You have completely nailed it. Affects a lot in many ways. But also depends in the open mind of the other person.affects us on a personal and social level. — Jack Cummins
I am asking to what extent the whole experience of having a unique, individual body is of significance as a social and personal factor in affecting our experiences and understanding, as a basis for understanding everything.
The whole way in which you say about what philosophers speaking about, including self and consciousness, as arising from the the body is why I am raising the whole topic of having a physical body, and what this means in terms of experience.
However, on a personal level, we know ourselves so much more intimately. I think that this level of knowing is important, and perhaps, in our most intimate relationships this can be explored further. — Jack Cummins
but none of this tells us anything about the human being, which reaches out to experience and explore meaning and ask philosophical questions. — Jack Cummins
I've learned from Schopenhauer that each body consists in immediate subjective apprehesion of the "thing-in-itself", or the real, which he conceives of as "the will" – that is, embodiment experiences, is affected by, the world from the inside-out immersively prior to "grasping it" from the outside-in partially, approximately. Nietzsche later conceives of "bodies as perspectives" from and by which experiences are interpreted (or aesthetically stylized). Almost a century later Maurice Merleau-Ponty phenomenologizes the body as "flesh of the world" (rather than merely "in-the-world" (pace Heidegger)). And during my student days, George Lakoff et al conceived of bodies as template-generators (my term, not his) of the metaphors used to structure everyday and theoretical discourses: embodied cognition.I am asking to what extent the whole experience of having a unique, individual body is of significance as a social and personal factor in affecting our experiences and understanding, as a basis for understanding everything. — Jack Cummins
The whole experience of having a body affects us on a personal and social level. I am referring to the subjective experience of how we see ourselves and how others see us on a social level. — Jack Cummins
Levinas' "face-to-face" is more about ethical encounters (i.e. responding – subjecting oneself – to the vulnerability or suffering of "the other") and how another's agony-anguish becomes mine via attention to another's face ... or something like that. Definitely not mere "communication". A mode of contact, or sympathy, that can be embodied. A phenomenological ethics of bodily vulnerability-availability to the demands of the other (stranger, foreigner, enemy (alien)) body. Levinas is quite deep and insightful.You mentioned about face to face communication and this involves a direct impact of awareness of the body in communication. — Jack Cummins
The body was of central concern to me in the 1980s for mostly reasons of "race" (being a large, athletic, black male moving warily through a number of exclusive, non-black spaces) as well as an instinctive rejection of platonism's/idealism's (& christianity's) 'disembodied gaze'. By the '90s I'd broadened my concern to include (human/social) ecology, that is, focusing on bodies entangled ecologically, which had the impact of grounding ethics for me in a vibrant, pluralistic, naturalism. For decades since, Spinoza's 'philosophy of immanence' (Deleuze) still makes reflectively-being-a-body-with-other-bodies indispensable for my agency (i.e. well-being).It appears that you have done a lot in this area ...
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