Sophrosyne and the Extended Mind
Excerpted and Abridged from The White Deer, by Melinda Reidinger
Aquote spuriously attributed to Carl Jung goes: “People don’t have ideas. Ideas have people” (his real quote related to “complexes” having people). But I want to leave pathological or hubristic states of mind: here, we’ll begin examining how non-human input opens our minds up like raising the blinds and opening the window in a stuffy room.
e.e. cummings gifted us with the poetic image “your head is a living forest full of song birds.” Let’s now make a chasmus out of his line: the forest full of song birds is your head. This is because your mind is partially constituted by other beings and elements (generally, living things, but also the land, the weather, the time of day, etc.) What effect will opening the mind more to a flow with the outside world have? For one, overweening ego, cultural neuroses and the endless arguments among competing human points of view may be drowned out a little by birdsong.
The opposite of hubris is sophrosyne (σωφροσύνη), a Greek word which is sometimes said to have no true equivalents in other languages. It is derived from the roots σῶς (sôs, “safe, sound”) and φρήν (phrḗn, “mind”) and is considered to be a virtue or ideal of excellence as well as “soundness of mind” or moral sanity. The classical philologist and literary scholar Helen North has described sophrosyne as the union of self-knowledge with self-restraint, and that is where we will find a perspective that allows for readjustment. One who has sophrosyne should also display qualities such as temperance, moderation, prudence, purity, and self-control.
For the Stoic philosopher Zeno of Citium, sophrosyne was one of the four cardinal virtues along with wisdom, courage, and justice. And Heraclitus’s Fragment 112 ranks it first among them: "Sophrosyne is the greatest virtue, and wisdom is speaking and acting the truth, paying heed to the nature of things." Choosing sophrosyne over hubris is choosing temperance over impatience, self-control over self- confidence, calm over resentment. Greek literature, drama, and philosophy frequently contrasted behavior driven by hubris with behavior driven by sophrosyne for edifying purposes.
In “Hubris and the Green Wall” I discussed the vice of hubris, which is an excess of pride that leads people to arrogate capabilities, resources, or destinies to themselves that are beyond what ought to be provided for them. Here, we will look at the “nature of things” that shape our thoughts, and by the end we will arrive at some perspectives that dissolve hubris and reintegrate the human mind into the world that gives rise to it.
The first matter that needs to be settled is that we are not just what’s in our heads: cognition cannot be localized to our brains, nor is it a thing that can be directly observed or measured. Western thinking has treated the body as secondary to the mind, an object in a world of objects in a tradition that reaches back (at least) to Plato, was updated and elaborated by René Descartes, and promulgated widely and put into practice during the Scientific Revolution. It has only been since the early 20th century that Western scholars even attempted to look for cognition in the body. The modern conception of embodied cognition has its intellectual roots in the work of John Dewey; it was further developed by the existentialist philosophers Martin Heidegger, John Dewey, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and it has only been studied empirically (especially physiologically) in the past few decades.
In recent years, medical researchers have been exploring the symbiotic relationships human bodies have with microorganisms. One of their most important findings has been how the enteric nervous system and its microflora influence not only many aspects of physical health, but also mental health, and our behavior and moods. This is called the "gut-brain axis,” and the implications not only for individual well-being, but also for our conceptual, social, and emotional worlds are staggering.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical conception of the body/mind relationship arose from the simple idea that we “inhabit” our bodies rather than “having” them, which is a radical reversal of the (related) concepts that we are spiritual beings or pure intellect imprisoned within corruptible flesh. This notion can be observed in certain religions and also appears in an updated form in the “transhumanist” movement I discussed in the last chapter; a movement which dreams of transcending the limitation of the flesh and the physical world for the benefit of a disembodied mind. When we hear someone speaking of inhabiting a “meat suit” or when they share memes with vaguely cosmic imagery and the Jesuit priest and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s (usually unattributed) quote: “We are not physical beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a physical experience,” we are seeing echoes of this traditional dualism. One also encounters it in New Age communities that emphasize “ascension” (or “ascended masters”) or “transcendence.”
