Two Names I Was Given in Munich, 2014
Munich, 2014. Phase II of the basic training. The lead instructor was Giovanni Felicioni.
An Italian living in the UK, and a former stage actor. He also gave a class on art history — on how painters from the Renaissance to the Impressionists had seen the human body (see “Becoming a Certified Rolfer in Europe — The Certification Training of the European Rolfing Association“). He brought seeing in from every angle.
I am not certain, but I think it was during an explanation of Tonic Function. James J. Gibson’s affordance came up briefly. And around the same time, he recommended reading Edward T. Hall’s The Hidden Dimension.
Affordance stayed with me, and I followed it up on my own — I read Masato Sasaki’s Afōdansu (new edition), a Japanese introduction to Gibson’s work. The Hidden Dimension I still have not read. I intend to, eventually.
At the time, why those two belonged together was beyond me.
One half of it I can say now.
Gibson’s affordance does not treat what you see as something assembled inside the head. When you look at a step and know you can get up it, that “can get up it” is not the result of calculating the height. The step is offering it to that body.
Hall’s book, as I understand it, is about the distance between people. That too puts the meaning outside the head.
So where, and how, is what you see decided?
One field spent a hundred years on that question: Gestalt psychology. This article goes there. And at the far end of it, the two names come back.
What You See Is Not a Copy of the Stimulus
Gestalt psychology begins in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century. It comes out of the people who read Mach’s The Analysis of Sensations (1886), and it was established as a field in Berlin in 1912 — by Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler. These three are the ones later called the Berlin school.
That history is traced in Part 3 of the phenomenology series: it grew from the same root as phenomenology and parted from it along the way. What this article takes up is what the field found.
The premise it had to break in order to exist is the constancy hypothesis.
A stimulus excites a sense organ, the excitation travels to the center, and it becomes sensation. Between them, a one-to-one correspondence. Fix the amount of light entering the eye and you fix the brightness seen. Fix the size of the image on the retina and you fix the size seen.
It is a reasonable thought. It makes what you see a copy of what arrived from outside.
Someone had been putting cracks in that premise early on.
Ewald Hering (1834–1918), a German physiologist. His name appears exactly once in Part 1: in the Amsterdam Lectures, when Husserl named the people who had been conscious of the method that became phenomenology, the one he named alongside Mach was Hering.
What Hering pointed out is this.
A sheet of paper that looks white in ordinary daylight still looks white in a dim room.
Move an object to twice the distance and its retinal image halves. It still looks the size it was.
Put that way it sounds obvious. It is not. The light reaching the eye really has dropped. The retinal image really has shrunk. The input has plainly changed.
And the white, and the size, stay as they were. This is perceptual constancy.
Two terms that sound alike, so to be clear about them:
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| The constancy hypothesis | The premise that stimulus and sensation correspond one to one |
| Perceptual constancy | The fact that what is seen holds steady while the stimulus changes |
If the second holds, the first cannot. If halving the light leaves the white unchanged, then stimulus and sensation are not corresponding one to one.
The philosopher Gen Kida draws the conclusion from Hering’s finding: sense perception is by no means merely passive or receptive — it is an active process, with a capacity to select.
On the “Perception as a Way of Seeing” page I wrote that perception is not receiving but taking hold. Here is the evidence for it.
And the premise was broken for good by an experiment, run by that same Berlin school. Frankfurt, 1910. Wertheimer ran it with Koffka and Köhler as his subjects.
Two points of light a fixed distance apart flash at a suitable interval. Motion is seen, running from one to the other. Nothing anywhere is moving. There are two lights, and each went on and off. Wertheimer named it phi motion.
Something absent from the stimulus is present in the perception. The result became a paper in 1912, and with that Gestalt psychology was established (taken up in Part 3).
Which brings this article to its subject. If what you see is not a copy of the stimulus, what decides it?
Figure and Ground
This is the largest of Gestalt psychology’s answers.
Figure and ground. Any scene you are looking at has already divided into something that holds a shape and the background it sits against. The first is figure, the second is ground.
Mach had written it early. Seeing a figure against a ground, he said, is a decisive moment in perception, and he demonstrated it with reversible figures and puzzle pictures.
