Occupation of physical space

The importance of physical consciousness

Anyone who has spent enough time with me has inevitably heard me talk about how someone “occupies physical space.” Usually I am talking about a girl I’m potentially interested in dating. It’s something I’ve been sensitive to for as long as I can remember. I noticed it in high school. I still notice it.

What do I mean by this?

To me, someone who occupies physical space well is someone who moves effortlessly through the physical world. They navigate physical objects with grace and fluidity. They are coordinated. They know their body. They position themselves around other people comfortably and congenially. When they touch other people or objects, they do so with a properly calibrated force. They hug well, they stand at proper distance and with proper awareness in social circles. They run gracefully. They shake hands in a way that is neither too firm and nor too soft. We all know what a crappy handshake feels like (I will explain in detail later). They hold themselves in a way that indicates that they know their body, know their environment, and know how their body fits in their environment. When they dance, their frame is firm but supple. They embody an Aristotelian mean in physical space. They are aware. They are conscious. Physically conscious.

Physical consciousness

Physical consciousness has two major components.

1. Being aware of your body

2. Being aware of your body in space

When I’m talking about “how someone occupies physical space, I’m usually talking about #2. But #2 is dependent on #1, so that’s where I’m going to start.

Bodily awareness

One measure of physical consciousness is the degree to which a person is simply aware of their body. Empirically, you might say they aware that when they do X they usually feel Y. For example, someone who is in touch with their body would have some level of awareness that, when they drink too much coffee, they get anxious. They might be aware that when they drink too much alcohol, it affects their sleep. That when they are hungry, they get cranky. When they have a headache, they need to drink water.

Some of these awarenesses are universal. Many are personal.

Naturally, this is important for athletes. People who are bodily aware know how hard to push themselves and when they are at their limit. They know when they feel the discomfort of an effort that they can push through versus the pain of a ligament, joint, muscle, or bone that is on the edge of failure.

No doubt bodily awareness is some kind of scale. At the low end of the scale are kids, especially babies, who are both wonderful and comical in their bodily unconsciousness. For example, they don’t know when they are hungry. They just feel discomfort and start crying.

I once sat in the car next to my nephew as he went from placid to crying to screaming to writhing in his car seat. I asked his mom what to do. I held his hand. I patted his tummy. And then all of a sudden he farted really loudly, stopped crying, and promptly fell asleep. When you are two years old, it’s acceptable to be unaware that you need to fart. But when you are middle age, or lets say, to be generous, over the age of 18, I think it is reasonable to expect someone to have sufficient bodily awareness to recognize what’s going on.

Integrated bodily awareness: Listening to your body

Whereas bodily awareness is about reading individual signals from your body, listening to your body is like an integrated awareness where you put several signals together to form an assessment of your overall state.

Someone with integrated bodily awareness can feel when they head to the gym how hard they should push. The can feel whether they got enough sleep, ate at the right times, and how worn down they are. Whether they are lifting weights or running, they know whether they can push it that evening or whether it is a night where pushing it would result in a torn muscle or a stress fracture. Maybe they insert an easier day or an easier pace. Maybe they do some cross-training.

This applies in a non-athletic way as well. If you head home after a stressful day of work having not had enough sleep and your back hurts, a bodily aware person might recognize that they are at risk of being short tempered. They might recognize that they need to move more slowly and deliberately, lest a fast moving disturbance, like a dog sprinting out from behind the house, might cause then to tweak their back.

Injuries often occur when the person is worn down. There’s less reaction time and energy to avoid surprises—less buffer to absorb load—and the person ends up with a pulled muscle, a torn whatever, a crash or a fall, and lots of frustration.

Ok, so what I’ve described is a pretty basic physical self awareness, but it’s a necessary precondition to properly placing a body in space.

Part 2: Bodies in space

How someone occupies physical space, to me, is an indication of how they move through the world. This has several components: (1) awareness of ones own body (2) awareness of objects in the environment and (3) coordination of ones own body through the environment.

I dance quite a bit of salsa and bachata—partner dances with close physical contact. Each person, as much as they have a characterological personality, has a distinct physical personality as well. You can feel these differences as you rotate through partners. Some women melt or flinch on the slightest touch. Some seem unable to tell when you are touching them. Some behave as if all the controls were inverted and shuffled, moving right when guided left. You can’t believe it sometimes.

