Life without a feeling of bodily organs would be merely a consciousness of existence, without any feeling of well-being or the reverse, i.e., of the furthering or the checking of the vital powers. For the mind is by itself alone life . . . in union with its body.
—Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement
It has twice happened to me that a piece of philosophy which I was developing about the body seemed to have a significance very different from that which had engaged my interest in the first place. The result in both instances was somewhat comical. In the 1960s, for example, I got involved with the philosophy of action. I was interested in working out the differences between two kinds of action—actions we perform by doing something else, which causes the first action to happen, and actions we simply perform, without first doing something through which the intended actions happen. Turning on a light by manipulating a switch and propelling a billiard ball by striking it with a cue stick are examples of the first kind of action. Moving one’s fingers or winking one’s eyes are examples of the second. I called these latter “basic” actions, and we are all endowed by nature with a certain repertoire of basic actions, through which we do these and various other things. Some people are impaired—they cannot move their fingers, say—and some are specially gifted—they can, to take a trivial example, wiggle their ears. These differences somewhat correspond to cognitive impairments, like being unable to see, and to cognitive gifts, such as clairvoyance, in which certain people know things in some direct way that others don’t (if you ask these so-equipped individuals how they know something, they say they just do). I developed these parallel structures systematically and published my results in my 1973 book, Analytical Philosophy of Action. I don’t propose here to discuss these ideas further other than to say that when I announced a graduate course in the philosophy of action at Columbia University in the late sixties, I was astonished by the throngs that turned out for the opening session. It made no sense to me—until I realized that the students were very excited by the idea of such a course because they thought it must be about the philosophy of political action. Those were revolutionary times in universities, and here was a philosopher ostensibly talking about what was closest to students’ hearts. I never saw so many bored, disillusioned people in my life when I explained that I was interested in such simple performances as raising eyebrows or raising body temperatures. The distance between such preoccupations and the overthrow of capitalism—or the military-industrial complex—was simply too distant for those bent on changing the world to have much patience with distinctions I by contrast found enthralling. A philosopher who was then a student recently recalled me standing in front of a blackboard covered with logical structures.
The second time something like this happened was when I published a collection of essays in a book I called The Body/Body Problem. The title made an oblique reference to a well-worn but eternally unresolved topic in philosophy, the so-called mind/body problem, and I originally presented my views to an academic audience at Columbia in the 1980s. When this book was published in 1999, however, “the body” had become a kind of hot topic in our cultural dialogues, largely in consequence of gender studies, queer studies, and theoretical feminism, not to mention the considerations of privacy that underwrote a woman’s right to abortion—topics that were hardly visible when the original lecture was delivered. My book was all at once felt to have a topicality I had never intended, especially since by that time I had acquired a certain reputation as a writer on art. For example, I was invited to be the keynote speaker at the twenty-eighth annual conference of the Austrian Association for American Studies, to be held at the University of Klagenfurt, addressed to “the various fixations within contemporary American culture, on the body.” The organizers of the conference cited not only The Body/Body Problem as evidence of my expertise, but the fact that I had published a long study on the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe. I found exceedingly comical the idea of an elderly gentleman, whose body showed no obvious dedication to weight lifting or marathon running—or even dieting—turning up in Klagenfurt to address earnest scholars on late twentieth century American concerns with the body. It was an act of charity to everyone involved that I declined the invitation.
But I did begin to receive invitations from various art programs, and though the interest that artists had in the body came from concerns rather different from those of the philosophers of my generation, the distance between them was not quite so insuperable as that which separates crooking a finger and the revolutionary overthrow of colonial oppressors. It is a fact that questions of gender, for example, had played no role to speak of in the philosophical discussions of the body I had addressed in the body/body problem, whereas they have become obsessively addressed by contemporary artists such as Matthew Barney or, earlier, Judy Chicago. And it is also true that philosophers of a later generation, particularly those upon whose thought feminism had had a major impact, were attempting to take up issues of gender in a fundamental way. These philosophers were much closer to contemporary artists in this regard than they were to the philosophers I had been addressing in The Body/Body Problem. My analysis had been offered as a way of narrowing the gap between the body as philosophically construed and the body as artists have come to think about it—and perhaps it was time that philosophy began to take up the kinds of issues that even the earnest students of Klagenfurt had decided to devote a summer institute to. So for better or worse I decided to accept some of these invitations, and to see what I might say that would help all of us, artists and philosophers alike, in thinking more clearly about our embodied condition. This chapter is a product of that decision.
