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GERNOT BÖHME
THE CONCEPT OF BODY AS THE NATURE WE OURSELVES ARE
The Concept of Body as the Nature We Ourselves Are
Published in:Journal of Speculative Philosophy 24 (3):224-238 (2010)
GERNOT BÖHME
Technische Universität Darmstadt
1. Why a Concept of the Body?
The demand for a concept—for a definition specifying what one means by a term (or, for
a thing, what it actually consists of)—is a classical requirement of philosophy. As a rule,
however, this demand can scarcely be satisfied, and there are good reasons for not
wanting to satisfy it. For a definition is always a way of fixing something, and a concept
is an intervention in the manifold diversity of things and phenomena that freezes them.
The defense of the diversity of the particular and, to speak with Adorno, of the
nonidentical is also an aim of phenomenology. The demand for a concept and the
preservation of phenomena therefore appear to be in conflict with one another.
The idea of formulating a concept of the body seems to conflict, especially, with
genetic phenomenology. For the basic methodological conviction of that discipline is that
there is a diversity of ways in which the body manifests itself—depending on different
modes of access to our complex somatic being as Leibkörper and on the ways in which
human beings behave toward themselves. It follows, at the least, that there cannot be one
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concept of the body, so that the question as to the concept of the body becomes a question
as to the particular justification of different concepts of the body. As far as such concepts
exist, whether in everyday understanding or in philosophy, it would be necessary to
demonstrate from which type of access, or from which self-relationship of human beings,
the definitions derive their meaning. Such a demonstration might perhaps bring an end to
unproductive discussions and theoretical controversies and strengthen our realization that
what actually is at stake is precisely this relationship to ourselves. Beyond that, however,
it would be desirable to form a concept of the body that not only determines the
predicates of a particular type of bodily phenomena—and therefore remains within the
cognitive—but also incorporates this self-relationship in the concept of the body itself.
That would be, in Kierkegaard’s sense, an existential concept of the body.
Let us begin with Descartes. For Descartes the body (Körper) is res extensa: that
is, what is essential to the body is really its volume. The body therefore manifests itself
primarily by occupying a space and, as the case may be, displacing other bodies.
However, Newton already pointed out that such a concept of the body does not even yield
a satisfactory mechanism, and he therefore also ascribed forces to the body: first, inertia
or mass as a vis insita and, second, weight, the reciprocal attraction of bodies. Viewed
historically, this Cartesian concept of the body, in being applied to the body of the human
being, has made possible a radical, and above all disenchanting, objectification of the
body and has thus inaugurated modern medicine. Now, however, we must ask under
which conditions we experience ourselves in such a way that the Cartesian concept of the
body is adequate.
2
We have already given an answer to this question and have just repeated it once
more: The Cartesian concept of the body has meaning to the extent that we objectify
human bodies in the same way as other things and subject them to scientific methods. But
that clearly is not the whole answer, for it takes for granted that we ourselves are and
must be the body-thing thematized in this way. How other people see us cannot be a
matter of indifference to us, and indeed we try, with mirrors or without them, to see
ourselves as other people do. Yet the estranging glance does not estrange us from our
body (Körper) entirely, for it is, after all, our body (Leib) that is being objectified in this
way. Furthermore, we have to contend not only with the glances of others but also with
other objects. Even for other objects—if I may put it so—we are also just objects, that is,
mechanical entities, and we have come to terms with this. The rule that two bodies cannot
occupy the same space also applies to us, and in moving through space we are entirely
subject to the laws of mechanics. This fact that, in our case too, we have to accept that we
are also bodies has given rise to the so-called body schema, and later to the body image,
which was originally introduced as a concept by Paul Schilder and then developed by
Karl Conrad. Thomas Fuchs, who elaborated this tradition, gives the following definition:
“By contrast, what I understand by the body schema is a central representation of the
body [Körper] which enables us to adopt an involuntary, implicit orientation towards the
attitude, position and movement of our bodies and limbs. This invisible network of
spatial orientation is not, however, limited to the body, but always also includes its
relationship to the environment and the way it deals with things. . . . Finally, the concept
of the body image corresponds to the habitual visual-spatial conception of one’s own
body, its appearance and properties; that is, the body as seen from outside.”1
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This concept of the body as the body schema clearly already has its meaning in
the fact that it does not determine the body simply as an object but from the perspective
that we must also be this object: “On existe son corps,” as Michel Henry expresses it in
French. But for just this reason we must point out that from the perspective that we live
and must live our body, no fixed schema will be adequate to it. This was reflected in
Jewish tradition in the prohibition on measuring living people—only the dead could have
fixed measurements. On a less profound level, perhaps, one might mention the fact that in
order to move about in the physical world, we cannot make our body simply a factual
entity and that we are able to move more competently the more variably we configure our
body. Gymnastics is a characteristic example: the performance is more successful the
more use is made of the fact that, as living bodies, we do not have a fixed center of
gravity. The possibility of autonomous movement depends—apart from our ability as
organisms to release mechanical energy in our bodies—on the fact that as we move we
constantly displace our center of gravity within our body.
