Detailed attention to the quality of our living, spontaneous, bodily reactions is unusual. In modern times, we have grown up much more with the idea of "putting theories into practice," with the idea that certain academic and intellectual people are ‘mind’ workers, while others do bodily work. Thus it seems OK for mind workers to sit in seminar rooms and conference halls (as we are now), or CEO’s to sit cherry-wood paneled offices, and rhetorically justify the worth of their mere talk by claiming that ultimately – as long as they observe certain empirical methods of testing and other standards of truthfulness – their talk will have its payoff in our practices. The fact that it takes place in a place and time quite divorced from our actual practices is not considered important. Indeed, so strong is the assumption that our bodies are only animated by our minds, that stories in which our bodies are ‘snatched’ by other alien and free-floating minds is a powerful fantasy for us (e.g., Stephen King’s Tommyknockers). We have inherited this sharp division between mind and body from Descartes (1986), whose declared goal in his Meditations was to establish the claim that the soul, or the self, is solely and purely "a thing which thinks" (p.19). But what about our bodies? What did Descartes think of them? Well, after beginning his exploration by asking himself the question: "What is a man?," he continues: "... the first thought to come to mind was that I had a face, hands, arms and the whole mechanical structure that can be seen in a corpse, and which I called a body... [Where] a body can be perceived by touch, sight, hearing, taste or smell, and can be moved in various ways, not by itself but by whatever comes into contact with it. For, according to my judgment, the power of self-movement, like the power of sensation or of thought, was quite foreign to the nature of the body..." (p.17).

We are still in the thrall of (Wittgenstein would say "bewitched" by) this story, and in a moment I want to suggest that the body that Descartes talks of here is, so to say, "the observed or the seen body," the body as known from the outside, not "the felt or the lived body" as known to us from within our living of our lives together. For I want to explore the strange and surprisingly extensive consequences of the fact that as living, embodied beings, we cannot help but be spontaneously responsive to events occurring around us. And as one consequence of this, in the moments of contact between ourselves and the others around us, our actions cease to be wholly our own; we begin to act jointly, as in a dance or suchlike – what I do is responsively shaped by what you are doing in reacting to me. But before I leave Descartes behind completely, I want to draw attention to more than the fact that he ignores our spontaneous bodily activities, I want also to point to how he leads us (by the same token) to disregard the importance of our ordinary, everyday ways of talking (which depend on our bodily responsiveness to each other too) – the ways of talking that he himself relies upon to mislead us in his arguments.

His argument from the example of a piece of wax – which prior to its melting is known in terms of certain of its sensed features, but which is still the same wax even when it has melted and exhibits a whole different set of such features – is well-known. From it, he concludes that "... the perception I have of it is a case not of vision or touch or imagination... but of mental scrutiny... But as I reach this conclusion I am amazed at how weak and prone to error my mind is... I am almost tricked by ordinary ways of talking" (p.21). Indeed, he continues this line of thought thus: "... if I just look out of the window and see men crossing the square, as I just happen to have done, I normally say that I see the men themselves, just as I say that I see the wax. Yet do I see more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men. And so something which I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact grasped solely by the faculty of judgement which is in may mind" (p.21).

Now I do not have the space here to go into the way in which we have been duped by Descartes’s rhetoric here. Bernard Williams (1986) examines this in his introduction to a recent edition of the Meditations. "We must not forget that the work is a carefully designed whole, of great literary cunning...," he remarks (p.x). "Its end," he says, "lies in its beginning" (p.x) – that Descartes suggests in the very first sentence of the book, that we must lay aside everything and anything that we can doubt. "But no one ordinarily supposes that the rational way to start on these things is to throw away or lay aside all the information one thinks one already has... (p.xi). But because Descartes is concerned with certain truth and nothing else, and we follow him because we unquestionably believe it to be an absolute good, we forget that in so doing we have allowed his (and our) arguments to become wholly detached from all our practices. Why? Because, I suggest, we are still tempted to think in terms of God- and Devil-ideas: we seem to take it for granted, for instance, that a single, logical, systematic, theoretical order of connectedness is good, and that if we had it, then (as Descartes in fact put it), we could "make ourselves masters and possessors of nature," while to continue to live in chaos and disorder is bad.

Indeed, with respect to learning, there are a number of seemingly unquestionable commonplaces about ‘powerful goods’ for learning, which follow from Descartes’s ignoring of our bodily responsiveness to our surroundings. Unquestionable God-ideas, with the power to influence learning are: the importance of principles, of repetition, of practice makes perfect; there is also the idea of clarity and simplicity, of logical frameworks and of single, simple, orders of connectedness; of the moment of insight, of individual style and talent, of events in the head; of the importance of logical structure, of system, of the one-way transmission of information, of testing and giving the right answers to questions; while true learning is independent of who we are, of our identity. All these God-ideas will need re-thinking.

I take this way of stating the issue – in terms of God-ideas and Devil-ideas – seriously and formulate it in these terms under the influence of a number of sources: One is Richard Webster’s (1996) book Why Freud was Wrong. Webster first notes Jung's (1963) comment on Freud’s motive for theorizing as he did: "In place of the jealous God he had lost, he had substituted another compelling image, that of sexuality. It was no less insistent, exacting, domineering, threatening and morally ambivalent than the original one..." (p.179, quoted in Webster, 1996, p.379). He then goes on to note that Jung himself, "instead of dismissing religion as part of the problem, ...saw it as a potential solution and as a source of healing" (pp.386-387). Indeed, cast into an intellectual environment of rationalistic positivism that is ostensibly is hostile to all forms of religious belief, many western intellectuals still feel themselves under, Webster suggests, "a profound psychological compulsion to immerse themselves once more in belief" (p.384). Rorty (1980, 1989) too notes this, and wants to try and cure us of our compulsive need to, as he puts it, "eternalize" or "divinize" the ideology of the day in our quest for a basis for our actions somewhere "beyond history and institutions" (p.198). While a final influence is again Wittgenstein. As he remarks about the baleful influence of theories in our attempts to understand human affairs more... : "we are under the illusion that what is sublime, what is essential, about our investigation consists in grasping one comprehensive essence (1981, no.444). A major example of such a belief at the moment, is the belief in the behavioral sciences that once we know the rules being followed by, or being used in some other way, by social actors in structuring their behavior, then we will then be able to explain all that they do (see Giddens, 1979, for an extensive account of this view of our social practices).

How else might we understand human activities and learning, if not in this manner? As Bateson (1979) remarks about a whole set of such empty explanations, "invoking a principle inside one component is in fact the error that is made in every one of these cases" (p.98). If we are ever to learn anything genuinely new, it is not explanation in terms of a tautological order of necessary relations devised by ourselves that will help us. We feel compelled to search for rules or principles, but even if we find any, statements of rules or principles lie before us "dead on the page’, so to speak. To be of practical help to us, we must ‘interpret’ them, and all our puzzles then begin again. As all the writers mentioned above point out, something new comes to us only when an other ‘calls out’ a response from us that we were not able ourselves to call out from ourselves¹.