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ABSTRACT
There have been numerous attempts to solve the apparent dualism of ‘body’ and ‘mind’, purportedly uniting mutually incompatible binaries through hyphenation, the creation of compound terms, or the erasure of one of the terms entirely. ‘Psychophysical’, ‘psychosomatic’ (with or without the word ‘unity’), ‘mind-body’, ‘body-mind’, and ‘somatic’, have all been advanced as a means of articulating an undivided sense of human being. This discussion deconstructs this descriptive matrix in an attempt to expose the naked paradox of human being obscured by tacit assumptions hidden in language. In dance the idea of ‘body’ is often afforded priority. Dancers understanding of themselves in activity, whether performing or observing – in the fields of learning, creating or rehearsing – is critically affected by their conception of themselves as divided or unified beings. To say, ‘there is no “body” … or “mind”’ might facilitate a more productive, poietic sense of practice, a ‘thinking in activity’ that does not imply a dualistic ontology. This requires a practical philosophical perspective. Such ‘philosophical practicality’ in dancers’ practice may afford them greater resilience for their future careers against the fragmentation of dis-unity that thinking of ‘body’ or ‘mind’ engenders.
Notes
1. I use the term ‘human being’ rather than ‘human beings’ throughout my discussion, to denote the kind of being that is human, rather than to refer to any individual human beings as such.
2. In his recent book on materialism Terry Eagleton (Citation2016) appears to both accept and dismiss the reality of subjective experience, what he terms ‘soul’, as something that just ‘is’: ‘Soul-language is simply a way of distinguishing between bodies of this type [i.e. human being] (or of some other animal kind) and bodies such as pitchforks or bottles of brown sauce’ (Eagleton Citation2016, 39).
3. W. B. Yeats ‘Among School Children’ in: Yeats Citation1967, 245.
4. For recent examples of this tendency of undermining agency through reductionism see: philosopher Daniel Dennett interviewed by Jim Al-Khalili in the BBC Radio 4 programme The Life Scientific (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08kv3y4), and, albeit from a more comic and critical perspective, Robert Newman’s book (Newman Citation2017) and BBC Radio 4 programme Rob Newman’s Neuropolis (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08nkn4 k). This reductive tendency (whether that is an author’s or commentator’s intention or not) frames human being in terms of a reduction to physical processes (the assumption being that there can be nothing mysterious, magical or conscious in such phenomena). Newman cites Professor Brian Cox’s assertion that ‘There is nothing special about human brains. They operate according to the laws of physics. In a sufficiently complex computer, I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t build AI’ (Cox cited in The Times 2014, available from https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/brian-cox-says-principle-of-ai-is-possible-j2m8nzvf905). An earlier example of this reductionism can be found in Francis Crick’s The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (Citation1994), where Crick argues that: ‘You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules’ (Crick Citation1994, 3). As an example of how Crick’s reductionism translates into science textbooks the authors of the 2007 edition of Neuroscience: Exploring the Human Brain state: ʻIn neuroscience, there is no need to separate mind from brain, once we fully understand the individual and concerted action of brain cells, we will understand the origins of our mental abilities’ (Bear, Connors, and Paradiso Citation2007, 24). More recently neuroscientist David Eagleman’s Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (Citation2011) and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen’s The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark (Citation2013) seem to make the case that ‘we’, in the sense of our subjective identities, do not exist. It is not necessarily that this scientific picture is wrong; it is rather the pejorative implications of the language and the tenor in which it is interpreted that are problematic. It may well be the case that the received idea of human being is inherently incorrect, but it is also the case that a great many other assumptions in the received idea of reality in general are incorrect (for example it might be said coequally that, as with the experience of subjectivity, ‘colour’ and ‘solidity’ do not exist ‘in reality’ in the way we experience them).
5. In the following discussion I will concentrate on the compound term ‘psychophysical’ as being the essential component of the sometimes-employed ‘psychophysical unity’. The compound nature of the terms ‘psychophysical’ and ‘psychosomatic’ already implies unification; the suffix ‘unity’, sometimes appended to them, is therefore arguably redundant. A term such as ‘psychophysical unity’ is, on closer examination, tantamount to a tautology.
6. See Alexander Citation1996 (originally published 1918), Citation2000 (originally published 1940), Citation2001 (originally published 1932) and Citation2004 (originally published 1923).
7. For example: Dance and the Lived Body (Horton-Fraleigh Citation1987), Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power (Foster Citation1996), Dancing Bodies, Living Histories: New Writings About Dance and Culture (Flynn and Doolittle Citation2000), The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory (Thomas, Citation2003), The Body Eclectic: Evolving Practices in Dance Training (Nettl-Fiol and Bales Citation2008), Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture (Noland Citation2009), The Wise Body: Conversations with Experienced Dancers (Early and Lansley Citation2011), Ageing, Gender, Embodiment and Dance: Finding a Balance (Schweiger Citation2012).
