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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal – Vol. 10, No. 11
Publication Date: November 25, 2023
DOI:10.14738/assrj.1011.15676.
Godwins, J. (2023). Philosophy of Body: Emodiment and Spatiality. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 10(11). 10-23.
Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom
Philosophy of Body: Emodiment and Spatiality
Jude Godwins
Department of Philosophy,
Seat of Wisdom Seminary, Owerri,
Imo State University Owerri, Nigeria
ABSTRACT
The issue of human existence is not a question of reason but a matter of one’s
relation to one’s body (Leib). Studies on laughing and crying as well as clinical
studies reveal human existence is the problem of how being body (Leibsein) and
having body are harmonized in certain life situations (Plessner, 1970, 37). They
show how human existence is not a question of human reason but a matter of one’s
relation to one’s body. For Plessner this indicates a new way of defining reason.
Reason would now mean how one relates to one’s body and to one’s environment.
The human being consists of the unity of the centric and the eccentric dimensions
of human existence. It boils down to the relationship between being body and
having body. The phenomena of laughing and crying show how man’s existence
consists in the attempt to balance these two existential arts of being and having.
Plessner shows that laughing and crying are answers to crises of human behaviour.
They are reactions to border situations. Laughing answers to the blockade that one
experiences when stimuli to action become irrevocably equivocal. Crying reacts to
the behavioural blockade one experiences when one and things no longer relate to
each other. When one finds oneself incapable of establishing a relationship to a
certain situation because the surrounding things have lost their meaningful links to
one another and so no longer make sense to one, one loses one’s ability to act. The
human body reacts with laughing and crying to behavioural crises and offers bodily
answers to boundary situations. This seems to reveal how our existence could be a
matter of our relationship to our body rather than a question of abstract reason.
Man, unlike the animal, can withdraw from his embodied, spatial existence and say
“I” to himself. This is demonstrative of how his situation in the world is (one of) a
mediated immediacy. By means of his Leib, man has immediate contact with the
things in his Umwelt (Plessner, 1970, 41). The "immanence of consciousness"
carries out its duty of revealing reality through the intertwining activity of receding
and residing, engaging and disengaging, remoteness and nearness.Only through the
body’s mediateness and only as Leib (lived-body, living body, inner life) can man be
with things, seeing and acting. The positional character of man’s life is man’s mode
of relating to his surroundings (Plessner, 1970, 42). Man’s possibility of “controlling
nature objectively in knowing and doing” has its roots in the Leib’s mediated
immediacy. Mediated immediacy in turn comes from our eccentric position, and our
eccentric position decides how we relate to our body as positional and situational
beings.
Keywords: Being body (Leibsein), having body, mediated immediacy, bodily answers,
eccentric position, positional and situational beings, human existence, bodily relationship,
abstract reason.
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Godwins, J. (2023). Philosophy of Body: Emodiment and Spatiality. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 10(11). 10-23.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.1011.15676
BEING-BODY AND HAVING-BODY: INTRODUCTION
Plessner argues for a philosophy where being body and having body inseparably belong
together. His study of non-linguistic expressive behaviours provides him with credible evidence
for this viewpoint. Non-linguistic expressive behavioural forms belong to that field of behaviour
that is uniquely human, i.e., a field of behaviour that humans monopolize.
Plessner picks two unique expressive behaviours, laughing and crying, and examines them in
themselves and in their “relation to the fundamental nature of man.” Unlike speaking, walking,
or giving signals by nodding or smiling, laughing and crying are not “intentional.” They are
involuntary behaviours. Yet they are not the kind of behaviours found in other animals. Only
human beings laugh and cry. Laughing and crying are not accidental byproducts of our
biological makeup; instead, Plessner insists, they belong to the nature of human existence and
are part of our meaning structure (Plessner, 1970, Xi).
Plessner shows that laughing and crying distinguish human existence from other forms of
animal existence, because in laughing and crying there “already appears an interpretation of
man by himself." It is aninterpretation that affords man a unique position. The body can only
be explained by behaviour; and only behaviours that are peculiarly and uniquely human and
conform with man’s understanding and setting of goals for himself, such as acting, speaking,
crying and laughing, make the human body intelligible (Plessner, 1970, 8).
There is more to animal behaviour than the chain of functions that the animal has and uses.
