With Descartes, against dualism

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JDSP 4 (2) pp. 195–209 Intellect Limited 2012

Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices Volume 4 Number 2

© 2012 Intellect Ltd Major Papers. English language. doi: 10.1386/jdsp.4.2.195_1

Keywords

dualismDescartesBergsonphilosophysomaticsconsciousness

Marie BardetUniversity of Paris 8 and University of Buenos Aires

Florencio nocetiUniversity of Buenos Aires

with descartes, against

dualism1

aBstract

At the crossroads between philosophy and ‘somatics’, we interrogate the problem of dualism as something that still more or less explicitly inhabits our discourse, and forms and deforms our practices. By closely following Descartes’ correspondence with the Princess Elisabeth (1643), we see how Descartes’ concern with distinguishing body from soul never ceases to be problematized by reason of the continual evidence of their union. Considering that in the correspondence the two keys elements that appear when thinking about the union of soul and body are weight and extension, we utilize these two pathways to comprehend the problems and concerns they have identified within the evidence of union. Furthermore, we seek to retrieve these prob-lems and concerns through Bergson’s later philosophy of ‘extensivity’ as it appears in Matter and Memory (1896) under a non-classical dualistic model. We do this, not to proclaim either union or extensivity as solutions, nor even to find the right philosophy for somatic practices, but to see how these problems historically found can help us look attentively at somatics’ abilities to invent non-dualistic forms and thoughts, particularly in regard to how they think through movement.

1. Article translated by Jacqueline Cousineau.

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Continually reopening the debate about the relationship between body and soul could produce laughs of scorn if presented in these terms, and yet, it never ceases to come up in other guises, or at least in other terms: the relationship between the somatic and psychic, ‘the body’ and ‘the head’, or even between the brain, neurons and the ‘thought’. Although in completely different ways, the medical field, philosophy, and ‘bodily’, ‘somatics’ or ‘dance’ practices have led their history with this relationship issue and its transformation. This relational conflict does not lack theoretical, practical and political complexity. We will situate our text at the crossroads between philosophy and what is called ‘somatic practices’ or ‘somatic methods’ or ‘somatic techniques’. These are terms for practices that, starting from the end of the nineteenth century in the West, work with movement and do not exactly fit under the categories of therapy, art or education, but are rather a hybrid of these three. According to Thomas Hanna, we will use the term ‘somatics’ (1995), and principally talk here about Feldenkrais, the one we know and practice.

This hybridity of fields constitutes the primary characteristic of somatics, rendering it difficult to define stable and permanent boundaries. Nevertheless, this hybridity also potentially constitutes a practical clue to understand how somatics can repattern what we hear by body and soul, in dialogue with these respective disciplines (medicine, pedagogy, dance, etc.). Somatics mostly affirm they want to invent ways to go through the dualist separation. Gerda Alexander, for instance, opens her book by writing that eutony is a research, adapted to the western world, that helps the individual to find a profound consciousness of his or her own bodily and spiritual reality ‘as a real unity’ (1996: 25). And Feldenkrais clearly states:

I believe that the unity of mind and body is an objective reality. They are not just parts somehow related to each other, but an inseparable whole while functioning. A brain without a body could not think; at least, the continuity of mental functions is assured by corresponding motor functions.

(1964)

In order to find out how somatics tries to avoid dualistic approaches, one must look closely at their practices together with their discourses. It would be impossible to take the texts as the whole method. That is what Ginot invites us to consider as a ‘radical epistemology of somatics’ (2010). To see how the dualistic issue plays out and the ways somatics invents some ways to go beyond, we will have to look closely both at the texts and the experience. Indeed, relying solely on grand declarations about the historical abolition of the separation between mind and body, or on all the types of assertions that take into account a ‘holistic’ approach, taking the person ‘as a whole’, does not magically solve everything because they renounce Cartesian dualism. On one hand, rejection of dualism with great enthusiasm at the door does not mean it cannot sneak in through the window with distinctions that suppos-edly have been declared obsolete. Expressions such as ‘my head’/‘my body’ or ‘I didn’t think about what I was doing’/‘It’s my body, spontaneously, that’s moving’ become difficult to analyse without acknowledging a certain dualism. On the other hand, any grand renunciation of dualism may altogether miss somatics’ real power to generate a new model, by simplifying the complexity of the relationship through a binary option. It is necessary to avoid any binary thought to be able to connect with the complexity itself that, because it creates so many problems, might provide the power for further reinvention.

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2. See Descartes (Meditations II):

I am therefore, precisely speaking, only a thinking thing, that is, a mind (menssive animus), understanding, or reason, terms whose signification was before unknown to me. I am, however, a real thing, and really existent; but what thing? The answer was a thinking thing (res cogitans).

(1901)

3. See, for instance, the short essay by Ravaisson ([1838] 2007).

4. Thinkers and artists in the ‘Acéphale’ community provide an extraordinary example of the latter. The writings of Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowsky and Jean Wahl in the four Acéphale magazines published between 1936 and 1939 furnish many arguments for the inversion of the traditional values ascribed to the opposed terms (Acéphale 1995).

