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Body and cosmos I: A philosophical map minds getting richer, more subtle, more surprising as they gained experience with the world Donald Hebb Gk. kosmos the universe Basic philosophical tools. A revised vision of how human bodies can be and feel their relation to the enormous cosmos of which they are a part.
Preamble: The boy in the bubble There was a documentary on public television about a kid born with SCID, an immune disorder so severe the only way he could survive was to be placed into a sterile plastic box the instant he was born and kept there ever after. His medical team expected to find a way to fix his immune system any moment, but time went by and they didn't, so he lived on and on with toys in a large sort of fishtank. His family and doctors would wear large black plastic gloves whenever they touched him. He was a bright kid who looked young for his age. As he got older he became increasingly anxious. He had nightmares about King Germ coming to get him. He and his therapist would fantasize adventures to other planets, where he would heroically defend her from danger. There was a scene where he was rocking back and forth singing One two three four / I can't take it any more. When he was twelve an attempt at a bone marrow transplant infected him with a virus and he died. While he was dying they took him out of the sterile box and his mother touched him skin to skin for the first and last time after his birth. 1. Inattention, dissociation, segregation These forms of inattention are forms of disembodiment in the sense that they're ways of living without awareness of aspects of body and world. They are interrelated.
The horizontality of social preoccupation that doesn't see there's a cosmos around us. Self preoccupation can be seen as a form of social anxiety. Examples: preoccupation with status, popular culture, shopping, social problems.
Boy blinkers and girl blinkers. Women often have a different form of bias/blindness than men. Doreen Kimura and gender aspects of brain organization. Men evolutionarily specialized to rush around in the physical world hunting things, women specialized to be interested in the well-being of human bodies. Kimura D 1992 Sex differences in the brain, Scientific American Sept 1992:119-125 Evelyn Fox Keller 1985 Reflections on gender and science Yale
What is dissociation physically. State switching, network isolation. How does dissociation happen. Maturational dissociations. Crises of early love. Traumatic dissociations. After dissociation elaborated defenses against reconnection. Drugs. Fantasy. Busyness. Money-making. Etc.
Dissociated humans have organized their environments and their cultural practices to support their defensive dissociations, so that children are routinely socialized into dissociation. These are some some examples of culturally promoted forms of dissociation.
Various ways of making 'otherness' of gender, race, class, sexual orientation, nationality, sect, etc - carry dissociated parts of feeling and knowing. In Jung, shadow-projections. Susan Griffin 1978 Woman and nature Harper and Row
Both poverty and privilege can isolate us from what would be significant to our evolved bodies, and therefore from sources of natural love and confidence. Bodies have evolved in a physical world with natural tasks and challenges. The skills and instincts native to us don't have a chance when our surroundings are denatured into ghettos or Disneylands or gated communities or safe clean suburbs. Environmental degradation. Making hideous places no one can want to attend to. Paul Shepard 1982/1999 Nature and madness, in Ecopsychology, T Roszak, M Gomes, A Kanner eds, 21-40 Sierra Club Books
It's as if they're all interpretation and no soul? All language, in a way. Packet letter. Image: In Gulliver's travels Jonathan Swift's land of the absent-minded pedants whose servants have to walk along beside them tapping their mouths with an inflated bladder. Ursula Le Guin's story of the evil sorcerer who preaches that real life is an afterlife, so that the skills and crafts of the villages and countryside have fallen into ruin. Confabulation. Religious fundamentalisms. Academic specializations. Lives consumed by political causes. 2. About dualism
Theist and Cartesian dualisms of body and mind or body and soul. Body in Descartes is said to be a machine; mind or soul is non-physical, not part of the natural world. Relation of dualism and creationism. External creator.
One member of the pair is valued and the other devalued. Men-women, culture-nature, reason-perception, town-country. Etc. Dualism and anti-body, anti-world impulse. The senses are fallible, reason or authority are the sources of true knowledge; we are strangers sojourning as corrupt bodies in a vale of sorrow before passing on to another more perfect life.
