Somatic Arts and Sciences
In 1977 Thomas Hanna founded the publication, Somatics: Magazine-Journal of the Bodily Arts and Sciences. One of the striking features of Somatics are the photographs, poetry, and beautifully written essays on the inside of the front cover. In conceiving the purpose of this journal, Thomas Hanna signaled that the arts are an equal partner to science in the shared goal of disseminating somatic thought and its practical applications.
Tom Hanna posing for the front cover of Somatics
Thomas Hanna, a professor of philosophy, ascribes the field of Somatics as being closely aligned with the thinking of American pragmatists William James and John Dewey. “As a young philosopher”, Hanna says in Selections from Somatology, “I discovered the Pragmatists as my first philosophical family, and their concerns instantly struck me as compellingly human and healthy and confident.” Hanna goes on to say, “what I think of as a somatology was being constantly suggested in The Principles of Psychology by James; and I am doing and thinking in the way that James would, I'm sure.”
Somatic Fields Today
The field of Somatics has been viewed mainly through a clinical and neuro-physiological lens. While somatic training and education has included a focus on such issues as emotions, trauma and mind-body integration, the primary orientation has been on achieving efficacy-based outcomes. This clinical orientation is perhaps the farthest thing from what one would consider to be artistic.
Being both a musician and a Hanna Somatics practitioner, I have come to believe that the arts have much to offer the field of Somatics. In fact, I will argue that the Somatic Arts and Somatic Sciences share a common philosophy. And by exploring this philosophy, we will understand how the Somatic Arts actually can enrich the entire field of Somatics.
Thomas Hanna
A Philosopher who works with his hands
The Philosophy of Somatics
Thomas Hanna was a pioneer in developing a philosophy of Somatics. Hanna studied the rich history of somatic thinkers in an array of disciplines, seeking to find the common thread that would explain the core principles that unified somatic thought. It was the American Pragmatists that came closest to aligning with those core principles and helped form Hanna’s definition of Somatology as the Science of Experience. How can we differentiate between what is somatic science and somatic art? In Hanna’s Somatology he insists, “we must look more carefully at the enterprise of art, i.e., of the artist-at-work, to truly understand what he or she is actually doing”.
William James: Principles of Psychology
In his book Principles, Williams James argued that the order of uniform causation which science must be used for, may be enveloped within a wider order, upon which science has no claims. In other words, science is an important field, but it doesn’t have a monopoly on the truth of experience. Other ways of knowing, such as religious and mystical experiences, cannot be understood through scientific means.
William James is best known for his idea of the stream of thought (stream of consciousness). James observed that our consciousness has a rhythm composed of a series of transitions and resting-places. “We rest when we remember the name we have been searching for; and we are off again when we hear a noise that might be the baby waking from her nap”. Consciousness is not always a series of ordered thoughts. In Somatology, Hanna describes how experience itself is a sensory-motor event of being caught within the flow of things and constantly adapting to that flow.
James also believed that “emotion follows, rather than causes, its bodily expression. Whereas common-sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike out”.
James goes on to say that this order of sequence is incorrect…that instead “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble”.
Appreciating James’ key insights, Hanna states, “the Pragmatists are absolutely correct in saying that the ‘universals’ of experience are categories of functions, meaning they must include our bodily experience”
John Dewey took many of William James’ ideas and applied them to a philosophy of art in his treatise on aesthetics, Art as Experience. Dewey articulates the difference between science and art by claiming that science states meaning, whereas art expresses meaning. The difference has to do with the intended communication between the artist, the artwork, and the person interacting with the art. Science states meaning objectively and does not depend on being understood in the unique way that the scientist perceived it in their original experience. Science is factual and not an expressive communication between persons. Art is a quality that permeates an experience. This experience is triadic- in a sense there is a speaker, what is said, and who hears it.
The Moral Function of Art
Dewey believed that art creates an imaginary vision of the way life could be, a possibility realized in actual material. In his book The End of Tyranny: An Essay on the Possibility of America, Hanna makes a sharp distinction between the humanoid and the human. Humanoids act mechanically and have little feeling or compassion. Fully human people are deeply introspective, open to new ways of living, loving, and experiencing with others. Fully-human people have self-determination and agency, are open and curious to greater self-discovery, having the very real potential for creativity and human flourishing. Humanoids are disinterested in art because art encourages empathy, along with an experiential space for sharing ideals and values. Art goes against the humanoid’s authoritarian leaning of following a strong man who will provide certainty and simplistic answers, foregoing any sort of serious introspection.
