Embodiment

Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky's The Ninth Wave

Athletic competition reveals a lot about human nature. Athletes learn about the need to "get out of their head" and use intuition to respond without delay, about the importance of embodied skills that are honed on the grindstone of experience. And the viewing audience, caught up in the excitement, becomes fully present in the moment. They experience emotions as real as those of the athletes themselves. I felt all this while watching a swim meet recently, and in the pauses between the action I reflected on what Iain McGilchrist meant by the need to "tap into embodied skills and intuitive wisdom" and "the importance of the spontaneous and implicit". Is embodiment the key to intuition, skill, intrinsic meaning, and presencing? 

Before he wiped his older Twitter history, David Roberts shared an article by Abebe Birhane, noting that he too was interested in the field of embodied cognition while still a graduate student in philosophy. For the academic community, embodiment has seen a surge in recognition as a unifying concept. And it's importance potentially extends much further. Even in the fields of climate activism and environmental justice, a disembodied perspective on life, that is a failure to attend to our embodied existence, goes a long way in explaining our failure to uphold values related to health. All of which is to say that, instead of reiterating that we must address poor health conditions, which many already tacitly acknowledge, it is still more important to highlight the causal conditions that lead to this state of affairs: the disembodied view. That's what contributes to our situation, and what must change if we are going to actually remedy it. Now, it might seem like a series of tangents and random associations to move from athletics to social health, but I hope I've shown that these disparate topics are united by the common theme of embodiment. Below I'll share a few insights from Iain McGilchrist on the subject: 

"There has been a tendency to discount and marginalise the importance of our embodied nature, as though it were something incidental about us, rather than essential to us. Our thinking and feeling is bound up with our embodied nature, and this needs to be acknowledged. So does the converse: that the material world is not wholly distinct from consciousness in some way that remains elusive. [Rodney Brooks notes that "Explicit representations are not necessary and appear only in the eye or mind of the observer. Models of the world simply get in the way. It is better to use the world as its own model."] The Buddhist view of interdependence is that it is based on a direct, intuitive apprehension. This contrasts with the Western mainstream, which tends to favor a view of reality as a re-presentation rather than a presencing; favors the abstract and disembodied over the sensory and embodied; and believes it has superior knowledge to the rest of us. As Alain Corbin has argued, we have become more cerebral, and retreated more and more from the senses – especially from smell, touch and taste – as if repelled by the body; and sight, the coolest of the senses, and the one most capable of detachment, has come to dominate all. (Nietzsche noted "All our senses have in fact become somewhat dulled because we always inquire after the reason, what ‘it means’, and no longer for what ‘it is’ ...More and more joy is transferred to the brain; that which exists is replaced by the symbolic.")

"Our active, embodied engagement with the world is a skill. It is something we learn before we are conscious of it, and consciousness threatens to disrupt it, as it disrupts all skills. In fact what one means by a skill is something intuitive and non-explicit. Everything about the body, which in neuropsychological terms is more closely related to and mediated by the right hemisphere than the left, makes it a natural enemy of the left hemisphere, the hemisphere of ideal re-presentation rather than embodied fact, of rationalism rather than intuition, of explicitness rather than the implicit. The left hemisphere's optimism is at odds with recognising the inevitable transience of the body, and its message that we are mortal. The body is messy, imprecise, limited – an object of scorn, therefore, to the fastidiously abstracted left hemisphere, with its fantasies of human omnipotence. Respect for context implies respect for embodiment – itself an important ‘context’ – respect for what is concrete and unique, being embedded in the world; similarly abstraction and generalisation inevitably move in the opposite direction, towards decontextualisation and remoteness from the embodied world in which we live [this is the pretense of objectivity, the negation of perspective]. Beauty is the most embodied of all values. An appreciation of the beauty of this world characterized the Renaissance, which saw the rehabilitation of earthly, embodied, sense-mediated existence, in contrast to the derogation of the flesh in the Middle Ages. For Montaigne, as for Erasmus, the body became present once more as part of us, therefore to be loved, rather than just seen as a prison of the soul."

