the teaching of art in relation to body-mind integration and self-actualization in art

National Art Education Association

The Teaching of Art in Relation to Body-Mind Integration and Self-Actualization in ArtAuthor(s): Kenneth R. BeittelSource: Art Education, Vol. 32, No. 7 (Nov., 1979), pp. 18-20Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3192331 .

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The Teaching of Art in Relation to Body-Mind Integration and

Self-Actualization in Art Kenneth R. Beittel

The Concept of Body-Mind. Perhaps the idea of body-mind is

Western, in the sense that in the East it has never been assumed that body and mind are separate. The dividing, calculating, controlling, reasoning mind can easily cross a line beyond which it forgets that the head merely floats on top of a body of which it is a part and which functions best often without its interference.

In medicine, we have come to ac- cept the interaction of body and mind, or psyche and soma. This has led re- cently to wholistic health and wholistic medicine, where dis-ease is not separated from attitude, life-world, and one's daily regime. Even chronic and incurable states have been shown to respond and reverse their trend under autogenetic instruction, guided imagery, and environmental and at- titudinal change.

In our culture, a separation of body-mind often occurs in nutrition. Unhappy and undedicated, we turn toward food and drink or drugs. If we under-act, we then over-eat. Not loved or loving, we crave sweet foods and strong drink. And when we go out to eat, we are often close to "eating the menu and throwing the food away." (Watts, 1973).

But when the body-mind is one and at rest, in quiet and pleasant surround- ings, eating and drinking become ritu- als and the food itself a sacrament. A few nuts, a steamed fresh vegetable, a piece of ripened fruit-these become satisfying celebrations of life and make us thankful for the beauty and nourishment of what is simple, whole, and pure.

Disciplines for One-ness of Body- Mind. The East has been rich in pro- viding regimes of practical discipleship, or discipline, toward unifying the body-mind. We can again raise the old debate as to whether discipline is necessary for this end. I would offer a

tentative "no, but . . ." as an answer. The qualification with which I enter into this issue is attributable to my re- cent definition of teaching art, wherein I state: The teacher is engaged in a depth hermeneutic concern- ing a student's self-formative process in art according to a common tradition. It is because of the existence of traditions honoring the unity of body-mind that we can turn to ac- cumulated wisdom for our guidance. These traditions are not essential to body-mind wholeness, as instances in each person's memory would show. Yet, they represent a journey into depth to help us return to where we all started-with unified body-minds.

Art and love and play and devotion discipline us toward wholeness by their very nature: we give up ourselves and in receptivity to otherness become what we are not. If we were able to experience these deeply and continuously, we would cheat death, for we would dwell timelessly within the wholeness of perpetual becoming. We would know only the qualitative immediate present, as pure duration and creation, or infinity. But we are finite. Hence discipline is required so that we may be visited by a movement toward wholeness. Unity is achieva- ble momentarily. It is no continuing state. The greatest master may have more of it, but if he makes claims beyond that, he blasphemes or is suffer- ing from what Jung calls "inflation" (the belief in over-determination of one's own spirit).

We thus contain multitudes and contradict ourselves, as the poet Whitman put it. It is because of our contradictory nature that we must do the "work" of the spirit. When we practice hatha yoga, for example, we try to unify opposed forces in the body, for literally translated, "hatha yoga" means joining the energies of the sun and the moon. If we take up aikido, we travel the road toward the

meeting of spirit (again, a literal trans- lation of the word).

It is as though there is an external and an internal or subtle self. Phenomenology and meditation alike attack the problem of sifting through the mind's restless and acculturated activity. Consciousness itself seems to have its indirect "fair witness" which "watches over" what the self is doing. This is the basis for the reflec- tivity which allow one to form oneself while deeply engaged in something which is other than the self.

Exemplification of this phenome- non is available in the accounts of Herrigel (1971), Murphy (1972), and Gallwey (1974), writing, respectively, on archery, golf, and tennis. In the lat- ter two, more Western in their view, an actual split into an outer and inner self, or a self 1 and self 2, is post- ulated. The inner self is all intuitive and feeling, risking, play-full, immediate, and qualitative. It is opposed by a critical, realistic, mediating, purpose-full, calculating self. The trick seems to be to have the outer self command the inner self to take over. It is indeed a "trick" on the calculating outer self to use its will against its will, just as the meaningless mantra will-fully used in mediation knocks the mind's restless willing.

Wholistic Participation of the Body-Mind in Pottery. As sophisti- cated moderns we are apt to think that only primitive or naive minds take tradition seriously. And, indeed, our problem may be that of listening, of finding the trans-diction, the word spoken by tradition across the present, from past to future. For example, we condescendingly allow Maria, the Indian potter of New Mexico, to have tradition; but then, she probably be- lieves the sun goes around behind a mountain each night. To follow Ricoeur (1978), we have learned our suspicion well, but not our affirma- tion; our archeology, but not our tele-

Art Education November 1979 18



logy. As he says of hermeneutics, so we can say of tradition: we pass through an arc from naive to knowl- edgeable understanding. The center of the arc is practice, imitation, explanation-the taking apart before a higher order of integration. Disci- pline is rooted in wholeness, but it is mediated. Understanding is immediate. Explanation and understanding, imitation and internalization, outer and inner body, are the dialec- tics of this arc. And arc by arc we round out the snake who swallows his tail.