We must also take account of the fact that we are bodies in a wider sense, in that
we must ascribe what we are told about ourselves from a scientific-medical perspective
not to an alien body-thing (Körper) but to ourselves. Of course this knowledge is
effective because we then treat ourselves, or have ourselves treated, in a detached manner
as the body-thing. But even that is not the whole truth, because the fact that we are this
body-thing in also being a subject body (Leib) plays a part here, too, and is the sole
reason why we are interested in being treated successfully through this detached,
objectified mode. Moreover, because we are not simply a body we are open to other
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possible ways of dealing with the problems—as a rule, illnesses—that our objectification
under the medical gaze makes necessary.
In Husserl we find the concept of the functioning body. The question here, as
Waldenfels puts it, is: “What does the body do, how does it perform, how does it
function?”2 Admittedly, one might believe from this formulation that we are concerned
with the body qua organism and therefore with the functional observations that biology,
as an objectivistic science, is fully qualified to make. But that is doubtless not what
Husserl meant. Rather, his concept of the functioning body corresponds to
Schopenhauer’s vision of the body as a correlative of the will. We are concerned with the
body insofar as we experience it as the medium of our self-moving. Husserl speaks in this
sense of motions as bodily movement tendencies, as distinct from intentions as directed
orientations of consciousness.
This concept of the functioning body does indeed differ from others, both from
the concept of the body that goes back to Descartes and from the pathic concept of the
body expounded by Hermann Schmitz. Sartre allowed the body to appear only on the
reverse side of action or, rather, as an interference factor in action. However, this is only
one way of experiencing the body by actively engaging with the world: there is also the
other way, of alert, competent, and sometimes joyful living to the full. Husserl therefore
gave special attention to kinesthetic experiences, that is, to the interaction of perception
and movement, as Merleau-Ponty did after him. His concept of the incarnated self should
therefore be regarded as another version of Husserl’s concept of the functioning body.
Hermann Schmitz has given a definition of lived bodily being or bodiliness
(Leiblichkeit) that has appealing clarity and ease of use. At the same time, one has the
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impression that its purpose is merely to distinguish bodily phenomena from others
without laying claim to encompass the essence of lived bodily being. Within the tradition
of definition, that would be entirely legitimate.3 One finds out only indirectly that
Schmitz’s definition, which appears merely to indicate a boundary criterion for the
bodily, nevertheless contains an essential feature, not to say the decisive essential feature,
of the body. I will first give you the definition itself, which distinguishes bodily (leiblich)
phenomena from corporeal (körperlich) ones and these in turn from mental phenomena:
“Bodily is that which has an absolute location. Corporeal is that which has a relative
location. Mental is that which has no location.”4
Schmitz’s body philosophy can be seen as the elaboration of Husserl’s discovery
of bodily feeling, which is contained in his “two hands” experiment. On the basis of this
experiment, one can give a second Husserlian definition of the body—apart from the one
just mentioned as the functioning body—as a field of sentience. For Schmitz the body is
what is given in bodily feeling. And because its feeling is a feeling-oneself, one can also
say that the body is spatially extensive feeling itself: my felt hand is nothing other than
the extensive feeling in the region of my hand. For these more or less bounded, more or
less stable, more or less interpenetrating fields of feeling, Schmitz uses the term body
islands. He then shows that bodily feeling has two basic tendencies, namely, constriction
and expansion; that these tendencies enter into a dynamic antagonism with one another as
tension and dilation; and that, furthermore, there are directions in this bodily feeling and
so on. Taken together, these structures of bodily feeling are referred to as the bodily
alphabet. This contains bodily elementary phenomena on the basis of which Schmitz
claims to be able to spell out more complex bodily experiences.
