COTENTION AND BODILY AWARENESS 'FROM WITHIN'
Concepts of
Embodiment of Trigant Burrow and
Elizabeth Behnke
Lloyd Gilden
. . .
till all at once, as it were, out of the intensity of the consciousness of
individuality, the individuality itself seemed to fade away into boundless
being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the
surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where death was almost a laughable
impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction
but the only true life. . . . I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said that the state is beyond
words?
Alfred
Lord Tennyson [1]
The
human species is on the threshold of a new way of being in the world, a
way which is evolving from our perception of being opposite to
and alienated from our physical and social environments to recognizing, as Woollcott describes it[2],
the "interrelatedness" of all aspects of the universe, experiencing
ourselves as integral components of the world, and feeling a sense of
solidarity with each other. While our
propensity for conflict and destruction is abundantly apparent in the wars and
oppression seen around the world, and in our pollution and destruction of our
environment, there are also many signs of a trend toward an alternative mode of
adaptation.
Feuerstein[3]
notes that Jean Gebser postulated this evolutionary step has been underway
since the beginning of the 20th century, manifesting itself, among
other ways, in philosophy, literature, painting, physics, biology, psychology
and sociology. Different aspects of our
relationship to the world are the focus of attention in these different areas
of study: in philosophy, the forms or structures of consciousness, the
relationship of mind to body and self to objects; in literature and poetry, the
use or style of language; in painting, transcending the use of perspective; in
physics, the structure of matter, space and time; in biology, the integrated
structure and functioning of organisms, e.g., homeostasis; in psychology, the
emergent awareness of unconscious processes, intuition, Gestalt and humanistic principles; and in sociology, the influence
of culture on mental and social development.
This
article is an attempt to elucidate aspects of humanity’s emerging consciousness
by linking the bio-psycho-social approach of Trigant Burrow with the
phenomenological philosophical approaches of Jean Gebser and Merleau-Ponty, as
set forth by Elizabeth Behnke in her article, World without Opposite/ Flesh of the World.
COTENTION: PERCEIVING
OUR INTERRELATEDNESS
Humans
begin life, as other species do, as integral elements in the “seamless web”[4] of
nature. Trigant Burrow used the term preconscious
to point to an organic authority
experienced by man in the precognitive, prejudicial phase of
the mental life that is concomitant with the late prenatal and early natal
development of the physiological organism. This preconscious period
represents... a mode of completion and fulfillment, of uninterrupted confluence
and totality.[5]
He
viewed the infant as being in tensional rapport–coterminous–with his mother,
and in that state experiencing a “strifeless phase of awareness.”
Preconscious
processes, therefore, constitute
the biological substrate of the cohesive feelings and motivations
which bind man to his fellows and to his physical world. This unitary phase is
primary to consciousness and exerts a powerful influence on subsequent aspects
of man’s life.[6]
In
Preconscious Foundations of Human Experience[7]
Burrow gives many examples of the manifestations of preconscious processes in
human activities, from music, poetry, and the arts to mystical experiences and
the highly skilled performances of surgeons and athletes.
During
the course of our evolution humans have, however, developed a second form of
consciousness which has made it possible for us to make an adaptation to our
environment that, paradoxically, both promotes our well-being and threatens our
very survival as a species. This mode
of consciousness, referred to as mental-rational
consciousness by Gebser[8]
and higher order consciousness by
Edelman[9],
arose during human evolution with the elaboration of the cerebral cortex and
subsequently with the faculty of language.
In contrast to even our closest primate relatives, we are endowed with
the ability to create words or symbols that stand for or represent the objects
and events that occur in the world around us and within us. As Ernst Cassirer put it,
Yet in the human world we find a new characteristic which
appears to be the distinctive mark of human life. The functional circle of man is not only quantitatively enlarged;
it has also undergone a qualitative change.
Man has, as it were, discovered a new method of adapting himself to his
environment. Between the receptor
system and the effector system, which are to be found in all animal species, we
find in man a third link which we may describe as the symbolic system. As
compared with the other animals man lives not merely in a broader reality; he
lives, so to speak, in a new dimension
of reality.
. . . No longer in a merely physical universe, man lives in
a symbolic universe. Language, myth,
art, and religion are parts of this universe.
They are the varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled
web of human experience. . . .No longer can man confront reality immediately;
he cannot see it, as it were, face to face.
Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic
activity advances. Instead of dealing
with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with
himself. He has so enveloped himself in
linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that
he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of this artificial
medium.[10]
Humanity,
therefore finds itself in a profound dilemma. We now possess a powerful tool,
our ability to use language, which constitutes a potent constructive and
destructive force in our dealings with our physical and social worlds. On the one hand, we have developed the
intellectual wherewithal to build skyscrapers and tunnels, airplanes and
automobiles, hydroelectric and atomic energy plants, metropolises and the
United Nations. On the other hand, we
have developed the tendency to fragment ourselves into alienated egos and
prejudiced opposing groups, created weapons of mass destruction, dictatorships,
million-man armies and terrorist organizations.
Burrow
noted that we now suffer from "an inadvertent but nevertheless
biologically unwarranted overemphasis on both the word and the head that
produces the word."[11] Wilber concurs, saying, language by its very
nature creates a "split in the universe between the knower and the known,
the thinker and thought, the subject and the object. . ."[12]
Hence, we have entered a mode of consciousness or attention that divides us
from our environment and from ourselves.
Burrow
named the mode of attention that has developed with the advent of language
"ditention" to emphasize the division or split between the observer
and what he observes; and he coined the term "cotention" to refer our
innate preconscious mode of experiencing that entails an awareness of our
unitary, organismic processes. These
processes provide "a more unitary, cohesive type of experience. . . the
sense of inner completeness and the feeling-continuity with all things. .
,"[13] "the cohesive feelings and motivations
which bind man to his fellows and to his physical world."[14]
Throughout
his career Burrow pursued the goal of transcending the ditentive mode of
relating, as it was manifested in the group setting among his colleagues and
students, and in phenomenological research involving kinaesthetic practices he
referred as the cotentive technique.
These endeavors are described in other articles on this web site,
including Prescription for Peace and Trigant Burrow and the Laboratory of the I by
Alfreda Galt.
WORLD WITHOUT
OPPOSITE/FLESH OF THE WORLD[15]
Burrow
began developing his revolutionary theories and explorations in human consciousness
in the United States in the 1920's within the framework of psychoanalysis and
biology, publishing The Social Basis of
Consciousness in 1927[16] Concomitantly, very likely it was the Zeitgeist, developments were taking place
in Europe in the field of philosophy where Edmund Husserl was discovering
"a new terrain of consciousness and . . . an extraordinary method."[17]
Elizabeth
Behnke has written extensively about the theories of many, including Husserl,
Gebser and Merleau-Ponty. In World without Opposite/ Flesh of the World
she sets out to elucidate "the corporeal foundation sustaining the natural
attitude itself. . ."[18]
By "corporeal foundation" she means: the foundation for experience
provided by the "lived body"–
a general manner of rendering oneself present to something
through the body; its typicality is that of a pervasive and operative style of corporeal constitution. . . “The
body," says Merleau-Ponty, "is our general medium for having a
world.”[19]
The existence of a bodily or corporeal foundation of consciousness is a central concept in phenomenology and is germane to consideration of the concepts referred to by Gebser as "world without opposite" and by Merleau-Ponty as "flesh of the world."
In
World without Opposite/Flesh of the World15
Behnke attempts to elucidate the implications of the role of bodily experience
by contrasting two different perceptual styles or experiential modes, which she
labels separative seeing and bodily awareness from within. Her approach to these alternative styles of
perception is to give experiential examples (which she urges the reader to
actively try out himself/herself) in order to provide the basis for
phenomenological explanations of each style.
Separative
seeing constitutes our habitual mode of awareness of our subjective and
objective environments and "permeates the whole of our everyday
life."[20] This perceptual is our characteristic manner
of rendering ourselves present to the
world and the "power that seeing
exercises over the seen."[21] Behnke identifies five aspects of separative
seeing: distance, perspectivity, alienation, staticity, and typicality. In her words:
The
typical perceptual style emerging in this description is one in which a subject faces an object, over there [at a
distance] and other [alienated], in such a way that the subject is
limited to a perspective. Both subject and object are typically static, and the style as a whole is a
general manner of rendering oneself present to something through the body; its
typicality is that of a pervasive and
operative style of corporeal constitution.[22]
Consider, for example, our
typical manner of perceiving another person as we walk down the street, e.g., a
man with a gray beard sitting on a stoop.
We assume the role of subject or viewer facing the individual. He is experienced as other than oneself, and
statically representative of a certain class of beings, a "man,"
occupying a fixed position in space.
Moreover, we typically classify various features about him: his age
("middle aged"/"elderly"), his manner of dress
("neat"/"disheveled"), his ethnicity
("white"/"black"), etc.
