Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine. …The cat walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high. —Mkgnao! … Mr Bloom watched curiously, kindly, the lithe black form.                     JAMES JOYCE, ULYSSES Human beings, unlike all the other animals, hate animal bodies, especially their own. Not all human beings, not all the time. Leopold Bloom, pleased by the taste of urine, and, later, by the smell of his own shit rising up to his nostrils in the outhouse (“He read on, pleased by his own rising smell”), is a rare and significant exception, to whom I shall return. But most people’s daily lives are dominated by arts of concealing embodiment and its signs. The first of those disguises is, of course, clothing. But also deodorant, mouthwash, nose-hair clipping, waxing, perfume, dieting, cosmetic surgery — the list goes on and on. In 1732, in his poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” Jonathan Swift imagines a lover who believes his beloved to be some sort of angelic sprite, above mere bodily things. Now he is allowed into her empty boudoir. There he discovers all sorts of disgusting remnants: sweaty laundry; combs containing “A paste of composition rare, Sweat, dandruff, powder, lead, and hair”; a basin containing “the scrapings of her teeth and gums”; towels soiled with dirt, sweat, and earwax; snotty handkerchiefs; stockings exuding the perfume of “stinking toes”; tweezers to remove chin-hairs; and at last underwear bearing the unmistakable marks and smells of excrement. “Disgusted Strephon stole away/Repeating in his amorous fits,/Oh! Celia, Ceila, Celia shits!” And, to continue with Swift, there was poor Gulliver. The beautiful and clean horse-like Houyhnhms believe that Gulliver’s clothes are him, and that he is as clean as they are — until they realize one day that the clothes come off, and beneath them he is just another smelly Yahoo. Returning to his home, Gulliver is henceforth unable to tolerate the physical presence of his wife and family. How crazy this seems, when presented in fiction. One cannot imagine sensible elephants or horses or dolphins shunning others of their kind on discovering that they are, respectively, elephants, horses, and dolphins, with the bodies appropriate for each. And yet — although Swift is an extreme case — this disgust with the body, this anti-corporeal campaign, is a part of the daily lives of most of us, and it is deeply embedded in Western culture and intellectual life. (Not only Western, but that is what I know something about.) Consider the elaborate flight stratagem of Western metaphysics, where body-hatred reigned supreme (though not uncontested) for about two millennia. One might have thought that the obvious theoretical position was in the vicinity of Aristotle’s: we are animate bodies, and the soul is the living organization of our matter. And yet what amazing contortions others, and even Aristotle himself, have gone through to deny the idea that we are essentially enmattered. To hate the body, it helps to imagine its opposite. It turns out that the incorporeal was a concept that took a very long time to be invented. Homer says that Achilles’ anger “cast many strong souls into Hades, and left the men themselves to be prey for dogs and a feast to birds.” So the body is the person; and even the psuchê is clearly something physical, albeit insubstantial and needing to drink blood in Hades in order to regain its wits. So when did Western philosophy come up with the idea that there is something about us that is totally incorporeal, and that we essentially are that immaterial super-something? I pause to celebrate a paradigm of classical scholarship, Robert Renahan’s essay, from 1980, “On the Greek Origins of the Concepts Incorporeality and Immateriality.” Renahan begins by observing that more or less all previous scholars take the concept of incorporeality as obvious and therefore assume that the Greeks found it obvious, too.