The Labor of the Mind. Anthony J. La Vopa

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СКАЧАТЬ We find here a classic case of the tenacious logic of illogic in the construction of difference. It rests on a false and arbitrary analogy between the physical and the mental, and a resulting causal inference, no less false or arbitrary, from the one to the other. Given the visible physical strength of men, their brains—physical organs, but unseen—were assumed to be stronger than women’s; they had more force, or energy, or power. And that in turn meant that men had greater strength of mind, particularly in what made a society and polity possible, the exercise of judgment in applying laws of nature and principles of morality and justice. Perhaps paradoxically, the unitary category, even as it might seem to level different kinds of intelligence by lumping them into a homogeneous mass, made it possible to arrange the kinds into a steep hierarchy. Men, but not women, ascended to the pinnacle of the hierarchy, where abstract thought and judgment reigned. One of the challenges we face today is to retain the critical work that abstraction does without undervaluing cognitive capacities that grasp the concrete particularity of our emotional and affective lives and the manifold talents and skills that go into human artifice.⁹ The question is, of course, central to making men and women experientially, and not just legally, equal. It is also integral to understanding, and changing, arbitrary inequalities of class and status.

      The larger issue is how the mind, understood metaphorically as a space in consciousness, is related to the physical organ we call the brain. In recent decades new imaging technology has produced remarkable discoveries of the division of labor among regions of the brain, of the electrochemical motion of its neurons, and of how the brain receives and acts on hormonal signals. We may eventually have digital simulations of chemical and electrical synapses connecting the roughly eighty-five billion neurons that make each brain unique. But consciousness, including the mind, is something else again. To the philosopher Colin McGinn there is no doubt that consciousness depends on the brain, and indeed that the brain is a necessary condition of its existence; but “there seems to be nothing about physical organisms,” McGinn writes, “from which [consciousness] could conceivably arise”; indeed, “the operations of matter look like a singularly inadequate foundation for a mental life.” McGinn aptly calls his position Transcendental Naturalism.¹⁰ The passage from matter to the immaterial—from activity in the brain to activity in the conscious mind (emotions, images, ideas, etc.)—remains incomprehensible to us and may be an insoluble mystery. We speak of the electrochemistry of the brain giving rise to, or generating, or producing the feelings and ideas of the mind. The very profusion of possible verbs to describe the brain/mind relationship betrays our ignorance.

      McGinn may be overly pessimistic. At this point agnosticism would seem to be the prudent position; neuroscience opens a vast new universe of scientific exploration, and there is no telling what it will and will not yield in knowledge of the mind. Nonetheless I find it essential to take McGinn’s skepticism as our heuristic premise, if we are to be duly critical of leaps to conclusions that reduce the workings of the mind to brain functioning. It was precisely such materialist reductionism that informed much early modern medical thinking about intelligence, which distinguished between brain and mind but in effect reduced the latter to the former. The question early modern physicians asked was not whether men and women differed in mental capacities, or what the differences were, but what paradigm of the brain/body relationship best accounted for them.

      In the very concept of intelligence (not to mention the measuring of it) we see the naturalization of something that could only be witnessed then, and can only be witnessed now, positionally. We see and hear performances of intelligence, without knowing what the thing (if it exists in the singular) is. More precisely, we see what a society and culture endorse some people and not others to perform, and what kinds of performance they forbid them, or at least disapprove. The rules are more or less internalized; there is room in individuals’ subjectivity to acquire a critical distance on them. People can, of course, adjust their performances to different contexts, and can move from one to another.

      Though my use of “performance” has obvious affinities with Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, I am not advocating a way of conceiving a feminist political strategy. Nor am I following Stephen Greenblatt and other practitioners of the New Historicism, whose modus operandi I find incompatible with the kind of explanatory and interpretive historical analysis I attempt here.¹¹ I am tempted to suffice with the OED definition of performance as “the doing of any action or work” and “the quality of this, esp. as observable under particular conditions.” But in the spirit of nineteenth-century positivism, the OED seems to have had in mind laboratory testing. For our purposes “observable” needs to be redirected to the ways in which we observe each other in the social relations of everyday life. In that capacity it implies—and I want to imply—that making one’s cognitive capacities audible (as in speech) or visible (as in writing or gestures) is a performance, not always in the sense that it is calculated to please or impress, but always in the sense that it occurs with awareness of the socially and culturally specific expectations of others. It is not quite right to say that my historical subjects misunderstood the workings of intelligence, as though we now thoroughly understand what they didn’t. They wrongly assumed that the nature of intelligence could be inferred from the performance of it. Neuroscience notwithstanding, we share this illusion with them. The critical point for our present purposes is that our historical subjects’ conceptual leap from performance to the thing itself is historically specific, contingent on the social arrangements and cultural resources of a particular time and place.

      Of particular interest here are what I am calling aesthetic and relational intelligence, which were often conceded to women. That women excelled in aesthetic sensibility—in the gifts of “taste”—was a truism from the beginning to the end of our period. This sensibility usually had to bow to the principled rigor of manly moral judgment; but as the aesthetic and the moral were so tightly interwoven in early modern thought, there was no dispelling the lurking implication that women should have a central normative role in defining public as well as private morality. I use the term “relational” purposely to link my work to Jerrold Seigel’s history of the idea of the self and, as important, to suggest its relevance to arguments reverberating through feminism for at least the last four decades.¹² In a study published in 1982 the developmental psychologist Carol Gilligan argued that women have a distinctly “female voice” in moral reasoning. Whereas men think morally by conceiving individuated rational agents and removing contextual detail to clear the way for the application of abstract principles, women’s moral thinking works through complex connections with others (hence “relational”) and takes into account the particularity of contextual detail. The implication is that the two voices should be integrated in a fully human moral reasoning.¹³ Though I admire Gilligan’s book, I wish she had brought more critical distance to bear on her claim about the difference in voices by considering historical precedents for it that had labile gender implications. We are only beginning to understand how complex were the implications of making relational intelligence a distinctly female capacity. This way of differentiating feminine from manly minds can be traced back at least to seventeenth-century France, well over a century before modern feminism emerged. It operated within the broad semantic range of the word esprit, which could mean the immaterial soul, or the mind as a structure of cognitive faculties, or the reasonableness of the cultivated social being, or the alacrity and acuteness of wit, or aesthetic and psychological discernment, or sentiment.

      Gilligan’s contribution to theory has come to seem naïve as “difference” feminism has undergone several mutations, some far more radical than she had in mind, advocating a feminine alternative to reason rather than a feminine kind of reasoning. The opposition has been no less firm. To some any positing of female difference in reason merely has the effect of validating men’s power to define what women are; but at the same time any purported universalism—even a concept of the human being that tries to transcend gender and sexual difference entirely—relies on a male model and justifies male control. Other feminists want to extend, not negate, the logic of a broadly liberal tradition of universal human rights based on a universal human nature. Still others have recently made their peace with abstract universals, with what might be called reluctant pragmatism. They accept the need for the regulative ideas that universalism provides, however exclusionary СКАЧАТЬ