Advancing the Human Self. Ewa Nowak

phenomenological approaches. In his polemic against St. Paul’s body-aversive, spiritualist doctrine, Aquinas claims that “any separation of soul from body goes against its nature and is imposed on it. (…) soul is not the whole human being, only part of one: my soul is not me.”¹⁸⁸ In other words, to Aquinas, my soul is not a whole and true me as it was in Pauline tradition: “For Saint Paul (of Tarsus) the true Self is the new man ‘called’ by a personal God, hence created by a vocation; he does not fall under the yoke of the Senses like the old Adam since the new life is both in and out of the world, manifested by his love.”¹⁸⁹ Aquinas initiated the first serious discussion on the embodied personal self. His statement is clear, and refers to its Aristotelian origins: “So if soul is deprived ←58 | 59→of body, it will exist imperfectly as long as this situation lasts.”¹⁹⁰ Although the refusal of reincarnation as incompatible with the resurrection dogma was the precise background for that discussion, Aquinas is to be recognized as a pioneer of the Western concept of one’s own body and embodied selfhood in at least two phenomenological aspects: namely as one’s own–hence–individual body, and as an embodiment inseparable from mental and spiritual lifeforms.

      In the Zen and Shinto tradition before its Westernization, as Hiroyuki Noguchi puts it, the formation of the body concept, its individuality, and identity, looked rather different. A meditative treatment of the Japanese body provides several steps to “switch from mental concentration to bodily concentration” in order to “separate the self from the body,” and finally to “encounter the pure body” belonging “only to nature itself: the body ‘as is’. To encounter the body ‘as is’ means that all sensations of the flesh disappear. What emerges instead, is a body of mist or air-like quality.”¹⁹¹ Its new nature “is one of total passivity; it can fluctuate with the true sense of being alive.”¹⁹² However, the life experienced is not that of an individual living organism, “but the life that flows through all beings in a world where everything is alive.”¹⁹³ Opening up to the life cycle should nourish and strengthen the individual life’s potentials, including the mind’s creativity. That practice is more of a therapeutic than of a sacral, esoteric, or celebrative character.

      In modern Western phenomenology, one’s own irreplaceable body often appears in twofold meaning, such as to have the own body (however, not as a physical object, but, rather, “as a work of art”)¹⁹⁴ and to be one’s own body. The first meaning still betrays a Cartesian externalist, objectivist, and mechanical touch, although exteriority remains one of the most important body aspects in phenomenology. Ownership is also found in Husserl, as he claims “my physical body to be preoriginally mine” (mein Leib als das ursprünglichst meine).¹⁹⁵ My body was widely explored by Merleau-Ponty who claims, “I am my body, I am my life” and leaves behind us, “once and for all, the traditional subject-object dichotomy” as well as the “traditional dichotomy of body and consciousness.”¹⁹⁶ ←59 | 60→Can my body cease to be mine? Having agreed with Jonas that “nobody has the right to another person’s body,” it is easy to recall a number of situations in which a subject is confronted with her ‘disembodiment’ or “closure of the self from the body.”¹⁹⁷ Bettelheim and Giddens refer to body and self dissociation reported by victims of tremendous horror in death camps. Biopolitical and disciplinary discourse powers may deprive persons of their inalienable right to their body. A changed feeling of the body and unusual existential feelings accompany a number of psychiatric disorders. In schizophrenia, one’s own body may disappear or appear as if it is alien body.¹⁹⁸ At the same time, phenomenology teaches “that the bodily self is a non-thing [Nicht-Ding], which is never ‘bodily present’ [leibhaft gegenwärtig], as things are.”¹⁹⁹ Furthermore, body shaming is explained as “out of the body” feeling while the latter is dominated by the oppressive body narratives or images.²⁰⁰ “The body becomes the focus of power and this power (…) subjects it to the internal discipline of self-control,”²⁰¹ which provides the right to own body with social sanctions. This conventionalized body was told to become our social skin, typical for modernity. In her book entitled The Body Multiple. Ontology in Medical Practice, Annemarie Mol shows human embodiment and bodily identity (including disease, pathologies, etc.) to ←60 | 61→be “done,” “enacted,” constructed or deconstructed by medical practices, social representations, biopolitical and normative discourses: “The vagina for instance. This organ is no longer capable, all by itself, of turning someone into a woman. A lot more is required to do womanhood: specific styles of talking, ways of walking, dressing, addressing.”²⁰²

5. Experiential Body

      Husserl explored both the objective and subjective (Ich-Organ) aspects of one’s own body in terms of phenomenological, i.e., experience-based, synthesis. According to his analysis in Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität II, the conscious I learns to identify her body as one’s own body (soma) on the basis of experiencing the latter as experienced from the first-person perspective (ich lerne meine selbsterfahrene Leiblichkeit, mein Leib untrennbar vom Somatologischen, in geistlicher Beziehung zum Ich-Organ). However, the identification process occurs in a mediated way, i.e., by means of another bodily organ (erst auf dem Umweg über den Andern).²⁰³

      Experiencing bodily reality (corporeality), identifying and recognizing it subjectively as ‘my’ personal body would both meet and transgress the criterion of one’s own body. That criterion does not predetermine one’s own body to be limited to natural or actual body landscape. It also applies, e.g., to lost organs and phantom limbs still identified or even experienced as integral parts of my body landscape, and a part of my body’s functionality. With the experiential body, a novel level of body concept will be achieved. It transcends the ‘preoriginally mine’ corporeality and its limited, egological ontologies to finally acknowledge “that a human body is not a discrete entity ending at the skin, and that material ←61 | 62→technologies constantly disorder our boundaries,”²⁰⁴ opening them to various kinds of somatechnics, and crosscorporeality. However, before addressing these new phenomena, a basic experiential body approach needs to be introduced.

      To humans and probably also to a large number of animals, one’s own body is a lived, sensed, and experienced body on the one hand, and living/sensing body with a huge sensorium on the other. Husserl described this,²⁰⁵ in a manner impressive to contemporary scholars combining phenomenology and embodied mind theory, as follows: “When my hand touches the table and when I pay attention to the very touching, I am, after all, conscious of an experiencing organ and not of an experienced organ.”²⁰⁶ According to Zahavi, “the relation between the touching and the touched is reversible, since the touching is touched, and the touched is touching. It is this reversibility that demonstrates that the interiority and the exteriority are different manifestations of the same (…) Thus, it is exactly the unique subject-object status of the body, the remarkable inter-play between ipseity and alterity characterizing double-sensation, which permits me to recognize and experience other embodied subjects.”²⁰⁷

      The body’s sensory dispositions offer plentifulness of impressions and experiences used as a measure of human wellbeing and happiness. It is not only curiosity; the idea of progress and human hubris accelerate the development of technologies and the so-called human enhancement across ages, beyond askesis, commitment, and humility. Being situated in and belonging to the world as an exploratory, agential, and interactive individual and experiencing one’s body and through one’s body, which can be quantified “according to the disposition of my limbs”²⁰⁸ and the functionality of my body. Even in the case of passive touch, our body remains engaged and world-directed. My experiential embodiment provides “non-conceptual feelings of the body” such as exteroception and proprioception, which “constitute a background [existential] sense of belonging to the world and a sense of reality,”²⁰⁹ and objects’ presence and absence, though in some general aspect my body is “an impersonal being.”²¹⁰ However, there are several special types ←62 | 63→of extended or even ecological experiential body which are groundbreaking for understanding how bodily identity nowadays is evolving, transgressing boundaries, and expanding over various bodily terra incognita-like territories.