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MENTAL FURNITURE #1


Sherlock Holmes

©1997 Dennis Leri


"...a man's brain originally is like an empty attic and you have to stock it with such
furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all number of every sort that he comes
across, so the knowledge that might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best
is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has difficulty in laying his hands
on it. Now the skilled workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his
brain attic. He will have nothing but tools which may help him in his work, but of
these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order." So said
Sherlock Holmes to Dr. Watson. (A Study in Scarlet, A. Conan Doyle)

Browsing around in a bookstore in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1979 I found a copy of the
complete stories of Sherlock Holmes. Moshe noticed the book as I carried it into
the Feldenkrais Institute. He immediately began to discuss the stories and quote
from his favorites. Seemingly, he knew them all by heart. Wanting to discover for
myself 'whodunit,' I told him we could discuss the stories after I had finished them.
We did share and enjoy a mutual enthusiasm for the stories. Moshe took to
calling me Dr. Watson for a while. In response to my questions he would say,
"Elementary my dear Watson," or, "Given what I have done today, what do you
think I will do tomorrow Dr. Watson?" 'Sherlock' Feldenkrais had many of his
favorite detective's traits.

Moshe had an incredible library in his house. One of his very favorite books was
one on criminal psychology produced by Scotland Yard. Moshe: "More real
psychology in there than in a hundred psychology books." Jeremy Krause
corroborated Moshe's enthusiasm for the book in a discussion we had in the
summer of '92. Moshe knew his library well. And, even more to the point, he
knew how to find what he needed in it. He once told our San Francisco training
his method of studying anatomy. Rather than study anatomy from the beginning
of a book straight to the end, he instead would consult his books after working
with someone. In that way he could relate his unique encounter with a person to
the otherwise academic subject of anatomy. He built up a very encyclopedic and
concrete knowledge of anatomy by grounding it in actual experience.

But anatomy books and physiology books were not a major part of his library.
There were books from almost every domain of knowledge. All those books and
their related fields of knowledge constituted Moshe's 'mental furniture.' The word
furniture means different things to different people. We can form an image of
individual chairs, table, couches, stools, etc. But, we find it harder to form an
image of furniture because it's not a thing but a collection of things, a whole
greater than the sum of its parts. We can understand Moshe's need or
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appreciation for anatomy books, books on physics and mathematics, psychology

books, judo manuals, etc. They are pieces of some greater whole. We often find
it difficult to form an image of the greater whole that constituted Moshe's mental
attic. We may even question why it might be important or interesting to look into
the matter. In future columns I will examine some of the 'pieces of furniture' in
Moshe's mental attic. Here we'll simply introduce the idea and hint at a pragmatic
methodology useful to link it all together.

Sherlock Holmes had a method of using his mental furniture. He would observe
the crime scene and all persons relating to it. Additionally important to Holmes
were the incorrect conjectures of Dr. Watson and the Scotland Yard detectives.
Holmes would make guesses -- hypotheses, inferences -- based upon what
pieces of his mental furniture were 'moved.' If, for example, he smelled a certain
odor then the piece of furniture relating to chemistry and poisons would be
'moved.' In that way he would form a hypothesis about the means and motivation
of a crime. The hypothesis would guide his investigation and that hypothesis
might change. Hypotheses which Holmes called 'deductions' are more properly
called abductions after C.S. Peirce, a 19th century philosopher. Considered by
most Europeans to be America's greatest philosopher, Peirce distinguished three
types of inferences: deduction, induction and abduction.

Peirce formulated it this way.

Deduction:

Rule - All the beans from this bag are white. 


Case - These beans are from this bag. 

Result - These beans are white.

Induction:
Case - These beans are from this bag.

Result - These beans are white. 

Rule - All the beans from this bag are white.

Abduction:
Rule - All the beans from this bag are white. 

Result - These beans are white.

Case - These beans are from this bag.

If you think about this a bit you can see that with deduction there is no possibility
of error and no possibility of novelty. In going from the general to the specific it
must follow that the beans are white. With induction there is a possibility of error
as well as correctness in our guessing. Each drawing out of a white bean is a
new confirmation of our guess while the drawing out a differently colored bean
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would be really novel. The general rule would be invalidated with a singularly
different result. But we are justified in making the guess because in every result
so far the beans have been white. While the probability is high for all the beans
being white it is by no means certain. With abduction the guess stands the
greatest chance of being in error but with it comes the possibility of the greatest
creative leap. Here, unlike in induction, we conclude without any prior evidence
that the beans are from the bag. We have a Rule, All the beans... ; we have a
Result, These beans are ... ; and we guess the Case, These beans are from this
bag. That's the guess. Peirce considered one of the greatest abductions of all
time to belong to the astronomer Kepler. With abduction one invents context for
content. In Kepler's case he initiated a new world view.

Schematically, this is Kepler's hypothesis: For all bodies in motion, the fact that a
given body moves by describing an elliptic orbit implies that that body passes
through given positions geometrically determined in such-and-such a way; but
Mars passes through given positions geometrically determined in such-and-such
a way; hence Mars moves by describing an elliptic orbit.
Kepler on scant evidence used what he knew from one field, geometry, to
generate a hypothesis concerning anomalies in Mars' orbit pertaining to the field
of astronomy. After making his hypothesis he gathered more evidence to support
it. It is vitally important that a hypothesis be falsifiable; otherwise it is not testable.

Kepler generated not just a new observation but a new way of doing astronomy. I
maintain Feldenkrais did the same for the domain of learning and education. To
abduct means to lead or take away; to kidnap. Here it means to lead away
something from both semantic fields of explanation thereby bringing forth a new
semantic field. Semantic fields are something like contexts for understanding
words and deeds. A Feldenkrais training hopefully creates a context for
understanding words and actions related to one's being able to generate a series
of actions that would be understood by one's peers as a Feldenkrais lesson.

Each of us has our own mental furniture. Our work as Feldenkrais practitioners
can be refined by quantum leaps through our making abductions and learning
how to test them so as to validate or invalidate them. A piece of our mental
furniture (our areas of knowledge, i.e., cognitive domains) can get perturbed by
the particulars presented to us in our practices. We then make guesses that
orient and guide our lesson. We are presented with more particulars and we
make more guesses and so on. Moshe once said that without the ability to go
from the particular to the general and general to particular anything (of
importance to understanding and advancing the Feldenkrais Method) done in a
particular lesson would die with that lesson. Some practitioners do great
individual lessons but they do not see what in their lessons has general import
and what has only incidental import. 'Import' means to bring something in and
what is most important is brought most deeply in. Being able to juggle a number
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of general principles with any number of particular percepts and guess what is
important and needed, defines what a practitioner is.

I don't think we have taken into account the kinds of abductions Moshe may have
made given the motions of human bodies and the domains of knowledge that he
commanded. We need to look at his and our own mental furniture. If we choose
wisely what we have in our attic then we can begin to form and test the kind of
hypotheses that distinguish our work.
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MENTAL FURNITURE #2



Scientific Causality and the Laws of Nature


©1997 Dennis Leri


I promised in the last article to talk about Moshe's 'mental furniture.' I begin with
the notion of causality. The scientific and pedagogical traditions that inform
Moshe's work employ causality. Moshe loathed facile, uncritical 'cause-effect'
reasoning. However, he adhered to scientific explanation in those domains where
it was applicable. Scientific causality in the proper context is a forcefully
persuasive concept. When misunderstood it can be misused and inappropriately
applied. Pedagogical causality concerns itself with the quest for understanding,
freedom and self-determination and will receive its own column.

David Bohm begins his book Causality and Chance in Modern Physics with "In
nature nothing remains constant. Everything is in a perpetual state of
transformation, motion and change. However, we discover that nothing simply
surges up out of nothing without having antecedents that existed before. Likewise,
nothing ever disappears without a trace, in the sense that it gives rise to
absolutely nothing existing at later times. This general characteristic of the world
can be expressed in terms of a principle which summarizes an enormous domain
of different kinds of experience and which has never yet been contradicted in any
observation or experiment, scientific or otherwise; namely, everything comes
from other things and gives rise to other things." He goes on to say, "This
principle is not yet a statement of the existence of causality in nature. Indeed it is
even more fundamental than causality, for it is at the foundation of the possibility
of our understanding nature in a rational way."

To arrive at scientific causality, relationships that remain constant amidst the

complex processes of change and transformation are noted and studied. Specific
constant relationships that emerge and are not coincidental are interpreted as
'necessary relationships.' 'Causal law' is the term given to necessary
relationships between objects, events, conditions or other things at one given
time and those at later times. However, the necessity of a causal law is never
absolute. For example, things usually fall to the ground when we release them
from our hand. Let's say it is a photo of Moshe and 'by chance' it's caught up by a
gust of wind and is blown up, up and away. Bohm: "...one must conceive of the
law of nature as necessary only if one abstracts from contingencies."
Contingency is defined as the opposite of necessity. Chance as a form of
contingency is outside the scope of things that can be treated by causal laws.
Chance events do not necessarily follow from any specifiable laws. How and
what does one abstract from contingencies?

'To abstract' means literally to 'take out.' Bohm: "When one abstracts something,
 6

one simplifies it by conceptually taking it out of its full context ...this is done by
taking out what is common to a wide variety of similar things. Thus, abstractions
tend to have a certain generality. Whether a particular abstraction is valid in a
given situation then depends on the extent to which those factors that it ignores
do produce negligible effects in the problems of interest." It takes training to know
how and what to abstract. One needs to know how to select those factors that
are important and relevant. The word 'relevant' has a meaning linked to that of
abstract. Relevant is an adjective derived from the verb 'relevate' which in turn
comes from the root 'to levate' which means 'to lift.' 'To levate' is used to describe
the kinds of acts that lift into attention any content whatsoever, even the very act
of lifting into attention. 'To re-levate' add the prefix 're' which signifies 'again'
adding to 'levate' the notion of time through recurrence. What recurs is a
similarity but also difference, since each occasion is not only similar but different.
Something strikes us as relevant because we re-cognize 'that' distinction or 'that'
difference again. If we no longer recognize it, it becomes 'irrelevant'. Constant
relationships that are relevant, that are lifted into attention and kept in attention
are thereby abstracted. In establishing causality we need to make relevant
abstractions.

Lifting out constant relationships is the first step towards causality. A causal law
suggests itself when a constant relationship, or regularity, is seen to hold within
the flux and flow of a variety of conditions. Regularities appear along with
irregularities. But, as a side note, what may seem like an irregularity when first
observed may in a later context be seen as having a higher order regularity.
Detecting regularities and supposing them to be the results of causal laws allows
us to go on to make hypotheses, i.e., abductions, concerning these supposed
laws. The Greek root of the word hypotheses indicates a supposition 'put under'
our reasoning as a provisional base to be tested via induction for its truth or
falsity. If found wanting, that is, if the hypothesis is not verifiable then other ones
are formed and tried. It is integral to the scientific method that a hypothesis be
falsifiable. If a supposition cannot be demonstrated to be false, then any truth it
may assert will have limited explanatory value.

In considering causal relationships, one must be careful to distinguish them from

merely associated events. For example, before winter begins, the leaves
generally fall off trees. But this loss of leaves is the effect of the lowering of
temperature and not the cause of winter. So clearly the concept of a causal
relationship implies more than just regular association in which one set of events
precedes another in time. Future effects come out of past causes through a
process satisfying necessary relationships. Mere association is not enough. One
must show that a given set of events or conditions comes necessarily from
another. Changes in one or more of the presumed causes must always produce
corresponding changes in the effects. Other factors must be held constant. In
considering a large number of cases co-ordinating changes on two separate sets
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of events strengthens the hypothesis of a causal connection. The tests, or

demonstrated co-ordinations, must be reproducible. If they are not, it is evidence
that there are more causes or fewer causes or other causes of the observed
effects. But if it is a strong hypothesis then there is a level of predictability that
comes about.

One can predict that given a specific set of conditions certain effects will follow
from causes. A more subtle result is that new phenomena can be predicted.
Broadening the domain of applicability of a hypothesis one arrives at laws of
nature. These laws are not like legal laws applied externally to limit the course of
events to certain prescribed paths but are inherent and essential aspects of
things. To construct 'laws of nature' as a general category of law we need to
include causal laws, laws of chance, and laws relating these two classes of law.
Causality and chance are both abstractions. They are two views of any object
(taking this word in its broadest sense). They are essential to effectively
organizing conception and perception. Seeing constant relationships means also
seeing that which is not constant, i.e., the result of chance. If we define causality
we must define chance. One can even formalize the acts of perception that
distinguish causality from chance. Laws of nature are constructed by human
beings to account for all phenomena under consideration and to define what is
causal and what is contingent. I will discuss the process of constructing meaning
in a later column on Piaget.

Newton's insight of the universal law of gravity could be stated like this: As the
apple falls, so does the moon, and so indeed does everything.
Explicitly,

A : B:: C : D :: E : F

where A and B represent successive positions of the apple at successive

moments of time, C and D those of the moon, and E and F of any other object.
This insight of Newton is as seductive as it is reductive. It is a compelling
hypothesis that relates the behavior of all physical objects in the universe. It is
elegant, simple and testable. It led the way in the quest by subsequent thinkers to
reduce all phenomena to physical and testable laws.

