Bridging our bodies and consciousnesses
To cope up with the digital and technological revolution we need to break with the western tradition of seperating our bodies from cognitive learning, and fully realise our whole selves and potential.
Antique and contemporary separation
The other day I listened to an episode from the Swedish Radio´s
“the philosophical room”, subjecting the theme of the long rooted dissonance between our body and consciousness, hindering us from realising our true learning and development capabilities.
This philosophical tradition with roots from the Greek Antique has influenced our schools, language, work cultures and societies in a negative,
separative way.
We have been taught and grown up in a society that separates the academic and the craftsman, the physical work from conscious, reflective work. In our society, physical work is often considered lower class, contrary to the “mentally challenging” professions.
A farmer or a mathematician?
A cleaner or a politician?
A sewer or a collection designer?
Who is making the real difference? Who is the under-payed?
Although many with an economically poor background or less education heads towards professions considered physical and therefore low class, dementing their expertise, reflective abilities and creative expressions in the medial spotlight is a waste of diversity, richness and understanding that hierarchies in workplace and society hinders them from.
The digital revolution forces us to understand ourselves again
Via technology our world develops faster than ever imaginable and it has opened doors to our complex, multi facetted world like never before. Understanding this complexity and to continue co-create new services, solutions and products we need to bring our human, individual complexity into our work space and offices — only then can we fully realise ourselves and teamwork.
We work and live in a global, non-hierarchial world where small independent craftsmen and craftswomen are cherished, where eating healthy is the answer and where you can show love and affection to whoever you want (in many countries at least!). Let us take it further!
This industry has the chance to be in forefront of finding pragmatic ways to bring our bodies into our workspaces and work cultures, making the connection of a holistic, human development.
To be frank, I believe it´s vital, because otherwise we will lose touch with our roots, dependency on nature and human connections in the future.
Many children and youth today interacts more with a two dimensional world than the existing three dimensional one. They lose out on an essential development dependent on interactions with movement, other humans and animals as well as finding themselves through recognising the limitations our world has. In my previous post, I wrote that parkour creates space and growth through interactions with the physical limitations around you.
-“Learning by doing” or, learning by recognising our limitations.
Preventing a world thats lost touch with earth´s and our own limitations, such as death or time, we as adults need to close the gap between physical and cognitive learning.
The western tradition of dividing
The antique and greek philosophy created and formed the western ideals a long time ago, some of them are still shaping us today, such as the idea of a separated body and spirit.
Christianity and the church continued this tradition, and contrary to the other big religions from the east such as Buddhism, Islam and Hinduism which does not make the difference between body and soul, where the physical actions plays a central part of the prayers and worship, Christianity highlights the spirit and sees our bodies as bearers and hosts of this spirit.
The church created the feudal system of separating king, priest, tradesmen and lastly farmers/craftsmen, widening “spirit from hand” further.
During the european enlightenment during the 17th century, the famous French philosopher Rene Descartes famously proclaimed; “I think, therefore I am” and continued the western tradition between separating consciousness and our bodies, again meaning that our bodies are hosts for our
cognitive selves. - “There is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible… the mind or soul of man is entirely different from the body.”
His thoughts reflecting over intelligence, and that it only exists when measured is perhaps one reason for our materialistic society and the separative thought that our brains are computers, with our bodies used to
transport them, broadly speaking.
In short words; René Descartes philosophies are pillars of our societies, and the class difference as a prolonged consequence, in my opinion unfairly.
I ask myself, how would our world look if society regarded intelligence as physical actions or presence? Would stress related sicknesses decrease?
The modernists
The challenging of these truths came first during the 20th century when
Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merlau-Pontry and John Dewey reflected, sought new answers to our being, our relationship with the reality and world around us, and the human way of learning and developing.
A quote from John Dewey gives wings to the idea of holistic learning:
“We do not learn from experience…
we learn from reflecting on experience.”
We experience with our senses, and how we experience is dependent on our body postures, if we have any pain, the quality of last nights sleep…
An experience is therefore made of our physical precense and how our senses concieve the three dimensional reality (or world) around us.
By using thoughts, our critical and reflective abilities, we can give individuality and understanding (by seeing connections to other or similar experiences) to this experience. We can learn and grow through making connections between new experiences.
Maurice was on the same lead:
“We know not through our intellect but through our experience.”
“The body is our general medium for having a world.”
These words and thoughts may seem to make sense for us today, but in all aspects they were ground breaking, defying the importance of spirituality or thinking uphailed by the church and society for many centuries.
Martin Heidegger wrote:
“Mere anxiety is the source of everything”
Which for me is another example of holistic learning, or that the source of our creativity comes from physical reactions and presence.
Perhaps he meant the power we find through our experiences, traumas and also fear. Anxiety is in one way a reaction to death, helping us flee from what we percieve as danger for our life. Creativity, imagination, attitude perhaps comes from us wanting to solidify our existence before death, then another example of our thinking/cognitive source; the body.
Embodied Cognition & Metaphors
A scientific progression on these philosophical thoughts, the recent decades have resulted in a bigger belief and more arguments for our body´s importance.
Two of the scientists are George Lakoff and Rafael Núñez who researched metaphors, here are some excerpts from their studies:
“Thinking about the future caused participants to lean slightly forward while thinking about the past caused participants to lean slightly backwards.”
“Squeezing a soft ball influenced subjects to perceive gender neutral faces as female while squeezing a hard ball influenced subjects to perceive gender neutral faces as male.”
“Subjects asked to think about a moral transgression like adultery or cheating on a test were more likely to request an antiseptic cloth after the experiment than those who had thought about good deeds.”
-Source is “The Scientific American”; Read further here
There is much more to be researched, discovered and highlighted and I believe we are on to something great, something changing, something moving us forward…
