Body of Knowledge Philosophy of the body    The way you view the body in relation to your mind is the way you view yourself. The Self-ish Self Study you did at the beginning of this chapter gave you some idea of your own self perception. If you compare notes with others, you will probably find a high level of variability among your peers. Similarly, attitudes on this issue have fluctuated widely from culture to culture through the ages. Eastern societies, especially those with Buddhist and Taoist leanings, have taken a more unified approach to human being than western culture in the last two thousand years. Whereas the East considers the self to be the physical functioning of the mind, the western approach has been to separate the mind and the body into two discrete units. Our earliest ancestors cared little for such distinctions, for they inhabited a world in which they were immersed in the raw experience provided by the structure and functioning of the body itself. It was the later Greek epoch that gave birth to the concept of mind as an intangible complement to the temporal body. It also established a hierarchy: the mind became the captain of the body vessel. The religion of the Middle Ages further compounded the division between mind and body by decreeing that since the soul was eternal and the body mortal, salvation would come through spiritual cultivation. The body should be healthy to uphold the sanctity of the spirit, but should otherwise be controlled, disciplined and ignored until it passed away. During the Renaissance period, the humanism of the age gave a new respect for the body. It became an aspect of a person worthy of cultivation, as a vehicle for creative expression and for living fully in the here and now. This recognition of the value of physical being and partial integration of the body into the self came to an abrupt halt in the seventeenth century due to the extraordinary influence of the ideas of one man. Rene Descartes' famous dictum, "I think. Therefore, I am," signaled the beginning of an era of dualism that has dominated the philosophic landscape ever since. He saw mind and body as separate and distinct entities, each with its own characteristics. The mind is the unextended, immaterial substance that does the thinking. In contrast, the body is a figure bounded by time and space that is divisible and non thinking. The mind and the body are so mutually exclusive, according to Cartesian dualism, that people virtually live at two parallel, but disconnected, levels. In the process of proving his own existence, Descartes rejected the evidence from the body, because he doubted the accuracy of sensory perceptions, favoring instead the proof supplied by his mind in the form of his rational thought processes. Descartes was a preeminent proponent of the philosophic technique of scepticism. His methodology of "radical doubt" produced the doctrine of "clear and distinct ideas." Subsequently, thinking and moving have rarely been equated. Thinking has assumed a preeminent status in western society and moving has been relegated to a secondary level of importance. Consequently, education sees it's primary mission as enhancing the life of the mind. Physical activity is extra-curricular, something to do at recess or to recreate [so that students may once again be ready to get down to the serious business of study]. In such an atmosphere, physical education, the subject which has moving as its focus, does not get much respect. Other philosophic explanations of the self have been proposed, but none have supplanted the Cartesian position in western culture that we are composed of two separate entities: mind and body. Berkeley suggested that we are mind only and that our being is in our perception. Theories of physicalism, or materialism, which explain self as body only have not won a wide following because of their limited explanatory power, but have gained some credibility from research showing that emotional response is attributable, in part, to the secretion of hormones and chemical processes in the body. More pervasive in its influence than physicalism, existential phenomenology has developed the notion of embodied consciousness to explain the concept of self. Maurice Merleau-Ponty was one representative of this school of thought who rejected the Cartesian mind-body split and the implicit assumption that the body was an object to be acted upon. Rather, phenomenologists suggest, the body is the starting point of our lives, the means by which we insert ourselves into our world, a "lived-body." It is not an object to be manipulated by our minds, but a subject through which we live, through which we act upon others and through which we develop dialectical relationships with the world around us. Science of the body    Science and philosophy are not strangers or enemies. In fact, they are often bosom buddies, mutually involved in advancing knowledge. Science is premised on philosophy. If you try to conduct an experiment in which you have no premises about what science is or what it can do, no purpose beyond the mechanics of testing, no logic, no ethics and no principles, it will probably not be well-received. Similarly, philosophy is premised on science, often as a starting point for reflection. Asking questions such as "what if?" "how do we know?" and "what do we mean by?" philosophers extend the boundaries of science by venturing into territory forbidden to science, where there are no tests to measure validity, no definite answers, only questions. Yet the ventures of science and philosophy are not separate and distinct. They are symbiotically linked, often embodied into one great thinker. History is replete with such individuals who have transcended one paradigm of thought. Galileo, Copernicus, DaVinci, Newton and Einstein are examples of a genre of thinkers who would not allow themselves to be limited in their approach to a problem of their times. At the frontiers of science today, there are new perspectives and scientific evidence for the interconnectedness between consciousness and the material world that suggest that self is an integrated, unified entity. Questions about the self, such as what is mind? What is the nature of matter? And, how are they related? tend to be avoided by modern science and passed on to the philosophers. Most scientists today adopt the western perspective that an objective reality exists external to us and independent of our minds. Our role, then, is to observe and measure what we see, but as a passenger not a participant. However, the notion of separability between consciousness and matter within science is being challenged by certain interpretations of quantum theory and by ancient eastern theory, both of which suggest that the observer interacts fundamentally with the system in the act of observation. The scientific paradigm based upon the powers of the eye and the mind; empirical observation and data-gathering followed by rigorous logical data analysis, is being supplanted by what historian, P.A. Sorokin has termed heart knowledge, by which he means knowledge grounded in the experience of lived-body. Willis Harmon has suggested that we are moving from the Age of Science to the New Age of Consciousness, by which he means that the traditional approach that gives legitimacy only to what science could observe, measure and explain is shifting to incorporate the more interior worlds of consciousness and spirit. Fritjov Capra, author of The Tao of Physics, has proposed that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift away from the old Cartesian, Newtonian mechanistic paradigm to a new paradigm which is the holistic, ecological world view. Such thinking represents a fundamental challenge to the way we do science in kinesiology. We are in the body business. In an anatomy lab, we probe it to understand its structure and we "read" it as the course text. In physiology, we subject it to stress tests to ascertain the limits of its functioning. In a motor learning course, we examine skill acquisition, transfer of training and retention as constructs that are generalizable to populations of motor learners. In a motor control experiment, we study epiphenomenon of the brain resulting from complex biophysical processes. In a biomechanics class, we do engineering of the body. In each case, we tend to treat the body as an object to be studied much as geologists study a rock. It is interesting to speculate how, as kinesiology adopts the new insights into the properties of consciousness and the interconnection between consciousness and matter into its operational framework, the way we do the body business will be affected.
Exercise 13: As a perception-check exercise discuss the following questions:
- if your studies were of the body-subject rather than the body-object, how would anatomy and physiology classes be different?
- if you were studying humans moving rather than human movement, what qualitative difference would it make to you as a student of kinesiology?
- would a fundamental paradigm shift toward a focus on embodied consciousness make kinesiology more of an art, less of a science.?