Let Us First Ask: What Is a Body?

Dear Friends and Family,

My hope in offering these letters on the body is to unfold an inquiry that promises to shake up what we hold to be true and invite us into a new relationship with our being—not as a self-help endeavor. The body is our being and a portal to the primordial within each of us. And, it’s not as straightforward as we might think.

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Taken-for-grantedness of the Body

If we cast our gaze upon the body for even a moment, we come to a body that is largely taken for granted. That this is so is twofold and invisible to us.

The first taken-for-grantedness has to do with how we understand the body. Science and medicine in Modernity have made giant leaps in understanding the body, and we are the beneficiaries of this ever-unfolding knowledge. But the knowledge is incomplete because it is premised on a certain way of viewing the world. This way tends to look at the body from the outside-in, wholly denying the view from the inside-out. A perspective of the body overly reliant on “objective”and materialist science misses aspects of our bodily experience, especially when it comes to matters of health and disease and variations in how we age.¹

The second taken-for-grantedness is how we experience the body. The body tends not to come to awareness except in a few prescribed ways, namely, during performance (athletics, yoga, dance, fine-motor activities), when we don’t like what we see, and when the body as we know it refuses us. In essence, we attend to the experience of the body according to our will. Does it look like and do what I want?

We don’t like what see when by our perception the body doesn’t measure up to what society says is good. The body’s goodness brings us to questions of cultural values and a long history in the West of valuing valor.² In time, we’ll explore this history together. But for now, we might say that the penchant for objectifying bodies as good or not good is a singularly human inclination. It is based on aspirations unique to the human, aspirations wholly unrelated to how the body truly is.

We can’t so easily hum along when the body refuses us through illness, injury, disease, and age.³ The body’s refusals bring us to questions of the experience of being alive.

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This Body Called Mine

Newtonian science gives as a body that is a thingness we can see and touch. This physical body is the means by which we move through the world. It is our material way through life.

The physical body has needs, which we attend to so that we may continue to be. We feed the body. We water the body. We move and warm and sleep the body. Our attention to these needs nurtures a living body.

Because this is so, we tend to refer to the body as mine. We take care of the body. Or we don’t. We like it. Or we don’t. No matter, it belongs to us. It has a privacy about it. There are things I know about my body that no one ever can. The same is true for you. These are not secrets so much as they are nuances. They form the basis of our uniqueness. That this is so tells us we live a body that is not only living. We live a body that is experienced. And because it is experienced, it is a lived body.

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The Trouble with a Body Called Mine

The tendency is to make living and lived distinct. In the category of living, we tend to turn to the life sciences to help us understand the activities of living: physiology, biochemistry, neuroscience, and so on. In the category of lived, we tend to turn to philosophy and the human sciences to help us understand the experience of being alive as a human: psychology, sociology, anthropology, and so on.

These perspectives are necessary and instructive. The trouble is that making living and lived distinct splits us in two. It has been splitting the human in two for ages. It has stumped philosophers for as long as there has been philosophy in the West. And it was philosophy that gave birth to science.

Aristotle was obsessed with what governed the body, which is evidenced in his lengthy tome, de Anima, in which he endeavors to understand the human soul. He believed the soul to be a particular intelligence distinct from the materiality of the body, albeit at once governing it.⁴ As we all are, Aristotle was a person of his time and influenced by the zeitgeist in Greek antiquity to understand not only the fact of our human existence but also our uniqueness.

I would be remiss if I did not bring René Descartes into the fold here. Descartes hoped to uproot Aristotelian thought, and while there is some debate about whether Descartes himself believed the Cartesianism that surfaced from his method of doubt, it is, in fact, what we inherited. And it pervades our science and medicine today, subtly and not so subtly. Cartesianism desouled the world, gave us a perspective of mind over matter, and made of materiality an extension of the mind. Body became a machine governed by a ghost.⁵ The desacralizing significance of this turn in the West cannot be overstated, and I would offer, it informed the Newtonianism that would soon follow.

In recent decades, hopes to remedy the split have brought us to the burgeoning field of consciousness studies, a transdisciplinary field that culls from life and human sciences, philosophy, and wisdom traditions, and even quantum physics to help us find our way home to the invisible within that surely imbues our life. At its best, consciousness studies embraces the invisible as the radiance that shines through our being. This is the field in which I did my doctoral work. This disclosure acknowledges my own bias—that I hold to be true something behind, beyond, and within living and lived.

