We must love each other or die.—W. H. Auden.

The dangerous level of individuality in contemporary Western culture is informed by a presumption that the mind, self, and soul are internal to the central nervous system. This conception of an internal/external boundary has roots as far back as the early modern emergence of science (Berman 1989), the historical development of which has produced an increasingly bounded and self‐contained individual at odds with most forms of communal life (Cushman 1990). Happily, scientific and philosophical studies of mind are coming to view the human mind as embodied, enactive, encultured, interwoven with a social and technical web, and as a construction not limited to the boundaries of the individual organism (Wilson 2004). Originating a generation ago in the content externalism of Hilary Putnam (1975) and Tyler Burge (1986), that the semantic content of mental states is often dependent on factors external to the subject, the last decade has seen the emergence of a substantially stronger process or vehicle externalism, that the structures or mechanisms making various mental states possible may themselves extend beyond the skin (e.g., Hurley 1998; Clark and Chalmers 1998). Amongst the external structures that carry information relevant to completing an action, which can be operated upon to accomplish that action, certainly the commonest and most important of these is other human beings with whom we sustain ongoing and historical relationships.

The thesis of the present essay is that vehicle externalism can be rooted in a relational ontology of self, and a primary intersubjectivity, which have mutual and reciprocal implications for a number of religious themes. I have argued elsewhere that redemption must be social (Teske 2000). I believe that our redemption has its origination in our most intimate relationships, where we must swallow our projections in order to heal our real, living, reciprocal, and mutual relatedness. Conceptions of isolated individuality entail great risks in our projective attempts at symbolic completion destined not only to fail, but also to damage the real possibilities of loving interconnections with each other. The redemption that is tied to faith, hope, and love may be led astray when confused with need‐based understandings of our relationships, as it is caritas that may better lead to the development of faith in each other and our futures together, and our embedding in corporate (embodied), collective (enactive), and communal (relational) life.

Externalism

Externalism is, quite simply, the view that “the mind ain't in the head.” It asserts that the constitution of thoughts, beliefs, and desires often include, even require, states and processes external to our biological organism. That does not mean that the mind is locatable outside the individual's head as heads and also bodies are proper parts of a mind; these are mereological, part‐whole, relationships. It requires that a person is both embodied and immersed in the world. The “somatic marking” that may be central to our conscious experience (Damasio 1999), and our external interdependencies, both developmental and social, are only accomplished with functioning bodies. Mental phenomena are hybrids that couple events in the world to physical processes in the nervous system. According to Mark Rowlands (2003), this the most important development in the philosophy of mind in the latter half of the twentieth century. I will argue that for meaningful social, emotional, and cognitive lives, the most important of such couplings are those both within and between other people and ourselves.

Content externalism, or “taxonomic externalism,” put forth by Putnam (1975) and Burge (1986), turns on Brentano's Thesis, around before Freud, that mental events are essentially and nonreductively intentional, that is that they refer to or are “about” events outside themselves. The “demon” behind Cartesian dualism, the possibility that the mind could exist with only a demon to delude it, presupposes what Gregory McCulloch (2003) calls the “Demonic Dilemma,” an ontological distinction between mind and world, and between a self‐contained mind and a mindless world. But this leaves either a mind cut off from the world, leaving no account of how intentionality could come into being in the first place, or a mind without content or subjectivity. Either intentional properties are a sham, or there is nothing to which intentions can be directed. To ask “what is a mental representation?” is to ask what it is to be directed to the world; if it is merely the reliable causal effects of objects in the world, like marks on Locke's tabula rasa, then there is nothing to make it a mental representation. Locke “shuffles” between an understanding of an “impression” as a mark on a tablet, and as a kind of knowing something (Rorty 1979, 146); as if writing something on a chalkboard would mean that the chalkboard knows it. McCulloch argues that a brain in a vat, in a null environment, would have no intentionality. Or pace Wilson (2004) or Thompson (2007) that the vat, since it would have to duplicate many of the properties and processes of the body, including all of the external events to which its sensorimotor couplings would connect it, would constitute a surrogate body, bodily processes then still being part of the minimally sufficient conditions for consciousness. No body, no consciousness.

It is on similar bases that Putnam (1975), in his twin earth arguments, shows that the meaning of a mental representation depends on, is necessarily individuated by, the events in the world to which it refers. Imagine two identical people, in exactly the same physical state, including every detail of their nervous systems, both experiencing themselves as seeing a tree; one on a world in which there is a such a tree, the other on a twin earth identical to the first, short that one tree. One person is seeing a tree; his twin is hallucinating. Two mental states, seeing and hallucinating, are individuated not on the basis of anything going on inside the head or the nervous system. It is something in the world, not something in the head, which distinguishes between different intentional states such as memory, imagination, or even hallucination.

Phenomenological externalism, the next step, follows from the view that phenomenological content, the content of your experience, is in the mind. Combined with Putnam's moral, this entails that the mind is not just in the head. McCulloch (2003) argues that since phenomenology has to do with the subjective, and externalism with the objective, then the objective has to be invoked to understand the subjective; in short, that the subjective must be inclusive of the objective. There is a sense of this even in Jean‐Paul Sartre's assertion: “It is not true that … the union of soul and body is the contingent bringing together of two substances radically distinct. On the contrary, the very nature of the For‐itself [consciousness] demands that it be body” (1958, 309). So, there is a tight relation between I‐consciousness and being embodied. We also see this spelled out in more neurophysiologic detail in Damasio's“somatic marker” hypothesis (1994). From here, McCulloch argues for an epistemological distinction, that, while not incorrigible (contra Descartes), “… knowledge of the intentional is both radically distinct from and privileged with respect to scientific knowledge” (2003, 13).

Granting privileged status to the “intentional stance” (cf. Dennett 1987) has powerful repercussions for the human sciences, since as the historian R.G. Collingwood (1993) makes clear, we have to think ourselves into thinkers’ positions to understand their experience as, without doing so, their words, their beliefs, and their actions would be meaningless. One does not need to mimic a causal trajectory, but one does need to mimic the thinking to acquire knowledge of minds. Consistent with Collingwood's view of history is that of sociologists in the Verstehen tradition (Martin 2000), and even primate ethologists like Barbara Smuts (1985) have argued for the epistemic necessity of attention to individual, embodied, subjective points of view. One is reminded of Nagel's subjective definition of a conscious organism as “there is something it is like to be that organism” (1974, 435). While this may be quite unlike the physical sciences, other philosophers in the externalist tradition (Thompson 2007; Wilson 2004) argue that in a mature science of mind, first person phenomenological methods and objective scientific experimentation must be mutually informative, not merely in terms of correlations, say, between brain events and naive subjective experience, but in terms of the greater sensitivities and richer phenomenologies involved in more disciplined first‐person methods, like those of the contemplative traditions.

Vehicle externalism, or “location externalism,” takes a further step. In addition to denying the logical or semantic independence of the possession of mental properties from a world of objects, properties, or events external to the subject, vehicle externalism denies that even the mental particulars need be spatially located inside the skins of mental subjects. Rowlands (2003, 6) suggests that there is no principled reason for not supposing that as “… the structures and mechanisms that allow a creature to possess or undergo various mental states are often structures and mechanisms that extend beyond the skin of that creature,” so too the mental states themselves (cf. Rowlands 2009 for a more recent account of his position and his response to several objections). If externalism is true of the architecture that allows us to perceive, remember, reason, or use language, then it is true of the processes that the architecture implements. The external structures can be as likely to carry the information relevant to accomplishing a task, and to the extent that they are manipulated and transformed by the organism to accomplish those tasks, they can be said to be parts of the process. For example, a causal explanation of how you multiply multidigit numbers (or even add them) would have to include (for most of us) a pad of paper, and the little procedures like “carrying” that you have to do, to explain how the multiplication is accomplished, and to explain how you understand it. It requires those external components for a full explanation of what is going on. Why would manipulating an external structure be any different in principle than manipulating one that is attached to or incorporated within one's body?