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Compared to Descartes’s extensional definition of body and Husserl’s functional
definition of body, we would have to call Schmitz’s definition a pathic definition of the
bodily. Bodiliness is characterized by experiences of self-givenness, or to use the
language of genetic phenomenology, the body, if one opens oneself to it, manifests itself,
in terms of the phenomenality characterized by Schmitz, as something that happens to
one.
But what has the body as the correlative of bodily feeling, or more precisely, as a
structured complex of bodily feeling, to do with Schmitz’s definition of bodiliness? To
pose this question is to realize that Schmitz’s definition is by no means as pragmatic as it
appears. This is due, above all, to the term absolute in the formulation: “The bodily
[Leib] is that which has an absolute location.” Absolute locations, one might think, do not
actually exist, since each location is determined by its position relative to others. This
prejudice is justified, though only for the sphere of the corporeal. The location of a
corporeal body (Körper) is determined by its position relative to other corporeal bodies.
In bodily feeling an absolute here is given. This applies both to the feeling of my body as
a whole and to the feeling of individual body islands. When I feel my hand, an absolute
“here” is implied in this feeling.5 This absolute “here” that is implied in bodily feeling is
a here-am-I, or more precisely, it is the primitive present that Schmitz has made his
principle of philosophy. The primitive present is the unelaborated I, here, now, this,
existence. “Unelaborated” means in this context that the feeling contains the seed of the
differentiating out of these elements.
If we look back from the differentiation of the I, here, now, this, existence, we can
say that it is in the absolute “here” of bodily feeling that the affective nature of the bodily
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existence of the human being is founded. It is as a body that the human being exists in a
given time, at a given place, and is affected inescapably by the inescapability of his or her
existence, which he or she experiences as this body in radical particularity. We see,
therefore, that the term absolute in Schmitz’s definition of bodiliness fully contains the
essence of the bodily as affected self-feeling.
Schmitz’s definition of the bodily is therefore linked back via the concept of the
absolute location to his principle of philosophy. This has far-reaching consequences,
which throw light on the meaning of his definition of bodiliness. According to Schmitz,
philosophy in general is the “self-reflection of the human being on finding oneself in
some surroundings.”6 What is at stake, in a still more radical sense than in Descartes, is
certainty in the face of, or better, under the condition of, radical shocks. These shocks to
one’s normal confidence in the world and in the self are more radical than Cartesian
doubt since they are not merely intellectual but touch on the certainty of being itself. We
are dealing with the experiences of fear and pain. And in much the same way as
Descartes did with doubt, Schmitz finds the reason for certainty in the shock itself. In fear
and pain the primitive presence of the inescapable I, here, now, this, existence is
encountered. On the basis of the primitive present Schmitz recognizes as a phenomenon,
in the sense used in his phenomenology, precisely what imposes itself in an overpowering
and undeniable way. Of course, these are primarily phenomena that in some way imply
the experience of the primitive present, as all phenomena of bodily feeling do. They
imply a certainty that traditionally has also been found in aisthesis, that is, in perception
in the strictest sense: If I see red, I cannot meaningfully doubt that I am seeing red.
Moreover, Ludwig Wittgenstein—following G. E. Moore in this—also found this sense
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certainty precisely in the experience of his own body: “I know, I do not merely presume,
that this is my hand.”7
The meaning of Schmitz’s concept of the body emerges here. The body reveals
itself, according to Schmitz’s conception, to the extent that one opens oneself to it as
something that happens to one; that is, it reveals itself in pathic modes of existence.
These, however, prove to be more than mere modes of cognition: they involve a search
for experiences of self-certainty.
2. The Body Is the Nature That We Ourselves Are
Each of the three definitions that have been discussed has its justification and
characterizes the body in terms of a specific mode of access or a specific self-relationship
of the human being. What is striking in all three is the orientation toward knowledge. The
Cartesian definition is entirely fundamental to a specific mode of knowing the body,
namely, as a scientific object. Husserl certainly deals with the lived body, but his
orientation is toward what this body is. And in the case of Schmitz, although the
existential relationship undoubtedly showed itself in the depths of his concept of the
body, nevertheless nothing of that can be detected in the form of the concept as finally
defined. The function of the concept is still merely cognitive. For us, by contrast, what is
at stake must be a definition of the body by means of which the problems we have with
the body become visible, and at the same time the definition should indicate a manner of
being a body in which one has a prospect of coming to grips with these problems, if not
solving them. That is to say that the definition should be able to perform a cognitive, that
is, an epistemological, function but at the same time a practical one that points in the
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direction of an ethics of bodily existence. This definition is the one that appears in the
title of this article and is explained in this section: The body is the nature that we
ourselves are.