8. The British philosopher Louis Arnaud Reid discusses the idea of ‘embodiment’ as a ‘psycho-physical’ phenomenon in relation to expression in the arts in his book Meaning in the Arts (Citation1969, 76, 77). In recent years this term has also become pervasive in the field of actor-training with the idea of ‘psychophysical acting’ as popularised by Phillip Zarrilli (See Zarrilli Citation2008 and Zarrilli, Daboo, and Loukes Citation2013).
9. It is perhaps worth noting that, as Lee Braver has discussed (Braver Citation2012; and see also Moore Citation2012), Wittgenstein can be viewed from both the analytic and continental philosophical traditions. Pakes appears to be writing from an analytic perspective that tends to assume, as Andrew Bowie has recently argued (see Bowie Citation2015, 51, 52), an attitude of ‘scientific objectivity’ that naturally reinforces a ‘subject-object’ split. Therefore, despite her observation that Cartesian dualism is ‘assumed to be antithetical to dance’s essence’, Pakes, in constituting ‘dance’s mind-body problem’ as an object of philosophical analysis, tacitly performs the very subject-object split that is part of the essence of the mind-body problem. In this sense it would seem that a ‘mind-body problem’ will be inevitable for the analytic philosopher.
10. I would also argue that the problem is not even improved by using a non-compound term, such as the use of sōma in the now-popular and ubiquitous term ‘somatics’. Thomas Hanna had argued, following Bruno Snell in the Citation1953 translation of his influential book The Discovery of Mind: The Greek Origin of European Thought, that sōma, the Greek word for ‘body’, following Hesiod, really meant the whole living person. Although Snell’s interpretation was comprehensively overturned by Robert Renehan in his Citation1979 article ‘The Meaning of Σομα in Homer’ (Renehan Citation1979), the myth that sōma means something more than ‘body’ has persisted. Even so, as I argue here, it still fails to solve the problem it is intended to solve.
11. The seventeenth-century mechanist world-view saw nature as consisting of small spherical corpuscular particles that were in constant motion. All natural phenomena could be accounted for in mechanical terms understood as the motion and kinetic interaction of these corpuscles. Mind or soul was outside of this schema because it was understood by Christians as being truly ‘supernatural’ and as originating from the Divine source (See: Gaukroger Citation1995, 269, 270).
12. For example, as used in the title of The Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices (Whatley Citation2009–).
13. For example, as used in the title of Judith Butler’s Citation2011 book Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex.
14. For example, as used in the title of Nettl-Fiol’s and Bales’s 2008 edited book Bodies Eclectic: Evolving Practices in Dance Training.
15. See: ‘The ‘problem of “feeling” in dance practice: fragmentation and unity” (Leach Citation2009).
16. It is important to point out here that ‘feeling’, insofar as it is anything substantial at all, is completely innocent in all of this. It is rather the inadvertent and unconscious (mis)use of perceived and imagined sensation that is problematic. This is because it is effectively the misinterpretation of an aspect of physiological functioning that results in the tacit assumption that the sensory mechanisms should deliver an absolute register of activity, which is a function that they are not designed to fulfill. The system’s use of sensory information is dynamic and contextual and is best left to operate at the non-conscious level. It would seem to be an accident of evolution that we have some conscious awareness of its operations. Proprioception (rather than sensation) – which is entirely non-conscious – is not directly perceived, and has the capacity, through training, to function with a high degree of accuracy.
17. I am referring to the processing of the ideas of Descartes, Kant and Hegel by, amongst others, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.
18. See, for example, Edelman Citation1989, 1994.
19. I am aware that intuition is precisely the phenomenon that David Best finds unacceptable in his discussion of Louis Arnaud Reid (Best Citation1974, 188, 189). However, Best is of course writing from within the analytic tradition for which the subjectivity of intuition would be anathema. Intuition is not so troublesome in the continental tradition and is, for example, central to Henri Bergson’s thought in An Introduction to Metaphysics (Bergson Citation1999).
20. Plato’s text is regarded as one of the sources for the idea of ‘the thing in itself’ that dominates the metaphysics of presence (See Agamben Citation1999, 27–38).
21. My understanding of Aristotle’s concept of ‘soul’ has been informed by Giorgio Agamben’s work, especially the essays in the volume Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Citation1999), particularly ‘The Thing Itself’ and ‘On Potentiality’.