Andy Clark (2003) asks how we answer the question “do you know what time it is?” in the context of contemporary culture. You say “sure,” and you look at your watch, one of the prototypic nonverbal movements of modern civilization (or even, these days, reaching into your pocket). You do not say “No, I don't know what time it is, but I am wearing a watch, so let me check it.” How is that different from hearing “Do you remember the first telephone number you ever had when you were a kid?” You do not say “No, but let me check my memory, and I’ll get back to you,” even though that is in effect what you do. It may take you a few seconds, or, as we age, even a few minutes before it “comes to you.”“Oh yeah, that was CEdar 6 – 1968.” But that is still “knowing it,” is part of what might be involved in retrieving a bit of knowledge or memory. But how is that different from consulting a journal for old memories, one of your own published papers for an argument, or your watch for the time? What if those memories required accessing chips that were implanted in your head, or even ones that were implanted somewhere else, or not implanted at all? What if they were in chips that you carried around in your pocket? Like the experience you might have of feeling “brain‐damaged” when your cell phone is not working. It is not “brain‐damage,” but it may be “mind‐damage.” Rowlands presents an evolutionary argument against developing genetically expensive encephalizations that might well have selective disadvantages to downloading them to the environment, as beavers do with dams, where the capacity to manipulate the environment obviates the necessity of internalizing it, whether initially adaptive or exaptive. This is true for external information bearing structures like the “optic array” in James J. Gibson's (1979)“ecological approach” to visual perception, where “information processing” begins with the manipulation of the optic array in active sampling. You do something like this when you are driving at night and your windshield is a little foggy; you can actually see better if you move your head back and forth a little bit, so you can better detect the invariants in the optic array. Wilson (2004) also cites examples from the socially distributed cognition of seafaring navigation, and the deictic coding of eye‐movements in animate vision, to the maxim of robotics, that the world is its own best model.

An externalist approach to mental events also includes a whole range of day‐to‐day external memory aids, from knotted strings, shopping lists, and marks on calendars, to books, and the whole panoply of symbolic artifacts in a literate culture. Memory for an argument might consist in the capacity to flip through a book, scan the relevant portions of each page, until one comes across the argument. I am reminded of a conversation with my brother, a Chicago lawyer. Sitting in his study where he has a whole wall of law books behind him, I am expressing proud amazement at what it means to “know the law.” He smiles and says, “I really don't know a whole lot more law than you do, but I know where to look it up, and you don’t.” His knowledge base is in how he interacts with a whole set of resources with which he has a long‐standing history. By the externalist view, there is no principled reason not to include that history, and those resources, as part of what you might attribute to his mind. Maybe this is the reason college professors spend so much time in book‐lined rooms.

The manipulation and exploitation of information‐bearing structures is also likely to have been important in the historical development of some of the abilities that they make possible, as in code memorization, or the development of capacities for reading and writing. There is a huge difference in how our brains are shaped, and how we interact with the world, and how we use this important set of external memory structures. I could not be giving a talk if I did not have some text in front of me. Students think we are so smart, but we have the notes in front of us, to which they do not always have access, though they may dimly know that much reading and preparation might have gone into their preparation. Indeed, as documented by Luria (1976) and Vygotsky (1978), many of our higher cognitive functions have been socially scaffolded in ways that are contingent on historical changes in social life and organization. We think of our higher cognitive functions as being produced by the basic equipment of the brain, but there are historical developments, learned through socialization, which are also necessary to make them possible. We are evolved to have remarkably plastic brains, which are what makes us historical beings, including substantial changes in how our brains are shaped developmentally to do what we so take for granted as part of intellectual functioning.

