Jan Boelhouwers is a professor in physical geography here at Uppsala University. Inspired by the work of Gendlin (1993; 1995) he has become interested in issues concerning the production of knowledge, epistemology and what role that the body plays in the learning process. We have had several discussions on these topics focusing on techniques that Gendlin has developed, and I have perhaps been what one could call an interested sceptic. How could we ever know ANYting without concepts, as Gendlin seems to claim?
A few days ago, Boelhouwers invited me to discuss these things again, taking a starting point in our earlier email exchange and a recent focusing experience of his. This is the text (slightly revised by both me and Boelhouwers) I sat down to write right after that discussion.
Shortly, focusing means making use of the body in knowledge production. The body may guide us in learning, in research, in learning about ourselves or other things; listening to the “pure experience” of the body gives us a new dimension of a situation. It is a matter of inviting the sensations and knowledge stored in the body and break the hegemony of the mind in the learning process. However, our thinking mind should not be understood as the enemy; but our brain, the organ producing thoughts, should not be the only body part we attend to.
Head is body too
This sort of reasoning seems to imply that body and mind are two separate poles where we can move from “living in the head” and produce intellectual knowledge, or “live in the body” and produce pure experience and concept- and theory-free knowledge. This is however not how it should be understood. My biggest issue with the body-mind dichotomy is that we tend to rank them and say that mind is better, more important and more abstract than the body (Sayer, 1991), but, in our discussion we found a way of reasoning to get around this.
The body and mind may be two elements in us, but not necessarily separate. In one sense, we are all body. The prerequisite for our very existence is our living body; our brain is a physical organ where doctors can monitor our brain activity and thoughts as impulses in nerve-threads and synapses. But, we are also all mind. Our self-conception has very little to do with flesh and blood, it is our idea of what that flesh and blood likes, dislikes, enjoys or does. My body is the extent of my existence, but what I am, for myself as well as for others is just as much a mental construct as is our image of Narnia. Body and mind are simultaneously everything and nothing, both needed for a full understanding of something. Possible at all?
Let us for a while exchange the words body and mind for experience, or even empirics, and theory. Kenny Jansson recently defended his very interesting and inspiring thesis (Jansson, 2009) at Uppsala University and framed it as a radical empiricist geophilosophy. He argued that everything he had done, seen, read, experienced, during his PhD constituted the empirical basis on which he pushed his, quite theoretical arguments. Everything, including theory, is experienced, and should thus be labeled empirics. Thanks Kenny for blowing up that brick wall between experience and concept, now I just have to come up with what to do with all that gravel!
My reasoning goes, shortly, like this: My language with its vocabulary, grammar and discourses and my experiences (including reading of theory) this far in life is my theoretical framework for understanding the world. If I encounter something that I don’t have any, what so ever, words or concepts for, it is impossible for me to grasp. If I came across an alien from outer space, it would most probably be so, well, alien, to me that I wouldn’t understand that it was an alien. As soon as we have something to say and say it, that is, conceptualize what is going on, what we think, feel or see, it is theorized.
Connecting back to body and mind then: If they are both all of us, what is the connection between them then? I don’t know, and to be honest, I’m not really sure that that is the important question here. If both body and mind are, they are both needed in our learning process, and how that is done is something Boelhouwers has been preoccupied with. Coming from different traditions of learning, we have had different experiences of how to merge them; He “living in his head” and finally learning to listen to what his body tells him; I previously living in an unconceptualized chaos, finding relief in putting it in the hands of the mind, analyzing the shit out of it. Meeting halfway, we agreed on sentences like “both are needed” and “balance is key”.
balance
We may intellectualize and analyze our world, but if we don’t ground that in ourselves, sit back, feel what the words stand for; ask “is this what I mean?” “is this right?”, then our learning will be too rational to understand life. Likewise, if we listen to our “gut feeling” without analyzing what that pleasure or fear driven voice has to say, we might be swimming dangerous, prejudiced waters without even knowing it. The gut feeling contains all those unformulated feelings of fear, anger, and joy. While it can teach us many things, we must be just as critical as usual. Shutting the mind out is to not dare or want to investigate what those feelings symbolize and are based in.
In our discussion, there were three words that emerged as very important, perhaps more important than the rest of it’s content. The three words are integrity, courage and responsibility, and are the answer to the question “what are the most important things in the learning process?”
I want to end this text before loosing either my own or your attention, so I’ll finish up now by trying to explain what we meant by these words. They are very intermingled and interconnected. Here they come in order of appearance in our discussion, and I believe also in order of importance.
Integrity is for me the capacity I need to be true to what I believe, to my experiences. Integrity is a willingness to take an argument to its endpoint and to take all the steps necessary for being able to say “this is how I understand this”, “this is my truth” and to be inquisitive about our own feelings, prejudice and thoughts. As researchers, we need integrity to not make sloppy claims, taking things for granted or taking those extra measures to understand things, with body and mind. The main elements in my term courage are curiosity, honesty, and courage. It takes courageous integrity to start digging in ones own world view and fix ideas.
Although partly being included in integrity, courage needs to be uttered in this context. Knowledge can be scary, it takes courage to be inquisitive.
And finally, when we have reached that knowledge, what do we do. We supposed responsibility would fit here.
References
Gendlin, E. T. (1993). Three assertions about the body. The Folio 12(1). http://www.focusing.org/gendlin/gol_intro.asp
Gendlin, E. T. (1995). Crossing and dipping: Some terms for approaching the interface between natural understanding and logical formulation. Minds and Machines 5(4), 547-560.
Jansson, K. (2009). Tillsammans : bidrag till den etniska boendesegregationens geofilosofi. Uppsala: Uppsala universitet.
Sayer, A. (1991). Behind the locality debate: deconstructing geography’s dualisms. Environment and Planning A 23(2), 283-308.
Other sources of inspiration to this text:
