Free will, Intuitional deliberation, and Somatic Intelligence
One of the better arguments for the existence of free will, I hear with my ear to the ground, is the idea of human responsiveness to reasons. Let’s call it rational deliberation. To weight things up one against the other and then freely choose your prefered path. This may be accurate when we deliberate clear external problems, such as a move abroad for a better salary, or to remain at home and be close to family. It is my ‘free will’ that deliberates and choses whether I stay or not, even if I am persuaded by a better salary I still appear to lucidly and freely be choosing the salary over my family.
The case is different when making choices in terms of habitual emotional or ethical intuitions. Here we have a harder task at getting to some place that resembles any free will. I am compelled to dislike a certain person or situation, not so much due to any freedom I have to make a particular choice, but by an embodied persuasion. Such an embodied persuasion is not a rationally deliberated persuasion, as may be the case with relocation, but what wells up within me, innately, as an intuition and overwhelms me. This leaves me feeling ‘certain’ of my conclusion, and yet at the same time I remain unaware of how ‘at the mercy’ I am of my feelings.
Somatic intelligence becomes significant in this realm of deliberation, and a solid somatic practice of greater value than any logical aptitude. If we are able to practice guidance over our unconscious body responses to stimuli, we begin to move closer to the heart of what persuades us most fundamentally, that is our feelings. People may call these ‘intuitions’. As I see it, this is a way of dressing ‘feeling’ up in fancy clothes and giving it a higher status. An intuition is at its base a feeling - an embodied sensation.
A daily practice that involves the development of our conscious relation with our embodied habits and body-responses is crucial if we want to gain any higher capacity at ‘free will’. My conscious ability to recognise and guide my body responses, in action and thought, is crucial for chiselling out an increasingly conscious, and more refined, subtle ‘free will’.
A shout out to the Alexander Technique, alongside what is better know as the ancient practice of Zen Buddhism is a remarkable art form, discovered and laid out by FM Alexander at the end of the 19th century. His theory and practice, in my view as a practitioner and teacher, shows how we can come to know the point at which we lose conscious lucid experience of ourselves, and with it any capacity to apply our free will.
It’s not only necessary that we safeguard lucid conscious experience for better value decision-making, but it is beneficial that we develop the somatic skill of maintaining such a high-level lucid consciousness. It is the embodied experience of freedom, that emerges from constructive conscious guidance of the body, that untangles us from being at the mercy of our unconscious ‘intuitive’ persuasions. It is not merely body-knowledge that is key here, but an aptitude in conscious inhibition and guidance of one’s body-response to ideas and environments. Upon embarking on the task of noticing our embodied habits and practicing to steer such toward freedom and intelligence, we begin to appreciate how complex (and unconscious) our value decision-making process is.
The Alexander Technique, as a practice and skill, is able to convince even the sharpest thinker that their personal conclusions or ‘intuitions’ are largely not in the realm of consciousness or freedom. We merely have the potential to become conscious of our habitually embodied intuitions. Somatic practice enables better intuitional deliberation, and nurture what many of us naively claim to have by default - a free will.
