![]() As Gibbs (340) writes in her account of Tomkins, he “makes clear that there can be no ‘pure cognition’ no cognition uncontaminated by the richness of the sensate experience, including affective experience”. Spinoza’s ontology meshes nicely with Tomkins’ notion of affect. They exist in an isomorphic relation which allows for an analytic distinction to be made between the two. ![]() As far as Spinoza was concerned, the mind and the body are one and the same thing (7S). ![]() As Spinoza (2) explains, “the body cannot determine the mind to thinking and the mind cannot determine the body to motion, to rest, or to anything else”. This should not be understood in terms of simple causality or an account of the interaction between body and mind. Darwin’s mistake was to fuse the corporeal with the cognitive or, rather, to collapse the former into the latter, ignoring how thought arises, as Spinoza points out, from some impact or modification of the body. Tomkins feels this omission was a result of Darwin misinterpreting the affect, viewing the interest and excitement he invested in his work as simply a function of thinking. He points out that while Darwin managed to catalogue surprise and meditation, he neglected to include interest within his typology. In his discussion of interest, Tomkins begins by making reference to Darwin’s work on emotions, a term Tomkins avoids in favour of affect (1). What I want to do here is to reassert the importance of their role by demonstrating how teachers can engender interest and to consider the ways this affects student learning. With innovation in this area conceived in terms of on-line delivery (Brabazon) and student-directed learning, contemporary pedagogy is witnessing a marginalisation of the teacher (McWilliam). While my focus is the early years of school, this study has relevance to all levels of education. Drawing briefly on an empirical study related to these issues in primary school classrooms, I want to examine how interest is generated by the particular practices that teachers employ. As an affect, interest has a physiological basis and it is with this that I want to engage. He explains, “without interest the development of thinking and the conceptual apparatus would be seriously impaired” (Tomkins 343). Coupled with excitement, it is one of the nine affects he identifies as innate to humans. To the psychologist, Silvan Tomkins, interest is crucial. I don’t seem to be able to muster the physical effort to apply myself I simply lack the necessary interest to start work. I know that I develop an unsettled feeling, a certain restlessness, that seems to pervade my body leading me to engage in a range of diversionary tactics such as ringing a friend, making a coffee or rechecking my email. While the physicality of literate practice may have long since been obscured by the habituation of these skills, at times we are still reminded of the visceral nature of learning, such as, when we have to apply ourselves to a task but lack the motivation to do so. We tend to forget the bodily dimension of learning how, as children beginning to write, we had to labour over forming letters, using the appropriate pen grip and sitting correctly. Given that education is generally understood as a cognitive process with a focus on the mind at the expense of the body, Spinoza’s insights are particularly interesting. As Damasio (213) explains, Spinoza “is stating that the idea of an object in a given mind cannot occur without the existence of the body or without the occurrence of certain modifications on that body as caused by the object, No body, never mind”. In a recent book, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio used the phrase “No body, never mind” to sum up the ways in which Spinoza prefigured much recent neurobiology in his conception of a psychophysical parallelism.
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