At the beginning of his book Body, Community, Language, World, Jan Patočka claims that the human body has never been considered worthy of reflection throughout the entire (Western) philosophical tradition. Human corporeity has been largely excluded from philosophical reflections since the times of Plato’s conception of the human as a being divided between a mortal body and an immortal soul. Yet there is one thinker who had, as early as the nineteenth century, described the history of philosophy, from Plato to (...) Hegel, as a history of the loss of human corporeity. This philosopher was Ludwig Feuerbach. While Patočka follows the path of phenomenological anthropology, Feuerbach tries to return the sense of corporeity to the human being through the rehabilitation of sensuous perceptions and emotions. Despite their different approaches to the problem, Patočka and Feuerbach both agree with the notion that intersubjectivity, based on the corporeity of two autonomous subjects, stands outside of any cognitive pattern. They both persist in their efforts to bring the human body back into philosophy as a relevant source of experience because they both understand that the human body remains a universal symbol across all cultures and societies. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the sense of being of the subject which is at the same time in the world and the medium of its appearing. An existential analysis of the intramundane body shows that it is a constituting pole of the appearing and leads Patočka to question its relation to the ego. Maine de Biran’s theory of effort considers the subject as a center made of force and resistance, meaning that self-consciousness is at the same time a consciousness (...) of the body and an awareness that its existence is shaped by exteriority. Yet Patočka deems insufficient such conception and looks for another way to overcome Cartesian dualism thanks to an externalization of the self: how can the self experience its body if it is ontologically different from it? By understanding force and resistance in terms of movement and by considering that each impulse implies its own outward efficacy, Patočka correlates the subject’s appearing to its motricity. This correlation articulates the body and the embodied self. I will ultimately argue that this movement through which the subject comes to existence coincides with the world’s own constitution and therefore explains the subject’s twofold sense of being. (shrink)