One of the buzzwords in the environmental community that has somewhat fallen in popularity lately is "appropriate tech". Most of us are already familiar with how it emphasizes that technology should be people-centered, that it should reflect the context in which it is used. Iain McGilchrist noted that "respect for context [and by extension, perspective] implies respect for embodiment". And while attention on appropriate tech may be on the decline, "embodied cognition" has seen a steady rise in academic jargon these last few decades. If we combined these ideas into "embodied tech", would we return to this fertile concept again? Regardless, the contemporary savants Kevin Kelly and Douglas Rushkoff have both noted that "technology comes with embedded biases and autonomy". Rushkoff provided the pertinent example: "We are free to use any car we like to get to work — gasoline, diesel, electric, or hydrogen — and this sense of choice blinds us to the fundamental bias of the automobile towards distance, commuting, suburbs, and energy consumption." Similarly, Jerry Mander argued that television is structured to produce couch potatoes by inducing a bias of physiological passivity - there is nothing to do but sit back and receive (making it an effective propaganda device). We need a lot more thinking today around how the biases embodied within our technologies interact with, and ultimately shape, our own physical embodiment. Both individually and collectively, as a society, we have a very disembodied perspective on life. And this failure to attend to our embodied existence goes a long way in explaining our failure to uphold values related to social and environmental health. We need technologies and practices of embodiment. If we do not understand our embodiment, then our understanding of appropriate technology and adaptive solutions may be incomplete. Our bodies are a part of us, and adaptation is a process that fits our bodies to our environment. However there has been a tendency in contemporary culture to discount and marginalize the importance of our embodied nature, as though it were something incidental about us, rather than essential to us. So if we are to successfully adapt, we may need to rehabilitate this earthly, embodied, sense-mediated existence. We could begin with recognizing that all technologies have biases. Some of these are more likely to resonate with our embodied nature and enable adaptive solutions. What would an adaptive solution for transportation infrastructure look like? What might that mean for our embodied experience of the world? In other words, does it move us towards decontextualisation and remoteness from ourselves, each other, and the world in which we live, or does it move us toward a deeper appreciation of the world and our place in it? 

Is it possible to reconcile McGilchrist's book "The Matter with Things", which was originally to be titled "There are no Things", with the concept of embodiment? Yes. Does embodiment refer to a posthumanist "new materialism", to Bennett's "vitalism" or Latour's "parliament of things"? No, not exactly, or at least not merely so. Matter is indeed important and has cognitive agency, as Hayles points out. For McGilchrist, embodiment is not about things per se, it is not about the abstract concept of matter, and most definitely not a reductive, utilitarian, and mechanistic form of materialism. And that's because embodiment is not just a materialist concept. Viewed through the lens of process-relational ontology, in the sense of Whitehead or Rovelli, embodiment refers to a way of engaging with a living world that reveals itself to us through our inherently contextualized bodies, whose parts work together for the benefit of the whole, a whole that is likewise contextualized within an ever changing world that presences itself to us. The intuitive wisdom of the entire feeling body is capable of attending to, and responding to this world. (This is in stark contrast to the idea of a conceptually disembodied mind that primarily manipulates re-presentations of the world.) Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Karan Barad, and many others understand these relational aspects well. Among them there may be differences regarding some of the finer ontological commitments they make, and they hold varying positions regarding philosophy of mind. Andreas Weber, who studied under Francisco Varela and writes from a 4E perspective, comes very close here. He writes of moving "beyond the limited logic of objective reason... to our shared condition of embodied beings – the conditio vitae," and in The Biology of Wonder concludes, "embodied existence is the primary benchmark for any ethics". But McGilchrist does not place his emphasis quite so much on matter or things. His focus remains on context and relations (admitting we have no idea what material existence is). In particular he comparatively describes how being receptive to the experience of embodiment in its messy, imprecise, and limited nature, and which is associated with the right hemisphere's view of the world, provides a necessary counterpoint to the experience of disembodiment in its cool, detached, and ratiocentric abstractness, and which is associated with the left hemisphere's view of the world. The danger is that the left hemisphere seeks to discount the right hemisphere's view. And in point of fact, the left hemisphere's view is indeed prominent in our contemporary culture. Confronting it and regaining balance is key to rehabilitating our health, both individually and collectively, because we are neither wholly material nor wholly incorporeal, so much as a more likely coincidence of these opposites. Psychiatrists like Louis Sass and John Cutting, who are also concerned with medical symptomatology, have pointed out these relationships as well, and that where the embodied sense is deficient, where context is neglected, we can see why this would be diagnostic of various mental disorders. As a syncretic thinker with firm roots in the psychiatric community that his research is based upon, McGilchrist extends these insights to encompass the much broader cultural dynamics we witness today.