This is why we paradoxically propose here to look at texts where Descartes himself was confronted with the problem that never ceased to come up as soon as he made the distinction between ‘body’ and ‘soul’, namely, their ‘union’. Especially in his Meditations – although to some extent throughout all his works – Descartes insists upon the radical differentiation between ‘minds’ and ‘souls’ (terms he uses as exact synonyms, i.e. ‘mens sive animus’)2 on one side, and ‘bodies’ on the other. It is only after the insistent questioning by Princess Elisabeth of Bohem that he is forced to explain the experience of the fact that ‘we are one person’. We shall see how Descartes’ own statement about the complexity of this fact echoes through movement practices as they attempt to effect the ‘union’. In addition, we will see how these echoes could possibly enlighten what is in play in somatic practices and refine ways in which what is at stake in somatics can be integrated into a larger field of thought and action. This will tend to nourish a theoretical–practical approach attentive to the deconstruction of the binary opposition between body and mind.

The inherent risk in an absolute distinction between systems of the ‘body’ (alternatively called ‘somatic’, ‘sensitive’, ‘corporeal’, ‘physical’ or ‘biological’) and the systems of the ‘soul’ (namely, ‘thought’, ‘reflection’, ‘conscience’, ‘mind’ or ‘psychic reality’) is double. First, it misses the precise singular-ity of what overflows between the two – for the time being we can speak of ‘two’ – by searching to attribute the whole explication to one or the other side (thus creating the irreducibility of problems such as corporeal habits and the unconscious that come up particularly during the nineteenth century).3 At the same time the distinction is very rarely a simple difference in a list of many different things; it automatically creates an opposition between the two (which is, by the way, how binary thought works). Moreover, this opposition never ceases to lead to a hierarchy between the two: the soul as soul only exists – throughout western traditions – as that which surpasses the body. Therefore, condemning dualism is as much, or even more so, about condemn-ing the hierarchy of one over the other as about discussing their distinction. Against this hierarchical division, there were critical approaches, especially during the twentieth century, that claimed that a compensating overvalua-tion of ‘the body’ could heal a western civilization that had ignored ‘it’ for so long.4 However, this belief fails to see that the hierarchy is lodged precisely in the distinction by opposition that produces two distanced entities, and that a ‘return to the body’ as a new source of truth could participate in and produce the same opposition. Considering that ‘the body’ exists as a category and as a stable substance a priori in order to then assert its ‘recuperation’ is also supporting, however implicitly, the fact that it could not know how to exist outside of its production as opposition to ‘something else’.

Somatics, inasmuch as it tries to work ‘through body activity’ – and not ‘on the body’, as, for instance, some gymnastics might do – is faced with this paradoxical evidence of the person as a whole, and not necessarily as a coming back to ‘the body’. Indeed, it would be difficult to define what the ‘body’ of the practice is. We might think that Feldenkrais, for instance, tends to work much more on the different relationships (with the gravity, with the environment, etc.) than on a presupposed ‘body’. It is an enormous challenge to estimate the implications of this possible way of thinking.

Crossing our philosophical trajectories with our experience of dance and Feldenkrais (as a participant), we will think through the lens of these practices that we cannot pigeonhole as ‘somatic’ or ‘corporeal’ without interrogating the soma or body reference, in order to summon cross-disciplines that cannot

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5. During that period, ému referred to simple displacement and not emotion. However, we recall the movement that continues to inhabit the current concept of emotion.

6 For English version see Descartes (Meditations VI):

nevertheless, because, on the one hand, I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, in as far as I am only a thinking and unextended thing, and as, on the other hand, I possess a distinct idea of body, in as far as it is only an extended and unthinking thing, it is certain that I, [that is, my mind, by which I am what I am], is entirely and truly distinct from my body, and may exist without it.

(1901)

be anything less than practical and theoretical at the same time. We therefore propose to situate ourselves also at the place where philosophy is in the midst of being made, where it acts as a way to make an experience of reality. And we will do so with the philosopher who gave his name to perhaps the strong-est dualism: Descartes. Instead of searching to do without them once and for all as one would with an unwanted icon or a scarecrow, we will look in his texts, and particularly in his correspondence – as a dynamic question/answer philosophy – at how dualism is already a problem, a paradox, more than a solution or a conclusion.

distinction and union paradox through descartes and princess elisaBeth’s correspondence

In this sense, there is a remarkable cohabitation of perspectives in Descartes’ thought: the Cartesian gesture that insists on distinguishing the ‘soul’ and the ‘body’ in order to know them by analysing their opposite substances – res extensa/extended thing vs rex cogitans/thinking thing – is accompanied at the same time by an affirmation of a primordial experience: that of their union.

