I was at an art event last night with some friends and we wandered into discussion of sex and dating and the human relationship to our animal selves. I’m particularly interested in this conceptual divide between our human and animal selves. I chimed in with a simple central premise from my book, which is:

Separation of the empowered from the object sanctions subjugation

In history, subjugation of women, Africans, and nature have all been/are all sanctioned by “our” understanding that “we” are not “them”. This is not my insight. I stole it from the Ecofeminists (including at least Carolyn Merchant) and am applying it to body theory. In my book I explore how our human concept separate from nature developed within western culture, responsive to religious and scientific influence. There are relationships between our self-conception, self-expectations, cultural constructions and behavior.

My book is not a work of philosophy. It’s an academic treatise relating the human relationship to the body to the human relationship to the natural world. To write the book I had to marshal research into evidence. There are several areas of research that could have been used (and can be used) toward the same argument, and one is art history.

Images from Western art history display cultural constructions of deviance, and beauty, inside artists relationships to the form. What is hidden? What is displayed? What is partially covered? What is central, and what is on the edge? Within these constructions, visible in our artwork over centuries, are displayed the evolving human relationship to the human body. This video for example, is a visual compendium of cultural interest in the naked human body. The special interest in the naked body relates to the very human relationship to the body, and conceptions of beauty and deviance that we project onto that conceptual field. In an abstract, natural, or scientific sense, the human body has no particular interest for our experience of it (as in the ape’s experience of its body.) Our personal and cultural constructions are part of how we’ve constructed our humanity, and are captured in their evolutions in art history.

By understanding the human conception, and the ways we exist within our own constructions, we can free a whole relationship to the non-human world. With this greater self-awareness we may be able to find the human not separate from the animal, but whole-ly inclusive of the animal. [For the whole story, read the book.]

The last few days Ive been working on a series of blog posts for OvationTv.Com. Theyve got me framing some really interesting video clips related to Bill Iveys new book, Arts, Inc. The book raises some excellent questions about how we understand art.

At the same time, Ive been celebrating publication of my book. (For some excerpts find the Somatic Ecology page on Facebook.) I got a copy in the mail from the publisher today, and found a footnote in my presentation of the Galileo material that I always really liked. The quotation in the footnote is from Galileos father, who was a professional musician. For me his thoughts highlight that Science and Art share an ethos of clarity.

The sentence in the book is, “Galileo, who would spend his entire lifetime fighting for objectivity, was born to a family which supported questioning and intellectual rigor over faith in tradition.” The footnote is:

“Galileos father in particular clearly influenced his intellectual bent. Consider the following from his fathers Dialogue of Ancient and Modern Music which was published at the time that Galileo was in University. It appears to me that they, who in proof of any assertion rely simply on the weight of authority, without adducing any argument in support of it, act very absurdly. I on the contrary, wish to be allowed freely to question and freely to answer you without any sort of adulation as well becomes those who are in search of truth. [in Fermi, Laura and Bernardini, Gilberto Galileo and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1961) 8]“

You sorta gotta understand the stranglehold that Artistotelian philosophy had on the science of the period to really appreciate the quote, but trust that his attitude was not common.

More another time, perhaps, on connections between art and science.

Christian writings make a tie to the body as impediment to a higher spiritual calling. The Apostle Pauls famous Corinthian Letter responds to the community in Corinth, which was agitating to create a Utopic society in preparation for the coming of Christ. As Peter Brown establishes in his brilliant text The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, the Corinthians proposed a radical ideal.

[The Corinthians] would undo the elementary building blocks of conventional society. They would renounce marriage. Some would separate from pagan spouses; others would commit themselves to perpetual abstinence from sexual relations. The growing children for whose marriages they were responsible would remain virgins. As consequential as the Essenes, they would also free their slaves. Somewhat like the little groups described by Philo outside Alexandria, men and women together would await the coming of Jesus holy in body and spirit.

