Disharmony as Intelligence
Color Analysis From A Mummy Cloth, Emily Noyes Vanderpoel. 1902.
Tuukka Toivonen January 23, 2025
Iwakan is one of my favorite Japanese phrases. It consists of three Chinese characters, 違 (i, meaning difference, deviation), 和 (wa, meaning harmony, peace) and 感 (kan, meaning feeling, sense), that together form a single word that loosely translates as a ‘sense of disharmony’. In daily interactions, I use the term casually when something feels off or out of place, yielding a mild yet noticeable dissonance rather than a jarring sense of wrongness. A friend recently pointed out that having an iwakan does not necessarily suggest a negative situation or grave problem as such, only that something—a sentence, a bit of furniture, a stylistic choice—might need to be rearranged or reconsidered.
What strikes me as remarkable about this single word—beyond how it incorporates the beautiful wa character (considered quintessentially Japanese) in its midst—is its gentle emphasis not explicitly on disharmony or dissonance per se, but our sensing of it.. Along with foregrounding the utterer’s subjective experience, iwakan for me serves as an eloquent reminder of the embodied nature of human knowing. It is the final kan character that signals this definitive quality, in a gesture so subtle that it becomes all too easy to overlook its potency. Here, dissonance becomes something felt intuitively in the body as opposed to a rational or purely intellectual observation of a discrepancy or incongruence.
Many other Japanese emotional and relational expressions end with kan or ki (気), the Chinese character of Daoist origin that (in Daoist usage) refers to the fundamental universal energy that permeates all life and the entire cosmos.
Think of the curious feeling you get, having just left home, that ‘something’s not quite right’, prompting you to realize a moment later that the keys are still on the kitchen table or that the air-conditioning is still humming. Or imagine spotting a dirty piece of plastic waste in the middle of your most cherished beach and the sensations this sight arouses in your body (while suspending any explicit thoughts about what should or should not be done in response). Next, recall how your abdominal area or your shoulders feel after a challenging conversation or an outright verbal conflict. What sensations can you detect or remember? What is the ‘shape’ and contour of your unease in each case? If you are anything like me, your experience of disharmony in situations like these may range from a strange tickle or tingle to slight disgust and heaviness.
In some cases, disharmony grows into a persistent, nagging signal that is simply impossible to ignore. Think back to the moment you first faced ‘adult’ pressures — when you began to get serious about your education, find a proper job or plan for career success. Alongside any immediate feelings of anxiety or frustration, did this generate any disharmonies or recurring kinds of bodily discomfort in you? In my case, the unease I felt in relation to future expectations surged around the age of 17 and 18, producing a lingering, growing discomfort that eventually led to a major life transformation.
The inner resistance I experienced in that now distant moment in my small hometown in Finland did not spring purely from my naïveté or lack of familiarity with the ‘real world’. No— it was rather that the transitions I was being asked to undertake felt devoid of meaning and resonance. The foremost paths into further study and work that I was being offered appeared alienating and uninteresting at the time. Internally, I met this situation with a screaming ‘why?’ along with the desire to find an escape hatch.
This sense of disharmony may not have resolved had it not been for a surprising turn of events that led me to discover an alternative route forward. On one sunny winter morning, seemingly out of the blue, an American youth musical group visited my high school in Kotka. That encounter inspired me to put all other plans—and uncomfortable expectations—properly on hold. Upon graduation, I duly flew to Denver to join a year-long tour that would first take me to the United States and then onwards to new lives in Japan and the United Kingdom. For the first time, I found a vigorous sense of aliveness, belonging and meaning in a totally new context.
It was iwakan that encouraged me to commit to this transition, coupled with the strong positive sentiments I felt towards the musical program. To me, this served as a powerful demonstration of the surprising influence that a subtle, embodied sensation can wield when we stay (or are forced to stay) with it. Building on these reflections alongside other experiences, I have come to see disharmony as a vital kind of intelligence, a holistic one that we all too often ignore at our peril. We may not have the words to latch onto and express it, or perhaps our society does not (yet) view it as a perfectly legitimate way of knowing, learning or making decisions. Change, however, may be on its way even in cultures that, unlike Japan, do not incorporate nuanced references to felt sensations in daily spoken language.
