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)