Moshe Feldenkrais was a world-class scientist who could clearly distinguish at

what level of human functioning cause-effect thinking is and is not relevant. Next
time I will give examples from the history of causality relevant to our work. So we
close with the notions of causality and the laws of nature as our first pieces of
mental furniture.
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MENTAL FURNITURE #3



Galileo

©1997 Dennis Leri


Moshe Feldenkrais said that if you want to understand human action shift your
focus from knowing 'why' to knowing 'how'. That shift did not originate with Moshe
but with Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). It is what differentiates the natural
philosophy of the Ancients represented by Aristotle (394-322 B.C.) from the
origins of modern science represented by Galileo. Galileo is granted the honor of
being the first modern scientist. In a future article I will make the case for Moshe
Feldenkrais being the last modern scientist.

Aristotle held views on many subjects from drama to mathematics to biology. His
views on causality and motion will be mentioned here. Aristotle distinguished four
types of causality: 1) material cause - the matter from which a thing is formed; 2)
formal cause - the form to be realized; 3) efficient cause - that which actually
causes the event, and; 4) final cause - the purpose to be realized. Aristotle used
the example of a statue to illustrate his point: the block of marble from which it is
to be hewn is the material cause; the form which is present in the sculptor's mind
during the work is the formal cause; the sculptor himself, through the
intermediary of his tools, in his chipping away at the stone is the efficient cause;
the destination or purpose of the completed statue is the final cause.

The first three causes refer to the thing itself. The fourth cause, final cause,
evidences the very existence of a thing as the realization of a purpose. For
Aristotle every living and every inanimate thing has purpose. Explanations which
traffic in a thing's purpose are called teleological. In Aristotle's view the natural
place for things is at rest. All motion is either natural or violent. Natural motion
describes an object's movements towards its future final resting place where it
achieves its purpose. Violent motion results from external forces which push or
pull an object. For Aristotle, the cause of all natural movement is the Prime Mover.
The Prime Mover does not set all things in motion at the beginning of time but
instead draws all things unto it at the end of time. Not external gravity, but rather
the object's own innate tendency explains why an object falls to earth. Aristotle's
world view is common-sensical and intuitive. It held sway for 2,000 years.

Galileo, in the process of inventing the mechanistic world view, ousted purpose,
or teleology altogether from science. He narrowed his scope of concern to a
description of how an object, any object, moves. He was not concerned with
appearances but with relationships of number, time and space. The mechanistic
world view, much derided nowadays, appeals to mathematics for the basis of its
inquiry into the working of nature. Galileo considered nature, "...a giant open
book written in the language of mathematics." Mathematical idealization,
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quantification, thought experiment, and limiting one's concerns to the 'how'

characterized Galileo's counterintuitive shift away from Aristotle. Virtually all
historians of science name Galileo as the first 'modern scientist.' In addition to his
scientific accomplishments, he also was credited with writing the best prose of
his era. Almost single-handedly Galileo overturned 2000 years of stifling
dogmatic belief.

Galileo was immensely popular with his contemporaries. Learned, an inventor, a

gifted conversationalist and story teller, a friend of the Pope, he was a sought
after guest by people from many levels of society. Were he not so popular and
had he not been a friend of the Vatican then surely he would have been burned
at the stake for his revolutionary and heretical views.

While he may or may not have been the actual inventor of the telescope, he was
its first advocate. Galileo saw to it that telescopes became readily available to
scholars and ordinary people. He also saw to it that his name was associated
with the device thereby spreading his fame. On one occasion, Galileo invited
people to look through his telescope at our moon, the planets and their moons,
and the sun and the stars. Interestingly, while looking at the moon only two
amongst twenty-four actually saw what we now see. Either they could make no
sense out of what they saw or they felt they were being deceived by Galileo. The
common world view shared by Galileo's contemporaries was that heaven and
earth operate by different laws. Galileo supported the heliocentric views of
Copernicus and Kepler but he went further. He demonstrated that there is but
one mechanics and dynamics operative both on earth and in the heavens. In
creating a new unified view of the cosmos he became our contemporary. Before
Newton could espouse his Universal Laws of Nature, Galileo first had to create
both new phenomena to observe and new ways to think about phenomena.

To the Ancients, a vacuum was unthinkable. But Galileo conducted a thought

experiment. Archimedes had shown that what makes lighter objects sink slower
or even float while heavier objects sink quicker depends on the density of the
medium. Galileo reasoned that if a medium got less and less dense and in fact
became a vacuum, then a heavy and a light object falling through a vacuum
would fall at the same rate. It was decades after he died that someone was able
to create a vacuum and prove Galileo correct. The ancients had reasoned that
light things fall more slowly to the earth while heavier things fall more quickly
because that is their nature. Galileo did another thought experiment. What if you
tied a light object and a heavy object together. Their combined weight being
heavier they would fall faster. But on the other hand, given their different natures,
with the slowing effect of the lighter they would fall slower. This thought
experiment revealed a contradiction in the Ancient world view.

Galileo stated that the natural state of objects is motion. He refuted the notion
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that things are naturally in a state of rest. He demonstrated that a ball rolling
down a slope picks up speed and that the same ball loses speed rolling up a
slope. He reasoned that a horizontally moving body in the absence of friction or
opposing forces would naturally continue to move forever. Galileo performed
another experiment with balls rolling down an inclined plane. Trained as a
musician, Galileo possessed an excellent 'ear'. By putting instrument strings
across the plane he was able to hear any differences that the two balls might
make as they rolled down. If the heavier rolled faster it should be readily evident
to his ear. There were no discordant noises. In another thought experiment he
mentally increased the angle of the incline to the vertical thereby approximating
free fall. To Galileo, all physical objects must fall at the same rate when one
subtracts wind resistance. He was the first to give mathematical expression to
the falling object's acceleration. He delineated the notions of speed or position,
velocity and acceleration.

Of all Galileo's inventions, the notion of acceleration is the most profound.

Distance divided by time equals speed. Speed specifies the rate of a body's
displacement, say 55 mph. When we describe speed and the direction of motion
we are specifying velocity, say 55 mph to the north. A quantity described by both
magnitude (how much) and direction (which way) is called a vector quantity.
Velocity is a vector quantity. A quantity described only by speed is a scalar
quantity. Constant velocity implies both constant speed and constant direction,
i.e., motion is unvarying and along a straight line. Constant speed is not the same
as constant velocity. A car on a circular track may have a constant speed but its
velocity will be changing at each instant as its direction changes. Acceleration =
change of velocity/time elapsed. Acceleration occurs only when there is a change
in a body's state of motion. Velocity is the rate at which the position of a body
changes and acceleration is the rate at which velocity changes. A change in
velocity is a change in its direction or its speed or both its speed and its direction.
The rate of change of velocity is acceleration. Acceleration measures how fast
things change. It is the rate of change of the rate of change. When in a later
article we come to discuss Moshe's ideas about awareness it will be crucial to
have some understanding of acceleration.

Galileo maintained that sensory qualities were secondary to primary dynamics.

By discounting the evidence of the senses he was able to make relevant
abstractions, that is, to use thought experiment and mathematics to provide
descriptions that are counterintuitive. To quote, "...Aristotle merely formulated the
most commonplace experiences in the matter of motion as universal scientific
propositions, whereas classical mechanics ...makes assertions which not only
are never confirmed by everyday experience, but whose direct experimental
verification is fundamentally impossible... Aristotelian physics thus has the
advantage over classical mechanics in that it deals with concrete, observable
situations constantly encountered. But from a scientific point of view this very
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advantage constitutes its weakness..." (The Mechanization of the World Picture:

Pythagoras to Newton, E.J. Dijksterhuis. Princeton Paperback, pages 30-31)

By examining the life and work of Galileo and his successors, we can gain fresh
insight into our work. The shift from knowing 'why' to knowing 'how' is central to
the foundation of the scientific method and of the Feldenkrais Method. Galileo
invented the notion of thought experiment so dear to Einstein. The relevance of
thought experiments to understanding how to construct lessons is crucial. Galileo
literally invented the ideas about gravity and acceleration implicit in our work.
Surely any thinking about Functional Integration and Awareness Through
Movement which includes the contributions of Galileo and other figures from the
history of science will be rewarded.
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MENTAL FURNITURE #4



Piaget and the Notion of Reversibility


©1997 Dennis Leri



Moshe Feldenkrais listed Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget as an author to read.

Personally, until recently I had read only Piaget's more philosophical work. In
looking over his work on childhood development I was struck by its many deep
resonances with Moshe's work. Piaget had this to say on 'the biological problem
of intelligence,' "Verbal or cogitative intelligence is based upon practical or
sensorimotor intelligence which in turn depends on acquired and recombined
habits and associations. These presuppose, furthermore, the system of reflexes
whose connection with the organism's anatomical and morphological structure is
apparent. A certain continuity exists, therefore, between intelligence and the
purely biological processes of morphogenesis and adaptation to the environment.
What does this mean?" (Origins of Intelligence in Children, pg. 1)

What indeed does this mean to us? Piaget correlates ontogeny, the historical
path of changes formative of an individual, and phylogeny, the history of the
evolution of the species in a way that clarifies Moshe's notion of organic learning.
He focuses on the role of the organism, specifically the sensorimotor system, in
learning. Piaget directs his inquiry away from the ontological, that is, explanations
and descriptions of what things are and towards the ontogenetic, that is,
explanations of how things come to be. Piaget might rephrase philosopher Martin
Heidegger's, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" by asking, "How is
there something rather than nothing?"

Piaget divides the whole time of childhood development into four stages, each
with subdivisions. They are: (1) The period of sensorimotor intelligence from 0-2
years. (2) The period of pre-operational thought from 2-7 years. (3) The period of
concrete operations form 7-11+ years. (4) The period of formal operations from
11 years onward.

Regardless of the stage or subdivision thereof, Piaget identifies three essential

operations involved at every level of growth whether 'physical' or 'mental':
assimilation, accommodation and adaptation (sometimes called equilibration or
re-equilibration). Reflexes must be used for the organism to adapt. Piaget sees
reflexes as organized schemata of actions delivered by the species to the infant
ready for use. Accommodation occurs when contact with objects (in the general
sense) modifies the action of the reflex. The consolidation and strengthening of
reflex action by virtue of its functioning is assimilation. The progressive
adaptation of reflex schemata presuppose their organization. Every reflex is
directed towards the world. As it encounters its world its action is modified. The
scheme whereby it continues to direct its searching actions and where the reflex
 13

comes progressively under the control of cortical activity is its organization. The
organism's various organizations of reflex schemata are its means of assimilating
novelty, first in the form of nourishment and later as data. Assimilation elaborates
and extends reflexes, acquired reflexes and habits. It does so by distinguishing
and differentiating: those objects that elicit the reflex; those that relate different
objects to endogenous needs, e.g. hunger; those objects that generalize its
capacity to recognize different objects. Objects of all kinds are assessed via
tactile and kinesthetic interaction as sources of nourishment, excitation, or as
cues to perpetuate action for its own sake. Those assessments are the pre-
cursors of more formal processes of judging.

Accommodation is the process whereby the schema, through it contact with

objects, changes its structure, that is to say, 'reorganizes,' to make place for the
what was assimilated. Accommodations give rise to new organizations based
upon previous ones. Assimilation is the action of learning to identify, recognize
and generalize objects. Accommodation is the modification of the action of
assimilation. Adaptation is how the processes of assimilation and
accommodation are brought into balance, i.e. e., how they are re-equilibrated, to
assure the organism a fit with its environment. At all stages of development, on
each and every level and in the structures connecting levels the three operations
are in constant interaction. For example, later cognitive stages remain connected
to the sensorimotor level albeit through a more complex organization.

Let's take an example familiar to almost any first year Feldenkrais trainee: the
sucking reflex. Endowed at birth with certain primitive reflexes, human
development begins when there is a lack of fit between primitive reflexes and the
environment. That lack creates a state of disequilibrium which the organism will
strive either through altering itself or its environment to return to equilibrium, i.e.,
it adapts. The sucking reflex is at first elicited by anything at all that touches the
child's lips. In the beginning the reflex is not developed enough to keep the nipple
in the mouth. With development the child performs the sucking better and more
selectively. It will not wait for the nipple to touch the mouth but will search
anything that touches its cheek. Also when hungry, anything that is not the nipple
will be rejected. So, the sucking reflex becomes elaborated into a schema for,
among other things, nursing at the breast. The global reflex of sucking becomes
more specialized in that it connects to its mother's breast or its bottle and more
generalized in that it can be used to explore and know objects other than the
breast. In Piaget's words, "The schema... is not limited to functioning under
compulsion by a fixed excitant, external or internal, but functions... for itself. ...the
child does not only suck in order to eat but also to elude hunger, to prolong the
excitation of the meal, and lastly he sucks for the sake of sucking." (Origins of
Intelligence in Children, pg. 35) In other words, the object sucked primarily
nurtures the sucking schema more than it is sucked for nourishment itself. The
increasing complexity of the organization of the reflex provides the rudiments of
 14

meaning for the child. Specific sucking actions will vary according to whether or
not the child is hungry. Thus the meaning to the child of sucking will differ
depending on circumstances.

