Animal Spirits and Cognitive Ecologies

Animal Spirits and Cognitive Ecologies

Conversion Project workshopMontreal, December 2011

John Sutton, Macquarie University, Sydneyhttp://www.phil.mq.edu.au/staff/jsutton/

Nick Keene, University of Auckland

Nicholas (Nick) [email protected]

I completed my Ph.D. in 2004 at Royal Holloway, University of London, on biblical scholarship and print culture in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, exploring the production and reception of English religious erudition within a European context. I have published essays and articles on religious scholarship, intellectual sociability and print culture in early Enlightenment England. I have also published on other subjects including early modern utopias and terra australis, and I have a particular interest in how ideas cross geographical, cultural and linguistic barriers. Recently I have become interested in developing a cognitive-cultural history that employs insights and models from cognitive science to open up new avenues of historical investigation. My latest publication is a co-authored book with Professor Evelyn Tribble (Otago) entitled Cognitive Ecologies and the History of Remembering: Religion, Education and Memory in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2011).


1. Introduction: distributed cognitive ecologies

2. Animal spirits: matter, mixture, medicine, memory

3. Remembering as conversions

4. Historical cognitive theories of religion

5. Sacred space and cognitive history


We think, remember, feel, communicate and imagine in rich multi-dimensional social and material contexts

Human brains don’t do much on their own, but are adapted to hook up with diverse external resources which we in turn construct

We are epistemic engineers engaged in cognitive niche construction, cultural and technological by nature

Extended mind and distributed cognition: mental activities spread beyond skull and skin, incorporating bodily, interpersonal, and material resources.

The (individual and collective) coordination of such disparate resources is highly context-specific: the elements in cognitive ecologies, and the balances found between those elements, are historically and culturally highly variable (plasticity of mind).


Early modern applications and tests of this framework

Lyn Tribble on the cognitive demands of Elizabethan repertory theatre. The ecology involves a distributed array of tools and artifacts, practices, institutional norms, mechanisms of apprenticeship, architectural innovations, changing features of the verse, etc.


Tribble & Keene extend to wider study of objects, skills, and technologies of embodied memory and attention, with a focus on religious cognition, affect, and practices.

Early modern England as apt test case because

a)Cognitive ecologies were undergoing rapid change across many dimensions, and

b)Those changes saw vigorous debates about the proper articulation or coordination between internal resources and external artifacts and supports


We try to take these cases back to cognitive theoryAlso, slowly to develop a general method for historical cognitive

science or, better, ‘cognitive history’, which adapts and updates history of mentalities by way of cognitive theory.

So, conversion.Conversion is costly, cognitively and emotionally as well as socially.

Dramatic individual and collective restructuring of the ecology.It may sometimes, to some actors, agents, and observers, appear

to be a purely ‘inner’ process or experienceBut it requires rich resources and support: an embodied, extended,

socially distributed, materially scaffolded process


Material culture and embodied practices are not mere supplements to religion. Rather, they partly constitute religion.

So the Reformation was not a conflict between two sets of doctrines, each supported by different institutional & material props, and partly defined by their attitude to those props.

But a complex meeting of two (or many) extended cognitive ecologies, distributed across the practitioner/ believer and an array of social and material resources.

Much controversy was centred not on doctrinal issues but on the adiaphora, the ‘indifferent’ factors: vestments, rituals, gestures, furniture, the material apparatus of worship

They matter because cognition – memory, affect, experience, belief – is embodied in human interactions across such distributed systems.


Conversion in natural philosophy and matter theoryOED ‘conversion’ 11a:‘The action of turning, or process of being turned, into or to

something else; change of form or properties, alteration’

Water into ice; air into water; aliment into fat; Godhead into fleshNo metaphysically neutral account

Alchemy/ chymistry: base metals into gold?General problems about combination and mixture

‘Since, however, some things that are, are potential, and some actual, it is possible for things after they have been mixed in some way to be and not to be’. (De Gen. et Corr. 327b)

Do ingredients lose their identity in the mix (krasis)?Are original ingredients recoverable after transformation?