Evidence of the ‘dispute’, if there is any, lies in Descartes’ correspondence with Princess Elisabeth, between 1643 and 1649, which reveals a particular audacity pertaining to the question of the union of soul and body. This epistolary experience is best read by closely following the line of thought that is played out in the direct and intimate agreements and disagreements that obtain between the two disputants rather than by a distant analysis. The fundamental discord concerning the questioning of the distinction between ‘body’ and ‘soul’ appears in the letter that Elisabeth addresses to Descartes on 20 June 1643, on how the soul ‘would act’. It is more important to note that the problem between what is in play is situating movement and sensation within impenetrable division between ‘soul’ and ‘body’. Princess Elisabeth exposes a particularly nuanced difficulty to Descartes: how can we think that the soul keeps within the relationship to the body ‘the capacity to move a body and to be moved by it’ (‘la capacité de mouvoir un corps et d’en être ému’5) (Descartes 1989: 72) when, according to the distinc-tion between extended and unextended substances that Descartes proposes in his Meditations (published in 1641 in Latin; see Descartes 1976: 76),6 it cannot utilize impulse or touch because it is unextended. Princess Elisabeth asks how one understands, imagines or thinks about motion or e-motion within an unextended reality, that is, an immaterial reality. By doing this, she brings up a crucial problem within Cartesian philosophy. The Descartes/PE correspond-ence weaves a philosophy that is possibly far from the jousting contradictions of the Academy, but nevertheless has a certain demanding accuracy and preci-sion inherent to intimate sharing that manifests itself through all the months of exchanging letters between La Haye and Egmond du Hoef to trace through an epistolary relationship a philosophy in process.

Between May and July 1643, five decisive letters are exchanged over the course of which Elisabeth drives Descartes into a corner until he explains that in addition to the things that belong only to the soul or to the body, there are those attached to their union. He recognizes here, in a remark with nothing anecdotal, that these things that are attached to union are exactly what he addresses least in his treaties because he exclusively spends his time on the properties of distinction that can be explained and justified. He warns us of a number of errors that result from this. In fact, he already alerts her in his first reply on 21 May 1643 that:

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7 In French, prouver is to prove and éprouver is to experiment and to feel. It is therefore impossible to translate the original subtitle ‘une é-preuve’.

the principal cause of our errors is [that] we normally want to use the things that do not belong to the notions in order to explain them, like when we want to use the imagination to conceive the nature of the soul, or when we use the notion of how one body moves another in order to conceive the way in which the soul moves the body.

(Descartes 1989: 68)

The criteria of clarity and distinction that prevent any error in knowledge, which are so dear to Descartes, make him concentrate his metaphysical efforts on distinguishing and separating. However, there is, for Descartes, a relation-ship between the acts belonging to different orders: sensations, thoughts, passions, sentiments. And there exists – and it would be an error to think Descartes did not recognize this – a relationship, a junction and a conjunction between what is distinguished under ‘soul’ and ‘body’:

(supposing that Your Highness has already clearly present in the mind the reasons that prove the distinction between the soul and body, and not wanting in any sense to beg or dispose of them in order to repre-sent the notion of union that each one of us experiences in ourselves even without philosophizing; to know that it is a single person who has together a body and a thought that are of such a nature that that thought can move the body and feel the accidents that happen to him).

(Descartes 1989: 75, emphasis added)

This problematic relationship is explained as the correspondence proceeds: every moment in life makes it obvious that life is the experience of the union of soul and body. This fact is easy enough to recognize, but it is harder to know the way it functions. Indeed, what designates the terms of union is not a third substance whose essence we can know. It is an experience that is not only unknown, but unknowable. It cannot be analysed by philosophical understanding, but must be felt and experimented. From there, in a parenthe-sis that is of the greatest importance, Descartes explains that in his books he insists a great deal on the ‘reasons that prove’ the distinction and on the ways to examine and understand them, but he neglects the experience that seems obvious to him: ‘the union that each one of us experiences’.

This correlation is a type of evidence that cannot in any form act as a proof: the union of soul and body does not prove itself by a chain of reasoning. This ‘together’ inherent to a union that does not prove itself but ‘experiences itself’ constitutes in this epistolary philosophy an invitation to experience the unprovable proof: not because we can experience something new (‘together’ is not a substantive), but because together is the crucial adverb in this ‘proof within experience’.

the prooF within experience7

First, then, I remark a big difference between these three types of notions: the soul is conceived only by pure intellect, the body – ie exten-sion, figures, and movements – can also be known by the intellect helped by the imagination, and finally, things that belong to the union of soul and good only know each other obscurely by way of the intel-lect only or even by the intellect aided by the imagination – but they

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know each other in a clear manner by way of the senses. Hence the reason why those who never philosophize and use only their senses never doubt that the soul moves the body and that the body acts on the soul; they consider the one and the other as a single thing, that is, they conceive their union. For to conceive the union between two things, is to conceive them as one thing. […] and finally, it is by using only life and ordinary conversations, and by staying away from meditating and studying things that exercise the imagination, that one learns to conceive the union between the soul and body. I never spend more than a few hours a day on thoughts that occupy the imagination, and only a few hours per year on those that occupy pure intellect, and the rest of the time I relax the senses and rest my mind.

