Blog

A Meditation on Philosophy as an Embodied Art

“What first brought you to philosophy?” Over the years, I think this has been the most common question that students, acquaintances, or colleagues have asked me. Academically speaking, I began my studies in 2003, but that is an entirely different story about the intellectual inspirations of psychedelics, which will require a post of its own at some point in the future. For my present purposes, we need to go back further, to the spring of 1990, Hudson Massachusetts. At the age of six, I entered what is now the Rising Sun Studio to begin what ended up being 10 years of training in Kenpo Jujitsu. The intentions and practices I cultivated in martial arts would later be transformed by another 10 years of snowboarding and then some further years being captivated by various forms of dance. What inspires me to reflect on the relationship between such embodied practices and philosophy today is how apparently unusual, and on occasion even scoff-worthy it has appeared to some of my colleagues that martial arts could be my earliest form of philosophical training. Nevertheless, my most important lesson from each of these practices today is that they were, on the whole, a form of phenomenology and that phenomenological reflection was what each of these practices were driving towards from the start.

 On the face of it I don’t expect that it should require a stretch of the imagination to see an analogy between philosophy and martial arts, among innumerable other physical disciplines. In somewhat concise terms, the commonality appears to be found in one’s intention to navigate a space of relationships with an ever-expanding kind of ‘know-how’. Whereas martial arts may be the most general way to move through embodied relationships with wisdom, philosophy aims to do so in a maximally general conceptual space concerning the nature of wisdom itself. Both practices are self-reflective in that they endeavor to characterize new paths, or ways, of navigation. In the case of martial arts, dance, or extreme sports, this appears as styles, or forms, whereas in philosophy we find schools based on certain topics and assumptions. This is something I have become incredibly fascinated by in recent months, as it seems to me to provide key insights into what it might mean to develop a system of philosophy, or way of life.

The question I want to explore here is whether these embodied practices can teach professional philosophers a thing or two about how to pursue their own sub-domain of wisdom. To do so, I will take a look at some of the concepts that were particularly evident in my martial arts training and how they bear upon my understanding of the professional practice of philosophy. It is from this starting point that I would like to conduct a reflection on philosophy as an embodied art.

Etiquette

One way to grasp a potential oversight of academic philosophy with regard for the insights available to an embodied discipline like dance, martial arts, or an extreme sport is simply by comparing them in terms of etiquette. How do martial artists, dancers, or athletes earn respect, versus philosophers? One thing I have noticed from riding with professional snowboarders, sparring with martial arts masters, or dancing with truly excellent dancers is that they will never shy from an opportunity to develop their skills. Whether they are given a high-school gym, or an Olympic training facility, they simply do what they love and they share it with whomever they can. Experts thus earn respect for their capacity and willingness to demonstrate, to teach, and share their art at nearly a moment’s notice. This has generally appeared to me as an etiquette of passionate humility, and it is something I have rarely encountered in professional philosophers.

Receiving my black belt at the age of 13 from my Shihan Doug McDonald at Rising Sun Studio in Hudson, MA. March, 1998.

What I have found most surprising about my experiences in academic philosophy is just how scared most philosophers seem to be to reveal or discover the limits of their wisdom. So often professional philosophers will use their intellect to do anything possible to avoid genuinely engaging with others in good faith. Many strategies can be used for this purpose, but the issue seems to be that many have made up their mind beforehand about who is deserving of their honest perspective.

The most common strategy I have seen is contrarianism. This can easily be mistaken for philosophical skill, though it amounts to only pointing out what is surely mistaken about the reasoning of another so that it doesn’t have to be reflected any further. This would basically be equivalent to an athlete declining to train with others while remaining content to declare all that those being observed are making mistakes in their own efforts of exercise.

 Another strategy is to simply exchange citations. This is also quite common and strikes me as equivalent to what old, retired athletes do when they get together for beers and recount the good old days when they, or someone they knew, had previously enacted their discipline with spectacular expertise. This strategy is clearly quite good for making those who are not as familiar with the popular names, theories, and ‘tricks’ feel quite out of the loop.   

To briefly return to the top, the most disturbing aspect of etiquette that I have encountered in academia concerns respect. Whereas athletes have no problem demonstrating their passion whenever possible, there seems to be a curious presumption in academic philosophy that our interactions outside of lecture halls or conference rooms are somehow separate from the pursuit of wisdom. It seems to me that all such interactions are opportunities to demonstrate precisely how we are always both students and teachers of wisdom, whatever path it happens to involve.