What is meditation? What is wholeness? What is wholistic participation of the body-mind, both in general, and in pottery particularly? Enlightenment has it that chopping wood and wedg- ing clay are the same. When we are in love, caught up in music, dancing, or writing a poem, we have no reason to meditate, as though it were only one kind of activity. Wholistic participation of the body-mind, centering, meditation are all one. The trick is to use no tricks and be utterly present- minded in whatever we do.

When I wedge my clay or center it on the wheel under this attitude, my body-mind is participating wholistically. I am not at deep rest with awareness, but in full action with awareness. Both are meditation. As the contemporary guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (1978) has demon- strated, there can even be a "chaotic meditation." The Sufi dervish dancers know this as well. Whenever our body-mind is truly and fully in what we are doing, we are in what today is called an "altered state of consciousness," but what I would call the full and genuine state of consciousness; for consciousness is always "of" something other than itself, and when it is fully in that otherness, it fulfills its nature most.

So said, I cannot claim more for pottery than anything we might do under this spirit. But along the path of our own self-formation within this tradition, we have ideal opportunities for this meditative transcendent trans- formation, this Zen of the simple act. To pride oneself on doing away with tradition in pottery, then, would be to deprive oneself of a deeply meaningful discipleship. The very repetitiveness of the acts, the symmetry and cen- teredness, the timeless echoes of form and fire, all of these symbolize that we

get somewhere by going nowhere, by being truly and wholly here in this humblest and most speechless art.

Imagery can help while we learn these lessons of wholistic participation. We have a feeling self as well as a directing self. We can listen to our body-mind. My Japanese teacher ac- tually cocks his ear, as a musician might, when he is in the midst of a flawless movement. He waggles his head before delivering the properly timed and weighted blow to a big pot needing to come to center on a tooling chuck.

Often I will take a student's hand or hands to ensure that a movement is felt, not just seen. I will tell them to forget that their foot is kicking, or to watch their breathing, or to give up chewing gum. I will not allow a radio. I tell them, "Imagine a sturdy steel rod in the center of the clay and lean on it." Again and again I will have them watch an entire movement, then practice it, then watch again, and so on.

"Tacit knowing" (Polanyi, 1967) occurs when through our body-mind we "know more than we can tell." As with the blind-man's probe, we read the world through the vibrations in our hand, forgetting the stick. Or, put otherwise, we develop nerves at the end of the stick. We take the world into our body and our body into the world. So with a bottling tool, the nerves reach to the tip of the stick and we "see" from within the dark inte- rior of the expanding sphere. I find that as the curve of a sphere swells from within and as I trace and have dialogue with that thrust through my outside hand, my entire body re- sponds with an effortless exhalation which settles with the ripening thrust of the curve. In such action, knowledge dwells within the body-mind.

If I return now to my definition of what it is to teach art, you will remember that the teacher was said to be engaged in a depth-hermeneutic or depth-interpretation of another person's self-formative process, or self- actualization, in art according to a common tradition. It is the common tradition which makes both a self- transcendence and a depth- interpretation possible.

The Language of Self-Actual- ization. Reflection on disciple-ship and tradition in pottery shows that wholeness both precedes and follows

right practice, no matter at what stage one may be. In Zen Buddhism the student already has Buddha nature and need do nothing to attain it, but few realize this profound thought. This is why body-mind integration and self-actualization are one. It is because we remember wholeness or are, as a gift of grace, in a state of wholeness that we can move toward wholeness or self-actualization dynamically.

In Alternatives for Art Education Research (1973), I try to demonstrate that it is possible to speak phenom- enologically about the artist in his world of creating. In addition, I at- tempt to reconstruct from the artist's own words the dynamic language of his own growth toward renewal and renewed self-actualization. My point here is that the language of self- actualization and about self-actualization is not a neutral or gray anonymous descriptive language. It is guided by a kind of love and belief. Abraham Maslow (1971) even uses the term "love knowledge." To hark back to our definition of teaching art and compare it with a language appropri- ate to self-actualization, we now find that the two are the same. The accent merely shifts. Where there is a common tradition, love for growth within its open structure is the guiding force. Where self-actualization is central, love for that wholeness of self which precedes all conquest of further wholeness comes first. If a student or disciple could voice his need, he might say: Treat me as whole so that I may become whole. The teacher's acts, in parallel fashion, say: "I am treating you as whole so that you may become whole." It is by dint of immersion in an open and meaningful tradition that a teacher can treat the student as po- tentially participating wholistically with his body-mind, for it is the tradition, not the teacher, that merits such participation.