I am regularly critical of my colleagues in psychology as being duly concerned with cognitive and emotional development, and to have improved in the last decades in their attention to its evolutionary roots, but then to have forgotten that they are missing the important developments of the millennia of human history. Such history is valuable precisely because we have evolved such neuroplasticity, and the long period of childhood dependency necessary for making use of it, which allows us to be the historical beings we are. We probably have a lot of the higher mental processes of which we make so much, including linguistic ones and many of the social practices and social constructions they make possible, because we are the sort of historical beings we are. Such abilities have been so shaped by the symbolically rich environment around us that we cannot make a principled separation between our ability to remember and our ability to exploit ambient information, from the formalisms that reduce complicated arithmetic calculations to an iterated set of simpler steps, to the use of technological artifacts which we find increasingly indispensable for the performance of a task. When I say, “I have to balance my checkbook; where's my calculator?” am I just punching buttons in a particular rule‐governed order? Is my calculator actually doing the addition and subtraction? No, I am doing it with my calculator. My brain is not doing the addition and subtraction, but I am. The mental actions that I attribute to my mind certainly require a brain, in all sorts of interesting and complicated ways, but are not limited to it. The brain is a proper part of the mind, but it is not even physically and causally all that the mind includes. To the extent to which the cognitive burden is distributed, so too is the epistemic credit. Wilson (2004) calls this “wide computationalism.”

Just as literacy can substantially reduce our internal memory load, so too can a series of external supports provide for substantially reduced dysfunction in Alzheimer's patients. A study in St. Louis (Edwards, Baum, and Morrow‐Howell 1994), showed a set of patients, who performed rather poorly on standard psychological tests, living alone and functioning quite adequately with homes stuffed full of cognitive prostheses, like message centers about what to do and when, memory books to record events, and even labels and pictures on doors. When I put a white‐board next to my study door, and learn to regularly check for what I should not forget as I leave for a meeting, I am offloading memory support, even if I still harbor the illusion that I do not really need it. Why are our uses of pens, notepads, and even perceptual prostheses like eyeglasses any different, however they might be taken for granted as external components of cognitive function? When external aids improve memory in the same way as do on‐board internalizations, are we not entitled to take credit for so remembering?

Merlin Donald (2001) has suggested that human cognitive evolution has reached the stage of the externalization of memory, a stage just as important as the development of language. Mimesis and language, although themselves coevolved with culture (cf. Deacon 1998), still depend on the internal memory capacity of individuals. Biological memory is impermanent, its medium is fixed, and its format is constrained. The emergence of literacy, and other skills involving symbioses with symbolic external storage, allows memory to be externalized in ways that are enduring, refinable, and even capable of reformatting. You have probably noticed this yourself, when you keep a journal, or write messages for friends, that once something is written down it becomes more objective, external. When you say something, you have some level of plausible deniability: “You didn't hear me,” or “you misunderstood what I said.” When you write something down, you cannot deny it. We grade students on what they write, not what they think, though they may later tell us that the answer they did not write is really what they were thinking all along. External storage also, via the use of a spatialized external information space, allows us to harness vision for reflective thought, to change the part of the brain used for thinking, to interrelate information and images in novel ways. It makes it possible to develop new cognitive strategies that are socially organized and can be institutionalized to survive the replacement of member individuals. External storage thus makes possible an even more thorough invasion and use of the brain by cultural programming, especially institutionalized education, the development and elaboration of new devices (from wax tablets to manipulable computer imaging systems), and new visual symbolic codes. This may change the role of biological memory to be more symbiotic with cultural artifacts, and increase demands on certain areas of the brain that, given its neuroplasticity, can expand their territory at the expense of other functions (e.g., the loss of rote verbal memory skills and visual imagination that may come with literacy).

