Practices of corporeality as a social and semantic basis of the concepts of "body" and "corporeality"

Rozin Vadim Markovich Doctor of Philosophy Chief Scientific Associate, Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences  109240, Russia, Moskovskaya oblast', g. Moscow, ul. Goncharnaya, 12 str.1, kab. 310 rozinvm@gmail.com Other publications by this author

Speaking about the body, we are influenced by medical discourse, as well as everyday understanding, we think of the body, adhering to two postulates. First, a person has one body from birth to death, first young and growing, then aging and weakening. The second postulate is that all people have about the same body (of course, up to the difference in natural data), so everyone understands atlases of the body or nude paintings. Nevertheless, these seemingly obvious ideas are currently being questioned and criticized by specialists working in the humanities and social sciences. The opposition "body - physicality" is gradually gaining ground, and these postulates are replaced by the opposite ones ? a person's body is not one, there are several of them, and in different cultures and forms of life bodies can be very different (but it is clear that we are not talking about a biological body).

   Indeed, already in antiquity, the preparation for the Olympic Games, involving a special lifestyle and long-term training, showed that the body of an athlete can be very different from the body of an average person. When in Modern times they began to study the practices of corporeality in different cultures, both obvious postulates of corporeality practically collapsed. Consider for example such a practice of corporeality as love.

American anthropologist Margared Mead describes the early forms of love (aboriginal and archaic culture). In the Manus tribe (New Guinea), husband and wife belong to different groups. "This belief lasts throughout her marriage... As for the husband, then for him the wife is a stranger. He had not chosen her; he had never thought of her before marriage without a sense of shame... Before his marriage, he was free, at least in his village. He could sit for hours in a men's house, playing musical instruments and singing songs. Now that he's married, his own soul doesn't belong to him either. He has to work all day for those who paid for his wedding... He has every reason to hate his intimidated, embarrassed wife, who recoils from his rude, inept embrace with curses and will never say a single affectionate word to him. They are ashamed to eat in each other's presence. They are ordered to sleep in different parts of the house" ^{[5, p. 196-197]}.

Another tribe, the Arapeshi (also New Guinea). "The engagement of the Arapesh takes place between a girl of seven or eight years old and a boy six years older than her. After the engagement, she goes to live in the house of the futureth spouse. Here the father-in-law, the future spouse and all his brothers together grow a little bride... If we take into account the fact that for a number of years a husband and wife have been living together as brother and sister, then one of the decisive factors in the attitude of Arapashi to sex becomes clear to us. Sexual intercourse with them is not associated with feelings that are sharply different from those that they have for their own daughter or sister. They turn out to be just a more complete and complete expression of the same feeling. They are not considered to be some kind of spontaneous human reaction to internal sexual stimuli" ^{[5, pp. 274, 280]}. Therefore, the fact of peculiar frigidity in adult women is no longer surprising. Arapesh women, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs notes, "do not receive even simple relaxation in sexual intercourse and described their feelings after sexual intercourse as a kind of indefinite warmth and a sense of relief" ^{[5, p. 298]}.

Things were no better than in the Manus tribe in the early Middle Ages. "The medieval Catholic theory of marriage," writes P.A. Friedman, "did not recognize marital love as a result of individual sexual attraction. In the union of spouses, medieval theologians argue, there should be no desire, since it is not the act of copulation itself that is sinful, but the desire accompanying it. Andrey Chaplain, who claimed that passion for his own wife is a greater sin than passionate love for any other woman, could back up his statement with a reference to a number of absolutely undoubted medieval authorities" ^{[14, p. 45]}. It is not for nothing that in the Middle Ages conjugal love was often understood as "love under compulsion" (amour de dette). Christina Pisanskaya, one of the first feminists, so to speak, wrote that "for many women, because of the rudeness of their husbands, a joyless life in marriage is much harder than the life of Saracen slaves" ^{[3, p. 154]}.

And here is a later medieval practice called "courtly love". There are four stages in this love: "hidinggosya", "praying", "admirer", on the fourth ? he is called "friend". Only at the last stage, if the "beautiful lady" falls in love with her faithful "admirer", she can grant him her love. One anonymous courtly poet writes:

«...O lady, beautiful-eyed, allow me by humble requests to get a date in a secluded place and lie down with you, as a friend does, caressing his mistress.

...I'm from paradise

I agree to refuse —

If only under cover

Enjoy with you.