For this definition to be able to reveal its function, it is necessary to explicate not
only its terms but also its structure. First, the term nature: The concept of nature is one
that, since the Greek Sophists, has been understood in terms of opposites. Before them,
the pre-Socratic philosophers of nature used the term nature—in Greek, physis—for
being as a whole. Since the Sophists, by contrast, nature has been a concept for a
particular sphere: the term refers to a certain mode of being. Nature is understood in
opposition to law, technology, culture, civilization. Nature is therefore what is there of its
own accord, what for us humans is given; nature is understood in opposition to what is
made by human beings. This difference is given its finest formulation by Aristotle’s
Physics. In it he takes up an example used by Antiphon the Sophist. A bed made of wood
is buried—willow wood is probably best suited to this experiment. Given the appropriate
humidity, a shoot will grow from it, so that another willow tree—not a bed—will come
into being. In terms of nature, says Aristotle, the object in question is wood; through
technology it has become a bed (Physics II, 193a). He then defines being that arises from
nature as that which contains the principle of its movement within itself, whereas being
arising from technology is such that it has the principle of its movement (that is, origin,
change, and reproduction) in man.
When we define the body as nature we explicitly place ourselves within this
traditional context derived from Antiphon and Aristotle. The body is addressed as
something that is given to us.
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One might suppose that the body qua nature was introduced from the outset as an
invariant, as something culturally and historically invariable, that is, as a kind of
anthropological constant. But that is not the case, not only because types of givenness can
be distinguished but also, above all—and this is the problem at present—because what is
given can be converted into what is made. To do precisely that has been, after all, the
predominant project of modernity.8 That was already an aim of modern natural science:
nature was to be discovered through reconstruction. But the human sphere, too, to the
extent that it was experienced as a given—human institutions, for example—was to be
designed according to a conscious, that is to say, a reasonable, plan. And the human
being, too, saw him- or herself, both as a private and as a social being, as something that
first had to be made into what it is and should be. The human being becomes human
through education, as Kant formulated it. The project of the self-education of human
beings, which to begin with was only a pedagogical and political one, became in the
twentieth century a scientific-technical project, that is, a project that took human nature
itself as its material and subjected it to a plan. Here we had indeed discovered one of the
main motives for developing a philosophy of nature from a practical point of view. For
this reason the body, too, is defined as nature, for in the first place it is given to us, even if
we do not accept the contents of the given and change them. Beyond that, one can
probably assume that even human beings who have emerged from processes of
genotechnical production and cloning would first experience themselves in their
condition as given and therefore as nature.
Now, there are different types of givenness, and one of them is the scientific type.
Our body is given to us also as a scientific fact, although indirectly, via the detour of
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apparatus and the medical perspective. We call the body that is given in this way the
corporeal body (Körper). That the corporeal body is nature is unlikely to be seen as
problematic, since nature is normally understood at present as that which is the subject
matter of natural science.
The justification for calling the lived body (Leib) nature can be derived from the
fact that it can also be given as a subject matter of natural science. What is crucial to our
definition, however, is that the body is also given to us in a manner that is not mediated
by another person or apparatus, namely, in self-experience. In this case, too, the reason
for referring to the body as nature can be grounded in the fact that it is given to a person.
To be sure, in this case the meaning (Sinn) of “nature” is different because the mode of
givenness is different: we are not dealing with experience from outside but with
experience of oneself. The significance (Bedeutung) is, however, the same, in that what is
given is the same thing, even though it is given in a radically different manner and
consequently with a different phenomenality.9
This formal characterization of the body as nature because it is given to us in self-
experience is not, however, sufficient for it to be referred to meaningfully as nature. That
it is given to us presupposes that, in a sense, or even initially and usually, we ourselves
are not this body. If that were not the case, bodily self-experience would only be
something like self-affect. Kant speaks of self-affect when he is concerned with the
subject experiencing its own activity: the subject affects itself by its activity. Already
here, therefore, one must take care that body-experience does not become a simple
phenomenon of consciousness. Self-feeling, which in reality can be practiced as feeling
our way toward our self and therefore as a kind of self-affect, must not generally be of
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this kind. Self-feeling must be able to surprise us, to touch us as something alien, if we
wish to describe it meaningfully as an experience of nature.
