of eleven statewelfare-to-work programs have demon-strated that the net income of recipientsremained the same or decreased despitethe fact that employment increased. Fewof the eleven programs generated sub-stantial gains in incomes or declines inpoverty.

Besides the loss in bene½ts, workingalso creates costs such as childcare andtransportation. Perhaps the most sig-ni½cant is childcare. A survey of child-care centers in forty-seven urban areasrevealed that in over half of the areassurveyed, childcare cost an average of$6,000 annually. Thus, a two-parentfamily in which both parents earn theminimum wage spends “one-quarter ormore of their income to afford average-priced care for an infant in 37 out of 47urban areas surveyed,” according to a2003 report of the Children’s DefenseFund. During the 1990s, state budgetsurpluses ensured that a substantialamount was spent on child-care subsi-dy programs and other supports for theworking poor. But even now, more than

one-third of states have long waitinglists for these programs–over two hun-dred thousand in California, forty-eightthousand in Florida, twenty-two thou-sand in Georgia, and thirty-eight thou-sand in New York City. Subsequently,most low-wage working families rely oninformal childcare–relatives and friendswho often also have jobs–creating anunending scramble to ½nd childcare in aworld of shifting schedules and flexible,temporary jobs. Many children are evenleft alone or in the care of older, but stillyoung, children.

While the government has helped al-leviate poverty for low-wage workers by considerably expanding the EarnedIncome Tax Credit (eitc) in the 1990s(federal spending on eitc is almostthree times that of tanf and more thanthat of food stamps), the working poorstill face tremendous challenges. Withan average wage of about $8 per hour,even working thirty hours per week for a full year grosses only $12,000, and fed-eral and state income payroll taxes off-set a sizable amount. Although familiesmay earn more income by working rath-er than relying on cash aid, their reducedreceipt of other government bene½ts andincreased work-related expenses meanthat these families are not necessarilybetter off.

This discussion has focused thus far onemployed leavers. However, more thanone-third of leavers are unemployed.Sarah Brauner and Pamela Loprest havefound that approximately 6 percent ofunemployed leavers are disabled, sick, or otherwise unable to work. Approxi-mately 69 percent of those without dis-abilities are looking for work. And 14percent of unemployed leavers rely onthe earnings of a spouse or partner asincome. Like employed leavers, very few of them utilize other governmentbene½ts, including unemployment, food

Welfare re-form’s hol-low victory



Note byJoel F. Handler

stamps, and Medicaid. In any case, ahigh proportion of leavers, regardless ofemployment status, reported suffering:33 percent cut down on or skip meals; 39percent are unable to meet rent, mort-gage, or utility payments; and 7 percentend up moving in with others.

Unfortunately, the pressure to meetthe new requirements has also exacer-bated welfare agencies’ use of sanctionsand diversions to discourage existingand potential welfare recipients. Sanc-tion rates in various programs now range from 20 percent to over 60 per-cent of the caseload. Reports reveal thatclients have been sanctioned for minorerrors: a missed appointment, a failureto ½le a form, or a lapse in administra-tive procedures. In a California study,recipients either didn’t know that theyhad been sanctioned (since grants of-ten fluctuate) or why. Moreover, manystates have failed to accept applicants.Cook County, Illinois, for example, onlyaccepted 19 percent of applicants. In sev-eral states, caseworkers used informaltactics to discourage applications, suchas requiring applicants to engage in mul-tiple job searches or to go on multiple in-terviews before even considering theirapplications.

The addition of work requirementshas undoubtedly complicated an alreadyoverworked, undertrained bureaucracy.prwora assumed that with the newwork requirements, increased state flexi-bility, and block grants, welfare agencieswould turn into employment agenciesoffering individualized services. This hasnot happened. Instead, the work pro-grams have been a mostly unwelcomeaddition. For most agencies, whetherpublic or private, their main task is stillaccuracy and timeliness in determiningeligibility and distributing payments.Though the titles, rules, and programs ofthe of½ces and its workers have changed,

most employees say that their jobs haveremained basically the same. They havereceived little training in the new rulesand programs.

Further, contracting with private agen-cies (nonpro½t and for pro½t), touted as a cure for the problems of welfare ad-ministration, has not helped. Advocatesclaimed that, with competition, serviceswould be delivered more ef½ciently,quality improved, and government mademore flexible. Thus, in 2001, over $1.5billion of tanf and state funds went toprivate contractors, according to 2002gao estimates. But contracting hasgiven birth to its own problems: con-tractual incompleteness, asymmetry ofinformation, dif½culty of governmentmonitoring, lack of competition, depen-dence of government on contractors,and opportunistic behavior, among oth-ers.