Now I think the end has come to me

From the desires that flared up in me,

If the beauty is in the bedchamber

He won 't shelter you near him,

That I caressed her, and kissed her,

And he pressed me to him

Her white, full, smooth body"^[14].

If a courtly poet elevates his beloved by identifying her with the Madonna, then the hero of Maupassant in the story "Caresses" omits her, considering her only as a source of pleasure, rather vicious.  "Let us," he says, "love voluptuousness like intoxicating wine, like a ripe fruit fragrant in the mouth, like everything that overwhelms us with happiness. We will love the body because it is beautiful, white and elastic, rounded and tender, sweet for lips and hands... Let's love voluptuousness, but not calm, ordinary, permitted by law, but furious, violent, frenzied! We will search for it, as gold and diamonds are searched for, because it is more expensive, it is invaluable, although fleeting. We will chase him, die for him or from him!" ^{[6, pp. 346-347]}.

Let's compare the understanding of the body in the Manus tribe and the Arapesh, in the early Catholic culture and the later, courtly, hero of Maupassant: these "bodies of love" are very different, it is easy to assume, formed by different cultures and practices of love. 

The concept of corporeality is introduced precisely in order to grasp the new foundation that is now seen in different representations of the body (different bodies). In part, it resembles the Kantian "thing-in-itself", which the great philosopher of modern times introduced in order to set "the subject of knowledge even before knowledge." "We can," Kant observes, "know an object not as a thing in itself, but only insofar as it is an object of sensory intuition, that is, a phenomenon." At the same time, Kant explains, "we always have the opportunity, if not to know, then at least to think of these objects as things in themselves. After all, otherwise we would come to a meaningless statement that the phenomenon exists without what it is" ^{[4, p. 93]}. Physicality is like a "potential body", it becomes different bodies in a particular culture and practice of physicality. Physicality can be conceived, but not seen and characterized as a certain body.

Difficulties in understanding physicality can be recorded in other authors. For example, an interesting characteristic of the physicality of our philosopher-phenomenologist Valery Podoroga, given with comments by Ya.V. Chesnov in the book "The Physicality of man: philosophical and anthropological understanding".

Chesnov. "The body has a composite figuration. In fact, in our perception, the body is always fragmentary, fractional. We say "my arm" or "my leg", referring to body parts as autonomous organs. We treat our body the way an archaic man treated the entire universe, which for him was lumpy, consisting of separate loci of space" ^{[15, p. 4]}.

Expensive. "The topological analysis of bodily practices, refusing to rely on the normative values of perception, tries to take into account its perceptual non-definiteness in its description of a particular bodily phenomenon (A.Bergson), i.e. exactly what the phenomenological subject does not take into account from the very beginning. In this case, the phenomena of the body are described not so much from the point of view of possible inclusion in the intentional horizon of the subject consciousness, but from the point of view of their immanent, non-intentional structure, where the function of the subject is minimized. In other words, the bodily image, “entering” into the topological description, retains its composite figuration, and if it is a fragmented, collapsed body or, on the contrary, a diffuse body, then only in this way it should be given in the description. And since we ourselves are these multiple bodies (and not the “consciousnesses” of our bodies) – loving, suffering, sick, eccentric, insane and ascetic bodies – and we are them not from the point of view of our passions, affects, random excesses, then, of course, it would be important for us to learn to reflect on our own bodily experience not from the position of a normative attitude, but from the position of our ability to be in the living world as a living being with a body and a “spirit". I would add: not just “possessing a body”, but also a body that (possesses me). Hence the importance of the distinction between the body that "belongs to us" and which we call "our own", and the body to which we "belong" and in relation to which we cannot use the predicate of appropriation, because, belonging to it, we are unable to appropriate it" ^{[8, pp. 7-8; 15, pp. 5-6]}.

Chesnov. "The body that possesses us, which we are all trying to appropriate, but we still don't know how to do it, is open to the world. Through being open, nature enters into us. There's no way we can handle her. The natural in us can be designated by the metaphor “thinking of the body”. Nature is broader than man, and therefore acts as a descriptive system. This system draws in the elements of the described, including the elements of the body" ^{[15, p. 6]}.

   The text is very interesting and seems to grasp the essence of physicality, but almost everything here needs interpretation and understanding: for example, in what sense the body is composite and fragmented, what in this case is the "whole of the body", what does the normative perception of the body or the immanent, non-intentional structure of consciousness mean, how to understand that the body possesses me, what kind of nature and descriptive system is Chesnov talking about, what does "body thinking" mean?

