Meanings of “Embodied Experience”: A Response to Anik Waldow’s Book

Meanings of “Embodied Experience”: A Response to Anik Waldow’s Book Hynek Janoušek (bio) Anik Waldow, Experience Embodied: Early Modern Accounts of the Human Place in Nature Anik Waldow’s book, Experience Embodied: Early Modern Accounts of Human Place in Nature, is a welcome contribution to an interesting topic worthy of wider discussion. That topic is the question of how the concepts of embodied experience and reason were understood in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century philosophy. This problem, according to Waldow, is often treated too narrowly, namely by concentrating on the problems of the theory of knowledge. Instead, Waldow shows that the main philosophers of the time understood experience and reason in a broader way and that not only the content of the concept, but also the angle from which experience was considered was not purely theoretical but moral and practical—and this, in turn, led them into researching experience as embodied experience. Indeed, on the one hand, according to most of these theories, our experience is born of a response to the causal action of the external environment on our body and of the body itself; on the other hand, the bodily subject of experience experiences herself as a being who actively and reasonably acts in the world and transforms it. We are aware of this active role.1 Since, in this period of philosophy, a fact is defined as that which is given to us by experience, and our bodily actions in the world are given to us in this way, our corporeality, and our action through it, are facts that must somehow be brought into harmony. However, man does not experience herself only as a machine mechanically bound to the sensory stimuli of her own body, but as an active agent who can use her reason and will to shape her life and the world in which she lives. But does man still really possess a reason and a will of her own, which distinguish her actions from the instinctive actions of animals, and which allow her to distance herself from immediate [End Page 305] sensory affects and to act? How can reason and will be interpreted in the context of an embodied and causally determined human experience? And if human moral determination points to self-determined and responsible action, and if this possibility is acquired through learning and education, what kind of self-determining reason are we talking about?2 Finally, the question is how society should shape experience of its individuals so that they can develop their reason and thus the possibility of self-determined action. Waldow chooses the works of Descartes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, and Herder to discuss these topics. The book thus covers authors of all three major linguistic areas in early modern philosophy. The text of the book is divided into three sections. The first discusses Descartes and Locke and the moral dimension of human experience. The second focuses on Hume, Rousseau, and Herder and the question of how the development of our higher cognitive and affective faculties is conditioned by affective responses to sense perception. In the third section, Waldow addresses the question of how the empirical science of man (anthropology) is understood in the work of Herder and Kant. The book starts with a chapter on Descartes, based primarily on an interpretation of his Meditations on First Philosophy. It is clear that in Cartesian methodological skepticism the meditator experiences a freedom to abstain from judging based on confused ideas. Meditations thus allow her to experience the active use of her own mind. This experience contrasts with the passive emergence of sensory ideas and concepts. In the conclusion of the Meditations, this passivity is interpreted as the soul’s experience of being embodied in a bodily substance. In contrast, the experience of the free use of our judgment is a practical experience leading to the development of the ability to actively follow truth and direct the will not only in theoretical inquiry but also in the control of our passions. This is very important for Descartes, for this experience is essential for a virtuous and happy human life. The chapter on Locke continues with a discussion of the activation of...