In fact, because of the dif½culty of cal-culating the cost of services, various pay-for-performance, cost-reimbursement,and ½xed-price contracts are used. Thus,contractors have more incentive to re-duce caseloads, rapidly move clients intothe job market, and prevent their return.Outcome measures, particularly of thequality of service, are especially prob-lematic. Evidence now shows that con-tractors are not more ef½cient than pub-lic agencies. Indeed, evaluations haverevealed the limited quali½cations andpoor training of staff in these agencies;the poor quality of services; a high use of sanctions; a diversion of funds forcorporate promotion; and a lack of im-provement in client earnings. Yet publicof½cials have had to justify the existingcontracts because contractors have be-come a powerful interest group.

Instead of declaring victory, it’s timeto recognize the severity of poverty andhardship in the United States. Despitehaving one of the highest average in-

comes, the United States has the aston-ishing distinction of having one of thehighest rates of poverty in the industrial-ized world. More ominously, it also hasthe highest child-poverty rate comparedto fourteen Western European countriesand Canada. Our problem is the assump-tion that once a family crosses the ‘pov-erty line,’ everything is all right.

However, the poverty line is serious-ly out of date. In 2000, Jared Bernsteinand his colleagues constructed a budgetjust to meet “basic needs and achieve asafe and decent standard of living.” Thisbudget included food, housing, healthcare, transportation, childcare, and oth-er necessary expenses (e.g., telephone,clothing, personal care, householditems, school supplies, television, etc.).It did not include restaurant meals (in-cluding fast food); vacations; movies;and saving for education, retirement,and emergencies. They found that innineteen different locations, this bud-get ran well above the poverty line. InBaltimore, for example, a family of fourwould have to have an annual income of $34,732 just for basic needs–twice the amount necessary to cross the pov-erty threshold. A single-parent family,with the parent working full-time, aseven-year-old, and a three-year-old,would need $30,000 to live–again twicethe poverty line. And the National LowIncome Housing Coalition recently re-ported that a one-bedroom apartment at average market rates anywhere in thecountry was not affordable for a full-time minimum-wage worker.

The poor are ‘playing by the rules,’ butnot enough full-time jobs paying decentwages and bene½ts are available. To raisea family of four even above just the pov-erty line, one would have to earn $9.36per hour, working full-time (thirty-½vehours per week for ½fty-two weeks). Yetnearly one-third of heads of households

earn less than $10 per hour. The state ofpoverty in low-wage America–with mil-lions of children lacking quality child-care, health care, and education–is notonly unjust but national suicide. Welfarereform is not the answer. Adequate in-come support for all families and decentjobs for the vast majority of parents whowant to work are the preferred solutions.Instead, tanf has been reauthorized, in-creasing the mandatory work require-ments for two-parent families.


Welfare re-form’s hol-low victory


As recently as a century ago, the forms ofgovernment known in classical antiquity–empire, monarchy, aristocracy, democ-racy, and mixed regimes–still existed.Moreover, people regarded them as le-gitimate. However, in the aftermath ofthe political instability that World War Iunleashed across Europe, new forms ofgovernment representing radical chal-lenges to the status quo emerged. Lead-ing thinkers lent their support to fascismand communism, in part because thesenew forms promised to solve economic

and social problems that parliamentarygovernments could not.

But with World War II the range ofpolitical legitimacy began to narrow dramatically. Fascism was defeated onthe battle½eld and also discredited as a morally respectable form of politics. The subsequent founding of the UnitedNations initiated the development ofuniversal norms of governance. Article21 of the Universal Declaration of Hu-man Rights speci½ed that “the will ofthe people shall be the basis of the au-thority of government” and that “thiswill shall be expressed in periodic andgenuine elections which shall be by uni-versal and equal suffrage.” For the ½rsttime in history, the nations of the worldof½cially endorsed republicanism as thesole source of political legitimacy.

To be sure, this norm has often servedto cloak authoritarian regimes–someoxymoronic (e.g., Indonesian PresidentSukarno’s “guided democracy”), othersalmost laughably hypocritical (e.g., the“Democratic People’s Republic of Ko-rea”). Nonetheless, these examples showthat governments, however repressive,now feel compelled to justify themselvesin republican terms.

It is not surprising then that this de-velopment changed political theory aswell. At one time, theorists had weighedthe relative merits of government by the One, Few, or Many–or, in more con-temporary terms, the rule of the Leaderor the vanguard party versus democrat-ic elections. But after World War II, de-bates about political theory focused in-creasingly instead on differences amongforms of democracy–elitist versus pop-ulist, representative versus direct, con-sensus driven versus agonistic, delibera-tive versus bargaining based, substantiveversus procedural.