   I will not guess and attribute my understanding of the body and physicality to the Price. I will act differently, I will propose the genesis of the formation of the idea of physicality. Not history, but genesis, that is, we will talk about rational reconstruction, which eliminates the description of the literal historical process, allowing you to set only the basic logically conceivable structures, milestones and turns of development.

            The practice of physicality. Prerequisites of the concept of "body". The concept of the body appears relatively late, perhaps not before the ancient culture. In practices that we could call bodily (hygiene, dying, treating diseases, battles, love), the corresponding words appear – "flesh", "corpse", "belly", "form" (rather, as a kind of person), "bones", etc. "Here we have," we read, "there has already been a confrontation of three concepts: "basre", or "basar", which means rather something dense and later it was translated into Greek "sarx", in the Bible, for example, or in Slavic means "flesh", that is dense; "pagru" or "pagar", or "pagra", - in Aramaic this word means, rather, a lifeless something or a corpse; and "jism" or "gushma" ("jism" in Aramaic, "gushma" in Arabic) means the shape of the body, that is, something so to speak, externally designed…The word "bone" can also sometimes mean the body, and sometimes even the soul: remember the expression "flesh of flesh, bone of bone" – in all evidence, this is it, the dualism of flesh as soft tissues, bone as hard, was also important in the Middle East" ^[13].

These practices are formed very early, even in the archaic culture, the listed words together with others set the "anthropological reality" that was thought within the framework of these practices. For example, a corpse no longer had a belly (life) and it had to be buried or something else done in accordance with custom. In different cultures, the meaning of these words differed, and the vocabulary lists were different. It seems easier to call this reality a body, but so far there has been no reason (integrity) to collect all these meanings as expressing one thing.

   Analyzing the meaning of these words, one can come to the practices of physicality that required these words. Some of them were based on visual perception and communication, for example, form, others on various practical actions (flesh) and observation (self-observation) of various kinds (corpse, stomach).

   The formation of the idea of the body. Ancient "schemes" invented to comprehend the phenomena of death and life, dreams, as well as archaic animistic representations played an important role here. (The function of schemes is to resolve problematic situations, to set a new reality that provides understanding, to act as a condition for a new action ^[9]). The central scheme is body and soul. Judging by the historical material, it was preceded by the ancient Egyptian scheme "body ? soul" ("Hat" ? "Ka"). At the approach of the client's death, the priests translated his Ka into an image or mummy of the customer, which was later strongly objected to by the Pythagoreans, who considered the corpse a prison of the soul ("Do not make your body the coffin of your soul," Pythagoras said ^[16]).

If in early antiquity the soul was understood purely archaically (it is immortal, can enter the body and exit it, respectively, the first understanding allowed to explain the recovery of a person, and the second illness and death), then already in the works of the Pythagoreans and especially Plato and Aristotle, the concepts of the soul began to be rapidly modified.

Plato's soul, on the one hand, behaves so to speak archaically, but on the other hand, it resembles an ancient person (chooses, thinks through his life). In The State, Plato describes the vicissitudes of souls in the afterlife; they must choose the next earthly fate, represented by lots. "After these words of the soothsayer, the one who got the first lot immediately approached, he took the life of a powerful tyrant for himself (above, the goddess of fate Lachesis, who cast lots into the crowd of souls, said: "Virtue is not the property of anyone alone, honoring or not honoring it, everyone joins it more or less. This is the fault of the elector, God is not guilty." – V.R.). Because of his unreason and insatiability, he made a choice without thinking, and there lurked a fatal fate for him – devouring his own children and other all kinds of troubles. When he then, without haste, reflected, he began to beat his chest, to grieve that, making his choice, he did not take into account the warning of the soothsayer, blamed for these troubles not himself, but fate, the gods – anything but himself <...> By chance, the last of all the lots fell out go to the soul of Odysseus. She remembered her former hardships and, having discarded all ambition, wandered for a long time, looking for the life of an ordinary person, far from business; finally, she found it lying around somewhere, everyone neglected her, but the soul of Odysseus, as soon as she saw it, gladly took it for herself" ^{[7, pp. 417, 418-419]}.

