4e Cognition and Classical Religions' Anthropology and Ontology

4e cognition offers resources supporting an anthropology and an ontology that overcome mind/body and related dualisms, dualisms which contradict the original understandings of the Western monotheisms and of some Asian religions. 4e cognition  embraces a holism with respect to the human organism, the human body—or as religionist William Poteat puts it, the human “mindbody,” where the parts of the body, including brain, nervous system, viscera, appendages, and so on, act or function meaningfully as an integrated reality where its properties are different from the sum of the properties of its parts. This contrasts with the standard model of the cognitive science of religion where the  separation of the brain from the rest of the body in its focus on brain mechanisms promotes a dualism reminiscent of mind/body dualism. At the same time it tends to embrace an ontology of reductive physicalism in relation to the material side of the dualistic coin. Additionally, many proponents claim that an innate dualism constrains human cognition. 

4e cognition represents a rapprochement with the Hebrew biblical, New Testament, and Qur’anic view of the human being as a psycho-somatic unity and a rejection of mind/soul-body/matter dualism from Hellenistic philosophy that influenced the theologies of the Western monotheisms and was exacerbated by Enlightenment Cartesianism and its variants. The Hebrew word nephesh, usually translated as soul or self, means the life principle, while the ancient Greek word psyche in the New Testament means the same; the Septuagint Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible earlier used psyche for nephesh, while the Arabic cognate for nephesh is nafs. The ancient Israelite version of life after death was Sheol, or the Pit, where all humans descended upon death. Noteworthily, the dead did not become immaterial souls but rather were embodied in the miserable state of being mere shades or shadows of their former fleshly embodied selves. During the Second Temple period, belief in resurrection of the body—not of a disembodied soul—developed in rabbinic Judaism and was assumed by the New Testament and the Qur’an. Nevertheless, the dominant model of the afterlife for classical Christianity became the immediate presence of an immaterial soul in heaven for the saved, where they would enjoy the Beatific Vision or a similar type of ultimate fulfillment, and only on judgment day and the general resurrection be reunited with their bodies—seemingly as an afterthought. In contrast, most Christian believers in an afterlife today imagine that postmortem they will recognize and be recognized by family and friends with transformed bodies in heaven. Regarding Asian religious traditions, Ruism/Confucianism and Daoism affirm a holistic rather than dualistic anthropology.

For 4e cognition, the human organism comes embedded or emplaced in an environment with affordances, to use J. J. Gibson’s term (1979, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception), as it enacts meaning in co-constituting its lifeworld with its natural-social environment. Unlike with the standard model of cognition, which tends to regard religious cognition as meaningless epiphenomenon, 4e cognition acknowledges meaning—in the sense of both adaptive knowledge and value—of human interaction with its environment. While the standard model tends to view culture as no more than the similarities among individual brains with no causative power, 4e cognition recognizes the incorporation, mostly pre-objective and tacit, of socio-cultural realities—not dualistically separate from nature—in the mindbody that plays a powerful role in human life. 4e cognition thus aligns with classical religions in refusing a nature/culture dualism and the extraordinary individualism of the modern West. The crucial nature of social relationships and the importance of nature resonate with Jewish, Christian and Islamic scriptures and with Mahayana Buddhism, Ruism/Confucianism, and Daoism, with Ruism especially lifting up social relationships and Daoism nature. 4e cognition can extend the joint project of organism and environment to evolution, with a mutual adaptation and specification of organism and environment (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, The Embodied Mind, 85-194). The fit of organism and environments finds some resonance in the classical religions, insofar as they are world-affirming in upholding the goodness of creation or of the world.

Relating to the closeness versus separation of organism and environment, though the standard model is representational, 4e cognition holds to some kind of direct perception of an organism in its lifeworld. 

Finally, 4e cognition recognizes the basic action of a sentient organism orienting itself to its environment. This provides an opening for a theory claiming that religions have  attempted to orient humans to the largest environment they can imagine. Traditionally, they have identified supernatural, divine, or extraordinary agents, forces, or realms as part of and/or the source of the larger environment.