In the Western world, the body has been freed from traditional forms of exploitation such as war and manual labor. However, the body now appears to be obsessively bound to some technical-aesthetic principle of efficiency for which those who do not—or, better said, do not manage to—live up to the given standards (in sport, but also sex life, self-care, and fitness) are stigmatized. In order to counterbalance this situational and excessively performative view, at last the body can and should be rediscovered in its felt and lived—rather than physical-anatomical—dimension.
This is not a consequence of the fact that cultural studies want to give up the anatomical-biological level in favor of the sociocultural one (the transition from sex to gender, for instance), rightly focusing on the “pre-objective qualities” of the body (Waldenfels, 2000, 332) that atmospherically pervade our entire existence (say, the male/female difference). Nor does it follow from the collapse of the disembodied conception of the mind (and even of the “brain-in-a-vat”)2 typical of classical cognitive sciences, whose Platonic view disregards the role of the body in the development of cognition: in fact, now the growing conception is that the brain is structured and modeled by the body (not just in an anatomical sense).3
The thesis that “the biological body (what it enables and excludes by its structure, basic posture, and motor capacity) is the body that shapes the way that we perceive and think about the world” (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008, 133) thus has to be hindered: in fact, this enactive role—which is transcendental for every subject/world correlation, rather than a simple screen4—is rather to be ascribed to the felt or lived body. That is, it should be attributed to what—roughly as body-subject5—“is not just a construct composed of limbs and organs, an ensemble of sensations and movements, [but rather] a felt-body which got shaped in an historical sense, whose experiences got settled in its invisible dispositions” (Fuchs, 2008, 57). Now, though it is true that the very contact with the world coincides, following Sartre, with our being already in the world, this being-in needs be understood above all in a felt-bodily sense. This in turn implies the exclusion of whatever view from nowhere, with the proviso that, once again, the world—with the feelings that are immanent to it (atmospheres, as we have seen)—determines our bodily-emotional situation much more than our own feeling can projectively attune the external world.
However, my aim is not to describe, once again, the limits of the naturalist view, bringing up the impossible physiological explanation of Socrates’s choice not to evade (Phaed. 98c ff.), evoking some esoteric technique of bodily auscultation, or even comfortingly giving value to the subtle somatic sensitivity which comes up in adulthood by replacing the early overflowing impulses. Nor is my intention to end up with the cheap triumphal conclusion for which we do not own, but rather we are our body. Such a conclusion, may in fact, sound true, as it refers, from a phenomenological point of view, to an “I,” which does not precede its own relations, but rather appears as a relational pole.6 At the level of the history of ideas, it hints at the somatic inflationism often wished for by the numerous and heterodox antidualistic enclaves of Western epistemology.7 Finally, from a theoretical point of view, it certainly refers to the quasi-thingly and unwittingly transcendental (as regards whatever experience) status of the felt-bodily. Nevertheless, it seems to indulge too much in the supposed incommunicability of life experiences.
Provided that I am not particularly keen on ineffabilism, it is certainly difficult to represent and a fortiori define the felt body, primarily because it’s not a proper thing, not even “of a particular type” (Husserl, 1989, vol. 2, 165). Even more so, if we allow that the questions about its operating nature (what does it do? how does it work? and, above all, what does it feel like to live it?) come before and shrink the role of the third-person theoretical-cognitive ones (what is it? what attributes does it have?).8 For these reasons, it is necessary to provide a more performative, or even exhortative, representation, rather than just a factual one. That is, we need a representation that maximally constrains the action of the causalistic objectivation of its own theme, but is grounded in the very perception of the felt-body, which is completely ignored by natural sciences and fatally reified as soon as it refers to the exposure for-the-others.9 Besides, we need a representation that may overcome both the over-cognitivist one of the “operating body,” and the excessively primitive distinction between body-in-action and body-in-habit, natural body and cultural body.10 Furthermore, such a representation shall neither lean too much towards the yet indispensable “discourse” about the body as a sociocultural construction (à la Foucault or Butler), nor towards those exaggerated virtual perspectives put forward by culturalist constructivism. Rather, it might be appropriate to raise some neophenomenological questions on the way the felt-body—as such, the “medium of the emotional life” (Böhme 2003, 130), which intimately touches and emotionally involves us11—may deliver a self-experience that’s more authentic and certain than the one delivered by the Cartesian cogito, yet in the form of a late and definitely intellectual doubt (“I am already always in the world when I say ‘I’”) (Waldenfels, 2000, 306).
