Emotions, Embodied Cognition and the Adaptive Unconscious

A Complex Topography of the Social Making of Things

John A. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367027018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429675799
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi di genere

Emotions, Embodied Cognition and the Adaptive Unconscious argues for the need to consider many other factors, drawn from disciplines such as socio-biology, evolutionary psychology, the study of the emotions, the adaptive unconscious, the senses and conscious deliberation in analysing the complex topography of social action and the making of things.

These factors are taken as ecological conditions that shape the contemporary expression of complex societies, not as constraints on human plasticity. Without 'foundations', complex society cannot exist nor less evolve. This is the familiar pairing from complexity theory: path dependency and dynamic emergence. Inter-disciplinary and complexity perspectives need to be incorporated into the social sciences. Routinely, sociologists think of social phenomena as a distinct field, expressed in the term: the 'social construction of' without apparent need to refer to other material, biological, psychological, material or ecological conditions or agents.

This book shows how the familiar sociological dynamics of identity, solidarity, differentiation and communication are shaped through the persistent interaction of unconscious and affective processing with conscious deliberation in newly emergent contexts. It is this re-expression, not the surpassing, of human characteristics in contemporary social action that needs to re-inform a complex, ecological approach to the theory and methodologies of the social sciences. The book is intended for a postgraduate/research audience and doctoral students to introduce and synthesise inter-disciplinary contributions to research into complexity theory in the social sciences.

Part 1

The legacy of critical rationalism: An attempted maturity

Chapter 1

Kant, Nietzsche

Maturity, genealogy, and freedom

Introduction

This chapter considers transformation of critical epistemology from a general to a historically specific genealogy of the subject. Key issues are the transformation of ethics, the claim of sovereignty, the critical centrality of discourse, and the neglected ‘drives’ that implement the specific forms of the will to power. There is a clear but incomplete psychology of modern humanity essayed here in the dialectic of the master and slave and its codification in both the acceptance and rejection of Judeo-Christian religion. However, Nietzsche’s challenge to humanity in taking ‘sovereign’ responsibility, its structures, ethical and power relations cannot be ignored for the project of rational secularism.

I am indebted to Owen (1994/2005) in this chapter and to Ansell-Pearson (1994/2002) for these readings of Nietzsche and his influence. While I find their readings extremely compelling, indeed a brilliant access to the whole question of genealogy, the reader will see that the questions I raise are not so much confined to these texts or Nietzsche’s originals but rather to issues provoked by the contrast with my own involvement with philosophy, sociology and complexity theory. As Ansell-Pearson (1994/2002) argues, every reading of Nietzsche is part deconstruction, part reconstruction. Nevertheless, and despite the difficulties of the originals, a challenging coherence remains.

Kant, critical maturity and the a priori

It is hard to counter terms such as ‘enlightenment’, ‘maturity’, ‘critical reason’ given their role in rationality secularism and modernity. My position is not a ‘postmodern’ response in the sense of a celebration of heterodoxy. Such a position would offer ‘alternatives’ but at the price of leaving intact, simply as another alternative, the very presuppositions of the ‘maturity’ it seeks to oppose. I want to argue that the supposedly postmodern alternative is close to, or identical with, its modern predecessor. Instead, I will seek to show that both Kant’s position and Nietzsche’s critical revisions always were and will always remain severely compromised.

Owen explains Kant’s position as follows:

immaturity [is] the reliance for understanding on the guidance of another …

On the other hand, enlightenment as reliance on one’s own understanding indicates the moment at which one does recognise the essential ground of one’s freedom in willing one’s own will, in legislating the moral law for oneself, and, thereby, engages in the activity of transforming oneself as an empirical individual in accord with the dictates of the categorical imperative.

(Owen 1994/2005: 12, my emphasis)

This is, of course, a simplification, if still cryptic. Citing The Critique of Pure Reason:

Experience teaches us that a thing is so and so but not that it cannot be otherwise … [and] if we have a proposition which is thought as necessary … it is an a priori judgement.

(Kant 1975/1988: 43, Section B3)

I draw attention to the terms ‘empirical individual’ and ‘experience’. Their significance is established in the opening sections of The Critique.

How should our faculty of knowledge be awakened into action did not objects affecting our senses partly of themselves produce representations, partly arouse the activity of our understanding to compare these representations, and by combining or separating them, work up the raw material of the sensible impressions into that knowledge of objects that is entitled experience?

