Cartesian dualism and disabled phenomenology

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I critically examine phenomenological disability studies' critique of so-called ‘Cartesian Dualism’. I argue that it is not a metaphysical divide between mental and extended substance that disability studies must overcome, but rather a more fundamental understanding of world understood only in terms of substance, what Martin Heidegger calls the ‘ontology of objective presence’. This view of ‘the world’ passes over being-in-the-world and the problem of meaning. After outlining phenomenological disability studies' objection to Descartes' legacy, I critically contrast the mind–body problem with the substance problem, suggesting the latter is crucial, and the former derivative. I conclude by discussing the contours of a disabled phenomenology: one that takes physical and mental difference as the basis for a theoretical project, rather than another site for phenomenological investigation.

KEYWORDS:

• Cartesian dualism
• Heidegger
• phenomenology
• subjectivity

Notes

1. Here, I have restricted my purview to embodied phenomenological disability studies that are explicitly anti-Cartesian. There are many phenomenologically inspired approaches that have bigger fish to fry, as in the work of Tanya Titchkosky (2007, 2011) Titchkosky and Rod Michalko (2012) and Rod Michalko (1998).

2. Obviously, readers of this journal are quite familiar with the social model of disability. I will not waste precious space outlining it in detail. Two sentences will do: social model research makes a divide between disability as oppression and impairment as functional restriction. Elimination of the former is the charge of disability studies, an emancipatory research project, organized by and for oppressed persons. See also Oliver (2004) and Barnes (1996).

3. An operative definition: ‘Cartesian thinking’ implies a divide between thinking substance and extended substance (res cogitans, res extensa), thus between thinking mind and a body extended in space. I will review this definition below.

4. Abberley (1987) uses the teratogenic effects of the drug thalidomide as an example of the social causes of impairment, explored phenomenologically in Abrams (2013b, 2014a).

5. Husserl (1970, 142) defines the “life world” as the pre-existing realm of self-evidences; ‘the life-world, for us who wakingly live in it, is always already there, existing in advance for us, the “ground” of all praxis whether theoretical or extratheoretical’.

6. Turner gives two counter examples, Irving Zola and Erving Goffman. Social model adherents, Barnes and Oliver especially, often discredit Goffman as an apolitical, interpretive sociologist. I reject this (light) reading in Abrams (2014b).

7. Tanya Titchkosky makes short work of this logic in her ‘Governing Embodiment’ (2003).

8. Descartes supposed that body and soul interacted through the pineal gland.

9. Here, I draw on Leder’s detailed discussion of Descartes in The Absent Body (op. cit).

10. From their classic paper, ‘The social model – in spite of its critiques of the medical model – actually concedes the body to medicine and understands impairment in terms of medical discourse. To recapture this lost corporeal space without returning to the reactionary view that physicality determines social status, the social model requires [us] to mount a critique of its own dualistic heritage and establish, as an epistemological necessity, that the impaired body is part of the domain of history, culture and meaning, and not – as medicine would have it – an ahistorical, presocial, purely natural object’ (326).

11. Sara Ahmed’s ambitious Queer Phenomenology (2006) pursues the same sort of logic that I want to pursue in this paper, queering phenomenology’s grounding orientation, and remaking that project in new and novel ways. She does not, however, address disability in that excellent book. In order to do phenomenology, must one ‘stand up, straight’? I intend to pursue this question in a subsequent manuscript, and invite my colleagues to do so as well.

12. For an excellent phenomenological example of how fibromyalgia is reconciled with physicalistic criteria of illness, and the meanings held by individual sufferers, see Wilson (2012). Mental illness and other non-visible conditions are also pertinent here, of course.

13. Sartre famously critiqued Heidegger for neglecting the lived body in Being and Time. Heidegger, it is true, says little about the body in that famous book. While taking this objection seriously, Aho (2005, 2) suggests that Heidegger did not thematize the body in that work because it is a ‘regional’ concern, relative to the fundamental ontology in which the body emerges as lived in the first place; ‘from the perspective of fundamental ontology, all of the current philosophical debates concerning the problem of the body […] are already pre-shaped by Dasein. It is by means of this open space of intelligibility that things can emerge-into-presence as the kinds of things that they are, making it possible for one to begin regional investigations into the problem of the body in the first place’. Heidegger's Zollikon Seminars are devoted to exploring the ‘regional problem’ of the body, though neither he nor Aho thematizes disability explicitly.

14. Hacking (2005) suggests us that Descartes existed in a very different historical period, and that his medieval concept of ‘substance’ bears little resemblance to contemporary usages of that term. His point: ‘we cannot much disagree with Descartes because one of his cardinal concepts has gone missing’ (158). We must admit our contemporary readings and misgivings are anachronistic. Obviously, things have changed since Descartes' death in 1650. With this stated, the anachronistic reading still has some purchase, as Leder’s The Absent Body demonstrates. I engage with that important book below.

15. This is very unfortunate: Askay (1999) documents the close similarities between Heidegger's thoughts on the body and Merleau-Ponty’s. In this paper, I emphasize Heidegger's reading over Merleau-Ponty not because the two are incommensurate, but rather because Heidegger's body has received much less attention in disability studies, in contrast to the French philosopher’s embodied phenomenology. Drew Leder’s (1990b) work takes up the challenge that Heidegger refused.

16. Here, I take inspiration from Conrad (1992).