But then there are some follows who are just phenomenal at holding physical space. Dancing with them is like melding your body with theirs. You sway right and they go right with you. The two of you move seamlessly through gaps in the dance floor. You navigate chairs and tables. Movements are fluid and calibrated. You’d never guess who these people are either—they aren’t necessary athletic looking. But as soon as you start dancing with them, you can feel their control. They are exceptionally in control of their body, and they seem to effortlessly coordinate their body with other bodies and external objects.

By the way, I’ve danced as a follow and in my experience, the same qualities apply to leads as they do to follows. I.e. the men also exhibit a wide range of physical consciousness.

Consciousness requires cultivation

At this point you may be thinking that “some people just aren’t that athletic,” and that we cant expect everyone to be a savant of physical space.

Humans obviously come in a wide range of forms. We are not blank slates, nor are we pre-programed machines. More like a book where the first few paragraphs of every chapter are written but where there are still many pages to write. Intellectually and physically, we are each endowed with those few first paragraphs. Maybe we start with strengths or weaknesses, some relative amount of intellectual and physical horsepower. For all of us, we need to write the rest of each of the chapters.

Furthermore, I probably don’t need to convince you that intellectual consciousness requires cultivation. It is common enough to talk of a kid who has “brains,” i.e. intellectual talent. But even when we say this, we know that this kid also needs to study in order to turn their “brains” into something cultivated and useful. Cultivation requires reading and writing and debating to hone the sort of intellectual consciousness that is required for someone to be able to quickly and easily put their finger on something, say just the right word, parse a situation, or see a path through a challenge.

Physical consciousness, I’d say, is similar. Like intellectual consciousness, we are all born with a few intro paragraphs—how naturally coordinated we are, our body type, our responsiveness to physical stimuli. But whoever we are, there’s also a lot left unwritten. Achieving physical consciousness requires effort to cultivate. For both those who are naturally predisposed and those who are not, devotion to improving consciousness is necessary for achieving it. Athletic or not, it requires practicing dancing, playing frisbee, swimming, lifting weights, and or any variety of other physical activities in order to cultivate that consciousness.

Becoming physically consciousness

There’s an idea that I came across in reading Erich Neumann that intellectual consciousness is created when someone puts words to an idea or feeling that was previously “known” but not articulated. Classically speaking, this is the power of the logos—the power of words to bring what was previously unnamed into being. The word names it, categorizes it, defines it, and packages it so that it can be held and manipulated.

When I told you at the start of this piece that in high school I used the term “how someone occupies physical space” to describe their physical consciousness, this was me putting a name on what had previously only been a feeling. I was making that feeling intellectually conscious.

I suspect something similar happens in the physical world. As you enact physical existence—when you finally nail that dive, that motion, that kick, or that throw in a way that you can understand—when you gain the strength and awareness of your legs and heart to run a marathon in a deliberate and controlled way—you bring into being a previously latent understanding of yourself as a physical body and as a being in space. And as this happens, you become physically conscious in a way that you weren’t before.

Excellence as a human being requires a balance of consciousness

Ok so now I have introduced 2 forms of consciousness: “intellectual consciousness” (introduced in that last section) and “physical consciousness.” How do they fit together?

I recently read Plato’s Republic, and in Book III, Socrates goes on a long discussion about the education of the “guardian” class. He makes the case that it is necessary to cultivate both “music” and “gymnastics” in these people. These may sound like two odd activities to cultivate, but I think they map fairly well onto intellectual and physical consciousness.