In order to create some space from binary models of this ilk, Maurice Merleau-Ponty described an “objective” body that, like other physical objects, has particular physical properties, such as size, weight, and so on, which can be empirically measured or captured in a photograph, but this is far less important than the “lived body”—the body through which we touch, feel, and move—grounds us as “body-subjects,” which was primary for us as experiencing beings. Later, the cognitive linguist George Lakoff and the psychologist Rafael Núñez would explain that the human mind is an emergent phenomenon that arises out of “the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experiences. This is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment.”
Merleau-Ponty wrote in Phenomenology of Perception that you’d never have to look for your right arm the way you look for an object on your desk, and you will never directly observe the back of your neck. We do not abstract ourselves the way others (such as scientists and philosophers) abstract us when we are actually engaged in the business of living. And when we inquire into our everyday experiences, we always find that we are involved in some way with the world around us, and this world is shared with others. “It’s ultimately a bodily awareness of this ‘intertwining’ that fosters our sensitivity towards other people,”4 or what philosopher Glen Mazis calls “embodiment’s access to the heart.”5 In order to cultivate compassion, connection, and intimacy, we must be aware of others, and of their own sensitive, embodied, and vulnerable perceiving.
Philosophers, theologians, and others working with reductive binary models had been looking for personhood in all the wrong places. Ari Freeman cites the philosopher Alva Noë from the University of California, Berkeley on how philosophers and scientists were missing the larger picture in their quest to isolate physical details. Trying to find consciousness within neurons is like
“trying to find the dancing in the musculature of the dancer. Or trying to find the value of money in the chemical composition of the dollar bill. It’s the wrong kind of place to look. The idea that I’ve had in my work is that instead of thinking of consciousness as something that happens within us, in our brains or anywhere else, why don’t we try and think of consciousness as something that we do, or enact, or perform in our dynamic involvement with the world around us.”
Félix Guattari was reaching toward a conceptualization of a subject that is an effect rather than a cause with his suggestion of “components” or “vectors” of subjectification (that is, factors that create the thinking subject). His subject was not a starting point, but rather a certain outcome—but not a final one because it becomes rather vector-like itself. Because it is both individuated and more capable of uniting with others it is capable of engaging in more ecological modes of thinking and acting that resist the artificial closure of an excessively individualistic perspective.
Nine years later, in an influential paper titled “The Extended Mind” by Andy Clark and David Chalmers, who are both cognitive scientists and philosophers, the authors provided a more functional description of some of the ways the objects in one’s physical environment can serve as parts of the mind. This view argued that what was still the predominant model of the brain imagined it as a processing center that creates mental models of reality, calculating input, options, and likely outcomes, and then gives us impulses that we react upon, which is the moment when the mind-body barrier is breached. The problem, Sigal Samuel tells us, is that this conception is a phantom: “...scientists cannot find anything physical in the brain that acts in such a way. The entity of “I myself” is a “mental construct” which is neither identical to our bodies or our brains, but is something emergent that evolved over millions of years. It’s more like a function we use to explain to ourselves what’s going on. The problem is that certain kinds of cultural conditioning convince us that this is the “real me” that possesses the body and brain, much in the same way as panentheism posits a Creator deity that both permeates and stands outside its creation.
Clark and Chalmers theorize that evolution has favored capacities ranging from “shortcuts afforded by bodily motion and locomotion to contingent facts about the structure of natural scenes in order to allow the local environment to reduce the burden on memory. They were the first to introduce the term “extended mind” to Western scholarly literature. However, while they were explicitly discussing human beings, if their theory has biological, evolutionary justification, it can be applied to other species as well.
As Bill Mollison said, “everything gardens.” That is, every organism participates in the creation of its habitat—though some do it in ways that are more obvious. Trees exhale oxygen; animals exhale carbon dioxide; fungi help the trees grow; insects pollinate; bears excrete the remains of salmon and fertilize forest soil. Some of the more dramatic examples of animal “gardening” include arctic foxes (which create adorable little gardens around their dens) and beavers. And the ways these creatures interact with their environments suggest that they, too, have part of their mental processes involved in acts of intervention as well as in the spaces they create. Octopodes have been known since 2009 to build cities for their kind. The first such sedentary colony was dubbed Octopolis, and then a colony of “gloomy octopus” (Octopus tetricus) was discovered 50 feet below the surface of the water in Jervis Bay, south of Sydney. This one, called Octlantis, is a kind of artificial reef constructed by the cephalopods, where they are safe from sharks, seals, and dolphins. The built environment even includes individual dens. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the life of urban octopodes is different than the life of their more solitary kin, as they engage in frequent squabbles over the dens, kicking others out when they intrude.