Dewey argued that art has a moral function that encourages us to grow into our potential evolution as a human being. At its best, art is democratic and serves society in reminding us that being human is a complicated affair. Similarly, Hanna states, “there is still an enormous residue of genetically given human traits that have, almost like a ‘miraculous find,’ never been fully encouraged to grow and occur in society and be tolerated enough to be able to proliferate. These traits are symbolized and self-owned through the uplifting and shaping influence of art”.
Art is Adjectival
Dewey says that art is a quality of doing and the quality of what is done. Art is an adjective, not a thing (a noun). Hanna states in Somatology, “everything that we linguistically fix and define involves a description of something no longer in process, and is therefore prima facie false. The true meaning of something has more to do with what you might experience in normal relationship with it. More comprehensively, how do you experience it?" "What was it like?" "How did it feel?" These are questions originating in first-person consciousness. First person consciousness is concerned with the quality of experience as much as the specific sensations and perceptions experienced”.
Art is an Experience
According to Dewey, an experience is a unified event with a pervasive quality. In contrast, a normal everyday experience is different in that a person goes through a sequence of ordinary events with little standing out in particular, except for episodic events deemed important. An experience is different: it wakes us up from the dream-like state of daily repetition and forces us to confront life in a fresh new way rather than automatically. This is exactly what makes life worth living. In Somatology, Hanna says of the artist, “artists cannot help doing what they do. That is the way they see it and the way they must go about saying it or doing it, or singing it or representing it in dance. It falsifies the human significance of art to idealize it and set the phenomenon outside of our realm of possibilities. Artists are a natural social class set off from the charge of the human herd, which is increasingly stultified in its experience of living. Artists are a class apart that serves our happy purposes, producing reminders of ourselves”.
Art is an Integral Experience
Dewey explains that the production of art is a multifaceted and difficult process which includes: 1) impulsion, 2) resistance, 3) use of medium and, 4) emotion. These elements are ordered, clarified, and colored by past experiences --eventually becoming an act of expression through a back-and-forth refinement. Indeed, there is a rhythm to the process of art, and this rhythm is a core aspect of all art just as there is rhythm within nature and human lives. Dewey observed that the production of art manifests as multi-varied rhythms through activity, continuity, culmulation, conservation, tension, and anticipation. Rhythm is also in the act of artistic perception, as one views art there are motor responses that feed back and forth between the viewer and the work. Works of art are means by which we enter, through imagination and the emotions they evoke, into other forms of relationship and participation that transcend our familiar routines and ways of knowing. Art is imagination made manifest - a way of seeing and feeling that is expressed and congealed into an integral whole, opening the doors of perception.
Albrecht Dürer was an artist Tom admired.
Albrecht Dürer, Studies of Dürer's Left Hand 1493/1494
This array of expressive hand gestures—all modeled by the artist himself—can be interpreted according to a traditional pictorial vocabulary dating back to the Middle Ages. The pointing finger is usually identified as a rhetorical gesture indicating speech; the hand elegantly holding the stem of a flower is understood as the sign of a man wooing his bride; and the third hand is engaged in a well-known crude gesture. These carefully delineated studies not only display the artist's facility with a pen, but also together create a witty trio of gesticulations.
Albrecht Dürer, Saint Eustace, c. 1501
The largest of Dürer's engravings depicts Placidus, a Roman military commander who was moved to conversion by the appearance of a stag with a cross between its antlers. He later took the name Eustace (the Steadfast) and became a popular patron saint of hunters. The spiritual intensity of the moment of conversion is translated into a dizzying display of engraved detail that imparts a crystalline stillness on the human and animal figures. The worship of Christ is expressed in the glorification of nature.
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When we see Durer’s sketches, we see a person with such a total on-line communication of the essential items as we should envision them. He has viewed his scene, and has been so astonishingly attentive to it that he sees far more details and contrasts in that scene that anyone might be expected to-and he can express this experience in an artistic representation that fulfills this self-need.”
Art in Civilization
Art has played a significant role in every civilization and Dewey explains that cultural memory and cultural exchanges are mediated by art more than anything else. The verb civilize means to instruct in the arts of life and thus to elevate the scale of civilization. In the temple, art and religion are not separated but connected. According to Dewey, the break between art and daily life occurred when art was relegated to an independent field. Aesthetic theories served to further distance art by presenting it as something ethereal and disconnected from daily experience. Rituals, mythology, and religion are all attempts of human beings to find light in the darkness and despair that is existence. Art is compatible with a certain degree of mysticism as it addresses the senses and imagination directly. For this reason, John Dewey’s theory defends the need for esoteric experience and the mystical function of art.
