The naturalisation of the mind

William James’s1 warning, issued at the beginning of his treatise on psychology, against inappropriate metaphysical interpretations of the data of early experimental psychology, was welcome in his time and it remains so today. Indeed, it is even more valid since the experimental method has proven its productivity in biology and is now being effectively applied in the cognitive neurosciences.

We have seen how these sciences set out to apply the methods of the natural sciences to what was traditionally an object of philosophical, metaphysical and epistemological reflection: the domain of the mind, its feel¬ings and its activities of sensory and intellectual cognition. Until recently, psychology was part of the philosophical rather than the scientific curriculum. For the cognitive sciences, by contrast – and in this they follow the evolution of biology – the mind or the mental, no more than life, should not be allowed to escape the empirico-logical method of the physical sciences, that is, of objective – in the sense of reproducible – observations and experimentations, alongside their logical and, if possible, mathemati¬cal ordering. This is the programme of the ‘naturalisation of the mind’, to which one cannot but subscribe if one adopts the perspective of Spinoza's philosophy.

This programme was proposed at the end of the nineteenth century, yet it is only in recent decades that it has recorded its most spectacular successes. Three concomitant developments have contributed to this: the progress in neurophysiology made possible by the physical and chemical exploration technologies of the human body as it acts, and of the brain in particular; the sciences and technologies of information; and the biological sciences, which have become physicochemical as well as biological, and which still serve as a point of reference. These successes derive from a reductionist method that has proven its efficacy.

I must make a preliminary remark about my title: we have been used to opposing the invention of fictions to the reality of things. Fiction, however, is not the invention of non-existing beings. It is a structure of rationality. It is, firstly, a practice of presentation that makes things, situations, characters and events perceptible. Next, it is a practice of linkage which constructs forms of coexistence, succession and causality between events so as to make sense of those connections. In this respect, there is fiction wherever and whenever a sense of the real and of its intelligibility must be constructed. Politics and social science construct fictions as well as literature. Conversely, the forms of avowed fiction can both reveal and question the modes of presentation of things and connection of events at work in politics and social science or in the discourse of the media.

In this respect the case of cinema is a privileged one because it is an art that creates fictions through the assemblage of fragments of time. And Béla Tarr's cinema is a still more privileged case for two reasons: he is one of the filmmakers most committed to making time the very stuff of cinematic fiction. Moreover this commitment to the materiality of time is implemented in the construction of fictions dealing with an explicitly political context which is itself a matter of time. He started making films in Communist Hungary. At that moment, he pitted the official rhythm of the construction of socialism against the everyday ways of life, problems and aspirations of ordinary people.

The Pauline political issue par excellence is the establishment of a new people of God. Hence, the question of community goes at the heart of it. With an eye to Rom. 13, it is often suggested that Paul wants to leave the authority of the Roman Empire largely untouched. As, for instance, Wright summarises: ‘Most have assumed that Romans 13 means that Paul was politically quiescent.’ Yet, his continued identification with groups that count for nothing in the existing socio-political order of the world grants these letters political and revolutionary potential. How should we understand this identification, and what kind of community is established by it?

A basic idea of our modern legal system, as expressed by Article 7 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is that ‘All are equal before the law’. Yet, who exactly is, and who determines who is, this ‘all’ or ‘everyone’? Who shares in this community of equals before the law? A Pauline approach to community departs from the viewpoint that the ‘all’ is not all and that, despite any pretence of the socio-political order to represent and do justice to ‘all’, there are those excluded from this ‘all’. They are exception and outcast. In this sense, the Pauline approach to community is the socio-political analogue of the ontological issue we addressed in Chapter 3 concerning the kosmos and the non-beings that are symptomatic of the crisis of this kosmos.

Schmitt's genealogy of the legal order provides a rather disturbing answer to the above questions. Equality before the law reflects the homogeneity of the political community.

Towards the end of Lucile Hadžihalilovic´'s Innocence (2004, Belgium/France), five girls on the cusp of puberty perform a dance in the underground theatre of their boarding school in which they have been confined since they were about six years old. Four of the girls wear butterfly wings and flitter across the stage while the fifth wields a white streamer that casts a symbolic web. The performance dramatises a section of the life cycle of butterflies which concludes with the insects twitching on the stage floor in death throes. For the girls, the dance is the culmination of years of ballet and gymnastic exercise, part of a strict programme imposed by the school to model the tiny, formless limbs of children into elegant movements and postures. Like the butterfly dance, the film as a whole can be seen as a performance of evolution, a tracing of the transformations of young girls as they mature, and as a play with evolutionary concepts, a creative mediation of natural history.