The Universal Declaration of HumanRights also made it clear that legitimate

William A. Galston was most recently Saul IStern Professor of Civic Engagement and directorof the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policyat the University of Maryland School of PublicPolicy. He is now a senior fellow in governancestudies at The Brookings Institution. Among his many publications are “Liberal Pluralism”(2002), “The Practice of Liberal Pluralism”(2005), and “Public Matters” (2005). He hasbeen a Fellow of the American Academy since2004.

William A. Galston

on the reemergence of political pluralism


governments are not only democratic inform but also limited in scope. Not evendemocratic majorities can deny individ-uals freedoms of thought, conscience,religion, and association, among manyothers. Notably, the document made no effort to specify the basis on whichhuman beings are endowed with rightsthat constrain the legitimate exercise ofpublic power. The U.S. Declaration ofIndependence famously characterizedthis matter as self-evident, a stance thatleaves theorists unsatis½ed. Since sinceredemocrats disagree among themselvesabout the range of legitimate public au-thority, appeals to unargued consensusare unlikely to get very far.

Many contemporary democratic theo-rists endorse the view that only thenorms of democracy itself circumscribethe scope of properly constituted demo-cratic authority. Others espouse an alter-native–a pluralist account of limitedgovernment. According to this view, so-cial life comprises multiple forms of ac-tivity and association. Political associa-tion is but one of these forms. Othersinclude families, civil associations, reli-gious faith and faith communities, thepursuit of knowledge and knowledge-seeking organizations, and the activitiesof solitary reflection and conscience.Each of these forms has an identity part-ly independent of the others, and eachgenerates claims to authority, no one ofwhich is dominant in all spheres, for allpurposes, on all occasions.

This is not a new idea. It takes as itspoint of departure an account of politicsfound in the writings of British politicalpluralists such as John Neville Figgis, G. D. H. Cole, Harold Laski, and thinkersworking in the Reformed Calvinist tradi-tion. Nor is the argument between plu-ralists and their adversaries a recent de-velopment. The pluralist movement be-gan to take shape in the nineteenth cen-

tury as a reaction to the growing tenden-cy to see state institutions as all-power-ful or total, a tendency that took vari-ous practical forms in different coun-tries: French anticlerical republicanism,British parliamentary supremacy, andthe drive for national uni½cation in Ger-many and Italy against subordinate po-litical and social powers.

Historically, one can discern at leastthree distinct secular-theoretical argu-ments for political monism rather thanpluralism. (Theological arguments,which raise a different set of issues, arebeyond the scope of this note.) The ½rstis the idea, traced back to Aristotle, thatpolitics enjoys general authority oversubordinate activities and institutionsbecause it aims at the highest, mostcomprehensive good for humans. ThePolitics virtually begins with the proposi-tion that “all partnerships aim at somegood, and that the partnership that ismost authoritative of all and embracesall the others does so particularly, andaims at the most authoritative good ofall. That is what is called . . . the politicalpartnership.”

Thomas Hobbes offered a second jus-ti½cation: Any less robust form of poli-tics would, in practice, countenance di-vided sovereignty, an open invitation toconflict and civil war. Thus, sovereigntycannot be divided, even between civiland spiritual authorities. In Hobbes’sview, this undivided sovereign authori-ty must also have unlimited power todecide whether, and under what con-ditions, individuals and associationswould enjoy liberty of action. No enti-ty, individual or collective, can assertrights against the public authority. In-deed, civil law may rightfully prohibiteven the teaching of truth, if it is con-trary to the requirements of civil peace.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau inspired a thirdargument for political monism: a society

The reemer-gence of po-litical plu-ralism



Note byWilliam A.Galston

cannot achieve civic health and moralitywithout its citizens’ wholehearted devo-tion to the common good. Loyalties di-vided between the republic and otherties, whether to civil associations or torevealed religious truth, dilute civic spir-it. Likewise, the liberal appeal to privatelife as against public life only legitimatessel½shness at the expense of the spirit of contribution and sacri½ce, withoutwhich the polity cannot endure. Repre-senting this tradition, Emile Combes, a turn-of-the-century premier in theFrench Third Republic, declared, “Thereare, there can be no rights except theright of the State, and there [is], andthere can be no other authority than theauthority of the Republic.”

It is in the context of these claims thatpolitical pluralism emerges as an alter-native to monism. Political pluralismrejects efforts to understand individu-als, families, and associations simply as parts of a political whole. Nor does it ac-cept the argument that they are merelyinstrumental, existing ‘for the sake of’some political purpose. For example, re-ligion is valuable, not only for the contri-bution it may make to politics and soci-ety, but in its own right, and there is noguarantee that religion faithfully prac-ticed will always support the existing po-litical or social order.

