Human Being, Bodily Being

This book seeks to make a contribution to contemporary phenomenological theories of body and subjectivity by studying various classical Indian texts that deal with bodily subjectivity (or the ‘bodiliness’ of being human) in ways that engage with the same concerns as contemporary Western philosophy but have different conceptual starting points. Through studies of four texts from different genres, I argue for a ‘phenomenological ecology’ of bodily subjectivity. An ecology is a continuous and dynamic system of interrelationships between elements, in which the salience accorded to some type of relationship clarifies how the elements it relates are to be identified. The paradigm of ecological phenomenology obviates the need to choose between apparently incompatible perspectives of the human. The delineation of body is arrived at by working back phenomenologically from the entire world of experience, with the acknowledgement that the point of arrival—a conception of what counts as body—is dependent upon the exact motivation for attending to experience, the areas of experience attended to, the genre in which the exploration of experience is expressed, and the expressive tools available to the phenomenologist. As a methodology, it is a pluralistic yet integrated approach to the way experience is attended to and studied, that permits apparently inconsistent intuitions about bodiliness to be explored in novel ways. Rather than seeing particular framings of our experience as in tension with each other, we should see each such framing as playing its own role according to the local descriptive and analytic concern of that text.