Embodied Subjectivity: Implications for Philosophy and Theology

Jude Godwins

Jude Godwins

Keywords: Embodied Subjectivity, Ending fragmentation, Perspectivity, Incarnation, Corporeality, Leib, Inter-corporeity, Inclusiveness, Organismic integrity

Abstract

It is because mental states are constituted by perspectivity that it is hardly possible capturing them by means of their abstract logical relations, as in Cartesianism, or their material causal relations, as with functionalism. The dual issue of what having a mental state is and of how such a state accounts for behaviour seems to be interrelated. Having a mental state is being a subject of behaviour that has a perspective on the world. This perspective is established by the behavioural responses to this world of objects that it renders apt. One’s responses to this world, in some form, transform the objects in question. Thus, the subjectivity at issue is an embodied one. Embodied subjectivity is authentic, because it accounts for the simultaneity of body and mind, and avoids the fragmentationist thought-trajectory. An embodied thought enables us find an epistemological substitute for both objectivist and relativist thinking, and an ontological replacement for both holist and fragmentationist thought-habits. Embodied subjectivity makes the fragmentation of the human agent and of the human society unnecessary.

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