Plato begins by noting the excesses of either of them:

1. Too much “music” causes a distortion:

“Then, when a man gives himself to music and lets the flute play and pour into his soul through his ears, as it were into a funnel—using those sweet, soft, wailing harmonies we were just speaking of—and spends his whole life humming and exulting in song, at first, whatever spiritedness he had, he softened like iron and made useful from having been useless and hard. But when he keeps at it without letting up and charms his spirit, he, as the next step, already begins to melt and liquefy his spirit, until he dissolves it completely and cuts out, as it were, the sinews from his soul and makes it a feeble warrior.” “Most certainly,” he said. “And,” I said, “if from the start he got a spiritless soul from nature, he accomplishes this quickly. But if it's spirited, the spirit is weakened and made temperamental, quickly inflamed by little things and quickly extinguished. Thus these men have become quick tempered and irritable from having been spirited, and they are filled with discontent.” “Quite so.” (411a)

2. Similarly, too much “gymnastics” causes a distortion:

“Now what about the man who labors a great deal at gymnastic and feasts himself really well but never touches music and philosophy? At first, with his body in good condition, isn't he filled with high thought and spirit, and doesn't he become braver than himself?” “Very much.” “But what about when he does nothing else and never communes with a Muse? Even if there was some love of learning in his soul, because it never tastes of any kind of learning or investigation nor partakes in speech or the rest of music, doesn't it become weak, deaf, and blind because it isn't awakened or trained and its perceptions aren't purified?” “That's so,” he said. “Then, I suppose, such a man becomes a misologist and unmusical. He no longer makes any use of persuasion by means of speech but goes about everything with force and savageness, like a wild beast; and he lives ignorantly and awkwardly without rhythm or grace.” (411c)

Finally, Plato points out that harmonization of the two is the ideal case:

“Don't you notice,” I said, “the turn of mind of those who maintain a lifelong familiarity with gymnastic but don't touch music; or, again, that of those who do the opposite?” “What are you talking about?” he said. “Savageness and hardness on the one hand,” I said, “softness and tameness on the other.” “I do notice,” he said, “that those who make use of unmixed gymnastic turn out more savage than they ought, while those who make use of music become in their turn softer than is fine for them.” “And, surely,” I said, “the savage stems from the spirited (thymotic) part of their nature, which, if rightly trained, would be courageous; but, if raised to a higher pitch than it ought to have, would be likely to become cruel and harsh.” “That is my opinion,” he said. “And what about this? Wouldn't the philosophic nature have the tame; and if it is relaxed somewhat more, would it be softer than it ought to be, while if it is finely reared, it would be tame and orderly?” “That's so.” “And we do say that the guardians must have both of these two natures.” “Yes, they must.” “Then mustn't they be harmonized with one another?” “Of course.” “And the soul of the man thus harmonized is moderate and courageous?” “Certainly.” “And that of the inharmonious man is cowardly and crude?” “Of course.” (410c)

On reading these passages, what I find most interesting is that physical consciousness may require more than just getting in touch with your body. The excellence of “gymnastics” may require a balance of physical and intellectual. I.e., it may be necessary to cultivate intellectual consciousness to fully realize physical consciousness. And vice versa, physical consciousness may be a necessary antecedent to intellectual consciousness. And finally, according to Plato, the optimal state will be a harmonization of the two.

Have you heard of Chess-Boxing? No kidding, this is a real thing. People play rounds of chess between rounds of boxing. The idea is pretty similar to what Plato is writing about here in The Republic. Of course, most of us do much more mainstream things than chess-boxing. We run or lift weights after a day of working at a computer. But, isn’t it odd that hoards of white collar workers who ostensibly only need their brains, migrate in droves to gyms after work, run marathons, hike mountains, and do yoga?

Yes, we still have meatheads with no cultivation of music or intellectual life (Aristotle criticizes the Spartans for this in his Politics). And vice versa, intellectual waifs with no cultivation of physical life. But, many people are clearly still searching for this balance of the physical and the intellect. I think they are searching for the harmony that Plato is describing.

We aren’t just brains, we are bodies too

The main point I am circling around is that we aren’t just brains. We’re bodies too. Starting with the idealists, guys like Kant, a huge emphasis was put on the brain. Modernity loves the brain in the vat idea. Postmodernism seems to love it even more. Today, it’s not uncommon to hear people talk about how humans are just biological calculation machines being transported around in their mobile meat suits. This of course is why it has become so acceptable to modify the meat suit. After all, in this form of thinking, the meat suit isn’t even really you.

Plato obviously disagreed with this assessment. The phenomenologists did as well. And even the simplest assertion of physical consciousness counters the meat suit viewpoint. For example, when the meat suit hasn’t eaten, the biological calculation machine gets grumpy. Or when someone is living with chronic pain, it’s pretty difficult for them to deny that the meat suit is an integral part of themselves.

