Body Consciousness and Performance: East and West (original) (raw)
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Body Consciousness: East and West
Embodiment is a universal feature of human life and so is body consciousness. Body consciousness, as I understand it, is not merely the consciousness that a living sentient body directs at the world and also experiences in itself (and through which it indeed can experience itself as both subject and object). Since the term body is too often contrasted with mind and used to designate insentient, lifeless things, and since the term "flesh" has such negative associations in Christian culture and moreover focuses merely on the fleshly part of the body, I have chosen the term soma to designate the living, sensing, dynamic, perceptive body that lies at the heart of my project of somaesthetics.
Body Practices and Consciousness: A Neglected Link
Anthropology of Consciousness, 2000
The dominant notions of consciousness in the West are anchored in a peculiar matrix of dissociated sensibility held in place by unthematized body practices. It is misleading to evaluate spiritual and philosophical notions of consciousness simply from the point of view of verbal, logical analysis, when they are expressions of these deeply rooted experiential sensibilities, deliberately cultivated over long years of habituation. There is a dramatic difference between how the West thinks of body practices as irrelevant to analyzing states of consciousness and how other cultures make direct links between these practices and the shaping of consciousness. For at least the last 150 years in Europe and the United States a number of teachers have developed body practices in deliberate resistance to the dualistic structurings of mentalities and physicality. They constitute a cultural movement of resistance shaped by the recognition of the mistaken notions embodied in Western dualism. An example is given of the work of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, the creator of the School of Body-Mind Centering.
Theoria et Historia Scientiarum, 2003
In this paper I argue that proprioceptive awareness (including both somatic and ecological proprioception) is primarily a form of non-perceptual awareness. This turns out to be philosophically significant in regard to what Shoemaker calls 'immunity to error through misidentification'. Although it is possible to make a mistake in identifying one's body via sense-perceptual modalities such as vision, some philosophers argue that one is immune to error through misidentification in regard to knowing one's own body by means of proprioception. If proprioception were a form of perception then it would be possible for one to proprioceptively misidentify oneself in referring to one's body. In arguing that proprioception is not a form of perception I am defending the immunity principle in this regard.
AGAINST EPISTEMOLOGICAL HIERARCHIES: ON THE VALUE OF FORMING BODILY KNOWLEDGE
Education & Pedagogy Journal, 2021
The article reveals such concepts as "metis", "body techniques", "practical skill", "kinesthetic intelligence", and "movement skill". These concepts are united by the fact that the accumulation of knowledge is presented as a largely unconscious process in which muscles play the same role as the brain. The essence of these concepts can be expressed in the term "bodily knowledge", which contrasts itself in the epistemological sense with codified practical knowledge, instructions, and rules-techne. Bodily knowledge is based on movements and muscle sensations. Russian physiologist I.M. Sechenov called this sensation "dark", pointing out that such sensations are almost impossible to comprehend, describe, and analyze. However, such feelings cannot be entirely opposed to thought. This "clever skill", as poet and writer Varlam Shalamov called it, can be considered a separate type of cognition. This article is an attempt to comprehensively discuss the concept of "body knowledge".
Handbook of Cognitive Science, 2008
Fr F F om the initial, old-age considerations on the nature of mind different approaches have emerged. Of special relevance are dualist approaches where mind and body may have strongly different aspects but still need some form of collaboration. The embodied cognition movement-may we use this expression-tries to reconcile the apparently multiple quality (duality & unity at the same time sound kind of religious) by means of analysing the ways in which the body may affect cognition: supporting, raising, sustaining, etc. I will propose other approach that may be considered similar to this one or may be perceived as completely apart from embodied cognition and full of panpsychism. My proposal is that the mind does not emerge/is-supported-by from bodily processes but that indeed, those bodily processes are the mind itself. I'm not only referring to those processes happening in the brain but, perhaps in the line of artificial life, to all those information-centric processes that constitute the very inner workings of hierarchical structures of life.