How a Dead French Philosopher Taught Me to Put Body Over Mind

This article originally appeared on Climbing

Here I am, five moves into New Pair of Glasses, a tall V7 in the Gunks. I set up for a crossover from a thin gaston to a right hand pocket, and now my body completes the move as I envisioned it in the minutes before pulling on. I'm conscious, in control, savoring my first highball boulder on this gray March morning. I hit the jug that marks the end of the crux, take a breath, and hear a spotter yell from the ground, "OK. You're in the no-fall zone now."

I don't remember much after that. Though I probably could have managed a fall onto the padded Carriage Road, I wouldn't have wanted to. And though the moves from the jug to the top were barely 5.6, they still demanded absolute deference.

My spotter's words and my failure to imagine the following moves put me into something of an unconscious condition, what I'd later realize was the "flow state." Before I knew I shouldn't fall, the idea of falling had left my mind completely. In fact, my mind seemed empty: All the exacting attention I applied to the first section of the problem was absent, somewhere apart.

The flow state is an exceptional experience, both familiar and rare enough to surprise us anew each time we encounter it. In climbing, as in other sports, it is where the intelligence of the body is made manifest, where, according to V17 boulderer Aidan Roberts, we find ourselves "acting without attachment to" a result, moving unencumbered by anxiety about a send or a potentially sketchy fall. Conscious thought falls away in flow, but it doesn't leave a void. Instead, a more capable force appears that gives commands using something other than language. Minutes after sticking our cruxes or scampering through run-outs, we come to see that the body understands this mode of communication much better than the mind does. After sending New Pair of Glasses, I sat on top of the boulder, looking south over rolling fields and experiencing both jubilation and a sense of amnesia. I felt a lingering impression of the sub-linguistic instructions my body had obeyed, but I struggled to remember them in a way I could articulate.

Most climbers have experienced flow. But I'd guess that few of us have considered it as deeply as the philosopher and mountaineer Michel Serres, whose 1999 book Variations on the Body contains a meditation on the flow state and a paean to the body. Serres was a highly regarded French intellectual who not only climbed himself but also suffused his work with lessons from his summits. He appeared in films about climbing late in life and recognized something decidedly human in the pursuit.

Serres was a member of the prestigious Academie Francaise and a long-serving professor at the Paris-Sorbonne University. In a note on their translation of Serres' 1985 book The Five Senses, Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley call him a "polymath and Renaissance man" who leaves readers wondering whether "there is anything beyond the range of Serres's erudition." He taught French, philosophy, and other subjects for nearly 30 years at Stanford University and wrote 73 books on topics ranging from ecology to the philosophy of science to the social role of technology, all in a distinctive literary style that resists simple description.

Though his climbing accomplishments are relatively little known, Serres considered his ascents to be some of the most edifying experiences of his life. "No seated professor taught me productive work," he writes, "whereas my gymnastics teachers, coaches and, later, my guides inscribed its very conditions into my muscles and bones." In Variations, translated by Randolph Burks in 2012, Serres recounts summiting Mont Blanc, the Ecrins Massif, and the Matterhorn, observing his bipedal body transform into a quadruped once the real climbing begins. "Feet become hands and my two manual grips secure balance," he writes.

Serres held that the body absorbed in movement--that is, in flow--integrates the five senses into a kind of second vision, a corporal vision, and this process occurs best when we're in a state of forgetfulness. Ask a skier how she links her turns or a pianist how he performs virtuoso passages, Serres suggests, and you'll find they can't explain it. "You think they're stupid, while your question, idiotic, shows itself to be completely ignorant of the body: performing its feats faster than lightning, it does without the mind and its supervision." This forgetfulness allows something mysterious about the body to rise up and present itself. Pressed against the mountain, or spidered out on a boulder, the body displays a fluid though calculated motion that Serres likens to music, whose rhythms guide the limbs and resound through the austere alpine environment. "There is nothing in knowledge which has not been first in the entire body."

Consciousness is an active antagonist to the forgetfulness in which the body best operates, stiffening the joints where the self-effacing body makes them supple and unified, Serres argues. To focus on one limb or digit during movement is to interfere with the global equilibrium that the body attains precisely by virtue of inattention. Serres illustrates this point by discussing pain, which both increases with consciousness and begets further consciousness, he says. Pain interrupts the assembled body and causes one or more parts of the whole to split off. "The more the limb splits off, the more it shrieks," and this noise arrests what we would call flow by drowning out the "tacit music" of the body engaged in free motion. "The most conscious of men was named Narcissus, a word deriving from narcosis," Serres writes. "What is the unconscious? The body. Better: the body in good shape."

