CHAPTER XYZ

The Body

It is in analysis of the evolved human body and a self within a group that we will understand how hominids first came to understand death. The analysis of the body takes place on two intimately related levels: animate form or tactile body, B(2, t, r), and the tactile-kinesthetic or lived body, B(1, p, r). Animate form is "a species-specific body with all its various spatial conformations, and attendant everyday postures, modes of locomotion, movements, and gestures. In broad terms, animate form is equivalent to the spatiality of the body in all its dimensions (Sheets-Johnstone, 1990, 5)." The tactile-kinesthetic body is "the sentiently felt body, the body which knows the world through touch and movement. It is not the body which simply behaves in certain observed or observable ways, but the body which resonates in the first-person, lived-through sense of any behavior. It is the experienced and experiencing body (Sheets-Johnstone, 1990, 5)." The tactile-kinesthetic body, B(1, p, r), is necessary to the existence of groups and of self-awareness; it is where life and where death understanding begins.

The tactile-kinesthetic body, B(1, p, r), is basically one of tactile-kinesthetic invariants. Present-day hominids - we humans - have "two legs of a certain form, teeth of a certain kind, tongues of a certain shape, all of which are, in essential respects, no different from those of ancestral hominids said to be capable respectively of bipedal locomotion, of chewing, of speaking (Sheets-Johnstone, 1990, 17)." Bodily uniformities like these are foundational to tactile-kinesthetic invariants; they are universal ways of feeling and moving. Conceptual meanings like death have been derived analogously from these fundamental tactile-kinesthetic invariants. Meanings initially arise in the simple act of noticing ones body, B(1, p, r), a body very similar to other human bodies, B(2, t, r). Because all humans have essentially similar brains and physiology, we have basically similar behaviors and reach basically similar understandings.

One person’s experience of living as a human body feels very similar to other persons bodily experience because of the species uniformities expressed in animate form, B(2, t, r), (like two legs and two lungs) and personally felt, B(1, p, r), as tactile-kinesthetic invariants (as in walking or breathing). This is a non-linguistic experience, because the experience is simply bodily. "The concept of hardness, for instance, is latent in the tactile-kinesthetic act of brushing the tongue across the teeth, just as the concept of softness is latent in the act of brushing the tongue across the lips. No word or words are necessary to the recognition of these pan-hominid tactile qualities. They are latent in corporeal experience (Sheets-Johnstone, 1990, 18).” These uniformities and invariants allows us to imagine how another person feels as a tactile-kinesthetic body, B(2, p, i). The similarities may not be immediately evident, but they are the reason why certain experience and thus certain concepts are culturally universal. The initial awareness of death and its eventually conceptualization is one such universal.

Lived and Objective Bodies

The body is a very intimate reality and it is also a distant and puzzling one. On the one hand we feel our own movements and physical capabilities. We are aware of internal grumblings and pains, of how we are sitting or walking, of how we are currently employed. But these sensations cannot be shared with others in the same way that one feels them. I can be in someone else’s shoes, but not their feet. Because of bodily uniformity, I can expect that you will feel your bodily existence in a similar way to me, though never in the exact same way. We can perceive other bodies, how they are moving, what they are doing, whether they are calling in pain. We can anticipate certain behaviors and movements based on what we perceive and as a result we can imagine what it is like to be another body in a different place, B(2, p, i). But we can never be that other body, nor can we know it in the way we know our own bodily experience, B(1, p, r).

In his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty (1962) provides us with a similar distinction to the above, which helps to elucidates this important double aspect of bodies. The body is a “lived body,” B(1, p, r), inseparable from personal existence, even in thought, because it is the body which defines and characterizes our own unique experience. The lived body is the body our ancestors evolved with. He writes that the body is also an “objective body,” B(2, t, r), which is the universal biology that constitutes our human physiology. This is animate form, B(2, t, r), it is a surface that we meet in a fully sensual way that begins at infancy with the tactile world of being held and nursed by another body, and is also encountered in early hominid social behavior like grooming. This is the body of other people, one that we cannot personally experience as ourselves, only imagine as personal, B(1, t, i). As a result of our advanced understanding today, this is also the body on the operating table, under the microscope, and in the textbook.

