Embodiment 31

one feels personally violated after a burglary. In other words, there is not an
organic body with clothes and computer added; rather, the whole assem-
blage of organism-clothes-computer is the living body. When we give up
our familiar prejudice of mind-body dualism, then, we must also give up our
familiar prejudices about what are the phenomena that constitute the body.

The Subject-Object as “I can”

We saw at the end of chapter 1 that human reality is “the subject-object
pair,” the very situation that is the occurrence of meaningfulness. In this
chapter we have understood this subject-object situation as the body,
and we can now see that this means that the subject-object is the “I can.”
To be a body, a subject-object, is to be a being of possibility, a being
open to the emergence of determinateness from an horizon of indetermi-
nacy. The hand is a determinacy the very definition of which is to make
grasping possible—it is that by which I can grasp—and as such it is a
route that opens us to a multitude of as yet unimagined experiences. This
is the situation of the body as a whole—it is the determinateness that
opens us to an indeterminate multiplicity of possibilities, of which our
action is the actualization. The development of the human is the devel-
opment of this “I can.” We are what we can do, and the identities of
those things that we contact are measured in terms of these abilities. We
are our possibilities for interactions with things, and things are their
possibilities for our interaction.
In chapter 1, we studied the place of interpretation in the identities
of the objects of our experience. We can now see more clearly that this
interpretation is not some free-floating act of intellectual assessment, but is
the response to an environment in terms of our determinate bodily capaci-
ties. It is how we are as bodies that sets the terms for our interpretation—
our appropriation—of our environment. To be an object can only mean
to be meaningful in terms of our bodily possibilities. Now this might
seem odd when we consider objects like moral values (things we “should”
do); intellectual principles (rules of logic or mathematics, or perhaps
philosophical concepts); or aesthetic norms (beauty or “good taste”).
Nonetheless (as we shall begin to see later), these objects are also defined
in terms of bodily capacities, but the capacities of very developed and
habituated bodies.
It is not hard to recognize that to call something “a chair” is a short-
hand way of saying “I can sit there,” or, given the more complex rela-
tions into which we tend to place chairs, “I can sit there while others are
32 Human Experience

present without looking stupid,” “I can put it in my kitchen in such a

way that I can still move around,” and so on. Most simply, a chair an-
swers to our bodily posture and characteristic bodily behavior, and even
in those more complex relationships that we in our society typically de-
mand something measure up to in order to be called “a chair,” the deter-
minants of identity are still structures of our bodily “I can.” Similarly, a
pencil is simply that with which I, a body with hands, can mark some
other substance, paper is that upon which I can leave my mark, and so
on. The key to seeing that this is also the case in the more sophisticated
moral and intellectual objects is already hinted at in what we have here
seen about the chair. One requirement for something receiving the title
“chair” can be that others will recognize it as such, or, as I just put it,
I will not appear to them to be stupid if I deem it a chair. This last point
reminds us that our dealings with things in the world are typically inter-
woven with our dealings with other people, and that an essential aspect
of what my body can do is to encounter such others, and we will see, in
fact, that it is this relation to others like ourselves that opens up the
moral, aesthetic, and intellectual realms. This experience of other per-
sons will need to be understood in light of the body’s openness, which we
have already considered, to what is “other” in general.
Our discussion of the body has emphasized the body as our original
determinacy, our determinate capacities for interaction. Yet this very de-
terminacy, these very possibilities, are possibilities for encountering
other determinacies, other powers. To define the body as our point of
contact and as our inherent publicity, is to recognize that to be a body is
to be subjected to other determinacies. To be a body is to experience
ourselves as subjects, that is, to find ourselves subject to the specificities
and demands that usher both from the forms in which we are open and
from the forms of that upon which we open. In this sense, then, the very
nature of the body is to be defined by the point of view of others, that is,
to be defined by how it is open to others, what it is for others. Because,
therefore, the initial determinacy of the body is precisely a determinate
openness, our basic determination is to be determined by others, or, we
might say, the fundamental demand we place on others is that they place
demands on us.
What this means is that the value of “the other”—that which is outside
my immediate control and places demands upon me—is inherent to our
embodiment: to be a human body is to make contact, which is to be such
that what matters to the other already matters to me. The fundamental
 Embodiment 33

capacity of our body—the fundamental capacity that is our body—is the

capacity to care about the others, where “others” runs the full range from
inert things to other persons. This is the amazing fact of experience, of
“being-there” (“Dasein”), as Martin Heidegger says: we are aware of, we
are affected by, others, and we retain our identity by being absorbed in the
identities of our surroundings. As we have seen, then, awareness, cognition,
or knowledge is of the essence of embodiment, for knowledge just is this
recognizing—this measuring up to—the determinacy—the demands—of
what is other.
We will see later that the values of aesthetic, moral, and intellectual
life are just the more sophisticated developments of this fundamental
capacity, this fundamental “I can”: “I can care about what others care
about.” To interpret is to see something as something, to bodily engage with
something in terms of some accessible determinacy, and to see something
not just idiosyncratically but in its universal significance—the issue be-
hind truth—is to see it as it is open to another perspective that I, or
another body like me, can adopt. The demands for objectivity and uni-
versality that are the core of our moral, artistic, and scientific values are
just the demands to respond to things as they can matter to others and
not just as they happen to matter to me according to my singular whims.
The ideals of truth, beauty, and goodness are the ideals to which we can
aspire because of our fundamental bodily capacity to care. These ideals
are implicit in the very notion of care, and our artistic, moral, and intel-
lectual life is just the explicit taking up of these values to which we can
respond by virtue of being sensitive. By virtue of being the activity of
making contact, the body is the activity of subjecting itself to an other to
which it must answer, and the specific objects we encounter in our en-
gagement with the “absolute” values of truth, beauty, and goodness are
simply the revelation of way in which we as sophisticated, habituated
bodies have come to develop our capacity to encounter the inherent
richness of the determinateness “other.”
This theme of universality, which derives from the inherently public
character of our body as “making contact,” thus raises the issue of inter-
subjectivity, of social and interpersonal life. These issues of intersubjec-
tivity will soon be our explicit focus, for we will see that the issue of
other people is not simply one issue among many, but is rather the issue
that sets the terms for all our dealings. Before addressing the place of
other people in our lives, however, we can study more directly the
constitution of the identity of this habitually elaborated, interpretive
34 Human Experience

body-subject and especially the correlation of this with the establish-

ment of the identity of a determinate world within which this subject is
situated. We can study, in other words, how the development of the
identity of the subject and the development of the identity of the object
are paired processes (and we will go on to see that this development of my
subjectivity-objectivity is inseparable from the development of my in-
volvement with other people and their developing projects of subjectivity-
objectivity).
In our study so far, we have seen that it is our being habituated to de-
veloped modes of behavior that opens up to us the more complex forms
of objective life. We can turn, now, to the phenomena of memory to see
how the past—the habituation—is carried forward and made present in
the form of the object.