To borrow an analogy from embodied cognitive science, this pursuit of wisdom cannot be separated from our embodied relations with others, just as a dance emerges between and among its participants. Upon reflection, my own expertise, whatever its extent, is the sum of my reactions to all the relationships and spaces I have occupied. This brings me to conclude that in the first instance, whatever our way is, it is an embodied intention to heal, grow, be vulnerable, and explicate ourselves with others. 

Discipline

In many cases philosophers’ area of expertise could be likened to a martial artist or dancer studying just one move, like an arm-bar or twirl, to the total exclusion of all other techniques. Obviously, doing so does not create new ‘ways’, ‘paths’, or ‘forms’ of that discipline if that expertise remains disconnected from others. Such fragmentation seems to have resulted from the mistaken assumption that all disciplines can progress by breaking down the problems they focus on into smaller and smaller parts. While this worked well for the mechanistic advances of the industrial revolution, it does not work with comparable satisfaction for concepts, nor for any embodied art. The wisdom of conceptual, logical, and embodied arts are all holistic. In fact, the common goal of both philosophy and embodied arts seems to involve a kind of feedback loop that cascades from a particular change of technique or idea of one scale, to the formation of more general principles at a broader scale of the domain or discipline in general.  

It should appear equally absurd for someone to come up with ever-more idiosyncratic ways to perform a particular move without connecting it to a wider practice, just as it is foolish to come up with increasingly specialized theoretical language without connecting it to peripheral fields of knowledge. I suppose it should be noted that I by no means mean to suggest that most philosophers commit this mistake, but I can say that most of the philosophers I have met or studied have made their careers on incredibly narrow areas of research that do not so often return to the questions of wisdom in general.

Learning a cork 720 at Snows Mountain, WV NH. 2003.

To advance beyond fifth degree black belt, a martial artist is often required to gain mastery in a completely different form; it is quite rare to find an expert dancer who does not dabble in multiple styles; and I think it’s fair to say that no extreme sport athlete will be content with just one means of defying gravity. Yet, philosophers seem all too comfortable to identify themselves with increasingly narrow domains of discussion, which often have ever-fleeting applicability to the practice of embracing the being and perspectives of others.

Maybe it’s just me, but the most beautiful forms of dance, extreme sport, or music for that matter, are always those that have integrated the forms of others. Similarly, the most effective martial arts have become those that have learned and synthesized the greatest range of alternative forms. What might it look like if philosophers were to intentionally pursue this end? For one thing, it strikes me as wildly antithetical to the analytic tradition to actively pursue such a synthesis. Nevertheless, taking the above into consideration, it also seems a moot point to provide an argument for why such a synthesis is necessary to arrive at an ever-more refined conception and enactment of wisdom.       

Spirit

I think that the greatest irony is that even those philosophers who claim to endorse embodied cognitive science are somehow unaware of what it means to engage in the practice of philosophy as an embodied art. The art of philosophy is not merely one of collecting knowledge or memorizing argument structures to cleverly disorient one’s interlocutor; it is a cognitive-emotional process of synthesizing perspectives towards a more inclusive embodiment of wisdom. This is to say that philosophy must have an end, an aim, or goal of self-transformation. Hence, the analytic pretense of objective exploration in philosophy is fundamentally confounded by the fact that we must create the very conditions that make the pursuit of wisdom increasingly possible. It could thus be said that philosophy is inherently proleptic and teleological. To ignore this is to fundamentally ignore the conditions of philosophy and to fail to reflect on one’s own purpose as a philosopher.

Me snowboarding at Mt. Hood, OR. July, 2000.

The embodied arts, including martial arts, extreme sports, and dance, have for the most part all been self-aware enough to recognize that the practice of self-transformation points towards a kind of fundamental good. As disciplines, each of these practices permit us to transmute trauma, anger, sadness, pain, etc., into intentions of creativity, self-empowerment, and agency. After spending twenty years of my life training in martial arts and freestyle snowboarding, it’s become apparent to me that the aim being pursued can be appropriately described as a spiritual enactment. Indeed, the attunement that we find when dancing with another can similarly be understood as the emergence of a spiritual space, in which we are both cleansed and empowered.

Certainly, one of the most crucial conditions of our entering such a common space is the good faith that self-transcendence is possible, that we are not to be identified with the limits of our beliefs, nor physical capacities of the present. What I find genuinely amazing is that while these embodied arts appear to have (for hundreds of years!) found the ongoing or perpetual cure to our existential depression and anxiety, professional philosophy ironically remains unequal to this task, or rests content in merely throwing words at the problem.

