Knowledge in Motion.

Antas, Portugal 7.2024

Humans have always had the wonderful capacity to complicate things by trying to simplify them. Take for instance the question on how we can know whether our experience of the world is real or not. In 17th and 18th century Europe, these questions gave shape to a debate between rationalists (who argue argued that human reason is the source of all knowledge) and empiricism (who argued that sensory experience is the source of all knowledge). The debate was ostensibly settled by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argued that knowledge begins with sensory experience but it is only our mind that is able to organise and structure this information in order to make sense of the world. For Kant, we can only have knowledge about the things in the world through our structured experience but never about these things-in-themselves. In other words, we can only know how things appear to us, not how they are independent from our experience. To give an example, we can only experience a tree through the information that we can gather through our sensory experience (texture, smell, colour, shape, size) and the way we organise this intellectually (species, type, age, health). Beyond this, we cannot know anything about the tree outside of our mind.

While this is certainly something that seems hard to deny (indeed, does a tree exist if we cannot experience it?), it does suggest that all knowledge about the world ultimately stems from the human mind. This lead 20th century philosophers like Gilbert Hartman and Hillary Putnam to float the so-called “Brain in a Vat” theory, which imagines our brain to be stored in a life-sustaining vat in which neurons are connected to electrical impulses that mimic those our brain normally receives. As a ploy that has inspired countless of science fiction plots like The Matrix, Total Recall, or Ghost in the Shell, the theory serves as an eternal rebuttal to any suggestion that we can have absolute certainty about our direct experience of the world. The idea that we can never know for sure whether our experience of the world is real, is being cleverly exploited by Silicon Valley billionaires that firmly believe reality to be a simulation while simultaneously spending billions on extending this experience indefinitely by trying to cheat death.

Yet it does not need to be this complicated. In 4th century BC China, the philosopher Zhuangzi argued that the very distinction between real or imagined experience is a false and artificial dichotomy. In his famous recollection of a dream in which he was a butterfly, he wondered whether indeed he was a human dreaming to be a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming to be a human. It is only when we treat both experiences as radically different that it becomes impossible to separate between the two. As a parable of the Daoist principle of non-duality, Zhuangzi’s dream suggests that distinctions like waking/dreaming, knowledge/experience, mind/body or reality/simulation are ultimately human-made constructs that do not reflect the deeper nature of the Dao or Way, in which all dualities are transcended. So instead of following Kant in seeing the human mind as the source of all knowledge about the world, we can refuse the binary between the mental world of mind and the physical world of bodies altogether by appreciating their continuous relationship. Indeed, the typical Western distinction between mind and body (or subject and object) disappears when the construct of a so-called Big Mind through which all knowledge is validated has collapsed.

While clever skeptics will be quick to point out that the previous sentence assumes what it seeks to prove, recent contributions by Western philosophers have confirmed Zhuangzi’s experience of non-duality. Jane Bennet’s vital materialism for instance suggests that the mind is not hierarchically separate from the body but deeply entangled within a world in which non-human entities like animals, plants, objects, or ecosystems equally hold agency. Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology has decentralised the human experience altogether by arguing, against Kant, that objects exist independently from human perception and that their essence can never be fully known. Our knowledge about the tree is limited to what we can experience and know about it yet this limitation only suggests that there is a dimension to the tree’s essence that we do not know and indeed cannot ever fully know.

What this means is that the limitations of our knowledge are determined by the artificial wedge that separates our rational mind from our embodied experience. Indeed, knowledge is not merely embedded in the world but also in our body. In short, all knowledge is embodied. This is not merely a case for the particular perspective (cultural, geographical, linguistic, historical) that informs our knowledge of the world. The human body itself can, as the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk has famously stated, literally be regarded as a body of knowledge. This sense of embodied knowledge resonates within somatic practices of knowing that seek to explore the relation between the human experience and the world in which it unfolds from an embedded and entangled perspective. These typically integrate physical sensation, sensory awareness, and movement; as for instance through movement-based therapeutics that centre around somatic awareness or practices that seek to integrate body and mind within the somatic experience such as yoga, qi gong, or dance. In each case, movement becomes a playful space where alternative ways of knowing are encountered and explored.

Yet movement is not necessarily a structured discipline. As one of the most simple and fundamental forms of movement, running presents itself as an ideal expression of exploring the unknown and transcending the artificial mind/body dichotomy. There are multiple ways in which running can facilitate an intentional encounter with the unknown; such as Rickey Gates’s project Every Single Street, in which he explored his home city of San Francisco as an unknown space he had taken for granted. Yet the unknown is not only outside of us. While the spectacular feats of ultrarunning have documented the inner peace that can be found by pushing beyond the physical limits of the body, the adrenaline-fuelled mantra of going farther, faster, and longer does not necessarily integrate our mind within our sensory experience (and vice versa). Indeed, even running without a single goal beyond the act of movement itself can disclose an experience that radically shifts one’s assumptions about the world and our experience of it. By seeing running as the somatic experience of knowledge in motion, the idea of a detached runner moving against a flat and neutral background gradually disappears. What emerges is an embodied presence in which moving, breathing, seeing, hearing, smelling, thinking, and feeling are integrated as a single expression of being. To ask whether this is real, would be to miss the point entirely.