Instead, political pluralism regards hu-man life as consisting of a multiplicity of spheres, some overlapping, but eachwith distinct inner norms and a limitedbut real autonomy. Moreover, it rejectsany account of political community that creates a hierarchy of these spheres.Rather, different forms of associationand activity interrelate in a complexmanner.

Furthermore, political pluralism doesnot seek to overcome, but rather endors-es, the division of human loyalty and po-litical authority created by the rise of re-

vealed religion, summarized in Jesus’maxim “Render unto Caesar what isCaesar’s and unto God what is God’s.”Obviously, this division creates prob-lems of practical governance. But plural-ists refuse to resolve these problems byallowing public authorities to determinethe substance and scope of allowable be-lief, or by elevating devotion to the com-mon civic good as the highest humanvalue. They recognize instead that fun-damental tensions rooted in the struc-ture of human existence cannot be abol-ished in a stroke but must rather be ac-knowledged and adjudicated with regardto speci½c circumstances and controver-sies.

In short, pluralist politics is a politicsof recognition rather than of construc-tion. It respects the diverse spheres ofhuman activity; it does not understanditself as creating or constituting thoseactivities ex nihilo.

However, a pluralist polity is respon-sible for coordinating other spheres ofactivity, especially in adjudicating theinevitable overlaps and disputes amongthem. This form of politics requires themutual limitation of some freedoms,individual and associational. For exam-ple, it monopolizes the legitimate use of force, except in cases of self-defense,when the polity cannot or does not pro-tect its members. It also foresees the pos-sibility of group tyranny and thereforeprotects the individual against some as-sociational abuses. But a pluralist polityalso presumes that the enforcement ofbasic citizenship and exit rights, suitablyunderstood, will usually suf½ce. Indeed,it respects that groups have a broad,though not unlimited, right to de½netheir own membership, to exclude aswell as include.

While political pluralism undoubted-ly has moral implications, it rests on em-pirical claims about the diverse forms of

human activity and association. Forexample, in most cultures, family tieslimit the scope of political authority.Sophocles’ Antigone revolves around the primordial imperatives of kinshipthat stand opposed to the imperatives of patriotic loyalty. In the story, the king, Creon, attempts to keep Antigonefrom burying one of her brothers. Thefact that her brother was slain in battle½ghting against his own city does notjustify per se Creon’s effort to preventher from burying him. To be sure, An-tigone is as deaf to Creon’s legitimateconcerns for his city as he is to her fam-ily obligations. One could make a casefor Creon’s stance. Still, Sophocles clear-ly implies that the disaster that befallsCreon is the result of his assertion ofpolitical authority beyond its rightfulbounds. Whether we ultimately agreewith Sophocles or not, Antigone containsthis basic message: political leadersshould not disregard nonpolitical valuescompletely.

American constitutional law also en-dorses the proposition that family tiesrestrict political authority; parenthoodis its own sphere of authority. For exam-ple, in the famous case Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the Supreme Court denied theright of a public authority–in this case,the state of Oregon–to require all par-ents within its jurisdiction to send theirchildren to public schools. In justifyingits stance, the Court declared, “The fun-damental theory of liberty upon whichall governments in this Union repose ex-cludes any general power of the State tostandardize its children by forcing themto accept instruction from public schoolteachers only. The child is not the merecreature of the State; those who nurturehim and direct his destiny have the right,coupled with the high duty, to recognizeand prepare him for additional obliga-tions.”

Of course, this does not mean thatfamily activities are immune from polit-ical regulation. Pierce explicitly recog-nized a substantial degree of legitimategovernmental regulation of the family,including its educational decisions. Thedeep theory of liberty on which theCourt relied allows the state to require“that all children of proper age attendsome school.” It is the task of so-calledpluralist casuistry to distinguish legiti-mate from illegitimate assertions of po-litical authority over families.

Consider another example. U.S. lawand jurisprudence restrict the sway ofpublic authority over religious associa-tions. It is a commonplace that theseassociations may establish their own criteria for their religious of½ces, not-withstanding general public norms ofnondiscrimination to the contrary. Forexample, public law cannot invoke thesenorms to compel the Catholic Church to admit women into its priesthood. Butthe limits are even stricter. As LaurenceTribe observes, courts and other agen-cies of the U.S. government “may not in-quire into pervasively religious issues.”The rationale for this restriction goes be-yond prudential fears of entanglementand political divisiveness. It reflects, aswell, the belief that doctrinal and scrip-tural interpretation is beyond the com-petence and rightful authority of politi-cal power.

