The Body, the Mind, and the Courage to Speak

Three disciplines that make discernment possible

If the first task is knowing how to evaluate what we're told, the second task is harder and more personal: building the internal capacities that make evaluation possible in the first place. Three of these matter more than any technique or checklist.

1. The first is learning to listen to the body.

2. The second is training the mind in critical thinking.

3. The third, and in many ways the most difficult, is finding the courage to ask the question aloud, and to say what we actually think once we've thought it.

Have the courage to speak

The body as an instrument of knowing

Western philosophy has, for long stretches of its history, treated the body with a certain suspicion, as though it were the mind's unreliable cousin, prone to distraction and appetite while reason alone could be trusted to find the truth. Descartes gave this suspicion its sharpest form when he split mind from body so cleanly that later philosophers spent centuries trying to put the two back together.

The split was never entirely accurate to lived experience and contemporary philosophy of mind, particularly the tradition of embodied cognition associated with thinkers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Embodied cognition has done a great deal to restore the body's standing as a genuine source of knowledge rather than an obstacle to it.

What does this mean in practice? It means the tightening in your chest when someone tells you something that doesn't add up is not noise to be pushed aside so the 'real' thinking can happen. It is data. It means the sense of ease you feel around a person who is being straightforward with you and the subtle wariness you feel around one who is not. These are forms of perception, slower and less articulate than language, but often faster and no less accurate.

This is not mysticism. It is closer to what psychologists call somatic intelligence, and it sits comfortably alongside the shamanic emphasis on the body as a primary sense organ for truth, not a secondary one to be overruled by clever argument. The two traditions, philosophical and shamanic, agree here: a mind that has learned to notice the body is harder to deceive than one that has trained itself to ignore it.

Critical thinking as a trained skill, not a personality trait

The second discipline is critical thinking, and it is worth saying plainly that this is a skill built through deliberate practice, not an innate gift some people have and others lack. Aristotle's logic, the informal fallacies catalogued by generations of philosophers since, and the habits taught in any good philosophy seminar, all exist for the same reason: to give the mind tools sharp enough to cut through a bad argument dressed in confident language.

A few habits do most of the work.

1. Ask what evidence would change the speaker's mind, and if the answer is nothing, be suspicious of the claim regardless of how it's dressed.

2. Separate the argument from the person making it; a flawed messenger can still carry a true message, and a charismatic one can still carry a false one.

3. Notice when a conclusion is reached by appeal to emotion, tribe, or authority rather than evidence, all classic and well documented patterns of faulty reasoning.

None of this requires a philosophy degree. It requires the willingness to slow down before agreeing.

The courage to ask, and to speak

The third discipline is the hardest, because it costs something the other two do not. Listening to the body and sharpening the mind can be done privately. Asking a question aloud, in a room where the question is unwelcome, or saying what you actually believe when it conflicts with what the room wants to hear, exposes you to consequence. Socrates paid for this particular courage with his life, and he is remembered because he refused, to the end, to stop asking questions the city found inconvenient. Few of us will face anything like his cost, but the shape of the challenge has not changed. Silence is often the more comfortable choice, and comfort is precisely what makes it seductive.

What makes speaking up possible is not the absence of fear but a settled sense that the truth, however inconvenient, deserves the effort. This is where all three disciplines meet.

1. The body tells you something is worth attending to.

2. The trained mind gives you the means to examine it properly.

3. And courage is simply the decision to act on what the first two have shown you, rather than filing it away as a private, unspoken doubt.

None of these three disciplines is complete without the others. A sharp mind that ignores the body's signals becomes brittle and overconfident. A sensitive body without critical thinking becomes credulous, mistaking every strong feeling for insight. And either one without courage produces a person who sees clearly but says nothing, which, in the end, serves the truth no better than not seeing at all.

Kathy Postelle Rixon is Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford, a researcher of philosophy of mind and physics, and shamanic practitioner. You can contact her at kathy@magicinharmony.com or visit her website at www.magicinharmony.com.