And the body in Plato's works is interpreted in a new way: probably under the influence of the Pythagoreans as a prison for the soul, as a reality blocking the memory of the good and consistent knowledge. On the contrary, Aristotle, in his work On the Soul, establishes a new relationship between the soul and the body: not archaic, they are connected not through movement, but through the categories form and matter. This is how Aristotle solves this problem. First, he proves that if the body moved, then "after leaving the body, she could return again" and "living beings, after dying, come to life" ^{[2, p. 16]}. For Aristotle, this is a contradiction. Then he shows that the body and soul are connected not spatially, but as form and matter. "Thus," writes Stagirit, "it is necessary to recognize the soul as an essence, a kind of form of a natural body, potentially endowed with life <...> one should not ask whether the soul and the body are one, like wax and the image on it, nor in general with respect to any matter and whose matter it is" ^{[2, p. 4, 38]}.

If Plato is referring to the practice of salvation (the recollection of the divine life, beauty, goodness and immortality by the soul) and as a condition of belittling the earthly, contradictory and finite life, then Aristotle considers the earthly life and the heavenly one, calling for the elevation to immortality in the earthly life. Hence the different understanding of the body, corresponding to different practices (whole).

Let's take a closer look at the idea of the body in the art of Praxiteles. He is known to have sculpted a naked female body for the first time in the image of the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite.

"But simple nudity,? writes Mary Beard, ?was only part of it. This Aphrodite was different, clearly erotic. Hands alone ? the sale is here. Are they modestly trying to cover up? Do they point in the direction of what the viewer most wants to see? Or are they just teasing? Whatever the answer, Praxiteles established those acute relations between the statue of a woman and the supposed male viewer that have never been lost from the history of European art - as the ancient Greek viewers themselves knew all too well. For it was an aspect of sculpture staged in a memorable story about a man who treated this famous marble goddess as if she were a woman of flesh and blood"^[17]. 

There was a long interesting story here. Three goddesses: hunting, Artemis, wisdom, Pallas Athena, and the hearth, Hestia, have always been depicted by sculptors dressed. Before Praxiteles and Aphrodite was dressed. By the way, most of the male gods in early antiquity were also depicted dressed. This tradition fully corresponded to the understanding of what the gods were. These were the celestials, so different from people that the latter did not consider it possible to see them naked in everyday life. In addition, as the story with Octeon, who accidentally spied on Artemis naked, showed, it was deadly dangerous.

But in the VI-V centuries BC, the situation changed dramatically. The Pythagoreans, who believe in deification and overcoming death, took the stage. They did not consider themselves equal to the gods, but they were equal to the gods, identified with them. Moreover, ancient art begins to depict gods very similar to humans, however, improved people. This is where the naked body was needed, it acted as an intermediary between the beautiful Greek women (as you know, Praxiteles created his Aphrodite from nature ? the beloved of the beautiful courtesan Phryne) and even more beautiful goddesses. The naked body attested the kinship of people with the gods. Praxiteles not only artistically models the female body, but, in fact, creates the ideal of an ancient woman-the goddess of love.

The body of Aphrodite created by Praxiteles forced the audience to recreate in their imagination and really experience, firstly, the appearance of a very beautiful naked woman (imitation of Phryne), secondly, the dazzling image of the goddess of love (achieved partly due to perfect proportions and skillful composition, partly the genius of the sculptor), thirdly, as if to try on to the first scene of love with all the expected events and impressions. There are two necessary conditions for awareness and experience of the body: artistic communication and the complex reality of entering into love, as well as communication with the goddess, and what!

What in Praxiteles' creation gathered the prerequisites of the body into the body proper, into a whole, unity? On the one hand, the theme and the image of the opening love. On the other hand, she collected sacredness, because Aphrodite herself was the object of love (therefore, absolutely everything in her should be perfect and beautiful). On the third hand, "communication about" gathered (people came from all over Greece to look at Praxiteles' creation), it was in communication that the audience spoke and comprehended the new reality ? the body of Aphrodite-Phryne, the goddess of love-hetaera, beloved of the genius sculptor Praxiteles. What connected all these different realities? Beautiful body: it was a source of love, birthright, beauty.

If the first condition (communication), as a rule, is the same, then the second (body content) you can't guess, it changes and requires a special reconstruction to get to it. For example, in order to get to the scheme of the formation of the body of a ballet dancer, the author proposed the following reconstruction.