It strikes me, to begin, that our embodied condition has played a very central role in our artistic tradition, mainly because visual artists in the West had the task of representing the mystery on which Christianity, as the defining Western religion, is based—the mystery, namely, of incarnation, under which God, as a supreme act of love and forgiveness, resolves to be born in human flesh as a human baby, destined to undergo an ordeal of suffering of which only flesh is capable, in order to erase an original stigma of sin. This entire vast narrative was revealed, and the artists were charged with the task of making it credible. In Burlington Magazine the great British art critic Roger Fry wrote in an article titled “Madonna and Child by Andrea Mantegna”: “The wizened face, the creased and crumpled flesh of a new born babe . . . all the penalty, the humiliation, almost the squalor attendant upon being ‘made flesh’ are marked.” Babies are pretty messy entities, and it is a tribute to Mantegna that his Christ child exhibits some of what mothers and fathers put up with when they are obliged to deal with a living mass of appetites and demands that a baby consists of at first. Even God, once God decided it was crucial to become enfleshed as a human, must begin life as helplessly as we all begin—hungry, wet, soiled, confused, colicky, crying, dribbling, babbling, drooling—and needing to be fed, changed, washed, and burped. The image of Jesus as a baby, naked and showing the unmistakable mark of gender which the noted art historian Leo Steinberg restored to consciousness in his book The Sexuality of Christ, has been as much a staple of Western art as has the image of Christ stretched, bleeding, and in a state of utter agony at the terminus of his life. It had, for reasons internal to Christian thought, to be a suffering death—Jesus could not, for abstruse reasons, simply die in his sleep, a smile on his face, surrounded by his disciples—like Buddha, say—just as it had to be a real birth through which God entered the world as an enfleshed being, between the legs of a human mother. The whimpers of god and of a baby are indiscernible, though the difference between them is momentous.
This past Christmas I was listening to a service of carols at Riverside Church, near where I live in New York, and I was struck by words in an unfamiliar carol. The first verse says: “A child, delivered on a stable floor. His mewing, newborn cry is all that God can say of hunger, thirst, and aching need.” And in the penultimate verse it says, “A man, in dying moments on a cross. His God-forsaken cry is all that God can say of searching, scarred, redeeming love.” God, who is eternal, would have no conception of either hunger or pain—and would require physical embodiment to know what these mean. Through the incarnation, it is nevertheless God that is hungry, thirsty, and needy; and it is God that cries out in pain barely imaginable to those of us who have never undergone that order of extreme torture. Still, there would be no way in which one could tell that these were not the sounds of an ordinary human infant or an ordinary human victim of torture. Those almost animal sounds are the voice of God expressing himself as human. I suppose that when we think of the voice of God, we think of it as disembodied, and coming from nowhere. But when we take incarnation literally, the voice of God cannot be told apart from that of an embodied human.
We all begin in the same way, and from the same place in the radical helplessness of universal babyhood. The philosopher Richard Wollheim notes in a remarkable passage in his book Painting as an Art regarding the art of Willem de Kooning:
The sensations that de Kooning cultivates are, in more ways than one, the most fundamental in our repertoire. They are those sensations which give us our first access to the external world and they also, as they repeat themselves, bind us forever to the elementary forms of pleasure into which they initiated us. Both in the grounding of human knowledge and in the formation of human desire, they prove basic. De Kooning then crams his pictures with infantile experiences of sucking, touching, biting, excreting, retaining, smearing, sniffing, wallowing, gurgling, stroking, wetting.
