Levin's_The+Body's+Recollection+of+Being+.+.+.

These are notes for Levin's //The Body's Recollection of Being//

Levin //The Body's Recollection of Being// Chapter 1: The Bearing of Thought
 * Chapter title is taken from a passage in Heidegger, but Heidegger neglects the bodily aspects of the actual “bearing” of thought (in the body). Levin aims to “shift the focus.”
 * An etymological analysis of the word “bearing” reveals a relationship to physical birth, to truth as disclosure, the embodied call to thought.
 * Levin emphasizes the call to thinking/being in our “posture, our stance, our gait and comportment, and in the thoughtful gestures of our hands” (92). Thought is not just manifest in words, but also in our bodies.

Part I: The Genesis and Unfolding of Human Motility
 * Concern for the human as a whole leads Levin to reflect on motility.
 * Gesture versus motility: gesture is concentrated in arms and face, explicitly expresses meaning. Motility (movement) presents postures/attitudes of the body.
 * Motility can be interpersonal and archetypal.
 * Motility occurs in a field of dimension, is “dependent upon the field,” is “grounded in the openness” of the field (94). Levin argues that awareness is inseparable from motility, which is grounded in the field of existence.
 * Being (becoming oneself) requires us to develop our awareness of motility: “commitment to developing the deepest truth of one's selfhood, namely: an individual realization of the universal relatedness to being which defines every one of us in a primordial way from the very beginning of our worldly existence” (95).
 * Related to our development, is the development of solitude, and also the development of opening ourselves to others, compassion...
 * Levin discusses the inherent “pre-logical” body awareness of the infant, the development of the ego, and that true awareness requires the incorporation of the infant primordial awareness (in addition to enlightenment beyond the ego—awareness of others). Adults, in some sense, have lost the infant-self connection—we must develop our “felt sense.” This higher sense of being is an unending process, is cyclical, and always evolving. The role of the philosopher, then, is to call attention to and articulate this awareness.
 * There is a helpful chart on page 114.

Part II: Hermeneutic Gestures

Section 1: Heidegger's Essay on Herakleitos, Fragment B50
 * This part of this chapter deals with thoughts from Heidegger “opened up” with the perspective of Merleau-Ponty... The focus is on gesture rather than motility.
 * Logos: logic, being, thought
 * Legein: the laying down and gathering up of logos (see extensive discussion p.119-120)
 * Both terms refer to articulation
 * Homolegein: the legein and logos of the self...
 * Levin hopes to explore the existential character of these concepts beyond Heidegger's conception, which he thinks is limited.

Section 2: Thinking with Our Hands
 * Levin begins with a helpful quote from Dewey on body/mind duality, and goes on to elaborate that the traditional stance separates the mind from the body as two separate awarenesses, what he calls an “incurable split,” the effect of which “perpetuates moral and spiritual affliction” (121)
 * The rest of this section elaborates on the hands as manifestation of conscious gesture.

Section 3: Being in the Grasp of Technology
 * “Our gestures bespeak capacities: not only capacities for doing, but also capacities for being” (124).
 * Levin discusses touch a primordial infant understanding (126), and the development of intentional touch as a cure for nihilism (128).
 * Duality: careful touch also implies a letting go (129).
 * Levin seems to equate technology and loss of touch (?) and the redevelopment of intentional touch as a movement against nihilism (132-133).

Section 4: The Cosmological Extension Begins with an interesting discussion of archetypal touch/gesture (the Sistine Chapel), and discusses gesture as encompassing something beyond the gesturer —eg. Our reach expands beyond the gesture, its object, etc. (136).

Section 5: Lending a Hand to Being
 * The gesture of “lending a hand” is both active and passive.
 * We “transcend the skin of our ego,” and move into being through the gesture (138).
 * Passivity: lending a hand “attunes us to the sensorimotor field” (139)
 * Activity: the gesture “empowers the field to be” (140)

Section 6: The Implicit Legein of Our Motility Legein (the gathering and laying down of meaning) is present in every gesture and movement, but we don't experience it with much awareness (141). Murleau-Ponty's “radical reflection” helps us to understand.

