Somatic Ecology

Religious roots to the modern relationship to the body

Rene Descartes We generally take it as a given that the body and mind are separate. Whether the reader is conscious of Descartes Cogito, or simply accepts the precepts of western medicine, the modern human is conceived (at best) alongside, but not a part of, the human body.

My upcoming book looks at how conceiving of the human as separate from the natural world influences our relationship to the environment, and the current ecological crisis. As many, I tie the human/nature divide to the development of the mind/body divide.

Chapter Three of the book looks at religious roots to the modern conception. Here are a few thoughts from the first pages of that chapter, in which I look toward the influence of Christianity, considering its roots in Greek culture.

This chapter will focus on Judaism and Christianity and how the body is regarded within those traditions. While both religions carry complex relationships to the body, this chapter will focus on sex as justifying representative and compelling conclusions regarding the body. The writings of the Jewish Kabbalah will be considered, alongside Christian Gnostic texts and the writings of the Apostle Paul.

These two religions have carried dominant influence in Western civilization; our modern attitudes toward the body have been shaped by their influence. It would be appropriate to offer the possibility that Christian attitudes were more influential moving into the age of science (as will be examined in the next chapter.)

Understanding how prior centuries regarded the body establishes the roots out of which grew the tree of modern science. As will be seen through this analysis of the Jewish and Christian relationship to sex, humanities relationship to the body has been troubled through-out Western history. It is this understanding which allows for accurate interpretation of the aspirational statement made in Job 19:26, “Yet in my flesh shall I see God.” The body has been conceptualized at a distance from a moral human presence on this earth.

Many facets of Christianity grew directly from Judaism – most simply the New Testament from the Old Testament. But regarding the relationship to the body, it appears that societal influences had a stronger impact than religious precedent. The Christian mindset appears to grow from Greek conceptions of the body. The relationship between Greek and Christian understandings is exhibited broadly, including in the following from Clement of Alexandria: “the human ideal of continence, I mean that which is set forth by the Greek philosophers, teaches one to resist passion, so as not to be subservient to it, and to train the instincts to pursue rational goals. [But as Christians] our ideal is not to experience desire at all.” While many are familiar with the celebrated sensuality of Greek culture, there was simultaneously an isolation of control over the body from within the human conception. As Gnostic writings make clear, early Christians take the isolation of the spirit, exhibited in the Greek ethos, to extremes. According to Greek scholar Jean-Pierre Vernant:

“The body is the agent and instrument of actions, powers and forces which can only deploy themselves at the price of a loss of energy, a failure, a powerlessness caused by congenital weakness.But it is always Death, in person or by delegation who sits within the intimacy of the human body like a witness to its fragility. Tied to all the nocturnal powers of confusion, to a return to the indistinct and unformed, Death, associated with the tribe of his kin – Sleep, Fatigue, Hunger, Old Age – denounces the failure, the incompleteness of a body of which neither its visible aspects nor its inner forces of desire feeling thoughts and plans are ever perfectly pure Thus for the Greeks of the archaic period, mans misfortune is not that a divine and immortal soul finds itself imprisoned in the envelope of a material and perishable body, but that his body is not fully one. It does not possess, completely and definitively, that set of powers, qualities and active virtues which bring to an individual beings existence a constant, radiant, enduring life in a pure, totally alive state, a life that is imperishable because it is free from any seed of corruption and divorced from what could, from within or without, darken, wither and annihilate it. ”

Excerpt Copyright Robert Bettmann, 2008

Greek culture related the human to the divine, through their Gods. The bodies weakness and lack of ability is what separated the human from the divine. In the revelation and development of Christianity, there are some strong similarities. In the way that the Greeks assessed their bodies as a weak link in being ‘god-like’, so too Christian Gnostics constructed the human body as separating the human from the divine.

Human Body Systems While one might say that religion doesn’t have much to do with science, our modern philosophy and science grew from these early, possibly less rational, understandings. The subsequent/simultaneous dividing of the human from the ‘natural’ inevitably followed. A prior chapter documents environmental theories that consider the impact of that division. Subsequent chapters look at somatic training methodologies that validate embodied knowledge.

The Agreement of Ideas

Louis Armstrong [ From the proprietor, 4/16/09:

In the original post, I began by quoting Louis Armstrong as saying: “What you don’t know ain’t gonna come out the other end of your horn.” That’s Louis on the side here. That wisdom, however, was in fact played by Charlie Parker. I’m pretty certain I knew that, somewhere in me.

The night I wrote the post I was working on my own book, and was feeling kinship lovey with Terry Teachout, whose Louis Armstrong biography will be out shortly. His blog, which is regularly good fun, as I’m sure the book will be, just had a great post about his process of tracking down the authenticity of things that Armstrong said. You can see that here. And now back to the previously scheduled broadcast…]

I’ve been working on my book the last few weeks. I’ve written in prior posts about the upcoming publication of my Masters thesis. I am working with a large academic publishing house, and am not provided with a text editor. I am responsible for delivering a finished file, which they will put together and print.