(ibid. p. 4)

‘Enlightenment’ and its moral obligations are addressed here as the authentic position of the human ‘empirical individual’ as opposed to the ‘member’ informed and disciplined by ‘traditional’ or customary forms of authority. This is an obligation critics continue to recognise. However, closer inspection reveals a number of implicit, irrational dimensions. The first is the prioritisation of the empirical individual as opposed to the social character of knowledge. It is right that such collective representations can be put in question but they will also remain part of the resource of critical examination. Owen’s use of the term ‘empirical individual’ operates as a kind of shorthand. Indeed, he clearly argues that such a term is incompatible with the Kantian a priori. But there this idiomatic reversion persists. I will make a radical claim here: the empirical individual cannot nor should not exist, even as a literary device, or as a shorthand reversion, as part of the idiom of philosophers. It is no basis for describing the activities of a social animal. The implications will be examined throughout the book. Let me first re-word this in terms of the subtitle: a complex topography of the making of things. The empirical individual is possible, as a verbal expression. But it cannot be in any sense a real thing or person, or member of a social species. It remains solely an idiomatic part of philosophy as non-ecological discipline. This is misplaced formalism. I reiterate here (see also Smith & Jenks 2018, noting the title: Sociology and Human Ecology) that the disciplinary and idiomatic limits of philosophy and its influence on sociology have to be breached. In other words, a philosophical ‘enlightenment’ is as inauthentic as an empirical individual. Both must be superseded.

Second, the term ‘experience’ is also treated with grossly misplaced formalism. It is simply not true that ‘can be otherwise’ can be attached to any qualitative experience. At the time of (re)writing it is 9 January 2020 and though that could have been otherwise it actually is not. Taking a slightly more complex example, understood formally, the bodily symmetry of animals ‘could have been otherwise’ but as a result of viable evolutionary development in relation to an environment, it actually is not. Similarly, there is nothing about white swans, cats or cars that prevents the next one being black. But while a shocking pink car is possible, a cat does not have the same natural range, nor can the swan or cat change their number of legs or sprout an elephantine trunk without attracting the term ‘pathological’; that is, not-swans or not-cats or not-whatever. It would be much more rational and reasonable not to formalise out of existence the manifold character of human experiences and, further, to admit that they are necessarily environmentally grounded, patterned, historical, and social. Differently put, experiences are not as Kant’s description suggests, arbitrary or conventional but true ‘to a degree’ as fuzzy logic would say. This again carries many important implications about the survival value of adaptations and norms which much of contemporary (so-called) ‘critical’ sociology has routinely derided as matters of power and subjugation. Indeed, if the experienced could truly be otherwise, without limit, no analysis of the distinct oeuvres of Kant or Nietzsche would be possible: the very enterprise denies the proposition. If we can read ‘Kant’ then his criterion is wrong: crucially not simply as a verbal contradiction but as an ecologically insufficient description. It is not ‘fitting’.

This brings us to the status of the a priori. Clearly, something precedes the possibility of human experience. Kant argues that space and time are a priori constructions because they are necessary. This must mean that they are not derived from experience

Space and time taken together are the pure forms of all sensible intuition. But these are a priori sources of knowledge, being merely the conditions of our sensibility, just by this fact determine their own limits namely that they apply to objects only so far as objects are viewed as appearances and do not represent things as they are in themselves.

(Kant 1975/1988: 80, Section B56)

It is strange that this human production of time and space tends to pass without comment. We now have (but Kant did not) a vast body of knowledge which we can call generally the evolutionary biology of adaptation between organism and environment, and more particularly, biosemiotics, to formulate this mutual relation. But you will find practically no mention of this in Owen (1994/2005) nor ‘critical theory’ – except in my/our previous work. There is, of course, extensive relevant work in socio-biology and evolutionary psychology but rather than fertile crossover with critical sociology, mutual enmity and avoidance prevail. More of this below. For the moment, let us say that lacking any adaptive or relational perspective the Kantian a priori springs, literally, ex nihilo. The nihilism of ‘enlightened’ rationality is not, then, something added by Nietzsche, nor Weber in his darker moments, but was there, structurally at the outset. An Enlightenment made out of nothing is not an Enlightenment. It, too, is not fitting.