22. It seems to me that the common idea of ‘reality’ that I tacitly tend to assume in my day-to-day activities is a rather impoverished idea of ‘materialism’. This is an idea in which scientific ‘physicalism’ is simplistically misinterpreted as merely a contemporary version of seventeenth-century corpuscular mechanics: the idea that the ‘physical’ world consists only of microscopic particles moving against each other. Since these particles were not in themselves conceived as animate, some extra, moving, animating ‘super-natural’ force was necessary to impart movement to the world (and which the Christian Descartes and the Jewish Spinoza both attributed, in their own different ways, to ‘God’). As such, apparent phenomena such as animate life and the conscious awareness that we experience for ourselves as ‘mind’ (and intuit as present in others) seems necessarily exotic and ‘super-natural’. As modern particle physics has shown, however, the contemporary version of these corpuscles or particles – atoms – are not at all inanimate but are rather fizzing with energy beneath their apparent ‘shells’. And, as contemporary molecular biology has discovered, the distinction between geological and biological reality is more of a continuum rather than a sharp divide (See Lane Citation2015, 27). Raymond Tallis argues for a new conception of ‘matter’ as well as wisely cautioning against the recent fashion of superficially invoking the strangeness of quantum reality to provide a solution (Tallis Citation2011, 353–357).
23. As the physicist Carlo Rovelli has recently stated: ‘The world is not made up of tiny pebbles. It is a world of vibrations, a continuous fluctuation, a microscopic swarming of fleeting micro-events’ (Citation2016, 113), and an ‘individual is a process: complex, tightly integrated’ (Citation2015, 72).
24. What are the implications of this? What matters, it seems to me, is that the dancer’s ‘body’ is understood more properly in terms of its manifestation of a sense of presence through the tangible way in which it is animated by the dancer’s conception of the-act-to-be-performed. The reality that is articulating this is the activity of the performer’s nervous system, which we see, and the individual experiences, through the feedback of our respective sensory mechanisms: the dancer proprioceptively, the observer visually. However, the reality remains wholly neural. Although the elements of the ‘world’ are transduced by specific sensory mechanisms, the nervous system knows nothing of the world in itself, as Kant rightly observed. It knows only the neural traffic and its interpretations of this. This sense of presence does not reside ‘in’, or ‘as’, the ‘body’ of the dancer, therefore, but in the activity of this neural traffic. This flow of information is performative, and as such, not reducible to the material substrate of the nervous system in terms of its anatomy, although this architecture does provide the parameters of its possibilities. Instead, what is important, what gives one particular dancer the particular quality he or she has, is the particular sense of quickening, a sense of gathered presence conveyed via the kinetic quality that the ‘body’ is imbued with by the activity of the nervous system. This kinēsis, thought by Aristotle to be one of the hallmarks of the animating principle of ‘soul’, is seldom thought of in itself. It is always implicitly reduced to ‘body’ and ‘sensation’, itself understood (incorrectly, I would argue) as being ‘bodily’ rather than intellectual.
25. My reading of Aristotle’s Physics is informed by Heidegger’s 1939 essay ‘On the Essence and Concept of Φύσις in Aristotle’s Physics B, I’ (in Heidegger Citation1998).
26. The equivalent in contemporary physics to Aristotle’s schema might be understood as the relationship between the wave-particle virtuality of the sub-atomic substrate, giving rise to the form of reality as we experience it. As Rovelli notes, ancient philosophy is at times uncannily prescient in its anticipation of current thinking (see Rovelli Citation2016, 3–30).
27. I am thinking, for example, of: Ivana Müller’s How Heavy are my Thoughts (2003), and While We Were Holding It Together (2006), Xavier Le Roy’s Le Sacre du Printemps (2007), Jérôme Bel’s The Show Must Go On (2001, 2004, 2015), New Art Club’s The Visible Men (2007), A Quiet Act of Destruction (2011), and Feel About Your Body (2013).
28. This idea of the ‘seething potentiality’ of nothingness can be related to quantum theory. As explained by Karen Barad: ‘According to quantum electrodynamics, the “vacuum” (which, classically speaking, refers to the void) is a state in which everything that can possibly exist exists in some potential form’ (Barad Citation2007, 92). Because of experiments conducted by Willis Lamb and Robert Retherford in 1947 on tiny shifts in the spectrum of hydrogen, Barad argues, we ‘have empirical confirmation of this seething potentiality’ (Ibid.).
29. The phrase ‘thinking in activity’ was coined by the American Pragmatist philosopher John Dewey to describe his experience of lessons in the technique of Frederick Matthias Alexander (cited by Alexander Citation2001, 42). In his writing such as Human Nature and Conduct (1922) and Experience and Nature (1929) his account of the momentary aliveness of process and the illusory nature of the dichotomy between perceived ‘ends’ and ‘means’ echo similar concerns in the continental phenomenological tradition of Husserl and Heidegger.