Section 7: Motility and the more Primordial Legein
 * We already function in the realm of the primordial through our motility.
 * Consciousness of that is enlightenment.

Section 8: Transpersonal Gatherings
 * This section opens with some very accessible and meaningful quotes about universal gesture...
 * Levin discusses the conscious gesture—one of compassion (148).
 * He brings Eros into the argument—the gesture of universal love as the archetypal gesture.
 * This gesture leads us into the transpersonal, the universal, belonging (153).

Section 9: Gesturing Recollection
 * Touch can access memory, both personal and primordial (154-155)
 * Merleau-Ponty's radical reflection can lead us to motility as a route to remembering “Being” (156).
 * Every gesture is “a gathering of a recollection” (157)

Section 10: The Homologein
 * Discussion of conscious movement, awareness.
 * Levin discusses extensively the self-aware gathering and laying down of understanding: “a question of gestures and movements, then, which gracefully inhabit the truth of Being, maintaining and protecting the enchanted field of its clearing” (161).

Section 11: The Gathering of the Circle
 * Summary of arguments (this section is worth reading!) gives the gist of the chapter as a whole (161-166)
 * Describes the 6 levels of gesture from least to most deep in Levin's analysis (161-162)
 * Discussion of the circle as a symbol for the essence of gesture and of understanding (163-166)
 * Brief introduction to circumambulation (movement in a circle) as body-path to ritual/understanding/awareness

I see no specific passages that seem to relate to particular topics—except a few, brief passages on infancy (as noted, for Anika). I think this text becomes more accessible toward the second half of chapter 1. The discussion on hands is worth reading, as is the final section (it provides a good, pretty readable summary of Levin's thinking).

**Chapter 2: The Living Body of Tradition**
 * Chapter opens with a series of quotes (Levin calls this “opening conversation” (167)). Lots of quotes about embodiment and the spirit from Merleau-Ponty, Jung, Freud, Neumann, etc.
 * Levin introduces his thinking by explaining that this chapter will use hermeneutical reflection to create “an ontological framework for the embodiment of spiritual life in keeping with a religious tradition” (170).
 * Levin focuses on the idea of the body as a transmitter of religious ritual.
 * He discusses a “body of wisdom” that incorporates both religious text and an “ancestral body” in relationship to spirituality.
 * This “ancestral body” is not the collective unconscious, rather, it is both biologically and culturally transmitted, an spiritual traditions are necessarily embodied. Tradition is both living and prescribed.
 * Nice quote: “In every human voice, there are echoes of the mother's tongue, echoes of significant teachers, respected elders, close friends; and there are accents, too, which bind the voice to the history of a region, a culture, and generations of ancestors. The athlete of today repeats the race of the Olympian torch-bearers, bearing the history of centuries in the very span of his body. The carpenter of today repeats the gestures of skill with have always constituted his handicraft; and it is only by the grace of that ancient gesture that he belongs to the tradition of the craft as it has been handed down from generation to generation across thousands of years...” (175).

**Part I: Religion and the Ritual Binding of the Body**
 * Levin begins with a nice series of quotes related to the body and religious practice (175-178).
 * The concept of “binding” relates to being engaged in a full body practice of something: ritual in the flesh. “Spiritual awareness” is related to complete openness to “primordial presence-ing of being.” The function of religion, says Levin, is “to maintain a binding commitment to the development of this spiritual awareness in the life of a cultural community” (179).
 * Ritual is the materialization of tradition—tradition manifest in our bodies.
 * The goal of the chapter is to “examine the nature of spiritual life from...our experience of embodiment as it passes through the ritualization of a religious tradition” (180).
 * Body ritual lead to fully felt devotion—opening and receiving.
 * Levin talks specifically about the body act of writing (as in monks who copied religious texts) as an act of devotion ritualized through the body. Copying text by hand, he says, both transmits the liturgy and transforms the writer. Reading also binds one's eyes to the text, to yield both physical and spiritual transformation.
 * Levin says: “In reading and writing, in the very gestures themselves, we are claimed by those qualities [patience, reserve, etc. as valued by the culture], but claimed precisely in and through our freedom; and our character is ordered, formed and in-formed, by way of a mimesis which incarnates its rationality, deeply inscribing it into our body of awareness” (190).

