The original Cartesian image of intelligence as rational deliberation, far removed from engagement with the material world, is a myth of the Enlightenment. Indeed, almost all the classic binary divisions our culture teaches us are shown to be wrong, and not through clever application of critical theory, but through careful attention to scientific experiments on everything from reaction times to neuroscience.
Emotion influences and guides our decision making (Damasio, 1994). There is no mythical central executive that lies at the top of the hierarchy of the brain, instead the neurons of the brain are a decentralized network of produces behaviour through coordination (Andres, 2003). The mind relies not on perfect representation and deduction over logic but a number of shortcuts and heuristics based on exploiting the body and the environment (Clark, 1997). Language is not a poor substitute for logic, but logic a poor substitute for the flexibility and analogical power of natural language, whose very heart is poetic metaphor (Lakoff et. al., 1999). We should not think of ourselves as rational disembodied intelligences but as radically engaged with our world in all sorts of powerful but far from orderly ways. This view of humanity goes directly against modern neoliberalism, which pretends we all have access perfect information and are perfectly rational.