There is a coincidence of opposites in figure-ground perception, between what is present and what is absent (though there may be a slight asymmetry, insofar as that which is present points to that which is absent). Terrence Deacon has noted that (1) constraints are absences of this sort (they point to things that are prevented from happening), they are (2) capable of reproducing themselves, and they are (3) always embodied. Deacon's teleodynamics might therefore be seen as the study of the semiotics of embodiment, or of that beauty which is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete" (wabisabi), just as "necrosemiotics" (opposite of "biosemiotics") might be considered the study of the semiotics of disembodiment. The coincidence of opposites and the importance of embodiment are also major themes in Zen, where everything is geared toward achieving insight into the nondual, unitary nature of reality, and similar ideas inspired Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch to write The Embodied Mind. The trouble is that words and concepts get in the way. Zen masters suggest that all that is required is that we quiet the rational, verbalizing mind and allow our intuitive nature to "perceive in a blinding flash the oneness at the heart". For this reason Huineng believed that awakening can come suddenly. A variety of techniques have since been designed to break the grip of reason and logic on the mind. The idea of a mystical, unitive state has had a profound impact on many aspects of Chinese and Japanese culture. Linji referenced this passage from the Zhuangzi:

"Dongguozi asked Zhuangzi, 'Where is this Course you speak of?
'Zhuangzi said, 'There is nowhere it is not.'
'You must be more specific.'
'It is in the ants and crickets.'
'So low?'
'It is in the grasses and weeds.'
'Even lower?'
'It is in the tiles and shards.'
'So extreme?'
'It is in the piss and shit.'
Dongguozi made no reply. Zhuangzi continued, 'Truly, your question misses the substance of the matter...'"

Everything that to ordinary eyes appears sordid, base, or bizarre — ex-criminals who have suffered mutilating punishments, men who are horribly ugly or deformed, creatures of grotesque shape or size — become the characters in Zhuangzi’s philosophical parables. As McGilchrist points out, “the body is messy, imprecise, limited — an object of scorn, therefore, to the fastidiously abstracted left hemisphere, with its fantasies of human omnipotence.” Who then is better suited to pry us loose from conventional concepts and teach us that "our understanding can be in the right only by virtue of a relation of dependence on something", a particular context and embodiment, than characters such as these?

Sources:
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things (2021)
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary (2009)

Respons-ibility

This is the second part to the previous article about attention, which included a highlighted section about the importance of networks of non-conscious cognitions and frictions. These forms of response, consistent with Hayles' wider planetary cognitive ecology, confront the trap of ratiocentrism and offer a path out of the dynamics of neglect we see today. The illusion of conscious control is part of the ratiocentric bias, it is a product of that same perspective. During a recent interview with Greg Ellis, Iain McGilchrist contrasted the ratiocentric urge to control with a healthier relational responsiveness. Our ability to attend, relate, and respond is predominantly enabled by intuitive and non-conscious processes, those which are more fully capable of "inhabiting the matter at hand". Following the quote from the interview, in the paraphrased selections below, is further explanation from McGilchrist.