We must therefore assume, contrary to the definition, that, initially and usually,
we ourselves are precisely not our body as nature. We, that is to say, adult people, late
products of European civilization, and, moreover, people who read books about the body,
start out from a situation in which an “I” has long since been differentiated out. Nothing
comes more easily to us than to speak of ourselves as “I,” and in fact each of us actually
is an “I” in the sense of a person who is constituted for permanence and is secured both
biographically and through social networks. To be sure, the body as nature is given to me,
but as something strange, sometimes positively disconcerting. Moreover, it can never be
denied that this strangeness is my strangeness. Of course, there are also massive self-
estrangements in which people regard parts of themselves simply as things.10 In those
cases one would speak of illness. In the normal state, however, the relationship to the
nature that my body is, as a relationship to something that belongs to me, is secured by
affective involvement. The feeling of the body remains a self-feeling.
The strangeness of the body qua nature is founded, first of all, on the fact that it is
given to me, that is to say, I always encounter myself as already gifted with this particular
body. Self-givenness is therefore, to begin with, a pregivenness. It is the body as fact, as
preexisting constitution, as sedimented prehistory of my present existence. To the extent
that the strangeness of one’s own body consists in this, we are concerned with nothing
other than with what Heidegger calls Geworfenheit (thrownness) or the fact that one has
no power over one’s own ground. However, Heidegger also formulates this insight in a
way that makes the task of being-a-self discernible:
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The self, which as such has to establish the ground of itself, can never be master
of that ground, and yet, in existing, must take over being-a-ground.11
Existence is not itself the ground of one’s being in the sense that being arises only
from one’s own project. Nevertheless, as being-a-self it is certainly the being of
the ground.12
However, the strangeness of one’s own body, through which it confronts us
precisely as nature, is founded not merely in its facticity but, rather, in its self-activity.
The body confronts the “I” as an Other, as a disconcerting spontaneity. This experience
cannot be better expressed than by Freud’s statement that the ego is not master in its own
house.13 That the body is experienced as nature means no more or less than that it is
experienced as something that cannot be subjected entirely to the mastery of the “I” but
which behaves toward it in a resistant, sluggish manner or, conversely, expresses itself
through self-activity. The body can be burdensome, intrusive, tormenting; it can be
demanding, surprising, and disconcerting. This experience is given a striking formulation
by Georg Büchner in the eighth scene of his play Woyzeck. To the doctor’s reproach that
“you have pissed in the street, against the wall, like a dog!” Woyzeck replies: “But, Herr
Doktor, when nature has its way.”
The body qua nature is not merely given to us, therefore, but positively imposes
itself on us. That I am myself this body is by no means self-evident, but I certainly learn
through my affectedness by the body that I must be it.
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So much for the term nature. We now turn to the second part of the definition of
the body, as the nature that we ourselves are. Although I have stressed that in civilized,
adult existence the body is experienced in the first place as that which we ourselves are
not, nevertheless the self has already made its appearance here: the experience of the
body, even if it was disconcerting, always remained self-experience. In this expression
the term self shimmers ambivalently between two meanings. Self-experience can mean
the experience one has oneself; but it can also mean the experience of the self. In reality,
both meanings are true of the body-experience. I introduced the human body (Leib) in the
preliminary definition as something that, in contradistinction to the biological body
(Körper), is an object of self-experience. And it is also apparent that, within the affective
dimension of bodily experience, it is always possible to feel that this body is my body,
that, in a certain sense, it is I myself that I am experiencing. Bodily feeling is always self-
feeling.
But what does it mean to say that in body-experience one actually experiences
oneself? Is this self a different, or even a deeper, “I”? Nietzsche speaks in these terms in
his aphorism “On the despisers of the body” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The body is the
self, the mighty ruler: “In your body he dwells; he is your body.”14 Is the “I” nothing
more than a kind of marionette or finger puppet on the hand of the great Self? To assert
that would undoubtedly be to underestimate the “I” in its autonomy and self-activity. It
has—even in its endeavors—sources quite other than the body, and it is distinguished
from and stabilized against the body by biographical identification processes and social
networks. Indeed, the body is alien only vis-à-vis a relatively independent “I,” which can
posit itself in a relationship of “having” with respect to its body (Plessner). It might
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therefore be the case that being-the-body-oneself would require one to forfeit the
autonomy of the “I” or at least to suspend it partially or temporarily. In general, to be the
body as nature oneself presents itself as a delicate task. It means incorporating what we
are ourselves, factually or in affective involvement, explicitly in our own self-projection.
