ETHICS AND CORPOREITY FROM A PHENOMENOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

Book excerpt: The approach to the theme of the body within the framework of phenomenology is developed in 20th century France. Despite the evident Cartesianism, it is there that the principles of a phenomenology of the body are configured, in the confluence between the phenomenological tradition and the philosophy of existence. The systematic development of the phenomenology of the body, which takes centered reflection on the corporeal existence and the incarnated subject, corresponds, among others, to Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Bernhard Waldenfels. The phenomenology of the body opens a new horizon to understand the corporeal dimension of human existence and offers a new philosophical view of the body, while the body is not only an observable reality as an object, but it is a dimension of the being itself, as, according to Merleau-Ponty, from the phenomenology of “corporeal existence”, the body is the “medium” of our “being-in-the-world”. That is precisely why it can be radically said that “being-in-the-world” (Heidegger) is primarily a “corporal-being-in-the-world" (Waldenfels). This implies “belonging to the world”, being “implicated” in the world through the body and, also, that the body opens a subject to the world. The phenomenology of the body sought to restore the unity of human existence. Husserl, Scheler, Marcel, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Waldenfels, among others, break with the modern mechanistic conception of the body and resignify subjectivity and objectivity, in open opposition to the dualistic tradition. The phenomenology of corporeal existence makes the body our way-to-be-in-the-world. The body not only ceases to be an object, but also a passive structure, receiving a reality configured by the confines of res cogitans. Based on Husserl, a theory of the phenomenological body is developed, which will reverse the subordinate role that the body had in Cartesian thought. Merleau-Ponty, who t