Radical Embodiment and Religious Practice and Thought: Rethinking the Body in Religious Studies and Theology

Dear Colleagues,

Etymologically, “radical” means getting to the root or source of something. Our bodies, as they orient us and enable us in an environment, a world, constitute the very roots, the self-organizing systems, that make possible all our living, knowing, and valuing. In terms of cognitive science, radial embodiment as an anthropology and epistemology endorses 4e cognition—that all human cognition, including cognition in the socio-cultural systems of religion, is embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended. That knowing is embodied explains why, in the history of religions, supernatural agents and subjects in the afterlife have usually been envisioned as embodied—even when vaporous or shadowy, rather than as immaterial (regardless of whether this is reflectively acknowledged or even denied). Embodied cognition is “enactive cognition,” a term coined and  developed by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, though the American pragmatists previously recognized knowing as an action. Cognition is never simply passive, but involves an organism acting to achieve its ends, goals, and purposes according to its norms or standards of proper functioning. Clearly, religious practice and belief, in order to make sense of the world, involves creative interaction with an environment in positing sacred, divine, or extraordinary agents, forces, and/or places/realms as part of one’s social and nonsocial world. One function of religion extends our primordial biological need to meaningfully orient us to our environment, as religion attempts to orient us to the largest environment we can imagine.

Cognition is embedded or emplaced in an environment, in relation to which a coupling or mutual constitution of organism and environment takes place. The environment supplies affordances (J. J. Gibson) for particular bodies, which negatively include harms to avoid. This cognitive coupling creates meaning, in the sense of both knowledge and value. Thus, an emotional or affective component always obtains. In orienting an embodied being to one’s ambience, in focusing on particulars in one’s environment, in sensing the action of one’s body—however tacitly, one experiences a qualitative and aesthetic dimension. To the extent religions are world-affirming, finding an overall goodness and even sacredness to life, they endorse the joint project of the human being and its environment to enact meaning—to experience value and avoid disvalue. Whether or not accurate relative to scientific or historical knowledge, world-affirming religions usually are adaptive relative to their social–natural worlds. To the extent religions are world-denying, they surreptitiously rely upon our embodiment for their religious practice and thought, sometimes being adaptive as they attempt to escape negativities of life and sometimes being maladaptive. Religious experiences, in the sense of extraordinary states of consciousness—which are embodied—are usually adaptive biologically and psychologically. The three thinkers mentioned with respect to enactive cognitive coupling extend this mutual relationship to evolution, with organisms putting pressure and defining environments rather than the environment doing all the selection. This suggests that religion has usually been adaptive in human evolution, particularly with respect to social bonding.

Finally, cognition is extended through tools such as a cane or symbolic realities less immediately perceptible such as a language or a tradition. Mark Johnson and George Lakoff cogently argue that all language, both semantically and syntactically, consists of metaphorical and metonymical extensions of non-propositional bodily schemas. These schemas involve not just internal bodily feeling and sensing or positionality of one’s body, but a wide range of the body’s cognitive and evaluative—affective and aesthetic—relations to its environment. Even the most abstract language of theology or religious thought radically relies upon our embodiment for its intelligibility. Michael Polanyi observes how we extend our bodies to include elements of a tradition—incorporating them, taking them into our bodies—and tacitly indwelling them in future action. Myths, which often address antimonies irreconcilable in terms of abstract logic, hold these together, even as they hold together in our embodied experience. Rituals obviously serve a crucial role in almost all religious traditions. Given the radical nature of one’s body in experience, the body figures not just instrumentally but substantively in all meaning, as it shapes and colors all experience. Any embodied experience then makes no sense if one attempts to translate it into a supposedly immaterial, nonspatial, nonaffective experience. The sentient self who perceives/acts in mutual constitution of a meaning-laden natural and social world allows for a biological approach consonant with a phenomenological approach.

Radical embodiment and 4e cognition contrast with two other ways of thinking about the body, each tending to hew to opposite sides of mind–body dualism. Some versions of social constructionism understand bodies primarily as passive objects on which discourse inscribes its constructs. On the other hand, reductive physicalist takes on the body refuse a holistic framing of the human being as an embodied consciousness or “mindbody” (William Poteat) who experiences real meaning, instead reducing this to an illusion or epiphenomenon. Here causation is mechanistic and linear, rather than the non-linear causation of a self-organizing body and environment interacting.

I am pleased to invite you, as scholars of religion and as interdisciplinary scholars, to contribute to this Special Issue as it explores and rethinks religious practice and thought in light of the radical nature of embodiment, of one’s body as the root of all that we encounter. Given the radical nature and pervasiveness of embodiment for human life and, in particular for our purposes, for religion, proposals are welcome in any of the following areas or combinations of areas (though not limited to these):

• cognitive science of religion
• phenomenology of religion
• religious experience
• ritual studies
• religion and art
• theories of myth
• embodiment in the creation, reading, and/or interpretation of religious texts
• origins of religion
• evolution of religion
• theories of the nature of religion
• how the radically embodied nature of religion can inform constructive work within particular faith traditions in their—
• theology or religious thought
• reflection on practices

Hopefully this Special Issue will contribute to the growth of scholarship in religious studies that takes the body with radical seriousness—beyond the merely inscribed body or the reductive physiological body—and offers original research in the areas covered in this invitation. If so, this issue will advance a full-bodied, non-dualistic, mindbodily approach to studying and grasping both the more pre-reflective or tacit and more reflective meanings of lived religion.

We request that normally, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200-300 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the Guest Editor, Dr. David Nikkel (davidhnikkel@gmail.com) and CC the Assistant Editor of Religions, Ms. Joyce Xi (joyce.xi@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editor for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer review.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. David H Nikkel
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• embodiment
• enactive cognition
• embedded cognition
• extended cognition
• meaning
• evolution
• adaptiveness
• ritual
• theories of religion
• theology