The objective body, B(2, t, r), was a discovery, a process of slow evolutionary and social understanding, which began with touchings and has developed into biological science. This body is also integral to the conceptualization of death. This does not mean we have two bodies, but two different views - self, 1, and Other, 2, - in our actual experience of bodies. Staring at the objective body, B(2, t, r), does not show the lived body, B(1, p, r), the lived body can only be individually experienced from a particular situation, creating a unique perspective that will one day vanish. The objective body, B(2, t, r), can only be experienced through Others, because the experience of being a lived body, B(1, p, r), intrudes on ones view of the animate form, B(2, t, r), of one's body.

In summary then, the tactile-kinesthetic body, B(1, p, r), is a point of view, an embodied self, and essential to human existence. Animate form, B(2, t, r), is contingent, though necessary for sophisticated group behavior and a conceptualization of death. Another’s body is tactile-kinesthetic, B(1, p, r), for them alone and an animate form, B(2, t, r), for Others. One can only experience another’s animate form, B(2, t, r), and only imagine one's own as such, B(1, t, i). This is because the self, 1, can't experience its body as a surface, as when it touches that surface it feels that touch, therefore, it is a tactile-kinesthetic body, B(1, p, r). Tactile-kinesthetic bodies, B(1, p, r), cannot be directly shared in their unique perspective, though another’s tactile-kinesthetic body can be imagined, B(2, p, i), because lived bodies have the same tactile-kinesthetic invariants resulting from bodily uniformities.

The Self and “I-cans”

The tactile-kinesthetic body, B(1, p, r), necessarily interfaces with the self, S(1, p, r). This self does not animate the body, nor is it an additional or separable part of the body. This self is the very awareness of the tactile-kinesthetic body, of what it can do, of “I-cans,” like “I can run,” “I can see,” and “I can makes noises (Sheets-Johnstone, 1990, 28).” Though most “I cans” are based on tactile-kinesthetic invariants, the awareness of these “I-cans” are different from my experience of other bodies, which can do the same things. I do not need to look in the mirror to know that I am opening my mouth, but I do need to look at others to see if they are. This awareness of “I can,” is the threshold of self awareness. “Consciousness is in the first place not a matter of “I think that,” but “I can (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 429, 137).”

The self, S(1, p, r), cannot be found in animate form, B(2, t, r), only in the tactile-kinesthetic body of oneself, B(1, p, r), and imagined in others, S(2, p, i), by the same process that allows one to imagine other lived bodies, B(2, p, i). This does not mean the self is reducible to the body. There are comatose bodies, which do not have selves in the sense that they are not aware of bodily “I-cans,” because such bodies can do very little. Neither is the self reducible to the brain or some other part of animate form, B(2, t, r). What are usually (and objectively) understood as "mental" or "brain" experiences, like emotion, permeate the whole body. "These frowns, this redness, this stammering, this slight trembling of hands, these downcast looks which seem at once timid and threatening - these do not express the anger; they are the anger. But this point must be clearly understood. In itself a clenched fist is nothing and means nothing. But also we never perceive a clenched fist. We perceive a man who in a certain situation clenches his fist... the synthetic totality 'body in situation' is the anger (Sartre, 1996, 346-7).” The self, S(1, p, r), is a body, B(1, p, r), in a particular situation.

To sum up, the self, S(1, p, r), is a bodily awareness of corporeal powers or “I-cans,” that are experienced in a particular and unique situation, be this as a body that is lived, B(1, p, r), or one of which others are aware of as an animate form, B(2, t, r). The self in situation, S(1, p, r), or in relation, S(2, t, r), is the foundation of the group.

