September 16th, 2007 Fred McVittie
We habitually identify ourselves with the body, presumably as part of an adaptive strategy within the evolutionary development of consciousness. The way we conceptualise that body may be in a number of different ways: as a machinic entity with a number of moving parts, as a kind of ‘node’ in a network of relations, as a container for the ‘self’ etc. Given that our cognition is structured according to the affordances of the body, these different body concepts will each facilitate a slightly different form of cognition. Furthermore, the transformations that different body concepts allow may suggest parallel transformations in the corresponding cognition.
One way that we may understand our bodies is as an entity having a centre and a periphery. We routinely understand our bodies this way, as revealed in essentialist folk theories, in the almost unavoidable sense that our ‘self’ stops at the skin, at the way we gesture toward the centre of our bodies when we indicate ourself, and in the host of philosophical, spiritual, and poetic metaphors which draw upon this understanding. We experience our bodies as having a boundary, the skin, and also having a region at its core, call it ‘the heart’.
In terms of simple human survival, the ontology of the centre and the periphery, heart and skin, are very different, and are also very different from other regions of the body. This ontological difference may provide an evolutionary account of the development of an embodied consciousness which understands itself in terms of a centre and a periphery.
The skin is the interface of the organism and the environment, and any physical exchange that takes places between these two domains happens across this interface. Since the environment is partly a source of threat, the skin is necessarily a protective layer and a vital organ of self-maintenance. Conversely, the environment is also a source of sustenance, so the boundary of the body, represented physically as the skin, must act not only as a barrier but also as a conduit for this sustenance. Lastly, it is through the outer layer of the body that new life is allowed to emerge, so the skin interface must also serve this vital end without compromising its other functions and the integrity of the organism which it sustains. In short, the transmission of objects or fluids through the surface of the skin is of extreme importance. In evolutionary terms, an organism which was equipped with particular sensitivity to events that took place on the skin would have a distinct survival advantage, and it is little wonder that most life-forms have some equivalent of pain and pleasure sensors, nerve endings, within this surface layer. This evolutionary history and the embodied advantage it confers persists in today’s complex social environment, and is culturally and psychologically represented in the way that traffic across the interface of the skin, the penetrations, transmissions, and emissions that punctuate our lives, are marked with particular attention and given a kind of ritualistic significance. The skin is also a surface on which we project the image that we wish to share with others, it is where we wear our public face.
The other component in this self-concept is the centre, possibly identified with, or referred to as, the heart. Again, in terms of simple biological survival, the centre of our body has particular significance. Whilst other parts of the body are often expendable, when the inner core of the body suffers harm it usually means the death of the organism. We see this in our instinctive behaviour when under threat, which is to curl into a ball, effectively wrapping ourselves around our core to protect it from harm. It is also evidenced in the autonomic processes of the body which privilege the core, and the core functions, over the more peripheral functions of those body parts which lie on or near the surface. In conditions of extreme cold the energy resources of the body are diverted to the core in order to maintain optimal functioning, even if this means depriving fingers and toes of blood supply and consequently allowing frostbite to develop. The logic of the body requires that fingers can be sacrificed in order for the heart to live. Again, both the physical and the cultural significance of the body’s centre can be, at least partially, ascribed to the logic of evolutionary processes; an organism (possibly even a single celled organism) which had some strategy for protecting its nucleus, through avoidance behaviour, through adopting a particular shape, through stiffening itself etc. would be more likely to survive and reproduce/divide that an organism who had no interest in what happened to its centre. Bringing the narrative up to date, in addition to the autonomic responses noted above that remind us of our instinctive regard for the inner core of our bodies, we also express our recognition of its significance culturally and psychologically, in our use of heart motifs etc.
These two components then, the heart and the skin, centre and periphery, are inordinately important in terms of self-preservation, with the regions of the body between these zones appearing far less critical as sites of possible threat or opportunity. The simple heuristic ‘watch the centre, watch the periphery’ has likely served as a survival strategy for much of our evolutionary history, and continues to feature significantly in the rituals, taboos, and cultural practices of the most ‘advanced’ human society. Whilst we know intellectually that our bodies are the complex meat machines described by anatomical science, we often behave as if they had only these two elements. In short, this purely functional reduction of the body to the two most mission-critical areas, a central heart and a peripheral skin, is a key way in which the body is understood and makes a major contribution to our body concept.
Given the close relationship between our concept of the body and our concept of ‘self’, it is likely that we will find this simplified map of the body duplicated in our understanding of our selves. We should find ourselves thinking and talking about our self (which we might call consciousness, mind, identity etc.) as if that self was structured in such a way that it consisted primarily of a centre and a periphery. We would think of our self as having a boundary at which our self stops, and a core, which is maximally distant from all points on that boundary. We might recognise the different components of this simplified body concept as different components of the self, mapping our self onto the centre and periphery and finding distinctions within our self that correspond to the differences in skin and heart. When we look at the evidence this does indeed seem to be what we find. Most models of the self, from the most vernacular and folk-psychological to those constructed by philosophy and the mind sciences, tend to appeal to this intuitive understanding of self in terms of centre and periphery. (A significant exception to this is literature which describes non-standard concepts of self, particularly metaphysical and transpersonal accounts. This will be picked up below).
Posted in Boundary, Centre, Embodiment, Self, Symbol | No Comments »