"The reason that the left brain needs certainty is because it wants to control. The modern disease is our need to control. It's through trying to control that we have destroyed the world. And we are destroying society through this passion for "I know how it should be." And "This is how it must be". The left hemisphere is like a bureaucratic establishment that has procedures that must be followed. It can only see these particular tracks, and if it follows these tracks it will be in control. But if anything else happens it's unsettling. This is one of the things that is promoted nowadays, that you should be in control, you know "Take control of your life! Do this! Make that!" and so on. In some ways this is very worthy, but it induces illusions that we can control, first of all, and anxiety when we find that we can't. A lot of patients who I saw as a psychiatrist would say, "You know, I just don't feel like my life is under control." And I felt like saying, "Well join the club!" For none of us is life under control. The art of life is knowing how to, as it were, 'surf the wave' to 'take the stream where it is leading', and make the most of that experience, not try to resist and insist that the wave should come over there three seconds from now. This will never happen. So it's a matter of responsiveness. Everything exists in a reverberative relationship. It's not a one-way relationship. It's a giving and a receiving. In that business of connecting to the world, not controlling it, but actually having a relationship with it, freedom, peace, imagination, growth happen. Whereas when we try to control everything according to the narrow conception that we have, we waste things. We waste opportunities, we make ourselves unhappy, and we destroy what we could have loved." 

"The distinction between what is controlled and rigid, with focus on detail, and what is flexibly responded to, with appreciation of the bigger picture, is significant. The left hemisphere sees its role as to control, and get things clear and fixed. The right hemisphere is open to potential and sees its role as to respond to the realities with which it is presented, with an open attendant disposition that one might call ‘active passivity’. It is able to respond to a changed, or changing, context. It is more capable of a frame shift; and not surprisingly the right frontal lobe is especially important for flexibility of thought, with damage in that area leading to perseveration, a pathological inability to respond flexibly to changing situations. For example, having found an approach that works for one problem, subjects seem to get stuck, and will inappropriately apply it to a second problem that requires a different approach – or even, having answered one question right, will give the same answer to the next and the next. It is the right frontal cortex that is responsible for inhibiting one's immediate response, and hence for flexibility and set-shifting. 

"Goals need to be flexible, responding to changing circumstances; and these in turn vary depending on how, and why, we pursue such goals. Since the world is, to all intents and purposes, infinitely complex in its structure, we could not predict it, even if there were no ‘black swan’ events. Some uncertainties are irresoluble, and we do well to recognise our limitations, since it makes for better decision-making. We need to be responsive to each step of the process. If you watch an animal – even an animalcule, such as an amoeba – exploring its environment, you will see it make forays, withdraw and adapt, try again in another direction, withdraw, and then find a direction it is prepared to pursue. Trial and error. Everything depends on an organism’s capacity to be flexible and responsive to its environment, just as the environment, both living and non-living, is responsive to organisms. It is this combination of interlocking responses that ensures stability. Good decision-makers are eclectic and not wedded to ‘consistency’. But when things turn out, for whatever reasons, the way we thought they might, we tend to overestimate our role in their doing so. We overestimate our ability to predict and to control. That way disaster often ensues.

"The right hemisphere-damaged, left hemisphere-reliant, patient is always in the right. They tend to disown problems and pass the responsibility to others. Psychopaths have no sense of guilt, shame, or responsibility. A distinguishing feature of schizophrenia is the inability to accept responsibility (causal repudiation), as in delusions of control of thoughts, feelings and actions by others. When they are presented with evidence that what they are doing is not working, their invariable response is first to deny that there is a problem, but, if pushed, to respond not that we have done too much of something that is ineffective, but that we simply need to do more of it. Denial, a tendency to conformism, a willingness to disregard the evidence, a habit of ducking responsibility, a blindness to mere experience in the face of the overwhelming evidence of theory: these might sound ominously familiar to observers of contemporary Western life. The idea that the ‘material’ world is not just a lump of resource, but reaches into every part of the realm of value, including the spiritual, that through our embodied nature we can commune with it, that there are responses and responsibilities that need to be respected, has largely been lost by the dominant culture.

