Thinking with the Body - Eugene Gendlin's Breakthrough Embodied Cognition Philosophy

Gendlin is the heir to Heidegger and Lakoff.  His work bridges psychotherapy and philosophy.  I can't believe I haven't read him before.

Excerpts from "Thinking at the Edge":
"THINKING AT THE EDGE" (in German: "WO NOCH WORTE FEHLEN") is a systematic way to articulate in new terms something which needs to be said but is at first only an inchoate "bodily sense." It is the difficult task of getting students to attend to what they implicitly knew but could not say and never considered trying to say.

"Oh," one student exclaimed when he grasped what I was looking for, "you mean something about which we have to do hemming and hawing." Yes, that was just what I meant. Another asked: "Do you mean that crawly thing?"

An internally intricate sense leads to a series of statements with certain recognizable characteristics. Statements that speak-from the felt sense can be recognized by the fact that they have an effect on the felt sense. It moves, opens, and develops.

This is in contrast to what we normally call "thinking", which seems to require unitized things which are assumed to be either cleanly identical or cleanly separate, which can be next to each other but cannot interpenetrate, let alone have some more complex pattern. The unit model is regularly the reason why some new insights cannot be said. But to reject the unit model in general is not possible, because it inheres in our language, our machines and in all our detailed concepts. The capacity for breaking out of the unit model cannot be imparted simply by studying Heidegger, McKeon, etc. Critique does not prevent us from falling into the old model.

We must develop a new use of bodily-sourced language with which we can speak directly from the body about many things — especially about the body and language. . Language does not consist just of the words. The situations in which we find ourselves, the body, and the language form a single system together.

We find that when people forgo the usual big vague words and common phrases, then — from their bodily sense — quite fresh colorful new phrases come. There is no way to say "all" of it, no sentence that will be simply equal, no sentence which will simply "represent" what is sensed. One strand emerges from the bodily sense, and then another and another. What needs to be said expands! What we say doesn't represent the bodily sense. Rather it carries the body forward.

People live through a great deal which cannot be said. When the living body becomes able to carry itself forward by symbolizing itself, it acts and speaks from a vast intricacy. . Humans don't happen without culture and language, but with and after language the body's next steps are always freshly here again, and always implicitly more intricate than the common routines. You can instantly check this by becoming aware of your bodily aliveness, freshly there and implicitly much more intricate than the words you are reading.

We need to build new social patterns and new patterns of thought and science. This will be a mutual product no single person can create. On the other hand, if we work jointly too soon, we lose what can only come through the individual in a focusing type of process. Nobody else lives the world from your angle. No other organism can sense exactly "the more" that you sense.


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Excerpts from "Three Assertions about the Body":
A felt sense comes. It isn't just there waiting. We have to let it form and come. That takes at least a few moments, sometimes longer. So we understand that a felt sense is a certain development, a certain bit of further life-process. What does it stem from? How can we think about ordinary events and experience in such a way that we could understand what a felt sense is and how it forms?

A felt sense is distinctly something there, something with a life of its own, that we attend to directly. If we attend to our bodies, in the middle of the body it comes, and then it is in an odd sort of space of its own. It brings its own space. In that space the felt sense is a direct object, that, there.

The kind of experience I mean is sometimes attributed to "the unconscious," although such a body-sense is, of course, conscious. We are aware of sensing it when it is there, yet it is true that much of the knowledge that can emerge from it was unconscious before. There is no such directly felt body-sense in the unconscious. When we invite it to come, we can feel it freshly forming. It is not already there, underneath. At most one could say that it forms itself from "the unconscious."

But calling it "unconscious" does not explain this kind of experience. It is only a mysterious name, just as "hunch," "intuition," and "instinct" are mysterious names for it.

What can we say about this kind of experience just from these two examples?

 The experience is felt rather than spoken or visual. It is not words or images, but a bodily sense.
 It does not fit the common names or categories of feelings. It is a unique sense of this person or this situation.
We must also notice one more characteristic of this kind of experience:
 Although such a body-sense comes as one feeling, we can sense that it contains an intricacy. Let me explain that.