One of the simplest forms of interaction between the world of material things, perception, and cultural ideas is found in pareidolia, the perception of a meaningful image in a random or ambiguous source material. It can happen spontaneously to anyone, and then the image, whether of eyes in the bark of a tree or Jesus in a piece of toast, can be communicated to others, who may also see the same image. Numerous experiments have proved that infants experience pareidolia with images that roughly resemble human faces, and these tendencies go back very far indeed in our evolution: at least as far back as the Australopithecines who found and cherished the Makapansgat pebble, a “river-worn stone whose naturally formed contours resemble crude eyes and a mouth” and buried it with their dead at a site in South Africa, far away from its original source. Joanne Lee comments “whilst it is impossible to know how this stone was viewed or interpreted at the time, and what were the perceptive and cognitive capabilities of such beings, thanks to its apparently purposeful relocations archaeologists have hypothesized that it may well have been recognized as a face, and that this seemed to have some significance for the hominids concerned.”
Beyond interaction with physical artifacts (which of course bear some form of culturally-mediated meaning), language appears to be a “central means by which cognitive processes are extended into the world.” Clark and Chalmers write: “it may be that language evolved, in part, to enable such extensions of our cognitive resources.” Further aids we have developed to extend our minds from sensory inputs and current thoughtwaves include anything used to record information, from notches on a stick or knots on a cord to paper and pencils to computers. All of these options for offloading cognition free up short-term memory, which is a huge advantage since our short-term memory capacity is limited. By extension, if we can record and remember the physical world, then we can also change our depictions and ordering of it for the purpose of affecting changes within our minds or moods, which is one of the ideas behind the change of mood that can be effected by redecorating a room, and of course also by myths and magical rituals.
For at least the last 60,000 years (though it’s probably much longer), humans have connected physical, mythical, and imaginary places through songlines (in Australia), dindshenchas (in Ireland), star maps, and the “method of loci” to aid memory and facilitate familiarity with landscapes. These older methods of storing and sharing memories, and of participating in the ongoing process of creating the world, are parallel in some ways to the more recent practice of putting thoughts onto paper or into computers for accessing later. But humans are not unique in doing such things: spiders have been observed by the Brazilian biologist Hilton Japyassú to use their webs as an extension of their sensory system and supplement to their cognitive system, in conformity with theories that had hitherto only been applied to human beings. And this suggests that the use of such techniques by “simpler” creatures indicates just how widespread extended cognition may be across species, and that this is one of the aspects that defines living organisms.
Human technology extends our connected minds through probes that have passed beyond the boundaries of our solar system or have been immersed into the deepest ocean trenches, and we can communicate with any human being who has compatible technology and a communications signal at any other place on our planet. (And we also attempt to send signals to life forms that live outside our solar system, if there are any.) When we turn our gaze in the opposite direction—back towards ourselves—the view is much less impressive. As a hatha yoga teacher (one of my other jobs), the most common problem I’m asked to help students with is the effects of their spending hours every day hunched over their computer and telephone screens. I am not disputing that technology offers us many valuable gifts, but physically we are starting to revert into the shape of fetuses or larvae, and we have aching backs and shallow breathing patterns. Effectively, our species is participating in a degree of voluntary disembodiment for either part or most of every day, and it’s painful when the trance wears off.
It’s clear that evolution required us to attune to our environments, or—as Brendan Myers put it— “human beings are ‘already ecological’ because our perceptual intelligence grants us the ability to gather deep knowledge of our surroundings.” Though, to head off any misconceptions, this doesn’t mean that the ability to use this perceptual intelligence is automatic—it must be practiced and trained. He continues: “this knowledge is ‘deep’ in the sense that it requires years of patience and consistent attendance to gather, and requires the sentience of your whole body to process and to reason toward conclusions.” Myers connects the exercising of this faculty to the relationships we build with the landscapes around us: “the more you get to know a landscape, the more the landscape rubs off on your mind, massaging it, working it over, planting seeds in it, pushing its footprints into it. Eventually the landscape becomes so much a feature of your mind that it also becomes a feature of your identity. It gets that far when a complete account of who you are must necessarily include a few statements about the places where you possess this kind of deep knowledge, the time you spent acquiring it, and the things you’ve done in your life because of it.” But if the two-dimensional images on our screens become our landscapes of reference, we are going to forfeit a lot of well-being.