I discovered Serres at a moment when I felt almost estranged from my body. After 20 years practicing gymnastics, but before finding climbing, I spent two physically fallow years sitting at a desk, toiling to develop my "productive" life and become "useful." Though I'd go to a traditional weight gym, the object of my exercise was a vague idea of fitness, pursued mostly to optimize myself for the type of work I did at my desk.

Yet in gymnastics, and now in climbing, fitness was a means to an end larger than itself. Form and aesthetics were much more important than power in gymnastics, because they represented the result of some mastery rather than one among many elements essential to it. There were rulebooks to follow and judges to appeal to in the sport, but there was also an instinctive sense of how a skill was supposed to feel when executed well. This sense was in part shaped by coaches, teammates, and experience, but there was a natural aspect to it too, one revealed by the fact that people who know nothing of the sport can nonetheless recognize mastery when they see it.

Like climbers, gymnasts must learn to defer to the body's intelligence in the "forgetful" state that Serres describes. When I competed on floor exercise, for example, I had to use the feeling of my body in space to anticipate the ground during an element, intuiting details about direction and orientation from subtle calculations in time. Those operations occurred somewhere beyond the mind. While I might have been able at times to actually see the ground approaching, my brain wasn't able to unscramble the picture fast enough for me to respond. I had to rely on feeling.

There was one skill I used to compete, called a Thomas, that consisted of a one-and-three-quarter backflip with a one-and-a-half twist. It was a rollout skill, which meant that rather than landing on your feet, you were supposed to use your hands as the first points of contact with the floor, graze the back of your head, and roll as smoothly as possible down your upper back and then up to your feet. The body's intuitive spatial awareness is crucial for a skill like the Thomas, because if you were to "lose" the ground--incorrectly calculate where it is in time and space--you would either land flat on your back or on your neck. So I often walked away from successfully performing my Thomas unsure of what had just happened. It seemed to unfold slow enough for the body to process but far too fast for consciousness to catch up. Gymnastics in general was like that: a blur felt deep in the gut. I had to give up control in order to succeed, channel the best of my body by stepping outside of it, forgetting it in some way.

Aidan Roberts learned something similar while working on and later sending Alphane, a V17 in Chironico, Switzerland. The boulder helped him "understand the resonance of aligning one's physical potential and how to optimize that," he said of the ascent in Mastery. "It was funny in that the attempt when I actually did it, it felt relatively effortless." In training for Alphane, Roberts realized that while he possessed the physical ability to climb the problem, he was still limited by his psychology. So he turned to fellow British climber Hazel Findlay for help.

Findlay has perhaps one of the most cultivated abilities to find flow of any climber active today. Famous for her dauntless ascents of terrifying trad routes, she now coaches climbers on how to overcome fear and, in her words, "let the body climb." Although most climbers appreciate the physical and technical prerequisites of limit problems, Findlay says, few fully understand how to focus their attention and elicit flow during their send attempts. "It's likely that your body contains all the knowledge that is needed to climb a piece of rock," she writes.

Serres would agree, and this paradox is one reason climbers often seem obsessed with harnessing flow: Although instinctive, and maybe even automatic, flow could be the key to unlocking all manner of limit climbs. We have to practice, and yet the body already knows.

I remember sitting at my desk in the early months after discovering climbing and feeling newly appalled at my two-year lapse in material focus. Like most gymnasts, I started the sport young, at age 2, meaning that whatever self-understanding I possessed in my first two decades of life was necessarily bound up with this ecstatic search for physical limits. To lose that was to sever a part of myself, though I didn't see it as such at the time. Climbing, once I started, seemed like a return to a neglected part of my nature, and in committing to it I felt reconstituted.

Reading Serres after this rediscovery helped me appreciate how much can be gained by focusing on our bodies in an increasingly immaterial world. At the end of the path that starts from sensation lies what Serres called "sapience," a type of refined taste that denotes some larger wisdom. In the twilight of his life, Serres returned to the high mountains to prepare his writing, he said, because "alpine climbs, for writing, are as good as ten libraries" and human intelligence "can be distinguished from artificial intelligence by the body, alone."

When John Gill decided, with a "playful attitude," to solo a 700-foot climb in the Tetons in 1990, he "experienced a fulfillment that was 'mildly religious,'" according to Pat Ament's book John Gill: Master of Rock. Later, during a solo of the third tier of Trinity Buttress in the Tetons, Gill reported noticing a "heightened perception and a subtle change in body chemistry" following the transition from scrambling to climbing. He climbed guided more by "whimsy than strategy" before reaching an unexpectedly difficult section that threatened to disrupt his flow, or worse.

Slightly off balance, standing on slick granite footholds, Gill couldn't make out any holds above him. He resolved to still his mind in preparation for the next few committing moves, pressing "tiny sparks of apprehension into the subconscious." As his body prepared to move, Gill knew he needed to concede, and he remembered thinking: "I am ready to receive instructions."

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