(Descartes 1989: 73–74)

On 28 June 1643, Descartes gives the Princess one of the keys to this unprovable but experienced union: the temporality of this experience. Experiencing the union between the soul and body takes a certain amount of time. In fact, time is the first condition of this union. The union is this ‘experience’ (éprouvement) in time, in a temporality that is not one of searching for the result of proven research that stands once and for all, but is something that accompanies the whole experience. The union only seems complicated when we try to think of it in the limited time of the work of the ‘imagination’ (mathematics, physics, etc.), or worse, by ‘pure’ understanding. The rest of the time, when we are at leisure, the union is evident because while relaxed the test and feeling of experience allows us to ‘conceive’ the union as we go instead of coming up with a known result.

But what would happen if we took the philosopher’s ‘relaxing’ as a partic-ular moment integral to his thought – to leave a place in philosophy for his experience of the world as described n his letters? What would emerge from Descartes during the majority of his day? When experienced ‘together’, the soul and the body are two distinct things in the chain of order of proofs of reason, and at the same time they are one and the same thing in the order of experience felt by their union. This is why it is difficult to seize this totality, ‘because in order to do that one needs to conceive them (body and soul apart) as a single thing, and when they are together to conceive them as two, which contradicts itself’ (Descartes 1989: 75).

For most of the day, this totality is both a simple and complex lived experience. We therefore do not need an alliance between two things to resolve the problem (in the same way that the notion of ‘psychosomatics’ does not guarantee that it will not create an opposition within itself). We rather need to make an effort to understand in a more radical way the ‘at the same time as’ nature of the one and same thing and the two different things that never cease to be different while experienced together. By bypassing the never-ending debate that tries to define body and soul as two things or one, we arrive at a problem that exists in a more ample philosophical perspective, which calls for a renewed vision and a revitalized effort. It calls us to experience ‘together’ what is ‘contradictory’. For the soul and the body mutually include and distinguish themselves from each other at the same time. Furthermore, it is this ‘at the same time-ness’ coming from their disjunction and their inclusion that produces them as they are and gives rise to their relationship.

Coming to experience of soul and body ‘together’ (where the ‘and’ tends to disappear or bend differently, and thus displace the debate about the existence of body and soul) is to seize the direction of their common movement. When the

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issue is knowledge, the prime attention is on their distinction even though their union is perceived without any problem. It is felt and never denied. It is not that Descartes put his mea culpa in his letters – recognizing an error by proposing to go in the opposite direction. No, when we pay attention to his thought process we can see that divergent lines of thought coexist. We could even say that the letter-writing genre better shows the trajectory of his philosophical process than the dogmas of history of philosophy’s heritage (which is more like a fixed paint-ing in a museum of ideas that succeed and oppose each other).

Going beyond dualism through weight and extension experiences

The non-contradictory complexity of philosophy in this correspondence proposes two movements that take into account (or rather create an image of) this union: incorrectly, weight and correctly, extension. Weight and extension constitute images that, without giving an exact representation of the nature of their union (which is intrinsically impossible since it is experienced and not proven), put us on the path to understand the effort needed to compre-hend the union between soul and body and refine the experience. Experience is therefore taken more as a journey through a tangible reality rather than a verification of a hypothesis of pure reason’s understanding. In this way, in more than an official sense, this experience is communal experience. Going further, it is not a given that reason should interpret or elaborate in order to create knowledge, as in scientific experience.

Indeed, the soul and body cannot be known except through their distinction – it is through what differentiates them that we understand them. This is the very foundation of dualism. The res cogitans characterizes itself by its unextended character, an exclusive characteristic of res extensa that would precisely not know how to ‘be thinking’ (cogitans). However, the soul must have some ‘thing’ of ‘material’ in which it moves and is moved into (é-mu). As it is, weight is a type of link to material without being extended, since it can move bodies without actually being one. Weight becomes a way to approach the ‘together’ experience of the soul/body union.

Weight

The idea of weight has the particularity for Descartes and Elisabeth that compels one to think of an action belonging to a body, and therefore to think of weight as matter even though it itself is not strictly material. Furthermore, the specific problem ‘between’ soul and body remains unless these are two bodies and one can move the other by the crashing of surfaces. To think of the union in distinction, inclusion and disjunction – here is the crux of the prob-lem between the union of soul and body.

For example, suppose that weight is a real quality that we do not have any other knowledge of apart from the fact that it has a force to move the body in which it is towards the center of the earth. We can hardly conceive how it moves the body nor how it is joined to it; and we can in no respect think that this is done by a real touching of one surface to another, because we experience already in ourselves a particular notion to conceive it; however I believe we use this notion poorly, by applying it to weight, because weight is not really a thing distinguished from the body […] but the notion given to us in order to conceive the way in which the soul moves the body.

(Descartes 1989: 69–70)

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Here, the concept of weight insists on the fact that it is at the same time ‘distinct’ from the body while being able to move it, without being another body. This idea for Descartes is false in physics because in his physics, he defines weight as a property belonging to all bodies and undistinguished from them. However, it gives an idea of the relationship of the soul with the body, of its immaterial materiality, and of it tangible intangibility.