**Part II: The Text of Flesh: Our Primordial Text**
 * This section begins with quotes, again. These vary from scripture, to Merleau-Ponty, to Nietzsche, Derrida...With these as guide, Levin aims to show that “the liturgical and scriptural texts themselves connect the human body to the image of a text” (191). The image of the body can help us further understand how religious tradition is passed along.
 * Levin begins by defining text using a definition from Julia Kristeva, in which a “phenotext serves as a projection of a genotext and invites the reader to reconstruct it from the entire signifying process” (192). In this sense, the phenotext is the visible liturgical text, and the genotext is the invisible text (of nature/the human body).
 * Levin goes on to cite scriptural references and physical practices that connect the word and the body.
 * In order to go deeply into our spirituality, we must become more embodied, and “return” to the “primordial dimension of our incarnation, the field of our wholeness in relation to Being” (197). When we do so, we come closer to fully understanding archetypal images—ancient spirituality.
 * Ancient archetypal images are embedded in our bodies, so we do them spontaneously and they manifest across cultures (eg. palms pressing together, kneeling to pray, raising our arms in praise).
 * Levin lays down series of steps that develop his ideas (paraphrased): 1) Liturgical texts hand down symbolic images. 2)These images are archetypal. 3) They are body representations 4) The body images appeal to our deepest bodies 5) the images arise from preconceptual attunement and manifest in our bodies' participation in the wholeness of being. 6) We can sense some truths but can not articulate. 7) corporeal images are models for the ideal body. 8) Ritual patternizes the schemata—the body in prayer has physical, spiritual, archetypal meaning. 9) ritualized movement creates shifts we can feel deeply 10) The transmission of spirituality by physical means is “intentional transgression.” 11) Liturgical texts produce a response that is active and passive 12) by this process, we are bound to archetypal/ancestral body. 13) This tradition guarantees the ongoing life of the ancestral body.
 * Levin discusses circumcision as an offering of the body in exchange for enlightenment.
 * We must be taught how to read the liturgical texts: we must translate them into daily life.

**Part III: The Fleshing Out of Text**
 * This section really focuses on pedagogy, teaching of texts. This entire section (207-223) is worth reading for its application to education.
 * Levin discusses a group of people in Colombia learn religious practices with the body.
 * He cites Dewey and the pedagogical process of body ritualization of education (208).
 * There is an original (physical) text on which all knowledge is dependent and to which all knowledge is received—the primordial body.
 * Our senses allow us to retrieve deep understanding from our bodies—the body is integral to the process of understanding.
 * The living body is made whole by retrieving the awareness of the primal body (its undeveloped wisdom)--the child body—retrieved through awareness, not regression.
 * The more we feel our own embodiment, the more we can access knowledge/the sacred/the divine.

