Yesterday I finally made it to McConnells Mill state park, where I enjoyed a spectacular 12.4 mile hike on the most pleasant day of this September. The hike, which follows the Western side of the Slippery Rock Gorge, begins at Hell’s Hollow and terminates at Eckert Bridge (below). I took this picture while having lunch in the creek (safely atop a rock).
At one point during the hike, I was moving at a pretty swift pace. At a small stream crossing I planted my foot on a large rock situated at roughly a 45 degree angle. The rock was damp and I immediately felt unsure of my footing, so I froze. In an instant my body registered its uncertainty and took stock of its position, and as I stared intently at my foot I was made aware of three options. Now, as I stared–and I should say that all of this exhibits the kind of knowledge, or ‘practical competence’, discussed by Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception–my mind was pretty much empty. It was too fixated on my foot to think, but nevertheless my body knew the condition it faced. As I am a relatively experienced hiker, I kept my footing and avoided an immediate spill. Such is the nature of my habit body. The three possibilities my body faced were: 1) attempt to move ahead, apply too much pressure and risk slipping; 2) lean backward and disengage the rock; 3) maintain a balance that would enable my body to remain on the rock and eventually step forward. Sensing that the risk of slippage was too great in #1 and #3, I ‘chose’ #2. It was an act of corporeal wisdom.
In one respect, this picture represents the body as an ‘I can’, a competent and able body that is well-adjusted to its environment and capable of dealing with its demands. But on the other hand, one must also see the body in this situation as compelled by an imperative that is commanded by the environment. Lingis is getting at something like this in The Imperative (pp. 67-8), when he writes:
The imperative in our environment is received, not on our understanding in conflict with our sensuality, but on our postural schema which integrates our sensibility and mobilizes our motor forces. It is received on our sensory-motor bodies as bodies we have to center upon things that orient our movements, bodies we have to anchor on the levels down which our vision, our touch, our listening move, on which we station ourselves and move in the heart of reality. It orders our competence.
Yes, as I stood frozen on the rock I was ‘anchoring’ myself; I had to. In that moment, on the rock, it was the rock that dictated my body’s orientation. This is not to say that I was at the total mercy of the rock, for I did not succumb directly to its slick and unpredictable surface. But I must admit that my body was caught somewhere between and ‘I can’ and an ‘I can’t', which played out as a negotiation between the imperative of the trail and the know-how of my postural schema.
very good, of course the trickier part is to have competence/phronesis in relation to less substantial “objects” which is why the social realm is not just more of the same.
Very nice post. You should do a phenomenology of hiking, it would read well.
Thinking about the “‘I can’” in the face of an “imperative that is commanded by the environment”: – the strange thing about Merleau-Ponty on sensibility, is that we are never truly coexistent with our bodily self in the act of perception, given that the body’s perception of the world is anonymous to the personal self. As he has it: “if I wanted to render precisely the perceptual experience, I ought to say that one perceives in me, and not that I perceive.”Lingis is right in this respect: “It orders our competence.” The “it” of one’s postural schema never really belongs to oneself.
Here’s my question, then: whose agency is at stake in your notion of “corporeal wisdom”? Put another, what level of perpetual life enabled you to choose option 2?
Dylan, thanks for the comment. I am quite sympathetic to the line of questioning you’re pursuing, this notion of anonymity. Can I say that the ‘wise’ one here is the anonymous body? Perhaps I implied too much agency by employing the language of ‘choice’ here. In a very real sense, my body did not choose option 2, but complied with that option. The situation played itself out in the manner I described, which left very little room (if any) for reflection, choice, and other such personal notions.
roughly speaking seems right to say that your body did not “choose” to act in that way but an-other body would have likely “complied” differently so I think we must be careful not to get too far into the way of positing an Objective/Universal/Structuralist sense of the authority/Imperative of a situation in the way in which say Hubert Dreyfus wants to talk about collective “whooshing” ups.
I have many times experienced this at McConnell’s. Only the experience is intensified when you run, jump, and even skip through the terrain as the immediate fear of falling and busting yourself is very real and only the slightest change in the angle of your foot makes all the difference. I find it very appropriate that one of your first posts since beginning at Slippery Rock University concerns the slipperiness of a rock. I told you McConnell’s Mill is a gem it really lets your mind wander.
Great point, Sam. Somehow I didn’t make the slippery rock connection. That’s really pathetic.
http://www.newappsblog.com/2011/09/weekly-philo-of-economics-controlled-hallucinations-or-andy-clark-meets-adam-smith.html