Bodies and embodiments

I’ve been thinking about bodies. Well, not just like that, but you know, things like rationality, reason, truth, universalism, culture and their relation to the flesh.

For the cultural relativist, the fact of individuals’ embodiment by culture and history makes appeals to reason, universalism and truth untenable: individuals are solely moulded by these external forces, passive recipients of the diktats of their environment. They adopt the latter element of Marx’s phrase from the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte – ‘ [...] they make it in present circumstances, given and inherited. Tradition from all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.’ – yet ignore its former assertion: ‘Men make their own history […] .’

Because individuals are unable to step out of their own (historical and cultural) skins, because language is said, like an over-zealous, if slightly clumsy, lover, to go ‘all the way down’, we can never attain that God’s-eye position of pure reason. Truth is diminished to the status of incommensurable ‘truths’, conversations that may possess coherence within a specific culture, but have no necessary relation to the external world or humanity. So in this sense they seem to take the bodies’ embodiment in culture and history seriously.

Yet this doesn’t necessarily refute the idea of reason and truth. Bodies don’t necessarily restrict comprehension of the world, but enhance our understanding. The relativist can’t quite get over the limitations of pure reason, so diminish the possibility of any reason, of any thought process that engages with, and seeks to understand the world. Simon Blackburn notes this in Truth, A Guide for the Perplexed:

What we talk about is intimately involved in our doings…. We are not ‘stepping outside our own skins’ as we say these things, we are staying firmly inside them, but secure in our explanations of our own doings. If Baudrillard’s contemporaries saw the bombs as real, this is not because they were getting above themselves, but because they were prepared to think about where their beliefs came from, and if anyone averts their gaze from such a question this means that they do not acknowledge their embodiment in the world at all.
(Simon Blackburn, Truth, A Guide for the Perplexed, 2005, p.171)

But there’s more to this. Thought isn’t only a product of culture – while thought is undoubtedly mediated through cultural forms, it may sometimes express some bodily truth, a truth that may transcend culture and history. Relativists deny this – for them, this form of universalism robs the individual of its culture heritage. While they take cultural embodiment seriously, the material fact of fleshly embodiment seems something of a different matter. The material body is robbed of its agency, it is unable to free itself from the determinations of culture - the body appears powerless against these dark forces at work.

Then the relativist denies the universality of rights – if individuals are solely shaped by culture, rights only exist when groups assert their existence: there is nothing external to culture we could look to in providing a foundation for universalism. The body, its material existence, the possibility that some universalism could be based on its very physicality, is discounted. Individuals are not simply seen as cultural producers, but become precisely synonymous with culture. In preserving and respecting actually existing cultures, the relativist asserts his respect for the individual by proxy: by respecting specific cultures. To them, the cultural embodying is the important thing: actual bodies seem all too much of a churlish distraction.