The texture of embodiment: Foundation for medical ethics

Abstract

In our everyday lives we mostly act through our bodies towards the world. Only at moments of resistance, disruption or disintegration do we turn our attention directly to the body. Readers, for instance, of journals like this one turn pages and study passages relatively unaware of their bodies. Perhaps a stomach rumbles, attempting to cope with breakfast, but for the most part the reader only hopes to find a tolera? bly interesting paper to settle down with, one that does not run on forever. That is, until she is jostled, has her foot stepped on, spills hot coffee on herself. Then, suddenly, the body demands attention ? and she turns to it immediately, as we all would. For no demands are so urgent, so undeniable as those of the body, that most intimate of the worldly objects. As Merleau-Ponty suggests in the opening quotation, it is the body that maintains our entire life-world ? thus a bodily crisis becomes, inevitably, a total crisis of that world. How is it that we are to grasp this body which is at once our very self and our greatest obstacle? It is at times our most willing servant, and at others our most feared adversary. In the first part of these re? marks I will focus on just this tensed duality which is the very texture of embodiment, drawing on a number of phenomenologists to sketch the dominant features of our bodily presence in the world. Next, I want