We might say that consciousness is wakeful presence, a presence that is aware of itself, even when we are cognitively unaware of the presence, as when we are sleeping. It need not involve the faculties of thought, though these faculties are expressions of consciousness.⁶

Adding this third force to body gets us closer to understanding the body anew.

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Body Am I

Every aspect of our being is enfleshed in the physicality (living), experience (lived), and awareness (consciousness) of our being. In this way, the body is not singularly the thingness we see and touch. Body is the totality of our being.

Our being is embedded in a world of beings shaping the physicality, experience, and awareness of each of us moment-by-moment. That this is so can be perceived with immediacy with each incoming breath or bite of food, both ushering in touches and tastes of Other. It is also true of impressions, such as when I see you, and something inside quickens with delight. That response is total—across the whole of me as a body.

As much as we are shaped by the world, we shape the world by the fact of our being. When you see my delight in seeing you, the experience of that impression lives in the totality of you. It registers feelings perhaps, and it changes your physiology . . . and mine in an ever-reciprocal unfolding of being.

So, we could say that we are an ecosystem nested inside ecosystems, and we would not be wrong. But there’s more to it than being an ecosystem. It is surely accurate to say that body is a field of activity nestled within ever widening fields of activity. Fields of activity are organized around the activities themselves as much as the living materiality they engender.

They engender the living materiality by forming a semipermeable boundary, which both encloses the activities of living and opens these activities to the world. This boundary is every membrane that is intimate with the world, such as skin, gut, and airways in the human.

To be alive, then, is to be this enclosure of activity that is at once an open system to the world—the open system both receiving and giving. There is no living without this two-way giving and receiving, neither for the human, nor for any lifeform. And all of it unfolds around lived experience and the invisible wakeful presence that this is so.

Which brings us to one more something we have not touched on about body. This something is an inner force that insists that this field of activity continues to be. This lifeforce is imbued within wakeful presence of being, and it desires to be. Is this desire consciousness? Is lifeforce consciousness? These are questions for us to explore. For now, we have here a new way of not only seeing but experiencing body as the totality of our being.⁷

The body lives (and dies).

The body experiences living (and dying).

The body enlivens awareness that already is.

The body desires to be aware, alive, and experiencing.

Within all these, the body knows how to live, die, and experience.

The totality of this body, we call I.

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Several weeks ago, I had the immense pleasure of conversation with

Mariah

of

Heartbeats

. Many of you have seen this video, but I thought to share it here for you who receive word from me only by email.

We circled questions about how we decide in times of uncertainty. Our conversation was just days before the next new and heartbreaking upheaval in the world.

We did not come to this conversation searching for answers to cling to. We came to this conversation circling, circling, and lending recognitions that surfaced because we were in open dialogue with one another.

For when you have an hour to sit and join us. . .

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1. I bracket “objective” because while science may place guard rails to fend off bias, there is never a science without the human and so never a science that does not have a subjective ontological and epistemological scaffold upon which to construct the questions science asks and the methods it employs to respond to those questions: i.e., science cannot be the absolute objectivity it aims to be. When science turns from this position, it avails to science anew, a revelatory science. This idea of science as revelatory (revealing what is there) was offered by Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York: Bell Tower, 1999).

2. Valor as a virtue came to shape the Western worldview of the body in Greek antiquity. The body ideal was that of the Greek male battle hero and athlete, which imprinted on Western medical and scientific discoveries and concerns for health and its restoration. See Gary B. Ferngren and Darrel W. Amundsen, “Virtue and Health/Medicine in Pre-Christian Antiquity.” In Virtue and Medicine: Explorations in the Character of Medicine, ed. E. E. Shelp (Dordrecht, NL: D. Reidel Publishing, 1985), pp. 3–22.

3. Sally Gadow, “Body and Self: A Dialectic.” In The Humanity of the Ill: Phenemonological Perspectives, ed. V. Kestenbaum (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,1982 ), pp. 86–100.

4. Aristotle, deAnima, trans. R. D. Hicks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907).

5. Multiple sources here. See especially Stuart F. Spickler, The Philosophy of the Body: Rejections of Cartesian Dualism (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970); Dalia Judowitz, The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011).

6. Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, trans. Noel Barstad and Algis Mickunas (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1953).

7. This perspective benefits from an interpretive synthesis of multiple sources. A few here, especially Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphono Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968); Hanne De Jeagher and Esequiel Di Paolo, 2007, “Participatory Sense-Making: An Enactive Approach to Social Cognition.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6 (4): 485–507; Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007); Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht, NL: D. Reidel Publishing, 1980); Franciso J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991); Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Andreas Weber, Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology, trans. Rory Bradley (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2014).