“All this should help us see why the humblest inner twitch or sensation—whether dissonant or harmonious—has the potential to be an important bridge between our day-to-day experience and the civilizational priority of protecting the Earth.”
Drawing inspiration from contemplative traditions, dance, and structured experiments and surveys, a growing body of multidisciplinary academic research approaches the felt dimension of intelligence through the concepts of embodiment and embodied cognition. Although still a new field of empirical inquiry, this research is already coalescing on understandings that profoundly challenge conventional definitions of intelligence as well as the reductive views of intelligence as algorithmic or computational. It proposes, simply, that intelligence emerges not in the brain alone but through the ongoing interaction of our minds, bodies and environments. The bodily sensations we feel as we go about our daily lives—whether relating to the temperature of the air, the motion of our legs as we walk, or the discomfort we sense before an important presentation—are integral to the way we exist and navigate the world, rather than something peripheral or subordinate to the explicit, conscious thought we bring to focused tasks and problem-solving.
One way to interpret this trend is to view it as the gradual and long-overdue incorporation of our animality, aliveness, and wholeness into mainstream thought. It is a liberating shift, in at least three respects: first, it encourages us to stop suppressing or discounting aspects of ourselves we internally feel compelled to follow but culturally devalue. This may result in enhanced feelings of personal integrity, wholeness and connectedness. Second, the realization that we are fundamentally embodied beings—living organisms with bodies—helps us understand that the essence of our intelligence cannot be replicated or appropriate technologically, for it relies on direct lived experience. Third, embracing our embodied, animal selves brings us radically closer to the more-than-human world, highlighting and activating a foundational commonality, a shared way of being that the various artificial (conceptual and material) divides we have enacted between us and the rest of the living world have not—and can never—eliminate.
In the ecological philosopher David Abram’s words, this subtle transformation means we no longer “look upon nature from a cool, detached position ostensibly outside of that nature”, instead we (once again) become nature.¹ As such, our lives can more fully embrace the processes uncovered by embodiment scholars where intelligence fundamentally arises through the interaction of mind, body and ecology rather than from the individual brain or algorithmic machines.
All this should help us see why the humblest inner twitch or sensation—whether dissonant or harmonious—has the potential to be an important bridge between our day-to-day experience and the civilizational priority of protecting the Earth. As the German philosopher and psychiatrist Thomas Fuchs insightfully observes, “[e]ven an ecological redefinition of our relationship to the earthly environment will only succeed if our corporeality and aliveness—as connectedness or conviviality with our natural environment —is at its center. Only if we inhabit our bodies will we also be able to maintain the earth in habitable form”². Should we fail to recover and revalue our embodied natures, we will put ourselves at risk of becoming diminished and disempowered by artificial intelligence technologies, allowing the opportunity to reconnect with our planet tragically slip beyond our grasp.
So it turns out that iwakan—in a marked contrast with the subtlety of the phrase—has quite a few major lessons to teach us, both individually and societally. By observing not only the disharmonies of our world but also paying keen attention to our embodied sensations, we begin to relearn how to live fully in our bodies. If we do so in a way that welcomes every kind of sensation as constitutive of our intelligence, we will learn to once again live intelligently in the more-than-human world. This is not an easy task—the learning journey I have personally experienced has been long and remains far from complete, replete with myriad mysteries that may never be resolved—but with practice, the basic ability to listen to our senses and inner interoceptive, somatic signals eventually becomes effortless. Thus, striking a beautifully harmonious and satisfying chord, we discover that by participating in our own existence wholly, we will also find it radically easier to participate—experientally and and regeneratively—in the larger sphere of life that our existence is rooted in.
Tuukka Toivonen, Ph.D. (Oxon.) is a sociologist interested in ways of being, relating and creating that can help us to reconnect with – and regenerate – the living world. Alongside his academic research, Tuukka works directly with emerging regenerative designers and startups in the creative, material innovation and technology sectors.
Tuukka would like to thank Elina Osborne and Chiharu Suzuki for the suggestions they kindly offered in the process of this article’s germination at Amigo House.
¹ Abram, D. 2010. Becoming animal: An earthly cosmology. New York (N.Y.): Vintage books.
² Fuchs, T. 2021. In defence of the human being: Foundational questions of an embodied 2 anthropology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