**Chapter 3: Moral Education: The Body’s Felt Sense of Value** Opening Conversation Summary (246-247)
 * Levin begins with a series of quotes about the body as a reflection of character, as an essential (and missing) component in education. Dewey, Emerson, Rogers, Nietzsche, others are quoted. (224-225)
 * Rousseau’s philosophy of education builds on the idea that we need not only to educate the body, but with the body as well. Dewey does this, too, says Levin, but their models are not enough. He aims in this chapter to address 5 issues of teaching of moral education with the body using the felt sense of a “body of values” that connects us with an embodied morality and character.
 * Contemporary society divides the body and the mind into factions: the body, in education, is viewed as a “distraction” (228). We seek in schooling to control and conform the body—to deny its use. Dewey quote (228) discusses this clearly.
 * When we do incorporate the body in schooling—in PE classes, or technical crafts—it is as a tool, not as a source of understanding. It is “reduced to the function of calculative thinking” (229). We see it mechanically, not organically.
 * Levin argues that moral education should address the whole person, appealing to our primordial felt sense of motility and morality. There is wisdom in our bodies that we do not use in schools.
 * Levin ties heteronomy (in this sense, morality applied to us from outside ourselves) to moral dysfunction (232). He argues that morality is actually ingrained within us, and that education should use the natural tendency toward morality to teach.
 * Levin outlines 5 problems and possible solutions for children’s moral development. He emphasizes that his ideas are “a rough sketch” of possibilities (234). He addresses:
 * 1) Psychological rigidity: “intolerance, dogmatism, fanaticism, opposition to necessary change, the suppression of creativity, deafness to rational argument…” (234), which can be connected to perceptual/bodily rigidity (in metaphor and in motility). Levin argues that working with children in a body-sense (stressing openness and flexibility) will help to develop implicit moral openness and flexibility.
 * 2) “Owning” our actions and embodiment is critical for developing moral character. Again, Levin stresses openness of posture and stance to develop acceptance. This should be evident in the teacher’s stance as well: the body of the teacher communicates acceptable behavior and attitude. We model and teach that openness, friendliness, awareness.
 * 3) Compassion should be manifest in the teacher’s presence, “so that it visibly graces her stance and gestures, and she is visibly moved by it” so in order to teach it by example (238). Levin paraphrases Nietzsche: compassion is physical response, is communicated physically, and is learned by mimesis. We must cultivate a “felt sense of being with others in a primordial intercorporality” (239). Intersubjectivity—intercorporality? Levin discusses the mimetic quality of smiling as an example of this.
 * 4) Levin extends the metaphor of “upright character” into postural embodiment. Education can ground moral “uprightness” in the already embodied physical knowing of upright moral character.
 * 5) Etymological tracing of “autonomy” (self-law) leads Levin to a discussion of the nomos (nature) of motility as something that makes us pre-programmed for autonomy: “Our motility is the inscription of the primordial nomos, which establishes the nomological conditions for our fulfillment as self-moved, self-moving agents, capable of initiating a binding self-restraint that is the first laying-down (legein) of our creative participation in a field of action where virtue and goodness of moral existence may really flourish in the beauty of its truth” (244). Because our bodies program us for autonomy, teaching from the body and to the body of the child creates wholeness, moral capacity, and communication and connection with the innermost moral self.
 * Levin gives a general overview of this pedagogically relevant chapter.
 * This summary is worth reading to get the condensed version of his ideas.
 * Powerful last sentence: “It is the joyful teaching, and not the punitive, that opens the child most deeply to the learning space of truth” (247).

**Chapter 4: The Body Politic** Opening Conversation Part I: Political Education in Classical Greece Part II: Corporeal Schemata
 * Quotes from Plato, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty address the education of the body and of the community, of order and rhythm.
 * Draws heavily from Plato’s writings about education, discussing the importance of dance for developing a community and its members. The truly educated person was sound of both body and mind.
 * Ethical politics (virtue) manifests in our bodies: “The aim of political education is to teach the political virtues in a mimesis of their bodily comportment: teach them, that is, by a method which, being true to the deepest nature of the body, is able to bring out the intrinsic potential for goodness” (251).
 * Dance, according to Levin (a la Plato and Merleau-Ponty) “teaches civic ideals and values in the most direct and unforgettable way, realizing them in the living body of their tradition” (253).
 * Levin begins by drawing from an Asian text that details the human body systems as analogous to political system working. He aims to move beyond metaphor into deeper representation.
 * The human body embodies the ideals of an ethical political system: “as a natural or wild being, as flesh, is always already the metaphor, the bearer, of a utopian political destination” (255). This leads Levin to what he calls an “ontologically radicalized political theory” containing the necessary characteristics (from Merleau-Ponty’s characteristics of the flesh) of “openness, intertwining, and reversibility” (256). More clearly defined, openness refers to awareness, intertwining to intercorporeality, and reversibility to reflexive understanding (like empathy).
 * Levin goes on to say that he does not have a model, and that he will not elaborate more in an isolated chapter, because he believes all matters addressed in the text have political significance: “The entire book is a political work, a gesture with political motives and effects” (259).

