Rethinking the Mind-Body Relationship in Early Modern Literature, Philosophy, and Medicine

The Renaissance of the Body

Charis Charalampous

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780367871321
• eBook ISBN: 9781317584193
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores a neglected feature of intellectual history and literature in the early modern period: the ways in which the body was theorized and represented as an intelligent cognitive agent, with desires, appetites, and understandings independent of the mind. It considers the works of early modern physicians, thinkers, and literary writers who explored the phenomenon of the independent and intelligent body. Charalampous rethinks the origin of dualism that is commonly associated with Descartes, uncovering hitherto unknown lines of reception regarding a form of dualism that understands the body as capable of performing complicated forms of cognition independently of the mind. The study examines the consequences of this way of thinking about the body for contemporary philosophy, theology, and medicine, opening up new vistas of thought against which to reassess perceptions of what literature can be thought and felt to do. Sifting and assessing this evidence sheds new light on a range of historical and literary issues relating to the treatment, perception, and representation of the human body. This book examines the notion of the thinking body across a wide range of genres, topics, and authors, including Montaigne's Essays, Spenser's allegorical poetry, Donne's metaphysical poetry, tragic dramaturgy, Shakespeare, and Milton's epic poetry and shorter poems. It will be essential for those studying early modern literature, cognition, and the body.

1 Introduction

Intelligent Bodies in Early Modern Philosophy, Medicine and Literature

DOI: 10.4324/9781315741789-1

This book examines a neglected feature of intellectual history and literature in the early modern period: the ways in which the body was theorized and represented as an intelligent agent, with desires, appetites and understanding independent of the mind. Its central aim is to rethink the origin of dualism commonly associated with Descartes; uncover hitherto unknown lines of reception; explore the importance of this intellectual history for readers’ responses to the period’s literary writing; and interrogate related ideological, formal and rhetorical aspects of literary art. Too many readers have been content to assume simplistically that mind and body were conjoined until Descartes, and then suddenly they were separated. But this is not how ideas are typically propagated, particularly ideas as fundamental and visceral as mind-body relations. This study gives a more nuanced and textured account of the ways that the body was itself imagined to be a thinking and feeling entity, one that was not merely associated with abjection, moral blemish and mortality, but with moral, spiritual and artistic gain.

The book explores the development of the ontological phenomenon of the intelligent body across a wide range of genres, topics and authors, including Montaigne’s Essays, Spenser’s allegorical poetry, Donne’s metaphysical poetry, Shakespeare’s tragic dramaturgy and Milton’s epic poetry and shorter poems. The complexity and importance of the intelligent body shaped, to a significant extent, contemporary aesthetics and approaches to emotions, cure, cognitive psychology and theology. At the same time, it cut right through the heart of literary art because poets and dramatists used it as a means not only to represent the human body and mind in their works, but to structure the encounter of the reader with the text and to condition the experience of performance. My primary focus is on literature because it is in the contemplation and experience of art that we are tasked to synthesize the response of body and mind to a single stimulus, and to reflect upon the notion of a bisected and bi-subjective self. Literary art, above all, especially as it leaps off the page into reading aloud, into music and into theatrical representation involves us in ways that lead writers themselves to meditate on and exploit the experience of a bisected but bi-subjective self.

In early modern texts, be they literary, philosophical or medical, we frequently witness bodies invested with intelligence. In attributing to the body memory, will, passions, imagination and understanding of its own, early moderns projected a psychological schema onto the somatic which operates independently but parallel to the conscious, rational mind. From Johannes Eck (1486–1543) and Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560) to René Descartes (1596–1650) and his critics, this form of dualism occupied a central position in philosophical and theological enquiries, mainly because it furnished the intellectual framework for thinkers arguing for the personal immortality of the rational soul, as the Fifth Lateran Council of 1513 demanded that they do through a dogmatic proclamation urging them to prove the soul’s immortality by means of natural reason, not faith alone. In turn, theories of somatic cognition in philosophy, religious thought and medicine were tested and reworked in literary culture. The Ecumenical Council’s decree and the rise of Descartes’ philosophy of the mind-body relationship constitute the bookends of this study’s inquiry into a form of dualism based upon analogy (i.e. both constituent components capable of thought) rather than opposition (i.e. the body as an unthinking thing). In order to highlight the body’s independent cognitive abilities, the book focuses primarily on instances where early modern writers and thinkers represented it as capable of understanding what the intellect is unable to grasp, as well as on occasions where they held that the body is able to contradict the mind’s judgments and intentions.