But I want to say more than just this.

From a (Heideggerian) phenomenological perspective, we are beings in the world. What we see in the world is dependent on our cultural and social context, our point in history, and the nature of our orientation in the world. If we as individuals or as societies are stripped of our physical being—say, if we increasingly live on an online information space that is disembodied, i.e. without-a-body in space and time—then it becomes ever more possible to experience the world in only that disembodied, intellectual realm. It may even start to feel like intellectual-idea-space is the only reality that exists. This opens the door to neuralink, cultivation of online avatar lives, obsession with (digital) social media, and chemical/surgical alteration of the body in the name of ideology (ideas). All of these modern developments explicitly obviate or at least deprioritize physical, bodily consciousness.

I personally don’t like this vision of the future. But it doesn’t even matter what I like. As long as we all have a hole in our face where calories go in, one in the back where processed calories come out, a heart that pumps nutrients around, the physical need to walk up a flight of stairs, the need to reproduce, simply to further the species, the pain of stubbing a toe—we are still physical beings in the world.

And as long as that is true, you can either be a cultivated physical being in the world or not.

i.e. You may be the king of a disembodied empire in an online RPG, but if your skin is furtively fusing with the faux-leather couch, then you are not even fully conscious, in my opinion.

And if you are not physically conscious, not only can you not achieve excellence in either the physical or the intellectual realm, you may not even be qualified to weigh in on moral matters of the physical realm. Issues like vaccines, abortion, and gene editing are all questions of bodily morality. How should we think about these issues? Physical consciousness is required. After all, how could someone pass judgment on how to treat a body if they are not even aware of the one they themselves occupy.¹

The attractiveness of physical consciousness to me

It seems increasingly likely to me, in my own life and in observing the lives of others, that Plato was correct—that excellent people simultaneously cultivate both intellectual and physical life—that they cultivate these states in balance and hold them in harmony. Excellent people are conscious of the physical constraints and realities of being a human; they are conscious of the intellectual possibilities of being a human. Put together, they are “neither too soft nor too harsh,” intellectually or physically. They are attractive in the balance they exude and the sensibilities they hold. And in the ways in which they move through both physical and intellectual space.

Last week I saw a 350lb man with a distended gut, duck-footed walk, knees creaking under heavy pronation, sweating, walking down the sidewalk. He was unable to avoid a branch on the sidewalk and did not notice that the branch scraped his leg and caused it to begin bleeding. This man obviously lacks physical consciousness. He lacks part 1, bodily awareness, and part 2, awareness of his body in space. It was not beautiful, the way in which he occupied physical space.

I use the word beauty because “physical consciousness” is an aesthetic judgment. It’s no different than the judgment bestowed on ski jumpers or figure skaters or the slam dunk contest. It’s not measurable. This guy I saw on the street doesn’t need a numerical rating for me to aesthetically judge him as being sub-optimal.

You will have already heard, all across your life, arguments for eating right, exercising, getting enough sleep, showering, cleaning your ears, washing your clothes, being a healthy weight. In my mind, these are all just nudges to remember that it’s on us to cultivate an awareness of our physical state. I’m not trying to go on a health crusade here. I’ve met plenty of people who are heavier in weight but still very physically conscious, including many dancers. The point isn’t to achieve god-like excellence but to strive for earthly harmony.

And of course, I must also say that I have no formal qualifications in philosophy, psychology, or physiology, so you can critique my analysis all you like.² Probably I deserve it. I’ll just say that, for me, I can’t help but notice the presence or absence of physical consciousness in people I interact with, and as I get older, I only notice it more acutely. And to bring it back to the beginning, physical consciousness is a big factor for me in the physical attractiveness of women.

When a woman holds herself confidently, moves deliberately, touches and responds with subtle awareness, eases and flows in and out of personal space, I find it attractive. And when I notice this, it’s likewise a reminder for me to pay attention, to cultivate my physical consciousness, and to be deliberate with my body just as I am with my words, because I know that women notice these qualities about me just the same.

1. Read my disclaimer on the Mercurious about page if you want to get upset with me. And if you do want to come at me, please do so in a way that balances physical and intellectual consciousness.

2. See footnote 1