How does weight manage to say something about the union that artic-ulates between tangible and intangible and is also highly concrete and immaterial? Rather than an identity of form or of function, it is a trouble-some identity that links weight to the relationship between soul and body. Indeed, the relationship between soul and body plays out where the problem of what occupies a place and does not occupy a place arises (it is impossible to locate the soul; it is easy to locate the body), thereby also questioning what is tangible/intangible.

In this way, one has the experience and learns through the experience how the tangible and the intangible articulate. Weight, that which does not occupy a place and yet tells us firmly where we are, is the only thing by which we know that we are at a certain place. How am I here and now, lying down on the ground, occupying this place? The contact with the floor, this relationship, is exactly where each Feldenkrais session begins: with a scanning lying on the floor, on our backs. We move through weight, and we can pay attention to it, not as proof of its existence, but to experience its variations. Focusing on the contacts with the floor, we are not trying to prove that gravity exists; we are trying to feel all the continuous modifications of the arrangement through it. This very common experience might help us to get – although not to prove – the union that Descartes recognizes.

Therefore, inasmuch as weight is not inside or outside the body that it moves, we can stop asking about the exterior or interior nature of the soul. At the same time, the serious problem of the place of contact by which the soul moves the body dissolves: there is no ‘place’ for the soul in/next to/on/around the body. This is precisely what interests Jean-Luc Nancy in his lecture on Descartes’ correspondence with Princess Elisabeth. What is this contact that leaves each res intact? It may be a contact between motions that approach each other –as a limit is approached – without touching (2006: 130–62).

We can see how the fact that the experience of the union between the soul and the body is not the experience of a place, or of a particular dis-position, invites us to think about a certain relationship of a non-localization while taking into account body/place. Some relation takes place without having a specific place: that is the particularly stimulating idea emerging from the body/mind problem taken as a dynamic relation and not as substances. As substances, they only could be either the same one thing, either two different, and for then, two opposed things. This dynamic perspective opens up possible links with movement experience, and the somatics approach. Therefore, we might understand how the union’s evidence experiences itself as a singular intensity of weight and by the co-linking extension of the soul with the body.

Extension

I beg [Her Highness] to freely attribute this matter and extension to the soul, since this is nothing other than to conceive it as united to the body. And after understanding this, and having experienced it herself, it

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would be easy for her [Highness] to consider that the matter that she had attributed to this thought is not the thought itself, and that the extension of this matter is of another nature than the extension of that thought, in that the first is determined to a particular place from which it excludes all other bodily extension, whereas this is not true of the second.

(Descartes 1989: 75, emphasis added)

Once more, if we understand, with Descartes, the distinction between the two substances, ‘body’ and ‘soul’ (which according to him also means ‘mind’), as a double opposition of the standard of extended matter (precisely allowed because of their homogeneous identity as the substance: res) then res extensa is the body, and the soul is res non extensa. In the same symmetric way, the soul is res cogitans while the body is defined as res non cogitans. All is held in a necessary and absolute double opposition. Therefore, in what sense does extension talk about their union?

Extension is less a fact (such as extended matter) than an activity, an ‘in the process of extending’. This is exactly what the gerund form clarifies. The process of extension would be in this sense a shared movement between soul and body, within which the soul is never extended; rather, it tends in the direction of the body’s extension. If the body, in extending, gets extended at certain limits of its boundaries, then the soul takes to the road and shares the tendency, the vector and the force of that direction, without ever being the result or being defined (defined within the borders of its extended matter) by the limits of an extended matter. The union with the body, this togetherness that says ‘at the same time’ the soul and the body, does not then make the soul extended matter, but rather a process of extension in a co-presence of movements of the soul and body.

This is the new shared line that seems to cross Cartesian philosophy, and in a possibly more decisive manner than that which distinguishes between soul and body: that which is between extended and extension. The distinc-tion between extensa and cogitans takes on a different sense: playing between ‘body’ and ‘soul’ is a difference of time, between the past participle and the gerund. The displacement of the centre of distinction indicates the existing plan from pure opposition: how something unextended participates not as part of extended matter (a contradiction in terms) but as part of the gerund of cogitans: extending. In this way, we understand extension as an ongoing tendency and not simply as fixed result in a substance. This allows us to imag-ine ways to bypass the dualist oppositions between soul and body and their false resolutions.

Therefore, the crossing, the junction and the relationship become the issue within a certain materiality of extension that we can understand as a certain common direction to the soul and body, coexisting with the opposite direction of their separation. To go beyond the problem of soul and body is to pass through a movement in two directions (or more) and to be invited to experience it.

Moving along the shared line where unextended/extended spills over, going to the place where in a certain sense extension is something that has no place, is to stop asking whether what is ‘sharing’ the soul and the body is a region (the brain and the nervous system in itself as a new location of monism), or a definition of substances, but a movement – a movement of extension that does not reach the limits of matter.

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From distinction to a relation in-between through movement

The experience of movement provides the ground necessary for connecting Descartes’ comings and goings about the distinction and the union of bodies and minds with those theories and practices that are nowadays dealing with similar issues. To quote Feldenkrais once again:

Moreover, the living organism itself is moving incessantly, and the nerv-ous system has to bring order to the mobile, changing world, as well as to its own mobility, to make some sense from this whirling turmoil.