At ½rst glance, this position, and thepluralist thesis it buttresses, might seemto be a classic example of cultural partic-ularism masquerading as universalism.Yes, Jesus instructed his followers (andadversaries) to render unto Caesar whatis Caesar’s. But don’t all the Abrahamicfaiths actually tend in principle towardtheocracy, to which each has succumbedat points in its history? And isn’t thistheocratic thrust alive today–amongProtestant fundamentalists who call for


The reemer-gence of po-litical plu-ralism

the of½cial designation of America as aChristian nation, among messianic Jewsin Israel who invoke God’s will in sup-port of their settlements and against theauthority of their own government,among the Wahhabi clerics in Riyadhand the Shia clerics in Tehran?

Pluralists respond that each of thesefaiths contains resources that validatedistinctions among different spheres of authority in social life. Both Chris-tianity and Judaism developed doctrinesthat drew lines between civil and reli-gious authority, a stance that eventuallydefeated the entrenched Constantiniantradition within the Catholic Church.And Islam, which traditionalists inter-pret to require the rule of God’s law inevery aspect of life, nonetheless endors-es propositions that open a path towardpluralism. Article X of the Universal Is-lamic Declaration of Human Rights be-gins by quoting the Quranic principlethat “there is no compulsion in reli-gion,” which it insists governs the reli-gious rights of non-Muslims. Therefore,“in a Muslim country religious minori-ties shall have the choice to be governedin respect of their civil and personalmatters by Islamic Law, or by their ownlaws.”

Like every other kind of political theo-ry, political pluralism is contestable. Butits guiding insight, anchored in widelyrecognized features of human life, offersan appealing basis for liberty and diver-sity. The pluralist wager is that thisapproach will prevail, not only over civictotalism, but also over theories that ½ndit easier to assert rights than to justifythem.


Note byWilliam A.Galston

Letters to the Editor of Dædalus


On history in the twentiethcentury

May 10, 2006

To the Editor:

Anthony Grafton’s essay, “History’spostmodern fates,” in the Spring 2006issue of Dædalus was interesting and in-formative, but I share neither his pessi-mism about the fate of history nor hislimited view of important twentieth-century developments. In summarizingother trends among historians in theUnited States, I will also focus on thepost–World War II period. More worksdeserve mention if readers are to avoid arestricted view of history in this period.

Grafton covers major works by micro-historians, especially Carlo Ginzburg,Natalie Davis, and Robert Darnton, anddiscusses some contributions by Law-rence Stone and Emmanuel Le Roy La-durie. He mentions other giants of his-tory like William McNeill and C. VanWoodward, but not their main contri-butions. I can suggest some additionalaccomplishments and controversies.

Postwar politics–from huac investi-gations and loyalty oaths to mass move-ments against war and for civil, wom-en’s, and gay rights–affected the per-sonnel and content of historical studies.A leftward turn among students, withmany choosing academe over more lu-crative professions, changed history de-partments from their former largely con-servative white male character.

The geographical expansion of histo-ry brought most of the world into his-tory courses. It also created new views of world and comparative history. Worldhistorians like William McNeill, LeftanStavrianos, and Marshall Hodgsonbrought differing novel approaches tomany aspects of world history, a growing½eld that challenged the privileging ofthe West over the rest that characterizedearlier writings and theories regardingglobal history. Elements of Marxismwere important in post–World War IIschools founded by social scientists butadopted by many historians–Depen-dency Theory, which originated in Lat-in America, and World Systems Theory,which was begun by Immanuel Waller-stein and divided the modern world intoa changing core, a semi-periphery, and a periphery, with the former exploitingthe latter. World-oriented historianshave often focused on trade, conquest,and migration as transnational forces:Many study trade regions–the Mediter-ranean, the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic,and the so-called Silk Route. Migrationand conquest sometimes create diaspo-ras, another topic of research.

While European history remained apioneer, the rapid development of non-Western history brought them a newrange and sophistication that could havehad more impact had more historianspaid attention. Joseph R. Levensonbrought a subtlety and sophistication to Chinese intellectual history matchedonly by Benjamin I. Schwartz. Anotherhistorical giant was Thomas C. Smith.


Letters tothe Editor

His early works analyzed the develop-ment of industry and agriculture inmodern Japan, ½nding many parallels to Western Europe. Smith later applieddemographic methods pioneered by theCambridge Group in England and foundsigni½cant parallels to Western trends.

Indian and South Asian history haveflourished, with an emphasis on theory–often postmodern and/or postcolonial–which have been welcomed by someand contested by others like RichardEaton. Partha Chatterjee’s view of thenation and nationalism is popularamong historians of the global South.

Studies of major historical empireshave also become signi½cant. Historiansof the Middle East have revised manyearlier views, especially of the OttomanEmpire. For example, there has been areaction against the view of Ottomandecline from the late sixteenth centuryon, with many writing only of a relativedecline as compared to that of the Euro-pean Northwest. The imperial harem,often blamed for the alleged decline, hasbeen rehabilitated in Leslie Peirce’s TheImperial Harem, which also revises viewsof how the empire was governed.

