The Sea of Reflexes

Carl H. Flygt

October, 2005

Since Heidegger, phenomenology has intensively pursued the question of what the human understanding is, and how it gives rise to thought and judgment. The consensus now seems to be that the understanding entails some sort of motor intentionality, quite independent of any higher order thought or reflection, in which spinal and medullary reflexes nevertheless exhibit a certain conceptual appreciation of the world, its relations and its objects. To grasp an object is a different sort of action than to point at an object, but grasping appreciates the object for what it affords just as pointing recognizes the object for what it is. Both actions are directed at an actual object, and so both in some sense are conceptual.

Reflex action on all levels is what the human infant comes equipped with. From the grasping reflex to suckling to the startle reflex, to the autonomic pumping of the chest and lungs, of the heart and the digestive tract, as well as the accommodations of the eyes to movements of the head and objects brought to differing distances, the human infant is a bundle of reflexes. It is these reflexes that gradually submerge into subconsciousness as higher cortical functions take over, and the intentionality of self-consciousness begins to dominate experience. But the sea of reflexes never goes away, and some of the more important ones, the orgasm for example, set the tone for many of our motives and values.

Now I have invested about twenty-five years in a study of Chinese qigong, from teachers regarded by most as second to none, which aims to balance and bring under conscious control all of the a priori reflexes of which the human body is capable. This background also qualifies me to expound with some certainty on what is subconsciously involved in human conversation, and on what it should be possible to expect of conversations whose fundamental constraint is to manage the sea of reflexes for the sake of exotic intuitions that are not only impressively intelligent, but emotionally satisfying in the deepest way possible.

The understanding was thought by Kant to provide a set of rudimentary and invariant concepts or categories which made human experience in general possible. These are the concepts of unity, of substance, of causality and of necessity, for example, and they should probably be thought of as affordances grasped by the sea of reflexes. Kant’s program, one recalls, was to place metaphysics on the secure path of a science. Kant wanted a scientific and responsible segue into clairvoyant intuition, such as that famously exhibited by Emanuel Swedenborg, and his critical framework was organized, I believe, to allow future generations the possibility of developing clairvoyance, or cosmo-mechanical understanding, out of purely logical methods.

To engage conversation as I have defined it in my forthcoming book is to engage the understanding, or the sea of reflexes in the Apollonic light of science and the great tradition of metaphysics, and thus to take on Kant’s program, and the puzzle of Swedenborg, in the most direct way possible. In fact, the example of Swedenborg, who was the sort of phenomenon that comes along only once in one hundred years, was superseded in the early 20th century by that of Rudolf Steiner, the Austro-Croatian clairvoyant who was probably a once in a thousand year phenomenon. Steiner’s legacy, from which we have the Waldorf schools and biodynamic agriculture, to name but two examples, devolved from an individual who in all likelihood had total self-consciousness of his entire autonomic nervous system and reflex arcs, and when Steiner trained his higher cortical functions on a bit of history or a problem in medicine, the intuitions that resulted were not only spectacularly exotic, but proved without exception to be of practical utility.

When one attempts to train oneself in the capacities that Steiner exhibited with so little apparent effort, one notices several things. One is that reflexes permeate the entire spinal column, and are subconsciously responsible for the upright posture and indeed, because it ultimately could be nothing else, for the basic sense of self. The transcendental unity of proprioception is the sea of reflexes radiating from the spinal cord, entering the viscera and the musculature, and returning to that primitive organ without the benefit or the need of thought, judgment or even perception. Another thing is that when higher cortical functions such as concentration and meditation are brought to bear on it, the bodily innervation quite readily goes numb, and the only solution is a lengthy and devoted practice of conditioning under the watchful eye of an experienced master, of someone who has gone through the whole thing already and has come out successfully on the other end.

Conversation theory seeks to supplant the traditional master with an arrangement more conducive to the freedom required by the modern ego and by modern society, in all of its complexity. Instead of submitting one’s devotion to a single individual, which writ large is a recipe for political despotism, as the history of societies in China and India readily attest, submit one’s devotion to a correct set of principles, and let the watchful eye be a distributed system of moral intelligence trained first and foremost on the circumstances of conversation. Similar results will be achieved, and many new ones as well. Those who wish to learn to stand on one foot for hours at a time can always return to traditional methods. The old ways will never go completely out of style, but they will not be for everyone. Lawful conversation, on the other hand, will be.

So it will go, I think. The purpose of conversation is to develop and refine the understanding, and the understanding is tied fundamentally not to self-conscious judgment but to what it is available to the sea of reflexes. Without fail, the sea of reflexes is summoned in each conversational moment, from the jolt of antipathy in the face of a conversational error, to the impulse to claim recognition for one’s own moment of originality, to the sympathetic appreciation to which we accede when something appears right to us, to the mystical appearance in the imagination, and even in the collective imagination, unbidden and transcendental, of an object of supernal beauty or power. It is to name and to manage the array of reflexes that the theory of conversation aims to do, not to suppress them, and never to allow them to hold to a state of mere nature, and thereby consign conversation to mere anarchy, but to submit them to intelligence, to consciousness and to the etheric field around the body and within the mind where ultimately we seek to settle ourselves, as beings of life and light.