The body

I suspect that I am not the only person who thought there was something off-putting in Richard Hanania’s recent argument against disparaging how heterosexual relationships (allegedly) actually work. Actually, there’s a lot of off-putting stuff in there, but the particular strand I’m interested in here is contained in this note:

The idea is that by claiming that looks-based attraction is lesser than attraction based on, e.g., personality traits or common interests we are relegating men’s attraction, which is primarily looks-based, to second-class status. The implied conclusion — resting on our intuition that the sexes should be on equal footing — is that we shouldn’t denigrate looks-based attraction. The reason this leaves one cold as a matter of rhetoric is that Hanania leaves undiscussed why people have it in their heads that looks-based attraction is lesser in the first place.

The reason, I think, is something like this. Romantic love, as opposed to the more temporal gratification of sheer physical attraction, is supposed to occur between persons. And there is a strong strain in our culture of viewing the body as incidental to the person whose body it is. What is supposed to be essential to personhood is not embodiment but aspects of mentality: one’s interests, one’s emotional profile, one’s sense of humor, one’s intelligence.

If we are supposed to be romantically attracted to persons, then there must be something baser, something to be ashamed of, about basing what is supposed to be a romantic relationship on lustful attraction to the body. We are tempted to say that such attraction is “merely” “aesthetic”. What we mean by this is that it is irrational, not based in anything deeper than reasonless preferences, which if we were stronger we would ignore, and which if we could we would jettison. The paradigm of romantic love is thus the meeting of the minds; when we stray from that paradigm we feel we are doing something illicit.

Reason embodied.

Now, I suspect that the reason Hanania doesn’t find this to be troubling is that he thinks that all preferences are like this: reasonless, aesthetic, backed up by nothing more than evolved and learned pleasure or disgust responses, no more or less rational than any other possible set. This is a sentiment you get a lot of with writers with (I’m sorry) no detectable spiritual life: we’re all just bags of meat, x stimulus tickles my receptors in a way y stimulus doesn’t, and therefore I’m team x and I will work to steamroll members of team y. But there’s no reason, ultimately speaking, why I should be on team x other than some long chain of meaningless contingencies. (As usual, it was Rorty who took this tendency in secular thought to its logical conclusion. This is why he found so much use in Freud’s conception of the human as a random collection of drives with decidedly unlovely origins.)

I don’t want to get too far afield here, so all I will say about this attitude, by way of dismissing it, is that personal experience has convinced me that C.S. Lewis had it right when he said that its tendency is to alienate us from ourselves. For how is one supposed to endorse one’s preferences if they are, on reflection, reasonless biases? If when we call things good we are speaking not of the intrinsic nature of the object but rather merely of feelings within ourselves — feelings which could just as easily be otherwise — then what other conclusion can we come to other than that they are “contrary to reason and contemptible”? There is little to say about this sort of nihilism other than that it is highly maladaptive.

So let’s not go down that road. Let’s assume — as I think most people do — that there is something higher going on with at least some of our preferences. The trouble is that we suspect that preferences having to do with physical attractiveness are not among this elect set. This, as I have said, is due to a theory of personhood that sees the body as contingent to the person it belongs to. We have two choices, then: either we can retain the mind-centric theory of personhood and alienate ourselves from feelings of physical attraction for reason of irrationality, or find some new theory of personhood on which the body takes something closer to the place our emotions give it. And, as Hanania points out, the place that our emotions give to the body is rather significant — so significant that we reject swaths of people from consideration for the most important relationships of our lives for reasons of embodiment. Which puts me in mind of the paper in which William James solved (albeit schematically) all of philosophy:

For a philosophy to succeed on a universal scale it must define the future congruously with our spontaneous powers. [… I]ts ultimate principle must not be one that essentially baffles and disappoints our dearest desires and most cherished powers. […] Incompatibility of the future with their desires and active tendencies is, in fact, to most men a source of more fixed disquietude than uncertainty itself.

I take it that our spontaneous attachment to bodily beauty is sufficiently deeply rooted that, per James, a philosophy which alienates us from it is self-undermining. So I am inclined to reject the mind-centric theory of personhood. And so what we need is a theory of the relation of a person to his body that makes physical attraction seem more than reasonless.

