4. STRUCTURAL RECONSTRUCTION OF ELLIOTT’S PRAXIALISM:
4.1. From rule-processing cognition to acting situational body-mind
4.1.2. Cognitive knower versus sensing being
The distance to “real” bodily fi rst-person experiences that Elliott wants to make at least rhetorically, in favour of brain-action, is revealed when he makes a distinction between pleasure and enjoyment, between biological, social needs, on the one hand, and cognitive activities, on the other hand683. He argues:
When biological and social needs intrude into consciousness, the result is disorder.
Order is restored in consciousness by satisfying these needs. When consciousness tells us that our biological needs or social expectations are satisfi ed, we experience pleasure. Pleasure can occur with little or no conscious effort; enjoyment cannot.
Pleasure can be stimulated electrically and chemically in the brain; enjoyment cannot.
Enjoyment results not from satisfying basic biological and social needs but from moving forward in psychological growth and complexity. Enjoyment arises only from unusual investment of our conscious powers.684
Besides a mechanical view of the human social behaviour and needs, this distinction presents the work of mind as an individual, intellectualized achievement685. Elliott repeats the problems of an information perspective to music by not just ignoring
‘qualia’, but also making a clear distinction between cognitive and bodily felt sensual pleasures. Consciousness appears as abstract power in the fl esh. There are in this respect similarities between Elliott’s view and the Cartesian tradition discussed in Chapter 3.1. Musical action as craft is cut off from passions, and more importantly, from social utility.
However, it is true that if music is seen as information, then, pleasure is not a message or material in musical information. Rather, pleasure is built up in the tactile embodied relationships. For instance, Shusterman holds that pleasure is not simply the same as pleasant686. One can think that in music phenomenological vividness is
683 See also, Elliott 1997, 29.
684 Ibid., 115, my italics.
685 Note that also Kant related social agreeableness to the biological animal side of pleasures (see Chapter 3.1.2.).
686 Shusterman 1998, 52.
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gained through channelled pleasure from which there is a continuum to other values.Pleasure does not exclude other constituents of the experience. Or as Middleton argues, musical performances involve a complex mixture of forces including pleasure.
According to him, pleasure can be examined through the concept of a pleasure-fi eld rather than either-or distinctions between different forces687.
Dewey himself warned about compartmentalization of modes of activity:
We undergo sensations as mechanical stimuli or as irritated stimulations, without having a sense of the reality that is in them and behind them – –. We see without feeling; we hear but only a second-hand report, second hand because not reënforced by vision. We touch, but the contact remains tangential because it does not fuse with qualities of senses that go below the surface. We use the senses to arouse passion but not to fulfi ll the interest of insight, not because that interest is not potentially present in the exercise of sense but because we yield to conditions of living that force sense to remain an excitation on the surface. Prestige goes to those who use their minds without participation of the body and who act vicariously through control of the bodies and labor of others. Under such conditions, sense and fl esh get a bad name.688
Also Willis challenges the distinction between cognition and the sensing “fl esh”
when writing:
The human use of objects and artefacts is not meant primarily (certainly not only) to signify meaning or information in a code to others, but is an immediate means of satisfaction and bodily fulfi lment, meaningful as pleasurable or satisfying in producing the fullest direct engagement with human needs and effecting the fullest expansion of human capacities and senses as bearing ultimately on the formation of a cultural identity.689
For instance, in African music the continuity between the biological, social and higher cognitive challenges can be seen as developed within the socially shared, ethical and bodily felt situation where the body is excited while dancing, and where the literally sweating “fl esh” fi nds other persons in the communal expression without undermining the cognitive and individual challenges of African music. By saying that the human body in that situation is simply “scanning acoustic waves for aural-contextual information”690 we seem to leave out something very humane and basic not only from the African musical experience but musical experience in general. We then abstract the subjectively and bodily felt and shared as well as generated social
687 Middleton 1986, 172. Also Jorgensen (1996) makes a distinction between pleasure and knowledge and seems to relate pleasure to vernacular musics and knowledge to classical music. There is a dialectical relationship between the two, however (ibid., 234).
688 Dewey 1934, 21.
689 Willis 2000, 20.
690 Elliott 1993, 75.
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situation into rules and cultural principles that can be traced to the brain that “plays”
with them.
Elliott is right in his pointing out that the Rylean action-disposition, where the criterion is “how well”, is important from the perspective of music education.
However, as a solemn view of why “music matters”, it seems to narrow the view rather than vice versa. Elliott focuses on the capacity of our consciousness to perform music under the guidance of context-specifi c rules but does not say much about the fi rst-person vertical experience or the social context of the event that conditions such an experience. Then, according to Velmans,
the study of mind and consciousness simply is the study of the rules and procedures people use when they think, solve problems, use language and so on, typically specifi ed in information processing or neural network terms691.
The study of musical consciousness is the study of musical rules. However, as Velmans argues, “[w]e are not just human doings, we are also human beings”692,
“thinking” is not the only thing that human do693. In this being, we are as much sensing organisms as cultured knowers. For instance, feelings as immediate meanings and as sensations (that make sense) are as much qualities of the things engaged (of natural sounds) as of the organism694.
On the other hand, if the aim of Elliott’s Dennettian eliminatism is only to point out that the vocabulary of theories of consciousness have been misleading and that the phenomenology-based theories might give a one-sided or even illusionary picture of how the human mind works, then the basic idea of starting from an acting system in its environment is a good basis for further examination695. Inclusion of the third-person perspective is necessary for the purpose of showing the socially-shared nature of experience. However, the main problem that I have tried to illustrate in this chapter remains. The perspective in Elliott’s philosophy of mind is pointing away from meanings in the world towards the individual brain that functions correctly
691 Velmans 2000, 73.
692 Ibid., 97, orig. italics.
693 See also, Bowman 2000a. Bowman (2000a) argues that Elliott’s theory of mind seems to have a tendency “to give a predominantly ‘rational’ spin to music cognition, favoring the reliability, orderliness, safety, security, and trustworthiness of masculine reason over the sensuous, embodied feminine” (ibid., 46).
694 See Chapter 2.3.3.
695 E.g., Ramberg (1999) claims that Dennett’s approach shares the pragmatist rhetorical,
“tactical” and “strategic” purposes in its attempt to change the focus of discussion.