We are bodies.
This is the main argument in the article, which I will make through a series of ideas from phenomenology – an orientation in philosophy interested in the world as it’s experienced.
Bodies are “holding fields” (Sills, 2006) of various systems leading to our experience. And our experience of the world is all we really have.
Bodies are therefore, all we have and all we are.
Our bodies integrate past memories and future predictions into our present potentialities, in constant interaction with other bodies and our overall environment. In other words, our bodies are the embodiment of space and time; the way in which we manifest.
Is this new, counter-intuitive or controversial? Or purely obvious?
As I will argue below, our Western philosophical tradition and much of the materialistic science that builds on it has disowned the body by characterising it as an objectified tool and platform of our mind: something to look after, exercise, diet, ignore or treat for the achievement of our higher goals, obtaining of pleasure and avoidance of pain.
What phenomenology invites us to do is to consider the body as an inseparable element in the system we form with our environment and to hold lightly any distinction between cognitive (mental) and affective (bodily) systems (Panksepp, 2006) which are in any case deeply intertwined.
My body is me as a subject, not an object I own.
A good starting point to embodiment is the reflection that my body is a subject, rather than an object.
An object – say, a table – is devoid of intentionality. I can observe a table, I can turn around and catch different perspectives of it, and I can leave the table and never see it again. If I paint it a different colour, it will have changed for me, but also “objectively” for you, or any other observer. The table has no intention in all of this.
A subject, by contrast, is that which is living intentionally. It exists with its own practical engagement with the world. A subject changes itself continuously since it’s in a dance with the world.
I am therefore, a subject: in motion and living.
And what are you? For you, you are a subject.
For me, in a way you can be an object. I can observe you, take different perspectives, leave and never see you again and I can also change you (e.g cut your hair).
But occasionally I may realise you are a subject too: I can become aware that you too exist independently, that you can observe me (like an object or even as a subject) and that you yourself are also in forever motion through your consciousness of being alive (Buber, 1958)
So far, so good.
But what am I in the first place? And what are you?
If being a subject is being intentional, the question becomes “where does this intention come from”?
This is where the great divide occurs.
From a Cartesian standpoint, I am my thoughts who come from my mind. And I also have a body that is akin to a tool whereby I can register the world out there and execute my thoughts as actions.
In other words, the body is an object operated by myself, the subject. This subject resides in the mind from where it takes control of the body as much as possible.
The Cartesian standpoint is the most fundamental and influential perspective in our philosophical understanding. It reigns in our common sense, our science and in our medicine.
When phenomenologists argue instead that the body is a subject (Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Gendlin, 1971) they are trying to break free of this Cartesian dualism (body as object operated by mind as subject) and bring together the mind and the body within the same subjective, intentional being.
The body is not a machine, it’s not a tool, it’s not a thing we have or a thing we carry. It’s our very being. Its changiness, decaying, emotional landscape, flowing veins, beating heart, racing thoughts, panics, aesthetic pleasures, perceived colours and the living contact with the world we inhabit is us.
This is what we mean when we say that “we are bodies” or that the body is a subject.
The body is not a machine, it’s not a tool, it’s not a thing we have or a thing we carry. It’s our very being.
Existence is bodily lived contact with the world
Cognitive science presupposes there is an external world out there that we perceive through our senses, by their light reflected or the sound waves it emits.
But for phenomenologists, there is no clear cut distinction between the world “out there” and our experience of it. It’s the ongoing relation which leads to our existence. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, Gendlin, 1997)
Let’s say I am sitting on a tree.
My experience of being alive at this moment is inseparable from the fact of this sitting. Being supported by this tree, I may feel relaxed, grateful or inspired. Whatever I am feeling, whichever the colour of my existence, it comes not just from me, not just from the tree, but from the relation we have just formed, this tree and me, in our holding/sitting arrangement.
This constant interaction with the world happens pre-reflectively. Before I sat on the tree, I may not have thought I wanted to sit on a tree, but rather it was the form of the branch that invited me, an invitation I spotted and took because I felt rather tired or simply because I felt like sitting.
Not only are our bodies part of our intentional subjective experience (as opposed to a machine to register external data and execute internal commands), they are also a “wonderfully intricate connection with everything around you” (Gendlin, 1971).
In other words, our bodies are us as beings-in-the-world, emerging and changing in relation to our projects and tasks.
Our bodies – ourselves – come into being through this action. Although we are hardly aware of them at the best of times, they are our doors of perception that allow us to focus and act towards objects. But also, the objects are what call us into being. Sitting in bed typing these words in my computer, my bed and my computer are helping me understand how my body is positioned, making that position felt and understood.
“There is no such a thing as a body” argues Orbach (2006: 68) building on Winnicott’s idea that we can be better understood in relation to others.
What could this all mean?
For one, it matters how we move through the world. What postures, movements and interactions we embody, whether they have the power to support us. And also, it matters how we organise our environment so that it calls our bodies to the actions we most desire for ourselves: from small details like having water in sight so that we drink, to where we may live and work for our general wellbeing. .
Therefore, a healthy body/system has a healthy relationship to its world – to its context, other people and more-than-human natural systems.