History has expanded to cover coun-tries without writing or with writing sys-tems that did not cover as much as didthose of much of Eurasia. Methods forusing oral history were pioneered by JanVansina; historical linguistics to meas-ure migration and material culture, byChristopher Ehret and others; and theuse of living languages to supplementincomplete writings, by James Lockhart.Such methods are mainly used for Africaand the Americas.

U.S. history since the 1950s has ex-panded in many directions, notably revi-sion of views of slavery, Reconstruction,and black history: beginning with theworks of W. E. B. DuBois and John HopeFranklin, and then Kenneth Stampp’s

The Peculiar Institution, which overthrewthe dominant view of benevolent slav-ery, and proceeding through the worksof Eugene Genovese, which saw slaveryas part of an interlocking social and cul-tural system. Recent examples includeIra Berlin’s Generations of Captivity andEric Foner’s works on Reconstruction.David Brion Davis has pioneered inmany, including cultural and compara-tive, aspects of the history of slavery.

Robert Fogel and Stanley Engermanbrought a novel mathematical econom-ic history approach to slavery in Time onthe Cross. Some economic historians fol-lowed their combination of ‘what if’ his-tory with mathematics into ‘counterfac-tual history,’ while others pursued themathematics without the ‘what if.’ Eco-nomic historians who came from historydepartments rather than economics de-partments tended rather to stress social,geographic, and cultural factors.

The intersection of economic historywith ecological and demographic historyhas flourished in recent decades. For in-stance, many works on disease have fol-lowed Woodrow Borah’s work on LatinAmerica’s drastic population declineowing to the conquerors’ diseases. Al-fred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism is aleading work on ecological history.

Among subjects crossing geographicalboundaries, women’s history stands outfor its contributions and for encouragingthe development of other ½elds–gender,family, male, and gay history. GerdaLerner, Natalie Davis, and Joan Scott areamong its several pioneers. In gay histo-ry, George Chauncey’s Gay New York goesbeyond its title in discussing varieties ofhomosexual culture and practice. Gen-eral histories can no longer ignore gen-der, though their mode of incorporatingit is not always sophisticated or ade-quate. The study of women and genderhas extended to all parts of the world:

three winners of the relevant aha JoanKelly prize since 1997 were books aboutChina, Syria, and Iran.

Also popular have been histories ofhuman relations to the nonhuman–often to commodities. There has been arise in writing about consumption and a relative decline in writing about pro-duction, although both the history oftechnology and of modes of productionhave received some attention.

In various ½elds number crunching,aided by computers, has yielded infor-mation about the social and economichistory of people for whom we havescant records. Other novel methodol-ogies, such as the Freudian psychohis-tory of Peter Loewenberg, also have ad-herents. Many historians use new me-dia, chiefly audio and visual records ofindividuals, events, and material culture.

The history of science and medicinehas become a major ½eld in many histo-ry departments. Thomas Kuhn’s semi-nal Structure of Scienti½c Revolutions waswritten when he was in uc Berkeley’sHistory Department. In addition to theusual intra½eld controversies, there aredisagreements between scientists, whooften see their history as a progressivediscovery of scienti½c laws and theories,and historians, who stress the social andcultural aspects of science.

On the theoretical side, a few bookswith different approaches have been in-fluential, notably, E. J. Carr’s What is His-tory? which combined a quasi-Marxistapproach with relativism toward what is important in different periods. Formore relativist postmodernists, HaydenWhite’s Metahistory is important, whileJoyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Marga-ret Jacobs’ Telling the Truth about Historycombines a partially postmodernapproach with others.

The students I have known have beeninterested in controversy and in diverse

approaches to understanding the past,and the writers I have known have beenenthusiastic, not bored. Surveying thevarieties of twentieth-century historyseems more a cause for optimism thanthe opposite.

–Nikki R. Keddie

Nikki R. Keddie, a Fellow of the American Acad-emy since 1994, is professor emerita of history atthe University of California, Los Angeles. She haswritten numerous publications, including “Mod-ern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution” (newed., 2006) and “Women in the Middle East: Pastand Present” (2006). Keddie was founding editorof “Contention: Debates in Society, Culture andScience” from 1991 to 1996. A longer version ofthis letter with citations is at http://nikkikeddie.blogspot.com/2006/05/history-writing-in-us-since-world-war.html.