Quite surprisingly, the most efficient means for achieving this Herculean feat is movement. Movement of the living organism is essential for the formation of stationary events in the changing, moving environment and the constantly moving organism itself. Even if we are observing inert matter, our senses still perceive moving impressions, since a living organism is never completely stationary until it dies.

(1979)

Movement as a clue to consider the union/separation between psychic and material realities is a very important philosophical point. More than three centuries after Descartes, Henri Bergson tried to rethink the relationship between mind and body, using the terms memory and matter (Matière et Mémoire, first published in 1896). He always assumed, ever since his Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (published in 1888), that philosophies at the turn of the century had to dialogue with all the psychological investiga-tions that had already been going on since the early nineteenth and even the eighteenth centuries (with e.g. the first psychophysiologists Ernst Heinrich Weber and Gustav Fechner, or psychologists such as Wilhelm Wundt or Théodule Ribot, and, of course, the philosophers Félix Ravaisson, William James and Herbert Spencer).

Bergson’s effort consisted in reviewing the problems of mind and body, psyche and matter, from the point of view of movement and perception, motion and emotion as the ever-changing reality of the universe. For that, he had to displace the absolute binary opposition between localizable extended matter (dividable, measurable) and unextended immateriality without place (purely indivisible and incommensurable). He needs to conceive a reality belonging to the extensive: ‘That which is given, that which is real, is some-thing intermediary between divided dimension and pure non-dimension. It is what we have termed the extensive. Extension is the most salient quality of perception’ (Bergson 1911: 326).

The problematic Bergsonian landscape of an always-changing perspective allied with continuously moving matter exacerbates the difficulty to such a degree that it makes Bergson conclude Matter and Memory with this ‘inter-mediate’ in-between – a stumbling block for his concern about a quality that is yet perceived through extended matter. For this philosopher, who never proposes a single monistic substance reuniting matter and psyche, experience and thought is a junction between what is no longer the soul but memory and matter, the experience of movement and change. By experiencing extension as something that allows one to think of the movement of matter and the quality of consciousness together, Bergson throws out, at the end of the nine-teenth century, the fixed back-to-back postures of materialism and spiritual-ism on this issue. Therefore, one cannot take his philosophy as a distribution

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of movement between inert matter with measurable dimensions and breath (anima) of a purely non-dimensional consciousness. Such is the demand of this philosophy that attempts to displace this line of sharing, redistributing many more binaries through that which is extended/unextended: measurable/incommensurable, quantitative/qualitative, homogeneous/heterogeneous, perceived object/perceiving subject, etc.

The crossings belonging to a heterogeneous and incommensurable movement (and therefore to a material body) constitute the vital kernels of Bergsonian philosophy. Indeed, the problem of extended matter that, for Descartes and Elisabeth, was essentially a problem of locating matter doubles with Bergson as the divisibility belonging to dimensional matter when we project it into a homogeneous, and therefore divisible and measurable, space. If it was necessary with extension to think of a certain materiality that does not occupy place, one needs now, with extension, to think of a certain indi-visible and incommensurable materiality. In this way, this ‘extensive’ reality makes this ‘between perception and the perceived thing’, ‘between quality and movement’ and ‘at once we find that there is no impassible barrier, no essential difference, no real distinction even’ (Bergson 1911: 291).

Extensivity is here again the name of a crossing in-between rather than a new reunited substance. According to Bergson, what made the distinction ‘essential’ both for materialism and spiritualism was the absolute opposition between what is extended (dividable) and what is unextended (purely indivis-ible), that had kept matter (body) and consciousness (mind) absolutely apart from each other. As it is, there are gradual distinctions, crossable passages between qualities (tending towards the non-dimensional and incommensu-rable) and movement (tending towards dimensional and measurable), and walkable transitions between perception and thing: tensions.

Between sensible qualities, as regarded in our representation of them, and these same qualities treated as calculable changes there is therefore only a difference in rhythm of duration, a difference of internal tension. Thus, by the idea of tension we have striven to overcome the opposition between quality and quantity, as by the idea of extension that is between the unextended and the extended.

(Bergson 1911: 330, original emphasis)

By the double fold of tension and extension, Bergson goes beyond both the simple opposition between quantity and quality, and the more complicated one between what is unextended and what is extended. Philosophy’s concern is no longer to understand the animation of an inert, extended matter (how the soul moves the body), but to comprehend the different directions of a same movement, extension and contraction, of matter in movement and conscious-ness perceiving it. In the same way, the distinction between something that a long time ago we called ‘soul’ and ‘body’, if it maintains itself as a difference in some degree, is more a sense of a type of complexity of experience. The differ-ence maintains itself throughout the experience of their union, which does not completely reunite them into a single and identical substance, or define two objects in something like a disjunctive synthesis. There is a certain thick-ness taking place (without necessarily occupying a ‘place’) in the joint experi-ence, through the different directions being taken; it could be a certain matter materializing in a memory, a certain quality qualifying itself through quantity, and a certain consciousness ‘consciousizing’ itself through movement.