I was working last night on Chapter 3, which deals with the science and philosophy that influence our perception of the body. I’ve always enjoyed studying history. The lives of the people who had these ideas, did these things. I find it interesting. I was looking at the section on the English philosopher Locke last night. Here’s the intro:

John Locke (1632-1704) was born at Wrington in England, and educated at Oxford where he received his B.A. and M.A. Subsequently he became a lecturer in Greek and later Reader in Rhetoric and Censor of Moral Philosophy, still at Oxford. In 1666 he met Lord Ashley, later First Earl of Shaftesbury, a leading figure at the court of Charles II. A year later he joined the Earls household, and for the next fourteen years shared in the fortunes and misfortunes of Ashley, serving in a number of supportive bureaucratic positions as the Earl rose to become Chancellor.

Locke was interested in philosophy, and it was the writings of Descartes in particular which first interested him. As Locke put it: he wanted to understand very precisely and systematically what knowledge “was capable of.” Nevertheless Locke was too involved with the vagaries of British politics to write early in his life. In 1683 he was even forced to slip away into exile in Holland following the Rye House Plot to kidnap the King. Locke was able to return to Britain in 1689 following the crowning of William of Orange, and it was at this time that the majority of his works were finally printed.

The Essay Concerning Human Understanding, (1690) his magnum opus on epistemology, was inspired by a conversation with a group of friends in 1671. They were engaged in philosophical discourse, when it became clear that they could make no further progress until they had examined the minds capacities and had seen “what objects our understandings were or were not fitted to deal with.”

Lockes basic notion counters Descartes, in that he believes that experience is the basis for all knowledge. We receive “ideas” from sense experience, and Knowledge, with a capital “K”, is the perception of the agreement or disagreement of two ideas. There are four means of establishing knowledge: Identity, Relation, Co-existence or Necessary Connection and Real Existence. All knowledge is also either actual (directly in front of us) or habitual (having seen proof and remembering it.)

What I was struck by just now is Locke’s assertion that Knowledge is the perception of agreement or disagreement between two ideas. I think there’s an interesting application there to choreography. I’m really looking forward to getting into the studio in April to start choreographing again. Just cause I know whatever I know….. doesn’t mean it WILL come out the end of my horn. But it’s been a few years, and I’m pretty psyched to see what we come up with.

I just found out that an idea that I had in 1996 will now be a book. My Masters thesis, which had been my undergraduate thesis, is being published. Here is a brief summary of the idea:

The fight to protect our natural environment can be usefully connected to a reconsideration of the human body. The body is more than corpse, and more than adjunct to the mind. Somatic Ecology states that there is a parallel between the way that we relate to our bodies, and the ways that we interact with the natural world. In fact, how we relate to our bodies is representative of how we relate to the natural world.

Somatic Ecology states that if we want to influence how we relate to the natural world, the most direct means to do so is not to take long walks in the woods, but to invite ourselves to encounter our own human nature – our bodies. Finally, Somatic Ecology argues that the environmental crisis is caused not by too much knowledge, but by too little, and that dance can be used to increase our human knowledge.

We are taught today that the only way to “know anything is through the use of the mind. The complete devaluation of empathic, embodied, sensual knowledge in polite society has sealed over the natural in our selves. What some have called the mechanization of the body (see: modern medicine) is part and parcel of the development of modern society (see: skyscrapers and airports.) Challenging the domination of science over true reason requires challenging the domination of mind over body. The first step is to validate, seek, and encourage somatic knowledge.

Empathy is at the core of somatic understanding, and encompasses the feelings by which we know life. We usually think of empathy as somehow a shared feeling – that one feels empathy for another. Empathy is actually a solitary experience. Its importance to the study of the body, and the natural world, is that empathy is the core of knowing. Empathy preceeds understanding, and follows awareness. These feelings and understandings are not predicated upon study, research, or science, but they do form the foundation for religion, culture, and even technology. Our exclusion of “feelings” from “rational” debate is not a symbol of the environmental problem, but a root cause.

Though we act as if we live in a rational world, we actually live in an empathic, lively world that simply appears to be dominated by “reason.” As we come to fully grasp the terrors caused by un-mitigated reason it will serve us to explore what steps we might take to reverse them.

Environmentalism at its core is not motivated by statistics, but by empathy. It is more similar to religion than science. In tracing a history of Thoreau, Pinchot, Muir, Leopold, McKibben (a history of thinking about environment) we discover this. As long as environmentalists place statistics between their argument and the audience, they weaken the ability to create change. To fight this battle with limited humanity is to fight a losing battle.

In this modern world of freeways and cubicles, it will be very difficult to move from an understanding of the need for body knowledge, to a place of greater somatic awareness. For this journey one needs guides and one needs pathways. Dance may be that pathway. In silence, without words, we can find where we exist with the rest of the world, human and non-human. In dance, without words, we can both develop and communicate our understanding of that connection.