Acquisition of the ability to discern one's circumstances plus development of

actions not directly related to reflex action become the basis for a differentiation
of the subjective and objective poles of experience. In learning the actions that
enable one to distinguish different objects and different contexts one's self is
progressively differentiated also. Sucking the thumb precedes more complex
hand to mouth or hand and eye coordinations. Progressing from simply grasping
to intentionally exploring with its hands the child distinguishes means, the hands,
from the ends, to bring something to its mouth, to shake something to make
sound, etc. As the child develops it passes through various 'egocentric' stages. In
Piaget's use egocentric refers to an infant's uncritical identification of its
perceptions with the world. Its actions produce its perceptions and, unable to
distinguish action from its consequences, those perceptions are for the child
'real.' Maturation consists in 'decentering' the perceptual world, that is, in
acquiring the means to recognize that different actions lead to different
perceptions. Such a recognition, implying the sensori-motorically constructed
basis of the real, makes different action and different perceptions of the real
possible.

Let's look at the acquisition of the child's concept of time to see how this
decentering takes place. In an experiment children of various ages are shown
two connected glass containers: one is long and cylindrical and the other broader
at its base and narrowing towards its top. Colored liquid is drained from one to
the other resulting in two simple motions: a drop of level in one and a rise in level
of the other. "The time operations involved are: (1) fitting the various levels into
the series A+B+C, etc. by means of 'before' and 'after' relationships (seriation is
impossible if the relations are 'simultaneous'); and (2) fitting together the
respective intervals (terms) AB, AC, etc. (AB is of shorter duration than AC, etc.
and A1 and B1 or A2 and B2 are synchronous)." (The Child's Conception of Time,
pg. 3) An adult has no difficulty in realizing that it is the same liquid and the same
amount of liquid that starts out in one container and ends up in the other, change
of shape notwithstanding. Children have all kinds of difficulties in linking what
happens in one container with what is happening in the other. There are many
seeming misperceptions: that the two events are unrelated, that is, that they are
'two'; that the amount of liquid is unequal, that is, volume is not conserved; that
one is happening faster or slower than the other and so on. Children at the
'intuitive' level are able to eventually see that at successive moments one of the
containers is getting emptied by recognizing that a moment before it was fuller.
Intuitive perceptions of succession and duration being egocentric do not lead to a
coordination of events in the two containers. Only when some schema is arrived
at that generalizes and coordinates the 'two' events into an organized whole can
there be said to be an understanding of time. Once constructed the time
 15

conception, action schema really, is used as the means for new actions. For
Piaget, a mature understanding of time occurs when there is a shift from intuitive,
egocentric irreversible interpretations of the motions of displacement to
operational, reversible interpretations.

Reversibility means that at any given moment in an action one can imagine a
previous moment or an initial moment as well as the next moment or the final
moment. What creates the perception of the conservation of volume of liquid or
the simultaneity of one level falling as the other rises is the 'operational' level of
action with its implied notion of reversibility. Because there is at this stage true
conception of time one can distinguish an action from its outcome. One can pay
attention to the action itself. One can 'interiorize' action, that is, perform it in
thought or through a model or analogue showing operational reversibility. (Think
about that in relation to some ATMs you might have done.) The real is just one
example of the possible. With reversibility one can modify one's action, that is,
one can slow down or speed up and one can change direction. Reversibility is
not simply a matter of 'playing the movie' backwards. It organizes into a coherent
whole and makes intelligible co-displacements of ones' self, objects and others in
the world. Reversibility is a construct that allows one to judge and modify the
quality of the action as it is being performed as well as evaluating its
consequences.

For Piaget, maturity is decentered behavior. To simultaneously differentiate ones'

self, objects and others in the world brings about a better integration of self into
the world and the world into the self. What the experiment mentioned above so
beautifully demonstrates is that to perceive any thing one must act a certain way
so as to make it appear. The action of perception is learned and is dependent on
a number of prior stages of learning. In thinking about Feldenkrais' use of the
term reversibility one can glean much of value from a reading of Piaget. It is also
very informative to compare and contrast Moshe's definition and use of terms like
organization, function, differentiation, integration, learning and habit with Piaget's.
I recommend just about anything by Piaget but especially The Origins of
Intelligence in Children. Piaget has his critics and an excellent critique and
contemporary interpretation of Piaget can be found in Barbara Rogoff's
Apprenticeship in Thinking. Also the work of Esther Thelen is particularly
provocative.
 16

MENTAL FURNITURE #5



Feldenkrais and Judo


©1997 Dennis Leri


"... it is bad in Judo to try for anything with such determination as not to be able to
change your mind if necessary..." (M. Feldenkrais, Higher Judo, pg. 94)

"From my perspective, which is of course as a martial artist, in the Feldenkrais

Method you take my balance and I have to find a new balance." Chiba Sensei,
8th Dan Aikido, after receiving an FI lesson from Elizabeth Beringer, 4th Dan.

The questions arise, how to change one's mind? by what means? in what
direction? to what end? We may wonder if a person whose balance is taken is
the same person who finds a new balance? Questions which can seem
academic in ordinary life become vital in the martial arts where one is thrust into
conflict, confrontation and harm's way. The question of survival possesses us:
Whether it is on the mat in the dojo, in the ring, or out on the street or wherever
and whenever we find ourselves engaged in a conflict or a struggle from which
we dearly want to disengage. Here and now, is it to be life or death? Any study of
the martial arts must play itself out against the background question of life or
death. Martial (mar- from the Greek god of war and strife Mars) arts training may
focus on mortal combat but the struggle with an opponent is secondary to the
struggle within one's self. Winning the inner battle is knowing how to play the
game. It is not 'what' we do but 'how' we do it that matters. "It is correct to say
that Judo teaches coordination of quite a different order from any other discipline.
It is clearly defined and methodically taught as a concrete thing. The movements
are, therefore more or less incidental and determined by a secondary
consideration; they are a means of learning the 'way,' the correct physiological
human way of doing." (M. Feldenkrais, Higher Judo, pg. 37.)

We all know that Moshe Feldenkrais was an accomplished Judoka, that is, Judo
practitioner. We mention it in our brochures. In the second issue of The
Feldenkrais Journal one can find an interview I conducted with Moshe in 1977.
There, in his own words, he tells how he was swept up into the inner world of
Judo. The founder of Judo, Prof. Jigaro Kano, chose Moshe Feldenkrais to be
one of the doors through which the East attempts to meet the West. Moshe
Feldenkrais, "The Judo way is to action, as the scientific method is to thought.
Both are not 'new,' not in the sense that our ancestors have never used them, or
that they are foreign to the human nervous system, but because they use
methodically what was formerly left uncultivated and therefore a matter of chance
or luck." (Higher Judo, pg. 37) Feldenkrais methodology, while not reducible to
either Judo or science, is clearly informed and indebted to both the aims of
 17

science and of Judo. In previous columns I have pointed to some of what

constitutes the aim and the means of science.

How does Judo achieve its aim? What is the aim of Judo? The answers to those
questions can be divided into two complementary views: 1) everybody else's and
2) Moshe's. Judo means "the gentle way" or "the gentle principle." Ju- means
gentle and -do (Japanese for the Chinese Tao) means way or principle. Koizumi
Sensei, 7th Dan Judo, "The principle of Judo is like the nature of water. Water
flows to a balanced level. It has no shape of its own but molds itself to the
receptacle that contains it. It has existed and will exist as long as time and space.
When heated to the state of steam it is invisible, but has enough power to split
the earth itself. When frozen it crystallizes into a mighty rock. Its services are
boundless and its uses endless. First it turbulent like the mighty Niagara Falls,
and then calm like a still pond, fearful like a torrent, and refreshing like a spring
on a hot summer's day. So is the principle of Judo."(Higher Judo, pg. vii) And,
"As an art and a philosophy, the ultimate object of Judo is the attainment of
harmonious unity of opposites in tune with life's realities; in short unity of Man
and God or Nature."(Higher Judo, viii) Koizumi Sensei has this to say about
Moshe Feldenkrais, "Dr. Feldenkrais explains how Judo training educates one to
be 'independent of heritage.' This phrase is the keynote and hallmark of the
standard of his treatise. It is universally recognized that Judo practice promotes
the sense of balance and self-confidence, cultivates the ability to overcome brute
force, inherited weaknesses or shortcomings, but the logical and scientific
reasons for these effects were left unexplored. Dr. Feldenkrais ... clarifies the
interrelation and intermingled working of gravitation, body, bones, muscles,
nerves, consciousness, subconscious, and unconsciousness and opens the way
for better understanding."(Higher Judo, viii)

Judo practice and its pedagogical analogies when scrutinized by Moshe provide
us with the "logical and scientific reasons" for Judo's effectiveness. Let's look at
how. The Higher Judo book provides guidance for Judo practice when both
practitioners are on the ground. The person on top, "top dog," or the person on
bottom, "underdog," has no advantage as far as winning the contest. The great
difference between them is in the "attitude and control of the body." If one is in
the down position lying on the back only two movements are possible: rolling
forward and backwards or from side to side. The position that is assumed to
accomplish the rolling is one familiar to all Feldenkrais practitioners: knees to
elbows, head off the floor. "For this position the body is very nearly a spherical
cap lying on a flat surface. To keep the body motionless by pressing on it,
pressure must be normally applied vertically downwards, just above the point of
contact with the floor. If we press at any other point, the cap will roll or rock, so as
to bring the point of contact with the ground vertically below the point of pressure.
Were there no friction, the cap would shoot out, away from the pressed spot.
Another way of holding down such a cap, is to spread over it, so as to produce
 18

pressure at the centre by the bulk of our weight, and to use the four members as
props preventing the cap from rocking in any direction.

"The mechanical analogy presented is very useful in figuring out correct action,
whether we are on top of the opponent or under him. Another mental picture, ...
used by Kano, is to regard the person on the ground as a thick wooden board,
roughly the shape of the human body, floated on the water. Here too, there are
only two ways of holding the board motionless when pressing it under the water.
Firstly, to press down vertically, just in the centre, and secondly, to spread the
body squarely over it, with the four members in water and throw it over yourself
most of the time.

"These analogies are not perfect, for in reality there is friction in the first and no
buoyancy in the second. Their usefulness lies in that they provide a general
principle for action of the combatants on the ground: the one attempting the
immobilization should behave as if the opponent on the ground were a
frictionless spherical cap or a floated wooden object. The one immobilized should
behave so as to reduce friction between himself and the ground, moving away
from the point where pressure is exerted, transforming sliding friction into rolling;
or he should attempt to produce conditions as near as possible to buoyancy, by
lifting off the ground the hips or one corner of the body. During the short period of
lowering back to the ground, conditions that can be regarded as buoyancy prevail,
and frictionless 'sidestepping' is nearly ideally achieved.

"The most important principle is to move your own body before attempting to
move the opponent. There is almost always a solution to any situation, whereby
swiveling, rolling, moving out of the way, etc., achieves easily, rapidly and
effectively, what can be performed only with great effort and slowly by moving the
opponent primarily. When in doubt what to do, the analogies suggesting
movement to 'remove' oneself in the direction where there is no restraint will
generally solve your problem.

"... One should always remember that the words 'immobilization' and 'holding' do
not describe a the actual state of affairs - they convey the idea of finality and fixity
that do not exist in action. An immobilization is dynamic and constantly changing
all the time. The opponent generally frees himself as soon as you stop
forestalling and checking his next move." Higher Judo, pgs. 54-55

The quote above illustrates how Moshe derives a general principle of action from
a dual "reading" of Judo practice, that is a reading employing Eastern metaphor
and Western scientific explanation. Judo practice is not diminished by being
drawn into a dual exposition. Moshe's characterization of being locked in a
struggle on the ground clarifies the situation as well as elucidating the means of
escape or of capture. We have more rather than less to actually aid us in the
 19

realization of our intentions. Moshe does not offer his insights in lieu of
experience but rather as guide to more fully experience. To perceive differently
one must act differently and to act differently one must know how to do so, that is,
one needs principles. Moshe's 'principle of no principles' so often misunderstood
as an admonition to eschew principles is rather, as Larry Goldfarb has pointed
out, one principle amongst many to invoke when needed. As cited above, the
task of immobilizing an opponent or of freeing oneself, is given a richer
presentation by playing scientific insight off naturalistic analogies. It is left up to
the person to find for herself or himself how to actually realize their ends. The
image and the explanation offer not a picture of the end result but more of a
"quick graph" of the means. The result is not either a merging with an image or
the construction of a scientific theory, but rather progress along the path of Judo
practice.

In the second part of the article I will examine Judo's orientation to the
development of a person who can live "independent of heritage." I will show that
the Feldenkrais Method is a continuation and generalization of Judo practice.
Furthermore, it will be seen that surprising consequences for the practice of our
method can be drawn from examining how one goes from learning Judo to
learning how to learn.
 20

MENTAL FURNITURE #6



Independent of Heritage: Feldenkrais and Judo - Part 2


©1997 Dennis Leri



"Dr. Feldenkrais explains how Judo training educates one to be 'independent of

heritage'." (G. Koizumi, Higher Judo, viii)

To be 'independent of heritage' means that for at least one moment we can know
life in a way not dependent upon our size, weight, strength, form, age, gender,
personal history, ethnic or religious background. Strictly speaking, Feldenkrais
seemed to say that through proper training and education we can create an
identity not founded on activity, passivity or indifference. For Feldenkrais the
basis for such a training was Judo, the Gentle Way.