Three directions re conversion & transformation in matter theory: The metaphysics and morality of mixtures Atomism & mechanism vs substantial forms

(eg Newman, Atoms & Alchemy, 2006), … or

Dynamics of body, mind, and memory: problems of proper blending in medicine and the moral physiology of mind The realm of ‘the quick and nimble animal spirits’

Animal spirits: not animals, and not really spirits either pneuma psychikon highest of the body’s spirits (natural, vital, animal) the fluids of the fibres, nerves, and brain from Greeks to (at least) C18th bearers of neural information … messengers


Range of bodily conversions as animal spirits are concocted or elaborated from the blood in humoral and mechanical bodies

Influences on the animal spirits by way of the blood Holistic cosmobiological passages and relations between body and

world: ethers & foamy quintessence, evil spirits, spirits of wine, melody The non-naturals: airs & climate, food & drink, sleep & wake, motion &

rest, evacuation & repletion, the passions Dynamic, context-sensitive fragile fluid balances Dietetics, regimen, moral physiology, ceaseless conversion processes

of continuous reciprocal interaction between body and world Culturally and individually specific (eg their porous, spongy bodies and

brains make the English so variable and inconstant)


Interconnected inner economies of fluids Blood, milk, sweat, fat, semen, tears, humours …

Descartes, L’homme: the strong, lively, subtle parts of the blood are converted or separated out into animal spirits as they pass through the carotid artery into the brain.

The next most subtle parts of the blood cannot reach the brain, and are drawn instead to ‘the organs designed for generation’



This becomes a basic tenet of Cartesian natural philosophy

Louis de la Forge, 1664: ‘one can confirm this dependence and communication which obtains between the spirits of the brain and those of the testicles by experience, which shows that those who are dedicated to study and who exercise their imaginations and their brains a lot, are not ordinarily very suitable for procreative functions … By contrast, those who are given to debauching women are not very suitable for serious application to study’

Animal spirits roaming and wriggling round the body’s secret canals drive muscular motion, but also ‘psychological’ capacities: memory, imagination, dreaming, passions, moods, melancholies, madness

And are at least the instruments of both reason and will


Problems about control of and discipline over the processes of bodily conversion, the potential for confusion among the fluid ingredients in the mix

Restoration debates about ‘a great deal of preposterous confusion’ (More) if memories are patterned motions of the animal spirits

Joseph Glanvill: ‘our memories will be stored with infinite variety of divers, yea contrary motions, which must needs interfere, thwart, and obstruct one another: and there would be nothing within us, but Ataxy and disorder’

But there is another lens: not control but conversion, not confusion but interanimation


Social and technological resources really not external to memory: just differently-balanced solutions to (diverse, context-specific) problems of managing the past, to help guide present and future action

Many forms of remembering, with multiple functionsThink of the interanimation of forms of remembering as conversion

(historical cases, please)

Case #1. Personal (‘autobiographical’) memory sedimented or converted into embodied (or procedural, or habit) memory (not just ‘conversion disorder’)eg Experience-driven, skill-dependent patterned practices and routines … ghost gestures … artisanal epistemology & the ‘mindful hand’ … the past disappears as it’s embodied (rituals)


Case #2. Interanimations of semantic (factual) memory and personal (autobiographical) memoryLosing access to source memory, going beyond experience

Egs: schematizing or genericizing of repeated experiencespermeation of conversion (and other) narratives by patterns, models, normsconversions of memory into testimony over time (from personal and communicative memory to cultural memory)conversions of testimony into memory over time(eg Schwyzer, ‘Lees and Moonshine: remembering Richard III, 1485-1635’, Renaissance Quarterly 63, 2010)


Case #3: interanimation of personal memory and artifactseg Yorick’s skull (cf Chillington Rutter 2006): it ‘had a tongue in it, and could sing once’, and then story piles on story, emerging from the skull-in-interaction, crossing temporal borders, taking Hamlet back to his childhood in dizzying mental time travelcf Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare on the polytemporality of things and actions


Case #4 collaborative rememberingeg the active Bible readers recorded in Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, martyrs and their communitiesconfessing receipt of vernacular Gospels, lending, reading together ….