June 1, 2006

Anthony Grafton responds:

One point of my piece was that argu-ment is the lifeblood of history. Profes-sor Keddie’s response nicely bears thisout. In fact, I didn’t set out to survey the½eld, and my original draft was in anycase much compressed to ½t this issue of Dædalus. So I don’t propose to arguewith Professor Keddie, who offers a dif-ferent point of view and much supple-mentary information. I only wish I could share Professor Keddie’s optimismabout the condition of our discipline–especially as I too work with many giftedand eager students at all levels. But theretoo, it’s salutary to have two points ofview expounded.


On history in thetwentiethcentury

On peace in the Middle East

May 8, 2006

To the Editor:

If William B. Quandt is to have any credibility as an expert “on the peaceprocess in the Middle East” (publishedin the Spring 2006 issue of Dædalus), heshould at least know that the ½rst nameof former Israeli Prime Minister Barak isEhud (the same as current Prime Min-ister Olmert’s) and not Aharon. He failsto mention that among those blamingArafat for the failure of the Camp Davidtalks were not only Clinton and Ross,but Saudi Arabia’s Prince Bandar. Whilementioning the unfounded speculationthat Arafat’s death was due to poison, he fails to mention the more plausiblespeculation that it was due to aids. Heconveniently ignores the fact that thecharter of Hamas declares that the elim-ination of Israel as a political entity is an unalterable principle that cannot beamended or moderated. He joins the farright in Israel when he blames ratherthan praises Ariel Sharon for turningover the entire Gaza Strip to the Pales-tinians. It is naïve in the extreme to be-lieve that “peace” can be achieved whenone of the parties refuses to recognizethe other party’s right to exist.

–Solomon W. Golomb

Solomon W. Golomb, a Fellow of the AmericanAcademy since 2003, is University Professor at theCommunication Sciences Institute of the Univer-sity of Southern California.

May 16, 2006

William B. Quandt responds:

Solomon Golomb is of course correctthat former Israeli Prime Minister Ba-rak’s ½rst name is Ehud. I stand correct-ed. The rest of his intemperate letter iseither a matter of opinions on which wediffer, or a signi½cant distortion of whatI actually wrote. I’m not sure that any-one knows what caused Yasir Arafat’sdeath, but it is certainly accurate to saythat many Palestinians believe that hewas poisoned. I have no knowledge oropinion on the matter.

More seriously, I fail to see how he cansay: “He joins the far right in Israel whenhe blames rather than praises Ariel Sha-ron for turning over the entire GazaStrip to the Palestinians.” Even a casualreader of my short article will see that I neither blame nor praise Sharon forevacuating Gaza. Instead, I merely statethat his decision seemed to reflect his “vision of the future–one that does notinvolve a negotiated peace with the Pal-estinians.” That also is, I believe, an ac-curate statement of how Sharon saw the future, even before the election of aHamas-led government.

Mr. Golomb seems very intense in hisviews, but that does not absolve him ofthe obligation to state my views accu-rately when he chooses to criticize them.

On teaching in European uni-versities

May 14, 2006

To the Editor:

In their essay, “American philosophy inthe twentieth century,” which appearedin the Spring 2006 issue of Dædalus,


Letters tothe Editor

Professors Dag½nn Føllesdal and Mi-chael Friedman write: “Unlike theirEuropean counterparts, American [grad-uate] students hand in written work sev-eral times a term and receive detailedcomments from their teachers. Euro-pean universities are too understaffed to give similar attention and feedback to their students . . . . ” Of my own uni-versity, Oxford, this is completely false,in respect to undergraduates as well asgraduate students. How am I to tell ofhow many other European universities it is equally false?

–Michael Dummett

Michael Dummett, a Foreign Honorary Memberof the American Academy since 1985, is EmeritusProfessor of Logic at the University of Oxford.

May 24, 2006

Dag½nn Føllesdal and Michael Fried-man respond:

Sir Michael Dummett is right. Oxford,and also Cambridge, gives attention andfeedback to its students similar to whatstudents receive in good American uni-versities. Unfortunately, this is not gen-erally the case in European universities.While American colleges and universi-ties, all 3,500 of them, have an averagestudent/teacher ratio of ten students perteacher, similar to that of Oxford andCambridge, most European universitieshave two to four times as many studentsper teacher with far less feedback foreach student. And the situation in Eu-rope is getting worse rather than better:Many countries are introducing a three-year B.A. without increasing teachingresources; East European countries, andalso France and Germany, draw the bestresearchers out of the universities and

offer them good research conditions,while the university teachers becomesecond-class citizens; Germany increas-es the teaching load for those who re-main in the universities from eight tonine hours of teaching per week. Withpolicies like these, good European stu-dents will continue to go to America fortheir graduate work, and America willretain its dominance in science andscholarship.


