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René Descartes was wrong, and Shakespeare could have told him so. Descartes's hard distinction between the inanimate and the merely living machine-matter, on the one hand, and the mind made of an immaterial essence, on the other, no longer convinces anyone. Since Charles Darwin we have accepted not a hard distinction but a continuous spectrum (indeed, a chain) of complexity and sensitivity connecting the low-order life forms and the higher, and recently it has become apparent that high-order rationality too is just a sophistication of simpler kinds of biological responsiveness. As Antonio Damasio has shown, the apparatus for thinking is built upon the simpler messaging systems common to animals and plants and that, essentially, we think and feel with our bodies and not with disembodied minds (Damasio, 1995). The realization of this embodiment is a key element in the recent " affective turn" in cultural and literary theory, and it confirms Raymond Williams's strangely oxymoronic claim that in 'structures of feeling" our beliefs and practices — our mental and physical lives — interpenetrate one another (Clough and Halley, 2007; Williams, 1977, pp. 128–35). It is not surprising that with this closing of the gap between humans and all other life (lower forms around us now, and the lower forms from which we evolved), scientists are increasingly finding evidence that the behaviours we call culture, morality, and politics occur in communities of animals (De Waal, 1982; De Waal, 2001; Whiten, Horner and De Waal, 2005).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137033598_5

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