УМСТВЕННАЯ ОБСТАНОВКА (№ 11) — Последний ученный и ...

MENTAL FURNITURE #11 - The Last Scientist and ...

"All the King's horses and all the King's men could not put Humpty-Dumpty back together again."

In the Mental Furniture articles I've endeavored to portray Moshe as a thinker as well as a doer. Our own studies of the Feldenkrais Method can be furthered by some familiarity with those domains and disciplines Moshe studied and mastered. In Moshe's writings and talks we find him mixing together practical, concrete lessons with broad claims for their benefits to humanity. Not mentioned are the strata sandwiched between the practical lessons and the universal claims. In our investigations into Moshe's professional and avocational pursuits, his "mental furniture," we encounter the kinds of generalizations, abstractions, logics of reasoning that are the "scaffolding" used to create "learning how to learn" situations. We can only marvel at the leap of imagination it took to go from what was known and believed about learning and human functioning to the artifacts we now call ATM and FI lessons. In no way will a thorough critical look at the underpinnings of the Feldenkrais Method, at Moshe's influences, and at the work itself not reward the person undertaking it. The path of inquiry is laid down by following one's own interest.

We are poised to enter the next millennium. We can predict, with no fear of being proved wrong, that whatever this century has seen in terms of change will pale in comparison to what's in store for the next hundred years. For our own tumultuous era, the image of an Einstein can be taken to represent the personification of genius. In the future maybe Moshe Feldenkrais will come to have a similar stature, not as a scientist, but as the last of that breed and the first of another. Before I make that case, I want to begin with the first scientist: Galileo.

While many great thinkers preceded Galileo, he was the first modern scientist. To Galileo, the book of Nature was written in the language of mathematics. Many before him had used mathematics, especially geometry, to investigate the natural world. Galileo made the unseen world of mathematics the means of investigating, measuring and interpreting the sensible world. He also brought something new and different to the table: thought experiments. The elegance of his thought experiments plus an ability to charm and persuade made him compelling. Galileo convinced others of a way to organize thought and perform experiments that yielded truths at once both universal and amenable to change and further generalization. His persuasiveness got him convicted of heresy while his charm kept him from getting executed.