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Indeed, the experience of conjunction between quality and quantity for Bergson comes back to the experience of junction between consciousness and movement. The movement can no longer be the objective property of extended matter and projected into a measurable, dividable space. Furthermore, we do not know how to understand this by a purely abstract consciousness (unex-tended, incommensurable, untouchable, etc.), although we can by an experi-ence of heterogeneity of the same matter. Therefore, consciousness of change (e-motion) and consciousness of movement (motion) situate themselves at the dynamic juncture between what is no longer produced as two essentially different substances but as mobile degrees of contraction (materialization) and expansion (awareness).

Our intention is not to declare Bergson’s philosophy as the right one to apply to somatics. We are not searching for any existing philosophy to apply to any somatics. But it seems that one of the problems Bergson faced and the way he went through it could give us some tools to elaborate some philosophy from somatics’ theories/practices. In this way, his rearticulation of the ‘matter’ and ‘memory’ distinction in movement leaves us with not a homogeneous one only ‘thing’, nor two absolutely distinguished things, but a dynamic articulation in-between, an articulation changing by degrees, through movement.

The movement that was the initial problem for Descartes and Princess Elisabeth (such as the immaterial soul – can it move and find itself moved?) opens up an invitation to experience, which is always a journey, a displacement rather than a definition that proves itself. Joint extension in movement is how the union is experienced together in the letters between the philosopher and the Princess. Following this, according to Bergson, movement is no longer a reality seized by consciousness, but the way in which materiality gives and perceives itself – the joint extended and unextended movement of extension is where that which never ceases to distinguish itself without opposing is articulated.

This is therefore a paradox that demands one to work on and to think of all the degrees of distinction – from the most tangible to the least tangible, from the most material to the least material – as an articulation of difference in many directions without opposition. It articulates; it shares a direction, without identifying itself within a single perspective, in contact with all while maintaining a gap and vice versa: not identification nor distance, but multiple articulations.

This is a paradox that presents itself as a shared ground for labours between somatic practices and philosophies. A paradox, finally, that draws out differ-ent ways for advancing: the distinction between what is different and what opposes, between results and processes, and between elements themselves and relationships. In describing his work, for instance, Feldenkrais sometimes goes far beyond the idea of bringing mind and body together:

We have then, from birth till death, a closed loop of four elements: skel-eton, muscles, nervous system, and environment. These elements are, in fact, very complex systems interacting with numerous feedbacks and feedforwards all along the loop. The loop can be drawn as a quadrangle with four sides and four summits. In my own work I deal mostly with the summits rather than with the sides. I deal with the linkage at the summits where the elements interact with one another and where the learned use of self is more apparent.

(Feldenkrais 1979)

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Perhaps we can think for a while on the way a dancer could also experience how much there are different levels, between anatomy, words, sensations, gestures, presentations before others’ regard, dealing with skeleton and direc-tions and skin and touch and orientation in the space, and potential and real gestures, and how then can we describe something of the different articula-tion of those strata, holding onto a non-opposition without falling into an identical totalization? – by staying the closest to the experience of weight, movement and the crossroads through which there is material and immate-rial at the same time. The thousand ways to relate, interpenetrate and articulate the material with the immaterial, the tangible and intangible of movement, is certain ‘knowledge’ from the way to go through movement beyond duality. But we suggest that this at the same time is not the conclusive definition of a togetherness, the final constitution of a stable and truthful object (psychoso-matics as a stable object, for example), but the place of paradox.

This paradox is less a contradiction to resolve than a permanent proc-ess in which differences, junctions and gaps produce and experiment among themselves. How does the anxiety of falling back to the model of a material body instrument vs an immaterial spirit keep a permanent relationship at the same time with the reality of multiple different directions? How could we think and act in this (lived) experience together where the movement becomes the paradoxical mode of experience rather than the essential characteristic of one or the other? And how can we start to elaborate those experiences through movement as a new way of knowledge?

In this sense, if gravity and extension appeared as the ways to make sense of this paradox and to experience a movement, it’s less as a finished move-ment and more as an experience of movement in progress that constitutes without any doubt, a point of contact between the practice of movement and philosophy.

Larger than the place-less relationship between soul and body, gravity is a way to comprehend what articulates between movement and consciousness, activity and passivity, and action and sensation. It is exactly that: an articulation. There where my skin touches the ground, where what is situated is at the same time what is at the point of leaving, is where different directional tenden-cies sketch themselves. In each articulation, one perceives and produces the orientation of the gestural involvement at the point of effectuation. Seizing movement’s tendency at the point of being executed is essentially gravitary proprioception, held off-balance. Between quality and quantity, extended and unextended, tangible and intangible, gravity is not a supplemental object for an abstract conscience. It is the activity/passivity of awareness going through the dynamic quality of a lived gesture at the limit of its being perceived and effec-tuated. It is not comprehended by the directional vector once the movement is executed (extended), but by the indication, the qualitative sign right at the moment of movement, and the potential orientation and intensity of accelera-tion (process of extension). It is to experience exactly what cannot strictly and entirely be measured and to characterize at the same time a gesture in the most ‘physical’ way possible. It is awareness that seizes in movement these extensive tendencies stretching between quantity of movement and quality of gesture. It is awareness that comprehends by doing and does by comprehending.