And these pictures . . . contain a further reminder. They remind us that, in their earliest occurrence, these experiences invariably posed a threat. Heavily charged with excitation, they threaten to overwhelm the fragile barriers of the mind that contained them, and to swamp the immature, precarious self.
The world itself, on Wollheim’s extraordinarily vivid account, as encountered by the infant, is as plastic as a lump of clay given form, if we can speak of form at all, by the way the infant engages with it. The world as we first encounter it—and we encounter it immediately with our fingers and mouths and viscera—is very different from, to use a somewhat unfair example, the world of classical physics—an integrated mathematical system involving relationships between mass, length, and time. But babies, in Western philosophy in contrast with Western theology, have played no role to speak of at all. The early empiricists supposed there must be a path from simple sensations to the concepts of science, and it is somewhat miraculous that if we indeed begin as Wollheim claims we do, that we can arrive at an ability to understand classical mechanics in perhaps a dozen years. By contrast with acquiring a natural language, however, the acquisition of classical physics seems no miracle at all. The baby of a student of mine was born deaf, and as a philosopher the student and her husband agonized about how their child would ever acquire language with no auditory input to speak of. But it is widely appreciated that on the basis of the most degraded input, children construct a correct grammar, and, in truth, when I met her baby, at age two and a half, she was able to ask me whether I cared to have some wonton soup. Writers like Locke did not begin quite so viscerally as Wollheim proposes, but rather with the so-called five senses, but my overall sense is that even if the content of neonatal experience is as Wollheim’s psychology describes it—a stew of smells, hurts, warmth, resistances, and givings way—there is probably an innate endowment of structure that enables us very quickly to give some common form to the experience and not merely to wallow in it. But I cite Wollheim’s visceral phenomenology because if there is anything to his account at all, the foundations of our knowledge of the external world presuppose having begun with the kind of body Mantegna’s painting depicts and de Kooning’s implies.
On one occasion in which I presented Wollheim’s thoughts, a colleague in cognitive science showed me a striking video. In it a man is holding an infant ten minutes old. The man opened and closed his mouth, and the baby, imitating him, opened and closed its mouth. The man stuck his tongue out and the baby stuck its tongue out. The mimeses were so exact and unpremeditated that it seemed almost as though the baby and the man were playing one of Wittgenstein’s language games, albeit without words—as if by opening his mouth the man was issuing a command to the baby to open its mouth. And if one reconstructed the inferential structure that connects persons and mouths, babies must come into the world with impressive computational powers, and a language of thought that gets them to reason that they must stick their tongues out when others do.
But his video contrasts so vividly with Wollheim’s words that we must infer that the latter uses the word “knowledge” as the Bible does, when it speaks of Adam “knowing” Eve. It may be a good, even inspired, interpretation of de Kooning’s brushwork, but in psychology it is limited to the way two lovers passionately explore one another’s bodies, or the baby palpates its mother’s breasts. Where is the threat that Wollheim speaks of? If one has read at all widely in Wollheim, you will realize that he is presupposing a psychoanalytical account that meant a good bit to him, where the baby in the video is already ten minutes into life, learning by imitation to be a human like the rest—learning what gestures mean.