Owen (1994/2005: 17–18) argues that for Nietzsche the ‘deduction’ of the a priori is simply a repetition or assertion of a time-independent dimension which he will seek to re-address as a matter of historicity or genealogy. It is therefore – I agree with Nietzsche – tautological. What is problematic and interesting for me is not so much the circularity but that the supposed deduction is flawed. If we accept that ‘experience’ cannot be formalised as uniform but is, on the contrary, qualitatively diverse, then the ‘necessary’ does not disclose a formal priority but a manifold of established adaptations. In this sense, time and space are indeed both derived from and necessary to ‘experience’. Crucially this is not simply a necessity that belongs to the fractured experience of the ‘empirical individual’ nor simply ‘humanity’ but to the biosphere. No amount of relativity theory at energised velocities close to the speed of light can alter this. For the biosphere, time and space remain necessary and their absence, unimaginable. The same applies to terrestrial ‘physio-sphere’ at the classical level. The entire status of the a priori in its Kantian form should therefore be refuted, if we are interested in a complex topography of the social making of things. Notice that what is rejected here is not human social construction but every version of it that rejects an ecological relation when ‘constructing’. I referred to this above as auto-eco-representation. Radically put, the concept ‘thing’ is indeed distinctly human in construction but should be understood as a creative and imaginative outcome of an interactive human-environment ecology.

I raise the question of imagination here because it is, in my view, one of the more neglected dimensions of Kant’s writing. Kant’s Critique speaks of three syntheses of the imagination: that of the past, present, and future that underlie human concepts rather than just impressions. The question of imagination is therefore central to the operation of reason but by that token, is never simply empirical. This is given by Kant: ‘senses partly of themselves produce representations, partly arouse the activity of our understanding’ (op. cit. my emphasis). Or put differently ‘representation’ is the faculty of realising that which is not itself or necessarily present. For this reason imaginative representation carries with it a long history of association with both creativity and delusion. By tradition, it therefore requires disciplined judgement. I suggest that the misplaced formalism of Kant’s characterisation of experience is far too hasty and lacking in judgement. The empirical individual is neither wholly empirical nor individual but in the biosemiotic sense a member of a species having certain adaptive informational predispositions. Yet these must be realised in a social context – like any other social animal – but displaying our unique post-natal plasticity in matters, cultural, technological, economic and historical.

These points are crucial so I will put them another way. Kant’s ‘categories’: experience, the ‘empirical individual’ are, arguably, misplaced formalism. But language has evolved, made available, these forms of categorisation and for good reason: they are adaptive strategies. They ‘propose’ that the difference between members of a categorial set – cars, birds, diseases, neoliberal economics – are less significant than their similarities. Similarity is significant information but by implication, difference, is insignificant noise. Of course the noise/information boundary can be drawn differently – sports cars, sea birds, sexually transmitted diseases, securitisation trading – but while inevitable (adaptively positive) they also carry risk. That, I suggest is the characteristic of every re-presentation. The critical claim of complexity theory is that the ecology of this re-presentative relation is grossly under-examined.

Nietzsche and language

Nietzsche is well aware of the problematics of linguistic representations but his analysis focuses almost entirely on the historical and cultural specificity – the plasticity of expression – rather than anything but the most rudimentary account of human adaptation. Consequently, while he objects to the Kantian transcendental ego and the synthetic a priori, as a sort of grammatical illusion, and therefore ‘nothing’ he proposes another form of groundlessness. Owen cites this passage:

[W]e find ourselves in the midst of a rude fetishism when we call to mind the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language – which is to say, of reason. It is this which sees everywhere deed and doer; this which believes in will as cause in general; this which believes in the ‘ego’, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and which projects its belief in ego-substance on to all things – only thus does it create the concept ‘thing’. Being is everywhere thought in, foisted on, as cause; it is only from the conception ‘ego’ that there follows, derivatively, the concept ‘being’ …

(Twilight of the Idols, cited in Owen 1994/2005: 38)

And adds the following comment:

Nietzsche’s argument in this passage is that our belief in ‘ego’ and ‘being’ is made possible by the distinction between doer and deed that language imposes on us in the form of the subject-predicate distinction.

(ibid. p. 19)

This passage from Twilight of the Idols and his comment are intended to show the constructive functions of language. I agree to some extent. However, Nietzsche’s comment is quite distinct: it argues that doer and deed, or cause and effect, are outcomes of linguistic construction. Further:

Truth is: a moving army of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms, in short a summa of human relationships that are being poetically and rhetorically sublimated, transposed, and beautified until, after long and repeated use, a people considers them as solid, canonical, and unavoidable. Truths are illusions whose illusory nature has been forgotten, metaphors that have been used up and have lost their imprint and that now operate as mere metal, no longer as coins.

(Philosophy and Truth, p. 51 cited in Owen 1994/2005: 21)

And Owen comments:

As such, for Nietz...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series editors’ preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Basic concepts, content and structure
• PART 1 The legacy of critical rationalism: An attempted maturity
• PART 2 Alternative foundations for a mature concept of community
• PART 3 Constants and dynamics in complex social expression
• Bibliography
• Index