Abstract
The authors trace the question “what can a body do?” back to one of the main conceptual lines of discussion featured in the history of modern thought, namely, the nature/culture distinction, closely linked to the object/subject and natural/artificial distinctions. These distinctions being the core of important developments in 20th-century French philosophical thought, a specific reference will be carried out to the works of philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Georges Canguilhem, dealing respectively with praktognosia and biological normativity. Having them in mind, the authors aim at relieving the body from the conceptual imagery provoked by yet another product of the nature/culture distinction: the mind/body dualism, which very often has submitted the latter to the former. Departing from the description of the ecosophical context assigned to the content of this article, the conclusive remarks hope for an ecologically renewed conceptualization of the body and its range of action.
Highlights
An ecosophical take on the issue at hand, “what can a body do”, surely encompasses a re ection that concerns both philosophical and scienti c ideas, since both conceptual lines are the very core of what we call “modernity”. is interaction should not lead to an alleged dimension of pure thought or pure praxis, because this would result in paradoxes that seldom have been understood for what they really are: misconceptions about what either philosophy or science are supposed to do
“Sophia” need not have speci c scienti c pretensions as opposed to “logos” compound words, but all “sophical” insight should be directly relevant for action. rough their actions, a person or organisation exemplies sophia, sagacity, and wisdom - or lack thereof
The relationship between modernity and the world made up of bodies is always mediated by our intellectual faculties. This mediation is apparently neutral, to the extent that the feature of being “biological” blends with the feature of being natural in the wider sense, namely “organic”, i.e., biological agriculture or organic food. is dichotomy stands in tight relation with another one, constituted by the pair “necessary-contingent”, that is, what’s necessary and that which on the contrary is changing, in transformation, o en confusing: to know the body and its range of action means to xate it properly along the necessary features it presents when compared to the tenets of a method, while contingency is taken into consideration only when the intellectual faculties’ mediation is highlighted, usually ending up in its absolute negation
Summary
Us, we aim at overcoming anthropocentrism, not as a naïve promise of developing an all-entailing systematic re ection on the environment, but more as an experimental promise of multiplying the ways of having a body, producing in this process a wider consideration on what life throughout the ecosphere is and how the dangers represented by the ecological crisis can take multiple forms throughout its vast extension In this sense, another account of ecosophy that is key to understanding the scope of this analysis is that of Félix Guattari:. It’s important to understand that, in the same way as philosophical and scienti c thought are seen as intertwined, thought and action, theory and practice are intimately related, and the only way to gain experience on this relation is by grasping the immense diversity implied in living beings’ feature of having a body In this sense, ecosophy wishes to switch back and forth from a classifying rationality to some sort of eld comprehension. Refusal to face up to the erosion of these three areas, as the media would have us do, verges on a strategic infantilization of opinion and a destructive neutralization of democracy» (GUATTARI, 2000, p. 41)
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