Embodied Disagreements

Anna Mudde

doi:10.22329/p.v9i2.4276

Abstract

In this paper, I suggest that embodied metaphysical experience underlies many of our everyday judgements, which are expressed in our bodily comportments and actions, through which disagreements in our ontological experiences are highlighted. I propose attending to such concrete, situated disagreements as a way of challenging the tradition of metaphysics as an enterprise of objective and universal theory, and as a way of promoting feminist, anti-racist, and queer practices of responsibility.

Highlights

In one of Simone de Beauvoir’s few discussions of metaphysics, in a defense of the philosophical role of literature, she argues for a distinction between the theoretical practices of metaphysics and the situated, embodied, concrete metaphysical experiences that comprise much of our lives
People know well that psychology is not, first of all, a special discipline foreign to life; every human experience has a particular psychological dimension; and while the theoretician draws out and systematizes these significations on an abstract plane, the novelist evokes them in their concrete singularity
Beauvoir insists there is another way to make explicit what is always already implicit in metaphysical experience: we can draw on lived experience as such, and describe it in concrete, situated terms, as many novelists do

Summary

ANNA MUDDE

Metaphysics is, first of all, not a system; one does not “do” metaphysics as one “does” mathematics or physics. In one of Simone de Beauvoir’s few discussions of metaphysics, in a defense of the philosophical role of literature, she argues for a distinction between the theoretical practices of metaphysics and the situated, embodied, concrete metaphysical experiences that comprise much of our lives.. In one of Simone de Beauvoir’s few discussions of metaphysics, in a defense of the philosophical role of literature, she argues for a distinction between the theoretical practices of metaphysics and the situated, embodied, concrete metaphysical experiences that comprise much of our lives.1 She compares this distinction to the one evinced in psychology. Taking up the idea that to do theoretical metaphysics requires as a precondition that human beings embody metaphysical experience as a matter of their situated “Being-in-the-world” [271], my interest is in the ways that our embodied judgements, actions, behaviours, and ways of making-sense express the moments of lived, often implicit, metaphysics. I consider a descriptive account of what an ontological disagreement might be like in order to facilitate attendance to them

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