"Eugène Minkowski saw that this involved a lack of ‘vital contact with reality’, the pre-reflective attunement to, or immersion in, the world that grounds our being. He defined the vital contact as an ability to ‘resonate with the world’, to empathise with others, to intuit how to respond affectively and to act rightly, through our partaking in an intersubjective world: “Without ever being ever able to formulate it, we know what we have to do; and it is this that makes our activity infinitely supple and malleable." Life vastly enhances the degree of responsiveness of, to, and within the world. Our attention is responsive to the world, and the world is responsive to our attention. Jan Zwicky said that "truth is the asymptotic limit of sensitive attempts to be responsible to our actual experience of the world... truth is the result of attention (as opposed to inspection). Of looking informed by love. Of really looking". Values are not invented but discovered and disclosed, and it takes life to discover and disclose them. They declare themselves in and through the responses of living beings to the world and the world’s response to them. Values evoke a response in us and call us to some end. They are what give meaning to life: such things as beauty, goodness, truth, and purpose. Every decision we make is not just a response to a known and certain world, but is part of co-creating that world for what it is. The self as an agent who takes responsibility for his or her actions is central to morality. 

"Direct experience ‘speaks’ to us and calls to us to respond with seriousness, reverence and gratitude. And that is what gives meaning to life. There is a process of responsive evocation, the world ‘calling forth’ something in me that in turn ‘calls forth’ something in the world. An Ent-sprechen is not ‘an answer to’ (une réponse à), but a ‘response to’, a ‘correspondence with’, a dynamic reciprocity and matching such as occur when gears, both in quick motion, mesh. Thus, our question as to the nature of philosophy calls not for an answer in the sense of a textbook definition or formulation, be it Platonic, Cartesian, or Lockeian, but for an Ent-sprechung, a response, a vital echo, a ‘re-sponsion’ in the liturgical sense of participatory engagement. We are trying ‘to listen to the voice of Being’. It is, or ought to be, a relation of extreme responsibility, custodianship, answerability to and for.” As George Steiner put it, "For Heidegger, the human person is only a privileged listener and respondent to existence."

In a recent paper, John Ehrenfeld highlighted the importance of a set of practices, of design, and of cultural norms, and that “pragmatic inquiry is driven by the right-hemisphere's ability to capture context and imagine ways to interact". He had a very specific definition for that word in mind. But I’m going to use it in the sense of Aristotle’s final cause, or telos, and I think this is a critical point. Our nihilistic culture, and I don’t think that is too strong of a description, has little to no idea where norms, beliefs, or values come from, or that they are anything more than a fiction that we can reductively explain away. So we have to address this. (One possible problem with pragmatism, I think, is that when taken alone it is vulnerable to the same criticisms that any blind theory rooted in 'selectionism' is vulnerable to. One must note that it is entirely possible to try and fail countless times, without number. So what is needed for success is an account of relationality, one which might also provide an explanation for how 'insight' into relationality is possible.)

An interesting feature of McGilchrist’s thought, which he borrowed from the physicist David Mermin, is that ‘relations precede relata’. This might not seem significant, but it ties into his idea that the telos of the cosmos is toward greater responsiveness, not longevity: "Something is happening in evolution at the cost of survival, because we are fragile, short-lived, vulnerable creatures compared with many far longer lived ancestors. There are examples of Actinobacteria in the depths of the ocean that are themselves around a million years old. There are redwood trees thousands of years old. And by comparison humans have far shorter lives. We're obviously not doing terribly well on surviving. Instead, what life seems to do is enormously increase responsiveness, and that responsiveness is to value. A single cell can value some things, and we can value more. So something is happening in evolution. I think that there's something that's driving this, and I think it is responsiveness. Response has in it this idea of ‘responsibility’, a sort of moral engagement with the world.” As an aside, his observation is noteworthy that organisms become more responsive in the course of evolution from unicellular and multicellular organisms. Michael Levin noted that the cells of multicellular organisms surround themselves with cells that are similar to themselves, or imitations as it were, and John Muckelbauer called imitation “responsiveness itself”. 