The Judo Path, as Feldenkrais describes it, differs from other disciplines in a
number of ways. "What a man can do now is mostly determined by his personal
experience, the habits of thought, feeling and action that he has formed....
Incapacity to do is produced by fear, imagination and otherwise distorted
appreciation of the outside world. We teach an unemotional, objective activity
which has nothing to do with what the person is or feels and we show that the
result depends entirely on when, what and how a thing is done, and on nothing
else. The result is that a small, sometimes insignificant physical body, of sixty
years of age or over can control a powerful youth as if the latter has no will of his
own. This is possible only by the impersonal, unemotional and purely
mechanistic habits of thought and action inculcated by Judo practice." (My
emphasis - DL, Higher Judo 17-18) In Judo practice nothing is or should be taken
on faith. Judo evolved a specific regimen to fulfill the goals of Judo practice.

According to Feldenkrais, Judo employs distinctive means to transform someone.

First, Judo is practiced with bare feet. Immature development of the use of one's
feet means "one is capable of only pre-selected acts resulting in arrested
development, decreased vitality, and withdrawal from attempting many activities
with a corresponding effect on behavior." Second, Feldenkrais discusses why
Judo develops the art of falling: "With great perseverance it is possible to
achieve...the state where one works not from necessity but enjoys the pleasure
of creative work.... (The state) is never achieved before adult independence from
gravitation." (Higher Judo, 20-21)

Third, from his first lesson the pupil is taught a fundamentally different way of
using his body. "Our way of action is formed in a society where organized
security and the belief that inherited personal qualities are things to be proud of
and defects to be ashamed of and hidden. Habits of thought and action formed
this way are of little avail when we are confronted with tasks in which our social
 21

standing cannot influence the outcome of the act. The proper activity is such that
the aim set to ourselves can be achieved in most circumstances. This demands
flexibility of attitude of mind and body quite beyond that which we form in the
present social environment.... In Judo we teach a functional stability, precarious
for any other purpose or for any length of time, but solving the immediate
problem in front of us or the act to be performed. We seek to mobilize on the
present situation all we have, throwing away all that is useless for the immediate
purpose.... If you examine Fig. 1 you will see that the person who has produced
the throw is himself on the brink of falling. The falling body is the only thing that
provides the balancing force and maintains the thrower in the upright position.
The two bodies are balanced on one big toe. The thrower has learned to
dispense with all rigid ideas of stability, security and force. He uses all the
properties of his body to the finest degree of perfection and to the limit of
independence from gravitation to achieve his aim... Dynamic stability is stability
acquired through movement, such as that of a top or bicycle. A top or bicycle is
so shaped that it is impossible to make them stand unsupported, but once set
moving, there is little difficulty in maintaining their centre of gravity above the
point of contact with the ground. In Fig. 1 the man balancing on one big toe is
neither quite motionless nor quite moving. Before a movement is completely
arrested, there is obviously an instant where the stability passes from dynamic to
static stability. The figure is taken a fraction of a second before that instant; this
position could not be maintained for any but a transitory instant." (Higher
Judo,18-28, my emphasis - DL)

The static and the dynamic to be lived in and through ecstasy. "The performance
of any act while we are in motion is exhilarating.... The thrilling feeling is quite
common in most methods imparting body skills.... In Judo it is the essence of the
training; training is not complete until the pupils can produce these states at will
and in spite of the opponent's resistance... The Judoka is free to attend to the act
he is performing, while the untrained man has his attention burdened with the
business of keeping balance on two feet -- a laborious and slow task.... Adult
erect standing is therefore not derived from static principles. It is essentially a
continuous regaining of unstable equilibrium from which the centre of gravity is
constantly drifting away, even while standing still." (Higher Judo, 18-28)

Fourth, adjustment to and of space is considered. "All the organs through which
we control our relations to space, are located in the head. Space can, therefore,
be viewed conveniently as a sphere, the centre of which is carried in the head....
Our space function is made through individual experience and is...a learning
process having infantile, childish, adolescent and adult stages like most of our
functions.... The scientist would say that we carry with us the origin of co-
ordinates, and that we gradually learn to control our activity in different parts of
the system.... We may picture space in front of us...as a cone with its apex in our
head. Gradually, we acquire independence in one cone after another until we
 22

have covered the entire solid angle of all the cones that compose it.... The
infantile stage is present so long as we cannot move the origin of our space co-
ordinate system.... Judo furthers the development of our space adjustment in all
directions from the origin of our moveable co-ordinate system, and it stands
alone in that it teaches orientation in all possible positions of rotation and
displacement of that centre itself." Gradually, through increased refinement the
center of one's self is located in the lower torso in the abdomen. From there all
actions are originated.

Fifth, "Outstanding excellency in any activity is impossible without generalized

co-ordinated control.... Those men that we incorrectly call 'great' are simply better
co-ordinated in most of their being.... Perhaps the most important feature of co-
ordinated movement, as we teach it, is that in the correct act there is no muscle
of the body which is contracted with greater intensity than the rest.... Where
change of position, or rate of motion masses is involved, force is, by definition of
the word, the cause. The sensation of effortless action...is because we teach to
perform voluntary acts by such attitudes and in a manner similar to the reflex
movements of the body. This sensation of lack of resistance is pleasant, as are
all acts where the voluntary control only directs the involuntary functions but does
not contradict any of the lower nervous centres. When co-ordination is
achieved...the breath is even and unhampered throughout any act.... Evenness
of breath is one of the means by which the master judges whether the pupil
complies with his instructions or not." (Higher Judo, 32-36)

Finally, there arises the question of motivation. "There can be no smooth co-
ordinated action of the executive organs without smooth mental processes, i.e.
motivation.... The expert Judo teacher can detect very slight deviations from the
correct procedure, because he has a very delicate gauge -- the minimum energy
principle. He eliminates all components in any movement that do not actively
cooperate towards the purpose at hand. He is concerned with the 'way' the
purpose is achieved perhaps more than with the act.... To train motivation control,
we have to train the resolution of emotions and habits. The strongest emotions
arise in connection with security and self-preservation.... It is enough to see what
(people) do when...their security is threatened, or when other strong emotions
are set up in them, to see that there is room for further growth and development.
Many seem to believe, with gratuitous assurance, that the control of emotions on
a verbal plane or that intellectual understanding is emotional control in fact. There
is no such thing as emotion without a body, a body without a nervous system, or
a mind without a brain. There can, therefore be no training of the body without
mental training, or training of emotional control without arousing emotions in the
body." (Higher Judo, 43-45, my emphasis - DL)

Feldenkrais acknowledged the necessity and the effects of familial and cultural
conditioning. But his experience as a Judo teacher proved to him that one can
 23

diminish to zero their burden upon us. Poor education in general, and in
particular haphazard somatic education, has given us less than optimal
behavioral dynamics. More to the point it has also formed our habits of attention
which are really habits of inattention. Employing the means of Judo one can
unlearn limiting habits while learning the principles enabling full and mature use
of one's self. Judo is fundamentally educational in nature; its founder Jigaro Kano
was Minister of Education for the Japanese government. We, of course, see its
traces in the aims, style and content of the Feldenkrais Method. I would argue
that our method is a more general approach to learning than is Judo. Judo uses
the vehicle of trial by fire, the warrior's way. The Feldenkrais Method recognizes
that while one need not be a warrior, everyone desires to fulfill themselves.

In creating the Feldenkrais Method Moshe did something that we should never
overlook. He did not ask us to imitate him or to enact his particular saga. Rather,
out of his extensive experience working with himself and others he abstracted the
impersonal, general structure of learning. He invented accessible lesson
schemas in the form of ATM and FI lessons. Being impersonal, we find in the
lessons plenty of room for our personal experiences. And that is so by design.
Each of us locates ourselves differently relative to those lessons. If we are to do
Feldenkrais work it is not enough to hold onto our personal experiences. We too
must forge general schemas accessible to any number of people like or unlike
ourselves. The products of our labors may or may not look like what we have to
recognize as the Feldenkrais Method. In creating lessons we establish a context
as well as provide the means for a person to realize and rearrange the particulars
of their life.

In doing the Feldenkrais Method we must be careful not to bow to what's

culturally trendy and fashionable or pander to the cult of victimization. If we for an
instant realize that our lives could be different and if we further realize the means
to make it so, then we know it can be so for others also. Make no mistake about it,
to achieve even a brief independence from our heritage is to realize the fruits of
learning how to learn. Even a fleeting severance of ourselves from our
conditioning can mark a stunning passage from ungrounded delusion or drowsy
disillusionment to one of unadorned worldly engagement. "You can lead a horse
to water but you can't make 'em drink." In leading a horse to water one needs to
know how to lead and how to recognize water. Our Feldenkrais heritage,
dedicated as it is to providing for independence of heritage, can with clarity of
intention both recognize water and lead one to it.
 24

MENTAL FURNITURE #7


G. I. Gurdjieff

©1997 Dennis Leri



"If a man could understand all the horror of the lives of ordinary people who are
turning round in a circle of insignificant aims, if he could understand what they
are losing, he would understand that there can only be one thing that is serious
for him - to escape from the general law, to be free. What can be serious for a
man in prison who is condemned to death? Only one thing: How to save himself,
how to escape: nothing else is serious." - G.I. Gurdjieff

It was late in the morning or perhaps it was late in the afternoon and Moshe was
concluding an interview with a writer for Psychology Today:

Writer: "It would seem that your ideas and your methods have much in common
with the work of Milton Erickson."

Moshe: "Oh yes, that's true. I have a tremendous degree of respect for his work.
And I met him. Margaret Mead introduced us. But, you know, while one can see
similarities in my work to Milton Erickson's, the person I feel I have the most
kinship with is (G.I.) Gurdjieff."

The interview was never published. The writer moved on to the NY Times. Maybe
someone, say Franz Wurm, can shed light on Moshe's relationship to the
Gurdjieff "Work" and the Gurdjieff community. Was it direct or indirect? Historical
fact: Moshe met Ida Rolf at a conference put on by the noted student of Gurdjieff,
J.G. Bennett.

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was born 1872? 1877? in the Caucasus region of
what is now Russia. The so called "rascal sage" heralded the coming of ancient
and esoteric Eastern teachings to the West. Neither a modernist nor a purveyor
of any "isms," he rather proclaimed there to be eternal Truths (with a capital T),
that there are people who know and live those Truths and that Objective
knowledge of the Real is possible. His work lives on in various guises amongst
groups that are not so much secret as private. Much has been written about
Gurdjieff. If you choose, you can find Gurdjieffian books in almost any esoteric
bookstore or in regular bookstore in their religion or spiritual sections. Moshe
recommended reading A.R. Orage's Psychological Exercises and P.D.
Ouspensky's, In Search of the Miraculous. Perhaps some of the flavor will come
through. But, knowing how difficult it would be to fully comprehend the
Feldenkrais Method by reading our books, you can be assured it would be much
more difficult to understand Gurdjieff's work through books alone. And as a flavor
it DID figure into Moshe's stew.
 25

"...we must examine the fundamental law that creates all phenomena in all the
diversity or unity of all the universes. "This is the 'Law of Three' or the law of the
three principles or the three forces. It consists of the fact that every phenomenon,
on whatever scale and in whatever world it may take place, from molecular to
cosmic phenomena, is the result of the combination or the meeting of three
different and opposing forces. Contemporary thought realizes the existence of
two forces for the production of a phenomenon: force and resistance, positive
and negative electricity, male and female cells and so on. No question has ever
been raised as to the third, or if it has been raised it has scarcely been heard.

"According to real, exact knowledge one force, or two forces, can never produce
a phenomenon. The presence of a third force is necessary, for it is only with the
help of the a third force that the first two can produce what may be called a
phenomenon, no matter in what sphere.

"The teaching of the three forces is at the root of all ancient systems. The first
force may be called active or positive; the second, passive or negative; the third,
neutralizing. But these are merely names, for in reality all three forces are equally
active and appear as active, passive, and neutralizing only at their meeting points,
that is to say, only in relation to one another at a given moment." (G.I. Gurdjieff
quoted in P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, pg. 75)

In one's life the Law of Three can be seen to be operative in any number of
situations. One undertakes to accomplish something. One encounters resistance
or inertia. Lacking both a reason and the will to continue one gives up or attempts
something else. If we don't have the resolve, if our aim is not to persevere, the
world provides us with the reasons to quit. But, it is the aim provided by "the
Work" that sustains one's efforts. To counter the vicious circularity of the dyadic
action-reaction dynamic a third force is needed. The third force neutralizes not by
eliminating the other two so much as providing a neutral way of observing, of
attending, of sustaining participation. Habits of attention and one's consequent
identification of and to what one attends to are insidious and not easily discerned.
And why bother anyway? Yet, somehow and in some way we sense there must
be something other than either our individual or our collective subjective
cognitions and perceptions. Maybe the very modes of attentional habits can be
examined? Is the active man or woman really active? Maybe their activity is
merely an habitual and therefore passive response to the world. And it can be
asked of the passive person what kind of active dis-stance must be effected to
not engage? To undertake an examination of our habits a third force must be
brought in that allows us to see, to bear witness to the other two.

