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Feldenkrais Research Journal • volume 3 (2007)

Article

Freedom and the Feldenkrais Method

Anna Yeatman
PhD, Department of Political Science, University of Alberta

Abstract
The core proposition of this essay is that Moshe Feldenkrais is best understood as a practical philosopher
of freedom. His intention is to open up a process of self-development wherein people are invited to
explore what it means to claim their agency as their own, thus, free to engage in ways of being that reflect
their individuality and its creative possibilities. For such freedom to be on offer, it has to be facilitated by
others, because the individual always finds herself within an environment that is constituted by the
presence of others. So how these others invite or do not invite the freedom of the individual is of
consequence for their freedom or lack of it. Moshe Feldenkrais thought that for the most part individuals
form their habitual patterns in adapting to other people's expectations and societal norms. Freedom is
misunderstood as will-power where the individual learns to meet such expectations and norms in some
form of self-control. The essay explores Moshe Feldenkrais' conception of freedom through comparing it
to that of a contemporary of his, also Jewish, and also focused on the practice of freedom: the political
thinker, Hannah Arendt. There is a profound convergence between Feldenkrais and Arendt on the
practical question of freedom not just for individuals but for the relationships and the institutional order
that they share.

It is not just inevitable but desirable I think that I attempt to integrate my ways of being, in this case my
long established practice as a political and social theorist with my much newer practice as a student of the
Feldenkrais method of self education. However, while what I offer here can be understood in this way, I
think there is a case to be made for all of us thinking about the relationship of the Feldenkrais Method to
freedom.

Keywords
Feldenkrais, philosophy, freedom, action, speech, plurality

Copyright ©: The copyright for this paper remains with the author(s).

Please cite: (First published in the) Feldenkrais Research Journal, volume 3; 2007.

Service marks: The terms Feldenkrais®, Feldenkrais Method®, Awareness Through Movement®, ATM®,
Functional Integration®, and FI® are service marked terms of the International Feldenkrais® Federation
(IFF) and Feldenkrais professional guilds and associations in many countries. In keeping with academic
conventions, they will not be service marked in the entire text as may be required in nonacademic use,
but only for the first and most prominent use of the terms. In recognition that these phrases are formal

Published by the International Feldenkrais® Federation (IFF) https://feldenkrais-method.org
Available online at https://feldenkraisresearchjournal.org

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terms referring to specific practices within the Method, and to the Method as a whole, capitalization of all
the words in each term has been retained.



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Freedom and the Feldenkrais Method 
 
Anna Yeatman PhD 
 
Anna Yeatman is a Canada Research Chair (Social Theory and Policy) in the Department of 
Political Science, University of Alberta (anna.yeatman@ualberta.ca).  Thanks go to Mridula 
Nath Chakraborty for useful feedback on an earlier draft of this paper.  
Background 
I am in the fourth year of my training (the Victoria Training led by Jeff Haller).  I am doing 
this in my 59th year, having spent most of my adult life so far in an academic and highly 
intellectualized mode of being.  I am also someone who has personally struggled to be free to 
live life in my own way rather than continue to live the way of being of my parents.  I have 
been politically oriented to questions concerning self determination: how does the individual 
acquire the capacity for self determination, how do her fellows facilitate or hinder her in 
relation to the possibilities of self determination, and what is it that the institutional order of 
our society might do if it were to facilitate and encourage individuals in taking up the 
possibilities of self determination?   I am writing a book, The Politics of Individuality, that 
explores these questions. I should add before I go on that my formal academic training is in 
social and political theory.  When I call on the resources of my intellectual background, I am 
often thinking across seventeenth century civil philosophy (e.g. the civil philosophy of Locke, 
Hobbes, and Spinoza), Hegel’s investigation of subjective experience in relation to what he 
calls ethical life, the post-metaphysical philosophy of Heidegger and Arendt, and post-
Freudian psychoanalytic theory (especially the work of Winnicott and those he has 
influenced).  The frame of reference I bring to this diverse body of thought is an enquiry into 
the nature of freedom and its relationship to subjective experience. For example, I ask 
questions like: what kind of being in the world for the human subject makes freedom 
meaningful? (My answer to this question is that this being in the world has to be that of 
individuality which is not a given but an achieved possibility that can occur only under certain 
conditions.)  How does the human subject need to develop and be facilitated in this 
development if s/he is to take up the opportunity of freedom?  What is freedom as a set of 
practices? What kind of institutional order is needed in order to provide worldly support for 
individual practices of freedom? 
 
