Advancing the Human Self. Ewa Nowak
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the phenomenological discussion around intercorporeality: interhuman,213 biological/environmental, extended,214 and technologically improved. That discussion is crucial to understand a series of most recent conceptualizations of the human embodiment in terms of extended, crosscorporeal, ecological, and hybrid embodiment. These concepts radically expand one’s own body’s ontology and establish a new epistemological framework for defining embodiment today.
It is Maurice Merleau–Ponty’s theory that expands the old frame the most because being one’s own body (one’s “natural self”) cannot be disconnected from objective and intersubjective reality. This might be Merleau-Ponty’s core ontological claim; however, notions of corporeality and intercorporeality should not be reduced to materiality and mechanical connections. Rather, “to be a body, is to be tied to a certain world (…); our body is not primarily in space: it is of it,”215 it has the world, as Merleau–Ponty claims. His claim sounds different than Heidegger’s Dasein as “in–der–Welt–sein” but it essentially connotes a similar sense of an experiential field shared by subjects, thus, intersubjective and social. For sharing something with others requires spatiality; the intercorporeality bridges the gap between me vs. the world around, inner vs. outer, immanent vs. transcendent. According to Merleau–Ponty, “the world is wholly inside and I am ←63 | 64→wholly outside myself.”216 Beyond “inside and outside” there is a “living cohesion” and a continuous, phenomenal “field of experience.” Intercorporeality does not require shaping linear interconnections from subject to object and subject to subject. In my intercorporeal condition, Merleau–Ponty clarifies, “I am neither here nor there, neither Peter nor Paul; I am in no way distinguishable from an ‘other’ consciousness, since we are immediately in touch with the world and since the world is, by definition, unique, being the system in which all truths cohere.”217 That kind of coherence corresponds with Heidegger’s “familiarity” and “being with,”218 but expands them as intelligible and not experiential relations rooted in the reality of all inter-subjects. It is, therefore, not only intellectual but also a preoriginal corporeal “Miteinander-sein” beyond ontological dualisms such as the Cartesian res cogitans vs. res extensa. It is to bridge the gap between “internal mind and external world,”219 which was unacceptable to Heidegger. “The experience of being there is not a matter of being plonked into a [fixed or determined, E.N.] spatial location but of being practically situated in an interconnected web of purposes, an appreciation of which is inseparable from practical activity. We are not in the world like peas sitting passively in a pod [nor are we “thrown” in the world without having any control over our position, E.N.]. Our activities and our sense of being part of the world are inextricable; the world shows up as a space of practical, purposive possibilities that we are entwined with,” while to Heidegger, being–in–the–world was not a matter of intercorporeality, sharing and the “causal facilitation but of a tacit understanding that renders the world intelligible.”220 According to Merleau-Ponty, humans “knit together as a cohesive functional whole” within a shared space–time.221 To make any experience, they need an embodiment that embraces interiority and exteriority.
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