In Natural‐Born Cyborgs (2003), Andy Clark argues that we have been human‐technology symbionts since at least the invention of words, and that what is distinctive about our long developmental dependency and our neuroplasticity is precisely our ability “… to enter into deep and complex relationships with nonbiological constraints, props and aides” (p. 5). Pens, paper, wristwatches, scratchpads, notebooks, calculators, cell phones, and internet access are just the current and newest layer of our extended cognitive systems, expansions of our consciousness by temporal extension, scaffolding, embodiment, and embedding (Wilson 2004). Certainly offloading computation to calculators, memory to written text, or temporal orientation to clocks can and has altered our brains historically and developmentally. It is an illusion to believe that the normal understanding of mind and person is limited to the boundary of our skin, as “our sense of self, place, and potential are all malleable constructs ready to expand, change, or contract at surprisingly short notice” (Clark 2003, 33). In addition to more exotic phenomena, like induced “out‐of‐body” experiences (Metzinger 2009), or the experiences of patients with prosthetic limbs (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 1998), are the experiences we all have with our favorite motorized prosthetic, the automobile. When someone “bumps into you” you do not experience it as someone bumping into the plastic and metal device inside of which you happen to be located, but feel it as a violation of your personal space, even as assault, or worse (as in the violation I felt as I watched two men breaking into my car, parked in front of my house). This should be obvious to anyone who has wondered about the ownership of a benumbed arm upon awaking, or whose rear end knocked something off a bookshelf. As these boundaries of our subjective sense of ourselves can both expand and contract, so our “minds” may also expand and contract. We are as much made up of the social and technological matrix in which we exist as organisms as by the neural events, conscious and unconscious, which occur inside our skin.

Theology: Our Predicament and Our Hope

In what space I have remaining, I can only sketch what I have detailed elsewhere (Teske 2008). But I want to say a few things about theological hopes and the movement from I to We that is entailed by the relational externalism of mind outlined so far. Phillip Cary's paper here (Cary 2011) and his work elsewhere (2000) provides the necessary historical overview, but I want to say something about the directions in which our communality and relationality may give us hope for some kind of redemption. Externalism denies redemptive value to a private, interior, individual relationship to the sacred and, in effect, codes redemption as necessarily better understood as being bound to our relationships with other people and with a larger communal world. While the history, from Augustine and Aquinas through Locke's camera obscura, which Phillip Cary addressed, provides the deeper background, there are also contemporary theological resources for an externalist view, or for using this view theologically. These would include Barth's (1958) idea that the imago dei exists in relationship itself, and cannot be isolated from our embodiment, of Karl Rahner's (1978) anti‐Platonist view of persons as wedded to the world, and of Stanley Grenz's Social God and the Relational Self (2001).

From I to We

I am always amazed at the sad sacralization of our ideas of individuality, which we believe even to be present in our ideas of an afterlife and its meaning. There is an example I love to use. In making a gazpacho, a kind of cold vegetable soup, one of the ingredients I always add is a few carrots, always chopped very fine, or even pureed as part of the very special, very cooling taste of this soup on your tongue. Imagine that you are a carrot, and you love being a carrot, and it is a wonderful, good thing. But you contribute your carrotness to a fine, delicious gazpacho that is, in some sense, the meaning of your existence as a carrot. Yet, somehow, in many forms of contemporary religious ideation, which is really not good enough, and it really does not mean anything, unless you somehow get to be a carrot again. I think I’d rather be part of the gazpacho.

The present essay has been an attempt to map out how the toxicity of contemporary individuality, rooted in the Augustine's inward turn, bounded in its dark interior room, and corrosive to communal life, can be recoupled to the external world, understood as relational, and meaningful only by virtue of our communal life. It helps if one can understand the mind as relational, rather than just the proper parts of the brain and what is inside the head, meaningful only in virtue of the things it is a part of. It is my view, and it is a déjà vu, that our redemption comes, and perhaps can only come, in particular, one‐to‐one, close, intimate, and loving relationships, even and perhaps inevitably, as mortal, embodied beings, unto suffering and death, as we are also redeemed. We do save each other, we can and must save each other, in imago dei, as the only path we have to any kind of escatological communion.

The present argument from externalism presses us to take the idea of being wedded to the world, literally of one flesh with it, ever more seriously. We are not only cyborg selves, incorporating our technologies, particularly extensive informational technologies, into our empirical self‐experience, but, in the extensive exteriorization of higher cognitive abilities, and even memory, we are truly symbionts with a symbolic material culture. Moreover, in the ways in which our memories, and the externalizations of them, can be involved in the highest levels, not only of cognition but of empathy, inclusive of our histories and our stories, our marriage with the world is also a marriage to time, it is diachronic. Preeminent amongst the externalities from which our selves are composed are our relationships with other human beings, particularly those with whom we have deep and lengthy, even life‐long, intimacies. This is the way that one person comes to “know” another, no longer strangers, though there is always more to learn. As with Gabriel Marcel (1951), what is more important is not “I think,” but “we are,” as knowledge is intersubjective; we know by knowing each other.