It is not just inevitable but desirable I think that I attempt to integrate my ways of being, in 
this case my long established practice as a political and social theorist with my much newer 
practice as a student of the Feldenkrais method of self education.  However, while what I 
offer here can be understood in this way – as satisfying my individual need for an integrated 
way of being – I think there is a case to be made for all of us thinking about the relationship of 
the Feldenkrais method to freedom.  The core proposition of this brief essay is that Moshe 
Feldenkrais is best understood as a practical philosopher of freedom.  

IFF Academy 
Feldenkrais Research Journal 3 (2007) 

® 2007 by the author 
ISSN 1817-4000 



 2 

 
Considering Moshe Feldenkrais as a practical philosopher of freedom 
I consider Moshe Feldenkrais to be a practical philosopher of freedom.  His intention is to 
open up a process whereby people are invited to explore their individual possibilities of being 
in the world in such a way as to enable them to live more freely.  Freedom denotes a highly 
developed quality of functioning on the part of the individual in how she works with her ever-
changing environment: she is able to move easily, fluently; she is able to open up options for 
how she may move; and she is able to develop awareness of herself as an individual who 
acts/moves so that she learns how to fit her action to her intention.  Feldenkrais does not 
consider movement to be the only modality of action.  Action includes also feeling, sensing, 
and thinking.  However, it is through movement that the individual human being engages in a 
vital as well as dynamic relationship to its environment. It is by means of self movement that 
the human being positions herself in the world: as Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (xxi) proposes, it 
is through such self positioning that the human being acquires a sense of “I” that provides the 
“foundation of our conceptual life, that is, the foundation of an ever-growing store of 
corporeal concepts, concepts such as ‘inside’, ‘heavy’, ‘light’, ‘open’, ‘close’, concepts 
having to do with consequential relationships, and so on.”  In developing a method of 
facilitating Awareness Through Movement (ATM), Moshe Feldenkrais’s intention in the first 
instance is to invite the individual to be aware of herself as a center of animation (Sheets-
Johnstone’s phrase xv), and on the basis of this self-valuing, to learn to trust as well as to 
explore her experience of engagement with her environment.  It is thus that I receive these 
two statements of his: “It is important to understand that if a man wishes to improve his self-
image, he must first of all learn to value himself as an individual, even if his faults as a 
member of society appear to him to outweigh his qualities” (Feldenkrais 1990: 19).  And: “I 
use the movements only to improve the process of self organization” (June 5 1980). 
 
In this conception, the human being is an individual subject who is free to develop or improve 
his or her ability, “that is, to expand the boundaries of the possible” (1990: 57).  In what 
follows, I want to explore this conception of freedom and to do so, at least to some extent, in 
dialogue with the idea of freedom offered by Hannah Arendt.  It is not arbitrary to link Moshe 
Feldenkrais (1904-1964) to Hannah Arendt (1906-1975).  Both of these extraordinary 
twentieth century thinkers were born around the same time in the part of Europe associated 
with large Jewish communities (Feldenkrais in Russia; Arendt in Germany).  They must have 
shared the legacies of Eastern European Jewish intellectual culture as these played out in the 
time before World War I, a time still shaped by hope for revolutionary change of the kind that 
would make European society more democratic and egalitarian.  This was the time of 
revolutionary social movements including the Jewish Bund.   Arendt (1970: 35) dates the end 
of this time with the murder of Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish Jew, in 1919 by “members of the 
ultra-nationalist and officially illegal Freicorps”, an act of complicity between the Social 
Democratic government of the Weimar Republic and an historically new kind of ultra 
nationalist populism (Arendt  1970: 35).   
 
Beyond this shared legacy, I do not know enough at this point to point to specific currents of 
thought or figures of influence they may have shared.  But one thing is clear: they shared the 
climate of thought that opened up with the critique of the Western metaphysical dualism of 
subject and object, a critique associated especially with Heidegger’s attempt to offer an 
account of philosophy outside the framework of metaphysics (see Bambach 1995; Dreyfus 
2006), and more broadly with the development of systems theory.  I identify this climate of 
thought with the following ideas: (1) it is not meaningful to think in terms of human nature 
because this presupposes a separation of the human subject from its world (the subject-object 
dualism): in reality the human being is positioned in a dynamic relationship to its 