In contrast with Western art and Christian theology, there are no babies to speak of in Western philosophy. Philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wrote about human understanding, human nature, and human knowledge—but they did it from the perspective of pure reason, regarded as our default condition. The genius of the Christian religion is that however beyond our grasp its essential mysteries are, a way was found, especially through art, to translate them into terms everyone understands, in situations in which we have all participated through the fact of having been babies and having grown up under a caregiver. I mean the primordial image of Western art is that of mother and child. In Ulysses, Joyce speaks of “the word every man knows,” and scholars have wondered what word Joyce had in mind. Was it, scholars have hoped, the word “love”? My sense is that the word would have to be invariant to all languages, and that probably it would be “Ma-ma”—two repeated syllables that together reenact the motion the lips make in sucking. Since Vasari we have thought of Western art triumphalistically, as the conquest of visual appearances, construed in terms of space, shape, and color, with the discoveries perspective and foreshortening as high moments. But this could all have been worked out in terms of figures in a landscape. The truly astonishing history rather has to do with representing human beings through their inner states—suffering in the crucifixion, hunger in the Christ child nursing, and, above all, love in the way the Madonna holds the Child. This was a discovery of Fra Angelico, who juxtaposes a Madonna and Child with an Egyptian Isis and Osiris, between whom there is not the slightest sign of love. Fra Angelico represents persons in ways that are to be understood only with reference to their inner states. These inner states are human universals, but they do not turn up, for deep cultural reasons, in other artistic traditions—certainly not, for example, in classical art, however beautiful, and certainly not in African art, however powerful. The astonishing thing about Western art is that we are entirely at home with it. The Nativity is an entirely familiar scene, with the baby, the mother, and the father (somewhat out of it), and with friends and family admiring the new baby, some of them bringing presents. We all know more or less what everyone is feeling, and in a general way what everyone is doing and why. And we know this because we know the way the body expresses these entirely commonplace feelings.
It is exceedingly instructive to juxtapose the great philosophical work of René Descartes—his Meditations, published in Paris in 1641—with paintings of that period, a Nativity, say, or the simple painting by Descartes’s countryman Nicolas Poussin, of The Holy Family (Detroit Institute of Arts) and painted in that exact year. The latter shows the Madonna playing with her baby, while warming something in a porringer from which she will feed him—he is in the process of being weaned. Saint Joseph is shown leaning against the windowsill, maybe catching a few winks, having been kept awake by Jesus’s yowling during the night. We know exactly what everyone is thinking and feeling. Nothing, of course, tells us that the Holy Family is holy—that is for the eye of faith. Even to begin to know what it means for them to be holy, one has to have internalized a fairly complex metaphysical narrative, beginning with disobedience and sin, and the knowledge we have of good and evil. But Christian artists managed perfectly to show how the personages in the holy family were human. There is a difference between knowing that the Madonna and Child are happy and that they love one another, and knowing that the Madonna is free of sin and the chosen vessel of the Holy Spirit. Both may involve inferences, but the former inference is of a kind we make every day of our lives without thinking about it. We learn this, so to speak, on our mother’s knee. We spontaneously respond with love to the look of love. So much is happening in a mother’s face when she feeds or nurses her child that the meaning of love is conveyed in the first moments of interaction between them. That, I think, is the kind of thing that Wollheim means to get across to his readers. I have read somewhere—what a dangerous experiment!—that if the person providing food wears a mask, the child will not eat. I think this would be true even if it were a smiling mask—a “happy face,” for example. So much depends upon the infant’s immediate knowledge of the mother’s feeling and expression. So many facial muscles are involved in the look of nurturing and love! There seems hardly room for being mistaken, though logically of course it is possible that we are mistaken.
Descartes begins with the fear of being mistaken, of being deceived by some kind of evil genius who bends his every effort on getting us to make mistakes. It is like a duel between man and the devil. Can I defeat the demon? Is there any way to cognitive tranquility? Can I be certain of anything whatever? The answer is yes. If I am always mistaken, I must at least be thinking that to be the case that is not. Only someone who thinks can be wrong—and if someone is always wrong, he must always be thinking. So a person cannot be wrong about the fact that he thinks, however wrong he may be in what he thinks. Suppose I am wrong about this. Then I am thinking that I am not thinking—and so I must be thinking after all! The one thing I cannot think away is thinking. So I am—I must be—what Descartes terms a “thinking thing,” a res cogitans in my essential nature. I can, easily enough, think that I do not have a body! Nothing follows from the fact that I think that I must have a body to do the thinking with! I can deny that I have a body—and I may be wrong but I won’t be wrong in the same way as when I think that I am not thinking. So I may have a body or may not. But I must be a mind if I am wrong. Sum res cogitans. The thinking self is logically distinct from the body. That is Descartes’s view. Here is the argument in a nutshell: I cannot intelligibly doubt my own existence, since doubting is a form of thought, and if I think I am. But I can intelligibly doubt that I have a body. Hence I am not identical with my body. Hence I can logically exist bodiless.