We are therefore faced with the question: In what mode of being are we our body? Here
to be is used as a transitive verb, in the same sense that Michel Henry says, “On existe
son corps.” This “existing the body” is performed in the affective and emphatic
accomplishment of life.
I shall give an example of each type of experience, although both examples are
still very provisional and preparatory. First, an example of how one experiences oneself
simultaneously as nature in affective self-feeling. My example is the difficulty of
breathing in conditions of smog. The process of breathing is one of the most important
phenomena of bodily existence, because it enables us to experience this bodily existence
as a process, a performance. Almost all exercises that are intended to teach us how to
engage with our bodily existence and open ourselves to our bodies begin with breathing
exercises. Awareness of breathing is, in a sense, body awareness itself. However, we are
not concerned with this general meaning of breathing here but with the particular
experience one has when, for example, smog makes breathing difficult. This experience
is in sharp contrast to the ease and inconspicuousness of breathing otherwise. It is an
experience of the burden of existence: one feels that existence qua bodily existence must
be performed in order to be at all. This experience has two sides. First of all, it is
especially important to us that it is explicitly an experience of nature. In struggling for
breath one experiences one’s dependence on air. Difficult breathing is a body-experience
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that causes the body itself to be experienced as something that is dependent on an
exchange with the rest of nature. This needs to be emphasized in looking back over
phenomenology up to now. Of course, breathing has been dealt with extensively in
phenomenology, as an alternation of tension and dilation, as a rhythmical dynamic of the
bodily economy.15 But it has not been treated as an experience of one’s own naturalness,
or better, “creature-ness,” because breathing has not been seen in relation to air. In
breathing we experience ourselves, as it were, as creatures of air; Paracelsus even refers
to human beings as such, because their vital medium is air.
The other side of this experience is the being-a-self implied in it. In difficulty of
breathing, our being-nature impinges on us not only as a fact but at the same time as a
task. In difficult breathing we experience breathing itself as a compulsion to breathe; that
is, affectedness by this phenomenon implicitly contains an obligation: having to breathe
is almost unavoidably wanting to breathe, and difficult breathing merges into an explicit
struggle for breath. The example shows, therefore, what being-nature-oneself can mean,
namely, engaging actively with what happens to us through our own nature. That this is
the case is seen most clearly where the affected person is finally overwhelmed by his or
her own nature. At precisely the point where difficulty of breathing becomes
overwhelming—in a serious asthma attack, for example—the identification of the
affected person with this distress in struggling for breath is greatest.
This example is at the same time an example of a more general truth, namely, that,
as a rule, being-a-self arises from negative experiences. I can imagine that this idea will
be uncomfortable for many readers. But how, otherwise, is the implicit self-relationship
that is contained in self-feeling to become explicit? How is being-nature to lead to a
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being-nature-oneself, if life is simply an effortless gliding along? It is all the more
important to give examples when the positive and unhampered performance of life
becomes being-nature-oneself. Examples of emphasis bear witness to this. Emphasis is
joyous participation in what happens of its own accord. One example is a child racing off
along the beach. Here, the acceleration is only unconscious emphasis, not the desire to
reach something more quickly, since the child is actually already where he or she wants
to be. There are life performances that are experienced with a tendency toward
intensification, which cause us to heighten them explicitly, to climb, so to speak, aboard
the wave that is engulfing us. The most striking examples here would no doubt be drawn
from the sphere of physical love. Emphasis is therefore a way in which we ourselves are
nature, on occasions when being-nature is experienced not as a burden but as a joy.