 "Louis XIV, the Sun King, launches the formation of the ballet. He clearly felt like a God and wanted his subjects to see him as a God. I think this was overlaid with the image-the ideal of a Renaissance man who believed that if he wanted, he could become a cherub (angel)… But how was God conceived? He appeared to his subjects, dazzled them with his beauty and majesty, demonstrated life and deeds, after which he solemnly left. It was beneath his dignity to turn his back to the audience, bow down in front of them, generally act like everyone else, usually. On the contrary, his every movement should be filled with beauty and expressiveness.

This was the anthropological image and ideal that, judging by the testimony of contemporaries, possessed the young Louis. At the same time, he understood that he did not live on Olympus, and although a royal person, but still a person. This conflict and problematic situation is resolved by Ludovic due, on the one hand, to art, on the other hand, to the restart of physicality (he puts on and performs dances in which he most often acts as Olympic gods, and trains every day, learning new movements and poses). It is here that the "bodily canon" begins to take shape (to be invented), about which Fokin writes ("the legs must observe five positions and all movements must consist in a combination of these positions and be limited to it; the arms must be rounded, with elbows pushed aside; the face must be turned to the public, the back must be straight, the legs turned to the side, heels forward” ^{[1, p. 3, 9]}), and later a more complex version of it with images of flight, weightlessness and acrobatics. Gods and cherubs appear and disappear, soar, show beautiful faces and figures, perform deeds, as a rule, set forth in myths and elegant literature.

Creating a new kind of dance, Louis XIV, the Sun King, together with his assistants (we would say today, the directors of dances and performances), found a number of new artistic means (music, costumes, scenery, stage, etc.), helping to assemble new images of the body and movement into a single whole ("artistic reality"). Especially interesting here is the role of music written by famous composers, for example, Lully. As a temporary art, music made it possible to organize in time and temporally link new units and gestalts of physicality. How can musical events, free from specific subject associations, express (set, describe) actually "dance events" ^{[10, pp. 76-77]}. 

Two interpretations of physicality. If the concept of the body was formed late, then the idea of physicality is even later, not earlier than the XIX, the beginning of the XX century. Cultural and semiotic studies pushed this awareness, in which it turned out that the ideas about the body are different in different cultures, and much here depends on the language. "From a cultural and historical point of view, corporeality is a cultural formation that is not reduced only to a biological substrate - the body, but is culturally mediated and has its own course of development in ontogenesis. Thus, the formation of physicality is due, on the one hand, to the influence of society and the culturally determined standards and standards of beauty, social attitudes and expectations, stereotypes established by it. In other words, the formation of self-perception mainly depends on the social assessment of an individual's appearance. On the other hand, a person's independent understanding of his body and its criteria of significance" ^[12].

The interpretation of the revealed facts was different.  In one case, the new reality ? "corporeality" was interpreted as a kind of replacement of the body, a "body", but not structured and changing, taking the form of one or another body. However, it is not clear in this case, what is the substrate of physicality, if not the biological basis, then what? A purely semiotic basis does not pass here, because you will not get from signs and diagrams of bodies.

In another case, physicality looks more like an approach, a methodology that allows us to reconstruct different bodies, this method we have demonstrated above. But then it is not clear how physicality exists as an aspect of the human body. In this second variant, this difficulty can be overcome by understanding the mechanism and process of becoming corporeality. I identify four main elements in this process: 1) the crystallization of a new anthropological image of reality (for example, the feeling of being a god or a hero, or a person), 2) the alignment of physicality and other mental structures under this image (the formation of bodies of love, dancer, musician, karate, etc.), 3) the unfolding of a new practice of physicality, 4) awareness of new formations of physicality and their consolidation in the language. Building a new physicality, as I show, on the one hand, involves the invention of schemes and other narratives (metaphors, symbols, stories), which entails the formation of a new reality, or rather a new "pyramid of realities" (see ^{[10, pp. 77-78; 11]}), on the other hand, the restructuring of feelings under the influence of a change in reality.   

The dilution of the body and physicality allows us to understand to a certain extent what is being written about physicality  Podoroga and Chesnov. The composite structure of the body probably corresponds to the state of corporeality when separate prerequisites of the body (flesh, organs, abdomen, corpse, kind-form, etc.) were formed and captured in language. "The body that possesses me" is corporeality as an anthropological image of reality, as the alignment of its bodies, the unfolding of the practice of corporeality, awareness of bodies, that is, it is the whole that determines the formation of bodies, not excluding the methodology of their reconstruction. The difficulty of understanding corporeality lies partly in this inclusion of the way of grasping corporeality in thought in the very process of becoming bodies.