These philosophies are historical artifacts that must be understood within their own time. Profoundly patriarchal, defended hegemonies of male elites who disallow feeling within themselves. Antiperceptual, exploitive, cynical, preying on people's fear of death and anxiety about the vulnerabilities of bodies.
Anthony Wilden 1972 System and structure: essays in communication and exchange Tavistock publications Wilden points out that pathological dualisms result when people ignore a background that is the common source of whatever is being contrasted. 3. Physical monism
A fruitful hypothesis. Everything is nature and nothing is outside nature. Nothing is supernatural. It is all one thing and it's 'physical,' but within the notion of the physical we include aspects of physicality that are invisible and ephemeral, for instance electromagnetic and quantum fields. Nature the entire universe - is self-creating, self-maintaining. Human bodies are embedded parts of the physical earth which is an embedded part of the enormous physical universe. Mind, soul and spirit are states or aspects or parts of evolved and mortal bodies.
One cannot help but be awed at how much of what we take to be specifically modern in human feelings and problems emerge from this unimaginably long history of perception, consciousness, hunger, mobility, sexuality, desire and fear in the world. Michael Benedikt Evolution is a creation story whose import is that humans are exquisitely adapted to the earth. It can make us realize we are at home in the universe. Example: Darwin described how the evolution of photosynthesis in plants is a precondition for human eyes. Pigments are plant tissues, chemicals, that change in response to light. The intelligent body is not just for knowing humans. The potential intelligence of perception. The structure of living species evolving to become always more complexly adapted to terrain, light, plants and animals. Coevolution. Contact as responsive restructuring. Cognitive value of action in the physical world. Cognitive base level.
The idea that it is comes from the old monotheist and Cartesian forms of dualism with value one member of the contrasted pair and devalue the other. If we go for a monism that selects the derogated member of the pair, it will seem we are being reductive. For instance if we equate everything we know with simple machines created by an external creator, then it would be reduction to say there is nothing else. Or if we equate everything we know with a body conceived of as corrupt, then again it would seem reductive to say nothing else exists. However we do not have to go that route. We are not agreeing with the original contrast, and not electing one or another of its pair. We are saying something else completely. Everything is body, but body includes most of the values and marvels ascribed to mind or soul we are not giving them up. (I am saying most rather than all because a few of them are probably mad fantasies.) 4. Cosmic humanism
Ursula Le Guin's Always coming home describes a culture in what is now the Napa Valley in California, but twenty thousand years in the future. If we imagine a far future we can see ourselves on earth now as quite an early civilization. Much of religion, philosophy and science is literally and bizarrely wrong, though there are aspects that work mixed up with the aspects that don't. Creation by an enormous parent, eternal life, and hope for magical or supernatural powers are still being preferred to experienced but open bodies that accept the tragedies of mortality and understand dissociation and reintegration. We are still far from having a culture that creates people capable of living fully in love with themselves and the cosmos. The opportunity of the present time is to build an outlook that is monist, lucid, rigorous, integrated and expansive rather than reductive. There is huge work to be done: personal, theoretical, political.
Images: Leonardo's drawings of flow in water, Durer's rabbit (early 1500's). Classical Greece developed and the Renaissance expanded a pre-scientific understanding that the universe is ordered and we as human bodies can come to understand that order. An interest in structure and function. Importance of observation and description. Confidence in observation rather than authority or scriptures. It's vital to work out a renewed humanism that understands human beings as physical bodies embedded in a physical world, and that expands the secular and perception-based impulse of the Renaissance to revise old science and integrate new science with the humanities.
Why are we ready to renew and expand humanism? In our own time, what is different? We know more about how things happen. Darwin and evolution. Psychology of dissociation. Birth control: women have had more time to think, more liberty to experience the possibilities of the larger world and they are beginning to address male blind spots. Political innovation and stability. Globalization. We have available more perspectives than we dreamed possible. We see at different stages in different places.