Gurdjieff said that in undertaking to do "the Work," that is, to deliberately intend to
realize one's full humanity, three components are required: that we work for
 26

ourselves; that we work for others; and that we work for "the Work" itself. One
usually works for one's self or for others. But echoing Rabbi Hillel, "If I am not for
myself who am I, and if I am only for myself what am I?" there can be a context in
which one can work for one's self, for and with others and for "the Work." In
assessing how people work, 'teach,' or 'train' in a Feldenkrais training program I
have noticed something similar. Some people are full of themselves or perhaps
they are out for themselves. In those cases attention to the individuals within the
group suffers and the Method doesn't reach them. Some people put their focus
almost completely outside themselves, they live only for other individuals. In
those cases attention to their own needs, to the long term needs of the group and
to the Method are diminished. What kind of example are they providing? And with
some others who work primarily for the Method alone, the teaching seems sterile
and abstract. But there are those work for themselves, for others and who also
work for the Feldenkrais Method. The consequences of coordinating all three can
be very different than can be predicted from any one stance considered alone or
in dyadic relationship.

Working earnestly to sustain and recreate the Method allows one to attend to
one's needs, the needs of others and gives the Method its due. To practice the
Feldenkrais Method, or perhaps to view the Feldenkrais Method as a practice
means one cannot develop one's self and not work to develop others. Neither
does it mean one can develop others while not developing one's self. The
Feldenkrais Method must simultaneously lead to the development of others,
one's self, and the Method itself. But the Law of Three is subtle and not obviously
obvious: "at a given moment" the practitioner can be active and initiating relative
to the passive student and the sustaining or neutralizing Method. Or the
practitioner could be passive or denying while the student is active and the
Method sustaining. Or the Method could be active while the student is sustaining
and the practitioner passive. And so on. Each member of the practitioner-student-
Method triad can play a positive, negative, or neutral role relative to the others.
The role of the practitioner needs to be played by one who can remember
themselves "at a given moment" as a student, as a living reference library of the
Method, or as a 'teacher.'

It was a hot summer Training Program afternoon and Moshe on an Amherst

video had made an allusion to the work of Gurdjieff. During a Q&A session it was
asked what Moshe had meant by that remark. The answer given was, "Oh, he is
only telling you to take it easy." But what was he saying? And why? And to
whom? Moshe knew that to Gurdjieff human beings have two aspects: 1)
essence, or that which is innate, which is a person's own, which is what is true in
a human being, which develops into one's individuality and which is controlled by
Fate; and 2) personality, or that which is acquired, which is not one's own, which
is what is false in a human being, which provides the information necessary to
work on the self and which is controlled by Accident. To be true to one's essence
 27

and to manifest it fully one must bring a human's three centers - head, heart,
moving - under the control and coordination of the will. An aside from Moshe,
"...at this point we are speaking of ...the training of will power and self control, but
not for the purpose of gaining power over ourselves or other people. Correction of
the self, improvement, training of awareness, and other concepts have been
used here to describe various aspects of the idea of development. Development
stresses the harmonious coordination between structure, function, and
achievement. And a basic condition for harmonious coordination is complete
freedom from either self-compulsion or compulsion from others."(Awareness
Through Movement, pg. 51) According to Gurdjieff, usually one of the centers
predominates and supplanting the functioning of the others prevents us from
living harmoniously. When all three are coordinated, when a person has acquired
a "permanent center of gravity," then real progress can be made.

A human being is not born with a vibrant awakened soul but must through "the
Work" create one. To create a soul a person must wake up and as a preliminary
to that they must realize that they are asleep, that they are mechanical, that what
for them goes by the name of human existence is only the movements of an
automaton. Most everyone is adrift in the world because they have no direction
and all that befalls them is simply accidental. What we take as our dreams,
hopes, fears, desires, and our sense of right and wrong are simply things which
befall us. Not understanding how it is that we do not and can not see, keeps us
asleep. As Bob Dylan sung, "You got big dreams baby, but to dream you know
you got to be asleep." But how to change things?

Gurdjieff spent his entire life in the constant creation of means to accomplish
awakening. Accordingly, the Gurdjieffian tradition holds that one can learn
through the proper use of attention that one is asleep. The first step is to begin by
observing the mostly neurotic and aimless character of our every action, thought
or feeling. With that observation we realize that there is little that we can lay claim
to call our own life. Our attention is captured by inner and outer identifications
that are almost exclusively a product of acculturation on the one hand and our
primitive biology on the other. But attention, or more precisely attending, seems
to neutralize 'sleep.' It is not unlike modern physics wherein the act of
observation changes the experiment, in our lives attention to our mechanicalness
'wakes' it up. And it must be noted that the effects of moments of awakening, of
'shocks' to the sleeping individual can have effects upon them not predictable
from their previous personal history. One's personal psychology can remain
intact and unchanged. It doesn't matter. What matters is that one develop the
wish to search for Truth.

To encounter Gurdjieff and to grapple with his ideas makes one able to more fully
appreciate their import upon Moshe. Gurdjieff's voice can be heard in the
following passages from Awareness Through Movement,: "If it is true that
 28

instincts come to us as a matter of inheritance, just as awareness is inherited,

then it will be preferable to perfect our awareness rather than to suppress the
animal that is in us. Awareness is the highest stage in man's development, and
when it is complete it maintains a harmonious 'rule' over the body's activities.
When an individual is strong, so are his passions, and his ability and vitality are
on the same scale. It is impossible to suppress these prime movers without
reducing his total potential. The improvement of awareness is preferable to any
attempt to overcome instinctive drives. For the more nearly complete a man's
awareness becomes, the more he will be able to satisfy his passions without
infringing on the supremacy of awareness. And every action will have become
more human."(Awareness Through Movement, pgs. 172-3) And, "...the degree of
awareness differs greatly between different individuals, far more than the relative
distribution of other faculties. Further, there are also great periodic variations in
the individual's awareness and its value relative to other aspects of his
personality. There may be a low point at which awareness may disappear
momentarily or for a period. More rarely there may be a high point at which there
is a harmonious unity, with all man's faculties fused into a single whole." In those
moments one, "...grasps that his small world and the great world around are but
one and that in this unity he is no longer alone."(Awareness Through Movement,
pgs. 53-4)

To take to heart Moshe's reminder that ease of movement, gracefulness, better

posture, etc., i.e., the effects of lessons, are trivial begs the question, "Trivial next
to what?" By juxtaposing Moshe Feldenkrais and G.I. Gurdjieff we can get hints
about the role of the non-trivial, or the miraculous in Gurdjieff's sense, in our
Method.
 29

MENTAL FURNITURE #8



Darwinian Evolution

©1997 Dennis Leri


In his introduction to Darwin's The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals
Konrad Lorenz has this to say: "...Jacob von Uexkull once said rather
pessimistically that today's truth was, after all, nothing but the error of tomorrow.
Thereupon... Otto Koehler answered, 'No the truth of today is the special case of
tomorrow!'... This second statement contains a very much deeper truth. In
science, and particularly in biology, the discoverer of a new explanatory principle
is more than apt to overrate the range of its applicability. ...One may indulgently
regard this little weakness as the well-merited prerogative of genius, because the
great man's pupils, though lesser discovers, are apt to be better at verification
than their inspired teacher and can be relied upon to clip the wings of his genius
when it threatens to soar too high. It is only when the pupils degenerate into
disciples who unquestioningly accept the far sweeping statements of their master
that danger arises, and a newly born epistemophagus (knowledge-devouring)
monster, another 'ism' rears its ugly head."

"However, the greatest of all discoverers in the field of biology did not commit the
error just discussed: when Charles Darwin discovered natural selection, the
explanatory principle that was destined to change our outlook on man and the
world more than any other before it, he decidedly did not overestimate the
number of phenomena that could be explained on its basis. If anything, he erred
on the side of understatement.... Like all really great scientific discoverers,
Darwin possessed an almost uncanny ability to reason on the basis of
hypotheses which were not only provisional and vague but subconscious. He
deduced correct consequences from facts more suspected than known, and
verified both the theory and the facts by the obvious truth of the conclusions thus
reached. In other words, a man like Darwin knows more than he thinks he knows,
and it is not surprising that the consequences of his knowledge reach far and in
different directions."

"Behavior patterns are just as conservatively and reliably characters of the

species as are the forms of bones, teeth, or any other bodily structures.
Similarities in inherited behavior unite the members of a species, of a genus, and
of even the largest taxonomic units in exactly the same way in which bodily
characters do so. The conservative persistence of behavior patterns, even after
they have outlived, in the evolution of a species, their original function is exactly
the same as that of organs... The adaptation of the behavior patterns of and
organism to its environment is achieved in exactly the same manner as that of its
organs, that is to say on the basis of information which the species has gained in
the course of its evolution by the age-old method of mutation and selection. This
 30

is true not only for the relatively rigid patterns of form or behavior, but also for the
complicated mechanisms of adaptive modification, among which are those
generally assumed under the concept of learning."

One of the underpinnings of Moshe's concept of learning how to learn is the

notion of organic learning. Essential to organic learning is the theory of evolution.
Not just any old evolutionary theory but Darwin's. Evolution as conceived of by
Darwin is one of the most powerful theories in the history of science and Western
thought. It is also one of the most misunderstood theories. Take the phrase
"survival of the fittest." Some suppose that it summarizes evolutionary theory. It
does not. The phrase is both incomplete and misleading. The idea that evolution
is progressive, that present life forms are improvements over earlier forms, is
also a misinterpretation. Another common error in characterizing evolutionary
theory is that organisms can be arranged on an evolutionary ladder from bacteria
to man.

The more orthodox definition of evolution is as a change in the gene pool of a

population over time. The gene pool is the set of all genes in a species or
population. The English moth, Biston betularia, is a frequently cited example of
observed evolution. In 19th century industrial England, rare black variants spread
through this moth population as a result of their habitat becoming darkened by
soot from factories. Birds could see the lighter colored moths more readily and
ate more of them. The moth population changed from mostly light colored moths
to mostly dark colored moths. Since their color was determined by a single gene,
the change in frequency of dark colored moths represented a change in the gene
pool. This change was, by definition, evolution.

Evolution is often characterized as either 'microevolution' as with the moths

above or "macroevolution" when referring to larger changes (such as the
emergence of a new species) taking place over longer periods of time.
Macroevolution is cumulative microevolution. In defining evolution as a change in
the gene pool it means that evolution is a population level phenomena. Therefore,
only groups of organisms evolve. Individual organisms do not evolve.
Evolutionarily stated, it is necessary to view populations as collections of
individuals with different traits. For example, as the frequency of black moths
increased, the "average" moth did not get progressively darker. There were never
any "average" half-white/half-black moths in the population.

Evolution is often equated with morphological change, i.e. organisms changing

shape and/or size over time. An example would be a dinosaur species evolving
into a species of bird. It is important to note that evolution is often accompanied
by morphological change, but this need not be the case. Evolution can occur
without morphological change; and morphological change can occur without
evolution. That humans are larger now than in the past is not an example of
 31

evolutionary change. Better diet and medicine brought about this change. The
gene pool did not change -- only its manifestation did.

An organism's phenotype -- comprised by its morphological, physiological,

biochemical, behavioral and other properties -- is determined by its genes and its
environment. Phenotypic changes induced solely by changes in environment do
not count as evolution because they are not heritable; in other words, the change
is not passed on to the organism's offspring. The fundamental error of
Lamarckian evolution was to assume that learned characteristics could be
passed on. Most changes due to environment are fairly subtle (e.g. size
differences). Large scale phenotypic changes (such as dinosaur to bird) are
obviously due to genetic changes, and therefore are evolution.

Evolution is not progress. Organisms simply adapt to their current surroundings

and do not necessarily become "better" over time. Gregory Bateson called it
survival of "the fit" rather than of "the fittest." A trait or strategy that is successful
at one time may be deleterious at another. Studies in yeast have shown that
"more evolved" strains of yeast can be competitively inferior to "less evolved"
strains. An organism's success depends a great deal on the behavior of its
contemporaries; for most traits or behaviors there is likely no optimal design or
strategy, only contingent ones. Bio-epistemologist Francisco Varela prefers the
notion 'viable' to that of 'optimal' when specifying the ongoing fit of organism to
environment and environment to organism.

How does evolution work? If evolution is a change in the gene pool; what causes
the gene pool to change? Several mechanisms can change a gene pool, among
them: natural selection, genetic drift, gene flow, mutation and recombination. It is
important to understand the difference between evolution and the mechanisms
that bring about this change. Why? Because while the fact of evolution is not in
question, the processes bringing it about are not all clearly understood. Bringing
about a change in the gene pool assumes that there is genetic variation in the
population to begin with, or a way to generate it. Genetic variation is "grist for the
evolutionary mill." For example, if there were no dark moths, the population could
not have evolved from mostly light to mostly dark. In order for continuing
evolution there must be mechanisms to increase or create genetic variation (e.g.
mutation) and mechanisms to decrease it (e.g. natural selection and genetic drift).

Natural selection is the only mechanism of adaptive evolution; it is defined as

differential reproductive success of pre-existing classes of genetic variants in the
gene pool. In other words, the genetic constitution of some individuals are (on
average) better than others at contributing their genetic variations to the next
generation's gene pool. Selection is not a force in the sense that gravity or
magnetism is no matter how often some biologists speak of it that way. Selection
is not a guided or cognizant entity; it is simply an effect. Darwin stated the case
 32

originally that it was 'as if there were a natural selection, comparable in its
separating effect to the artificial selection a farmer makes of the varieties that
interest him. Darwin himself was quite clear in his metaphoric use of the term
selection. There is in the theory of evolution no need for the environment to play
the role of 'selector.' When supplied with genetic variation, natural selection
allows organisms to adapt to their current environment and their environments to
them. It does not, however, have any foresight. Structures or behaviors do not
evolve for future utility. An organism must be, to some degree, adapted to its
environment at each stage of its evolution. As the environment changes, new
traits (new combinations of genetic variation) may be selected for. As an
organism changes it modifies its environment. Large changes in populations are
the result of cumulative natural selection -- numerous small changes are
introduced into the population by mutation; the small minority of these changes
that result in a greater reproductive output of their bearers are amplified in
frequency by selection.