At a time when Christianity was just growing, the Corinthians radical notions threatened the inclusion of more mainstream elements, and so Paul wrote to put down this rebellion. That a critical concept within the religious fringe was abstinence is telling. That Paul himself was celibate points directly to early Christianitys troubled relationship to the body. In ministering the Corinthians toward sex, his words expose a very negative conception of the act. In Corinthians 7:36-38 Paul wrote:

If any one thinks that he is not behaving properly toward his betrothed [in some versions virgin], if his passions are strong, and it has to be, let him do as he wishes; let them marry – it is no sin. But whoever is firmly established in his heart, being under no necessity but having his desire under control, and has determined this in his heart, to keep her as his betrothed, he will do well. So that he who marries his betrothed does well; and he who refrains from marriage will do better.

Paul declares that marriage is a negative, undertaken only to ward off the sin of sex before marriage. Second, marriage, and sex, are negatives that are better to be refrained from altogether. Paul states this even more clearly in an earlier passage, Chapter 7 verses 32-34.

I want you to be free from anxieties. The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; but the married man is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please his wife, and his interest are divided. And the unmarried woman or girl is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to be holy in body and spirit; but the married woman is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please her husband.

Marriage calls into question the ability to focus on the Lord. Married people lack the quality of what Brown analyzes as “the undivided heart”, and are therefore lesser Christians than those who are married solely to Gd.

[excerpt from Somatic Ecology, copyright R. Bettmann 2009]

The purpose for me in researching this was to document exactly how negative our culture is in relating to the body. That negativity, with ancient roots, has some modern expressions.

My upcoming book looks at how conceiving of the human as separate from the natural world influences our relationship to the environment, and the current ecological crisis. As many, I tie the human/nature divide to the development of the mind/body divide.

Chapter Three of the book looks at religious roots to the modern conception. Here are a few thoughts from the first pages of that chapter, in which I look toward the influence of Christianity, considering its roots in Greek culture.

This chapter will focus on Judaism and Christianity and how the body is regarded within those traditions. While both religions carry complex relationships to the body, this chapter will focus on sex as justifying representative and compelling conclusions regarding the body. The writings of the Jewish Kabbalah  will be considered, alongside Christian Gnostic  texts and the writings of the Apostle Paul.

These two religions have carried dominant influence in Western civilization; our modern attitudes toward the body have been shaped by their influence. It would be appropriate to offer the possibility that Christian attitudes were more influential moving into the age of science (as will be examined in the next chapter.)

Understanding how prior centuries regarded the body establishes the roots out of which grew the tree of modern science. As will be seen through this analysis of the Jewish and Christian relationship to sex, humanities relationship to the body has been troubled through-out Western history. It is this understanding which allows for accurate interpretation of the aspirational statement made in Job 19:26,  “Yet in my flesh shall I see God.” The body has been conceptualized at a distance from a moral human presence on this earth.

Many facets of Christianity grew directly from Judaism – most simply the New Testament from the Old Testament. But regarding the relationship to the body, it appears that societal influences had a stronger impact than religious precedent. The Christian mindset appears to grow from Greek conceptions of the body. The relationship between Greek and Christian understandings is exhibited broadly, including in the following from Clement of Alexandria: “the human ideal of continence, I mean that which is set forth by the Greek philosophers, teaches one to resist passion, so as not to be subservient to it, and to train the instincts to pursue rational goals. [But as Christians] our ideal is not to experience desire at all.”  While many are familiar with the celebrated sensuality of Greek culture, there was simultaneously an isolation of control over the body from within the human conception. As Gnostic writings make clear, early Christians take the isolation of the spirit, exhibited in the Greek ethos, to extremes. According to Greek scholar Jean-Pierre Vernant:

“The body is the agent and instrument of actions, powers and forces which can only deploy themselves at the price of a loss of energy, a failure, a powerlessness caused by congenital weakness.But it is always Death, in person or by delegation who sits within the intimacy of the human body like a witness to its fragility. Tied to all the nocturnal powers of confusion, to a return to the indistinct and unformed, Death, associated with the tribe of his kin – Sleep, Fatigue, Hunger, Old Age – denounces the failure, the incompleteness of a body of which neither its visible aspects nor its inner forces of desire feeling thoughts and plans are ever perfectly pure Thus for the Greeks of the archaic period, mans misfortune is not that a divine and immortal soul finds itself imprisoned in the envelope of a material and perishable body, but that his body is not fully one. It does not possess, completely and definitively, that set of powers, qualities and active virtues which bring to an individual beings existence a constant, radiant, enduring life in a pure, totally alive state, a life that is imperishable because it is free from any seed of corruption and divorced from what could, from within or without, darken, wither and annihilate it. ”

