So I begin again (always) with myself, my particular viewpoint, like a wave stretching against the rock, but no longer as an abstract thinking substance. I begin as a living subject inhabiting a world of experience. I am not the product of an analysis. Such a way of being-in-relation is more fundamental than the isolation of consciousness.
But how can such a subjectivity be embodied? I do not need to prove the world through reason, for I constantly experience it in my own flesh, nor am I the autonomous creator of my own states. I am constantly affected, and these affections appear to me as the immediate or distant source of those states. My being is embodied through this process. However, we often regard the very fact of being affected not as a necessity arising from our condition in the living world, but rather as a form of enslavement, or at least as an external limitation that ought to be mastered. This conception of the subject, aspiring to free itself from the contingencies of existence, can certainly be found in philosophy. Above all, however, it has become part of the cultural background that many of us continue to share.
This cultural background is, in my view, at least open to discussion. It shapes our embodied subjectivity as though it were a form of property, no different from an umbrella, a yacht, or a watch. The fantasy of mastery urges us to rely solely on ourselves, to appropriate ourselves as consciousness, and to act as the sovereign owners of our own being. Nevertheless, unlike property, I cannot give my body away once and for all. At “best”, I can rent it out in exchange for a wage. That is why, whenever someone claims to be enslaved by “the world”, I want to ask: Which world are you talking about? The world of ourselves? And is it not this legal fiction of self-ownership that ultimately imprisons us within the world — as a representation of ourselves, and as the ideology sustaining the belief that everything can be bought and sold?
I mean something else. This body is not what I possess, because it is what I am. I exist and feel through it. Maybe the strange familiarity we maintain with our own bodies prevents us from treating them as anything other than an attribute of what we take to be our « true » self: consciousness. It is true that the body is mortal, and by that, it is itself something of the world. Every possibility is, in the same movement, both of the world embodied and of the body worlded. I am, as I feel myself to be, but a tiny part of the world experiencing itself. At the same time, without existing in this world, I would not even be capable of feeling myself. I found here that the meeting point of exteriority and interiority is flesh.
Now it seems that I have gone further towards a structure of experience that is fundamental. However, this structure cannot claim to be self-explanatory. The intertwined experience of my embodied self and the world is only phenomenological, and if every philosophical inquiry begins with experience, experience alone cannot be foundational of reality. On the contrary, only a reconstruction of the reality in which experience is situated can make the whole understandable. The experience of a particular self is only the necessary but insufficient starting point, first for all of us, but not first in reality. This reconstruction of reality means taking into account the historical, social and material conditions of a particular society, which are always grounding our particular living world as situated.
In this account, not only is reality historical, but the categories through which we think are themselves a product of history, and definitely not timeless structures of thought that lie there, waiting to be discovered, and then projected backward onto human history as “grounding principles”. A category is fruitful insofar as it enables us to reconstruct a concrete domain of reality, to grasp its internal relations and mediations, and finally to trace the historical genesis of both that reality and the thinking material through which we understand ourselves.
These methodological remarks are only to point out that no particular experience or category can be foundational. The question is no longer what “Being” or “human nature” might be in themselves, but how human beings become what they are through history. This is something that we can render through the empirical observation of concrete and particular human beings taken in their history, and must not be presupposed by ontological or metaphysical reified abstractions. I suppose that we can now ask: which are the more general categories that can be reconstructed, regarding human history and society, in order to understand ourselves? In other words, what kind of animal are we?
If history is something that is unintelligible without a constant movement of historical change, and if this movement cannot be explained by the actions of isolated individual subjectivities nor by a mystical approach to “Being”, “Spirit” or “God”, it must be human communities themselves that make their own history, despite, of course, never doing so for each generation under conditions of their own choosing, but under the legacy of the past of all humankind. Then, we must look towards our social practices, and through them see how we produce, reproduce, satisfy, sustain and transform all of our needs and therefore the material world as a global web of life. This precise category, which has a strong explanatory power, is precisely the one of praxis, in which we can see the human condition as historically constituted through collective praxis.
We take part in the human adventure just as we take part in our own personal history, in the history of those who are close to us and of those who are not. My way of experiencing the world is singular and irreducible, and I recognize this same singularity in others. Our ways of eating, seeing, feeling, loving, enjoying, suffering, speaking, thinking, and, ultimately, caring are not given once and for all, but we make them, and we can fully understand all these intentionalities as practices and activities, and then transform these always relational, material, historical and social practices and activities. It is in this sense that we are situated and cannot claim any universality.
I will discuss what I mean by careful or uncareful practice, seeing now that care cannot be defined only by relations abstracted from their concrete practices, and again, is not only a purely moral concern concerning only individuals and their abilities to care. All this is precisely what I will develop in the next article.