 3 

environment;1 (2) thus individuality does not denote some set of essential attributes of the 
singular human subject but refers to the dynamic patterning of the way of being that is the 
individual in relation to her environment;2 (3) there are instinctual bases for human conduct in 
relation to its environment but these are less important than the open horizon of possibility for 
human being-in-the-world that comes about because of the human capacity to think about 
reality and to develop self-awareness; (4) human being in the world is dynamically structured 
by individual agency in relation to an environment that is shared with other individuals so that 
the specific temporal-spatial positioning of the individual is articulated in relation to a wider 
shared temporal-spatial positioning (what Heidegger calls facticity or historicity); (5) thus 
human awareness is contextually framed by the historicity of lived experience, both individual 
and inter-individual; (6) it is in how we as individuals take up (or fail to take up) the open 
horizon of future possibility that we shape our relationship both to our present and to our 
past;3 and finally, (7) intentionality is the type of agency that is involved in directing one’s 
movement towards something, a type of agency that is kinetic in nature thus entailing a 
“movement of meaning”.4 
 
The idea of freedom that Feldenkrais shares with Arendt belongs to this climate of thought.   
Here I can be only suggestive regarding this proposition, but let me offer it in two ways.   
Firstly, both Feldenkrais and Arendt refuse to accept an account of freedom in terms of will; 
indeed both argue that will-power (the will-to-power) not only interferes with, but profoundly 
undermines, the individual’s capacity for free action.   Instead of the will, Feldenkrais and 
Arendt conceive freedom as the opening of new and, thus, unknown in the sense of 
unpredictable possibilities for the articulation of individual agency.  For this to occur, the 
individual cannot be subject to force, in this case the internal force of the will.  Secondly, 
Feldenkrais and Arendt take for granted that individual conduct is deeply shaped by its 
environment and that the most significant aspect of the individual’s environment in this 
respect is her parents in the first instance, and the normative force of society in the second 
(mediated as this is usually by means of the first of these two forces).5  Yet for neither                                             
1 Consider here this statement of Moshe Feldenkrais: “Man’s life is a continuous process, and the improvement 
is needed in the quality of the process, not in his properties or disposition” (1990: 33). 
2 “A man tends to regard his self-image as something bestowed upon him by nature, although it is, in fact, the 
result of his own experience.  His appearance, voice, way of thinking, environment, his relationship to space and 
time – to choose at random – are all taken for granted as realities born with him, whereas every important 
element in the individual’s relationship to other people and to society in general is the result of extensive 
training” (Feldenkrais 1990: 20). 
3 Bambach (1995: 220) presents Heidegger’s phenomenological conception of temporality as one that  is 
centered in subjective experience and that must therefore be opposed to an implicitly theological conception of 
“narrative, developmental time” as a sequence of stages: “Because historical science was organized around the 
theme of narrative, developmental time, it tended to conceal the genuine meaning of temporality as a unity of 
what Heidegger termed three temporal ecstasies: the phenomenon of the future as a ‘coming-toward’ [Zukunft], 
the past as a ‘having been’ [Gewesenheit] and the present as a ‘waiting-toward’ [Gegenwart].” 
4 Bambach’s  (1995: 231) discussion of Heidegger’s notion of intentionality is to me highly resonant with 
Feldenkrais work: “ ‘Every lived experience’, Heidegger argued, ‘directs itself toward something’; that is, it is 
not an intra mentem coordination of the physical and the psychical but a kinetic, dynamic center, a movement of 
meaning (Sinn) which breaks with the Cartesian, objectless subject who first must proceed outward toward the 
object.” 
5 Feldenkrais (August 4 1980) declares: “None of us want to do what our parents did – none of us!”  I am not 
certain Arendt would have identified with this statement partly because she was brought up by a mother who 
pride-fully identified as Jewish which produced, of course, a sense of being outside “society”. In her portrayal of 
Rosa Luxemburg’s Polish-Jewish background – Arendt’s mother was a great admirer of Rosa Luxemburg – 
Arendt speaks of a distinctive milieu which “has now completely disappeared”.  It is hard not to think she is also 
thinking of her mother’s milieu: “Its nucleus consisted of assimilated Jews from middle-class families whose 
cultural background was German…, whose political formation was Russian, and whose moral standards in both 
private and public life were uniquely their own.  These Jews, an extremely small minority in the East, an even 
smaller percentage of assimilated Jewry in the West, stood outside all social ranks, Jewish or non-Jewish, hence 