Dangers and opportunities of this time - computer modeling neuroscience feminism - Greek science followed by the Middle Ages 5. Conclusion: In love with cosmos Enjoy with your family the beautiful land of life. Albert Einstein
Growth of intelligence through contact with order. Contact and love. Perception - see Body and Cosmos II
Take account of the dualistic roots of conventional science. Origins of science in the mechanical model of nature. Astronomy and the clockwork universe. Enlightenment ideas of reason as different from and superior to the senses. Industrial revolution and Victorian age of scientific discovery. Cosmic humanism would bring a comprehensive critique to conventional science be aware of the observer as a factor in the observation and the theorist as a factor in the theory, grow into understanding the difference between mechanisms and organisms, integrate fields that have been narrow specializations with each other. Take account of the fact that it is human bodies that do science: the naturalizing impulse in current philosophy of mind and philosophies of science and math.
Story of the guru who could materialize a rose out of thin air. Marketplace of credulity. Exploiting hunger for supernatural marvels and transcendence of physical limitations. Superficial readings of science that can be sold to people wanting the old religious reassurances. Self-absorbtion. Very little sense of the natural world except as pretty scenery, assuming science is too hard.
What sort of basic philosophy will best support care for our local places and the earth as a whole? The question of cognitive ecology. What sort of world do we need to be able to be sane and intelligent and in love? Is it the same answer to both questions?
At its most general, embodiment studies is an emphasis on understanding human life as the life of a physical body. What does embodiment studies have to do with the large omnipresent other body of the cosmos itself? Bodies are evolved to be in integral contact with the cosmos. Look at how 'body' is theorized now body and social struggle body and illness body and sex. 'Body' is so much associated with the repressed that theoretical fascination with body tends to deal with these areas of social and personal anxiety, so that the rest of the body's marvellous capabilities are taken for granted or reassigned to imaginary non-body entities like disembodied mind or 'soul' or 'spirit'. If we say the large body of the physical cosmos is all there is and all there needs to be for human flourishing, then embodiment studies will be the humanism part of cosmic humanism.
Why women are and should be making this new culture. What does embodiment studies have to do with women? embodiment1 plus embodiment2 Why women need to transcend their preference for social attention and claim the physical world too. The era offers us a massive opening. A culture of female shining. They are in a position to take on a thorough critique of patriarchal and dissociated aspects of conventional science and philosophy and religion. They need to take on thoroughly rebuilding science/philosophy/ethics in the understanding that male dissociation makes male theory unpleasant to us. We now have central thinkers we can work off. Who are the sources? There are male allies too. (See bibliography below.)
Image: lying with one's back to the earth and looking outward rather than upward. Body and cosmos I brief bibliography Embodiment studies web worksite: http://web.goddard.edu/embodiment/index.html Evelyn Fox Keller 1983 A feeling for the organism Yale
Evelyn Fox Keller 1985 Reflections on gender and science Yale Paul Shepard 1982/1999 Nature and madness, in Ecopsychology, T Roszak, M Gomes, A Kanner eds, 21-40 Sierra Club Books
Ursula Le Guin 1985 Always coming home University of California
Susan Griffin 1978 Woman and nature Harper and Row Eugene Gendlin 1981 Focusing Bantam
Carol Gilligan 2002 The Birth of Pleasure Alfred A. Knopf
Supplementary notes: Embodiment studies as a theoretical framework (taken from the frame section of the embodiment studies web worksite) From my point of view, the concept of living systems should be the overarching concept for all of our educational institutions. In other words, we should be teaching the politics of living systems, the economics of living systems, the science of living systems. All of these things would be united by that central concept. -Elizabeth Sahtouris, web interview with Scott London What IS embodiment studies? At its most general, embodiment studies is an emphasis on understanding human life as the life of a physical body. Some version of this emphasis has been found within a number of separate sub-cultures: Buddhism (and yoga and other such studies that reconnect internally disconnected bodies and make people more aware of them); European phenomenology (which ultimately, ie several centuries back, also has Eastern origins); a revolution happening currently in philosophy of mind (which draws from neuroscience, computer modeling and complex dynamics); British and North American cultural studies with its critiques of the politics of gender, race and class; and a modernist tradition in literature that has tried to write close transcriptions of lived experience. These different approaches as they are constituted mostly don't pay attention to one another and do not work