Don Hanlon Johnson, now Professor of Somatics at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, is one of the few writers in English to mention Ilse Middendorf and her work. In his view the dominant mode of life in the twentieth century involved an
‘incomprehensible savaging of flesh’ as evidenced by
global and local wars, genocides, politically directed torture and famine, terrorist attacks, the selling of children and women into prostitution, and personal wanton violence to family members and street victims (1995b, ix).
On the other hand he sees that:
there has been a steady resistance building among innovators who have devoted their lives to developing strategies for recovering the wisdom and creativity present in breathing, sensing, moving and touching (1995b, ix).
He sees this ‘movement of resistance’ as having its roots in the middle of the eighteenth century with a number of people, and gives Leo Kofler (1837–1908) as an example. Born in Austria, Kofler contracted
tuberculosis in 1860, emigrated to the US in 1866 to work at the German Lutheran Church in Newport, Kentucky, and set about
studying the nature of breath, through anatomy and exercises. By 1887 he was organist and choirmaster at St Paul’s Cathedral in Manhattan, a position he held for the rest of his life. Johnson writes that by then Kofler had healed himself and developed a method for teaching others how to free ‘restrictions’ to breath, which he described in The art of breathing (1897). The quest for recovery from illness or injury through
to be unsuccessful is common among those who have founded somatic bodies of work, as Johnson notes:
Many were faced with a physical dysfunction or illness which threatened their life and work, and for which their physicians could offer no relief. Gindler had tuberculosis; F.M. Alexander had chronic laryngitis; Gerda Alexander had rheumatic fever; Moshe Feldenkrais, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and Judith Aston had severe accidents leaving crippling bone fractures (1995b, x–xi).
Johnson writes that Clara Schlaffhorst and Hedwig Andersen came from Germany to New York to study with Kofler. Their German translation of his book is now in its thirty-sixth edition. In 1916 they founded the ‘Rotenburg school of Respiration’, which influenced many of the pioneers of body awareness work, and continues today under the name ‘Schlaffhorst-Andersen School’ (www.cjd.schlaffhorst-
andersen.de). Middendorf acknowledges the continuing importance of their influence as well as their book, Atmung und Stimme [Breathing
and voice] (1928). Brigitte Wellner, one of the Middendorf practitioners I interviewed, with many years experience in voice, also had some
experience with the Schlaffhorst-Andersen method. She describes it as: ‘very solid, it’s sort of technical, it doesn't go as deep as the breathwork of Middendorf’ (Appendix G, paragraph 3).
Johnson’s contributions to the field of bodily awareness are legion (see for example 1994, 1995a, 1997), and his thesis that the revival of interest in and awareness of body is a response to the dominant mode of life in the West is provocative. However in this context he claims to have no explanation for how the dominant mode of life triggered such a ‘movement of resistance’. How there came to be such a ‘savaging of the flesh’ is ‘incomprehensible’. And in a sense it is. There is no simple
answer, but Johnson’s own work on the formation of scholars, which I discuss later, points in the direction of a complex answer where the mode of daily life is remade in the more abstract image of the relation between intellectuals. Briefly, in this view31 the world has been and is
being remade through abstracted technologies, the first of which was writing, so that what once were certainties in the social world can no longer be taken for granted. The technosciences arising from the coalescence of abstract intellect with the mode of production have worked and continue to work to vastly increase the destructive power of weapons, while human face-to-face contact and interaction in many areas, including in combat, are reduced.
Philosopher Charles Taylor’s investigation of modern identity (1989) explores the intertwining of selfhood and morality. He contends:
Perhaps the most urgent and powerful cluster of demands that we recognize as moral concern the respect for the life, integrity, and well- being, even flourishing, of others. These are the ones we infringe when we kill or maim others, steal their property, strike fear into them and rob them of peace, or even refrain from helping them when they are in distress. Virtually everyone feels these demands, and they have been and are acknowledged in all human societies. Of course the scope of the demand notoriously varies: earlier societies, and some present ones, restrict the class of beneficiaries to members of the tribe or race and exclude outsiders, who are fair game, or even condemn the evil to a definitive loss of this status (1989, 4).
Taylor goes on to propose that these moral concerns are so ‘deep, powerful, and universal’ that we are tempted to think of them as instinctual. ‘Culture and upbringing may help define the boundaries of the relevant “others”, but they don’t seem to create the basic reaction
itself’ (1989, 5). He connects this with the ‘almost universal tendency among other animals to stop short of the killing of conspecifics’ (1989, 5). But, he argues, these moral concerns are not of the same order as other ‘instinctual’ reactions such as the love of sweet things or aversion to nauseous substances. In addition to the instinctual facet they have a connection to what it means to be human:
we should treat our deepest moral instincts, our ineradicable sense that human life is to be respected, as our mode of access to the world in which ontological claims are discernable and can be rationally argued about and sifted (1989, 8).
If we take Taylor seriously, as I believe we should, then how is it that this past century has seen such a ‘savaging of flesh’, as Johnson calls it? As I see it the abstract remaking of the mode of daily life that has been happening since the invention of writing, that accelerated with the invention of moveable type and printing, and continues to accelerate with the proliferation of information technology, can remove us, alienate us, from these ‘gut instincts’, these felt senses of what it is to be
human. And one of the tremendous possibilities of somatic works is that we reconnect with these bodily feelings.