 4 

Feldenkrais nor Arendt does it occur that individual freedom resides in a flight from the 
presence of other subjects. Rather, they are interested in how the relationship of the individual 
to other individuals can be practically approached and thought of so that it invites and 
facilitates their freedom.  Let me take these in turn.  
Freedom is not will-power 
How many times does someone who goes to ATM classes hear the teacher’s encouragement 
to find a way of doing the lesson without engaging in effort?  If one listens to ATM classes on 
tape taught by Moshe Feldenkrais himself, he often says something like this: if you use effort, 
it is because you do not think you can do the movement.  In encouraging the learner to engage 
in the lesson without effort, the teacher is engaging in a complex mode of facilitation of 
individual learning, one that is oriented to bringing the learner in relationship to possibilities 
of movement that lie beyond her habitual patterns of movement in the world.  The habitual 
patterns are all too likely to have been shaped by will-power, by the individual feeling 
compelled to make herself act in ways that society (as mediated by her parents) think she 
ought to do.  When the individual shapes her conduct in terms of norms, she uses her will to 
impose on herself, she loses connection with what it is that she has “naturally” the ability to 
do (sense, feel, think, and move).  “Natural” is a tricky term to use here. For Feldenkrais, it 
refers to a cultural-social-evolutionary heritage of being human that is expressed in a 
repertoire of ability – how this group uses language, moves, makes artifacts, etc. – that is 
passed on from one generation to another.  This does not mean that this repertoire of ability 
does not change or develop over time, or that it is in any way “simple” (Feldenkrais 1990: 
25).  In using the term “natural” for this kind of acquired ability, Feldenkrais is distinguishing 
it from ability, as it is either mediated by individual engagement in self-education, or by the 
professionalization of ability (here I am working with Feldenkrais’s (1990: 40-49) conception 
of what he calls “strata of development”).   When an activity is professionalized, the process 
itself is subject to method, systematization, and reflective specification.  The paradox of such 
professionalization is that, while it may improve how we do things, it can also displace the 
individual’s confidence in her own capacity to learn how to be a human being in the world: 
“We may observe how natural practices have gradually given away to acquired methods, to 
‘professional’ methods, and that society in general refuses to allow the individual the right to 
employ the natural method, forcing him instead to learn the accepted way before it will permit 
him to work” (Feldenkrais 1990: 27).  Here Feldenkrais, I think, is suggesting how scientism 
– the conception of science as the only true kind of knowledge – leads to the displacement of 
experience as the basis of learning and development.6 
 
In Feldenkrais work, the individual is invited to discover her own experience of movement 
and to use this experience as the touchstone for how she receives informed guidance from the 
teacher about how she might find direct skeletal connection with the ground for support.  If a 
lesson is taught well, it invites the individual to put to one side habitual patterns of using her 
will to command herself and to open up an inner space where she can explore and listen to 
what may be for her entirely new possibilities for action.  If it is our individual ability we are 
exploring, improving and developing, it is recognizable only in the absence of force.  It is in                                                                                                                                         
had no conventional prejudices whatsoever, and had developed, in this truly splendid isolation, their own code of 
honor” (Arendt 1970: 40-41).  She goes on to say of this code of honor: “The hidden equalizer of those who 
always treated one another as equals – and hardly anybody else – as the essentially simple experience of a 
childhood world in which mutual respect and unconditional trust, a universal humanity and a genuine, almost 
naïve contempt for social and ethnic distinctions were taken for granted” (Arendt 1970: 41). 
6 “Scientism means science’s belief in itself: that is, the conviction that we can no longer understand science as 
one form of possible knowledge, but rather identify knowledge with science”, Habermas cited by Bambach 
(1995: 27). 



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how we sense and become aware of ourselves moving that, as individuals, we develop a 
capacity for having an experience that is our own; that is, it expresses our unique being in the 
world, and it is neither confused with nor displaced by how others seem to want us to be in 
the world. When we free ourselves to become open to, and thus, in a very real sense, free 
ourselves to “have” our own subjective experience, we learn to discriminate our experience as 
distinct from what it is we may feel we “ought” to feel, sense, or do.  On this basis, we can 
learn to trust our experience and to use it as a touchstone for what feels functional for us as an 
individual.  
Moshe Feldenkrais’s (1977: 57) own way of putting these points is as follows: 

These lessons are designed to improve ability, that is, to expand the boundaries of the 
possible: to turn the impossible into the possible, the difficult into the easy, and the 
easy into the pleasant.  For only those activities that are easy and pleasant will become 
part of a man’s habitual life and will serve him at all times.  Actions that are hard to 
carry out, for which man must force himself to overcome his inner opposition, will 
never become part of his normal daily life; as he gets older he will lose his ability to 
carry them out at all.  