Natural selection works at the level of the individual. In the example I gave earlier,
dark colored moths had higher reproductive success because light colored moths
suffered a higher predation rate. The decline of light colored genetic variants was
caused by light colored individuals being removed from the gene pool (selected
against). It is the individual organism that either reproduces or fails to reproduce.
Genes are not the unit of selection (because their success depends on the
organism's other genes as well); neither are groups of organisms a unit of
selection. There are some exceptions to this 'rule.' The individual organism
reproduces or fails to reproduce. It competes primarily with others of it own
species for its reproductive success. Natural selection does not necessarily
produce individually optimal structures or behaviors. Selection targets the
organism as a whole, not individual traits. So, specific traits are not optimized, but
rather combinations of traits. In addition, natural selection may not necessarily
even select for the most optimal set of traits.

Other important mechanisms of evolution are genetic drift, mutation,

recombination and gene flow. They are worth looking into. The main thing to
remember is that evolution is not progress. Evolution should not be represented
as a series of improvements from simple cells, through more complex life forms,
to humans (the pinnacle of evolution). Modern biologists hold that all species
have descended from a common ancestor. As time went on, different lineages of
organisms were modified with descent to adapt to their environments. Thus,
evolution is best viewed as a branching tree or bush, with the tips of each branch
representing currently living species. No living organisms today are our ancestors.
Every living species is as fully modern as we are with its own unique evolutionary
history. No extant species are "lower life forms," atavistic stepping stones paving
the road to humanity. A related, and common, fallacy about evolution is that
humans evolved from living species of apes. This is not the case -- humans and
 33

apes share a common ancestor. Both humans and living apes are fully modern
species; the ancestor we evolved from is now extinct and was not the same as
present day apes (or humans for that matter). Our closest relatives are the
chimpanzee and the pygmy chimp. Evolution is still occurring through the
mechanisms listed above; all organisms and their surroundings are co-evolving.

The theory of evolution is what unifies all of biology. Evolutionary biologists can
provide an elegant answer to the question, "How did we human beings get
here?" Evolutionary theory distinguishes and differentiates between an
individual's personal history (ontogeny) and her or his impersonal species history
(phylogeny). The difference between the ontogenetic and the phylogenetic is the
difference that makes a difference in Feldenkrais' profound approach to learning.
The very notion of 'function,' as used by Feldenkrais, binds together the biological
means of organismic viability with new instances for a fuller realization of one's
potential. We individuate in the time allotted to each of us against the backdrop of
the broad expanse of evolutionary time. By utilizing the distinction between
phylogenetic and ontogenetic patterns of behavior we can use the former to
influence and change the latter. Borrowing from Lorenz's introduction we can say
Moshe Feldenkrais did not overestimate the breadth of application of his ideas
and, if anything, he erred on the side of understatement. Moshe knew more than
he thought he knew, and it is not surprising that the consequences of his
knowledge reach far and in different directions.

References: 
Mind and Nature & Steps to an Ecology of Mind -- Gregory

Bateson; 
The Tree of Knowledge -- Maturana and Varela; What is Life? --
Margulis and Sagan; anything by Stephen J. Gould; Evolution sites on the
Internet; and Darwin's own work.
 34

MENTAL FURNITURE #9



Engineering

©1997 Dennis Leri


"There's no success like failure and failure is no success at all." Bob Dylan

"Life is trouble." Moshe Feldenkrais

There's probably no profession more misunderstood than engineering. The most

general description of the profession of engineering is "a field of study or activity
concerned with deliberate alteration or modification in some particular area." To
engineer is to, "Arrange, contrive, or bring about, especially artfully." (The New
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary) Moshe Feldenkrais was a very, very good
engineer.

I recommend for your reading pleasure the book To Engineer Is Human:The Role
of Failure in Successful Design by Henry Petroski. It's easy to read and you'll find
yourself underlining sections of the book as well as quoting stories and
anecdotes to your friends. Petroski says, "I believe...that the ideas of engineering
are in fact in our bones and part of our human nature and experience." and, "The
idea of design -- of making something that has not existed before -- is central to
engineering, and I take design and engineering to be virtually synonymous..." (To
Engineer, pg. xi) And then this, "I believe that the concept of failure... is central to
understanding engineering, for engineering design has as its first and foremost
object the obviation of failure. ...To understand what engineering is and what
engineers do is to understand how failures can happen and how they can
contribute more than successes to advance technology."(To Engineer, pg. xii)

Engineering does not share the objective of science which seeks to understand
and explain the given world. Nor is it that of art which, unfettered by the so-called
Laws of Nature, creates worlds at the limits of the Imagination. Although
engineering is most appreciated when science and art combine to make an
aesthetically pleasing creation, the objective of engineering is to create new
worlds out of the materials of this world and in obedience with its laws. While the
honeybee's honeycomb has had a changeless design for eons, human structures
are constantly changing and evolving. Human engineers develop new materials
that lend themselves to new designs and all this leads inevitably to new ways
that things can go wrong. Engineered things and systems (like irrigation canals)
came into being long before the pyramids. Now, engineering is evidenced in
virtually everything we know. The process of design differs greatly in its
application, use of materials and how to arrange them.

The birth of design process begins with ourselves. Petroski, "Indeed, just as we
 35

all have experienced the rudiments of artistic creativity in the childhood

masterpieces our parents were so proud of, so we all have experienced the
essence of structural engineering in our learning to balance first our bodies and
later our blocks in ever more ambitious positions. We have learned to endure the
most boring of cocktail parties without accident of either our bodies or our
glasses succumbing to the force of gravity, having long ago learned to crawl, to
sit up, and toddle among our tottering towers of blocks. If we could remember our
early efforts of ours to raise ourselves up among the towers of legs of our parents
and their friends, then we can begin to appreciate the task and the achievement
of engineers, whether they be called builders in Babylon or scientists in Los
Alamos. For all their efforts are to one end: to reassemble Nature into something
new, and above all to obviate failure in the effort." And, "...the history of
engineering... may be told in its failures as well as its triumphs. Success may be
grand, but disappointment can often teach us more." (To Engineer, pg. 8-9)

How can disappointment be a teacher? More directly, what means does an

engineer employ to learn from mistakes and failures? Before going directly to
those questions it will behoove us to consider them in the light of our own
engineering training. In a beautiful chapter entitled Falling Down Is Part of
Growing Up Petroski links together the elements of our apprenticeship with the
material world. He begins with our own developmental movements and extends
the consideration to all the things we have to bump up against, fall over, climb up
on or through, lift up and put down, and so on. He ties it together with the implicit
engineering education we get in fairy tales and nursery rhymes. There's: Jack
and Jill went up the hill /To fetch a pail of water; Three wise men of Gotham/Went
to sea in a bowl/If the vessel had been stronger/My song would have been
longer; Ring around the rosie/A pocket full of posies/Ashes, ashes/We all fall
down; and then there's Humpty Dumpty or The Story of the Three Pigs and the
Wolf who huffed and puffed and blew down two of the pigs' ill conceived houses.
And so many more. Petroski, "Our own bodies, the oral tradition of our language
and our nursery rhymes, our experiences with blocks and sand, all serve to
accustom us to the idea that structural failure is part of the human condition."(To
Engineer, pg. 19) In later childhood through our play we learn that there are limits
to the amount of abuse a toy can take. We learn how not to build a fortress. We
learn what is necessary to burn something we would rather cook. We also learn
how to improvise, to repair and to rebuild with a better idea as to the
requirements for greater success. Simply because we made them, we may even
come to cherish our makeshift toys and buildings more than those provided to us.

The overarching principle of design is "less is more." But how much less is "less"
and is it the reverse of "more" or is less something else? In other words, while
economics dictates that cheaper is better, safety dictates that one should only
take calculated risks. But when combining the ever changing characteristics of
materials and the progressive improvement of engineering principles one must
 36

expect the unforeseen. So, engineers always overbuild. They do so to take into
account most of what may be unforeseen. But accidents happen. And when they
do engineers have incredible tools, actual and conceptual, at their disposal to
analyze what went wrong. Failure analysis as it is called has as its aim to seek to
assemble the whole into something greater than the sum of its broken parts. The
investigators would cause Sherlock Holmes to be envious. "Finding the true
causes of failure often take as much of a leap of the analytical imagination as
original design concepts."(To Engineer, pg. 184) Recall physicist Richard
Feynman's elegantly simple analysis and explanation of the Shuttle disaster.
Feynman showed that while it was the rubber O-rings that were the material
cause, the actual cause was poor design and lack of project oversight. While it
may prove embarrassing to the designers of a failed project to have their failures
open to such scrutiny, the integrity of the profession demands that if there is a
cause (or causes) of failure then it must be found out and rectified in subsequent
designs. I was in Israel in 1979 when the Three Mile Island nuclear plant nearly
melted down. Moshe, who helped design Israel's nuclear power plants, said that
when the Israeli's built their plant, it was a combination of the best of French,
English, German, Russian and American designs. He said that there were
numerous arguments as to how to best build a safe plant. The problem that
occurred at Three Mile Island was predicted by the Israeli designers. They built
theirs differently.

Engineering design shares certain characteristics with the positing of scientific

theories. Scientists hypothesize about the behavior of our given universe,
whether atoms, honeybees or planets, while engineers hypothesize about
assemblages of concrete and steel that they arrange into a world of their own
making. Although we may not realize it, our belief that all honeycombs have a
hexagonal shape, or that the Sun will rise every morning in the East are not
incontrovertible facts but hypotheses. While much is made of the notion of
scientific hypothesis, at its heart it is guessing. It may be very educated guessing
but it is guessing nevertheless. Hypotheses in engineering, rather than testable
conjectures about the Universe, are constructions testable by how well they
perform the functions they were designed for. While we point to buildings, bridges,
electronic gadgets and jets as obvious products of the engineering mind virtually
everything in our human world has some amount of design science in it.

Bridges are amongst the most beautiful and recognizable of human creations.
They are designed to span a river, a gorge, some sort of gap. They connect
something not previously connected. Or, they connect in new ways some things
already connected. They allow movement usually in two directions. As beautiful
as the Golden Gate bridge is in itself, of equal beauty is the view it allows while
serving its function to connect San Francisco to Marin County. And since they
establish new connections or reconnect old things in new ways, why not think of
an ATM lesson as a bridge? As design structures ATM lessons fulfill the criterion
 37

of less is more. And the process one enters into doing an ATM lesson gives us a
very tangible experience of less is more. By design, lesson structure and function
contribute to an understanding of human structure and function. Our
interpretations of a lesson instruction are our best guesses, our own hypotheses,
as how to best proceed. Embedded in the lesson, and in fact one to the things to
be rediscovered by the student, is how to 'remember' the best guesses of our
ancestors or our own personal history. Through a recollection and a reshuffling of
our impersonal phylogenetic adaptations and our own personal ontogenetic
learnings we can recreate ourselves. ATM lessons are designed to give us a
sense of the narrowness of our understanding while at the same time putting that
narrowness on a very broad species specific sensory motoric base. Our
'narrowness' and our sense of limitation are learned and as such they can be
relearned or unlearned. When our guesses fail us we are provided with the
impetus to learn. But that impetus must be given direction through the careful
design that underlies the best ATM and FI lessons. Our self generated
constructions act as our bridge from old outworn habits to new behaviors.
Disappointment can be a profound teacher if we have the means to reassemble
our experience in new and fresh ways.

Someday someone will recognize Feldenkrais for the genius of his design
science. In the pursuit of human development, understanding and awareness
certainly Moshe Feldenkrais and his method are well recognized. But recognition
for how a lesson "lessons" is still long overdue. For example, the reversal of
proximal and distal, so ubiquitous in lessons is an idea or intuition that would
occur to an engineer but not to a biologist, psychologist, or anthropologist. The
bridge that supports us as we travel over it can be used without understanding
how it was built. But, while we can use a bridge or a lesson and not know who
built or how, it never-the-less was engineered by an engineer. If design is making
something that has never existed before to exist and given that ATM and FI
lessons never existed before, then certainly Moshe was a designer.
 38

MENTAL FURNITURE #10



The Fechner Weber Principle


©1997 Dennis Leri


WEBER-FECHNER PRINCIPLE: An approximate psychological law relating the

degree of response or sensation of a sense organ and the intensity of the
stimulus. The law asserts that equal increments of sensation are associated with
equal increments of the logarithm of the stimulus, or that the just noticeable
difference in any sensation results from a change in the stimulus which bears a
constant ratio to the value of the stimulus.

In the bright midday sun you light a candle. Does anyone notice it getting
brighter? Will you identify my voice if I call you on your cellular phone at a rock
concert? You're carrying the downside of a refrigerator up a flight of stairs and
someone puts a hammer on the fridge, do you sense the difference? Mostly, the
Fechner Weber Principle or Law holds that you won't notice a difference. Moshe
Feldenkrais invoked the Fechner Weber Law in discussing the necessity of
reducing effort while learning. The Fechner Weber principle marked the
beginning of the science of psychophysiology and yet all its implications have not
been played out in that field.

Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795-1878) was the German anatomist and physiologist
who first introduced the concept of the just-noticeable difference, that is, the
smallest difference perceivable between two similar stimuli. Weber was a
professor at the University of Leipzig from 1818 until 1871. He is known chiefly
for his work on sensory response to weight, temperature, and pressure; he
described a number of his experiments in this area in De Tactu
(1834;"Concerning Touch"). Weber determined that there was a threshold of
sensation that must be passed before an increase in the intensity of any stimulus
could be detected; the amount of increase necessary to create sensation was the
just-noticeable difference. He further observed that the difference was a ratio of
the total intensity of sensation, rather than an absolute figure; thus, a greater
weight must be added to a 100-pound load than to a 10-pound load for a man
carrying the load to notice the change. Similar observations were made on other
senses, including sight and hearing. Weber also described a terminal threshold
for all senses, the maximum stimulus beyond which no further sensation could be
registered.

Weber's findings were elaborated in Der Tastsinn und das Gemeingefühl(1851;

"The Sense of Touch and the Common Sensibility"), which was considered to be
"the foundation stone of experimental psychology." Weber's empirical
observations were expressed mathematically by Gustav Theodor Fechner, who
called his formulation Weber's law.
 39

Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887) was a German physicist and philosopher

and a key figure in the founding of psychophysics, the science concerned with
quantitative relations between sensations and the stimuli producing them. At the
age of 16 he enrolled in medicine at the University of Leipzig where he studied
anatomy under Weber. No sooner had he received his medical degree, however,
than his interest began to shift toward physics and mathematics.

Fechner's psychological interests began to manifest themselves toward the end

of the 1830's in papers on the perception of complementary and subjective colors.
In 1840, the year in which an article on subjective afterimages appeared,
Fechner suffered a nervous collapse. Exacerbated by a painful injury to the eyes
sustained while gazing at the sun during his research, Fechner's ailment
manifested itself in temporary blindness and prostration. He resigned his position
at Leipzig and went into a lengthy period of virtual seclusion during which his
interests turned increasingly toward metaphysics. In 1848, the year of his return
to the University as Professor of Philosophy, he completed Nanna, a
metaphysical treatise that contains his first explicit, philosophical treatment of the
problem of the relationship of mind to body.

In Nanna, and in the more important Zend-Avesta (1851), Fechner sketched out
a dual-aspect, monistic, pan-psychical mind/body view. In a famous metaphor
Fechner likened the universe, which is at one and the same time both active
consciousness and inert matter, to a curve that can be regarded from one point
of view as convex and from another as concave yet still retains its essential
integrity. In line with this approach to mind/body, Fechner laid out a future
program for psychophysics -- to demonstrate the unity of mind and body
empirically by relating increase in bodily energy to corresponding increase in
mental intensity.

Between 1851 and 1860, Fechner worked out the rationale for measuring
sensation indirectly in terms of the unit of just noticeable difference between two
sensations, developed his three basic psychophysical methods (just noticeable
differences, right and wrong cases, and average error) and carried out the
classical experiments on tactual and visual distance, visual brightness, and lifted
weights that formed a large part of the first of the two volumes of the Elemente
der Psychophysik. Fechner's aim in the Elementewas to establish an exact
science of the functional relationship between physical and mental phenomena.
Distinguishing between inner (the relation between sensation and nerve
excitation) and outer (the relation between sensation and physical stimulation)
psychophysics, Fechner formulated his famous principle that the intensity of a
sensation increases as the log of the stimulus (S = k log R) to characterize outer
psychophysical relations. In doing so, he believed that he had arrived at a way of
demonstrating a fundamental philosophical truth: mind and matter are simply
 40

different ways of conceiving of one and the same reality.

While the philosophical message of the Elemente was largely ignored, its
methodological and empirical contributions were not. Fechner may have set out
to counter materialist metaphysics; but he was a well-trained, systematic
experimentalist and a competent mathematician and the impact of his work on
scientists was scientific rather than metaphysical. He combined methodological
innovation in measurement with careful experimentation. Mental events could,
Fechner showed, not only be measured, but measured in terms of their
relationship to physical events. In achieving this milestone, Fechner
demonstrated the potential for quantitative, experimental exploration of the
phenomenology of sensory experience and established psychophysics as one of
the core methods of the newly emerging scientific psychology. Later research
has shown, however, that Fechner's equation is applicable within the mid range
of stimulus intensity and then holds only approximately true.

He later delved into experimental aesthetics and sought to determine by actual

measurements which shapes and dimensions are most aesthetically pleasing.
He was also a proponent of panpsychism (from Greek pan, 'all'; psyche, 'soul'), a
philosophical theory asserting that a plurality of separate and distinct psychic
beings or minds constitute reality. Panpsychism is distinguished from hylozoism
(all matter is living) and pantheism (everything is God). For Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz, the 17th-century German philosopher and a typical panpsychist, the
world is composed of atoms of energy that are psychic. These monads have
different levels of consciousness: in inorganic reality they are sleeping, in animals
they are dreaming, in human beings they are waking; God is the fully conscious
monad.

In 19th-century Germany, Arthur Schopenhauer asserted that the inner nature of

all things is will -- a panpsychistic thesis. And Gustav Theodor Fechner, the
founder of experimental psychology and an ardent defender of panpsychism,
contended that even trees are sentient and conscious. In the United States,
Josiah Royce, an absolute idealist, not only followed Fechner in affirming that
heavenly bodies have souls but also adopted a unique theory that each species
of animal is a single conscious individual -- incorporating into itself the individual
souls of each of its members.

So, now we are able to place the Fechner Weber Principle in its proper historical
context. While the metaphysical implications of the principle were important to
Fechner, its impact on his contemporaries was decidedly methodological. We
can appreciate it as the first attempt to scientifically coalesce or imbricate the
material and the mental. Specifying just noticeable differences in any sensation,
that is, heavier, brighter, louder to be the result of a change in a stimulus bearing
a constant ratio to the value of the stimulus the Fechner Weber Principle relates
 41

quantities to qualities. The Feldenkrais Method raises the question, when

contemplating the Fechner Weber principle, just how is it that we can lower the
background stimulation to enable us to detect just noticeable differences at lower
thresholds. While learning with reduced effort is its own reward, somehow the
different strata of our experience are reconfigured via a Feldenkrais lesson. In
reconfiguring previous configurations we are face to face, so to speak, with the
most intimate dynamical machinations of habit.

We know from our reading of Piaget that as we act so we sense, or even that
action is cognition. Our experience, being grounded in the sensory motor
substrate, is plastic and amenable to great variation. Sensory motoric operations
are grounded in evolutionary processes. The habits of the species, the so called
phylogenetic learnings and learning processes, make it possible to sequence and
stratify our actions so that we can maintain sentience and participate in
acculturation. The habits of a culture as enacted by each of us are the so called
ontogenetic learnings. All the contingencies of life -- diet, locale, ancestors, etc. --
impact our personal history. Our personal history is encoded in the
temporalizations and spatializations signified by what we attend to and what we
can attend to. We live in the textures of the upsurge of phenomenal existence.
The generic possibilities of bright or dark, hot or cold, wet or dry, smooth or rough,
sudden or slow and so on are instantiated in the unexpected reflection of the sun
in a window, the coolness of the morning fog, the dryness of the flour diminishing
as it changes to dough and so on. Sensing differences is a function of the
intensity of a stimulus relative to the intensity of the ongoing level of stimulation.
Interpreting those differences makes them meaningful. No differences, no
meaning.

By design, a Feldenkrais lesson evokes the archaic phylogenetic dynamics of

organic learning. Those species specific processes are, in our personal history,
often poorly integrated and socialized. Lessons resocialize them. By intelligently
reshuffling the phylogenetic and the ontogenetic we can do more with less effort.
We reset the change point at which we can detect just noticeable differences.
New distinctions can be drawn because of newly differentiated sensory motoric
operations. Our attention is drawn to different differences. Thresholds below
which we perceive nothing and above which perceive something are shifted.

If philosophers forever ponder the question "Why is there something rather than
nothing?" thinkers and researchers from Weber to Fechner to Moshe Feldenkrais
have begun to ask and answer the question "How there is something rather than
nothing?" In-habiting the world means living in it. A habitat is a house. The
Fechner Weber Principle is a habit our species uses to live in this world. The
various set points of background stimulation to emergent percept are established
by us as learned habits. As Feldenkrais practitioners we can, through the means
at our disposal, use our species specific set of habits to reorganize our socially
 42

acquired habits. Learning is habit forming.

 43

MENTAL FURNITURE #11



The Last Scientist and ...


©1997 Dennis Leri



"All the King's horses and all the King's men could not put Humpty-Dumpty back
together again."

In the Mental Furniture articles I've endeavored to portray Moshe as a thinker as

well as a doer. Our own studies of the Feldenkrais Method can be furthered by
some familiarity with those domains and disciplines Moshe studied and mastered.
In Moshe's writings and talks we find him mixing together practical, concrete
lessons with broad claims for their benefits to humanity. Not mentioned are the
strata sandwiched between the practical lessons and the universal claims. In our
investigations into Moshe's professional and avocational pursuits, his "mental
furniture," we encounter the kinds of generalizations, abstractions, logics of
reasoning that are the "scaffolding" used to create "learning how to learn"
situations. We can only marvel at the leap of imagination it took to go from what
was known and believed about learning and human functioning to the artifacts we
now call ATM and FI lessons. In no way will a thorough critical look at the
underpinnings of the Feldenkrais Method, at Moshe's influences, and at the work
itself not reward the person undertaking it. The path of inquiry is laid down by
following one's own interest.

We are poised to enter the next millennium. We can predict, with no fear of being
proved wrong, that whatever this century has seen in terms of change will pale in
comparison to what's in store for the next hundred years. For our own tumultuous
era, the image of an Einstein can be taken to represent the personification of
genius. In the future maybe Moshe Feldenkrais will come to have a similar
stature, not as a scientist, but as the last of that breed and the first of another.
Before I make that case, I want to begin with the first scientist: Galileo.

While many great thinkers preceded Galileo, he was the first modern scientist. To
Galileo, the book of Nature was written in the language of mathematics. Many
before him had used mathematics, especially geometry, to investigate the natural
world. Galileo made the unseen world of mathematics the means of investigating,
measuring and interpreting the sensible world. He also brought something new
and different to the table: thought experiments. The elegance of his thought
experiments plus an ability to charm and persuade made him compelling. Galileo
convinced others of a way to organize thought and perform experiments that
yielded truths at once both universal and amenable to change and further
generalization. His persuasiveness got him convicted of heresy while his charm
kept him from getting executed.
 44

The popular image of Galileo is of his dropping objects from the Leaning Tower
of Pisa to prove objects fall at the same rate of acceleration. It probably never
happened. His actual experimentation was brilliantly conceived and executed.
More important was his utilization of thought experiment. Galileo, in a thought
experiment, imagined two objects falling through a vacuum at the same rate. No
such vacuum existed until some sixty to eighty years after Galileo thought it into
existence. And, of course, when put to the actual test objects fell as Galileo
imagined. By his own admission, the thought experiments Einstein constructed to
develop his notion of Relativity owe much to Galileo.

In imagining objects falling through empty space Galileo had to disregard the
world as he and others knew and intuited it. Neither he, nor anyone else, has
ever experienced on this Earth a feather and a cannonball falling at the same
rate except in a carefully constructed environment. Galileo had to factor out the
persuasive evidence of his senses which were part and parcel with the
sensibilities of the then prevalent world view. The doubting of appearances is the
basis for the notion that science is counter-intuitive. Color, temperature, smell,
taste and texture have no relationship to considerations of mass and motion as
mathematical and theoretical constructs. They are irrelevant. After factoring out
the evidence before us and by considering the laws of motion, the motion of
objects can be reconsidered. Knowing that objects are drawn to the Earth (as an
example of gravitational attraction) at the same rate allows one to account for
why in our observations they do not: wind resistance, friction, etc. Newton
formalized Galileo ideas and actually to some degree limited them. Einstein gives
credit to Galileo for the idea of Relativity, a possibility Newton missed. Galileo
reduced the explanation of so much of the phenomenal world to principles that
the notion of reductionism began with him and flourished with Newton.

Jump ahead a few hundred years and look in on a young Russian born Jew --
Palestine emigrant, French university educated, Judo trained, lab assistant to
Joilet-Curie -- living in London working for the British Admiralty during WWII.
Picture Galileo as the bookend at the beginning of science and Moshe the
bookend at science's end. At the end, that is, of a certain, pervasive, dominant
reductionistic practice of science. Moshe realized that for human life to come to
life it must regain it's senses. Moshe was fond of saying that any abstract thought
deserving of the name thought could be shown to have it's basis in the
phenomenal world. There should be 'instances,' that is, specific embodiments of
thoughts for every general notion. When he personally really needed it, all his
scientific understanding and all his practical experience in Judo and other
domains did not enable him to place himself fully in the human world. Something
else was needed.