out of a common framework. There is a common framework latent in these approaches, however, and developing this integrated framework is an exciting and very current enterprise. That framework should include: 1. a workable metaphysics which can imply an epistemology, ie an embodiment metaphysics 2. in keeping with an embodiment metaphysics, a workable theory of what a person is, ie a psychology: some notion of attachment, dissociation, defenses, the unconscious, self-communication 3. instances of developed styles and modes of human sensing, feeling, thinking, saying that are consisent with this framework (eg Woolf) 4. methodologies for bodily reintegration 5. implications for community action More specific commitments of this framework are likely to be: 1. in metaphysics/ontology: The body and the physical world are real. Body structure/function has evolved through millions of years so that it is adapted and viable in real conditions. Physicality is immensely complex and subtle, and we do not need any sort of non-physicality in our explanatory systems. 2. in epistemology: Knowing is a structured body. At a base level of perception and action we are evolutionarily adapted to be able to know very effectively. But humans are extraordinarily able to imagine as well as perceive and act, and imagining activity (which includes a lot of language and theory) can be very maladapted. 3. in psychology: Consciousness is a dynamical effect of complex synchronized activity in the brain. Brain activity can be non-conscious if it isn't part of a synchronized sub-network. A lot of important neural response is normally non-conscious but the conscious network can also shrink drastically as a result of trauma and training. (People respond to trauma by disconnecting internally, so that feeling and knowing response are occurring without awareness.) Intelligence and vitality are reduced as a result of these dissociations. There are ways to reconnect disconnected structure. 4. in personal instances of developed modes of being: Artists and saints, etc, have found ways to reconnect and get access to their greater human capability, and their work can jump other people into reconnected structure/function. 5. in methodologies for bodily reintegration: There are also direct ways of working with the body, for instance Buddhist techniques of sitting quietly and feeling what's going on. These allow reconnection because the brain is always trying to get its functional wholeness back. Doing anything that's hard to do can also help with reintegration because it calls on more of the brain. 6. in implications for community action: There are many possible implications; for example, if humans are adapted to the physical earth they evolved in, then it is probably important to preserve that earth in good condition so humans will have somewhere to be their maximal selves. If humans lose intelligence and capability by dissociating structure from consciousness then it is probably important to figure out how to reconnect them. Etc. * A web search finds that embodiment studies as an academic term is presently associated with: 1. a movement in robotics engineering that emphasizes robots who 'learn' within an environment rather than being fully pre-programmed. 2. a tenet of Buddhist thinking (also prominent in related Eastern disciplines such as yoga, tai chi, aikido) emphasizing sensory and emotional presence. There is for instance a Buddhist Institute for Embodiment Training, and a book called Being Bodies: Buddhist Women on the Paradox of Embodiment. 3. a movement in cognitive science and philosophy of mind, criticizing Cartesian mind-body dualism and working to understand cognitive concepts in terms of evolved bodies embedded in the physical world. Mark Johnson has developed an embodiment concentration in the philosophy department of the University of Oregon. This approach is also called situated embodiment. 4. a second potentially related movement in philosophy, based on Merleau-Ponty, emphasizes the phenomenology of embodiment. Dr Elizabeth McCardell, an independent scholar in Australia, for instance, wrote a dissertation called Catching the Ball: constructing the reciprocity of embodiment. She moderates a usenet group and a webpage on the philosophy of embodiment. Adrian Harris runs a UK-based embodiment listserve that regularly sends out interesting articles and event notices. You can subscribe here by writing SUBSCRIBE Embodiment Your Name in your email. Or here to correspond with Adrian. Micahel Zimmerman of Duke University has written an essay arguing that there is a need to add embodiment studies to any college curriculum. He envisages an emphasis on sexuality, gender, emotionality, homosexuality, and mortality, to "discover ways of suffering less and of provoking less suffering in other people." "All this requires deep, demanding, and often terrifying work," he says. The University of Reading in England has a cultural-studies based embodiment program that is purely theoretical and emphasizes a political critique of existing social attitudes toward body norms. Janus Head. A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Continental Philosophy, Literature, Phenomenological Psychology and the Arts is putting out a special issue (Winter 2006/2007) on "The situated body".
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