Movement

Caspar David Friedrich - Das Eismeer

If the Anthropocene is the age of denial and neglect, then these are the product of paralysis and perseveration. McGilchrist writes, "There is an observable and reciprocal relation between objectively fluid movement on the one hand, and subjectively fluid cognition and creativity on the other. Since both subjects with schizophrenia and those with autism have an impaired sense of fluid time, they may also display loss of fluidity in cognition, and difficulties in perception and interpretation of motion... it can leave them rooted to the spot: "I get stuck, almost as if I am paralysed at times." Recall the fixed stare of the Gorgon (or basilisk) of Minoan mythology, that immobilises and kills. According to Minkowski, morbid immobility shows itself in stereotyped movements and thought perseveration. Analytic thought and language tend to immobilise the world; motion, time, flow are replaced by stasis, eternity and fixity. Concepts stand in for whatever it is that exists in the world of experience, and therefore within time. They immobilise and sunder the natural flow of the entity in question: they freeze, so to speak, elements that are in their very essence dynamic, and they separate into parts the essentially inseparable. Conceptualisation is a form of congelation, freezing in time. Life is no longer experienced, which is the only way in which it can truly be understood (right hemisphere fashion), but 'understood', which is to say reduced to a conceptual object, a re-presentation (left hemisphere fashion) outside of time. Bergson said: "Intelligence starts ordinarily from the immobile... intuition starts from movement". We see ourselves, and therefore come to know ourselves, only indirectly, through our active, embodied engagement with the world at large." Individuals and societies that feel paralyzed find transitions difficult, to say the least, and that presents a challenge for advocates of social change. But our embodied intuitive wisdom, with its understanding of context and that which is implicit, and its capacity for spontaneous responsiveness, is capable of overcoming the neglect that results from this narrow form of attention produced by the ratiocentric left hemisphere, its "analysis paralysis" and perseveration. McGilchirst concludes "What I aim to show is that motion is at the core of every aspect of our experience, and of our ability to make sense of it, in a way of which we are normally unaware, because our analytic intellect cannot deal with it; and that motion is foundational to existence, and stillness merely the limit case of motion, not stillness primary, and motion some form of aberration or disturbance of the foundational inertia." 

In Madness and Modernism, Louis Sass explores the idea that madness "is the end-point of the trajectory that consciousness follows when it turns in upon itself and we cease to act, to be involved, spontaneous and intuitive, and instead become passive, disengaged, self-conscious, and stare in an ‘objective’ fashion at the world around us." He notes how "Various writers have pointed out the dangers of enshrining reason, and how it can bring on the catatonic paralysis of overdeliberation and self-consciousness. In The Birth of Tragedy (and again in Twilight of the Idols), Nietzsche criticizes the coming of hyperrationalism, represented by Socrates, which Nietzsche believed was increasingly becoming the norm in Western civilization. He describes how the logical side has become overdeveloped, where consciousness, the "dissuader and critic," replaces instinct as the dominant motivating force. Socrates epitomizes this aberrant condition and is described as hearing a quasi-divine voice that speaks to him as if from without - a voice that, as so often in schizophrenia, is a "purely inhibitory agent"; it "always spoke to dissuade." For such a person, command hallucinations, if they do occur, might actually serve as a way of escaping a dominant mood of anxious self-awareness and paralyzing ambivalence, a way of catapulting oneself out of more characteristically schizophrenic states of endless deliberation, vacillation, self-criticism, and doubt. One patient spoke of the external world as a "stretching emptiness [where] all is unchangeable, immobile, congealed, crystallized." Schizophrenic hyperreflexivity involves an increased reliance on the more volitional or strategic (i.e., the serial) modes of mental processing, and an excessive, often paralyzing tendency toward vacillation and conscious deliberation among unsuppressed alternatives, leading to confusion, paralysis, and associated feelings of arbitrariness. ...The true exercise of freedom and rationality (at least as we normally use these terms) relies on the smooth operation of many forms of nonconscious mentation and of spontaneous or automatic behavior."

