The Body: A Very Short Introduction by Chris Shilling

Author:Chris Shilling
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780198739036
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2015-11-24T05:00:00+00:00

The ‘known’ and the ‘unknown’

Education is as much to do with bodily doing as it is with cognitive thought, and while the two phenomena are perhaps ultimately inseparable, the former has tended until recently to be neglected in most analyses of teaching and learning. This neglect is important not only because it marginalizes issues related to how we learn to engage with, experience, and alter the environment in which we live, but also as a result of how the development of physical abilities, habits, and techniques informs our reflections on and beliefs about the world.

In contrast to the traditional Western view that our minds possess independence from the activities and relationships in which we are enmeshed—defining us as human because of their capacity to facilitate thought—practical experience and action is not necessarily opposite to, or undermining of, intellectual insight and reflection. Irrespective of whether this involves judging or tracking animals, scrutinizing medical images, communing with God, or any number of other examples, the bodily techniques through which we experience and act on the world can facilitate a deeply engaged type of thinking informed by the nature of the environment in which the individual intervenes.

Developing this point, the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey explains the links between bodily experience and action, on the one hand, and conscious mental thought, on the other, through the distinction between, and connections that link together, anoetic and noetic knowledge. Anoetic knowledge exists independently of conscious thought: it inheres within our embodied selves outside of conscious attention as an awareness, intuition, or knowledge of how to do something yet to be formulated reflexively. Noetic knowledge, in contrast, is manifest consciously in terms of reason, reflexivity, and intellect. While it is often difficult and sometimes impossible to translate sensory-perceptive experiences into noetic knowledge, they form a layer of being on which thought and reflection are formulated.

Dewey’s discussion is important as it suggests that the education of bodies operates at the level of pre-conscious anoetic knowledge as well as conscious noetic thought. Looked at from this perspective, the examples of bodily education examined in this chapter involve the shaping of particular kinds of preconscious awareness, assumptions, and orientations. The differences that exist between the sportsperson who ‘feels at home’ when engaged in rigorous physical training, the religious mystic for whom stillness is preferable, and the musician who feels most alive when playing cannot be explained solely on the basis of intellectual knowledge or values. Instead, body pedagogics provides an anoetic and pre-conscious basis on which understanding develops.

This approach to educating bodies has important consequences not only for understanding how cultural differences emerge between people, but also for appreciating some of the difficulties that can confront communication and dialogue between groups of people seeking to overcome conflict. If we accept that different forms of body pedagogics create gaps between people—in terms of both their practical and intellectual sense of what is natural, feasible, and desirable—then the idea that talking on its own might prove a means of understanding will often be of limited value.

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