**Chapter 5: Taking the Measure in Stride** Opening Conversation Part I: The Measure Part II: In Balance Part III: Walking the Path
 * Many quotes from religious texts and philosophy concerning the earth, heavens, and walking—the connection of the body with the earthly and the celestial.
 * Levin uses the word “measure” to refer to meaning of being. We measure our mortality, our being, existence.
 * Levin argues that we can connect to ontological measure: “though the rhythm of our stride, it may be possible for us to experience the measure of an openness-to-Being that we could not dream of realizing any other way” (266).
 * We measure ourselves against the earth and the sky: the verticality of our posture pressing up and down at once, by the rhythm of our own beating hearts.
 * Walking marks our progress, “our own true stride, the stride that is uniquely fits our bodily being, [through which] we can begin to realize in its rhythm the individuating measure of our being” (269).
 * Levin discusses the parallel between physical and mental balance: “A well-balanced mind, clear and steady, requires a well-balanced body…” (270). He discusses posture connected to physical well-being and moral standing.
 * The earth and sky are two poles which draw us up and down at once: through the earth, we are connected with time and the passing of time, while through the sky we are connected with spaciousness/eternity.
 * The balance of grounding with the earth and connection to the sky allows us balance, to find our center: “a necessary step in the development of our ontological capacity to open ourselves to the larger measure of Being and to encounter other beings with equanimity, justice, and a presence that is deeply responsive, since the life which is lived without such a center of balance is ontologically too insecure, too vulnerable, to tolerate that measure of openness” (274).
 * Drawing from Heidegger’s conception of thinking as a path of steps, Levin moves into embodied thinking—the actual taking of physical steps in thinking.
 * He discusses the idea of the earthly and celestial, with the human body in the in-between space—motility gives us access to both the celestial and the earthly: “when we are walking the path of thought, our flowing stride, as we actually experience it, (e.g. as highly charged) meaningfully participates in the motions which are characteristic of both realms” (277).
 * Levin moves into the next chapter with a series of questions about human nature, proposing to “take them in stride” in the remainder of the text (280).

**Chapter 6: The Ground and Its Poetizing** Part I: The Earth: Our Elemental Ground Part II: The Poetizing Dance Part III: The Ecstatic Leap of Faith
 * Levin begins with a series of quotes about the earth/ground, being, and questioning (from Heidegger, Nietzsche, Thoreau).
 * Referencing Heidegger and Nietzsche, Levin discusses masculine call to power and feminine principles, stating that “the groundrules of the old patriarchy must be called into question. Until they are, the will to power can only hasten the annihilation of the earth. Can we, without transforming this masculine will to power, sincerely hope to avoid the possibility which Nietzsche loudly proposes in Ecce Homo, that 'there will be wars the like of which have never been yet on earth'?” (283).
 * The relationship between ground and being: “ground” seems to have a multiple meaning here—it is the literal earth, but also the atmosphere by which being is measured, an “elemental presence” which underlies the mystery of Being, in which “the worlding of the world” is “presenced” (284).
 * Reference to Merleau-Ponty as calling for a “transcendental geology” that allows for another understanding of our “dwelling” upon the earth. This would “bring us back to the fact of our embodiment,” our humanness: “...until we acknowledge the human body in a way that upholds its dignity as a body of the deepest inherent understanding, and until, therefore, we fulfill the dream of the earth in the very bearing of our thinking, we cannot reasonably expect to escape the fate which is sealed for us within our metaphysics, nor will we be able to walk the path of beauty, beyond the nihilism of its enframing, into that great openness which thinking calls the very truth of being” (289).
 * Levin states his argument on 291: overcoming traditional metaphysics means living fully in the body (see his argument detailed).
 * “We are, or can be, fully human only by virtue of our relationship with the earth” (291).
 * Objectives in this section: “to demonstrate that when dance is thoughtful, it is a fundamental form of poetizing... to bring the dance to disclosure as the origin or the essence of movement in general” (293).
 * Levin connects dance and poetry as expression of being, defined by and metered by rhythm (heartbeat?). He discusses the Kogi, who teach children to dance before they walk—thoughtful walking is “sacred-movement-of the-origin” that makes us whole and connects us to the earth (297).
 * Levin discusses dance (and movement) a la Merleau-Ponty as “an anchoring of the active body in a vectorally organized space” (298). When we feel the wholeness of our selves through rhythmic movement, we feel the wholeness of the earth, of Being.
 * Quotes on dancing and thought from Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger... (300-302)
 * Levin discusses nihilism as loss of being, as the need to control rather than depend upon the ground. We can avoid this through “joyful release of poetizing movement” (303).
 * Decision is a “leap”--Levin discusses “leap” in both physical and metaphoric sense here. It is both the acknowledgment (trusting) of the ground and the leaving of the ground—both defying and acknowledging gravity, risking and denying faith at once. Heidegger’s concept of //satz// (origin) is relevant for Levin: “in both the leap and the proposition, the thinker is related to the ground” (307).
 * Heidegger, Levin says, “misses the opportunity to make this spirit explicit as a bearing of thought” in the body. He begins to discuss the leap, the ground, the origin, but does not bring these concepts fully into the body (where Levin argues they belong).
 * “Mortals leap and dance in obedience to the earth, the elemental presence of ground: mortals leap and dance with a rhythm of power, a rhythm which gets its measure from the immeasurable ground which stands under their feet” (310).
 * Poetizing is play and our “most harmonious relationship to the ground” is “characterized by play”(313). Of metaphysics: “facing the horror of an abyss, rather than the kindness of ground, because it has vehemently refused to be with the ground in a way that is truly harmonious, refused to bend its thinking in obedience to the earth” (313). We can not separate the mind and the body. We must shift “the center of energy” from “the head” to “the trunk” (314). We must be “moved by compassion” and “go where we are moved” (316).

