Abstract
Katan offers a necessary summary concerning the integration between the embodiment of knowledge and the capacity to reform it. The chapter analyzes body-mind correlation as an inner integration between abstract knowledge and concrete understanding. Following pragmatism, the chapter parallels reformations of knowledge in dance and philosophy. Focusing on Gaga, Katan propounds the somatic research of bodily feelings as reformation of physical knowledge.
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Notes
- 1.
Francisco Varela Francisco, Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1991, pp. 28–29: “In the beginning the relation between mental intention and bodily act is quite undeveloped—mentally one knows what to do, but one is physically unable to do it. As one practices the connection between intention and act becomes closer, until eventually the feeling of difference between them is almost entirely gone. One achieves a certain condition that phenomenologically feels neither purely mental nor purely physical; it is, rather, a specific kind of body-mind unity.
- 2.
Ibid, p. 29: “In particular, the practices involved in the development of mindfulness/awareness are virtually never described as the training of meditative virtuosity, […] but rather as the letting go of habits of mindlessness, as an unlearning rather than learning. This unlearning may take training and effort, but it is a different sense than effort from the acquiring something new. It is precisely when the meditator approaches the development of mindfulness with the greatest ambitions—the ambition to acquire a new skill through determination and effort—that his mind fixates and races, and mindfulness/awareness is most elusive. This is why the tradition of mindfulness/awareness meditation talks about effortless efforts and why it uses the analogy for meditation of tuning, rather than playing (an instrument) […] When the mindfulness meditator finally begins to let go rather than to struggle to achieve some particular state of activity, then body and mind are found to be naturally coordinated and embodied.”
- 3.
Alva Noë, Action in Perception, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.
- 4.
Barbara Gail Montero, Effortless Bodily Movement, In: Philosophical Topics 39 (1), pp. 67–79, 2011.
- 5.
Heinrich von Kleist, On the Marionette Theatre (1810), Thomas G. Neumiller (trans.), in: The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 16, No. 3, The ‘‘Puppet’’ Issue. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, Sept. 1972, pp. 22–6: “Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness.”
- 6.
One of the existing platforms of dance educators for reflecting on and discussing their somatic approaches is the website IDocDE (I document dance education): http://www.idocde.net.
- 7.
Friedes Galili (2015).
- 8.
Evan Thompson, Diego Cosmelli, Brain in a Vat or Body in a World? Brainbound versus Enactive Views of Experience, In: Philosophical Topics 39 No. 1, spring 2011, pp. 163–80.
- 9.
Dewey (1934, 1980).
- 10.
Ibid, p. 15.
- 11.
Einav Rosenblit sees in general the practical similarities between contemporary dance and Zen-Buddhism. See: Einav Rosenblit, Too Human Body, Zen-Buddhism in the Art of Contemporary Dance, Tel-Aviv: Resling, 2014.
- 12.
Aristotle, Physics. David Bostock (ed.), Robin Waterfield (Trans.), book III, chapter 1: The Definition of Change, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 56.
- 13.
Aristotle, TS (1981), p. 97.
- 14.
The physicality of understanding is present, inter alia, in the phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and in the pragmatism of William James and Dewey. For the connection between philosophy and art and the correspondences between pragmatism and social theory, see also: Tullio Viola, Peirce and Iconology: Habitus, Embodiment, and the Analogy between Philosophy and Architecture. In: European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, IV, I 2012, pp. 6–31.
- 15.
Aristotle, The Metaphysics, in: Hugh Tredennick (trans.) Aristotle in 23 Volumes, vols.17, 18, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, (1933), 1989. p. 5.
- 16.
Maxine Sheets Johnstone, 2009.
- 17.
See: George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2003.
- 18.
See: Gadamer, The Ontology of the Work of Art and its Hermeneutic Significance, In: (1975; 2004), 102–57.
- 19.
Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy. John Cottingham (trans.), First Meditation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 12–15.
- 20.
See: Matthew Ratcliffe, Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
- 21.
See: Michael Polanyi, The Logic of Tacit Inference, In: Knowing and Being, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1969, p. 140.
- 22.
C.S. Peirce, Sundry Logical Conceptions (1903) In: Peirce (1998), pp. 226–41.
- 23.
Ibid, p. 239.
- 24.
Ibid, pp. 235–39.
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Katan, E. (2016). Embodied Reflections. In: Embodied Philosophy in Dance. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60186-5_4
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