Glimpses of the history of the intelligent body are often captured in secondary literature. In her seminal study The Body Embarrassed, Gail Kern Paster found that the everyday functioning of internal organs was “tumultuous and dramatic” even in health, noting that this aspect of early modern physiology “ascribes to the workings of the internal organs agency, purposiveness, and plenitude to which the subject’s own will is often decidedly irrelevant” (Paster 1993, 10). As Paster indicates here, evidence suggests that various early modern physicians, philosophers and literary writers did not understand the unwilled physiological alterations of the body as mere reactions caused by a mechanical imbalance of the body’s fluids, but as physiological processes suggestive of “agency,” “purposiveness” and “plenitude.” Paster, however, does not explore these cognitive aspects of the body and their consequences for literary art, as her main purpose is to link the suppression of bodily secretions and evacuations and the appearance of new kinds of bodily shame to the supersedure within medical science of humoral theory. Yet, a central question that grows naturally out of the research devoted to the body in this period is what it means to say that bodies are autonomous entities whose operations demonstrate “agency, purposiveness, and plenitude.” This view points at a shared understanding of the somatic as a cognitive agent in its own right, one that has the ability to respond to events and assess situations meaningfully and independently of the mind.

More recently, the contributors to Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare’s Theatre: the Early Modern Body-Mind have provided thought-provoking insights into the notion of the intelligent and autonomous body, encouraging us to “query the standard historical attribution of a damaging dualism to the ‘wound inflicted by the Cartesian split of mind and body’” (Johnson, Sutton and Tribble 2014, 1–2). Jan Purnis’s “The Belly-Mind Relationship in Early Modern Culture: Digestion, Ventriloquism, and the Second Brain” is particularly outspoken in its insistence on the notion of somatic intelligence. Here, Purnis presents “a belly that is especially thoughtful, seemingly with the capacity to think and reason on its own and even to undertake the complex intellectual work involved in making up an audit. Although the importance of all organs working together is a key element of the moral of the fable, the belly appears able to operate independently of the brain and heart” (Purnis 2014, 238). Purnis, then, suggests a form of intelligence on the body’s part, one that demonstrates autonomous thinking and reasoning capabilities, linking this ontology to modern advances in medical and cognitive science, particularly Michael Gershon’s The Second Brain: A Groundbreaking New Understanding of Nervous Disorders of the Stomach and Intestine. And Michael Schoenfeldt has observed that the physiology suggested in Donne’s writings “underpins a world where bodies could be imagined to speak and think, where blood could be characterised as eloquent” (Schoenfeldt 2009, 145). But what exactly does the body think of independently of the conscious mind during the act of reading? What are the historical and epistemological foundations for this understanding of the body as an intelligent and autonomous cognitive agent? And how did the theory of the intelligent body animate the intended effects of key literary devices as those devices are presupposed to operate within the horizon of the period’s notions of perception? It is this history, its complexity and significance that this book seeks to recover.

In this introductory chapter, I explore, in brief, examples in contemporary philosophy, medicine and literature which represent the phenomenon of the intelligent body. My aim is to introduce the ontology of the intelligent body and show that it was not an isolated phenomenon that can be attributed to a very limited set of authors, but an ontological outlook well-woven into the literary and intellectual fabrics of the early modern period. Here I also trace the origins of the notion of the autonomous and intelligent body back to the philosophy of William of Ockham (c.1287–1347), who may be conceived of as the first dualist.

The Body “Thinks and Judges” (Melanchthon 1998, 240)

Early modern natural philosophers and physicians divided the powers of the body or, more accurately, of the organic soul-body composite, into the powers of the external and internal senses. The former gather information from the surrounding world and the latter process this information and yield the results to the intellectual soul or mind, the distinctive cognitive processes of which are conceptual apprehension, reasoning and self-reflection. In order to exemplify the dominant view of the cognitive processes that the body performs, we may appeal to Pierre de La Primaudaye’s (1546–1619) summary of the cognitive powers of the organic soul’s internal senses, which are “diuided by some into three kindes, by others into fiue. They which make fiue, distinguish betweene the common sense, the imagination, and the fantasie, making them three: and for the fourth they adde Reason, or the iudging facultie: and for the fift, Memorie. They that make but three kinds differ not from the other, but onely in that they comprehend all the former three vnder the common sense, or vnder one of the other twaine, whether it be the imagination or the fantasie” (Primaudaye 1594, 131). Despite its precarious name, “reason” does not refer to the rational mind or the intellective soul. It has this name because of its ability to produce judgments based on a cognitive process that resembles an intellectual cognitive process. As the popular treatise Batman uppon Bartholome has it:

THE vertue of féeling that commeth of the soule sensible, is a vertue, by which the soule knoweth & iudgeth of coulours, of sauours, and of other obiects that be knowne by the vtter wits. The vertue imaginatiue is it, whereby wée apprehend likenesse and shapes of things of perticulars receyued, though they bée absent: As when it séemeth that we sée golden hils, either else when through the similitude of other hills we dreame of the hill Pernasus. The vertue Estimatiue, or the reason sensible is it, whereby in being héedfull to auoide euill, & follow that is good, men be prudent & sage. And this vertue Estimatiue is common to vs & to other beasts: As it is séene in hounds & also in wolues: but properly to speak, they vse no reason, but they vse a busie & strong estimation, but héereof we shall speake in another place. But Memoratiua is a vertue conseruatiue or recordatiue, wherby the likenesse of things, least they should be forgot, we lay vp & safely reserue. Therefore one said, the Memory is the coffer or chest of reason.

(Bartholomaeus and Batman 1582, 15v)

This form of sensory cognition (reason sensible) had a longstanding history in medieval theories of cognition since Avicenna’s (c.980–1037) postulation of an estimative power located in the inner senses that distinguishes between various features of perceptible objects. Avicenna posited the existence of an estimative faculty in order to explain the innate ability in all animals, including humans, to sense an intention that is intrinsic to the object. Intentions are the extra-sensible properties that an object presents to an animal or person at the moment of perception. These intentions affect the perceiver powerfully, such as the negative feelings a sheep senses in perceiving a wolf, or the positive feelings sensed in perceiving a friend or child (see Black 1993 and Tachau 1993). It is this faculty’s ability to perform judgments that prompted early modern thinkers to name it “reason” or “reason sensible.”

In his Table of Humane Passions, Nicolas Coeffeteau elaborated on the cognitive powers of the organic soul. He wrote that “the Knowing powers” of the organic soul “are of two sorts, that is to say, the Exterior and the Interior” (Coeffeteau 1621, A12r). “The Interior powers capable of Knowledge,” he continues, are three, “whereof the first is the Common sence” (Coeffeteau 1621, av). Its main duty is to receive the sentient qualities of a cognitive object, “Compare them, Discerne them, and Iudge of them” (Coeffeteau 1621, ar). The function of Coeffeteau’s “common sense” corresponds to Primaudaye’s “Reason” or Bartholomaeus’ (and Batman’s) “reason sensible,” as by means of this faculty “the creature may distinguish that which is healthfull from that is hurtfull” (Coeffeteau 1621, ar). Reason then sends the information to “another Power meerely Knowing, which is called the Imaginatiue; as that wherein are graven the formes of things which are offred unto it by the common sense, to the end the knowledge may remaine after they are vanished away” (Coeffeteau 1621, a2v). As in Bartholomaeus’ (and Batman’s) account, the imagination’s role here is to preserve and project the form of the cognitive object which the common sense has judged in the physical absence of that cognitive object. Then, imagination sends this information to the “Store-house and Treasury […] which is the memory” (Coeffeteau 1621, a2v). Its function is to present to the common sense the forms which have been “consigned unto her.” For this reason, memory “may well bee sayd also to helpe to Knowledge” (Coeffeteau 1621, a2r). It should be noted that the intellect has not, as yet, been involved in the process: A person’s body performs these cognitive processes without the need to apply any corresponding concept. The body can perform judgements, store and recall information, and prompt an action without the need for any discursive, linguistic content.

A number of early modern authors adopt...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Intelligent Bodies in Early Modern Philosophy, Medicine and Literature
• 2 Montaigne’s Corporeal Self: A Dialectics of Bisubjectivity and its Medicinal Virtues
• 3 The Allegory of the Body and the Body of Allegory in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene
• 4 Thinking (of) Feelings: Reaching for the Divine in Donne’s Poetry
• 5 The Intelligent Body on the Stage and the Wonder of Tragic Pleasure
• 6 Milton’s Prophetic Mission: At the Boarders of Poetry and Music
• 7 Epilogue: The Afterlives of the Intelligent Body
• Index