Your body-sense of the person you know contains all your past history with that person and what you hope for with that person. It also contains what that person rouses in you and some of your own unresolved troubles. In there as well is the exact way in which you[Page 24]do and don't like the person, and much more. Let me roll all that together and call it "an intricacy." You might be able to think three or four of those things, but most of them remain implicit. Such a body-sense contains an implicit intricacy.

We don't usually think of physical feelings as containing a whole complex mesh. Physical sensations are supposed to be simple. A pain or a sensation is just what it is. It is opaque. We don't expect a hidden complexity, for example, in the stabbing pain of a twisted ankle or in the sensation of red. A complex situation might have led to the twisted ankle, but we don't expect to find the intricacy of the situation inside the pain. What distinguishes the kind of physical sense I am discussing is that it does contain an implicit intricacy, "all that" about that person.

You can sense that it is implicitly complex, even if you don't find any of it out, even if you don't succeed in opening it and entering. I speak of "opening and entering." This kind of bodily experience is a door. If we open it and if we enter, we can go many steps into it...

Rio Grande SIlvery Minnow

Interactive version: http://www.usbr.gov/tsc/rivers/awards/Nm2/rg/riog/schematic/SCHEMATICalbuquerquediv.html

The River. Like the Nile it rises in distant mountains, then flows down through farm, city, farm, and city, losing water to the desert. I've skipped over headwater steams in the highest alpine meadows in Colorado, and fished tributaries from the high peaks in the Wiemenuche, the San Juan, the Sangre de Christo mountains.

The Grande enters New Mexico as a whitewater river cut deep in a thousand-foot canyon, opens onto the agricultural floodplain of the (NM) Central Valley just north of Albuquerque and loses water continuously as it flows south toward Texas and Mexico.

It goes dry most years these days, fish left out under the oven sky. Agricultural diversions, cities. Dams and reservoirs. Water sinking into deep sand. Low-flow channels carry the remaining trickle south to satisfy more cities, interstate treaties. Fought over by water managers, farmers, and conservationists. (Link to article: How much water used by cottonwoods versus farmers versus cities. )


We went seining for fishes: white suckers, red shiners, catfish, chad and fathead minnows but most of all: Silvery Minnows, endemic to New Mexico and listed as Federally Endangered.

The Silvery Minnow is endangered for a range of reasons. Like many river fish it is negatively impacted by dams turning the river into lakes. The drying of the Rio Grande is probably more extensive now than it was before modern agricultural irrigation and pumping, but the Rio Grande probably always went dry and only remained wet in refugia...


Silvery Minnows: One thread in the tapestry of life. We were looking for silver needles in the full force of river water, the gush and rush, one and a half feet per second. We splashed into the surging river water, waded out to the river’s sand bars. We used bag and beach seines, color-coded buckets, rite-in-the-rain and water-resistant-(but susceptible) electronics, but the fish were nowhere to be found.

Mud flats held the first tiny dicotyledons of new weeds, sprouting. In a few isolated backwaters (I can’t say exactly where) we did find a few, or even many, Silvery Minnows, alive and wide-eyed. We photographed them, weighed and measured them, and checked whether they were tagged fish raised in a hatchery or a wild child, conceived in good ol’ mother nature.


For unknown reasons, the 2013 spawning was a good year for the Minnow and it seemed like it might bounce back then, but not much has been seen of that cohort since. Meanwhile, the lawyers aren't waiting .... (link to Wild Earth Guardians lawsuit)

Presentations about Presentations

SlideShare.net contains a huge number of awesome presentations. If TED.com is the best place to learn what makes a great talk, slideshare.net is the best place to focus on the slides behind the speaker. Its funny, but there are whole schools devoted to the technique of writing, but the ability to craft compelling slides is so often overlooked.

The site is also a great place to store presentations in the cloud.

