Home 9 Passage 9 Corporeality

The existential theme of corporeality may guide our reflection to ask how the body is experienced with respect to the phenomenon that is being studied. As object? As subject? Sartre has shown that, in ordinary life the body tends to be experienced as passed-over-in-silence (passé sous silence). While we are bodily engaged in the world, we do not really pay attention to the body. How and when do we become aware of our bodies? How do our desires, fears, cheerfulness, anxieties incarnate themselves in the world in which we dwell? How is the phenomenon we study perceived, sensed, touched by the body? We may look at our own body in the same appraising manner as we may look at someone else’s body—however, this look is not the same, since we perceive our own body with our own body. So, how is the body of self and other perceived differently? Similarly, how do we experience being touched by some thing or by a person? How do we experience the body in online activities? Some phenomenological authors regard body, corporeality, or embodiment as the fundamental motif of their understanding of human phenomena. Merleau-Ponty (2012) is the phenomenologist of the body. Richard Zaner (1971) wrote an early text on the phenomenology of embodiment that is still relevant. And Donn Welton (1999) has edited classic and contemporary readings on the phenomenology of the body.