The last thing I want to say on the issue of spirit concerns the collective conditions of philosophy today. Philosophy, just like any embodied art, succeeds, progresses, and grows only insofar as a greater diversity of people can collectively participate in the practice. This means that the issues and debates surrounding diversity in universities today often appear to be missing the point. It is our birthright as conscious beings to pursue wisdom in intellectual and embodied ways. The business models operative in both academia and sports thus risk convincing us that some kind of antiquated form of competitive evolution is sufficient for progress. Consequently, ‘diversity’ becomes a mere numbers game.

I would like to suggest a symbiogenic alternative. Accordingly, we might downplay the glorification of those who perform at the peak of their discipline and instead attend to the conditions by which more individuals would be permitted to achieve excellence of wisdom in and through our collective participation with one another. As with the synthesis of alternative styles in any given embodied discipline, philosophy progresses by building bridges across the widest range of both disciplines and perspectives alike. Ultimately, it appears that the very same intention of philia-sophia can be found in expert dance, just as sparring partners, or philosophical interlocutors: it is an intention towards maintaining the intersubjective conditions of one’s discipline such that ongoing synthesis and differentiation of paths becomes possible.

Dancing with Ksenia in Leiden, The Netherlands. Summer, 2022

The Nature of Wisdom: An Interdependence of Therapy and Philosophy

By way of introduction to the philosophy, I would like to begin by providing a map of the problematic that afflicts our culture today. To my mind, the central thread of this problem concerns our collective misunderstandings of meaning-making as a practice, how it can be performed with more or less expertise, and the ways our social institutions can either facilitate or inhibit our capacity to do so. This problem can be brought into sharp relief in the context of both education and healthcare. A key distinction about dialectical holism is that it implies the interdependence of therapy and academic philosophy. This is because in functional terms, they are both aiming for the same end, which is wisdom.

As I understand it, wisdom involves being about the limit of a given conceptual domain. When applied to oneself, wisdom means bringing one’s attention to the biographical context and physical constraints that give rise to any given perception, reaction, or mode of being in the world. This eventually results in an alleviation of suffering via self-understanding and the capacity to make meaning of what lies within or beyond one’s control. On an interpersonal level, wisdom manifests as an effort to grasp the experiences of others and to see the conditions of their limits, which helps to further clarify one’s own identity within a wider space of human-being. As will be discussed below, both of these enactments of wisdom are essential for philosophy and mental health. In a more technical context, this definition of wisdom can be seen in the efforts to map out the limit of a given scientific discipline, which inevitably leads to increasing interdisciplinary dialogue at the interface between disciplines and the development of new fields of study.

If philosophy is to be about wisdom, then it must be about the facilitation of interdisciplinary discussions and the mapping of intersubjective phenomenological spaces. An interesting correlate of this commonality is that both appear to achieve their end through the practice of friendship. In a therapeutic context, the therapist serves as what I call ‘mindfulness training wheels’, bringing the client’s attention to the context that gives rise to their reactions and some tools for changing the context into something more desirable. In the case of philosophy, the philosopher provides scaffolding for the construction and arrangement of ideas, one that serves as both an anvil for testing new ideas and maps congruence with a common language across perspectives. Empathy, I claim, is required for success in each of these endeavors. This is because in either case of therapist or philosopher, they achieve their end by being able to recognize where an individual is located within a phenomenological landscape that has different valuations and logical structures from their own.

This point concerning the importance of empathy brings us to the core of our meaning-making problem: if all perspectives are granted equal value a priori, then we have undermined any possible motivation for learning from or synthesizing the perspectives of others. This is because such an equal valuation presumes that there is no better or worse way to behold or engage with a common world. Consequently, all differences across perspectives become reducible to idiosyncratic emotional reactions. Quite concerningly, these emotional reactions have been taken to be indicative of reality in both therapeutic and philosophical contexts. In the therapeutic domain, the individual’s emotional response is often taken to be indicative of whether they ought to move towards or away from a given stimulus because the individual is often assumed to have sufficient knowledge of themselves and the values that guide their meaning-making practices (e.g. feminist and CBT approaches). Doing so avoids the challenge of uprooting the unconscious associations that form one’s worldview. Philosophically speaking, recent critical theories have asserted a priori knowledge of an oppressive bias in all human practices, which ultimately undermine our ability to posit an objective world through scientific discourse and thereby dispenses with any capacity to build a knowledge of our relations to others. As we can see, both problems result from an assertion of unquestionable valuation: therapeutically, this is the positive assumption of the free agency and self-knowledge of the individual, while critical philosophies assert the negative assumption of our collective participation in oppressive forces.