Excerpt Copyright Robert Bettmann, 2008

Greek culture related the human to the divine, through their Gods. The bodies weakness and lack of ability is what separated the human from the divine. In the revelation and development of Christianity, there are some strong similarities. In the way that the Greeks assessed their bodies as a weak link in being ‘god-like’, so too Christian Gnostics constructed the human body as separating the human from the divine.

While one might say that religion doesn’t have much to do with science, our modern philosophy and science grew from these early, possibly less rational, understandings. The subsequent/simultaneous dividing of the human from the ‘natural’ inevitably followed. A prior chapter documents environmental theories that consider the impact of that division. Subsequent chapters look at somatic training methodologies that validate embodied knowledge.

In the original post, I began by quoting Louis Armstrong as saying: "What you don't know ain't gonna come out the other end of your horn." That's Louis on the side here. That wisdom, however, was in fact played by Charlie Parker.  I'm pretty certain I knew that, somewhere in me.

The night I wrote the post I was working on my own book, and was feeling kinship lovey with Terry Teachout, whose Louis Armstrong biography will be out shortly. His blog, which is regularly good fun, as I'm sure the book will be, just had a great post about his process of tracking down the authenticity of things that Armstrong said. You can see that here. And now back to the previously scheduled broadcast...]

I’ve been working on my book the last few weeks. I’ve written in prior posts about the upcoming publication of my Masters thesis. I am working with a large academic publishing house, and am not provided with a text editor. I am responsible for delivering a finished file, which they will put together and print.

I was working last night on Chapter 3, which deals with the science and philosophy that influence our perception of the body. I’ve always enjoyed studying history. The lives of the people who had these ideas, did these things. I find it interesting. I was looking at the section on the English philosopher Locke last night. Here’s the intro:

John Locke (1632-1704) was born at Wrington in England, and educated at Oxford where he received his B.A. and M.A. Subsequently he became a lecturer in Greek and later Reader in Rhetoric and Censor of Moral Philosophy, still at Oxford. In 1666 he met Lord Ashley, later First Earl of Shaftesbury, a leading figure at the court of Charles II. A year later he joined the Earls household, and for the next fourteen years shared in the fortunes and misfortunes of Ashley, serving in a number of supportive bureaucratic positions as the Earl rose to become Chancellor.

Locke was interested in philosophy, and it was the writings of Descartes in particular which first interested him. As Locke put it: he wanted to understand very precisely and systematically what knowledge “was capable of.” Nevertheless Locke was too involved with the vagaries of British politics to write early in his life. In 1683 he was even forced to slip away into exile in Holland following the Rye House Plot to kidnap the King. Locke was able to return to Britain in 1689 following the crowning of William of Orange, and it was at this time that the majority of his works were finally printed.

The Essay Concerning Human Understanding, (1690) his magnum opus on epistemology, was inspired by a conversation with a group of friends in 1671. They were engaged in philosophical discourse, when it became clear that they could make no further progress until they had examined the minds capacities and had seen “what objects our understandings were or were not fitted to deal with.”

Lockes basic notion counters Descartes, in that he believes that experience is the basis for all knowledge. We receive “ideas” from sense experience, and Knowledge, with a capital “K”, is the perception of the agreement or disagreement of two ideas. There are four means of establishing knowledge: Identity, Relation, Co-existence or Necessary Connection and Real Existence. All knowledge is also either actual (directly in front of us) or habitual (having seen proof and remembering it.)

What I was struck by just now is Locke’s assertion that Knowledge is the perception of agreement or disagreement between two ideas. I think there’s an interesting application there to choreography. I’m really looking forward to getting into the studio in April to start choreographing again. Just cause I know whatever I know….. doesn’t mean it WILL come out the end of my horn. But it’s been a few years, and I’m pretty psyched to see what we come up with.