Upper Rio Grande Watershed: Rio de los Pinos to Conejos River

Flanked by the Conejos River and Rio de los Pinos, this watershed includes Pinorealosa and Osier Mountain, along with many excellent creeks (named and unnamed), alpine meadows, and river bottoms. Controlled burns and selective logging seem to be keeping the woodland open and healthy, while fire or beetles have left enough dead and downed timber to create unnavigateable thickets, quite conducive (necessary and sufficient) for unfragmented, Wilderness landscape.

Thin, filamentous, and/or deeply pinnatifid leaves, everything with prickles, spines, or a dense covering of hair (tomentous) -- but not many poisonous. Hairs serve to insulate as well as defend. ... In the wetlands, poisonous and fleshy plants dominate. Elk and bear, fire and grazing, Rorippa, Mimulus, Penstemon, Geum, myriad rodents scurrying away in all directions, fawns hiding breathless in the grass, hellebores and corn lilies, the 'Umbel of God', ululation, mountain thunderstorms...

The coastal fog of California, gentled by a 1,000 miles travel. I heed the thunder, and elevate the advent of rain above dull annoyance. This morning, I climbed the cliffs above our campsite. When I reached the top I felt like crying. Don't know why. Looking out over the watershed I understand the pattern. All water runs downhill. There is a band of trees from a lower line where it is wet enough to grow to an upper line where it is too cold to grow. There is a line in-between those two, above which precipitation exceeds evaporation. All rivers originate above this line, in their Headwaters.

I was always thinking of new, clever, ways of getting ahead of Nature, ahead of myself, beyond lightspeed and Saturation, entropy, Capacity. Rainbows multiplying from the first: Asgaard, Bridge to Heaven. But why does it curve back to Earth? Everyone sees a different shape and distance, depending on their perspective. The kind of rain mosquitoes can still swim through to sting. Lightening and that particular sound of the thunder rolling off of the peculiar and idiosyncratic topography up-valley.

But what if the world refuses to be ordered by the human mind? We know honeybees can be trained to show preference between human faces, but will they ever understand them? Then how too will we ever understand our world? Words are useless if we rely on them to a fault, if natural variation is continuous and nonlinear, yet we expect it to conform by our contingent, evolutionarily-derived logical architectures and cognitive biases.

On the backbone of the continent, the Genesis of the Southwest; a looking-glass world, mountains in every direction, but the brooding presence of the Great Plains felt in the passes opening between. At times we thought we were in Kansas, or safe away in our beds dreaming, but we were in the San Luis Valley, ripening in the sun.

You have driven up and down the mountain valleys, the flanks that lead up from below or down from above, the highways and streams of rivers and clouds. You have stood, still, in the center of the valley, under Blanca, for days. Transfixed interest, blossoms like dollar bills in the breeze. You have climbed high up where there is more air than land, yet still cannot seem to breathe enough and the mountain says enough and the Thunderstorm says Enough and you flee their mutterings and grumblings

Storms billow on surrounding mountains, then range over the landscape. Powerful rain, thunder and lightening on into the night...sigh... San Juan rainstorms. The next day the storms grow but, despite our hurry to avoid them, only blow for early Evening Entertainment, and on into the night. Next day, storms brush by, delivering a soaking with bits of hail mixed in. These storms build on the San Juans, blow low over the valley --but nothing can slow them until the Sangres, where they slide silently up the crest, lick their salty skins, run a tongue along sharpened teeth, and watch the wounds of mankind's world.

Where have all the willows gone? The heart of the landscape dug out, munched, passed, trampled dirt. The magic and will to live that flowed wild, healthy, worshipful. Destruction AND Growth. Unsimplified. Wet, unique.

All land in the West is "wetland"; fear not. Although nothing fits into categories anyway, each consciousness, attuned to an unique understanding, attempting an unbiased account of who-knows-what for someone else. Under the roof of the world, wet with the aspen, the carex, and the rivers; mountain ridges diverge until they peter out, rivers seek their breathren and converge until they become one with the ocean. Flowing water flows together - it lubricates itself; whereas water soaking into sponge, expands -- it flees the mutual weight of multitude.

Oh now gentle rain, Conejos River hopping along...who understands?