Distinct means distinguishable: the mind is distinguishable from the body, and logically independent of it. One has the sense that for Descartes, this was a powerful idea: it meant, in more traditional terms, that the soul is independent of the body, which is a kind of logical argument for the possibility that the soul can survive separation from the body, hence an argument for immortality. It is worth emphasizing that this need not have been quite such glad tidings as Descartes may have thought. The church strongly believed in bodily survival: Christ bodily survived death, and ascended to his Father’s side in his bodily condition. We are allegedly rejoined to our body on the day of judgment. The church was not interested in a heaven of bodiless spirits flitting about. I mention that again to emphasize how central the body was to religion—it is certainly central to Islam if you consider the promises of a fleshly paradise made to suicide bombers—when philosophy, as in the case of Descartes, could in effect write it off.
What did he write off? The body as conceived of by Descartes was not the body in Poussin’s world or in our own, so far as our common experience goes. It is a machine—a kind of statue with moving parts, more complex than a watch, but only by matter of degree. It is through the motions of its various parts that Descartes proposes to explain how this machine performs its essential functions—walking, eating, breathing, and the rest. Descartes undertakes to describe the body in such thoroughly mechanical terms in his Traité de l’homme in 1664. All these functions, he says in the end, follow naturally from the disposition of our organs, no more and no less than the movements of a clock—or some other automaton—“follow from the movement of wheels and balances.” It is all perfectly mechanical and due, he argues, to the “heat of the fire that continually burns in the heart, which is in no sense different in nature than the fire we encounter in inanimate bodies.” The steam engine was not to be invented for another century—but there is little question that had he known about it, Descartes would have used it as a model for representing the way we operate. The history of thought about the human body has pretty much been the history of such models. In the seventeenth century the available models were clocks. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they were self-regulating mechanisms like steam engines. Today the models are based on computers. No one can tell today what tomorrow’s technology will yield by way of models for understanding the bodily processes. So the understanding of the body has been by and large metaphorical, and in consequence of technological progress we know immensely more than the ancients knew or could have known about the body. Aristotle would have had to do some serious catching up if he were to come back to earth: his knowledge of the body is hopelessly out of date.
On the other hand the body as represented in art would have been—would indeed be—entirely accessible to him. He would have had no difficulty whatever in knowing what is going on in Poussin’s painting of the Holy Family, just as we have no difficulty in understanding the way people in The Iliad and The Odyssey behave, or in the Greek tragedies. He would have had no difficulty grasping what goes on in Picasso’s Blue Period paintings. He would have had some trouble, perhaps, with Cubism—but what did Picasso paint but men and women and things to eat? When we read Aristotle on digestion or on color, we have nothing to learn. Neither have we anything to learn when we read him on the emotions, as in his writings on rhetoric. But the reasons are very different. We have nothing to learn from him on digestion because his views have been totally superseded. We have nothing to learn from the rhetoric because nothing much has changed. The human material today is just as it was in ancient times, just as it was in the age of Poussin. And the same is true of Descartes. His physiology is dated in a way in which Poussin’s physiognomy is not: human nature is still the way Poussin depicted it. Of course, the body has not changed over the two and a half millennia since Aristotle. But the knowledge of the body has changed so that it would be difficult to believe that Aristotle, Descartes, and your standard medical textbook of today are talking about the same thing. But this is not true for poetry and painting. We cannot really have better knowledge of human beings than we get from Homer and Euripides, or from Poussin or early Picasso. It is this disparity that I referred to in the concept of the body/body problem. These days, of course, painters are trying to use science to paint human beings. The art dealer Max Protetch sent out a Christmas card of his family, painted by someone who paints DNA. It is a picture which shows his DNA as well as the DNA of his partner, Heather, and their two children. Of course, Aristotle would have had no idea of the Protetch family from this! No one can tell very much about what people are like from their DNA! But I won’t follow this line further here.
