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September 25, 2005
The embodied character of human conduct--embodied practices and embodied discourse--- presupposes the idea of a set of historical relations 'deposited' within individual bodies in the form of mental and corporeal schemata of perception, appreciation, and action. We are socialized into both a linguistic and a bodily community of practices. concept of habitus expands and illustrates its force as an embodied discourse. Our body is not just the executant of the goals we frame or just the locus of the causal factors which shape our representations. Our understanding itself is embodied. That is, our bodily know-how and the way we act and move can encode components of our understanding of self and world.
Our embodied skills are acquired by dealing with things and situations. These skills in turn determine how things and situations show up for us as requiring our responses.
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But the rub is that, though emerging from a numerically unique and historically contingent neurophysiology and existing in intimate association with their embodiment, human beings are not identifiable with their bodies, but rather exist through their relations with others qua other, who, though likewise embodied, can not be objectified as bodies. It's the cross-secting of human interrelationships that gives rise to the level of the linguistically "embodied", socio-cultural form of life and the meaning-potentials that, while requiring a material sign-substrate, can not be reduced to their "autonomous" operation, separate from their communicative usage, just as action/behavior is oriented toward and by interaction. Perhaps it can be put this way: just as biological organisms "violate", but are compatible with the laws of physics, so the communicatively generated, "immaterial" meaning-potentials in terms of which human beings exist "violate" but are compatible with material existence and physical causality. The worry is that a materialistically-inspired attempt to find a "ground" in bodily existence might be just as one-sided and sollipsistic as the idealism it rightly opposes. Materialism vs. idealism is a metaphysical aporia.