On Posture
Good posture is not just about aesthetics or back-pain prevention. There is also a ‘numinous’ aspect to it. The upright bi-pedal posture is an act of transcendence. Physically, it is what distinguishes us from “the other animals”. Metaphysically, it is an ascension; the primary metaphor for apotheosis.
Although they are grounded (well-balanced and rooted), the upright are oriented away from the earth. They are, literally, open; that is, unfolded and exposed. In his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche describes the ‘noble man’ as one who ‘lives in trust and openness with himself’. According to the former philologist, the Greek word, ‘gennaois’, meaning high-born or high-minded, ‘underlines the nuance “upright” and probably also “naive”’. There is a certain naivety to exposure — especially in exposing the vulnerable neck and belly — but Nietzsche’s ‘noble man’ is defined by a joyful ‘carelessness’, and an affinity for action: ‘as rounded men replete with energy [they were] necessarily active’. The opposite, the ‘man of ressentiment’, is defined by an impotent ‘slackening of tension and relaxing of limbs’; i.e. bad posture. The openness of the ‘noble man’ stands in stark contrast with this inhibited, ‘squinting’ man: ‘his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices him as his world, his security, his refreshment’. This is the reactionary prey-perspective. It may improve chances of survival, but it does so at the expense of transcendence.
In the first chapter of Hans Blumenberg’s Work on Myth, Blumenberg presents an account of ‘anthropogenesis’ that emphasises this transition from low and closed to up and open. According to Blumenberg, this transition occurred as a response to ‘an enforced or an accidental change in the environment’ of early man. The species was forced to ‘avail itself of the sensory advantage of raising itself upright into a bipedal posture’. In a passage that has stuck with me since I came across it, he writes that, this ‘situational leap’ — the receding rainforest and the move into the savanna/ cave setting — ‘made the unoccupied distant horizon into the ongoing expectation of hitherto unknown things’:
[This creature] left the protection of a more hidden form of life, and an adapted one, in order to expose itself to the risks of the widened horizon of its perception, which were also those of its perceivability. It was, as yet, no forward thrust of curiosity, no gain in pleasure from the broadened horizon, no exaltation at acquiring verticality, but merely the exploitation of a favorable opportunity for survival by avoiding the pressure of selection, which would have driven toward irreversible specialization
The upright have a ‘widened horizon’, but are also more visible. Without the cover of the canopy, the ‘whole horizon’ becomes equivalent with the ‘totality of the directions from which danger ‘can come at one’. This is what Blumenberg calls, ‘the absolutism of reality’. As the video below illustrates, primordial man existed in a state of precariousness that induced anxiety and required ‘indefinite anticipation’:
Blumenberg’s thesis is that myth emerged in order to subdue the absolutism of reality. As Angus Nicholls writes in Myth and the Human Sciences: ‘Through the work of myth, anxiety, which corresponds to an empty and indeterminate horizon full of non-specific threats, can become fear, which is more controllable precisely because it can be directed toward a certain something’. Like Ernst Cassirer — who claims that even very primitive forms of mythical thought exhibit ‘the desire and the need to discern and divide, to order and classify the elements of its environment’ — Blumenberg argues that, initially, myth was a process of morphological systemization. It equipped the world with names as a ‘means to divide up and classify the undivided, to make the intangible tangible’, thereby counteracting the ‘elementary forms […] of perplexity, at the least, and in the limiting case, of panic’. This naming process provided ‘form’, which gave our ancestors respite from the absolutism of reality.
But even in this there is Nietzsche’s naivety of the upright. Although it provided form and made the intangible tangible, myth did not, as Blumenberg emphasises, make things ‘comprehensible’. In opposition to the etiological explanation of myth, Blumenberg claims that they are not archaic attempts at explanation. Rather than answering questions — in the way the sciences do — myths ‘make things unquestionable’; it pushes things to a distance ‘by means of storytelling’ and thereby provides ‘another life-stabilizing quality: the inadmissibility of the arbitrary, the elimination of caprice’. It fills the acute absence of answers — the horror vacui — with stories that were compelling and, crucially, ‘could not be contradicted by reality’.
In Totem and Taboo, Freud links primitive man with young children in their shared overestimation of their influence on reality; this is what he refers to as the ‘omnipotence of thought’. This is the basis of religious rites and magic rituals. It is another distinguishing aspect of our species, and it springs from our upright precariousness/ naivety.
According to Camille Paglia, the religious/ mythic impulse is an attempt to ‘surmount or transcend nature’. It marks the transition from ‘earth-cult’ to ‘sky-cult’, which is also the transition from the animal body to the human mind: ‘[the] switch of the creative locus from earth to sky is a shift from belly-magic to head-magic’.
The archetypal sky-cult is Homer’s ‘gleaming’ Olympus. The upright posture is a Promethean imitation (akin to the Christian “made in the image”). It is an active outreach, like in Michaelangelo’s ‘The Creation of Adam’. It conveys charisma, in the Greek sense, which translates to a ‘gift of grace’. Athena gives charisma to Odysseus on Phaecia, which makes him ‘taller and sturdier and caused the bushy locks to hang from his head thick as the petals of a hyacinth in bloom’. He becomes ‘radiant with grace and beauty’, resembling, as one onlooker points out, ‘the gods who live in heaven’.
We know now that postural flexion regulates serotonin, and that this relationship is bidirectional; meaning, exogenous serotonin induces an ‘elevated, flexed posture’, and postural flexion also increases serotonin production.
Critics of Jordan Peterson often also dismiss his prescription to ‘stand up straight with your shoulders back’ (facetiously referring to him as the ‘Lobster King’, in reference to a study he cites on the posture of crustaceans). They dismiss this prescription as a false panacea — and they are correct. Good posture is not a cure-all. But it is foundational. I too regard with suspicion calls to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”, but to dismiss such a simple fix, and one that evokes our greatest efforts of transcendence, is just stupid.