Spending more time outdoors is crucial to restoring physical, mental, and spiritual health, not only to ourselves, but to all the other beings we interact with. These salutary effects were well known by the Transcendental authors of the 19th century. For instance, Henry David Thoreau, found restorative value in reverential, observant hauntings of places left to self-manage, such as Mt. Katahdin, and the environs of Walden Pond. In Walden, he writes:
We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.
The Transcendentalists then had a profound influence on John Muir, who not only appreciated wild landscapes, but also put a great deal of effort into preserving them from civilized “development.” Muir believed that nature is good for everyone, and he is a premiere example of how a love for wild lands can lead to an ardent desire to protect them from destructive interventions. He wrote in one of his (originally unpublished) journals: “There is a love of wild nature in everybody, an ancient mother-love showing itself whether recognized or no, and however covered by cares and duties,” and getting out of our over-civilized spaces and habits revitalizes us: “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life. Awakening from the stupefying effects of the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury, they are trying as best they can to mix and enrich their own little ongoings with those of Nature, and to get rid of rust and disease.”7
When we have recognized our minds’ essential embeddedness in their surroundings, it is a short step to recognize that it would be healthful, wise, and enjoyable to cultivate the open exchange of information among sensing and receiving centers. “The world is abuzz with animate forces, and we are among its many transmitters and receivers...but then, if all bodies and things are always moving and changing, everything throbbing and pulsating with the animacy of the universe, this capriciousness should not be so surprising.”
The question arises of why this visceral enthrallment feels so satisfying. The late Edward O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis borrows the essential insight from Erich Fromm (who probably adapted it from Albert Schweitzer) that humans have an innate psychological attraction to all that is alive and vital. There are, of course, numerous studies that document the reasons why we are not indulging in this more, which range from overwork to online distractions, to parenting styles that discourage children from unstructured outdoor play, and even changing laws and guidelines for social workers that penalize parents that allow their children to explore their local habitats without adult supervision.
Clearly, few of us who are expected to spend most of the day cooped up indoors are experiencing optimal levels of immersion in our ecosystems, and many live in cities or other environments where the ecosystems have been horrifically blighted. The (US) Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the average American spends 93% of their time indoors. If they would like to make more connection with “nature”—even a park—the average American is going to have to make an effort to work it into their lives. If “biophilia” is an innate drive to seek pleasure in the natural world, our bodies and minds must be suffering when we are separated from our participation in the animacy of our biomes all day. There is a growing literature that describes the baneful effects of “nature-deficit” disorder on adults and children, and on society as a whole as well as a “life-force deficit” or “ecological boredom” that robs us of a certain spark or inspired sense of purpose.
When it is possible to spend time in outdoor settings, it’s ideal to select somewhere large enough to stroll around. In recent years, there has been a fair amount of hype around a form of outdoor mindfulness or ecotherapy called shinrin yoko, or “forest bathing.” The practice was developed in Japan in the 1980s with the intention of remedying burnout in tech-sector workers—and also inspiring people to feel connected to the country’s forests so that they would want to protect them. Qing Li, the president of the Japanese Society of Forest Medicine and the author of several popular books and many scientific articles on the benefits of forest bathing, writes: “This is not exercise, or hiking, or jogging. It is simply being in nature, connecting with it through our senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. Shinrin-yoku is like a bridge. By opening our senses, it bridges the gap between us and the natural world.” And this brings very tangible benefits to overall health, including reduced stress, reduced blood pressure, lower blood sugar levels, better mood, improved ability to focus (even for children with ADHD), faster recovery from surgery or illness, increased energy level, improved sleep, and better immune system functioning.
Got more time? Go on a longer hike. Rob Greenaway, one of the founders of ecopsychology noted that “civilization is only four days deep,” by which he meant that the first three or four days hikers spend on a wilderness trek are marked by discomfort as they experience the loss of running water, phone signals, and other comforts. Once this passes, then they begin to feel “an increased sense of aliveness” and “feelings of expansion or reconnection.” This “wilderness effect” has been observed by guides for decades.