Martin Heidegger wrote "The evil and thus keenest danger is thinking itself. It must think against itself, which it can only seldom do." This echoes Carl Jung's famous saying "the only real danger that exists is man himself... his psyche should be studied because we are the origin of all coming evil.” As McGilchist has pointed out, this is indeed where we must look. There may be positive feedback loops among the schizotypal traits of the left hemisphere that, unmitigated, have given rise to and sustain the modern and contemporary situation of Western cultural psychology. (Our capacity for imaginative systemic reinvention appears to be grinding to a halt.) To take the example explored here, although humans perhaps evolved to occupy a "cognitive niche", exploring the limit of self-referencial left hemisphere processes has led to schizoid paralysis and perseveration, which induces disembodiment, which in turn only serves to increase immobility and vacillation, and so on. Schizotypal traits and patterns of thought and action, per McGilchrist and Sass, are now observable both in individuals and the wider culture, and ultimately, left unchecked, these prevent a more effective response to the global threats we face. Although the focus of this article is on motion, and in particular the lack thereof, many other schizotypal traits produce similar feedback dynamics. Instead of embodying love, they result in a downward spiral that ends in the disembodiment of death. 

Slow Movement

In Carl Honoré's 2004 book, In Praise of Slow, he describes the Slow movement: "It is a cultural revolution against the notion that faster is always better. The Slow philosophy is not about doing everything at a snail's pace. It's about seeking to do everything at the right speed. Savoring the hours and minutes rather than just counting them. Doing everything as well as possible, instead of as fast as possible. It’s about quality over quantity in everything from work to food to parenting." If that's what it is about, then why call it the Slow movement? I do appreciate the double entendre of the word 'movement' here, if we assume slow could literally be describing the pace of movement, in addition to a popular revolution. But how does the pace of movement influence our experience of life? Essentially, it frustrates that simple utilitarianism that has taken over contemporary culture. It's not slowness per se that Honore values, so much as he's resisting the bland utilitarianism that irons out the richer textures of life. The Slow movement originated in just that resistance effort in 1986 in Italy. There's a lot of dimensions of social health, and not all are well served by the dominant ethics of business and politics. An old issue of Reader's Digest quoted a saying that John Lennon later made famous: "Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans." This captures the elusive nature of trying to fully appreciate the circumstances we find ourselves in. It's a task we would neglect at our own peril. That planning and mapping of life from point A to point B ignores all the terrain in between. It turns out there's a lot of other benefits to slowing down. Food can be savored and is digested better, stress levels decline and sleep is better. Relationships deepen. We can develop a more profound, lifelong passion for something (or someone), and spend less time following the latest 'hot takes' on breaking news or gossip. The subject of time occupies a full chapter in McGilchrist's book The Matter with Things. The Slow movement receives special mention in that connection:

"Now we are all encouraged to see time as a resource, a thing, and therefore to rush our lives indiscriminately in order to pack ‘more’ into it. As a reaction to this there has arisen the Slow Movement, whose raison d’être, according to Norwegian philosopher Guttorm Fløistad, is that our most profound needs, those for closeness, care, love and appreciation of the good things in life, as well as of one another, depend on slowness in human relations: ‘in order to master changes, we have to recover slowness, reflection and togetherness. There we will find real renewal.’ Pressure to acquire speeds things up; living in tune with the world moves things at the world’s pace once again."

Keywords: paralysis, perseveration, fluidity, flow, movement, motion, mobility, immobility, stillness, inertia, time, stereotypy, overdeliberation, stasis, fixity, frozen, crystallized, congealed, constancy, catatonia, morbidity, inhibition, hyperrationalism, vacillation, doubt, dynamic, transition, transformation, change, flux, "panta rhei" (everything flows)

Sources:
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things (2021)
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary (2009)
Louis Sass, Madness and Modernism (1992)