What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties…how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god!

….And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?

Hamlet II.ii, Shakespeare (c.1600)

God has not given me half as much intuition as I constantly require!

Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow (1959)

Hamlet blames himself for his disappointment. Henderson blames God. Both are unhappy with the gap they perceive between the kind of mental powers they can imagine and what they've got. The recurrent failure of reflective people to attain what they consider satisfying knowledge suggests that skepticism is neither accidental nor occasional. A pessimist might well notice that the brain's way of constructing its knowledge invites the inference of its inadequacy. As the studies in this book show, Hamlet and Henderson are not alone: people often notice that they don’t have reliable access to the godlike knowledge they can nevertheless imagine. Philosophy, literature, and art repeatedly rediscover skepticism. At the same time, however, the very brain structure that allows the emergence of skepticism also underwrites an almost infinite potential for responsive growth. We are fit not only to survive in a complex environment but also to learn from it, to change it, and even, occasionally, to enjoy it. An optimist, thus, or an artist, might detect at least the possibility of satisfaction.

One way to think about skepticism is as a brain state, like joy, or like knowing geometry; it is produced by the dynamic interaction among bodily structures and the world outside the body. If, however, the mind/ brain is a construct of the interactions of the body and its nervous system within its environment, skepticism cannot be an entirely intellectual assessment of an imperfect world, since there just isn’t any such thing as "an entirely intellectual assessment." We cannot enforce the separation. Socrates was wrong, in the Phaedo, to assert that "we make the nearest approach to knowledge when we have the least possible intercourse or association with the body, and do not suffer the contagion of the bodily nature." (Jowett, trans., Vol 1:115) Somehow, we do have knowledge anyway. But how? Philosophers who are disenchanted, for a host of reasons, with the Socratic-Cartesian dualism of mind and body, and cognitive scientists interested in how human consciousness emerges from its fleshly embodiment, can be found, thus, in a conversation which Patricia Churchland called "neurophilosophy," and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson described as "philosophy in the flesh."[1] Johnson (1987) asserted the basic, and by now uncontroversial, claim clearly: "Our reality is shaped by the patterns of our bodily movement, the contours of our spatial and temporal orientation, and the forms of our interactions with objects." (xix) In their 1991 book, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch cite Maurice Merleau-Ponty as the source of their inspiration. For the French phenomenologist, "embodiment...encompasses both the body as lived, experiential structure and the body as the context or milieu of cognitive mechanisms." (xvi) For the philosopher, Andy Clark, experiments in artificial intelligence and robotics have been decisive. He concludes that "brain, body, world, and artifact are discovered locked together in the most complex of conspiracies. And mind and action are revealed in intimate embrace." (1997:33)

A new description of the relationship between bodily constraint and human knowledge and freedom is thus emerging, if not entirely gracefully. The issues have not been easy. Massive reconceptualization and redefintion is occuring, and terminology is everywhere being negotiated. Although many of the participants would be surprised at the confluence, what is happening is what literary theorists understood Nietzsche to have initiated: the necessary deconstruction of binary terms that have long anchored scholarly research and discussion. Not only the opposition between mind and body must be refigured, but also the distinctions between freedom and constraint, between culture and nature, between innate and learned, between given and constructed, even between genotype (traditionally, causes) and phenotype (traditionally, effects). This last is argued by the biophysicist, Robert Rosen, who insists that relationality is the crucial ingredient of biological systems. Genotypes can not be said to determine phenotypes the way physical forces were once thought to produce physical phenomena because the two are related on a continuum:

Unfortunately, if perhaps, inevitably, just as this theoretical convergence among philosophers, scientists, social scientists, and humanists is emerging, an old but newly rancorous anger has been reawakened among the disciplines involved; because some of the cognitive work has either given the impression or actually argued that accepting the embodiment of mind entails accepting a kind of mental and behavioral determinism, many humanists have found it nothing less than scandalous.[2] It is my assumption here, as it was in my 1993 study, Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation and the Modular Mind, that the architecture of the embodied mind itself provides the possibility of the mind’s freedom, as well as of its constraint. The identification of body and mind does not entail any more or any less determinism than does living in one culture rather than another. What we are, apparently, determined to do, is to produce culture, and culture lets us control nature.

