One for the Other

Somatic-affective resonance and ethical sensibility

NB: I’m currently smoothing out a discussion on this topic for an article, so I apologize for the fuzziness.

Contemporary studies in neuroscience show the degree to which our automatic neural systems and sensorimotor apparati structure our social relations. Evan Thompson, in his Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, summarizes much research when he describes how “Neurons in the anterior cingular cortex that respond when a patient receives an unpleasant stimulus to his hand also respond when the patient watches a pinprick applied to the examiner’s hand” and how “many of the same brain areas are activated both when subjects imitate and when they observe facial expressions of various emotions” (395). For Thompson, this research describes a model of human relations in which we are fundamentally interdependent. The human body is hard-wired to respond somatically to other humans. Thompson concludes that “this constitutive interdependency shapes the social domain on the basis of a sensorimotor resonance between self and other in the perception and execution of action” (395). Emotions resonate in a way similar to sensorimotor actions: Thompson calls the ways in which individuals’ emotions affect others’ emotions “affective resonance” (395). Further studies show the embodied nature of ethics: neuroscientific studies by Greene et al have argued that human morality stems from areas of the brain such as the amygdala and the precuneus/PCC that govern emotion. For the purposes of this essay, I will refer to the human body’s various somatic/emotional response systems collectively as “somatic-affective resonance.”

Cognitive science can tell us how embodied social relations work, but can give us very little on how to apply that information to matters of everyday life. I propose viewing cognitive science’s revelations on social relations in a Levinasian light to move towards applying them to literature. Cognitive scientists and Levinas give surprisingly similar accounts of the fundamentals of human interaction. While cognitive science explores the somatic foundations of human interaction, Levinas writes of “the body being inverted into a one-for-the-other by animation” and a “signification of one for the other” (OB 72). Levinas calls this bodily “one-for-the-other” sensibility. Sensibility is “vulnerability” and a “passivity still more passive than any passivity” that forms the bedrock of human interaction and makes the ethical relation possible (166, 50). Sensibility is an involuntary, passive receptiveness to the Other in much the same way that mirror neurons are—indeed, Levinas explicitly identifies sensibility with the body: it lives “at the edges of the nerves” (14). Sensibility, or the body’s receptivity to the Other, opens the door to ethics. We may immediately see the confluences of Levinasian thought and cognitive science, but to move towards applying these insights to literature, I will examine sensibility further.

Having identified sensibility with somatic-affective resonance, I will explore how sensibility’s ties with signification can relate cognitive science to practical wisdom and literature. While cognitive science thoroughly describes the behavioral and biological structures of somatic-affective resonance, it can do little towards applying these insights to everyday life. Levinasian ethics can fill this gap. Levinas is insistent upon sensibility’s role in signification: to know that “sensibility qua vulnerability signifies, is to recognize a sense somewhere else than in ontology” (64). Signification “somewhere else than in ontology,” for Levinas, “overflows itself as a symbol of this in that” (62). This overflowing resists attempts to totalize or fully grasp signification—like water, one can never fully take hold of sensible signification. To synthesize what I’ve discussed, the core communications and relations that make up the foundation of the human experience are beyond totalization. What this means for practical considerations is that the metaphor “gut reaction” is quite apt: somatic-affective processes structure subjectivity and conscious thought. This idea is not new: Aristotle argues that bodily sensory data (aesthesis) is vital in practical wisdom (phronesis). However, Levinas contributes a model of the body’s role in cognition—one similar to that proposed by cognitive science—that opens the possibility of ethics and the impossibility of totalization. For Levinas and cognitive science, then, ethical deliberation can never be severed from the natural body, which is a priori culture. Such accounts of subjectivity offer emancipation from societal repression, totalization, and conceptualization.

Locating freedom and the Good

Contemporary poststructuralist orthodoxy is impregnated with Cartesian dualism - that is, Descartes’ belief that the mind and the body are made of different material and are separate. For Descartes, the body moves within the material world and is, as Antonio Damasio puts it, “infinitely divisible,” while the mind, being made of what Descartes calls “mental material,” has no phenomenal existence within material space. The Cartesian argument for this separation between the mind and the body can be usefully encapsulated within his dictum that je pense, donc je suis, or, in Latin, Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am: thus, the certainty of my existence is dependent upon my ability to exercise reason. Cognition ensconces subject formation.

Poststructuralist theorists and philosophers, following this model of subject formation, locate power and agency within culture. Foucault identifies identity with the exercise of state power. Judith Butler (pace to my many friends who adore her), writing that “There is no self that is prior to the convergence or who maintains ‘integrity’ prior to its entrance into this conflicted cultural field” and that “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender,” envisions subjects that are inexorably conquered and modified by cultural norms. Freedom, for Butler, exists only through parodic interpretations of a priori cultural structures. Freedom, for the poststructuralist set, is inextricably entwined with resistance (against what, I will address): being at odds with whatever happens to be “normal” or “legitimate,” i.e. dominant. Likewise, terms such as “subversion” proliferate among academics as the loci of various Goods.

However, this apotheosis of “subversion,” as Martha Nussbaum has noted, lacks substantial ethical grounding. Subversion for its own sake leads to unfortunate misidentification of groups that “resist” something yet are largely malicious as “anti-hegemonic” and therefore good, e.g. the notion that Hamas, with its utilization of children as human shields and draconian stances towards women, is somehow an “emancipatory movement” simply because it “resists” the state power of Israel. Such confusion is made possible by poststructuralism’s unease with positive normativity: in denouncing any notion of normativity as oppressive and subordinating, potential universal Goods such as human dignity and equality wither. Freedom and justice, then, can never be more than at best fleeting and at worst illusory.

The ethics-shaped hole in poststructuralist orthodoxy stems, as I’ve argued, from the belief that subjectivity is embedded within culture, which is in turn helpless against state power, normative repression, etc. However, recent findings in cognitive neuroscience, explicated by Antonio Damasio, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Blakey Vermeule, and others, locate subjectivity not within culture but within the body: thus, post-Cartesian identifications of the mind-body relationship being akin to that between a driver and her car give way to views of that same relationship being dialogic and mutually modifying. Subjectivity, being grounded in a natural and material body and therefore existing prior to culture, thus takes shelter from cultural oppression. Here we may find not only true individuation unbuffeted by societal winds, but also the possibility of universal, unenculturated ethics, i.e. the Good. Such unenculturated, “primordial” ethics are described at length in the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Buber. Of course, subjectivity does venture into the cultural sphere and is modified by it; however, what I find problematic is the assumption that subjectivity is wholly engulfed by culture, as suggested by Butler. Even so, it can be powerfully argued that neuroscientific explications of subjectivity’s grounding within the body provides a locus for universal conceptions of freedom and Goodness that is currently absent within contemporary cultural theory.

Why this is here

I made this blog to have a place online for writing about serious things, and I didn’t want to bother my friends with said serious things unless, of course, they wanted to be bothered. It’ll be nice to write semi-seriously somewhere other than an academic paper.