These days, I am constantly struck by how self-evident the functioning of the human bodymind is. This intuitive evidence, however, I find nowhere satisfactorily described – and certainly not in any source that would be widely recognized as “scientific”.
Which brings me to a point about science and society. Most of society is still largely, it seems to me, in the thrall of the modernist fallacy; and those elements that are not are usually in the grip of the contrary delusion of relativism. This, notwithstanding that many scientific theories themselves have laid bare the intrinsic limitations of the scientific method – at least as traditionally conceived – in reaching a complete understanding of complex ecosystems.
The point I want to make about the limitations of science is not about intrinsic limitations of an epistemological order, however. Popper, Kuhn and Feyerabend have all done it much better than I could. I rather want simply to point out the very obvious fact – well-known also to those philosophers – that what is known, “scient”, is, however you define “knowledge”, at any finite moment of history a subset of what is knowable. The one cannot, therefore, be taken as a simple proxy for the other. We need, as a result, to internalize the uncertainty embedded in the description of the world available to us when using “science” as a metric to evaluate claims about the world or a method to solve the problems we face. In respect of something as epochally challenging as climate change, I think we have got the point. However, in other areas of daily life, I think we have not. Here, the tyranny of the known remains resplendent (often coexisting with the tyranny of “revealed knowledge” hawked by practitioners of one or other totalizing ideology). And people pride themselves on their rationality (respectively morality/enlightenment) in bowing to its dictates, when they should be ashamed of their irrationality in seeking to live as if, in life, all was understood (or anything was “revealed”).
Nowhere is this destructive polarity between modernism and relativism more evident than when it comes to the human body (let me use the word “body” for bodymindspirit, for which unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any word – it is not a problem from my perspective, but it may be one from yours). In (“Western”, or “scientific”) medicine, we treat what we know with what we understand. However, we experience in our bodies all of what is, whether it is known or not. Our limited description of the world has not changed what is, but it has changed how we are able to perceive it.
This need not be so. Maps are partial guides to a partial world. We all know this; we do not expect the world we discover to conform in all particulars to what we see on a map. It may be unscientific to assert, where we reach the boundaries of our present knowledge, “hic sunt dragones”. But it is an imperative of scientific honesty, all too often ignored particularly but not only in the popular imagination, to acknowledge the limitations of the map, and to realize that it is not because a hazard is not marked on it that it will not impact upon your journey.
So the question is not, or should not be, “is the body a machine?” The exhortation is, rather, “be conscious that the body is not the machine you believe it to be”. The map is not the terrain, but we should, and ultimately must, live in the terrain, not on the map.
The body(mindspirit) having a certain importance to our quality of life, being an unavoidable (though often avoided) reality, it is useful to realize we have another source of knowledge than the scient or (still more) revelation. The phenomena experienced in the body are directly knowable to us in a way which doesn’t require abstraction and codification. You don’t need to understand and explain, and, all too often, doing so cuts you off from the source of your experience, mentalizes and denatures it. Not only intellectuals do this; it is a script of, at least, the whole Western world.
So next time you meet me, don’t explain what you’re feeling, just feel it, feel it fully and accept it. Only then, if ever and if it has any importance, may you explain. Your modernist fetishism (or your relativist ramblings) evoke only my sympathy, which you will not find very useful. If you live your life, though, as a creature who not only acknowledges but celebrates uncertainty and spontaneity, you will instead win my admiration, which may be equally useless to you, but is much more useful to me.