A reversible figure is a picture that can be seen two ways. Take the white as figure and it is a vase; take the black as figure and it is two faces turned toward each other. You have seen the kind of drawing.
Here is the point. Not one line has changed. The ink on the paper is the same ink, in the same places. What changed is which side was made figure and which was made ground. Nothing else.
And only the side that became figure holds a shape. The side that became ground loses its shape and falls back. While the vase is there, the black is not shaped like a face. It is just background.
What you see is not decided by the stimulus. It is decided by how figure and ground get divided.
This is not a fact about trick pictures. Every scene in front of you right now is built this way. These words are figure and the space around them is ground. Lift your eyes and something else becomes figure.
Why Things Come Together
So what becomes figure?
Gestalt psychology set this out as laws — the conditions under which separate elements are seen as one group. The main ones:
- Proximity — things near each other group
- Similarity — things alike group
- Closure — a nearly closed line is seen closed
- Good continuation — a line that runs on smoothly is seen as one line
- Common fate — things that move together group
Each one sounds obvious once said. Sounding obvious is the strength of them. You are not applying them deliberately; it simply looks that way.
They are still the basis of design, of how type is set, of how a screen is laid out. Put two buttons close together and they read as a pair; move them apart and they read as separate things. That alone changes what the user understands.
And the same laws are at work when you look at a body.
Body Reading Is Choosing Figure and Ground
In Rolfing, looking at how a client stands and walks is called body reading.
A client is standing. The practitioner is looking. What appears depends on what is made figure.
Say the right shoulder appears to be up. In that moment, the two shoulders are figure and the torso is ground. The pair of shoulders stands up as one group, and the difference in height shows inside that group. Similarity and proximity are doing the work.
Make the whole ribcage figure instead and it changes. The shoulders fall back into ground. Where the ribcage faces and where it twists come up as shape, and the height difference now reads as part of that twist.
Same body, different things seen. Not a different object — a different division of figure and ground.
Ask the client to walk and another law comes in. Common fate.
If the pelvis and the ribcage rotate together, the two are seen as one unit. If they move on separate timings, they are seen as two. Saying “this person’s thoracolumbar region moves as one block” is a perception of common fate.
Where a body divides and where it runs continuous: that is not settled by where the joints are. It is settled by what moves together.
Part 2 said that the hardest thing in Rolfing is not touching but seeing. Part of why is here. What you are meant to see is not sitting there already shaped. It appears only once figure and ground have been chosen.
Choosing a Figure Is Also Not Seeing the Ground
There is a reverse side to this.
Only the figure holds a shape. What you made ground loses its shape. While the vase is there, the faces are not. Not at the same time.
The same thing happens in a session.
If the booking said “stiff shoulders,” the shoulders become figure. And the feet have fallen back into ground. Not unseen — they are in the visual field. But they hold no shape.
It is the same shape as the pulled hamstring in Part 1. When a name appears, you stop seeing. A name decides in advance what will be figure.
So training the eye is not a matter of looking harder. Being able to swap figure and ground is the harder thing.
I take it that this is why so much of the basic training is spent watching other practitioners. Flood the student with instances before their own way of taking a figure sets. It is the stage Ida Rolf called Auditing (taken up in “A Body Is Not the Sum of Its Parts“).
What a practitioner is looking at is also taken up from Jeff Maitland’s side (see “Principles and Observational Skills in Rolfing — Jeff Maitland’s Approach“).
The Break, and the Revival
That is what Gestalt psychology found.
And then it did not continue.
By the time the theory had been put in order, in the 1920s, behaviorism had taken over as the dominant paradigm in psychology, and speaking about consciousness was forbidden. Kida calls it the era of “psychology without a mind.”
Only observable behavior counted. The study of seeing could no longer talk about seeing.
It took forty years for the revival to start. By Kida’s account, the re-evaluation of Gestalt theory in this area had to wait for the cognitive psychology of the 1960s onward — and specifically for the arrival of J. J. Gibson’s ecological approach to perception.
And there is the name from the classroom in 2014.
James J. Gibson (1904–1979), an American psychologist. His major work is The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979).