On teachingin Europeanuniversities

PresidentPatricia Meyer SpacksChief Executive Of½cer

Leslie C. BerlowitzVice President and Chair of the Academy Trust

Louis W. CabotTreasurer

John S. ReedSecretary

Jerrold MeinwaldEditor

Steven MarcusLibrarian

Robert C. PostVice President, Midwest

Geoffrey R. StoneVice President, West

Jesse H. Choper

Dædalus Board of Editors Committee

Steven Marcus, Chair, Joyce Appleby, RussellBanks, Stanley Hoffmann, Donald Kennedy,

Martha C. Nussbaum, Neil J. Smelser, RosannaWarren, Steven Weinberg; ex of½cio: Patricia

Meyer Spacks, Leslie C. Berlowitz

Committee on Publications

Jerome Kagan, Chair, Emilio Bizzi, Jesse H.Choper, Denis Donoghue, Jerrold Meinwald;

ex of½cio: Patricia Meyer Spacks, Steven Marcus,Leslie C. Berlowitz

Inside back cover: Many of the brain structuresused to represent and manipulate the body andits workings perform double duty and also playa role in the construction of the self, a processindispensable for consciousness. Somatosen-sory cortices are shown in orange yellow; thecingulate gyri in yellow and red; the subcorti-cal nuclei of the hypothalamus and brain-stemtegmentum in pink; and the combination ofinsular cortex and thalamus in dark blue. SeeGerald M. Edelman on The embodiment of mind,pages 23–32: “As a result of higher-order con-sciousness enhanced by language, humans have concepts of the past, the future, and so-cial identity.” Photography courtesy of HannaDamasio, MD, and the Dornsife CognitiveNeuroimaging Center, University of SouthernCalifornia.

coming up in Dædalus:

Marilyn A. Brown,Benjamin K. Sovacool& Richard F. Hirsh Assessing U.S. energy policy 5

Jorie Graham Incarnation: 9:30 am to 9:36 am 12

Antonio Damasio& Hanna Damasio Minding the body 15

Gerald M. Edelman The embodiment of mind 23

Arne Öhman Making sense of emotion 33

Mark Johnson A philosophical overview 46

Carol Gilligan When the mind leaves the body 55

William E. Connolly Experience & experiment 67

Jacques d’Amboise A dancer’s experience 76

Ray Dolan The body in the brain 78

Jerry Fodor What we still don’t know 86

Dorian Gossy The Door in the Woods 95

Stanley Rosen Leo Strauss in Chicago 104

Joel F. Handler on welfare reform’s hollow victory 114William A. Galston on pluralism 118

on historiography, Israel & Palestine, European students &c. 123

DædalusJournal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Summer 2006

Dæ

dalusSum

mer 20

06: on body in m

ind

U.S. $13; www.amacad.org

plus poetry by Kevin Carrizo di Camillo, John Kinsella, CharlesSimic, Lawrence Dugan &c.; and notes by Michael Cook, RichardMorris, Susan T. Fiske, Daniel G. Nocera, Omer Bartov, Robert I.Rotberg, Samuel Weber, Harriet Ritvo &c.

Akeel Bilgrami, Wendy Doniger, Amartya Sen, Stephen Greenblatt,Kwame Anthony Appiah, Sydney Shoemaker, Joseph Koerner,Susan Green½eld, David A. Hollinger, Carol Rovane, Ian Hacking,Todd E. Feinberg, and Courtney Jung

on identity

William H. McNeill, Adam Michnik, Jonathan Schell, James Carroll,Breyten Breytenbach, Mark Juergensmeyer, Steven LeBlanc, JamesBlight, Cindy Ness, Neil L. Whitehead, Mia Bloom, and TzvetanTodorov

on nonviolence& violence

Joan Roughgarden, Terry Castle, Steven Marcus, Elizabeth Benedict,Brian Charlesworth, Lawrence Cohen, Anne Fausto-Sterling, TimBirkhead, Catharine MacKinnon, Margo Jefferson, and Stanley A.Corngold

on sex

Joyce Appleby, John C. Bogle, Lucian Bebchuk, Robert W. Fogel,Jerry Z. Muller, Richard Epstein, Benjamin M. Friedman, JohnDunn, and Robin Blackburn

on capitalism& democracy

Anthony Kenny, Thomas Laqueur, Shai Lavi, Lorraine Daston, PaulRabinow, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Robert George, Robert J. Richards,Jeff McMahan, Nikolas Rose, John Broome, and Adrian Woolfson

on life

on the public interest William Galston, E. J. Dionne, Jr., Seyla Benhabib, Jagdish Bhagwati,Adam Wolfson, Lance Taylor, Gary Hart, Nathan Glazer, Robert N.Bellah, Michael Schudson, and Nancy Rosenblum

comment

on body in mind

½ction

memoir

notes

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Dædalus - American Academy of Arts and Sciences

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