There isn’t much point in going into the details of these argments here, not only because they have been argued elsewhere at length, but also because even as I write the final version of this chapter in the summer of 2000, we find ourselves in the "post-genome sequencing era," in which all of these arguments will be recalled and retooled. But Daniel Dennett’s conclusion may stand, for now, as a convincing opening response to humanist concerns. Dennett argues that the interactions of different aspects of "body" — are infinitely complex, and further, are so entangled with cultural formations, that the claims of those who would portray human nature in the grips of biological determinism are vastly oversimplified. The important point is that our freedom is cultural: "human behavior is largely determined by culture, an autonomous system of symbols and values, growing from a biological base, but growing indefintiely away from it." The evolved cultures of human groups are "able to overpower or escape biological constraints in most regards." (1995:491)

Here, then is the meeting point between the new cognitive science and the interests of cultural studies in the construction of ideologies and social selves. The conversation can resume, with literary and cultural historians and theorists interested in asking the same fundamental questions as the neurophilosophers and analysts of the embodied mind across the disciplines. Literary and cultural scholars, however, will immediately want to challenge Dennett to show that culture itself does not constrain human freedom just as fully as genes were once thought to. In spite of the recognition of the importance of environments (from the next gene on the chromosome to the world outside the individual body), in cognitive studies, cultural historians are rightly uncomfortable with the almost total neglect of the issues of agency of cultural systems within the "intimate embrace" Clark describes. Who embraces and who is embraced? Our part in the symposium will be to investigate how the creativity manifest in a Shakespearean play or a Caravaggio painting is entangled in a conspiracy not with the world as a set of perceptible objects that are simply "out there", but with a culturally constructed world.

For example, children growing up in late 16^th century England — if they learned to read at all — learned from books without pictures. Those children’s brains were simply not the same as the brain of the child who learned to read in Italy at the same time, and also different from the brain of a rural English child who was not taught to read at all. The difference was not caused by the natural surroundings but by the social and ideological structures of the society, specifically by a highly contentious Protestant iconoclasm. The contribution of the literary and cultural historians to the project of understanding the embodied brain will be to keep a sustained focus on the structures and detail of that external world in which the brain constructs itself, and the way the individual negotiates the demands of its local cultural world.

This book is an attempt to do just that. Mary Crane has begun the work in her exemplary Shakespeare’s Brain (Princeton, 2000), discussing how the web of culture and body together contribute to subject formation in Shakespeare’s plays. Here I have tried to expand the notion of culture by examining not only texts, but also an exemplary set of paintings, in an effort to chart the creative interaction of the mind in its body with some of the ongoing epistemological dilemmas of the early modern period, specifically with versions of mind/body skepticism. They suggest that in the period just before Descartes the entanglements of brain, body, and culture, were felt by some to be a sickening disappointment. Yet for others, during the same period, they produced a benign satisfaction. Skepticism, always a possibility, was, then, as I will claim, a particular threat to social stability. Some kinds of cultural structures — such as debates over the Eucharist — seem to have provoked the brain to recognize its own gappiness, others, such as pastoral paintings, calmed or distracted it.

These chapters test an earlier claim (Spolsky, 1993) that although the human brain is dependent on categorizations, inferences, and analogies that are normally, even systematically ambiguous, that same brain’s recombinatory power and the pressures to fill in gaps between representations in different modalities, evoke an infinite variety of responses. I will argue that the works of art themselves are the evidence that the very gappiness of the brain’s architecture, combined with its generative power to seek out and build new connections, thus recombining and realigning, is the human mind's greatest success. It is a success that more than compensates for the inability to achieve what Western metaphysics it has traditionally conceived of as ideal and permanent truth. The theoretically infinite number of creative possibilities, however, will in practice be channeled and restricted by the cultural surround, although those restrictions are themselves often negotiable. In this book I am particularly interested in the way genres of pictures and texts both enable and channel form and meaning. While the artistic responses that in fact appear at any time take the specific forms they do from the genre possibilities available in the local context, it is crucial to note that those genres are also always open for revision, expansion and recombination. The genre possibilities in the early modern period, including a revivified pastoral and the newly contrived tragicomedy, were apparently exploited in ways that let us understand the pictures, poems and plays discussed here not only as themselves evidence of past skepticism, but also as ways of satisfying it.

