Touch and Taste
Embodied Cognition and the Emergence of Aesthetics
Michel Chaouli, Indiana University
The book I am working on puts insights gleaned from phenomenology and cognitive science into conversation with a wide range of writings drawn largely from the tradition of the European Enlightenment. By generating such a conversation, I hope to arrive at a richer notion of embodied thinking, an idea that has come to occupy a prominent place in a number of disciplines and one that has a chance of becoming a point of contact between the humanities and the sciences. When we conceive of thought as embodied, we acknowledge not merely the trivial idea that it occurs in a body, but we try to make sense of the less-than-obvious idea that thinking happens by means of the body. In this conception, the body is the true staging ground for our whole mental life; its capacities, appetites, frailties, and needs—the ways it can be by turns rigid and plastic—give rise to and at the same time delimit the range of our cognitive and imaginative world. Understanding the mysterious process by which a bodily situation flows into a cognitive configuration is the central task that phenomenology and cognitive science have given themselves, each it its own way. The case I would like to make is that accounting for the embodiment of thought will gain both philosophical and historical depth by including the vast and varied efforts that the European eighteenth century has made in addressing this question.
Provisionally entitled Touch and Taste: Embodied Cognition and the Emergence of Aesthetics, my book puts forward three main theses. First, I argue that the most powerful accounts of cognitive embodiment the eighteenth-century Enlightenment offers are to be found in aesthetic theories, broadly understood both in the original sense of aesthetics, as an inquiry into sensation and the senses, and in the more recent sense of a philosophy of the beautiful. I read aesthetics in the modern sense as a continuation of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century accounts of the senses, albeit in a different key. All of these accounts, I argue, are ways of approaching the question of the embodiment of thought. My second main thesis is that some of the most searching thinking on the embodiment of mind can be found specifically in the ways the sense of touch has been reflected on. I show that despite its avowed devotion to illumination and the sense of sight, the Enlightenment is a project powerfully devoted to touch. But the accounts of touch we find here fail to cohere into anything like a unified theory. On the contrary, many of the most consequential contributions—my third main thesis—proceed negatively: they offer us flagrant violations of bodily integrity, or severe deviations in the way the sense of touch works, to test, as it were, how tightly coupled the link is between embodied (affective, emotional) responses and reasoned judgments. This is the route taken by many artworks I study, both literary and visual. I examine how a widespread fascination with skin (smooth, folded, pierced, wounded) and an anxious debate about disgust among many eighteenth-century writers can be understood to engage the more fundamental question of the bodily dimension in thought itself.
At first glance, the eighteenth century seems to provide an unpromising context for such an investigation, since its chief intellectual tradition—the Enlightenment—has usually been seen to be indifferent or even hostile to bodily entanglement. But this is an impoverished view of the Enlightenment. As I show in a broad cross-section of texts—philosophical, anthropological, literary, art historical, critical, medical—eighteenth-century writers are alive to the problem of the embodiment of thought, because for all their commitment to rationality they have an acute awareness of the physiological, psychological, and cultural context of thought itself. It is for this reason that some of the most significant thinkers of the period—among them Locke, Berkeley, Voltaire, Diderot, Condillac, Kant, Herder, Goethe, and Moritz—explore the human senses in some detail. More often than not, their inquiries lead to what Diderot termed "the most philosophical sense," namely touch. While not adding up to a single account of touch, these writings give rise to what I call the haptic Enlightenment, an Enlightenment centrally engaged with touch. Touch is not only the hero in a counternarrative directed against sight. Rather, in virtually all significant Enlightenment thinkers, it underpins sight and thus anchors the reasoned, objective, and ultimately noncorporeal engagement with the world in haptic embodiment.
The texts I discuss do not stop there. They describe and at times perform what Maurice Merleau-Ponty has called "an imperceptible twist" by virtue of which "an organic process issues into human behaviour" (The Phenomenology of Perception [1945]). While our experience in all its variety can only be understood through the fact of embodiment, Merleau-Ponty reasons, this experience is not reducible to the body taken as a purely biological entity. This insight—that we are animal and yet, if not rational, then at least also more than animal—is developed by many of the writers I discuss, for they show in a variety of ways that touch, while circumscribing the range of human behavior and thought, by no means determines it. The real realm of human cognition is neither raw organic touch nor pure thought, but something that moves from one to the other, something that requires touch yet drifts towards thought. I argue that art represents an instance of such movement, and that the discipline of aesthetics can be understood as a philosophical enterprise that provides an implicit account of the embodiment of thought.
In writing this book, I am also motivated by larger questions: to what extent can the insights emerging from the modern sciences of the mind aid us in our reading of philosophical and artistic works? And conversely, how might current scientific discussions about the embodiment of mind be informed and perhaps deepened through an understanding of the haptic Enlightenment, for example? To me, these are questions of great urgency, for they open the humanities to exciting work in the sciences, where new research is changing the core meaning of concepts central to humanistic scholarship, concepts such as language, memory, affect, and culture. This is not a question of "applying" the results or even the procedures of science to the study of culture. Rather, it is a matter of rethinking well-known questions in light of new theories and insights (the way psychoanalysis or linguistics opened questions in the study of literature).
This book is an attempt at such rethinking. It pursues both historical and theoretical goals. The historical goal is to unearth the rich history out which arise current attempts in cognitive science, neuropsychology, and phenomenology at understanding the precise fit between embodiment and cognition. My claim is that many of the eighteenth-century ways of formulating the problem and offering solutions, largely overlooked today, will deepen our current debates. The reason is to be found in the theoretical dimension of my argument. The eighteenth-century accounts I discuss do not merely represent the prehistory of our current thinking about the embodiment of cognition; they have not been simply superseded by better ideas. Rather, in their most profound expressions they lay bare a perplexity about how the extraordinary variety of human thought can be related back to our bodily existence. My sense is that many current scientific investigations into the mind tend to overlook this perplexity.
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