Living with Bodies

How many 'bodies' do we have? In a sense, this is a curious question because we all seem to have one body : this body of flesh and blood which we can touch and prick. However, a bit of reflection on what what we mean when we use the word 'body' shows that we have (at least) as many as three bodies.

The First Body – 'The phenomenological body' : This body is the 'object' which we find ourselves in 'possession of'. However, our knowledge of this body is variable and subject to delusions. For example, a person whose foot has been amputated can feel a pain in the 'place' where her foot had once been. We speak of this body as an object that belongs to us, and yet it is not just a thing to which we have a merely optional relationship : we simply cannot choose not to be in this body. We are, in a very real sense, bodies. This body is the most important 'object' for each of us in the world. It stands in opposition to the world and at the same time is closely related to it. We can even say that this body is rooted in the world and exists in reference to it. At the same time, this body is an infinitely negligible and unstable event in the world- it is the locus of all our changing emotions, thoughts, actions and feelings.

This body is what we call My body : it is our phenomenological apparatus for existing in the world. It is this body which I feel to be unalienably mine. It is the body of my happiness and of my pain, and of the countless other experiences which I undergo. I do not have a merely 'external' relation to this first body ; in some strange way, I am this body itself. It is presupposed in all our relations with the world and with the entities in it.

The Second Body – 'The socio-anthropological body' : This body is the one as others see it. If I am reading a book sitting on a park bench, absorbed in reading it, it takes another person (that is, another body) to sit down on the bench to make me aware of my own existence. It is by becoming aware of the second body around me that I realise the existence of my first body. And it is the other way round too : it is because of my 'sense' of the first body that I am able to experience the second body of the person next to me. This second body has a definite form and is the one that is depicted in the fine, the performing and the visual arts. This is the body which cosmetics beautify, love yearns for and touches, armour protects, jewellery embellishes and so on. This was the body that was so dear to Narcissus, but is also the one that drives so many to despair. It is a source of gloom to many of us when we look at it, withered and aged in the mirror. It may become the body that we do not want to accept and yet it stands in some close though incomprehensible relation to ourselves. It is this body which seen reflected in the mirror raises deep inside us the question of how this second body is related to the first. Will the first phenomenological body also cease to exist when the second body is destroyed by illness and death ? Thus springs forth some of humankind’s perennial questions about immortality. This is why meditations on the second body have often assumed a melancholic obsession with the question of death.

This is the body that enters into the art of a Raphael, a Tintoretto and a Dali. Again, this is the body that is marked and branded in various ways to represent our social status. How we 'carry' this body with and around us reflects our tastes and beliefs about what human embodiment is and reveals our social class and our engenderment (e.g. a young boy with a cut finger might be told : 'Stop crying and behave like a man!') The body of the chieftain of an African tribe, the body of a French monarch, the body of a contemporary sportsman, the body of a rock star --- all these bodies are both feared and in some ways attempted to be emulated. This is the body of anthropology and the issues of purity, pollution, initiation-rites, and taboos revolve around it. Depending on various socio-anthropological beliefs, this second body can be delighted in or despised, be accepted as a friend or feared as the ever-lurking enemy. This is the body of asceticism and monasticism in many of the world’s religions. This is also the body of belligerence --- the body has to be dominated, subjugated and disciplined for the war-effort. This is again the body of economics --- the body which enters into all calculations of per capita income and documents of government policy.

The Third Body – 'The physiological body' : It is possible to live without ever seeing the second body (as in the case of the blind) and without having a 'feel' for the first body (as in the case of a two day old baby). This third body lies behind the surface of the unbroken skin of the second body. It is also possible for a person who has a 'sense' of her first body to be totally unaware about the physiological structure of her third body. We are not equipped to know the structural details of the third body on our own : there is nothing within ourselves that leads us to suspect that we have a liver, two kidneys, a medulla and so on. All our faculties of action are instead turned towards the 'external world', that is, the domain of the first and the second bodies. This third body is the one that can be reduced to parts and pieces, be dissected and dismembered. It can be 'broken down' into thin slices or viscous drops under the microscope. This body ultimately is therefore a set of histological cryptograms.

All of this skirts the boundaries of a hotly disputed terrain between the 'reductionists' and the 'holists' : how does one move from the third body to the second and the first bodies? That is, if you split up the human organism, all you have is a mass of flesh, blood and nervous tissue. How is it the case that from this ('lifeless') conglomeration there arises the sense (the 'feeling') of being a body (the first body) and the body that marks socio-anthropological status (the second body)? This is a debate that I leave for another time.

Let me instead move on to another question : which of the above three bodies is the most 'fundamental' or 'primary'? Strictly speaking, none of them is more fundamental/primary than the other two which means that the separation of the human body into 'three bodies' is only for conceptual clarification. At different stages of a person’s life and in different cultures, one of the above three bodies may, however, be more emphasised than the other two. A doctor in a hospital is primarily concerned with the third body while an actress in modern cinema is fundamentally involved with the second body. And yet these three bodies are interconnected too. A psychiatrist has to deal not just with the second body of her patient but also with the patient’s sense of the first body and the state of her third body. A successful actress is concerned with both her second and third bodies. An anorexic is primarily concerned with her second body which has repercussions on her third body and also on her sense of personal identity of which the first body is the 'carrier'.

Behind the experience of being embodied in the second and the third senses, there always lies the first sense of being and having a body. We both are a body and have a body. We have a body because we feel that we 'possess' a body which stands on certain occasions over and against us, as when we feel dis-eased, un-easy and overwhelmed by grief, melancholy, ecstasy and euphoria. At such times, the body almost becomes a separate entity opposing us. And yet, at the same time, we are a body because the experience of being embodied, that is, of being a body, however difficult it may be to explain conceptually, underlies all our waking moments.