The body knows and acts before (or as) the mind thinks
I come into the room. It’s a winter morning and the room is quite dark. I reach out to pull the blinds. And after I do this, I realise I haven’t thought about what I have done.
Merleau-Ponty calls this pre-reflective intentionality. A sensorimotor engagement with the world where thoughts, if they come, refine, re-orient or reaffirm actions as they happen. A “presence to the world that is older than intelligence” (1964: 52)
Now, cognitive psychologists (how I was trained as an undergrad) will argue this is procedural memory at play: the system we engage in habitual actions such as driving a car.
But then, in novel actions such as cooking dinner for a friend in their kitchen, cognitive psychologists would argue procedural memory isn’t enough: we don’t know what to do. Therefore we will engage our semantic memory (our knowledge about the world) and our episodic memory (things we have done before) to come up with a solution which becomes a higher order goal (make pasta bolognesa) which then becomes lower order goals such as “grab a pan”, “fill it with water”, “wait for it to boil”, etc. It is these lower orders that then get our body moving.
This is the way in which cognitive science minimises subjectivity and puts it in the third person.
For phenomenologists, thought-influenced action such as cooking in a novel situation still starts from the body in the first person. I start by opening cupboards and getting a sense of the potentialities of the environment. As I rummage through cupboards my body knows how to move to audit existing food. When I see tomato passata an insight emerges: can I make pasta? Now, my search becomes more deliberate. My perception is more intentional, my attention more focused. But then I see some gnocchi. Great, I can now cut the cooking time.
“The body is not more than an element in the system of subject and his (sic) world and the task to be performed elicits the necessary movements from him (sic) as a sort of a remote attraction” (1964: 122)
Reflective intentionality influences how the body will move (by refining what the task is) but essentially rides on the always at play interaction between the body and our environment.
Therefore, phenomenologically, our thinking refines and adjusts our never not intentional bodily existence.
And just like we bodily know how to drive a car, make dinner for a friend or do our tax returns, we also somehow know about our deepest problems and most complex situations.
Gendlin calls this body-knowledge phenomenon the felt sense (1971). For him, our situated bodies know a lot more about our situations than our minds understand. Focusing is the act of directing attention to a vague feeling inside our bodies to bring it to awareness and find the right words to describe it. As a result, our bodies ease the tension they carry from having this problem. Through focusing, problems become more clear, better defined; and ways forward also start revealing themselves.
Les Todres confirms there is an “aesthetic pleasure that satisfies a client emotionally” (2007) when words are found to describe a feeling. This way, there is sense-making that bridges the inner word of a bodily feeling with language that can be shared with others.
Bringing the felt sense into words allows us to operationalise it and reflect on it, therefore opening up new possibilities to move, act and embody our situation.
The body lives with our traumas and the potentiality of our healing
Our bodies carry our traumas, in ways which our reflective minds may not have become re-acquainted with yet (Reich, 1945; Merleau-Ponty, 1964; van der Kolk, 1994).
This means that the whole way our bodies work: our posture, our tissues, neurochemical transmission, our perception and emotional landscape is influenced by historical traumas that our thinking mind has forgot or never processed.
So even if we think that “we had a happy childhood”, we could be suffering from traumatic memories coming back “as emotional and sensory states, with little capacity for verbal representation” (van der Kolk, 2002). As Merleau-Ponty explained, our “momentary world” during a “formative element of my whole life” (1964: 97) creates a structure that survives not as an episodic memory but as a general way of being.
Practically speaking, this could be an unspeakable sense of dread, a rigid posture, a mistrustful outlook, low threshold for stress, seeing feedback as attacks, autoimmune diseases and an endless list of body responses we aren’t conscious of relating to these traumatic episodes.
This supports a “dumping ground” view of the body: carrying repressed memories of traumatic experiences as problematic ways of being and accumulating disease (Mate, 2003)
However, a complimentary way is that the body offers us a “royal road” to healing: we can (partly) heal from our traumas by working in a variety of embodied ways: movement, posture or EMDR (Shapiro, 1995 )
We need to consider that trauma is complex and therefore requires a complex way of working that integrates cognitive, emotional and sensory systems in the nervous system (Herbert, 2006): neither physically-oriented, nor cognitive work alone will do it.
Healing comes from building safety and trust in the body, accessing and integrating difficult material that has been repressed and the rupture of attachment patterns through experiments in new ways of being and relating.
Bibliography
Corrigall, J., Payne, H. and Wilkinson, H. (2006) About a body: Working with the embodied mind in psychotherapy. London: Routledge.
Gendlin, E.T. (1997) The process model. Northwestern University Press
Gendlin, E.T. (1978) Focusing. New York: Everest House.
Maté, G. (2011) When the body says no: The cost of hidden stress. London: Vermilion.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of perception. Translated by C. Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Original work published 1945)
Pankseepp, J. (2006). Core emotional systems of the mammalian brain; in About a body: Working with the embodied mind in psychotherapy. London: Routledge. London: Routledge.
Todres, L. (2007) Embodied enquiry: Phenomenological touchstones for research, psychotherapy and spirituality. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
van der Kolk, B. (2014) The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. London: Penguin.