The Group and The Self

The tactile-kinesthetic experience of “I-can” is a necessarily embodied “point of view (Merleau-Ponty, 1974, 200),” because no one else can possibly share it, as I feel it. Self awareness is not “a mere fragment of the world but a certain “view” of the world (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 351ff).” This view, this perspective the self, S(1, p, r), has is “one of the component parts of reality (Ortega, 193, 89-90)" and is as important to self-awareness as “I-cans,” because "perspective is the order and form that reality takes for him who contemplates it. If the place that he occupies varies, the perspective also varies (Ortega, 1931, 142)." This perspective is characterized by what Heidegger calls Befindlichkeit, a sense of mood or of how one is feeling. Self-awareness is then, both “I-can” and “my perspective,” the awareness of oneself as an individual capable of Befindlichkeit in this particular body and in this particular situation, which others can only imagine or objectify. It is this self-awareness that allows for the understanding that it is my body and my life, which will one day end for me.

Other people’s awareness of oneself is a necessary part of this self-perspective. A fully developed sense of self-perspective, of this body, of this situation, is an impossible experience without others. Others, S(2, t, r), are initially encountered as tactile surfaces, bodies with a substantial and animate presence that can be sensed and explored on the surface, B(2, t, r).

These other bodies, B(2, t, r), have their own sense of self-perspective of which we are made aware via “the Look (Sartre, 1996).” The Look operates in two different ways – first as the unmediated anti-solipsistic experience of the Other, S(2, t, r), where the realization that the Other, S(2, t, r), exists is a result of a feeling, which can only arise through there being another person present. Therefore, the awareness of the Other, S(2, t, r), is an awareness of oneself as encountered by others, S(1, t, i). Sartre (1996, 259) uses the example of shame to illustrate (his famous example of the voyeur at the keyhole).

The second operation of the Look is an extension of the first. The Look is the objectifying perspective of another, S(2, t, r), ones awareness of the presence of another, S(2, t, r), perceiving you as an animate form amongst other forms. The realization that some other consciousness perceives the same situation that you do, but from their perspective, and that you are included in this surrounding, constitutes part of the experience of the Look – a rupturing of simple self-awareness, S(1, p, r), where one realizes one is subject to the others, S(2, t, r), apprisal, S(1, t, i). Before the Other, S(2, t, r), was noticed, one was existing solely for oneself, S(1, p, r), but when one is regarded and apprised by another consciousness, one exists for the Other self also, S(1, t, i). The Look makes one aware of the perspective of others, of another, S(1, p, r), which cannot be known in a full personal sense, S(2, p, i).

Awareness of others, S(2, t, r), is an awareness (imagining) of one's body as not lived, but perceived, B(1, t, i), of oneself in their perspective, S(1, t, i). Understood in this way, we can see that the self, S(1, p, r), is in the tactile-kinesthetic body, B(1, p, r), and the group, S(2, t, r), is in animate form, B(2, t, r). Via the sensory encounter with another, one understands that one is part of a group, a self among other selves. This full sense of self and awareness of the group is essential to death understanding.

The group is an essential part of how we came to understand death as an event for others and ourselves. This is because the “group is crucial to survival of the individual, both physically and as a social being, that is, as a body and as a self. This is most obvious in the case of children and disabled persons who cannot care for themselves (Stodolsky, 2002).” It is in being aware of others, and thus their needs, that one becomes aware of a different form of behavior that indicates injury or death. By the time of the “pliocene period of hominid evolution, members of a hominid group apparently protected and ministered to the needs of the injured (Sheets-Johnstone, 1990, 213).” It is in this evolved group dynamic of care, that death as a concept is first conceived.