The perceptual style of
separative seeing seems to correlate quite closely with Burrow's ditentive mode
of attention, which constitutes the basis for our social alienation, as well
as, our alienation from inanimate objects.
Although Behnke does not address the question of the role of language in
perception, Burrow argued that the use of language dominates human perception,
and that our propensity for symbolically classifying reduces people to members
of one class or another, e.g., a sex ("male"/"female), a race
("white"/"black”), a religion
("Catholic"/"Protestant"/ "Jew"/ ”Muslum”), etc. Consequently, we reduce people, to a large
degree, to objects, interfering with our perceiving them as other living,
breathing persons.
Moreover, the
classifications provide the material for our mode of relating to our physical
and social worlds. For example, compare
your affective reactions to your perception of the person sitting on the stoop,
if you were to perceive him as a "disheveled," "elderly,"
"white," "Catholic," "man" vs a "neatly
dressed," "middle aged," "black," "Muslim," "man."
In both instances, a
separative or ditentive attitude would have been adopted, and the resulting
perceptions, as well as, behavioral dispositions toward the individual, would
be alienating; the stage would be set for the manner of dissociative relating
that typifies most human social relationships.
Behnke offers the perceptual
style of bodily awareness 'from within'
as a radical contrast to separative seeing.
Whereas we tend to be oblivious to the experience of our body while
engaged in separative seeing, bodily awareness 'from within' arises from
perception of the "internal flux"[23]
or "kinaesthetic field"[24]
that is spread throughout our body.
The term is a reference . . . to the body sense that is a
“feeling-through” my lived body
(including its appropriated “extensions”). . . a concretely reflexive living-through
the moving corporeal “conditions” by which we are “rendered present to
something.”[25]
She summarizes a
phenomenological description of perceiving her body while lying down as
follows:
Whereas
separative seeing yields static objects “over there,” optimally given as
clearly bounded figures against ground, bodily awareness ‘from within’ yields a
dynamic “hereness” that displays “spread” without clear “edges.” And while
separative seeing transfixes the ego as well as its objects, bodily awareness
‘from within’ moves in a fluid self-awareness that does not require
perspectival orientation. It is
characterized by “mineness” rather than alienation and by “living-in” rather
than contemplating as an object.[26]
In short, bodily awareness
'from within' is characterized by dynamism, not staticity; an aperspectival,
not perspectival, orientation; a sense of inclusiveness or spread, not
distance; and a sense of "mineness," not alienation. Moreover, the perceptual
style of bodily awareness 'from within' can occur as we employ vision, hearing, touch, taste and olfaction. In other words, we can perceive the whole
spectrum of sensory events 'from within,' and thereby enrich our perceptions by
embodying them.
How would we perceive the
man on the stoop 'from within'?
First, we would feel ourselves as dynamic, and thereby
recognize and empathize with his
dynamic Beingness. Secondly, we would
not view him as if we were gazing from a fixed position or perspective from
behind our eyes at an object occupying a particular position in space, but,
rather, from multiple perspectives (at different moments in time); and
experienced as included within a shared space.
Hence, we would be open to him as a fellow human with whom we can feel a
sense of acceptance and solidarity.
To summarize, an alternative
exists to humanity's alienated, conflictful way of being-in-the-world. We no longer have to experience ourselves as
detached from and in opposition to others.
We can learn to attend to the dynamic processes inherent in our Being
and thereby become aware that we exist in an intimate, interconnected
relationship with our fellow humans and the world as a whole.
To realize this potentiality
we can engage in various somatic practices, such as developing bodily awareness
'from within' and Burrow's cotentive technique. These practices will facilitate transcending our tendency to pass
over in silence the experience of our body, the very core of our Being, and
thereby set the stage for containment and integration
of our out-of-control symbolic faculty within our whole Being. Consciousness of our corporeal or
biological substrate–bodily awareness 'from within'– and our symbolic consciousness will interpenetrate[27] to
become cotention. With this shift in
the center of gravity of our consciousness, a radical and adaptive
reorientation to the physical world and to our fellow human beings will take
place, which will be experienced as "lucid awareness"[28] or, as Tennyson described it,
". . . the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest . . . the
only true life . . . "
1. Quoted by Maurice Nicoll in Living
Time and the Integration of Life ( London: Vincent Stuart, 1952), p. 64.
2. Woollcott, P. Jr. See Varieties of Conscious Experience on
this web site.