What externalism entails is that we are, even physically and materially, not limited to the boundaries of our skin. What we are about is outside ourselves, is other. What we are even as individual selves, is not an internal space, connected to other such spaces, but that we are quite literally, and externally, composed of each other. We are one flesh, immersed in the world and married to the world, we are of one flesh with it as we are one flesh with each other; not in ourselves but in each other do we live and move and have our being. As minds and selves, we are embodied, enacted, encultured, and embedded within each other, our bodies, in living community. Given a primary intersubjectivity, a relational ontology of self, our selves are developed and enacted only in empathic, and hence bodily, coupling. Our contemporary culture of indirect, distant, electronic communication, however available, can too easily attenuate our mimetic, face‐to‐face, and embodied empathies, which need the regular renewal that can only come via these engagements (cf. Teske 2002).

Our bodily attachment, the bonding with each other that can produce communal life, is a product of our commonality of affective experience, rooted in our biology, as well as in the developmental shaping that makes cultural differences so difficult to overcome, and historical changes in it possible. Love is the positive form, shame an affect that produces the boundaries of individual isolation. Donald Nathanson (1992, 243 ff.) suggests that our expectations of love are built around the reduction of negative affect and the relief of needs in childhood. Love is built out of a cumulative memory of scenes that combine urgent need and the solace of relief, the scripts that we call love in adult life. Loneliness and redemption are paired experiences, the magnification of which can be seen in the relief of lovers’“at last I have found you.” Pride expands the boundaries of self, but shame guards them. As we see ourselves, or parts of ourselves, as defective, so we can cast another who sees us that way, and we develop a catalog of such experiences over a lifetime. Shame always haunts love, as the more we long for communion the more we are vulnerable to the shaming augmentation of its attenuators. Love always involves the risk of pain, intimacy validating, but its impediments injuring, our experience of self. Shame is what modulates those affects that lead us to be social, communal, as we develop strategies to protect ourselves by withholding interest or remaining isolated. Vulnerability to pain and shame is the cost of being unarmored, the cost of being open to loving. Such emotional dynamics are central to our relationality; our religious yearnings are deeply driven by them. We have each felt the difference between communities in which one feels the power of the communion of positive emotions and ones in which shame and judgment predominate. The abject isolation of social shame is mitigated only by loving communion, and its redemption of disgrace, of exile, of feeling forsaken (Teske 2007).

In our hopes for loving, communal ends we defeat the barriers of shame, not by ignoring them or pretending they are not there, but by looking them square in the face, and seeing the differences between the limitations of our mortal, embodied state, and the limitations incurred by the isolating boundaries of shame. An intersubjectively externalist view of mind, self, and relationship is one of the ways to help understand and undercut historical views that have contributed to constructing and reinforcing these isolating boundaries. But it is in religious imagination that we can project new futures for ourselves, of what it might mean to think about ourselves, our relationships, and our communities differently, and why it might matter deeply to do so (cf. Laurenson 2007, 815). We still face injustice; we still feel the alienation of one tribe from another, of hatred and warfare, of the isolation and separation of our loneliness, and of the ecological degradation of our planet. What an intersubjective externalism can help us see, is how we are parts of each other, members of a communal body, and coupled with, wed to the world, of one flesh with it (Rahner 1978). What it may take a religious imagination to see is how, in redeeming each other, and our broken world, we redeem ourselves.

Note

A version of this article was presented at the annual conference of The Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS), on The Mythic Reality of the Autonomous Individual, held at the Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, NY, USA, June 20–27, 2009.

An extended version of this article was presented at “Subject, Self, and Soul: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Personhood,” 13–17 July 2008, in Madrid, Spain, and was an invited publication in: Transdisciplinarity in Science and Theology, Vol. 4, ed. Eric Weislogel. Bucharest, Romania: Curtea Veche, 2008, pp. 311–338.