Physicality and Strangeness

The tactile-kinesthetic body, B(1, p, r), is neither abstract nor scientifically manipulable to that self; It is in a sense non-physical. Yet a distinction at some point in our history was discovered between the tactile-kinesthetic body, B(1, p, r), and a sophisticated understanding of animate form, B(2, t, r), as a physical body, B(2, v, r). This understanding of animate form, B(2, t, r), as physical, B(2, v, r), was “a matter of apprehending physicality in a preeminently material rather than physiognomic sense (Sheets-Johnstone, 1990, 211).” This was possible because the surface of the physical body, B(2, t, r), is an essentially visual body that can be analyzed and inspected, it is beyond ourselves, out in the world. This is the scientifically investigated body that Merleau-Ponty (1962) calls “the objective body.” The physical animate form, B(2, v, r), is a visual body because “its inspection is preeminently the work of two eyes, and this not on etymological grounds, but quite the reverse: because two hands, nostrils, ears, or a tongue cannot approximate to the corporeal wholeness and profusion of detail grasped by two eyes (Sheets-Johnstone, 1990, 213).” Though another body is initially encountered as a tactile surface, with which every sense can engage, vision takes on extra import in investigating injury and noticing strangeness. Vision then becomes the primary mode of investigation into the state of bodies as material animate form, as biology.

A minor point that we need to be aware of regarding this analysis is how the physical body, B(2, v, r), became a sophisticated physical body. There is a definite refinement through human history as to how the understanding of the physical body, B(2, v, r), lead to the understanding of the body in terms of the biological sciences. Over time, crude inspection and care lead to inspection with sensitive tools and the medicalization and study of the body in more complex material terms. That said, the biology of the laboratory does not affect the existential grasping of death understanding; death is understood in the way outlined above regardless of modern science. But it is worth noting that modern science has deepened our understanding of death in a way that death can be recognized on different levels, specifically the cellular.

There is a prototypical awareness of death prior to the visualization of the physical body, B(2, v, r), when one realizes that “it is essential to me not only to have a body, but to have this body (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 431).” One, S(1, p, r), might wonder at the dissimiliarities between life when one had two arms and life when one has lost an arm. Here there is an ending to a particular way of living, a kind of death. This is easy to understand because tactile-kinesthetic bodies are well aware of their own pain and injury. But the visualized physical body, B(2, v, r), is the only way in which early humans could become aware that other bodies like theirs, B(2, p, i), could undergo important physical changes, physical changes like injury or death.

To reach an understanding of death, hominids also had to realize that others, S(2, t, r), were injured by noticing how strangely they are moving or acting. To then inspect and even care for this injury or pain are important developments in visualizing the physical body and reaching an understanding of death. What is initially seen is strangeness, something unusual, atypical to animate form, B(2, t, r). The “aura of strangeness pervading a perceived difference in something heretofore familiar, (caused) a perceptual shift (Sheets-Johnstone, 1990, 216).” This shift is at its most profound when the recognition that animate forms, B(2, t, r), could not only change in their typical behavior and appearance but also have, unlike ones own body, B(1, p, r), visualizable insides, B(2, v, r), a deeper material realm.

Normally the shifting visual form of another, B(2, t, r), does not imply anything within it, it is a surface. Though one is aware of the likelihood that others feel internal sensations, B(2, p, i), one is not directly aware of a deeper materiality that is typically hidden in normal bodily acts that take place just beneath the surface, like sex, defecation or eating. To see the insides of another body, B(2, t, r), is to see something strange, something altered, something which is not normally seen as part of another, B(2, t, r), or of oneself, B(1, p, r). On one hand, there is a typical surface body, B(2, t, r), but there is also an alien inside, which is now exposed or spilling out from the injured or rotting body, B(2, v, r). “The lack of connection appears strange… I can at least discover my felt hand and my visual hand to be connected in the singular experience of moving it and seeing it move. I have some sense of a felt-visual correspondence (Sheets-Johnstone, 1990, 219).” But there is no such felt correspondence between the remains of a dead body, B(2, v, r), and its normal appearance, B(2, t, r). What is now seen is unexplainable by the typical awareness of animate form, B(2, t, r), which is normally just a moving surface. The insides are strange. To the caring, investigating hominid newly aware of the physical body, B(2, v, r), this further materiality is a revelation.

