The world is at your feet
Perspectives from Choreography on Conceptual Metaphor
Hamish MacPherson. 2014
The world is at your feet.
Or rather the world is in your feet.
I wish to argue that the human mind, and all its abstract structures and concepts, is rooted in the human body.
This is the underlying hypothesis of the field of embodied cognition but I want to consider it from my own interest in and practice of understanding choreography as a field of thinking.
I wish to argue that if in general the human mind generally is rooted in the human body, then in particular, the Enlightenment - the 18th century movement in science and philosophy seeking human advancement through logic and reason rather than tradition - is rooted in the human feature of feet which are the most fundamental device for measuring the world. And which even pre-date humans.
And not only is the Enlightenment rooted in walking but it was an ideology developed and reinforced through a cultivation of walking. Walking became what we might call a ‘choreo-philosophical’ practice.
It may be easy - as a species - for humans to take our feet for granted - but by considering imaginary creatures who could never measure their travels with discrete footsteps, might make ourselves aware of other, counter-Enlightenment, ways of thinking.
Let me start with one such creature.
Jabba the Hutt was the slug-like crime lord that first appeared in the Star Wars franchise in Episode six, The Return of the Jedi.
In the Star Wars mythology the Hutt species are characterised as intelligent, powerful and ruthless. Despite the slug-like tail, reptilian eyes, leathery skin and lack of a skeleton Hutts are essentially humans in a different body but with a limited personality.
This sort of anthropomorphism where non-human creatures are seen in human terms occurs in mythology throughout cultures. It is often tinged with a bit of extrapolated racism - by which I mean these ‘others’ are seen as homogenous groups with little diversity.
So we find that hobbits are always homely.
Klingons are always angry.
And mermaids are always seductive.
But there is something particularly mistaken about the anthropomorphism applied to mermaids.
And Jabba the Hutt.
And Nüwa creator of humankind in Chinese mythology
And Dreamworks’s Turbo the racing snail.
Quite obviously none of them have legs or feet.
And without these locomotor appendages these species would be as dissimilar to us in their thinking as they are in their physique.
For example, I want to argue with reference to Conceptual Metaphor, that something like counting is built into or rather from our human bodies rather than something ‘out there’ for us to discover.
Humans normally lean to walk aged between nine and 12 months. I learned some time in between these two photographs being taken.
The footstep is arguably the first rupture of a continuous world.
The journey from ‘here’ to ‘there’ is continuous and had no inherent divisions in time and space until we - as a species and as individuals - apprehended it with the kinaesthetic, all-body counting of left, right, one, two, three four...
That awareness of ordinality - the position of something in a sequence - whether it is first, second, third, fourth etc. - is developed slowly in the first 18 months of life.
Five steps to success.
Seven easy steps to weight loss.
Twelve steps recovery.
Our thinking is full of metaphorical steps.
Whether literal or metaphorical steps are a series of discrete, identifiable and repeatable sequential points followed with the intention of achieving a pre-designated objective.
Conceptual metaphor is an idea in cognitive linguistics first extensively explored by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their 1980 - book Metaphors We Live By. A key proposition is that abstract concepts are built - through metaphor - on the concrete realm.
They argue that these metaphors are not just ways to talk about abstract ideas but ways to reason about them as well; applying the logic of the concrete realm to the abstract one.
One of their most common examples is the metaphor of love as a journey “It’s been a long, bumpy road”, “We can’t turn back now”, “We’re at a crossroads” etc. So when talk about “being stuck” in their relationship, the solutions are often drawn form the concrete domain - going round an obstacle, abandoning the vehicle (i.e. the relationship) etc.
Even mathematics - traditionally seen as completely abstract and the foundational language of the universe - is thought to have concrete - embodied - roots including arithmetic which is derived from movement along a path. 1, 2, 3, 4...
I would go further and argue that the first footstep contained within it the seed of the Enlightenment.
Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant offers walking as a metaphor for the Enlightenment in his essay What is Enlightenment?.
He writes that “Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage [youth]" and goes on to describes the protective guardians that discourage such emergence by preventing
“the docile creatures from taking a single step without the leading-strings to which they have fastened them. Then they show them the danger that would threaten them if they should try to walk by themselves. Now this danger is really not very great; after stumbling a few times they would, at last, learn to walk. However, examples of such failures intimidate and generally discourage all further attempts.”
But this isn’t just a way of describing the Enlightenment. Rather the Enlightenment - the methodical reform of society through reason and science - is arguably a highly complex, abstract elaboration of the methodical progression of walking.
And so is it any wonder that Kant walked every day as he philosophised, in his grey coat and Spanish stick and with such regularity at half past three every afternoon such that people were said to have set their clocks by him?
And this further reinforced the physical act upon which his philosophy was rooted.
There is a legend (to be taken with a pinch of salt) that the first time that Kant missed his walk was in 1762 - when he would have been 38 - in order to read Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s new book Emile.
Rousseau himself wrote in his 1782 book Confessions that "Walking has something that animates and enlivens my ideas: I almost cannot think when I stay in place; my body must be in motion to set my mind in motion.”
And his last unfinished book Reveries of a Solitary Walker is divided into ten chapters called "Walks".
Going for a walk became the discipline par-excellence of the Enlightenment.
Of course this is not to say that non-Enlightenment philosophers did and do walk nor that one needs to be able to walk to think progressively and rationally.
But ‘taking a walk’ was the particular choreo-philosophical practice of this movement just as other philosophical movements have had their own choreo-philosophical practices for example in ancient greece there was wrestling and athletics as well as walking. There is a legend that Plato’s real name was Aristocles but he was named Plato by his wrestling coach because of his physique Greek word “platon” translates into “broad. And Eastern practices like Yoga are similarly entwined with philosophical thought.
Furthermore the promenade - the leisurely public walk - was not just for philosophers. As Andrew Hewitt writes in his book Social Choreography, walking was an important activity for the bourgeoisie who, having replaced royalty and aristocracy as the powerful class in this period, rejected dance and find their own aesthetic with which to display themselves publicly.
Here is a plate for The Art of Walking the Streets in London by John Gay: A poem describes the perils of walking in London in the 1710s.
The poem takes the form of a walk through a day and night and gives mock advice on how to dress and survive various perils.
The popularity of going for a walk in the 18th century allowed cities to be understood and known by creating these linear encounters changing town planning leading to the creation of promenades, pleasure gardens and shopping streets in cities. Here is the Duchess of Devonshire out for a walk in Thomas Gainsborough’s 1783 painting The Mall in St. James's Park.
But if there is a particular relationship between walking and Enlightenment thought, might we access other forms of thought though other movements?
Here is a performance that I was in with Laura Burns in 2013 where we spoke a train of thought, first walking in circles around each other.
And then while wrestling.
While walking there was a natural immediate fit - a simultaneous propulsion of thought and movement through my own will; onwards and around, onwards and around.
But while wrestling thought pulled itself in multiple directions simultaneously as force, orientation and intention shifted constantly through many parts of my body all, in constant intimate negotiation with another person.
Or if we spin like the Dervishes, will we think in circular, repetitious pathways?
How might we think if we shuffle and crawl like Jabba the Hutt, laboured, methodical, delicate.
For humans these modes will always be subservient to the walk - which will remain our primary form of movement - but they need not be underplayed in our repertoire.
For with new movements we might discover new metaphors with which to construct new ways of thinking.