So now I think we might say that what really drives pragmatism is a telos toward increasing responsiveness, or “respons-ibility”. That which evokes a response in us, and gives our lives meaning, we often call values or virtues. Accordingly, pragmatism could be described as a result of the desire to be more responsive to (and caring for) reality and each other, with imagination (and wonder) being the capacities that allow us to fulfill that desire. None of this is done out of purely utilitarian considerations, though it may appear as such from the perspective of the left hemisphere, but rather this is done because it is the simply that to which we are inexplicably drawn. And it is a prerequisite for flourishing. We might say that, seen from the left hemisphere, 'wholeness' is the description of the telos of the cosmos. But this description of wholeness can easily turn into a sort of flat ontology, a homogenous and static version of telos that is intrinsically objectionable. However from the right hemisphere Gestalt, wholeness is actually 'responsiveness', which is a telic description that suggests a far more dynamic sort engagement of coincidentia oppositorum. And after all, returning to Mermin and "The Matter with Things", we need a right hemisphere description of telos that elevates the "relations", not a left hemisphere description of telos that focuses on the "relata".

To bring us back to his specific pragmatic concern in writing his paper, what’s the lesson here for managers? Victoria Alexander once noted that creative and intelligent behavior (i.e. responsiveness) emerges in complex systems when individuals and organizations have both freedom and constraint (there’s a coincidence of opposites). “Government/culture should provide the enabling constraints (language, tradition, borders, laws, courts, currency, public buildings, hospitals, schools, mass transportation, energy and communication networks) but the people making use of those constraints should have the semiotic freedom (i.e., the ability to interpret rules and even misinterpret rules) to make their own decisions, set their own goals, and enjoy/suffer the consequences.” One should hope this freedom is bound by wisdom. At any rate, she's describing a kind of dance, a dialogue, and managers should be capable choreographers, as it were, to allow these dances to play out.

To review, a LH "insurrection" appeared when power and control become the predominant value of the system, whether this system is a single organism or a collective. Over time, and with greater technological proficiency, the capacity for Western civilization to exercise power and control has increased, and so has our hubris. It's the familiar warning that power tends to corrupt. The implication, once again, is that if we adopt a kind of methodology - a way of life and form of attention - that includes features that are more consistent with the characteristics of humility (instead of hubris), and responsiveness (instead of control), then we could restore a healthier balance. How do we change the direction that humanity and the planet is taking? If we can implement a methodology that is consistent with the actions required for healthy individuals and societies, then have we effectively addressed the existential problem we face? More pragmatically, any methodology which might allow one to be comparatively more responsive and caring (to each other and the planet) than the existing methodology, would likely be preferable for that very reason.

Per McGilchrist, telos and value are not emergent properties of the right hemisphere. If they emerge at all, then their emergence in some way coincides with the cosmos itself, making them what he calls 'ontological primitives'. He describes other processes, such as consciousness, in a similar way. There's a relationship among all these primitives such that ultimately no hard and fast distinctions may be possible to make. Critically, the right hemisphere is somehow able to 'presence' to these aspects of reality in a way that the left hemisphere cannot. Now, if these sound like esoteric pronouncements, that might be because they present a significant challenge to Western cultural assumptions and scientific premises. For some people it is a bridge too far. Can we pick and choose among the ideas McGilchrist advances? Perhaps we would like to retain the basics of the hemisphere hypothesis, but discard or modify the portions he wrote about value, purpose, and the sense of the sacred. I think we could, but it would come at a high cost. It would rob the 'Master' of much of his authority over the 'Emissary' and potentially reduce them to equal partners. If we accept that the RH is more veridical, then I think we must follow where it leads. And it leads to a very numinous sort of world, with transcendent values that can guide us into a flourishing future. Which isn't to say there are no problems with the ideas of value, purpose, and the sacred. After all, how long have we been habitually misconceiving these in a distorted LH fashion?

Keywords: attend/relate/respond vs. neglect/deny/control

Sources:
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things (2021)
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary (2009)