Having used these examples to demonstrate the objective reality of the definition
of the body—to speak with Kant—I would like to conclude this essay by examining the
structure of the definition in more detail. This definition, in contrast to the great tradition
of defining, undoubtedly has not simply a “what-ness” as its content. The demand for a
definition was brought into the world by Socrates in the form: What is X? What was
expected in reply was a specification of the essential determinations of the X in question
—its what-ness, its essence. If one were to read the definition body is the nature that we
ourselves are in the light of this tradition, the least one would observe would be a tension
between the two terms defined, namely, being-nature and being-a-self. Readers who are
less versed in the philosophy of bodiliness may suspect a contradiction even here. The
dichotomy of nature as the given, on the one hand, and law, culture, technology, and
civilization as something fabricated, on the other, seems to render the bringing together of
18
being-nature and being-a-self impossible: “Self and givenness behave like fire and
water.”16 The tension between being-nature and being-a-self cannot be denied. However,
it points not to a contradiction but to a task. Being-a-body is given to us and at the same
time assigned to us as a task. A definition of the body should be called an existential
definition, by analogy with Kierkegaard’s concepts of existence.17 It involves not only a
what-ness but a performance, a way of existing. Here, the tension between nature and
self, in which bodily existence plays a part, in principle admits two possibilities. One is
the familiar notion that, as far as possible, the active subject masters, disposes of, or
suppresses nature. That would be—to speak with Heidegger—the deficient mode of
being-a-body. In the authentic mode of being-a-body, what is at stake is to unfold one’s
being-a-self in such a way that one’s own being-nature is admitted to it.
Notes
19
1. Thomas Fuchs, Leib, Raum, Person. Entwurf einer phänomenologischen Anthropologie
(Stuttgart[AQ: PROVIDE PUBLISHERS FOR ALL REFERENCES.], 2000), 41.
2. Bernhard Waldenfels, Das leibliche Selbst (Frankfurt am Main, 2000), 42.
3. I have already demonstrated such a pragmatic way of defining in Plato. [AQ: HERE
AND BELOW, USE “CF.” ONLY TO MEAN “COMPARE.” OTHERWISE, USE “SEE.”]Cf.
Gernot Böhme, Platons theoretische Philosophie (Stuttgart, 2000), sec. II.7.3. In Schmitz there
seems to be a slight uncertainty regarding the difference between definition of essence and
pragmatic definition, when he gives the corresponding chapter in System der Philosophie 2.1 the
title “Der Begriff des Leibes” (“The Concept of the Body”) but then, in §43, gives a Definition des
Leiblichen (definition of the bodily).
4. Hermann Schmitz, System der Philosophie, vol. 2.1: Der Leib (Bonn, 1965), 6.
5. Schmitz explores in detail the problem that, in bodily feeling, the different body islands
constitute a manifold of absolute “heres,” which nevertheless cannot be strictly distinguished from
one another.
6. Hermann Schmitz, System der Philosophie, vol. 1: Die Gegenwart (Bonn, 1964)[AQ:
CITE PAGE NUMBER FOR QUOTE.].
7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Über Gewissheit, No. 57,” in Werkausgabe, vol. 8 (Frankfurt am
Main, 1984), 131.
8. Cf. G. Böhme, Einführung in die Philosophie. Weltweisheit, Lebensform, Wissenschaft, 4th
ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), chap. 1, 3–7.
9. On this manner of holding on to the identity of the given despite radically different modes
of givenness, cf. Gottlob Frege, “Sinn und Bedeutung,” in Funktion, Begriff, Bedutung. 5 logische
Studien, 2nd ed. (Göttingen, 1966), 40–65. Frege’s classical example is the different modes of
givenness of Venus qua morning star and evening star.
10. See relevant cases in Oliver Sacks, Der Mann, der seine Frau mit einem Hut verwechselte
(Reinbek, Germany, 1997), e.g., 85 (in English, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat [London,
2009]).
11. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), 8th ed. (Tübingen: Niemeyer[AQ:
PROVIDE YEAR.]), 284.
12. Ibid., 28.
13. Although Waldenfels (Das leibliche Selbst, 284) refers to this statement of Freud’s, he
cannot do justice to the strangeness of one’s own body. Rather, he introduces the concept of
strangeness into body philosophy to make it clear that one’s own body is experienced as one’s own
only by virtue of the relationship to the other, strange body.
14. The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, n.d.), 146.
15. Schmitz, System der Philosophie, vol. 2: Der Leib, §49b, §50b, and passim.
16. Gerhard Gamm, “‘Aus der Mitte denken.’ Die ‘Natur des Menschen’ im Spiegel der Bio-
und Informationstechnologien,” Zeitschrift für kritische Theorie 12 (2001): 39.
17. Cf. my Einführung in die Philosophie. Weltweisheit-Lebensform-Wissenschaft, 3rd ed.
(Frankfurt am Main[AQ: PROVIDE YEAR (AS WELL AS PUBLISHER).]), chap. 3, 3.