This strangeness can only be experienced because of Befindlichkeit. This mood of strangeness is a mode of understanding that discloses the world. The world is disclosed in this way, because there is no fundamental subject/object dichotomy between the self, S(1, p, r), and the Other, S(2, t, r), nor between the self, S(1, p, r), and the world it is situated in. “Our psychical being enters into the materiality of our nature just as the materiality of our nature enters into our psychical being. As we descend into the deeper layers of the latter, we move away from our unique individuality, our individual consciousness, and descend into the collective aspects of our being (Sheets-Johnstone, 1994, 271).” The mood of strangeness in witnessing the exposed insides of another, B(2, v, r), is a visceral understanding that also rises from within oneself, S(1, p, r), because of the shared natures of the living and the dead. Any self, S(1, p, r), that sees the inside of another, B(2, v, r), will feel this mood of strangeness, it is a universal experience.

If humans had no sense of how they felt, they could not experience this strangeness. Heidegger’s description of angst matches this sense of strangeness “all entities within the world sink away…” The familiar world becomes “uncanny” no longer familiar in “terms of how things have been publicly interpreted (Heidegger, 187-8H).” The normal encounter with another body, B(2, t, r), has become something unusual and uncomfortable.

The material body, B(2, t, r), thus becomes a strange body, B(2, v, r), “the other which I knew is yet another other. (Sheets-Johnstone, 1990, 220)." Its animate form, B(2, t, r), is no longer the same. Yet all the elements of sameness are there, it is a body very much like mine, B(1, t, i), and yours, B(2, t, r). Though familiar and basically the same, the strange, unknown visual body, B(2, v, r), evidently also has something missing. There is no Look, no Other, S(2, t, r), and thus a reduced sense of my own self, S(1, t, i). There is now only a stillness and a silence that is just as strange as the insides, a body without self-awareness or reciprocal relation, S(2, v, r).

Group and Loss

Without the group, the awareness of an individualized selfhood, S(1, t, i), is not possible and neither, of course, is an awareness of others, S(2, t, r). In Heidegger’s words, “it belongs to the nature of Dasein to exist in such a way that it is always already with other beings (Heidegger, 1982 p157).” The group is thus necessary to an awareness of another’s death and of one's own. On seeing another body in all of its strangeness, B(2, v, r), a contrast emerges. “In the appearance of the-Other-in-death, a no-moreness of similarity is set against a persistence of similarity (Sheets-Johnstone, 1990).” The Other for me, S(2, v, r), is no longer what s/he was, S(2, t, r), nor am I what I was for him/her, S(1, t, i), there is no “we,” no relation. There is an inanimate body, B(2, v, r), with no self, S(2, v, r). This indicates an end to communication with the other, S(2, t, r), an end to reciprocal interaction, an end to membership with the group. The separation gives rise to a sense of loss; the other, S(2, v, r), is silent and still, but so am I by virtue of his/her deafness and numbness. An analogy begins to form from the awareness of the end of social interaction. It is not just the other, S(2, t, r), that has radically changed, but myself and the group also. “The visual form which is the other is apperceived as a change which exists in continuity with its own past. What appears in the aloneness of the Other is thus a heightened sense of individuality (Sheets-Johnstone, 1990, 225).”

This heightened sense of individuality is only possible because of the ontological reality of perspective; a perspective that defines the self, S(1, p, r), but which can only be completed with reference to the other, S(2, t, r). The understanding that the absence of the other, S(2, v, r), as part of the group, which once included an embodied self, S(2, t, r), leads to the threshold of death understanding. One has understood the strangeness as a particular end of another individual with whom one communed, and also the end of one's group whose dynamic will not longer be the same as it was.