**Chapter 7: The Gathering Round Dance** Opening Conversation Includes Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jung, Merleau-Ponty, discussing circular motion, dance, bodily expression of joy, praise, consecrated dance. Part I: A Place of Clearing
 * Levin charts Heidegger’s discussion of a mythical dance that included the earth, the heavens, mortals, and the gods. The dance is a circle: no beginning, no end—it is time, creation, eternity. A “round dance.” This is, according to Levin: “a symbol, a prototype, of 'the coming of the great beginning”(324).
 * This round dance is world-building, and it “gathers around a center. Being is welcomed in that center. The round-dance is a hermeneutic circle gathering the Fourfold in a recollection which turns toward the central meaning of being” (325).
 * Levin traces the round-dance in many cultures: the Sioux, the ancient Greeks... As a celebration of all aspects of being, of every living thing, inclusive. This is the worlding of the world. It is also the clearing of ground for the experience of being, of truth. It is “a recollection of the primal taking-place of space: an event taking place in, and taking place as, an appropriation of the mortal body in a movement for the sake of the coming-to-presence of truth in the communal ring of protection” (334).
 * Discussion on “magic circles” or mandalas as means for healing and as archetype.
 * Levin includes a table on page 337 that outlines a complete summary of his analyses of embodiment throughout the text: this is helpful and worth looking at.

Part II: Space Part II: Resting This brief, final section invites the reader to rest, breathe, and “share what we have learned” (349).
 * Levin discusses the idea of linear, will-to-power conception of the world and history, and suggests, instead, a round-dance, inclusive understanding of history and being.
 * Euclidean geometry, which shapes our modern constructs of science, involves lines, measures, and not roundness—we are realizing it is just one conception of reality in a vast set of possibilities. Levin argues for a move toward other conceptions of space and understanding.
 * The final parts of this text move into psychological understanding (as per the book's title). According to Levin, the shape of one's inner space affects the concept of one's outer space. In other words, when we are suffering “our lived space will be shaped and warped, narrowed and tightened, in relation to that neurosis” (343).
 * The loss of body leads to pathology: we become divided: “Our entanglement with the objective space of classical physics has in fact encouraged us to deny, to forget, or to devalue our pre-ontological, bodily felt sense of the intrinsic richness, meaningfulness, and openness of our space for living” (346). We are unreceptive to human body needs: “We have expanded our civilization into the envelope of outer space; yet we cannot make room, here on earth, of people very different from ourselves” (346). The body is our common thread—primordial being.
 * The child's experience of space as “a place of enchantment” is attributable to embodiment, the child's “openness” to the body (348).