There are few people in the world who have a deeper understanding of movement and its fundamental role in life and all creatures living than the author of this book, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone. Over a career spanning many decades, her writings (based on her profound knowledge of evolutionary biology and philosophy, and her life’s experience with dance) have exposed how humans and indeed the entire animal kingdom use movement to know themselves and their worlds. Animation, says Sheets-Johnstone, is the foundational ground of life itself. To scientific fields who have largely ignored or taken for granted the significance of movement, for all forms of life that move themselves, Sheets-Johnstone has held a mirror up to Nature and shown us how, by making the familiar strange, a whole new science of human experience—grounded in animation and dynamics—becomes possible. Sheets-Johnstone often talks of Aristotle, but she is, in effect, a kind of Newton—not of course in a mathematical sense, but in drawing our attention to something akin to gravity that we all take for granted—who shows, through exquisite insights and beautifully expressed writings, how central movement is to who we are. Seldom does someone come along and change the way you think. In a remarkable set of books characterized by their style and scholarship Sheets-Johnstone has told us who we are and what we’ve become—from the primacy of movement to the roots of thinking and the roots of morality. The impact of her work for cognitive science (where enaction and embodiment are the latest buzzwords), the brain and neurosciences, theoretical biology, and philosophy itself, is just beginning to be felt. On a practical level, we can only hope that her message gets through to a troubled educational system in which memorizing and testing seem to be favored over knowledge and intelligence, and the freedom for teachers to truly lead forth (“educere”) their learners to wonder and explore is squelched more often than not.
In this, her latest treatise, Sheets-Johnstone pulls no punches. Hers is a clarion call for humans to educate themselves about evolution and to be aware of their interconnection to the natural world and what they are doing to it. And, given their role e.g., in the case of climate change and biodiversity, what they are not doing about it. We have as she says little grasp of our true nature, and a big part of that is our ignorance of our origins. For Sheets-Johnstone, that boils down to a human neglect of Charles Darwin. And not just his “Origins of Species” but his many other writings as well. To the extent that Nature and human nature are not in conflict but rather complementary, one might add Niels Bohr’s famous dictum “Contraria sunt complementa”: when it comes to
What this means is not the usual deep bowing reverence and lip service to the brain as the citadel of understanding ourselves. Or, for her, a step even more wayward, the misguided and slippery equation of brain and person. Sheets-Johnstone once again turns to Darwin’s dictum: “the mind is function of the body.” It is in this relation, not only the organ of the brain, from which a stable foundation must arise. The brain is a complex dynamical structure, part of a whole-body nervous system that co-evolved with its environment. What we call cognition emerges from this system’s dynamic patterns of spatiotemporal activity. One (of many) of Sheets-Johnstone’s most inspiring messages is: animate bodies are mindful bodies. For her, to think in movement and to create synergies of meaningful movement are built-ins, “pregivennesses” of animate life. Advocates of so-called 4E Cognition (my term not hers, but two of the E’s have been mentioned above) and their derivatives are challenged to take note.
Likewise, as Sheets-Johnstone is wont to remark, even to revered (perhaps misguided?) colleagues, when it comes to the brain people do not experience cell assemblies. Large collaborations among neurons are correlates of experience. In the way one might imagine the coherent light of a laser to be the correlation among photons. As far as the mind~brain relation is concerned, at least for the neurally inclined, correlations are the best we can do. For Sheets-Johnstone, regions of the brain may precisely be correlated with human experiences, but they do not in any way descriptively elucidate experience, notably, its dynamics in the form of feelings and movement. And here is a key aspect that underwrites Sheets-Johnstone’s entire philosophy: the truths of experience are as proper an aim of science as the truths of behavior. This is like Samuel Beckett (“I can’t go on, I’ll go on”) meets Albert Einstein (“On the electrodynamics of moving bodies”). With respect to realizing this philosophy, her emphasis on the importance of if/then relationships and thinking in movement is the opening act. Sheets-Johnstone’s stress on the significance of if/then relationships in many walks of life—her strictly phenomenological point of view—has much in common with relational views of reality as expressed by contemporary theoretical physicists such as Karen Barad and Carlo Rovelli. Barad, for instance, raises the Bohr view of “phenomenon” to ontological status in her intra-active, agential realism account of physical theory. More than that, Sheets-Johnstone’s work connects directly to the detailed ethological studies of animate movement by scientists like the late John Fentress and the sophisticated, insightful, and time-consuming movement analyses of natural animal behavior by Ilan Golani. Dynamics are not only at the heart of movement, but at the heart of the brain and indeed at the heart of human nature and Nature itself. But the dynamics of what? Hers is a dynamics of relationships, a dynamics of organization that transcends the things themselves, a coordination dynamics. As Sheets-Johnstone notes, as body parts coordinate when a body runs, so brain neurons coordinate when a body runs. From the very foundational movements of approach and avoidance comes a dynamics of curiosity, inquisitiveness and consciousness itself.
J.A. Scott Kelso