But the concept of death is still not yet fully realizable. Staring at the dead one can try to imagine being as still and silent, but one, S(1, p, r), can never actually experience death, just as one can never actually experience another tactile-kinesthetic body, S(2, p, i). Imagination falls short because of the reality of the tactile-kinesthetic body, B(1, p, r), which denies the experience of being a corpse, B(2, v, r) simply by the fact that one lives, that one is not strange, mortally wounded, or rotten. One plays dead, yet feels the blood rushing in the head. Living bodies, B(1, p, r), cannot feel the stillness of death. Only when this difference with someone who was once the same, B(2, p, i) is realized, does it become clear that animate form, B(2, t, r), and the inanimate cadaver, B(2, v, r), are no longer the same being. The self is gone, S(2, v, r). “The concept of death is thus as grounded in my experience of utter likeness to the Other I once knew as it is in my experience of utter contrast to the Other here before me (Sheets-Johnstone, 1990, 229).” In this contrast, one understands that a similar being is now dissimilar, that this being once moved with a sense of livedness and perspective and Befindlichkeit, which were all verified and reflected within a shared community, now no longer shared. The dissimilarity is now ones fate also, one imagines that eventually “I-too” will also be silent, still, and strange, S(1, v, i).

Conclusion

To perceive a dead body is not enough for a person to know death. Death can only be recognized when the body is in a certain state, B(2, v, r), and the certainty of mine being one day the same, B(1, v, i), is realized. The result is a full sense of self, a self that does not just live and move, S(1, p, r), or appears for others, S(1, t, i), but that has a certain end, S(1, v, i). This is a result of the observers recognition of him/herself in the dead body, the unfeeling and inanimate form, the surface ruptured by insides, and also in the marked difference in behavior of the dead as not touching, not Looking, not reciprocating or communing. I will appear for others as a strange body, B(2, v, r), a body that is no long part of any group, a body lacking a self, S(2, v, r). The realization of death is the realization of a whole and unique self alone and also within the group, and of a future death, that just like ones own point of view and tactile-kinesthetic experience, can never be shared. In Heidegger’s words “angst individualises Dasein and thus discloses it as solus ipse (Heidegger, 1982, 157)." Death understanding requires going from the Other's death, S(2, v, r), to imagining one's own, S(1, v, i), and the awareness that another will one day see the reality of my death, S(2, p, i).

This knowledge of death is always the same, and arose over time in the same way for all dead-burying hominids. Only in the ways so described can a self awareness and bodily awareness develop within human society which leads to understanding death, because the body, B(1, p, r), self, S(1, p, r), and group, B(2, p, i) / S(2, p, i), are cultural and existential universals. The evolution of death understanding “gave rise to a new drive, generative death anxiety, as a result of the conflict between the survival instinct and the knowledge of one's own eventual death…. Its first signs were flowers on graves and other symbolic expressions related to funeral ceremonies (Stodolsky, 2002).”

Bibliography

Heidegger, M. (1982). The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indianan University Press.

Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1974). The primacy of perception and its philosophical consequences. In J. O’Neill (Ed.) Phenomenology, Language and Sociology: Selected Essays of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. London: Heinemann.

Ortega y Gasset, J. (1931). The Modern Theme. London: The C. W. Daniel Company.

Sartre, J. P. (1996). Being and Nothingness. London: Routledge.

Sheets-Johnstone, M. (1990). The Roots of Thinking. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Sheets-Johnstone, M. (1994). The Roots of Power. Chicago & La Salle: Open Court.

Stodolsky, D. (2002, 15 October). Essential realities and their meanings [Objective]. Immortalist Philosophy. (URL <http://secureid.org:8100/Lists/Immortal/Message/9.html>.)

Note

* Corresponding author: David Stodolsky, Institute for Social Informatics, Tornskadestien 2, st. th., DK-2400 Copenhagen NV, Denmark.

Mail-to: david.stodolsky@socialinformatics.org