Mind and Body Issues and the Implementations on Critical

clarity, he also advocated the importance of cultivating our somata, which he considered as essential tools for all human attainments. In Conversations of Socrates, it is said that:

“The body is valuable for all human activities, and in all its uses it is very important that it should be as fit as possible. Even in the act of thinking, which is supposed to require less assistance from the body, everyone knows that serious mistakes often happen through physical ill-health” (Xenophon, Conversations of Socrates1:153, 163, cited in Shusterman, 2006, p.8).

In a more emphatic argument, Aristotle highlights that critical thinking is not only about the use of minds and words, but that it rather is about “a holistic human activity” (Robinson, 1978, p.1) that involves a combination of attitudes,

emotions, linguistic skill and logical proficiency (ibid). According to Aristotle, critical thinking is expressed through a healthy body, as well as through emotions – particularly, empathy. Aristotle valued the virtue of empathy, because it helps people understand how other people think and feel, thus it encourages individuals to be open to possibilities and alternatives and be able to “communicate” (ibid) with them. In this vein, the Aristotelian position would be that, when designing their teaching, educators should consider that reason cannot be divorced from emotion and thus, to think critically is not to retreat to the realm of pure reason (Heinaman, 1990; Robinson, 1978).

Descartes, on the other hand, was responsible for changing the route of western thought into a different direction; contrary to Aristotle, he argued that mind and body are separate and distinct insofar as the mind is capable of thinking while the body is not. According to Descartes, sensation and human perception of reality are the source of untruth and illusions, with the only reliable truth being the existence of a metaphysical mind; this mind is capable of interacting with a physical body, but cannot exist on the same physical plane as that of the body (Hoffman, 2009). Descartes has been highly influential on many taken-for-granted assumptions that since developed in western thought about the split of mind from the body, according to which the body, its senses and desires are instruments that mislead people’s judgement and distract their attention from the truth (ibid). Based on this argumentation, his fellow philosophers, especially humanist thinkers, focused merely on the mind and considered it important to emphasise language and rationality as the distinguishing essentials for humans to be critically

conscious of themselves, while they neglected to perceive the body as a universal and sensing soma (Macintyre-Latta & Buck, 2008).

This approach began to shift recently when contemporary thinkers

subjected the above theories to critique while they argued in favour of the necessity of the body for all human sense making and positioned it in an “intertwining” state (Bresler, 2004; Merleau-Ponty, 1968; Noddings, 1992; Sidorkin, 2002); “[body] is the storm-center, the origin of coordinates, the constant place of stress in [our] experience-train” (James, 1976, p.86). Essentially, in a world where the body may be taken for granted or be abused, harmed or underestimated due to ever-increasing technological inventions, bodily skills and capacities define the limits of people’s freedom, ethical thinking, choices, commitments, objectives and perceptions, and indicate what to expect from the others (Dewey, 1938; Macintyre-Latta & Buck, 2008). Shusterman (2006) extends James’ argument further, arguing that all the world’s objects, energies, and regularities are incorporated in the body directly and practically from a position that settles and directs our horizons of meanings (left and right, up and down, forward and backward, inside and outside) in both realistic and metaphorical ways (ibid, p.6-7). In his words:

“[…]ethics implies choice, which in turn implies freedom to choose and act on that choice. We cannot act without bodily means, even if these means are reduced (through the wonders of technology) to pressing a button or blinking an eye to implement our choice of action” (Shusterman, 2006, p.6).

More importantly, according to Shusterman,

“the soma supplies [a] primordial point of view through its location both in the spatiotemporal field and in the field of social interaction” (ibid, p.7).

Zarrilli (1995) points out that the paradigmatic shift in approaching the body in relation to mind, thinking and experience was achieved mainly through the work of Merleau-Ponty in his book: Phenomenology of Perception (1945). Zarrilli’s (1995) comments are worth citing here at length:

“Merleau-Ponty challenged the Cartesian cogito and asserted the primacy of the lived experience in the constitution of meaning. This phenomenology eloquently (re)claimed the centrality of the body and embodied experience as the locus for ‘experience as it is lived in a deepening awareness’ (Levine, 1985:62). He rejected the exclusive assumption of the natural sciences and modern psychology that treated the body as a thing, object, instrument, or machine under the command and control of an all-knowing mind” (Zarrilli, 1995, p.13).

In his arguments about the account of human body, Merleau-Ponty

(1962) challenges all philosophical positions that conceptualise body as a “scientific object” (ibid, p.3) that is separated from humans’ ontologically distinct consciousness. Conversely, he identifies the subjectivity of humans with their consciousness for, human “being-in-the-world” (p.440) is a bodily being and thus, the human body is itself a “subject” (ibid), and the human subject is unavoidably,

not just conditionally, embodied. As he explains, either in the context of certain performing skills or in people’s general everyday dealings with the world, people need to acknowledge that it is their bodies’ deliberations and understandings that guide them towards what to do and how to do it. In other words, the link between “meaning” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p.140), a concept which includes such elements as intention, objective, understanding, direction/directedness, importance, and the body is increasingly being made. This “praktognostic” (ibid) body is in fact what connects the human subject with the world:

“Our bodily experience of movement is not a particular case of knowledge [i.e. intellectualist, theoretical ‘knowledge’]; it provides us with a way of access to the world and the object, with a “praktognosia”, which has to be recognized as original and perhaps as primary” (ibid). Merleau-Ponty (1962) also refers to the inextricable relationship between the body and mind stating that consciousness is in the first place not a matter of “I think that” (p.137) but of “I can” (ibid):

“I can therefore take my place, through the medium of my body as the potential source of familiar actions, in my environment conceived as a set of manipulanda and without, moreover, envisaging my body or my surrounding as objects (..). There is my arm seen as sustaining familiar acts, my body as giving rise to determinate action having a field or scope known to me in advance [‘practically’ known, by the body itself], there are my surroundings as a collection of possible points upon which this bodily action may operate....” (ibid, p.105).

The issue of the body, mind and experience attracted the attention of the fields of cultural politics and feminism in relation to issues of race and gender, such as Butler’s (1988; 1994) theory on performativity of gender. These fields of study considered the human body as “an intentionally organized materiality” (Butler, 1988, p.156) which “is always an embodying of possibilities both conditioned and circumscribed by historical convention” (ibid), challenging concepts of identity in terms of personality development and gender. As Butler (1988; 1994) explains, from a very early age, children can actively embody certain cultural and historical possibilities they experience; also, they develop their thinking and identity as it is shaped through the gendered characteristics they have adopted. This perspective, which is connected with Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, will be discussed in a later section4.