Feldenkrais, always a respecter of reality, did not think we could get rid of our attachment to 
will; in fact, he valued enormously the human subject’s use of will to engage in self-
improvement.  He (August 4 1980) offered the paradoxical insight that the more intelligent an 
individual, the more likely she is to be aware of her inferiority in relation to others (what it is 
they can do that she cannot);7 it is usually these individuals who are neurotically driven by a 
sense of inferiority who engage in the most remarkable and creative processes of self-
improvement.   In Awareness Through Movement, there are two passages where Feldenkrais 
distinguishes between use of will for self education and use of will for self compulsion: 
 

... we are speaking of the training of will power and self-control, but not for the 
purpose of gaining control over ourselves or over other people (Feldenkrais 1977: 51).   
 
… we should differentiate clearly between improvement of ability and sheer effort for 
its own sake.  We shall do better to direct our will power to improving our ability so 
that in the end our actions will be carried out easily and with understanding 
(Feldenkrais 1977: 57).  

Let me turn now to Arendt.  Like Feldenkrais, Arendt sees each human being as unique; thus 
the birth of each new human is the beginning of something new.  Arendt conceived freedom 
as the principle of beginning. It is the interruption of automatic process and of habitual 
patterns of life.   The human subject is free because s/he is a beginning, and thus is capable of 
the faculty of beginning (Arendt 1977: 167).  Whether the human subject is willing to risk 
exploration and thus articulation of her individuality or uniqueness is another matter.  Arendt 
emphasizes the fragility of this aspect of human being in the world.  She argues for it to 
flourish – for the individual to feel valued as an individual—a distinct kind of space has to 
open up for the articulations and explorations of individuality. She sees this space as “the 
political”, and she is acutely aware of how corruption and domination may shut down this 
space as she is also aware of how a societal insistence on conformity to norms may displace                                             
7 My notes on what he said in this talk at this juncture read: It (a sense of inferiority) is an experience which is 
absolutely justified – if one looks at it, one is really inferior in this or that (so the most intelligent people have the 
strongest sense of inferiority) – someone will always be better at something than you are.   



 6 

the space of the political entirely.   Moreover, even when the space of the political offers as 
the worldly space within which freedom can appear, individuals can still refuse to risk the 
disclosure of themselves in their action (Arendt 1958: 180).   
 
Arendt is aware of how her conception of freedom as both beginning and the articulation of 
individuality contravenes the established Western (and as she sees it Christian) account of 
freedom in terms of the will.  She offers an account of how the I-will paralyzes the I-can very 
similar to the one we find embedded in the Feldenkrais method: “Historically, men first 
discovered the will when they experienced its impotence and not its power, when they said 
with [Saint] Paul: ‘For to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find 
not’ ” (Arendt 1977: 161).  She emphasizes how the impotence of the will readily encourages 
tyranny both over self and over others: “Tyranny at any rate, the only form of government 
which arises directly out of the I-will, owes its greedy cruelty to an egotism utterly absent 
from the utopian tyrannies of reason with which the philosophers wished to coerce men and 
which they conceived on the model of the I-think” (Arendt 1977: 163). 
 
If Feldenkrais can be said to put more emphasis on how a freedom of action enables the 
individual to have a sense of options for how they live, where he and Arendt converge is on 
an account of freedom as the disclosure of possibilities of being that were not known prior to 
this point.  Such disclosure is structured as an intersection between what is personally real for 
the individual and the reality that the individual shares with other individuals.  It is for this 
reason that the disclosure of possibility in the individual’s engagement in freedom to act is 
both idiosyncratic and illuminative of human possibility.    
The inter-individual space of freedom 
Both Arendt and Feldenkrais think that if individuals are to practice freedom – and the 
emphasis should be on practicing freedom – they have to develop a capacity to think that does 
not lead them to seek to transcend their conditions of being but, instead, leads them to 
concretely engage with these conditions – testing the limits, expanding the boundaries of the 
possible, engaging with new beginnings, making new meaning.   Thinking of this kind is a 
worldly activity and it is for this reason it can be practiced only in relation to and in the 
presence of other individuals.  To put this point directly: an individual can engage in the kind 
of thinking that creates an open horizon for her being in the world only if she explores the 
world that she shares with other individuals in such a way that each individual’s unique way 
of practicing freedom discloses possibilities not just to herself but to her fellows.   For this to 
occur, these other individuals have to be present in several capacities: as those who invite the 
individual to disclose their possibilities of being; as those who facilitate such disclosure; as 
those who witness such disclosure; and who communicate their witness to the individual in 
such a way as to facilitate the individual knowing the truth of her being as it is disclosed. 
 
