The Felt Body and Embodied Communication

Abstract

Abstract In the 4th and 5th centuries B.C. the most significant paradigm change in Western intellectual culture occurred, later affecting Christianity and subsequently science. In the interest of personal empowerment over spontaneous stirrings, a private inner sphere, a so-called soul (psyche) was ascribed to every conscious subject which was taken to contain their whole experience, like a house, conceived of as an inner world in which reason was to be the master of spontaneous impulses; the empirical external world between these inner spheres was cleansed of all gripping forces and, for this purpose, ground down to a few elegantly selected types of features and their carriers (atoms, substances): the remainder of this grindingdown was deposited in the souls or overlooked to nonetheless be found in the souls in changed form. Man was dissected into body and soul. In the transposition into the soul’s huge amounts of life experience were forgotten. Among them can be counted the felt body which disappeared between body and soul as in a crevasse, even though it is the closest thing to human experience.