Last time in this column I touched on the balance, in body reading, between Seeing — observing — and perceiving, that is, taking in during the work what changes are occurring in the client’s body (see “Phase III (6) — Seeing and Perceiving (1): Seeing Begins with a Concept”). I would like to say a little more about this.
In fact, this was not my first encounter with a perceptual way of seeing. The first came through a book: The New Realitiesby Peter F. Drucker, the management scholar and professor at Claremont Graduate School.
Published in 1989, it was the book my father recommended when, around the time of my university entrance examinations in 1990, I asked him for something on why the socialist countries, the Soviet Union among them, had collapsed. Drucker wrote it at the age of eighty. I remember being struck that a book of that quality could come at such an age.
What is remarkable about the book is that it speaks not only of shifts in the history of economics and management but of the change in the worldview — the philosophy — underneath them. This appears most clearly in the closing chapter, “From Analysis to Perception: The New Worldview.” I would like to introduce it, at some length.
First, on the analytical way of seeing. The book takes the computer as its example. The computer, Drucker argues, is the furthest expression of the analytical and conceptual view of the physical world that began in the late seventeenth century with Denis Papin. It traces back to Leibniz, Papin’s contemporary and friend, who found that any number can be expressed digitally, by ones and zeros; and Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica extended that finding beyond the confines of number into logic itself. Anything that can be set out clearly as data, it followed, can be expressed by ones and zeros. The computer was thus a triumph of the conceptual, analytical model of Descartes, Papin’s teacher.
By contrast, the perceptual way of seeing. Here the example is modern biology. Life, in the terms of modern biology, is recorded as a genetic code — as programmed information. Life as that unfathomable substance, if no recourse is to be had to supernatural explanation, can only be described as something organized by information.
And biological processes are not analytical. In physical phenomena the whole is made of parts and equals their sum, and so can be understood by analysis. In biological phenomena there are no parts; everything is whole. Adding the parts together does not produce the whole. Information itself is analytical and conceptual, Drucker writes; but meaning is neither. Meaning is a perceptual recognition.
Such a perceptual way of seeing has appeared in psychology and in modern art, and he sets out the shift from the analytical to the perceptual as follows. The move from analytical concept to perceptual recognition, he notes, began before the computer arrived. Around the 1890s, a century earlier, Gestalt psychology showed that what can be understood is not C, A, T but CAT — that whatever exists in actuality is a perceptual recognition. Since then, nearly every branch of psychology, from child to behavioral to clinical, has shifted its weight from analysis toward recognition. Modern painting is modern, on his account, in setting out to express what the one who paints sees rather than what the one who views sees. It is not depiction. It is meaning.
Finally, on what lies ahead for the world — ecological problems, problems of the global economy, the various problems of capitalism — his conclusion is that since Descartes the weight has fallen on conceptual analysis, and that from here on a balance between conceptual analysis and perceptual recognition is needed.
The importance of the balance between the analytical and the perceptual, which I have been touching on in this column, is set out here with real clarity, and I find that of considerable interest.
From this standpoint I would like to look a little further at Rolfing, and to think about body reading and the rest.
Note, August 2026
This piece records a book read twenty-five years earlier, remembered in a classroom in Munich.
It was around 1990, at the time of my university entrance examinations. Wanting to know why the socialist countries, the Soviet Union among them, had collapsed, I asked my father for a book. What came back was Drucker’s The New Realities, written by its author at the age of eighty.
When I read it, the closing chapter made no sense to me. It is titled “From Analysis to Perception,” and it says that physical phenomena can be understood as the sum of their parts while biological phenomena have no parts and are entirely whole; that information itself is analytical, but meaning is a perceptual recognition. The sentences could be followed. Where any of it applied could not.
It became clear twenty-five years later. In a classroom in Munich, shown an image made only of assembled shapes and told there was a giraffe in it, the giraffe rose into view. Not a line had been added. What changed was the side that looked. Three days after that, this piece was written.
It was not a book found in a shop but a book handed over by someone. And what came back from my father was not an answer to the question of why socialism had collapsed. It was that the way the world is seen was in the middle of changing. To a question, what came back was not an answer but a way of seeing. Noticing that took, again, twenty-five years.
Two of the propositions quoted here are worth setting down.
The first concerns parts and wholes. Biological phenomena have no parts; everything is whole. Adding the parts together does not produce the whole.
Eighteen days after this piece, in Phase III (12), the five principles of Rolfing are learned. The first of them is Wholism. Value the scientific view of the body as the sum of its parts, and at the same time see the whole as whole. Two and a half weeks before receiving it as theory, I had taken in the same proposition from a book on management. And in this piece it is set down as a quotation and nothing more — with no sense that it is the same as a principle about to be taught.
The second concerns information and meaning. Information itself is analytical and conceptual; meaning is neither, and is a perceptual recognition.
In the Advanced Training of 2025, Kevin Frank’s way of putting it was taught. Bodywork approaches physical structure — fascia, the skeleton; energy work approaches an unseen field of information; and the two are not opposed but stand as the ends of a continuum sharing the transmission of information. There is no essential distinction between bodywork and energy work, on that view. All of it is information.
At first glance this says the opposite of Drucker. One recasts everything as information; the other separates information from meaning. But the place being handled is the same. Outside the layer that can be described as information, something remains that cannot be described. Drucker called it meaning; the Advanced Training handled it as holding a field in which healing can occur. Both are pointing at the edge of what analysis reaches.
At the end of this piece I wrote that I would like to look a little further at Rolfing from this standpoint and think about body reading and the rest. In the event, that work took ten years.