There are social benefits found in cultures that perceive nature as a spiritual force. The American eco- psychologist and activist Chellis Glendinning describes a connection between the minds of those who live in Indigenous cultures with what she calls the Primal Matrix: “The state of a healthy, wholly functioning psyche in full-bodied participation with the healthy earth. Our Primal Matrix grew from the earth, is inherently part of the earth, and is built to thrive in intimacy with the earth.” Indigenous scientists have also pursued lines of research that reconcile Indigenous perspectives with formal academic discourse. Often, this work is not only theoretical, but also proposes practical solutions.
While non-Indigenous peoples might consider land as a form of personal property they own, a commodity to trade, or an asset to make profits from, Indigenous populations have a deeper connection that doesn’t partake of these views. I do not want to make excuses for land theft from Native populations and ongoing exploitation that are the background to some people’s decisions to move to cities. However, the findings I cite, which discuss Native populations in urban environments, demonstrate that “maintaining connections with and having a relationship to nature and the ‘land’ is not dependent on access to a literal material place or physical location, but can often involve symbolic or sacred representations, and spiritual relationships with broader more universalizing notions of ‘Mother Earth.’” As Andew Hatala and his coauthors point out, health is not conceived of in many Indigenous cultures as merely physical health or the absence of disease, but it also comprises a balance of four elements – the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual—that are integrally bound together. When people are able to draw on these four elements they show more positive adaptation and resistance “in the face of colonization, historical traumas, or structural violence, as well as current stresses, challenges, and demands.” This study emphasizes that nature/Mother Earth/the healing elements of landscape need not be sought out in remote rural locations, but can also be accessed in an urban environment. The researchers conclude that natural environments should be conserved, expanded, and made culturally safe and meaningful.
Those who are not part of a traditional or contemporary Earth-based religion can regardless benefit from a spiritual connection. Forest bathing, with its cultivation of sensory awareness, is certainly a valuable practice, but there is another dimension beyond the basic five senses that can be activated by those who want to feel more connected to the landscapes they move in, to penetrate the “green wall” and involve themselves in the animacy of being. It’s a dimension that is often connected with religious or spiritual experiences: awe.
The first step in practicing sophrosyne; that is, determining how much is enough and refraining from overtaking, means putting things into their correct perspectives. When we acknowledge our relationships to the living beings that provide for us and feel grateful, the blessings tend to spread. We can practice gratitude by taking a moment to truly see and to thank (as opposed to “being thankful for” as though it were given by someone or something else) a flower, a sip of cool water, a perfect falling leaf, a deer sighted at the other end of a clearing, for being there, for being part of you and of your reality in that moment. Then we can work on exercising the restraint that is the necessary second part of the virtue of sophrosyne, and finally, we will be moved to act generously. As Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Potawatomi Nation and professor of environmental and forest biology writes,
“Gratitude is so much more than a polite thank you. It is the thread that connects us in a deep relationship, simultaneously physical and spiritual, as our bodies are fed and spirits nourished by the sense of belonging, which is the most vital of foods. Gratitude creates a sense of abundance, the knowing that you have what you need. In that climate of sufficiency, our hunger for more abates and we take only what we need, in respect for the generosity of the giver.
If our first response is gratitude, then our second is reciprocity: to give a gift in return. What could I give these plants in return for their generosity? It could be a direct response, like weeding or water or a song of thanks that sends appreciation out on the wind. Or indirect, like donating to my local land trust so that more habitat for the gift givers will be saved, or making art that invites others into the web of reciprocity.
Gratitude and reciprocity are the currency of a gift economy, and they have the remarkable property of multiplying with every exchange, their energy concentrating as they pass from hand to hand, a truly renewable resource. I accept the gift from the bush and then spread that gift with a dish of berries to my neighbor, who makes a pie to share with his friend, who feels so wealthy in food and friendship that he volunteers at the food pantry. You know how it goes ...”
Melinda Reidinger
Melinda Reidinger lives in a rural part of the Czech Republic with her family and two wolfdogs. She's a former academic, and now a writer and translator, and her personal practice is best described as eclectic hedgewitchery with elements of classical and fayerie cults.