Abstract
This article uses the work of the contemporary U.S.-American novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt as a means to engage with the two seemingly contradictory concepts—the mind and body. The famous mind-body dualism, also known as Cartesian dualism, approaches the mind and body as fundamentally distinct entities; the mind is conceptualized as a non-physical, immaterial thinking substance, and the body as a physical and material object, incapable of thinking. This ‘inherent’ dualism is often perceived as a contradiction, which is reflected in such metaphors and expressions as “mind over matter,” “the mind drives the mass,” “it’s all in your head,” or “mortal body,” to name just a few. Drawing on ideas from phenomenology, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and embodied cognition, Hustvedt rejects this contradiction and argues for the deep entanglement of the physical and the mental. She advocates the model of the mind proposed by the German neuroscientist and philosopher Henrik Walter who describes the mind as inherently embodied, extended, embedded and enacted. This article highlights the significance of this line of research that contributes to the expansion of interdisciplinary knowledge and applies a more holistic, inclusive approach to the study of the human condition.
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Notes
- 1.
In Christianity, the body and soul are considered interconnected. Up until the end of the eighteenth century in the US, and the middle of the nineteenth century in Britain, it was prohibited to dissect human bodies to learn about anatomy because it was believed that the body must not be damaged in order for the soul to enter heaven after death.
- 2.
Plato famously divides the human soul into three constituent parts: reason, spirit, and appetite (2008 [c. 380 BC]).
- 3.
It is noteworthy that, on the other hand, Aristotle (384–322 BC) has a very different approach to the mind-body question (a more modern one), whereby both the body and mind are perceived as parts of the natural world; the mind, or soul, being an extension of the body. Like Plato, Aristotle also divides the soul into parts (the intellect being one of them), which is immaterial and does not have a corresponding bodily organ. Many modern scholars emphasize the distinction of Aristotle’s concept of the mind from that of Descartes’ (e.g., Kenny 1989; Ryle 1952 [1949]). In Aristotle’s model, the intellect is part of the soul, which, in turn, is part of the body and not a separate entity. That is why it is not surprising that the Christian Church partially adopted and appropriated Aristotle’s philosophy, especially his ideas about the immateriality and immortality of the intellectual part of the human soul.
- 4.
Rosenkranz and Hoffman refer to Spinoza’s monism as “neutral monism” (2011, 287). Spinoza’s ideas about the mind and body greatly influenced the works of William James (1842–1910) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970).
- 5.
Spinoza’s ideas about Nature overlap with those of the philosophy of panpsychism, which ascribes a mentality to everything in the natural world. In this respect it is important to mention the work of Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673), the Duchess of Newcastle; an overlooked thinker in Western philosophy whose views have a great impact on the writing of Siri Hustvedt. Hustvedt discusses Cavendish’s philosophy in her two-hundred-page erudite essay titled “The Delusions of Certainty.” Cavendish opposes her contemporaries, Descartes and Hobbes, and their dualism and “mechanistic, atomistic theory,” promoting “a monistic organicist view (we are all material but not machine-like)” instead, whereby the “mind exists not as its own distinct substance but as part of the world” (Hustvedt 2016b, 144). Cavendish’s ideas were not taken seriously at the time, to a large extent because, as Hustvedt argues in another essay, “she had the wrong body for a philosopher” (2016d, 13).
- 6.
Like placebo, which is based on positive expectations that a patient will get better, nocebo suggests the patient’s negative expectations will lead to the worsening of their condition.
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Wagner, D. (2023). “Embodied Minds” and Intersubjectivity in Siri Hustvedt’s Works. In: Febel, G., Knopf, K., Nonhoff, M. (eds) Contradiction Studies – Exploring the Field. Contradiction Studies. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-37784-7_11
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