As Elizabeth Grosz has pointed out, the term ‘evolution’, derived from the Latin e-volvere, means ‘to roll out’, to ‘unfold’ (2004: 24). This chapter uses the concept of evolutionary performance as a base from which to leap into questions of temporal unfolding, particularly where such unfolding is slow and gradual. Despite not being associated with the slow cinema movement per se, Innocence employs many of the attributes of the more obvious exponents of this grouping. Within the relatively compact confines of 122 minutes of film, Innocence displays an attention to the leisurely pace and rhythms of the girls’ everyday lives.

“HAVE I been long away?” I asked as I raised myself upright in the chair where I had been resting.

“I sent you from hence on Thursday morning at noon,” replied Heliobas. “It is now Saturday evening, and within a few minutes of midnight. I was growing alarmed. I have never known anyone stay absent for so long; and you resisted my authority so powerfully, that I began to fear you would never come back at all.”

“I wish I had not been compelled to do so!” I said regretfully. He smiled.

“No doubt you do. It is the general complaint. Will you stand up now and see how you feel?”

I obeyed. There was still a slight sensation about me as of being cramped for space; but this was passing, and otherwise I felt singularly strong, bright and vigorous. I stretched out my hands in unspeakable gratitude to him, through whose scientific power I had gained my recent experience. “I can never thank you enough!” I said earnestly. “I dare say you know something of what I have seen on my journey?”

“Something, but not all,” he replied. “Of course I know what worlds and systems you saw, but what was said to you, or what special lessons were given you for your comfort, I cannot tell.”

“Then I will describe everything while it is fresh upon me,” I returned. “I feel that I must do so in order that you may understand how glad I am, – how grateful I am to you.”

With the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, necessity and causality emerged from the mists of theology. After becoming mechanical and then mathematical, these notions have continued to haunt philosophy until the present day, with the indissociable question of free will following them like a shadow. Spinoza's particular and radical doctrine in the Ethics provides valuable landmarks for following these developments. Its ontological, epistemological and anthropological dimensions translate, among other things, into a conception of a relation of identity between the body and the mind as a special case of the identity between an ‘idea’ and its object.

As we have seen, to each body qua mode of extension is united an idea qua mode of thought. This union reproduces at the level of each mode the union of attributes in substance. From this it follows, among other things, that the term ‘idea’ in the Ethics has a number of meanings that are not usually associated with it. On the one hand, Spinoza gives an explicit definition of the ‘idea’: ‘By idea I understand a concept of the Mind that the Mind forms because it is a thinking thing’ (Ethics II, Def. 3). On the other hand, however, we also learn that the mind – which according to this definition forms the ideas – is itself ‘the idea of an actual existing body’, and that this applies to human beings as well as to all other indi¬viduals (Ethics II, 13, Schol.). And since the human body is composed of a great number of parts that are themselves highly composite bodies, the idea that constitutes its mind is itself composed of just as many parts, and parts of parts, as the body is – that is, of just as many ideas as are naturally united with these bodily parts (every idea is united with its body).

PRINCE IVAN PETROFFSKY was a constant visitor at the Hôtel Mars, and I began to take a certain interest in him, not unmingled with pity, for it was evident that he was hopelessly in love with my beautiful friend Zara. She received him always with courtesy and kindness; but her behaviour to him was marked by a somewhat cold dignity, which, like a barrier of ice, repelled the warmth of his admiration and attention. Once or twice, remembering what he had said to me, I endeavoured to speak to her concerning him and his devotion; but she so instantly and decisively turned the conversation that I saw I should displease her if I persisted in it. Heliobas appeared to be really attached to the Prince, at which I secretly wondered; the worldly and frivolous young nobleman was of so entirely different a temperament to that of the thoughtful and studious Chaldean philosopher. Yet there was evidently some mysterious attraction between them – the Prince appeared to be profoundly interested in electric theories and experiments, and Heliobas never wearied of expounding them to so attentive a listener. The wonderful capabilities of the dog Leo, also, were brought into constant requisition for Prince Ivan's benefit, and without doubt they were most remarkable. This animal, commanded – or, I should say, brainelectrifi ed – by Heliobas, would fetch anything that was named to him through his master's force, providing it was light enough for him to carry; and he would go into the conservatory and pluck off with his teeth any rare or common flower within his reach that was described to him by the same means.