The consequence of either of these mistakes will be a state of increasing narcissism on an individual scale and a relativism about truth and morality on a collective scale. Indeed these trends are being exacerbated by our use of social media and the mind-numbing polarization narratives that have been fed to the public in recent years. Interestingly, this problem can be formulated as a lack of critical philosophical reflection on part of the therapy and a lack of a positive trajectory of thriving for the philosophy. If the practices of therapy and philosophy are to be about wisdom, then they thus converge on an exercise of navigating towards increasing coherence.  By coherence I mean an integration of one’s unconscious intentions into our conscious practices on the one hand and an ongoing synthesis of perspectives with scientifically rigorous analysis on the other. However, the interdependence of therapy and philosophy can be made even more clear when we examine emotions as a context to our beliefs.

Here, I part company from analytic philosophers who hold out hope for achieving a deep sense of truth about the world through a pure method of linguistic analysis. I claim, the aims of any academic study of philosophy typically articulated as wisdom, can only be achieved insofar as the emotional context of one’s beliefs can be sufficiently reflected. If emotions are co-arising with values and values dictate our phenomenological landscape, then analyzing our beliefs about this landscape will be insufficient to understand or alter its dynamics. This must be done in and through living one’s values and emotions, for they are not mere propositions, but a multidimensional process of meaning-making. This implies that the tools of psychotherapy and phenomenology are eventually required during the development of one’s philosophy, since this involves interpersonal communication of the worldview and reflection of one’s own motivations in sustaining it. However, it appears these reflective capacities would inevitably develop as cognitive capacities of self-reflection if the practice of philosophy were to be rigorous in maintaining multi-scale investigations. In the interest of facilitating wisdom then, it is suggested that philosophers embrace this role as phenomenological guide, thereby obliging us to articulate a trajectory by which emotional intelligence can advance in tandem with the development of one’s worldview.

If the aim of psychotherapy is the mental well-being of an individual and if ‘well-being’ depends upon the capacity to develop a sufficiently complex and personally satisfactory worldview, then the aims of psychotherapy depend upon philosophy. An implication of this position is that contrary to many theories on offer, the client is not sufficiently capable of setting their own developmental trajectory through life, since part of their problem may be that their logical and self-reflective capacities have been insufficient to establish a worldview that can respond to the actual complexities of our world. The consequence is that rather than attempting to avoid the possibility of indoctrinating a client in some theory or another, this bias must be embraced. Doing so means we recognize the theory as a tool and offer it willingly, while also providing the skills to evaluate any theory by looking for its limitations. Such an addition of therapy would inevitably involve incorporating philosophical methods into the process to help a client acquire the skills necessary for building their world-view with increasing rigor.

Though there are many practices that integrate the common processes in therapy and philosophy into a single process, I offer one example in an artistic context. Surrealism is a means of uprooting one’s unconscious value structures and non-conscious intentionality. Under the guise of the paranoiac critical method, one can produce icons of mythos for an individual or a culture’s developmental biography. In doing so, surrealism simultaneously provides tools for self-reflection and meaning-making, which are the two primary aims shared by both therapy and philosophy. A further feature to note is that surrealism exists as a polar opposite of mindfulness and both appear as methods within a phenomenological space of investigation: mindfulness aims to recognize and see past respective associations, while surrealism aims to recognize and magnify associations ad absurdum. What all of the above appears to suggest is that the practice of phenomenology, as a means of recognizing and representing one’s emotional associations within an interpersonal context, is currently underappreciated in philosophy and therapy. The skills that this method of investigation facilitates appear to be essential for cultivating empathy, self-reflection, and navigating the limits of one’s sense-of-self. Phenomenology, I suggest, can provide the missing philosophical ingredient in therapy and the missing emotional ingredient in philosophical practice. Taking these lessons together, our capacity to develop wisdom is necessarily interdependent with an increasing self-awareness and the integration of other’s perspectives. Cultivating wisdom in this way appears as a parameter of health as it develops along a trajectory of thriving, while also implies an intellectual process of constructing an increasingly coherent worldview.