What Gibson brought in was the invariant. Move around while looking and the information reaching the eye changes continuously. What the body picks up is what stays unchanged through that change. It is Hering’s constancy, restated from the side of a body in motion.
Masato Sasaki, who has done much to introduce affordance research in Japan, writes that invariants come in two kinds.
The first concerns the enduring properties of a thing — an animal’s species, its sex, or that a particular person is that person. This is the structural invariant. The second specifies what kind of change is going on right now — whether someone is smiling, or bracing against something they fear, read from the face. This is the transformational invariant.
Both of them are at work across a ten-series.
Knowing “this is the same person” on a different day, in different condition, is the structural invariant. Knowing what has changed since last time is the transformational one.
And Sasaki has a line that lands straight on figure and ground. Attend to the change, he writes, and you see the character of your own movement; attend to what is invariant and you see the enduring properties of the environment. Seeing is always a matter of dividing attention between those two.
Seeing was forked from the start. Figure and ground. Duration and change. Lean all the way into one and you drop the other.
Why Those Two Names Belonged Together
What Gibson did, in one line:
He pushed figure and ground out into the environment.
Gestalt psychology studied figure and ground as something the seeing side does. Gibson held that what can become figure is settled by what the environment offers that body. That is where affordance comes in — in Gibson’s phrasing, a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior at the same time.
A floor offers being stood on. A chair offers being sat on. A step offers being climbed, or does not, depending on the body. The same floor offers different things to different bodies.
And invariance sits inside the definition itself. What exists to be directly perceived, Gibson said, is substance, medium, surface, layout and event — and an affordance is an invariant combination of those real things.
This is where Tonic Function joins. Hubert Godard’s framework looks at the body within its relationship to gravity and to space (see “Our Relationship to Gravity: A Guide to Tonic Function“). Change the relationship to the floor and the standing changes. Affordance restates that relationship from the environment’s side.
And Hall’s The Hidden Dimension (1966)?
I have not read it, so I cannot write about what is in it. Edward T. Hall was an anthropologist, and the book, as I understand it, is about the distance between people.
Even so, why the two were named together is now reachable.
Both put the division of figure and ground outside the body. Gibson put it in the environment. Hall put it between people. And Tonic Function puts it in the body’s relationship to gravity and space.
Where a body is, is not settled inside the body alone. That subject has its own article (see “Where Does Space Exist? — Inside the Body, or Outside It“).
An instructor who taught art history named those two during an explanation of Tonic Function. That, I think, is what it was about. A painting, a body, a space — each appears only where figure and ground have been chosen.
What You See Has Been Selected
To put it together.
What you see is not a copy of the stimulus. The paper is white in a dim room. The input changes and what is seen does not.
What settles it is the division into figure and ground. Without one line changing, which side you make figure changes what is there.
Body reading is that choice itself. Shoulders as figure, or ribcage. Things that move together taken as one, or as two.
And choosing a figure is also not seeing the ground. Which is why the hard part of training the eye is not looking harder, but being able to swap them.
Eleven years ago I was given two names. One of them has arrived here. The other I still have to read.
Sources
Hering’s constancy, Mach on figure and ground, and the break and revival of Gestalt theory follow Gen Kida, Mach and Nietzsche: A History of Thought at the Turn of the Century (Shinshokan, 2002; Kodansha Gakujutsu Bunko, 2014). The invariants and the account of affordance follow Masato Sasaki, Afōdansu, new edition (Iwanami Kagaku Library 234, Iwanami Shoten), pp. 53, 66 and 71. Both books are in Japanese and have no English edition.
What Kida, Sasaki and Gibson say above is given as prose rather than as quotation, deliberately. Kida and Sasaki write in Japanese, and Sasaki quotes Gibson in Japanese translation; turning those passages back into English would produce sentences that are in none of the originals. For Gibson’s own wording, go to The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979).
The laws of grouping (proximity, similarity, closure, good continuation, common fate) are standard Gestalt psychology and are not drawn from either book.
This article is the main text behind Perception as a Way of Seeing — What Is Rolfing Actually Looking At?. The articles that take up the subjects touched on here are gathered there, group by group.