The Language of Practice. Aesthe- tics, criticism and interpretation theory have limited their scope unin- tentionally by ignorance of the norms of practice and adequate considera- tion of the ontology of creation. Even before this issue is examined, there arises the prior one of the adequacy of verbal discourse for the interpretation of visual experience. I see no problem here, since I subscribe to the belief that all that man can be can also be reflected in his language, if it is not




indeed already his language itself. Still, there is the suspicion voiced last year by Henry Moore, on reaching his eightieth birthday, when he said that literary criticism remains more con- vincing than art criticism, because after all, the critic and the poet share the same medium, whereas a transla- tion, and therefore a double interpretation, is involved in the transition from a visual to a verbal language. The "voices of silence" win out, for after all is said and done, much less is said than done.

I will here argue that there is a "language of practice," as ex- emplified in artist's shop talk, where a search is made for verbal equivalents to norms of action and traditions of action. In this, the dust of the studio and the smell of materials become the laboratory of thought and the experiential basis for interpretation and understanding.

We talk here of the reasonableness of passion, not of the passion of reason. The norms of practice are closest to those of action. As in action, interpretation and not a kind of verbal mathematization or logic of reason is the end. Connections and causations are weak, because it is story, style, plot, and world-view that make this kind of meta-history cohere. We must lend ourselves to the reasonable real- ity of its fictional, even mythical truth. The superordinate myth circulating around the artist's overflowing poten- tial in his unfinished life series must resonate in the language of practice. We must talk like athletes and coaches in mid-season. Ontologically speaking, we must see the future as historical and yield ourselves medita- tively to what Anderson (1978) calls "the free becoming of being."

Still, the language of practice is language and not practice. I believe Ricoeur (1978) is right: text, action, and history, though they may have different theoretical formulations, structurally and conceptually have the same problems of interpretation. Further, just as the philosopher is often limited at the experiential base toward which he turns his conceptual tools and his community of thought, so he who reasons of practice and tradition is often limited at the language end while rich in the experiential base of action norms. Those who inquire into the phenomena of making art, responding to art, and the teach-

ing of art take seriously the tension between norms of practice, the con- text of each event, and the traditions of language. At the confluence of these stands the seasoned art educa- tor, for his profession insists upon practice, theory, and application, therefore keeping painful and present the connections between art and life.

As applied, this language of practice has two aspects to it. Foremost, through it we learn to construct the story of making art. Without this con- tinual verbal conquest of art, we can hardly be called art educators. For the teacher, this is more than "shop talk," because such talk must cohere, must present order or a "selective world" (as Buber (1947) calls it) in the form of a wholeness otherwise likely to be sundered for the student. If our teacher talk does not help the student's world and the student's making of art, we have the wrong talk and would do better to remain silent and learn to listen.

A second meaning of the language of practice refers to the conquest of new content in the interpretation of art. Closeness to making art yields in- sights otherwise opaque when we are before finished works. Aesthetic theory has forgotten its vulnerability to works by starting from too dis- tanced a viewpoint. I cannot develop this critical aspect of the language of practice in this paper, except by im- plication of what it means for the education of another through art.

Some people fear verbalization connected with art. Perhaps they do so because so much of it is irrelevant or empty. I do not fear language with art, including the language of example and gesture. I see a dialectic at work in the language of practice which en- larges conscious awareness on the one hand while language is expanded by the aware consciousness on the other. It is a give and take. As we learn to say what we formerly could not, we inevitably speak in wholeness and in metaphor, and in so doing language is not a dead end nor a substitution but a gateway toward new action. The language of practice is language of and toward practice.

In summary, three simple points have been made: (1) wholistic participation of the body-mind is both pre- cursor and outcome of growth and self-actualization; (2) growth and self-actualization are organic proc-

esses requiring a special kind of language for both their nurturance and for understanding them; and (3) this language, in its very infancy, is a dialectical, metaphorical one which I have termed the language of practice. This language has a phenomenological aspect acquirable through in-dwelling or participatory knowing, and a hermeneutic aspect definable as interpre- tive and applied. It holds much in common with Zen talk of "right practice in that a descriptive and norma- tive intent coalesce. It is discipline, that is, disciple-ship, to a tradition, where growth and self-actualization are involved. In teaching we develop a language of practice related to the student's discipleship toward wholeness, which is also a depth hermeneutic or interpretation of his self- formative process. In short, when we truly teach art, we are mediating body-mind integration and self- actualization in and through art.

Kenneth R. Beittel is professor of art education, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsyl- vania.

References John M. Anderson, "... Since the

Time We are a Dialogue and Able to Hear from One Another," Man and World, 10, 1978, 115-136.

Kenneth R. Beittel, Alternatives for Art Education Research, Dubuque, Iowa: William C. Brown, 1973.

Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1947.

W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis, New York: Random House, 1974.

Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery, New York: Vintage Books, 1971.

Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, New York: Viking, 1971.

Michael Murphy, Golf in the King- dom, New York: Delta Books, 1972.

Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimen- sion, New York: Anchor Books, 1967.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, The Psy- chology of the Esoteric, New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1978.

Paul Ricoeur, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, Boston: Beacon Press, 1978.

Alan Watts, In My Own Way, New York: Vintage Books, 1973.




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