Rene Thom, the mathematician, biologist and inventor of Catastrophe Theory,

has proposed that a Galilean world view is not appropriate to biological
 45

organisms. In fact, he says, responsiveness to differentials of heat and cold, light

and dark, wet and dry, smooth and rough, quickness and slowness, to name a
few, are essential to understanding how organisms work. Qualities are as
essential to biology as quantities are to physics. Qualities are potential and
generic. That is, the general possibility of experiencing hotness or coolness is
actualized in a particular incident of this coolness. What this coolness may mean
for me is how I use it to navigate my world. By again bringing in qualities we
situate the living being. Living beings, as they are sentient and seem to want to
remain so, require the ability to discriminate between relevant and irrelevant
qualities. Moshe used thought experiment to reverse the hundreds of years of
devaluation of the senses. His thought experiments reveal the limitations of
thought. Those limitations can be lifted by using the senses to flesh out the
thought. To steer one's actions by using the senses paradoxically one must first
inhibit an action. To hold back from action, to rehearse, to imagine, to do an
experiment mentally and then to observe the consequence in action: this is the
Feldenkrais Method on many levels at once.

How does one form an image of action to be performed? How does one
"remember" an action just done? How can one modify or alter the course of an
action while in it? How does an alterable action relate to or impact our behavior?
How can we question are own ignorance and not simply add to it? Why bother?
Knowing 'that' I do something is entirely different than knowing 'how' I do
something. Or is it? To know 'how' implies that I know the 'what' that I am doing.
How the 'what' is implicated in the 'how' is at the heart of the clarifying the notion
of awareness. Feldenkrais deconstructs the order of scientific reasoning. He uses
the thought experiment to end thought. That is, he uses thought experiments to
link thought with action and action with thought. Thought and action, both
alterable, both linked, are put at the service of constructing a life. Historically,
much of the linking of scientific thought to action has been in the service of
warfare. Galileo helped develop cannons. In Moshe's linking of thought with
action we have the means whereby we can stop waging war against ourselves.

In what Heinz von Foerster has called the shift from "observed systems" to
"observing systems" questions about the observer as well as the thing observed
get bumped into a whole new world of inquiry. 'Observing' is not a thing but a way
of acting. And now, at the end of the millennia, it is respectable to hypothesize
enactment as knowing, cognition as action. Moshe anticipated this development
and left hundreds of constructs, i.e., ATM lessons, to deconstruct 'observing.' But,
in the end Moshe Feldenkrais was undone and redone by his realization that
human behavior is not only action, only thought, only feelings, or only sensations.
The very idea and image of a self is, when thoroughly reconnected to thought,
action, sensation and feeling, not a solid thing or an ephemeral nothing. It is but
the realization that, "In those moments when awareness succeeds... He grasps
that his small world and the great world around are but one and that in that unity
 46

he is no longer alone." (pg. 54 Awareness Through Movement)

If there is to be any Grand Unified Theory of Everything then there must be some
way to test those theories. I suggest that the tests already exist and that we are
waiting for the theory. Top thinkers from within science have asserted that the
current paradigm of science is at an end. When science turns the corner,
transforms itself, gives itself another name then perhaps the new Book of Nature
will be written in the language of sentient movement and enacted ways of
knowing. The science of "brute facts" discovered by a detached observer is
giving way to artifacts of knowing invented by the participation of engaged
observers.
 47

MENTAL FURNITURE #12


Speransky: A Basis for the Theory of Medicine


©1997 Dennis Leri



From Body and Mature Behaviour. "The most fundamental property of the
scientific method is that it always leads up to a point where only experiment, i.e.,
confronting theory with reality, gives weight to the true argument and then
discards the others that may have seemed equally or more plausible. It generally
brings to light phenomena that were considered trifling and unimportant.”

"We are not surprised to find that we know in fact very little of the properties of
the nervous tissue, and discover with Speransky and his school many
unexpected phenomena. For instance, the body reacts physiologically almost as
a fundamentally new entity after certain irritations of the nervous tissue. (Body
and Mature Behaviour, 4-5)

"[Speransky] has built a theory of medicine on these premises, namely, that the
reaction depends on the sum of irritations of the system preceding it; the nervous
system reacts as a new entity after each irritation. (Body and Mature Behaviour,
26)

"One thing seems to be established beyond doubt, namely, that the previous
history of a particular nervous system, i.e., the kind of irritations it has actually
undergone, has the most profound influence on its biological properties. ... Owing
to the unique capacity of man to form new responses, the kind of irritations to
which every nervous system is submitted, varies from individual to individual. The
responses of each nervous system are therefore different even to identical
physical, chemical, or any other stimuli. Closer scrutiny throws singular light on
human nature and behaviour." (Body and Mature Behaviour, 157)

New theories about the nature of life, the nature of the universe, and the nature of
consciousness can be found everywhere. Each new theory proclaims itself to
explain nearly everything and thereby to constitute a new world view or paradigm.
New paradigms -- Buddy, can you paradigm? -- are de rigueur. The new
paradigms rely on the mathematics of non-linear dynamics to describe the
surprising, sudden and seemingly a-causal qualitative shifts in a system. Non-
linear dynamics are the basis for Chaos theory, Catastrophe theory, complexity
theory, fractals, strange attractors, neural Darwinism, autopoiesis, etc. It is seen
as the key to understanding the spontaneous emergence of qualitative different
processes, properties and forms in living and non-living systems. The various
theories deal with how life or some part of it came about and what it is. Some of
the hottest new theories concern the notion of self-organizing systems. By
appealing to the notion of self-organization the conditions for the emergence of
 48

life forms and their temporal existence can now be specified. For example, the
Santiago School of NeuroEpistemology and its proponents Varela, Maturana and
von Foerster have given us the notion of autopoiesis, self-making, to describe the
realization of a living entity on its own terms. Autopoiesis specifies the way an
organism is bounded and how that boundedness can maintain itself in relation to
a medium (the milieu in which it appears). Their rigorous description of the
character of any living entity and its relationship to other entities has shifted the
primary emphasis away from the species as the engine driving evolution and
onto the individual. In older evolutionary theories individuals were seen as
dispensable to the greater good of the species. In autopoietic theory, individuals
are not dispensable but central to evolution.

If an individual and its behavior are so important then surely there must be some
post-modern notion of what constitutes a state of health and a state of pathology
for any individual. But, here we see that modernity and post-modernity are
woefully deficient in producing such notions. Consciousness, normal or altered, is
explained without reference to the well being of individuals. Edelman's neural
Darwinism, for example, explains the plumbing and wiring of consciousness and
the importance of the nervous system in its particular relationship to the organism
yet deals not at all with what it means to live a life, a particular life, your life or
mine. But to find someone who poses questions related to defining health and
pathology, who looks to study those actions constitutive of a healthy mind and
body we must go to early part of the 20th century.

Moshe Feldenkrais often spoke with admiration about Russian researcher and
theorist A.D. Speransky. When reading Speransky's book one is initially faced
with grim, gruesome and grizzly accounts of experiments that nearly all have the
same result: the test animal dies. Animals have their brains chopped up, frozen,
and traumatized in all sorts of ingenious ways. Pages and pages of slightly
differing experiments are catalogued. But, the grim task of reading becomes a
sort of detective story of ever increasing interest. We travel back in time to
Russia in the Twenties and Thirties. Hard questions about pathology and health
were being asked and put to the test. Numerous twists and turns along the way
led to some very startling propositions being put forth.

In one series of tests dogs are given morphine and after the morphine takes
effect portions of their brains are frozen. After the morphine wears off the dogs'
health cascades downwards in stages that mimic epilepsy. But, freeze the brain
without morphine and the dogs pretty much recover just fine. Is the morphine a
shock to the system? The animal recovers when morphine is given at the same
time as the freezing or nearly so. Is time a factor? Give morphine long enough
after the freezing to constitute it as a separate perturbation and the same results
are obtained as when the morphine is given before the freezing: the animal falls
into a horrible, seizure punctuated decline into coma and death. So, the system
 49

recovers from one shock but not two. And, the system that succumbs is a
different system from the one that recovers. Smudgy Karma aside, the
experiments give rise to serious questions about the nature of health, of
pathology, and the role of the nervous system in all functions of an organism.

The question "What is pathology?" Speransky says, is as unanswered as the

question "What is health?" Theories from physiology, biology and other sciences
relating as they do to organismic functioning are not theories of health or
pathology. Medicine has no theory, or rather it has many theories borrowed from
other disciplines. Either way the result is the same. Ten years or so ago I heard
an esteemed lecturer say the same thing at a U.C. Medical School lecture.
Medicine as an art is a lot older than what we now call the scientific method.
Empirically proven medical approaches whether allopathic, homeopathic,
acupuncture or herbal, no matter how effective, have no theory in the modern
sense. That is not to say they're not systematic or even logical, but only that the
bases for their successes are without theoretical foundation.

From Speransky's A Basis for the Theory of Medicine: "..Disease was never
looked upon as an independent quality, as a special form of biological processes;
the starting point has always been formed by conceptions of a contrary nature.
Taking as an indicator one or more groups of complex reactions that go to make
up the conception of normality, disease was conceived as a distortion or
alteration of these conditions. From this, it was rightly concluded that to
understand a disease, it is necessary to know what is normal.”

"But we have also no suitable means of approaching the concept of normality. ...
We cannot define disease as the antithesis of health, since neither side of such a
medal bears any imprint.

"At the present stage of science, what has to be done is to look for the qualitative
distinguishing features within each of these conceptions. It seems to me, that as
far as disease in a complicated organism is concerned, we have succeeded in
solving the task. The form in which the nervous component of the pathological
processes makes its appearances does not occur under normal conditions. The
pathological conditions are characterized by new reactions. The presence of the
latter is evidence we are dealing with a real pathological process. Consequently,
it is neither the disharmony of phenomena existing in normality, nor the
disorganization of correlation in the functioning of separate parts of the organism,
that defines its pathological state, but the emergence of new qualitatively distinct
processes. The disorganization of correlations, disharmony, etc., are only a
consequence of these last.

"There is no doubt, of course, that the basis for the development of

neurodystrophic processes in the organism lies in the peculiarities of structure
 50

and function of the nervous system, i.e., in its physiological properties. But their
distortion creates, as it were, a new type of nervous activity, the appearance of
new reactions, not only unnecessary but directly harmful to the life of the
individual. Hence, the question is one, not of degree, but of form, in other words,
of qualitatively new biological phenomena."(198-9)

In Body and Mature Behaviour Moshe Feldenkrais takes Speransky's argument

concerning the domain of pathologies relating to poisons, viruses, bacteria or
physical trauma and extends it to the psycho-physical dynamics of human
individuation. Cannot we assume, he hypothesizes, that the pathologies of
everyday life, i.e., various neuroses, will follow the same dynamics laid out by
Speransky. And those dynamics are that the nervous system is really and truly
different in subsequent moments in time; that the same perturbation will affect the
system differently at different moments; that different perturbations may yield the
same response; that pathologies are not health plus some disturbing agents but
self sustaining autonomous nervous system patterns; and that health being
undefined needs some examples to study, e.g., Yogis and Judo masters. What
means does Speransky employ that Feldenkrais builds upon?

For Speransky the problem begins with trying to find indicators of health or
pathology more subtle than whether the animal is dead or alive. He has data
galore but how is he to make sense of it? "... Analysis alone is not enough for
setting the data in order, for systematizing them and creating a working
hypothesis. Synthesis is required. ... Confusion in views does not depend on lack
of details. ...We have to define the principles which at the given moment are best
capable both of unifying the data..." (405, Theory of Medicine). To see the forest
above the trees, to seek a point of view from which to make evaluations
Speransky seeks to make the case for a unifying view by generalizing from his
data. How exactly are a black rabbit and a white rabbit different or a tall man and
a short one different? Appeals to blood chemistry, morphology or whatever
merely maintain the same statistical principles. At whatever scale there are
indicators meaningful to some discipline. But, taken together what do they
indicate about health or pathology? While there is no shortage of signs signifying
something to someone the essential nature and mechanisms of phenomena are
elusive unless the search takes a different path. Speransky, having disabled
answers and theories that lead nowhere new, finds hints in the questions he can
now ask. All the indicators in all the allied disciplines whether formal like
physiology and biology or methodological like clinical medicine intersect in being
related to an emerging image and concept of the nervous system.

Speransky's conceptual leap was practically arrived at through thoughtful

experiment. For a theory of medicine, to start with the central role of the nervous
system "makes it possible to give suitable arrangement to all other facts, to find
the proper place for each constituent and to determine the order of functioning of
 51

the separate parts." (401, Theory of Medicine) Speransky's characterization of

health and pathology as emergent self-perpetuating states anticipated much
theorizing now current. His thinking led to him being able to create pathological
states mimicking certain diseases. He was also able to demonstrate that
pathological states could be interrupted and health returned not fighting the
irritant but by changing the state.

For Moshe Feldenkrais, Speransky's hints at the interdependence of all

phenomenal indicators on nervous system functioning gave rise to his idea of
mature behavior. Such behavior is not constituted by any of the many external
indicators, e.g., societal or religious standards. Unique and dynamical patterns of
neurophysical action whether neurotic or potent make up behavior. Mature
behavior is that state of health that permits one to recover from the slings and
arrows of outrageous fortune as well as to form and live a vision of life on one's
own terms. A state of health is not achieved by treating parts of a system but by
effecting a global change of state which connects the world around one to the
world within one.

Source: http://semiophysics.com/SemioPhysics_Articles_mental_list.html