Now, one thing that definitely isn’t going to do the work we need is to say that physical attraction has to do with things like assessing a mate’s likelihood of being able to hunt successfully, or the amount of fat reserves they can tap into in the event of a pregnancy during lean times. For if this is the case then physical attraction no longer serves any function, and we have not a justification for it but rather a debunking explanation: there is little reason now for physical attraction, even if there might have been on the savanna.

Similarly, it is not going to work to say that the body is properly attractive because it is, at present, the only possible vessel of the mind. For this makes it seem like physical beauty is meaningful only so long as we cannot sustain a brain in a vat.

No, what we need is a theory that makes embodiment essential for the human functions we reflexively endorse — essential for, let us say, the pursuit of truth (which for the pragmatist — my sort of pragmatist — is our fundamental activity). The first sketch of that sort of theory that I read was given by Virgil Aldrich in the paper in which he fills out Wittgenstein’s aphorism that the body is the best image of the soul:

The idea was at first a religious one: God makes man in His own image. In the secular form given it by the above insights into the conditions of doing things with words, it reads: Language (Logos) makes man in its own image. […] What this more literally means is that any being whose practice is, for example, to say what was in the past before his time, or what the future is likely to bring when he is no more, and fell why he believes this, or who can tell stories of the death of kings (and of God) and speak of what to do about it; in short, anybody that can be rational or speculative or imaginative about anything, and show it in speech — this addition is redundant — will have the right form of the body for this. Reason, in this comprehensive and humane sense, requires it — the erect posture, the nose and mouth recessed under eyes with which, in that right place, the agent can not only simply see the things around him but can contemplate their nature with speculation in his eyes — ‘in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!’ The grand implication of this is that anybody — any body — that embodies reason and makes it articulate in this large sense will be in form somewhat like any other reasonable being anywhere in the universe. It will be somewhat like the human body. It is innocent and natural to think this way about the human form, not out of conceit or a sort of cosmic racism but in praise of a universal principle of expression that has become articulate in that soulful form of the body.

This is a nice description of the sort of view we need to end up with, but there is no argument here. Indeed, the argument Aldrich does give in this paper leaves a lot to be desired: it comes dangerously close to simply defining “telling” et cetera as the sort of thing that can only be done by something with a human form, and then observing that if you stipulate this and note that “telling” is an activity of rationality then only something with a human form can do it. That is not only circular but, I think, implausible. It rests on the idea, drawn from Wittgenstein, that if we saw something non-human talking — a lion, say — that we would perceive it not as talking in the full sense of meaning what it says, but rather think

that it had undergone some odd sort of programming, or otherwise been taught like the parrot to go through the motions of talking. […] Our eerie impression would be, not of a lion talking, but of something making a lion ‘talk’ — making it go through the motions. [… A] talking mouth talks only in a human face.

This would certainly not be my reaction, and the fact that it would not be a popular reaction is evidenced by the popularity of (as opposed to uncanny valley-type unease at) media featuring talking animals. And it is this sentiment — the idea that the body has little to do with what goes on inside — seems, when presented in this way, quite natural, contra Aldrich. But something like what Aldrich has in mind must be going on if we are to get out of the trap Hanania reveals with our sentimentality about the body intact.

I have to say that I am a bit at a loss here. A more charitable read of Aldrich’s argument starts from the fact that Aldrich characterizes the position he is elaborating as a “philosophy of human life”, the implication being that it is not life-affirming to think that the human form which we find so alluring is not intimately connected to the features of man (rationality, say) that we can endorse without hesitation. “If one thinks that the kind of body makes no difference to the kind of mind — what thoughts it has, etc. — then, in the end, one naturally lapses, like William James, into wondering whether one’s sweetheart is an automaton with no soul at all, desperately resolving in the end to believe that she has a soul, ‘pragmatically’ speaking […]” — and this is a pattern of thought that obstructs, rather than affirms, human life. But then we are just back in the position we started with: wanting to affirm our attachment to the body but not quite seeing how to get there without rejecting other premises that we also hold dear.

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