THE BODY · A QUESTION OF GRAMMAR
On a habit of speech that installs a driver and a vehicle — and on how much of this is fixable by changing a pronoun.
My legs had nothing today. My back is being difficult. I need to get my body to cooperate.
Each of those sentences has two people in it. There is a person, and there is a thing the person owns, operates, negotiates with and is periodically let down by.
Nobody means it literally. It is a habit of speech, and it would be harmless except that the habit installs a relationship: an executive up top issuing instructions, and a somewhat unreliable machine below receiving them.
The correction here is grammatical rather than philosophical, and it is smaller and more tractable than the vocabulary around it suggests.
The ditches here are unusually far apart, and both are well populated.
A thing to be programmed, fuelled and overridden. It is a productive metaphor for training load and a poor one for living, and its failure mode is treating a signal as a malfunction to be managed rather than information to be read.
The reverse: every sensation treated as meaningful, trusted absolutely, and consulted like a source of wisdom. Sensation is information of variable quality, and a great deal of it is noise.
That line is mine rather than any tradition’s, and it is here because the traditional lines on this subject all carry metaphysics I am not borrowing.
What is portable is the grammatical point: the difference between “my legs are heavy” and “there is heaviness” is not a difference in the facts. It is a difference in whether a driver has been installed in the sentence, and the driver then has to be managed.
The thirteenth chapter of the Bhagavad Gītā opens by distinguishing the field from the one who knows the field — the body and everything happening in it on one side, awareness on the other.
It is a dualistic move, which is worth noticing in a collection called Not-Two. The chapter goes on to complicate it, and the schools that read it have disagreed for centuries about how far the separation goes.
I bring it up to be honest about the material rather than to use it. The text that most famously discusses this seam does not settle it, and any collection that pretends the traditions are unanimous here has not read them.
The relevant work is on interoception — the perception of internal bodily states — and the useful finding is a distinction rather than a result.
Garfinkel and colleagues separated interoceptive accuracy, measured objectively, from interoceptive sensibility, which is how good you believe you are at it.4 The two are only weakly related. People confident about reading their own bodies are not reliably better at it.
That cuts against both ditches at once. It undercuts the oracle, since confidence in the signal carries little information about the signal. And it undercuts the machine, since the signals are real and measurable even if your reading of them is not.
What it does not do is support any claim about the unity of mind and body. It is a finding about the reliability of a perceptual channel, and that is all this essay takes from it.
The objection is that the vocabulary this essay complains about is doing real work.
The case against
Describing a body as an object with parts, states and failures is what makes it possible to report a symptom, get it examined and have it treated. Objectifying your own body is not a mistake; it is a skill, and people who cannot do it are worse off.
The grammar in this essay is for the hours of ordinary doing. It is not for the consultation, and a person who has trained themselves out of saying “my knee has been hurting for three weeks” has trained themselves out of something useful.
The honest version is that both grammars are instruments, and the error is having only one of them. Most people have only the first.
Swap the possessive for a description, during ordinary doing. Not “my legs are heavy” but “there is heaviness.” It sounds affected for about three days and then stops.
Notice the negotiation sentences especially — getting it to cooperate, making it behave, pushing through it. Those are the ones with a driver in them, and they are the ones that make a hard day into a conflict with somebody.
Keep the object grammar for reporting. Symptoms, duration, location, to anybody qualified to hear it. That is the section above and it is not a concession.
And treat sensation as information of variable quality. Neither an instruction nor a malfunction — a reading, with an error bar, from a channel you are probably worse at than you think.
This block is quieter than the others and most of it happens in how you talk.
The habit of speech installs a driver and a vehicle, and then the driver has to manage the vehicle, and a difficult day becomes a disagreement between two parties who are not in fact two parties.
Changing the pronoun does not resolve anything metaphysical and is not meant to. It removes a relationship that was smuggled in by the grammar.
And the object grammar stays, for the hours it is for. The error is not using it. The error is having nothing else.
During ordinary doing, swap the possessive for a description: not “my legs are heavy” but “there is heaviness”. Watch for the negotiation sentences especially.
Keep the object grammar for anything you would report to a professional. The error is not having that one — it is having only that one.
Terms are given in the language of the tradition they come from and are not treated as synonyms. Modern research is cited by author and publication.