Twentieth-century biology has undergone two major revolutions: that of molecular genetics in the 1960s and that of epigenetics and biocomplexity at the end of the century, followed by the development of the contemporary cognitive neurosciences. These scientific advances raise old philosophical questions in new forms. The most obvious are questions about the relation between the living and the inanimate, and between the body and the mind – but these are not the only ones. To these questions, Spinoza's philosophy from the seventeenth century surprisingly offers more pertinent solutions than most recent philosophies established in subsequent centuries. Yet these solutions are very rarely invoked, not only by contemporary biologists, neu¬robiologists and psychologists, but also in nearly all of the philosophical debates outside of those of the small circles of Spinoza scholars, which constitute a minority within existing philosophy departments.

One reason for this situation is without doubt the need to overcome the difficulties of understanding Spinoza's Ethics. Spinoza not only uses a language that is in many instances anachronistic, borrowed as it is from scholasticism: it also provides answers to philosophical questions that seem counterintuitive and paradoxical to his readers. Examples include the question of purposiveness in nature, which the observation of living beings suggests to us; the relation between body and mind; the role of intention in voluntary action; of freedom and determinism; truth and error; and many more. To these eternal questions of philosophy, continuously revived across the centuries in conjunction with changes in scientific developments and knowledge, Spinoza proposes disconcerting answers, which frequently contradict settled solutions and common sense. Very often, Spinoza's solutions cut through the matter at hand as through a Gordian knot, reformulating standard philosophical problems such that they end up appearing as false problems.

This section brings together extracts from a range of primary material that offers a sense of the literary, philosophical and print-cultural context of In Memoriam's composition, publication and afterlife. In each case, an extract from an essay, article or review is accompanied by an introduction that links it to Tennyson's poem. The section begins with a review of Tennyson's fi rst volume of poetry written by Hallam himself, originally published in the Englishman's Magazine and later included in the Remains in Verse and Prose of Arthur Henry Hallam, published by Arthur's father, Henry, in 1834. This is followed by part of Henry Hallam's memoir of his son and an account of the funeral. I also include an extract from Hallam Tennyson's Memoir of his father, which includes Tennyson's own remarks about In Memoriam and a draft section that was not included in the fi nal published version of the poem. Extracts from Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology and Robert Chambers's Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation are included to provide a starting point for explorations of the scientifi c context of In Memoriam's composition (see also the ‘Profi t and Loss’ section of the Reading Guide). The second half of the section focuses on material published in response to In Memoriam, beginning with some contemporary reviews and ending with an essay by T. S. Eliot, which demonstrates how In Memoriam's identity and reputation were shaped by its readership.

Compositional Contexts

Arthur Henry Hallam, Review of Poems, Chiefl y Lyrical

Hallam's review of Tennyson's fi rst volume of poetry, one of the most infl uential early essays on Tennyson, was published in the Englishman's Magazine in August 1831.

This chapter will consider the intersection of slow cinema with road movies that narrate voyages to and through Europe. The two films under consideration here, Heremakono (Abderrahmane Sissako, France/Mauritania, 2002) and Morgen (Marian Cris¸an, Romania/France/Hungary, 2010), are concerned with slow voyages towards Western Europe with starting points in Africa and Eurasia. Despite the frequent association of the road movie with speed, slow cinema and road movies are a natural pairing in a contemporary European context where, for political and economic reasons, certain journey narratives are apt to become ‘slow’ – or paused – road movies. Travel by foot has traditionally been more prevalent in European road films which have tended to place less emphasis on auto-mobility and speed than in the American strain (Laderman, 2002: 258; Mazierska and Rascaroli, 2006: 8). At the same time, the ‘single minded walk-in-the-wilderness’ film is a staple of slow cinema (Romney, 2010: 43). Heremakono and Morgen, however, both take ‘slow’ a step beyond the simply plodding or meandering trek by focusing on pauses in the respective voyages rather than on the voyages themselves. Scholarly examinations of European road cinema have recently drawn attention to a number of films that depict stalled voyages and focus on ‘socio-cultural tension that cannot find release in the transformative experience of the journey’ (Rascaroli, 2013: 22).

