Whole Brain Philosophy

Hello to rewilding philosophy, your newsletter on ekoPhilosophical health for our times. Having talked about ontology last time, today, I want to talk about another dimension of ekoPhilosophical health, namely epistemology.

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“Without this body, without this tongue or these ears, you could neither speak nor hear another’s voice. Nor could you have anything to speak about, or even to reflect on, or to think, since without any contact, any encounter, without any glimmer of sensory experience, there could be nothing to question or to know. The living body is thus the very possibility of contact, not just with others but with oneself – the very possibility of reflection, of thought, of knowledge.” David Abram

It’s Monday, 3pm when I walk into Kate’s praxis. It’s in Prenzlauerberg, which is like the Prospect Park of Brooklyn, New York. I go there every three weeks or so. The first time I went was ten years ago. On and off, I have been going there ever since.

Kate is a Grinberg practitioner. The way I’d describe the Grinberg Method is as a practice that brings awareness to mental patterns mirrored in the body. By dissolving these bodily patterns, the mental patterns also dissolve. Wikipedia describes it as follows: “The Grinberg Method is a method of teaching that focuses on using the body, specifically body attention, perception, and the individual’s direct personal experience. The goal is for people to learn to be attentive to themselves and their surroundings, and stop automatic limiting habits in order to increase their ability to recuperate and attain personal goals and well-being. The method was developed in the early 1980s by Avi Grinberg.”

To me, going to those Grinberg sessions is a philosophical practice.

I am a person who likes to, and is conditioned to, think her way through the world. At one point in my life, though, I noticed that talking and analyzing my mind only got me so far. To understand myself better, I needed a different way to get to know myself. My mind, I found, is producing these well-practiced stories about myself, my past, and who I am.

The interpreter

An eye opener was to understand confabulation.

“Confabulation means the invention of a story to fill in a gap. It is not the same as lying. In lying we are conscious of the deceit ; in confabulation the subject believes the story.” Ian Mc Gilchrist

Confabulation was discovered through the research by the cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga who conducted a series of experiments with split-brain patients to explore how the two hemispheres of the brain function independently and communicate with each other. One of his famous experiments demonstrated how the brain constructs narratives to explain actions, even when those actions were initiated without the individual's conscious awareness.

While assumptions about the functions of the left and right brain have been questioned lately, for example by Ian Mc Gilchrist, the role of the left brain as an interpreter still holds up. McGilchrist sees the left hemisphere's tendency to confabulate as a critical insight into how our brains function. He even suggests that much of what we consider rational thought is, in fact, a post-hoc construction, and that our perceived rationality is often an illusion created by the left hemisphere.

Our brain constantly creates stories. A good way to observe this "interpreter" is by watching children who invent stories about events that never happened, treating them as if they were true. We commonly refer to this as imagination. I don’t think we lose that imagination; our stories just become more sophisticated.

For me, understanding the interpreter and maintaining a regular meditation practice has made me aware of how I construct these stories. Some of them, I have told myself for so long that I began to believe they are me. Yet, others, I can see forming in my head for no particular reason that I am aware of.

Because of this, I came to understand that I cannot understand myself through my analytic capacities alone. Analysis literally means to take apart. The word "analysis" derives from the Greek word "analusis," which means "a breaking up" or "a loosening." It's composed of "ana," meaning "up," and "lysis," meaning "a loosening" or "a dissolution." Over time, its meaning evolved to encompass the process of breaking down complex substances or ideas into simpler components for examination and understanding. Analysis is what the right hemisphere does - breaking things apart.

Bypassing the interpreter

The body, I found, can bypass the interpreter.

Through embodied practices, I get to know myself differently. My body tells its own story without the analysis I impose upon it. When my shoulder hurts for years for no apparent reason, it doesn’t mean there is no reason; it just means I haven’t analyzed it (of course, sometimes the reason might be purely physical). I can try to find the cause by tracing it back to my family history, which might be helpful. Alternatively, I can use the body to dissolve the pain without fully understanding why. I found that changes in the self can occur this way. These practices can also activate the right hemisphere—the one that conceives of the whole.

Moreover, by engaging in embodied practices, I can access a form of knowledge that is pre-verbal and pre-analytical. I found that this form of knowledge can lead to rather unexpected insights. When we move, breathe, and inhabit our bodies, we create space for new experiences and perspectives to emerge. The insights gained from such practices are often very different from those obtained through talking therapy. They do not come from dissecting and analyzing but from a place of deep, embodied understanding. This kind of knowledge can reveal connections and patterns that are not immediately apparent to the interpreter. I believe many of us have experienced realizations about our emotional state or new perspectives on long-standing problems during a meditative walk or a session of yoga.

Why does this matter?

Through knowing myself differently, I also know the world differently. And through knowing the world differently, I can make other decisions—hopefully wiser ones. It brings me into a different relationship with the world.

I think part of rewilding philosophy is to accept other forms of knowing than analysis (the dominant mechanistic way of knowing the world). Considering embodied knowledge as a valid form of knowledge generation recognizes that knowledge is not solely a product of abstract, analytic processes but is also deeply rooted in our physical bodies and sensory experiences and that our bodily experiences play a crucial role in shaping our understanding of the world. Ideas on 4E-cognition and late research on how the body keeps the score support this perspective by emphasizing the interconnectedness of mind, body, and environment in the process of knowing.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty has noted that our experience of the world is always embodied, that we project the sense of our body onto everything we experience. He also pointed out that human consciousness, and therefore the self, cannot exist in some abstract, transcendental mind. All consciousness is derived from the experience of phenomena, and experience fundamentally depends on the body.

“True philosophy entails learning to see the world anew.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Embodied practices are integral to practical philosophy because they offer a direct, experiential approach to self-transformation. By integrating the wisdom of the body with the insights of the mind, we create a more comprehensive approach to living well in our times. As Hadot emphasizes, true philosophy is a practice—a continuous process of becoming that engages all aspects of our ways of knowing, being, and acting. It’s not merely an analytical endeavor; it is a way of life that involves the whole person—mind, body, and spirit. Embodied practices, such as Grinberg, but also mindful breathing, physical exercises, or meditative movements—what Hadot calls spiritual exercises—allow us to engage with ourselves and the world around us in a different manner and can enable us to bypass the endless loop of intellectual analysis.