Wisdom from Without
It took a long time for me to get to this, but I recently watched the Netflix documentary My Octopus Teacher. The film was a poignant autobiographical video journal of a photographer, Craig Foster, and the relationship that developed between himself and an octopus.
A crucial thread that ran through the film were the various things that the octopus taught, through Foster’s observation of her activities as she went about her day. In one of the earlier commentaries, Foster made the fascinating point that came out of his own research into the common octopus.
It is generally known that octopi have high degrees of intelligence, due to their large brains. However, Foster made the comment that most of its cognitive activity does not occur there. Instead, said Foster, two-thirds of its cognition occurs in its body. In other words, with every movement of its arms and its propelling itself through the waters, the octopus is also thinking.
I found this little factoid fascinating, not the least because most of us, myself included, long perceived a sharp split between mind and body. Even when we get a hunch to the contrary, or even when we receive data to the contrary, we still tend to think of thinking as a mental activity, sectioned off from our bodies.
What helped me give voice to this hunch to the contrary was my reading, on and off, works by the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which has been masterfully summarised by Christopher Ben Simpson’s book Merleau-Ponty and Theology.
According to Simpson, Merleau-Ponty spoke of what the Germans call a lebenswelt, a lived world that resided beneath what we might take to be the factual world (12), the world measured out with our scientific instruments and stored in our conceptual minds. This lived world contains various layers of ordering, what Merleau-Ponty called the physiochemical “physical order”, the embodied “vital order” and the sociocultural “human order” (13).
The borders between each of these orders is a porous one since, according to Merleau Ponty, any living organism will exist in what he calls a “dialectic of living being and its biological milieu”, as well as a “dialectic of the social subject and its group”.
Furthermore, whilst there is a hierarchical relationship between the orders (from the physical moving up to the human), Merleau-Ponty nevertheless stressed that there is no surpassing one order into another, without leaving the former behind.
Put another way, even though we humans live within the human order, the various dialectics mentioned above mean that we do so with imprints of the physical as well as the vital orders within ourselves, in such a way that the first two, more primordial orders, shape the way we sculpt and move within our cultured order. The wisdom that emits from this higher order, therefore, is profoundly shaped by the first two, so much so that how we think and perceive are intertwined with how we move and have our being in the physical and the vital orders.
This is the reason why Merleau-Ponty uses the word “intervolve” to describe humanity’s being in the world. It is a being whose interiority (such as thought, perception etc) is worked within his or her exteriority in the world around him or her. This is why Merleau-Ponty says in one place that “the world and I are within one another”.
What this means in practice is that our physical environments, and our movements within them, have a profound impact on our interior life. This is no mere ramblings of a pomo hippie. It also has resonances going back as early as Thomas Aquinas, who once stated that the movements of one’s soul coincide with the dispositions of one’s body.
The pursuit of wisdom, therefore, cannot be the result of, like Descartes, removing oneself from the orders of creation. If Merleau-Ponty is right, the extent to which we do cut ourselves off from our exterior involvements is the extent to which we actually end up distorting, if not losing, our interiority.
On the flipside, if the life of the Christian is the pursuit of wisdom modeled by Jesus Christ, then the extent to which we pursue wisdom with fidelity, is the extent to which one is plunged into the world in which he or she lives.
Liturgically, this can be found in microcosm in some of the concluding lines of the Eucharistic Liturgy, where the parttaking of the divine mysteries are accompanied by a sending out (in the West, it is marked by the line “Go, it is sent”; while in the East it is marked with “let us go forth in peace, in the name of the Lord”).
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