Abstract
Is it possible to reconcile an objective, scientific description of the body with the subjective experience of being or having a body? This chapter argues that because an objective account understands subjectivity as a function of the biological organism, it fails to explain the complex and often paradoxical relation between subjectivity and corporeity. Contemporary philosophers such as Plessner, Heidegger and Jonas have pointed out the importance of the concept of life for understanding subjectivity. Moreover, through their analysis of life, they confirm Kant’s insight into the close relationship between subjectivity and temporality. It is no mystery that many attempts to reconcile subjectivity and the body fail to capture movement and time, as they often rely on definitions of living systems for which time is always extrinsic. A different and more successful strategy is to invoke the Aristotelian concept of enérgeia, or perfect activity, to describe the distinctive character of living processes. This notion also illuminates the role of consciousness, which at face value appears to be out of time, thus posing an even harder problem. For Aristotle, consciousness depends on a vital activity: the activity of the intellect (nous). Thus this chapter integrates the discoveries of contemporary biology with key Aristotelian concepts like enérgeia and nous to develop a concept of the living body as a center of coordinated vital activities, including the generation of consciousness, presence and temporality, and to grasp their characteristic temporality as synchrony. This view inspires both an understanding of the body as more than a mere thing, and a means of reconciling the atemporality of conscious experience with the instability and exteriority of our body.
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Notes
- 1.
From a phenomenological perspective, the importance of corporeality as an inherent determinant of all experience has been highlighted in a radical – and, in my view, somewhat one-sided – way, by Hermann Schmitz (2011). He goes so far in his attempt to avoid the dualism and mentalism of much of the Western tradition that the distinction we have been discussing between the interior and exterior perspectives seems to vanish.
- 2.
- 3.
“Körperliche Dinge der Anschauung, an welchen eine prinzipell divergente Außen-Innenbeziehung als zu ihrem Sein gehörig geständlich auftritt, heißen lebendig” (1981, p. 138).
- 4.
“Positional liegt ein Dreifaches vor: des Lebendige ist Körper, im Körper (als Innenleben oder Seele) und außer der Körper al Blickpunkt, von dem aus es beides ist. Ein Individuum, welches positional derart dreifach charakterisiert ist, heißt Person. Er ist das Subjekt seines Erlebens, seines Aktionen, seiner Initiative. Es weiß und es will. Seine Existenz ist Wahrhaft auf Nichts gestellt” (1981, p. 365).
- 5.
Fuchs calls the brain a “mediating organ” (2013).
- 6.
Bruno Snell (2000, pp. 13–20) points out that in ancient Greek art and literature the body is not seen as an organic unity until the fifth century BCE. Previously the body was seen as different parts added to each other. They were melea kai gyia, that is, parts with muscle, strong, articulated and able to move. The word soma, however, that corresponds to our term “body ” was only used by Homer as meaning “corpse.” What we call “body ” is referred to in plural as a collection of members and is considered from the point of view of human activity.
- 7.
“A system can be defined as a complex of interacting elements” (von Bertalanffy 1969, p. 55).
- 8.
This affinity between the notion of system and mathematic s is especially evident in the cited work of von Bertalanffy (1969).
- 9.
“Change is analogous to spatial variation. Change does occur in virtue of unchanging facts about temporal parts.” Sider (2001, p. 214).
- 10.
“The organizational account of functions relies, then, on the theoretical assumption according to which the various temporal instances of a system, in spite of any changes which may occur, can be considered as instances of the same encompassing self-maintaining organization, to the extent that their constitutive organizational properties are causally transmitted from one instance to another instance by the maintenance of a material connection between them” (Saborido et al. 2011, p. 599).
- 11.
In a similar way Scheler distinguishes between functions and actions: “First, all functions are ego-functions; they never belong to the sphere of the person. Functions are psychic; acts are non-psychic. Acts [loving, hating, judging, for example] are executed; functions happen by themselves. Functions necessarily require a lived body and an environment to which the ‘appearances’ of functions belong. But with the person and acts we do not posit a lived body ; and to the person there corresponds a world, not an environment . Acts spring from the person into time; functions are facts in phenomenal time and can be measured indirectly by coordinating their phenomenal time-relations with measurable lengths of time appearances given in functions themselves. For example, seeing, hearing, tasting, and smelling belong to functions, as do all kinds of noticing, noting and taking notice of (and not only so-called sensible attention to) vital feeling, etc. (…)” (Scheler 1973, p. 388). Concerning the different ways of experiencing the self in knowledge and action, see Murillo (2009).
- 12.
“Time is nothing other than the form of inner sense, i.e., of the intuition of our self and our inner state” (Kant 1998, A 33, B 49).
- 13.
- 14.
Medieval Aristotelianism usually translated this distinction between perfect activity and movement as inmanens and transitiva: “Action is twofold. Actions of one kind pass out to external matter [transiens], as to heat or to cut; whilst actions of the other kind remain in the agent [inmanens], as to understand, to sense and to will. The difference between them is this, that the former action is the perfection not of the agent that moves, but of the thing moved; whereas the latter action is the perfection of the agent” (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 18, a. 3 ad 1).
- 15.
The notion of the cogitative sense does not appear as such in Aristotle , but is common in the later Aristotelian tradition.
- 16.
The word enérgeia which I have translated in this text as “activity” is usually translated into Latin as actus.
- 17.
This fact legitimates the consideration of living beings as systems and their activities as processes, provided that they are not ontologically characterized by these concepts.
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Murillo, J.I. (2016). Body, Time and Subject. In: García-Valdecasas, M., Murillo, J., Barrett, N. (eds) Biology and Subjectivity. Historical-Analytical Studies on Nature, Mind and Action, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30502-8_7
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