One group of thirteen men and women were ‘reading together in the booke of the exposition of the Apocalyps, and communed concerning the matter of opening the booke with seaven claspes’Alice Collins ‘was a famous woman among them, and had a good memory, and could recite much of ye scriptures and other good bookes; And therefore when an conventicle of these men did meete at Burford commonly she was sent for, to recite unto them the declaration of the x commandments, & the Epistles of Peter, and James’

Social influence & interaction as essential to remembering


Thinking of remembering and conversion continues search for ‘terms to express the before in the after’

But … after conversion, nothing is ever the same againA non-linear transformation, with the conversion event as untellable: the teller of the conversion narrative is not the same person who was converted(OED 11a – it’s an action of process of turning or being turned into something else)Conversion as (welcome) trauma

This can round out and test one promising cognitive theory of religion, Harvey Whitehouse’s ‘modes of religiosity’ framework


Harvey Whitehouse and colleagues’ ‘modes of religiosity’ thesis

A cognitive theory of religion developed from anthropological cases, to integrate prior dichotomized models of routinized vs charismatic religious forms, and to allow for varying instances within a framework

Two non-exclusive tendencies or ‘modes’ of religiosity, with co-occurring psychological and sociopolitical features, and which give rise to typical dynamics Doctrinal modeImagistic mode


Doctrinal rituals are repetitively performed androutinized, so are remembered as scripts in semantic memory, not as separate events.Codified systems with leaders and orthodoxy checks, which can spread widely across diffuse,anonymous communities.

Imagistic rituals are infrequent, so rememberedin autobiographical memory as separate events. They are emotional, highly unusual events, with revelations transmitted through sporadic collectiveaction, producing cohesive particularistic social tieswhich are intense, small-scale, noncentralized.


Early modern test cases in radical separatist groups such as early Quakers from 1640s to 1680s (Tribble & Keene 2011, chapter 5)

Frequent but unscheduled rituals and meetings, affective and unique ritual forms and behaviour, with ecstatic or passionate experiences of divine presence: howlings, quakings, tremblings.

Firmly in the imagistic mode.But swiftly expanding, regulated, institutionalized through 1650s.

Centralization, leadership, orthodoxy checks. Increasing spread requires shift towards the doctrinal mode, in post-Restoration campaign for acceptance. Necessity of repetitive performances, times and places to meet, set forms and rituals. Restraint of quakings.

Need to compare other separatist groups. Need to assess tension/ separability of doctrinal and imagistic aspects for

participants and observers.The model captures something of the dynamic, & can be further tweaked.


What about conversion?

Ilkka Pyysiainen, ‘Religious Conversion and Modes of Religiosity’ (2005)Most forms of conversion occur within the doctrinal mode.But he treats conversion as a shift from one to another existing and established religion. So conversion within the imagistic mode would require moving ‘from a local cult to another such cult’ (p.159).

Some kinds of conversion may occur within the imagistic mode.The rare revelatory experiences of the imagistic mode are highly arousing,

haunting, often traumatic. Emotion’s role in autobiographical memory.They are vividly remembered as unique events, which resist but demand

sense-making and interpretation. Thus they trigger ‘spontaneous exegetical reflection’ or personal inspiration, though often fragmentary.

Many puzzles about imagistic mode phenomena in literate contexts, and roles of experts. We can help test and refine the modes framework.


Nick Keene on converting sacred space: reconfiguring cognitive ecologies in the parish church

Complex late medieval spatial practices and conceptions transformed or ‘converted’ (rather than wholly rejected) in reforming communities

Continuity in the buildings, within which the pathways to heaven are redrawn.

Changes in sensory signals of the sacred. Iconoclasm not as wholly destructive, but realigning of cognitive capacities, shifts to an economy of attention, managing the risks of routine.


New emphasis on sermons and on hearing the word, which requires attending (not just attendance).

New ideal of shared attention and subsequent recall, contrasted with habitual mindless action (parrots, magpies, beads) and with distraction of Catholic regime




Highlighting of the pulpit and the lectern

And new requirements or norms for posture,gesture, behaviour

Costly demands of remembering long chunks oftext … close recall requires somatic discipline

Production & reception of sermon both scaffoldedby new methods and structures, divisions derived from print layouts, easier to internalize as culturally-sculpted internal surrogates

New forms of music – metrical psalms


Thanks!

John Sutton, Macquarie University, Sydneyhttp://www.phil.mq.edu.au/staff/jsutton/[email protected]

Nick Keene, University of Auckland

Documents

Animal Spirits and Cognitive Ecologies