Both Arendt and Feldenkrais have difficulty reconciling the inter-individual space they see as 
the essential condition of freedom with “society”.  However, in developing their respective 
conceptions of an inter-individual space, they can be seen to offer the conception of a 
distinctive sociality that is shared between free subjects.  Free subjects are human beings who 
enjoy the status of being invited to stand forth and present to each other as individuals, that is, 
as unique beings who have their own distinct way of being in the world.  Arendt uses Socrates 
to help her conceive this uniqueness: the individual’s being in the world follows from each 
individual having his ‘”own opening to the world” (Arendt 2005: 15). 
 
Arendt is entirely explicit about the necessity for this inter-individual space if freedom is to be 
possible at all.  In a passage that reveals clearly her insistent association of freedom with the 



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“plural” condition of humankind, she rejects conceptions of freedom that celebrate an “inner 
freedom” as though the individual could be self-sufficient, and in this self-sufficiency, could 
discover such a thing: 
 

Hence, in spite of the great influence the concept of an inner, nonpolitical freedom has 
exerted…it seems safe to say that man would know nothing of inner freedom if he had 
not first experienced a condition of being free as a worldly tangible reality.   We first 
become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the 
intercourse with ourselves (Arendt 1977: 148).    

“Plurality” is Arendt’s term for the inter-individual sociality that if articulated as a worldly 
reality makes the freedom of individuals possible: “Human plurality is the paradoxical 
plurality of unique beings” (Arendt 1958: 176).  Like Feldenkrais, Arendt accepts that all 
organic life manifests “variations and distinctions” (Arendt 1958: 176), but unlike other living 
species, it is only the human species that has evolved in such a way that it expresses this 
distinction thus enabling it to become apparent as a worldly reality. For Arendt uniqueness is 
disclosed in speech and action:  
 

Speech and action reveal this unique distinctness.  Through them, men distinguish 
themselves instead of being merely distinct; they are the modes in which human 
beings appear to each other, not indeed as physical objects, but qua men.  This 
appearance, as distinguished from mere [she means automatic] bodily existence, rests 
on initiative, but it is an initiative from which no human being can refrain and still be 
human (Arendt 1958: 176).  

She goes on to make the most interesting suggestion: “Action and speech are so closely 
related because the primordial and specifically human act must at the same time contain the 
answer to the question asked of every newcomer: ‘Who are you?’ “ (Arendt 1958: 178).  This 
is surely a fascinating provocation to the Feldenkrais practitioner who in Functional 
Integration lessons uses hands to explore through touch the question of her student as she 
presents today: who are you, and what possibilities of being are you ready to explore today?  
As far as I am aware, there is little explicit exploration in the Feldenkrais world of practice of 
the distinctive sociality that makes freedom in the Feldenkrais sense possible.  Yet it is clear 
from the practice of the method that something like an Arendtian conception of the distinctive 
sociality of plurality or inter-individuality is at work.  This is evident in the one-on-one 
“functional integration” lessons where the practitioner engages in a Socratic form of 
midwifery (what Socrates called maieutic): the facilitation of the disclosure of the truth of the 
being of the other.  I make this connection because Socrates is, for Arendt, a key historical 
figure who illuminated the nature of freedom: 
 

To Socrates, as to his fellow citizens, doxa was the formulation in speech of what 
dokei moi, that is, “of what appears to me.” … The assumption was that the world 
opens up differently to every man according to his position in I; and that the 
“sameness” of the world, its commonness (koinon, as the Greeks would say, “common 
to all”) or “objectivity” (as we would say from the subjective viewpoint of modern 
philosophy), resides in the fact that the same world opens up to everyone and that 
despite all differences between men and their positions in the world—and 
consequently their doxai (opinions)—“both you and I are human” (Arendt 2005: 18).  