Animal behaviour is, over and above these functions, a “reciprocal bond” between the entire
organism and its surroundings. Human behaviour is also a “reciprocal bond” between one and
oneself. Human behaviour, Plessner insists, is the “self-interpretation of man by himself as
man.” (Plessner, 1970, 9). This differentiates one behaviour from the other and lends each type
of behaviour its place and meaning. The capacity for speaking and acting means much more
than merely having particular organs; it implies also that we have the ability to give meaning.
Thus, acting and speaking are always preceded by self-disclosure and acknowledgement of
meaning. This provides evidence for the fact that a person has relation to his body and to his
Umwelt (Plessner, 1970, 10).
Therefore, Plessner’s study reveals laughing and crying as unique expressions of human nature.
Put differently they (laughing and crying) reveal a breakdown of human nature that
“characteristically exposes it at its limits” (Plessner, 1970, Xii). Laughing and crying, Plessner
holds, are authentic, fundamental possibilities of all human beings, irrespective of any spiritual
and historical transformation (Plessner, 1970, 10), because (as forms of behavioural relation to
self) laughing and crying are “forms of expression of a crisis” occurring suddenly in particular
situations due to man’s relation to his body (Plessner, 1970, 11).
Whereas animals are and have bodies, man is the only animal that not only is and has a body
but that also knows about it (i.e., he knows about his being a body and having a body). However,
this does not mean, Plessner insists, that man’s essential characteristic is some form of
theoretical knowledge or rationality that distinguishes him from other animals. Instead of
rationality, it is relation (ways of relating to the body) that distinguishes man from other
animals. Human beings and other animals relate to their bodies differently (Plessner, 1970, Xii).
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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal (ASSRJ) Vol. 10, Issue 11, November-2023
Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom
Animals live and experience from and into the centre of their corporeal being and “cannot
escape it.” Their entire behaviour is concentrated on their bodily existence. As animals, human
beings too live and experience from and into the centre of their corporeal existence. However,
in contrast to animals, human beings make themselves the centre of their existence, the way
animals cannot. Whereas animals are comfortable with their centric existence, human beings
fight their centric existence, even as they cannot escape from it. The human being makes living
from the centre a conscious thing. Man takes up this centralized life, examines it, challenges it,
and confronts it. Although he is incapable of freeing himself from his centric existence, he places
himself against it and battles with it. This way of relating to the self/himself is what Plessner
refers to as man’s “eccentric position.” A living thing with this existential structure is still closely
related to its animal nature, even as it detaches or separates itself from it. Even as it is detached
from locality, its existence has its natural place, as all animal life has. This kind of living thing
would then be “everywhere and nowhere” (Plessner, 1970, Xii).
Plessner maintains that no new entity comes from outside to create this eccentric positionality
in man. Man’s eccentric position is only the result of a “break in nature, which produces a new
unity,” a living thing. This living thing is body (Leib), it is in man’s physical body (Körper) (‘as
inner life’) and it is outside man’s physical body (Körper) as the perspective from which it is
simultaneously physical body (Körper) and inner life. Humans have this “threefold structure.”
The human being, Plessner holds, is the “subject of its experience, of its perceptions and its
actions, of its initiative. It knows and it wills” (Plessner, 1970, Xii).
Thus, as persons we are at a double remove from our body (Körper). We are a peculiar type of
animal. For, not only do we have an ‘inner life distinct’ from, though not inseparable from, our
physical life, but we also hold out (stand up to or confront) against both of these. We hold both
(physical life and inner life) “apart from each other and yet together.” In this way, the human
existence reveals itself as characterized by the ambiguity of “necessity and freedom,
contingency and significance.” It is man’s eccentric position, Plessner holds, that gives man’s
existence this character of ambiguity.
Plessner holds that laughing and crying are the “unique expressions of the breakdown of this
eccentric position” of man. It is when things overwhelm us, he believes, when they are too much
for us that we cry, even when it is a cry for joy (Plessner, 1970, S. Xii). And it is when the
ambiguity in our basic situation breaks forth to an uncontrollable degree, and yet does not harm
us, that we laugh.
Plessner’s work is a philosophical study of man. His source is our everyday experience in the
most common and complete sense (Plessner, 1970, Xiii).
HOW MAN RELATES TO HIS BODY
For Plessner, in laughing and crying an expression of behaviour significantly and consciously
relates to what occasions it. This behavioural expression breaks out eruptively, runs its course
compulsively, and lacks definite symbolic form. This strangely opaque form of expression of the
human body shows how man relates to his body and how what defines man is this relation to
body rather than rationality (cf. Plessner, 1970, 25n).