In their ‘articulation of motion in terms of confinement’ (Laderman, 2013: 175), stopover films problematise the very concept of a ‘road’ movie. Ute Fendler, writing on francophone African contributions to the genre, defines a ‘true’ road movie as one in which ‘all of the action unfolds on the road, between the point of departure and arrival’ (Fendler, 2008: 79).

China today exports in six hours as much as it did in the whole of 1978. During the first half of the 2000s, it climbed from the seventh to the third place on the list of the world's largest economies, and by the end of the decade it had surpassed Japan to become the world's second largest. Since the late 1970s, the country went from 20 per cent urbanisation to today's 54 per cent, with urban population growing by more than 500 million. Six thousand miles of track were built only in the past eight years, and the country has already invested in over one thousand high-speed trains. The expressway network of China is the longest in the world, and the biggest hydroelectric power plant is also Chinese. And, as it is worth mentioning, all this and a lot more happened in just over three decades.

It might seem incongruent to open a chapter on slow cinema with a list of the fastest economic and social changes ever observed in history. Yet any discussion of Jia Zhangke's cinema and its relationship with time, be it fast or slow, cannot but start with the reality of contemporary China, a country that has been on the fast track since the transition from a planned economy to a socialist market economy, starting from Deng Xiaoping's Era of Reforms (Gaige Kaifang, 1978–92). And this is because his films have, since the mid 1990s, been both reflecting and reflecting on the new Chinese historical and social conjuncture of intense transformation.

A contemporary philosopher, Donald Davidson, referring explicitly to Spinoza,1 has developed, under the name ‘anomalous’ monism, a monism of body and mind that we can only express with the help of two different languages, without a law or a general rule for translating one into the other.

Yet we shall see how he too stumbles on the question of psychophysical causation, of the physical upon the mental and vice versa. Like many philosophers of science, Davidson resorts to the formal notions of emergence and supervenience to analyse the problems of reductionism and psychophysical causation in the context of the contemporary sciences. Yet there is no agreement on the meanings to be given to these notions in their application to various fields. This is because metaphysical questions, such as the physical closure of naturalism and the question of free will, are often inserted into these analyses, as is precisely the case in Davidson.

We must therefore examine some uses of these notions as we find them in the contemporary philosophical literature.

The causality of the physical upon the mental is framed today in terms of emergence and supervenience, and the question of this causality is taken up anew in relation to physicalist reductionism, albeit not without misun¬derstandings, since the term ‘physical’ means either what is material (ontological reductionism) or what is describable by physics (epistemological reductionism, sometimes called ‘intertheoretic’ reductionism).

‘The mind emerges from the brain’ is the more sophisticated expression of Cabanis's famous formula ‘The brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile’.

Between October 2018 and January 2019 the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto hosted Companhia (Company), an exhibition dedicated to the creative dialogues between the cinema of Pedro Costa and works by several other artists. This initiative presented some of the results of numerous collaborations maintained by the filmmaker over the years with Rui Chafes, Straub and Huillet and the non-professional actor Ventura. More patently, the exhibition was structured around numerous sources which, in diverse ways, exert a direct influence on Costa's authorial practice. The filmic heritages of Robert Bresson, John Ford, Fritz Lang, António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, Charlie Chaplin and Jacques Tourneur gained central importance in this exhibition. Other media influences also gained visibility. Among others, Company included works by poet Robert Desnos and photographers Jacob Riis, Walker Evans and Jeff Wall, and by artists such as Pablo Picasso and Maria Capelo. This assemblage of different works – film stills, painting, sculpture, video installations, poems, photographs – illustrates an authorial process which, firstly, reflects prolonged collaborative practices and which, secondly, is organised through the entanglement of different intertextual and intermedial influences. Indeed, the sentence used to contextualise Company to the public encapsulates these two characteristics animating Costa's creative practice: ‘each film is a letter written by a thousand hands’.

The collaborations and documental confluences organising Company are also particularly visible in Cavalo Dinheiro (Horse Money, 2014). This feature film reflects an evolving and prolonged collaborative process. As in previous works directed by Costa, Horse Money relies on a group of non-professional collaborators who contributed with their personal stories and who imprinted their lived experiences onto the film.