 8 

The individual cannot articulate her opinion without being facilitated in this process by other 
individuals; she cannot know what it is that she has said or disclosed by way of truth except in 
the hearing of and listening to it by these others. Moreover, Socrates saw an even more active 
role for such facilitation: he saw himself as practicing the art of midwifery or maieutic (and 
see Fiumara 1990, chapter 10 ) – “he wanted to help others give birth to what they themselves 
thought…, to find the truth in their doxa” (Arendt 2005: 19).  
If Functional Integration can be thought of as the art of midwifery in relation to the disclosure 
of the individual’s possibilities for improvement of her ability, Awareness Through 
Movement lessons can be thought of in the same way. Here the practitioner uses her voice and 
attention to guide individuals in the exploration of their possibilities of movement.   It is 
relatively easy, I think, to recognize this maieutic feature of Feldenkrais practice, less easy to 
see that the other enabling condition of this practice resides in the availability of a space for 
such disclosure.  Here I am not referring to the chronic difficulties practitioners have in 
finding physical space for lessons – although this is surely a connected issue -- but to the 
intangible political space that has to be on offer.  Arendt offered her account of freedom after 
she had both experienced and written about twentieth century totalitarianism (both Nazism 
and Stalinism).  It is obvious that Feldenkrais lessons would not make sense in a 
concentration camp as they would not in any situation of oppression, domination, or severe 
deprivation.  My reasoning here is as follows: in any situation that is structured so as to put 
the individual onto alert because she is at risk of threats to her survival, she has to put all her 
attention into reacting in the interests of her survival to such threats.8  She cannot use her 
attention for purposes of self awareness.    
Moshe Feldenkrais was deeply aware of this point of course: human beings cannot explore 
their possibilities for self improvement if they are reduced to the conditions of bare survival.  
Both Feldenkrais and Arendt were aware that human evolution has reached a point of 
reckoning: either we develop our ability to think or we risk using our advanced technological 
mastery of the means of survival to destroy both our selves and our world.  It is to Arendt and 
her work, however, we must look for an articulation of the point that freedom and politics, 
understood as a secure opening of a public space in which freedom can appear, are two sides 
of the same coin (Arendt 1977: 149).     

                                            
8 Winnicott made a similar point in relation to the baby: The baby whose environment of care is unreliable and 
inadequate has difficulty in stabilizing a sense of its own distinct being in the world because it has to interrupt its 
sense of being in reacting to, and attempting to fend off, these external threats to its being.  Here are Winnicott’s 
own words on the matter: “…it is when things do not go well that the infant becomes aware, not of the failure of 
maternal care, but of the results, whatever they may be, of that failure; that is to say, the infant becomes aware of 
reacting to some impingement.  As a result of success in maternal care there is built up in the infant a continuity 
of being which is the basis of ego-strength; whereas the result of each failure in maternal care is that the 
continuity of being is interrupted by reactions to the consequences of that failure, with resultant ego-weakening.  
Such interruptions constitute annihilation…” (Winnicott 1990:52). 
 
 



 9 

References 
Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition, Chicago: Chicago University Press. 
 
Arendt, H. (1970) ‘Rosa Luxemburg: 1871-1919’, in Men in Dark Times, London: Jonathan 
Cape, pp. 33-57. 
 
Arendt, H. (1977) ‘What is Freedom?’ in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in 
Political Thought, New York: Penguin Books, 143-173. 
 
Arendt, H. (2005) ‘Socrates’ in J. Kohn ed. The Promise of Politics, New York: Schocken 
Books. 
 
Bambach, C. (1995) Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism, Ithaca and London: 
Cornell University Press. 
 
Dreyfus, H. (2006) ‘Heidegger on the Connection Between Nihilism, Art, Technology, and 
Politics’, in C. Guignon ed. The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, 2nd edition, 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 345-373. 
 
Feldenkrais, M. (August 4 1980) Videotape #68 ‘A Sense of Inferiority’, Amherst Training. 
 
Feldenkrais, M. (1990) Awareness through Movement: Health Exercises for Personal 
Growth, West Drayton: Arkana Penguin Books. 
 
Fiumara, C. (1990) The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening, London and New 
York: Routledge. 
 
Sheets-Johnstone, M. (1999) The Primacy of Movement, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John 
Benjamins Publishing Company. 
 
Winnicott, D. W. ‘The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship (1960)’ in The Maturational 
Processes and the Facilitating Environment, London: Karnac Books: 37-56. 
 