Descartes’s picture of mind and body is easily caricatured by saying that he represents us as ghosts in machines, and there is little question that his thesis of the logical independence of mind and body, on the one side, and his highly mechanistic view of the body, on the other side, certainly seem to support such a view. But his view is really more complex than that, and it is worth talking about at some length. In the sixth (and final) Meditation, he somewhat surprisingly asserts that “I am not in my body the way a pilot is in a ship,” when his thesis of the logical independence of mind from body would have encouraged us to believe exactly that. No: Descartes wants to say that we are at one with our body, that we and our body are indissolubly commingled. His thought is that a pilot knows only by inference that his ship has been damaged—the ship begins to list, or has sprung a leak, or whatever. By contrast, when our body has been damaged, we feel it directly: we feel pain, or we feel dizzy to the point where nothing resembling thought can take place in the soul. Naturally there are damages to the body we don’t feel: we do not know that we have high blood pressure through feeling anything, we learn it only through the reading of an instrument. Or that our glucose levels are unacceptably high. But Descartes is thinking about certain fundamental cases in which we know immediately that our body has suffered injury—the way, to return to babies, the infant cries when it is hungry, thirsty, wet, or colicky. And we know that something like this has happened when we hear the baby cry, though we may not know which thing. The baby is not in its body the way it is in a carriage. The baby does not cry when there is a hole in the carriage.
It is the mind as embodied that Descartes attempts to explain, however crudely, in the Traité of 1664. He really is interested in what takes place in an embodied mind: passion and desire, the sensations of sounds, smells, tastes, and thermal changes—the bodily sensations Wollheim describes. He is interested in waking and sleeping, which go only with embodied minds. And of course there are problems, a major one of which is discussed with a brilliant image some decades later, in 1714, in Leibniz’s Monadology. It takes us to the heart of the mind/body problem:
It must be confessed that perception and that which depends upon it are inexplicable by mechanical causes, that is, by figures and motions. And supposing there were a machine so constructed as to think, feel, and have perception, we could conceive of it as enlarged and yet preserving the same proportions, so we might enter it as into a mill. And this granted, we should only find on visiting it, pieces which push one against another, but never anything by which to explain a perception. This must be sought for, therefore, in the simple substance and not in the composite or in the machine.
Leibniz then argues that perception is in what he terms the “simple substance” but not in the machine. And this really is a kind of ghost-in-the-machine theory.
The image of entering the body the way one enters a mill is exceedingly vivid. Technology has evolved in such a way that we can enter the body, optically at least. While I was writing this, I underwent procedures for kidney stones—an exceedingly painful condition. The stone was visible by means of a CAT scan, and by fiber optic exploration through a catheter. The urologist could see the stone, and knew neuroanatomy well enough to see that I was in excruciating pain. One could map the path, from the nerves upon which the stone was impinging through the whole neural network, and one could infer that I must be in pain. One could, in a manner of speaking, see the pain. But seeing and feeling are very different sensations: one can see the way a feather moves across the sole of the foot—but one will not, through the visual pathways, feel the tickling sensations the feather creates. Think of the most intimate physical relationship there is, that of sexual intercourse. We have entered/surrounded one another’s bodies. But what the other is feeling is a mystery as old as we are. No matter what the behavior is of the sexual other, we want to know whether it was “good” for them. We know what we feel. But what the other feels is a matter for doubt: remember Meg Ryan’s feigned orgasm in When Harry Met Sally.
We are at the heart of the mind/body problem here, and Leibniz is unquestionably right in saying that we do not see the perception of the person whose body it is that we have “entered.” The perception is experienced only by that person, the one who feels pain or tickling—or ecstasy—and this is what Descartes would have meant in part in speaking of the way we are intimately bound up with our body. “I feel your pain” is sympathetic nonsense. When Jesus cries out “Let this cup pass from me” (Matthew 26:39), he knows there is no way this can be done. The entirety of the Christian drama requires that God himself suffer in the body of his Son the terrifying agony of dying on the cross. It cannot be done for him.
