Wordsworth, Keats and Cognitive Spaces of Empathy in Endymion

Eighteenth-century medicine provided an anatomical basis for the belief that our skin is not a barrier against but a channel to the feelings of others. Mutual adoption of the term ‘sympathy’ in medicine and moral philosophy exceeds metaphor to speak to the way Enlightenment and Romantic-era culture understood the body’s openness to external influence. While Romantic writers conceived of reading as an embodied social interaction between writer and reader, contrasting sentiments surfaced between those who celebrated the possibility for radical interconnectedness and those who feared the vulnerability of a penetrable self. William Wordsworth and John Keats experimented with poetic form to find how best to manage a reader’s engagement with the text and thereby shape their sympathetic faculties. Examining acts of reading in Wordsworth’s Prelude and Keats’s Endymion, I apply Giovanna Colombetti’s work on enacted spaces of empathy to show how Keats’s theory of feeling challenges Wordsworth’s and goes beyond Enlightenment models available to them to envision a more revolutionary model of social cognition. For Keats, poetry enacts a co-emergence of aesthetic experience where cognition and composition seem to occur between acts of writing and reading at the site of text.

Barthold Heinrich Brockes and Distributed Cognition: The Delicate Flux of World and Spirit

This chapter discusses Barthold Heinrich Brockes, a prolific German poet of the eighteenth-century, as a precursor of theories of distributed cognition. It argues that developments in anti-dualist and radical Protestant thought around 1700, together with Brockes’ own commitment to the ‘mixed-science’ of physico-theology, cause his poetry to resonate with modern approaches to cognition. Through close readings of individual poems from the collection Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott, the chapter examines Brockes’ presentation of the flux between mind, body and world, and of the productive use which, through what we might call ‘epistemic engineering’, humankind can make of its environment. It also remarks on the compatibility of this religious work, geared towards the celebration of God, with modern, essentially secular understandings of our world.

Eighteenth-Century Antiquity: Extended, Embodied, Enacted

Sir William Hamilton’s Greek vase collection, assembled at Naples between the 1760s and 1790s, became a turning point in the reception of ancient material culture and hence in perceptions of classical antiquity. This chapter compares three angles of approach to the collection, each corresponding to a strand of distributed cognition. Extended cognition is represented by the catalogue which made the collection available to the reading public; embodied cognition is represented by the dance performances of Emma Hamilton, Sir William’s wife, who based her tableaux vivants of ancient life around the images represented on the vases; and enactive cognition by the aesthetic theory of the ‘feeling imagination’ developed by philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who visited the Hamiltons at Naples and commented unfavourably on Emma’s performances. I argue that Herder’s rejection of Emma’s kinetic reception of ancient artwork was predicated in part on his reluctance to place physical limitations on simulated movement.

Blake and the Mark of the Cognitive: Notes Towards the Appearance of the Sceptical Subject

This essay seeks to understand the implications of the distribution of cognition across the arbitrary boundary of skull and skin into the environment so that cognition can be partly offloaded onto the environment, and in so doing, open up new areas of inquiry for distributed cognition such as subject/object relations and scepticism. It reframes William Blake’s ‘London’ so that we can look afresh at his speaker. Blake’s blurring of where inputs and outputs begin and end make him an ideal candidate for such an inquiry, and he highlights the stiff price to be paid for all this cognitive efficiency: the inability to distinguish between affordances and ideology.

The Literary Designer Environments of Eighteenth-Century Jesuit Poetics

This chapter revisits earlier accounts of distributed cognition in cultural environments and practices. It extends the notion of designer environment (i.e. spatial and procedural arrangements that amplify and scaffold cognition) beyond the usual focus on problem-solving and the task at hand. For outlining the complex capacities that come into play with the linguistic, cultural and literary contexts of literary designer environment, it draws on the critical and literary writings developed by Jesuits in eighteenth-century France. In particular, these literary designer environments enable fictional extensions of thought where immersive experience and abstract reflection can be combined. The article discusses individual literary texts and the larger intertextual net of literature in terms of the designer environment and suggests to broaden the perspectives from distributed cognition, the cognitive niche and scaffolded learning to include these.

