Susan Stuart

Social participation requires certain abilities: communication with other members of society; social understanding which enables planning ahead and dealing with novel circumstances; and a theory of mind which makes it possible to anticipate the mental state of another. In childhood play we learn how to pretend, how to put ourselves in the minds of others, how to imagine what others are thinking and how to attribute false beliefs to them. Without this ability we would be unable to deceive and detect deception in the actions of others, and our ability to interact within our social group would be greatly impaired. In this paper I claim that the capacity for deception is necessary for a theory of mind, and a theory of mind is necessary for complex social interaction.

David Skrbina opens this timely and intriguing text with a suitably puzzling line from the Diamond Sutra: ‘‘Mind that abides nowhere must come forth.’’, and he urges us to ‘‘de-emphasise the quest for the specifically human embodiment of mind’’ and follow Empedocles, progressing ‘‘with good will and unclouded attention’’ into the text which he has drawn together as editor. If we do, we are assured that it will ‘‘yield great things’’ (p. xi). This, I am pleased to say, is not an exercise in hyperbole.

Through our hands we construct our world and through our construction of our world we construct ourselves. We reach with our hands and touch with our hands, and with this reaching and touching we come to understand how things feel and are. It is not an utterable knowledge, yet it is knowing the world in a dynamically-engaged affective, effective way. Through affective feedback our reaching and touching becomes a prehensive grasping which leads, through the enkinaesthetic givenness of the agent with its world, to a situated and embodied knowing, and the rudiments of apprehension. With each fresh comprehension a new enkinaesthetic enquiry is engendered; with each enquiry we have afresh the anticipatory dynamics of reaching, touching and feeling, with the hand-to-object of world-investigation, the hand-to-body of auto-investigation and investigating the Other.