I think, details aside, that Descartes has probably carried the matter as far as it can be carried. Why the perturbations of nerves should be perceived as pain or tickling by the person whose nerves they are is a mystery. It is the mystery of nervous tissue. Imagine that we walk into an actual mill, and we see the millstones pulverizing the grain between them. Someone might say: if this were a human body, we might imagine that the one whose body it is could be in pain. Is the mill undergoing an agony that we cannot feel? Is it like bone crushing against bone when the cartilage is gone and someone needs a hip replacement? You can think one way or the other. The sound the stones make could be the groans of a being in agony—or they could just be the sounds the stones make when they grind against one another. Such speculation is not entirely idle, since it does raise the question of whether there are bodies other than those we possess, the owners of which—if there are owners—can have the kinds of perceptions we have. If not, then Descartes and the being he describes in Traité de l’homme are the beings with the kinds of feelings the figures in Poussin’s painting show—the feelings that are so transparent to us, however little we know of what goes on in their bodies to make those feelings possible.
I want now to pick up Descartes’s idea of the logical independence of mind from body, which has an application today that it would not have had in the seventeenth century, and to which our somewhat clumsy speculation on whether the mill is in agony has a certain bearing after all. Until relatively recently, the only beings we knew to be capable of thought had the kind of nervous tissue that defines the human body. Descartes was convinced that nervous tissue was not the whole story, since he refused to believe that animals had minds or were capable of thought or even, if you can imagine, that animals even felt pain. (When we plunge lobsters into boiling water today, we like to say that they don’t feel anything.) Kant spoke of rational beings—which included us, but also included “higher beings” like angels—and though there was some speculation about the kinds of bodies angels possessed, there would have been a question of whether they felt pain or even pleasure of a physical sort. But the question took a new direction when it began to seem that computers were capable of thought, and the idea suggested itself to philosophers that mental processes were multiply realizable: that thought could be a brain activity or a computer activity, and thinking realizable in neurons or in microchips.
Philosophers and nerds of every persuasion have obsessed on the issues of multiple realizability, centering around the question of whether machines can think, play chess, and the like—whether artificial intelligence is intelligence. On these matters there is a vast and inconclusive literature, and I do not propose to embark upon it here. The question for me is not whether machines can think, but what thoughts they can have, and it seems to me clear that they could not have thoughts about the body that presuppose the embodied condition Descartes speaks about in the sixth Meditation and the Traité de l’homme. I don’t mean to say that there are not “language games” a machine can master involving what we may call the language of the body. The machine can say “I have a headache,” and we say “Is it something you ate?,” and the machine says that no, it is due to stress and we say the machine ought to relax and the machine asks how, with so many responsibilities, it can do that. This is like pretending. Machines do not have headaches, do not eat, do not have stress, cannot take vacations. To understand these idioms one has to have a body like the body we all have. One has to be human. One has to be like the personages in Poussin’s paintings, and to belong to, to use the title of a famous exhibition of the 1950s at the Museum of Modern Art, The Family of Man.
When I wrote the Body/Body Problem, at the end of my discussion of the Sistine vault I alluded to a philosophical position called Eliminativism. In effect, it held that the language we use to describe one another, keyed to the body language painters have used, is based on what the authors of the position called folk psychology, and that it is hopelessly out of date. In effect, they said, we are to use a language based on what we might encounter when we enter Leibniz’s mill—the language of the body we perceive when we see the shuttle back and forth of nervous impulses. And my thought was that there are the two bodies, the body as encountered upon entering it through incision and dissection as well as by X-ray, MRI, and various other modes of medical imaging, and the body of folk psychology, which expresses anger and grief and the like. If we eliminated folk psychology, we would have no idea of the meaning of what we encounter in the body. If we eliminated what science tells us, we would have no idea of how these meanings are possible.
The body that feels thirst and hunger, passion, desire, and love. The body that we understand when we read the ancients describing men in battle, men and women in love and in grief. The body, I would say, that our artistic tradition dealt with so gloriously for so many centuries, and somewhat less gloriously in a certain kind of performance art today.