Embodied Cognition in Berkeley and Kant: The Body’s Own Space

Berkeley and Kant are known for having developed philosophical critiques of materialism, critiques which lead them to propose instead an epistemology based on the coherence of our mental representations. For all that the two had in common, however, Kant was adamant in distinguishing his own ‘transcendental idealism’ from the immaterialist consequences entailed by Berkeley’s account. In this essay I return to their respective theories of spatial intuition, since it is by paying attention to Berkeley’s account of space that we discover a surprising account of embodied cognition, of spatial distance and size that can only be known by way of the body’s motion and touch. More striking than this, is the manner in which Kant’s approach to the problem of incongruent counterparts also relies on a proprioceptive cognition. Thus while cognition theorists today have recognized that certain challenges faced by perception and cognition can only be resolved by way of an appeal to the facts of embodiment, my aim in this essay is to show that such recourse is not new.

Distributed Cognition and the Humanities

The general introduction, which is replicated across all four volumes, aims to orientate readers unfamiliar with this area of research. It provides an overview of the different approaches within the distributed cognition framework and discussion of the value of a distributed cognitive approach to the humanities. A distributed cognitive approach recognises that cognition is brain, body and world based. Distributed cognition is a methodological approach and a way of understanding the actual nature of cognition. The first section provides an overview of the various competing and sometimes conflicting theories that make up the distributed cognition framework and which are also collectively known as 4E cognition: embodied, embedded, extended and enactive cognition. The second section examines the ways in which humanities topics and methodologies are compatible with, placed in question or revitalised by new insights from philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences on the distributed nature of cognition, and considers what the arts and humanities, in turn, offer to philosophy and cognitive science.

Enacting the Absolute: Subject-Object Relations in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Theory of Knowledge

This chapter examines Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Theory of Life’ (1816/1848) and his theory of knowledge, discussed in Biographia Literaria (1817), through the lens of autopoietic enaction. It focuses on parallels between historical and contemporary theories, particularly their philosophical underpinnings, and argues that Coleridge’s theories are an important alternative to Cartesian accounts of the mind. Interrogating these theories in terms of enactive concepts, such as structural coupling, dynamic co-emergence, and mutual co-dependence, exposes the inherent embodied, embedded, and enacted premises on which Coleridge’s theory of cognition relies. The relationship between the subject and the object implicit in dualist and materialist theories reveals the effects assumptions about this relationship have on the way human beings understand themselves in relationship to nature and their own bodies – effects that are frequently inimical. The chapter concludes that Coleridge and the enactive approach offer valuable options for overcoming the schism between consciousness and nature, mind and world.

Is Laurence Sterne’s Protagonist Tristram Shandy Embodied, Enacted or Extended?

This chapter explores the ways in which Sterne in Tristram Shandy may have anticipatedaspects of the concepts of 4E cognition. It sets Sterne into his historical-philosophic milieu, especially in the dualist traditions of Locke and Hume, and seeks to understand how Sterne’s narrative and its protagonist are living systems embodying cognitive worlds. Autopoiesis, the term used to describe systems capable of maintaining and reproducing themselves, is shown to be applicable to Sterne’s creation of a protagonist who cannot figure out who he is or how he got to be where he is. The chapter particularly emphasizes the runaway digressive loops driving Tristram’s cognitive mindset and demonstrates how the continual perturbations he experiences whenever he tries to get outside his own head disturb his self-organization. It shows that when Tristram aims to traverse the autopoietic borders he has set for himself, as he often does, he becomes progressively disturbed.

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a background to current research in Enlightenment and Romantic studies on topics related to distributed cognition. The first section of this introductory chapter by George Rousseau reflects on current research in Enlightenment and Romantic studies on topics related to distributed cognition, while the second section by Miranda Anderson considers how the various chapters in this volume advance work in this area. The thought-world of the long eighteenth century involves notions of flux between mind, body and world, mind-life and subject-object structural couplings, sympathetic circulations, mind metamorphoses and manacles, and texts, performances and artefacts as cognitive aids or modes of access to other minds and past phenomenologies.