In Somatology, Hanna also bemoans the separation of art from daily life: “How we create social visions has come to a high art in the present entertainment industry, and this art is most highly patronized and rewarded when it can be bought for purposes of business promotion. We are experientially saturated by images, symbols, slogans, scare images, noise, and violent occurrences in our social environment, so as to all be contaminated. At one time the artists, and often even the art lovers, could pursue their passions without interference from a noisy environment. The old way was to quietly and happily devote one's life to the genteel cultivation of those pleasures, a situation of noble class privilege during the Middle Ages. That time is no more, and we are all contaminated in the way in which we have been forced to close off and be blind to the full range of what our environment now pours down on us. The current triumph of the communication media so deluges us with the indiscriminate flotsam of society that the cultural environment begins to function like the bowl of the flushing toilet”.
The Shade- François Auguste René Rodin, 1880
The twisted, grotesque figure is very much in line with the demonic, tortured souls that were depicted in Rodin’s other works based on Dante’s Divine Comedy and his interpretation of Hell itself.
The Art of Somatics
The role of art in society has been exiled from our daily life. Social and mass media bombard us with constant distractions, which not only steals and corrupts our attention, but distances us from the direct, first-person experience of our natural rhythms. We literally and figuratively lose touch with ourselves and the world.
While artistic experiencing takes time and focused attention, it provides the joy and empathy we all yearn for with our fellow inhabitants of this earth. Hanna states: “I deeply feel that the beckoning future of our race is to finally become so at ease, so unafraid, so uncompelled as to be able to live in joy and friendliness. It is obviously the functional program in response to which we can function optimally in social intercourse and in somatic experience”.
Thomas Hanna was a Somatic Artist
Thomas Hanna was both a somatic scientist and a somatic artist. Tom wrote poetry, prose, sang, played guitar, acted, sketched, painted, and sculpted. Tom saw artistic beauty in the human form and the human form in everything around him. Those of us that knew him intimately understood how deeply respectful he was of artists and their art. Driving around Marin County Tom would always comment on how the golden rolling hills looked like the voluptuous outline of a woman. He would point out the unique beauty of the face of a person walking by. Almost every meal Tom enjoyed was exclaimed by him as a thing of beauty to behold and savor. An afternoon drive in the camper van turned into an adventure into the unknown. And in the early mornings and late afternoons, Tom would sit on the patio and watch the light and shadows interact with the nature surrounding him as he contemplated the mysteries of life. Thomas Hanna, surely, embraced both somatic science and art.
Some selected Poetry, art, music, and prose by Thomas Hanna
A very early poem by Tom Hanna (date unknown)
A drawing by Tom of Wendell as a young child ( I had an unusual way of sucking my thumb that Tom found amusing) C 1961
Hambones was a faculty band when Tom was a philosophy professor at Hollins College, Roanoke, Virgina
Tom found the lyrics to this song in one of folklorist John Lomax’s collections and set it to music. Recorded November 1970
This live reading of one of Tom’s prose from Somatics was recorded at the first Novato Hanna Somatics training, July 13, 1990.
Somatic Arts and Somatic Sciences Share a Common Philosophy
Somatic Arts and Sciences are both about the experience of striving to be fully human, to be constantly moving toward freedom, autonomy, and happiness. Every human being has artistic potential and can participate in the processes of art. Somatic science is an integral part of the somatic arts. Somatic science explains how the soma can interact with its environment in a fully functioning manner and without being stifled by outside forces. The somatic arts, however, do more than explain, they express a transformative perspective between somas, a unique communication that cannot be stated by science alone.
Why would we not want to embrace the richness of artistic expression in our work as somatic thinkers and practitioners? My hope moving forward is that somatic fields today will open up, even further, toward embracing somatic arts in their many differentiated expressions and varied forms. I am certain that Tom would have wanted it that way.
References
Dewey, J. (2005). Art as Experience. New York: Perigee Books, Penguin.
Hanna, T. (1991). Selections from Somatology: Somatic Philosophy and Psychology. Somatics: Magazine-Journal of the Bodily Arts and Sciences. 8(2), 14-19.
Hanna, T. (2007). Somatology: Intro to Somatic Philosophy and Psychology, Part 2. Somatics: Magazine-Journal of the Bodily Arts and Sciences. 15(3), 4-9.
Hanna, T. (2008). Somatology: Part III. Somatics: Magazine-Journal of the Bodily Arts and Sciences. 15(4), 10-16, 16-54.
Hanna, T. (2009). Somatology: Part IV. Somatics: Magazine-Journal of the Bodily Arts and Sciences. 16(1), 18-22.
James, W., Burkhardt, F., Bowers, F., & Skrupskelis, I. K. (1890). The Principles of Psychology (Vol. 1, No. 2). London: Macmillan.