3. Feurerstein, G. Structures of Consciousness (Lower Lake,
CA: Integral Publishing, 1987) p. 130
4. Burnshaw, S. The Seamless Web (New York: Braziller,
1970)
5. Burrow, T. Preconscious
Foundations of Human Experience
(New York: Basic Books, 1964) p. 104
6. Ibid., p. xvii
7. Burrow, T. Preconscious Foundations of Human Experience
(New York: Basic Books, 1964)
8. Feurerstein, G. Structures of Consciousness (Lower Lake,
CA: Integral Publishing, 1987) p. 41
9. Edelman, G. Consciousness: The
Remembered Present.
In P. C. Marijuan, Ed. Cajal and
Consciousness (New York: N.Y. Academy of Sciences, 2001), p. 113
10. Cassirer, E. An Essay on Man (New York: Bantam, 1970) p. 27
11. Burrow, T. Preconscious Foundations of Human
Experience
(New York: Basic Books, 1964) p. 112
12. Wilber, K. Two Modes of Knowing. In R. Walsh
and F. Vaughan (Eds.), Beyond Ego (Los
Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1980) p. 234
13. Burrow, T. Preconscious Foundations of Human Experience (New York:
Basic Books, 1964) p. 71
14. Ibid. p. xvii
15. Behnke, E. World without
Opposite/ Flesh of the World. Posted in
Varieties of Consciousness on this web site.
16. Burrow, T. The Social Basis of Consciousness. (New
York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927)
17. Natanson, M. A. Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks. (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1973) p. xiv
18. Behnke, E. World without Opposite/Flesh of the World p. 7
19. Ibid., p. 8
20. Ibid., p. 12
21. Ibid., p. 9
22. Ibid., p.11
23. Ibid., p. 15
24. Ibid., p. 16
25. Ibid., p. 23
26. Ibid., p. 17
27. Rosen, S. M. (1997). Wholeness as the body of paradox. Journal of Mind and Behavior, 18, 4, 391-424..
28. Behnke, E.
Personal communication with the author in which Dr. Behnke stresses the
point that "lucid awareness . . . is a matter of autonomy in context of
(rather than abstracted from) connectivity, rather than egoless confluence . .
.”
[1] Quoted by Maurice Nicoll in Living Time and the Integration of Life ( London: Vincent Stuart, 1952),
p. 64.
[2] Woollcott, P. Jr. See Varieties of Conscious Experience on this web site.
[3] Feurerstein, G. Structures of Consciousness (Lower Lake, CA: Integral Publishing, 1987) p. 130
[4] Burnshaw, S. The Seamless Web (New York: Braziller, 1970)
[5] Burrow, T. Preconscious Foundations of Human Experience (New York: Basic Books, 1964) p. 104
[6] Ibid., p. xvii
[7] Burrow, T. Preconscious Foundations of Human Experience (New York: Basic Books, 1964)
[8] Feurerstein, G. Structures of Consciousness (Lower Lake, CA: Integral Publishing, 1987) p. 41
[9] Edelman, G. Consciousness: The Remembered Present. In P. C. Marijuan, Ed. Cajal and Consciousness (New York: N.Y. Academy of Sciences, 2001), p. 113
[10] Cassirer, E. An Essay on Man (New York: Bantam, 1970) p. 27
[11] Burrow, T. Preconscious Foundations of Human Experience (New York: Basic Books, 1964) p. 112
[12] Wilber, K. Two Modes of Knowing. In R. Walsh and F. Vaughan (Eds.), Beyond Ego (Los Angeles:
J.P. Tarcher, 1980) p. 234
[13] Burrow, T. Preconscious Foundations of Human Experience (New York: Basic Books, 1964) p. 71
[14] Ibid. p. xvii
[15] Behnke, E. World without Opposite/ Flesh of the World. Posted in Varieties of Consciousness on this
web site.
[16] Burrow, T. The Social Basis of Consciousness. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927)
[17] Natanson, M. A. Edmund
Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks. (Evanston: Northwestern
University
Press, 1973) p. xiv
[18] Behnke, E. World without Opposite/Flesh of the World p. 7
[19] Ibid., p. 8
[20] Ibid., p. 12
[21] Ibid., p. 9
[22] Ibid., p.11
[23] Ibid., p. 15
[24] Ibid., p. 16
[25] Ibid., p. 23
[26] Ibid., p. 17
[27] Rosen, S. M. (1997). Wholeness as the body of paradox. Journal of Mind and Behavior, 18, 4, 391-424.
[28] Behnke, E. Personal communication with the author in which Dr. Behnke stresses the point that "lucid awareness . . . is a matter of autonomy in context of (rather than abstracted from) connectivity, rather than egoless confluence."