This gives all its stature to the idea of several somatic practices that work for awareness that is not of or on movement, but by or through movement. This is precisely a way to think why collective sessions of Feldenkrais are called ‘Awareness through movement’. And this might be the real potential

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of non-dualistic invention within somatics: working through movement more than having a new object body or movement on which to work on.

‘Awareness through movement’ that displaces the attention from the result to the process and from extended matter to extension – such is the invitation of this journey of exercising Cartesianism where union opens the perspective to a non-oppositional difference that cannot be reduced to any correspondence by mimesis, or by associationism/localism. Re-grasped by going through philosophical and historical challenges, taking seriously the work through movement demands and forces a constant renewal of episte-mological, political and aesthetic perspectives to avoid producing the ‘body’ as a fixed category. Therefore, the territory of thought finds itself spread out and repatterned, although less as a zone limited by its distance from the corporeal, physical or somatic than as a dynamic redistributing by crossings, passages and relationships with what is not strictly one or the other thing, and producing itself on the edge – strata that knit together sensations and images, percepts and concepts, acts and words. A dynamic relation where philosophy and somatics – insofar as they ceased to be opposed as theory, on the one hand, and practice, on the other hand – can invent themselves at a limit’s edge which escape at the same time to unique opposition and total unification.

reFerences

Alexander, G. (1996), L’eutonie. Un chemin de développement personnel par le corps/ Eutonie. A way for personal development through the body, Paris: Sand.

Bergson, H. (1911), Matter and Memory (trans. N. M. Paul and W. Scott Palmer), London: George Allen and Unwin.

—— (1959), An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (trans. F. L. Pogson), New York: Macmillan.

—— (1985), Matière et Mémoire/Matter and Memory, Paris: PUF.Descartes, R. (1901), The Method, Meditations and Philosophy of Descartes,

translated from the original texts, with a new introductory essay, histori-cal and critical by John Veitch and a special introduction by Frank Sewall, Washington: M. Walter Dunne, http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/1698/142025. Accessed 3 April 2012.

—— (1976), Méditations Métaphysiques/ Metaphysics Meditations, Paris: Vrin.—— (1989), Correspondance avec Elisabeth, Paris: Flammarion.Fechner, G. ([1860] 1966), Elements of Psychophysics, California: Holt, Rinehart

and Winston.Feldenkrais, M. (1964), ‘Mind and body’, Systematics: The Journal of the Institute

for the Comparative Study of History, Philosophy and the Sciences, 2: 1, pp. 27–44. Reprinted in Kogan, Gerald (ed.) (1980), Your Body Works, Berkeley: Transformations.

—— (1979), ‘Man and the world’, Somatics, 2: 2, pp. 19–29. Reprinted in Hanna, T. (ed.), Explorers of Humankind, San Francisco: Harper & Row.

Ginot, I. (2010), ‘From Shusterman’s somaesthetics to a radical epistemology of somatics’, Dance Research Journal, 42: 1, pp. 12–29.

Hanna, T. (1995), ‘What is somatics?’, in D. H. Johnson (ed.), Bone, Breath & Gesture, Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, pp. 341–52.

James, W. (1880), ‘Le sentiment de l’effort’/ ‘The feeling of effort’, Critique Philosophique,. 9: 34, pp. 123–128.

Nancy, J. L. (2006), Corpus, Paris: Métaillé.Ravaisson, F. ([1838] 2007), De l’Habitude/On Habits, Paris: Allia.

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Ribot, T. (1888), Le mécanisme de l’attention/ The mechanism of attention, Paris: Alcan.

—— (2007), Psychologie de l’attention/ Psychology of attention, Paris: L’Harmattan.

Spencer, H. ([1875] 2007), Principes de psychologie/ Principles of psychology, Paris: L’Harmattan.

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suggested citation

Bardet, M. and Noceti, F. (2012), ‘With Descartes, against dualism’, Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices 4: 2, pp. 195–209, doi: 10.1386/jdsp.4.2.195_1

contriButor details

Marie Bardet, Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Paris 8 and University of Buenos Aires, has a postdoctoral grant from CONICET/UBA in Argentina. She is a member of the Soma&Po – Somatics, Esthetics and Politics research group directed by Isabelle Ginot in the Dance Department at University of Paris 8. Her investigation links theory and practice of movements in seminars, creations and writings. In 2011, she published Penser et Mouvoir. Une rencontre entre danse et philosophie (Paris: L’Harmattan).

Contact: Cochabamba 558 dto 20, C.A.B.A.(1150), Buenos Aires, Argentina.E-mail: [email protected]

Florencio Noceti studied philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina), where he is now Professor of Philosophy. He teaches psycholo-gists and psychiatrists in the Faculty of Medicine. He also works with visual and conceptual artists.

Contact: Aguirre 1153, No. 2A, C.A.B.A (1414), Buenos Aires, Argentina.E-mail: [email protected]

Marie Bardet and Florencio Noceti has asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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