The claim that art satisfies is of course a truism. But the assumption here is rather more complex. I am testing the claim that by considering the embodied brain within a specific cultural world — early modern Europe — as a brain whose evolved structure inclines it to discover skepticism, our understanding of the satisfaction art provides can be understood not only as a kind of knowledge needed in a specific situation, but also as a kind of knowledge just as necessary and satisfying as the knowledge of how to find food. In other words, embedded in the historical study, I find shards that allow us to understand some human universals about brains and art and knowledge and skepticism. Here are some preliminary versions of the universals these studies more or less implicitly defend: (this is all part of the necessary negotiation about terms) 1) knowledge isn’t only abstract. 2) Bodies have knowledge but never have enough. 3) Works of art — especially those that have been popular, but not necessarily only those considered high culture — are part of the dynamic by which a culture keeps its balance, or finds a new stability, in the face of the more or less permanent stream of threats and crises that are the human condition. A work of art can, now and then, supply just that knowledge needed by minds and bodies.

The texts and pictures I will be considering here were produced over roughly a century — say, from Polidoro's "Doubting Thomas" of 1531, a year before Henry VIII's break with Rome, through Shakespeare's plays, and up to Jan van Goyen's sea and cityscapes of the 1640s, painted shortly after the publication of Descartes' Discours de la méthode in 1637. Taken together, they exhibit a variety of ways in which the cultural work of a historical period of deep distress in early modern Europe offered a measure of satisfaction to its audiences. I consider their testimony to be skeptical in that they all suggest or at least surmise the insufficiency or incompleteness of knowledge. Yet they were also satisfying. The tragedies satisfied, as Aristotle knew, by providing a necessary knowledge even if that knowledge confirmed the skeptic’s worst fears about the world’s malignity. The pastorals satisfied quite differently; knowledge, in that genre, is often a present-tense, physical experience of relief from the disappointingly incomplete world of abstractions. I will argue that during these years various forms of pastoral provided a bodily consolation for mortality — a physical comfort. Not at all unlike the theological doctrine of the Incarnation, the pastoral response was as popular, indeed as ubiquitous as it was in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries because the pain to which it responded was a bodily pain - an embodied skepticism engendered by the religious crisis of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.[3] In all the studies here, the quest for satisfaction is a struggle with and a response to the question: can I know what I need to know?

My title, SATISFYING SKEPTICISM, then, is chosen to argue against the inevitability of a tragic interpretation of the conditions of human knowing. I suggest we read the evidence of complex cultural texts as demonstrating that the benefits derived from human creativity are more than adequate compensation for the satisfactions it might be imagined an idealized knowing would provide. Our potential for originality and reinvention is itself the basis not only of our survival in a constantly changing world, but also of our satisfaction, such as it is. This adaptability is arguably the single most important component of human success; if the species has survived it is because it is evolved for flexible responsiveness. However, once humans had evolved sufficient consciousness to be skeptical, had they not developed compensatory satisfactions, they would have been in danger of extinction by mass melancholy.

[1] These were the titles of their books: Churchland, 1986, and Lakoff and Johnson, 1999. Núñez and Freeman (1999) with a rich bibliography and Bateson and Martin (1999), a popular treatment discussion, continue the argument for embodiment.
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[2] As early as B.F. Skinner's 1971 Beyond Freedom and Dignity, and as recently as Thornhill and Palmer's A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (2000).
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[3] The notion of the Reformation here is scandalously generalized, but sufficient, I hope, to my purposes. Martin Jones' (1995) is presumably right to argue that Lutheranism itself did not produce the widespread skepticism I refer to, the phenomenon and its attendant anxiety only becoming widespread when it became clear that the parties involved had given up on reconciliation.
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