However, such a phenomenological approach needs accurately to be integrated at the ethical and aesthesiological levels in respect to the yet restricted Husserlian ontogenetic approach (passive synthesis). In turn, the phenomenological approach should also precisely describe human involuntary experiences. Surely, it shall include the memory—implicit within, and of, the felt-body—which gives rise to the habitus: otherwise said, that style or melody which grounds the continuity of an individual, as it allows him or her to perform an action with a certain grace, so to speak, in virtue of a tacit and largely analogical knowledge which does not lie within the explicit or autobiographical memory. It rather appears within intrabodily motor figures of a physiognomic kind (consider a musician’s fingering), raised by repeated motor-expressive sensations, which are suggested by things, quasi-things, and environments.12
We’re free to choose what path to follow. We may see the body as a physical and tangible thing among the others (Körper), thus metaphysically and semantically presupposing a Cartesian dualism13 and a third-person perspective,14 be it scientific or commonsensical. Or—as I hold—we may focus on the felt- or lived-body (Leib), thus rehabilitating a word that’s certainly older and partly imbued with a religious connotation: but it is nevertheless continuously invoked throughout the twentieth century (Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, to name a few), also for its critical value against the instrumental reason, as well as for the fact that it refers to something that’s been undoubtedly erased, with even pathological consequences (think of the hypochondria epidemic in the eighteenth century). Such elimination favored the view that the body is something merely physical-anatomical and always somebody else’s, even when it’s one’s own. The body has thus come to be seen as a sort of black box, whose signals need be immediately medicalized and manipulated,15 because they are (or rather, have become) unknown and no longer aligned with the dogma of efficiency.
To be clear: the terminological choice (felt- or lived-body) may sound rough, as the physical body nevertheless entails a form of life (for instance, the nowadays privileged one of narcissism), while the lived-body entails something that’s relatively objectual (were it not, how could we develop a phenomenology out of it?). Yet such understandable hermeneutical scepticism towards the shorter way should not become an alibi for ignoring such a difference. One thing is to speak about the (physical) body in third person, taking advantage of the ex-centric (Plessner) human position in order to privilege what got reified within the medical-naturalistic (physiological, chemical, neuroscientific, and even genetic) perspective and even pathologically derealized (for instance when we associate our own hand to another object). A completely different thing is to speak about the (felt-) body in first person, acknowledging it not just as the objectivation of the will (Schopenhauer), but also as the keystone of a pathic form of the existence,16 which, because of its irreducible destinality and subjectivity, modern daily life tends to erase or technologically manipulate, as it inexorably transforms what is “given” to us into something that’s “fabricated.”17 As we see, this is the only way the felt-body can be considered in its phenomena both as an example of quasi-thing and as the location in which—and thanks to which—we can have an involving experience of every quasi-thing.
Surely, these are two complementary forms of life. A good dialectic between the two is in fact what may prevent psychopathological phenomena—for instance, those that may come along with one’s bodily transformation during puberty.18 Such dialectic also allows for a scientificity that is not heavily alienated, since even mere measurement19 constantly presupposes the lebensweltlich bodiliness, as Husserl’s Krisis notoriously shows. Despite this, of course, the (quasi-thingly) sphere of the felt-body is the only one that’s fully prereflexive, as well as being extended in the lived space—unlike the psyche—and surfaceless,20 but also indivisible—unlike the physical body. In the same way, what is within the body (and always in the pericorporeal space, too) can be felt only through it, yet without any mediation of either the sensory organs or the bodily schemes, as we see. As per the physical body, whose function in history has often been rigidly normative toward the lived-body,21 what’s felt in it is mostly something negative—namely, a burden, fatigue, illness, practical incapability, etc., or because it gets reified by someone else’s glance, be it occasional (the intrusive bystander) or professional (the physician). On the contrary, the physical body is not even noticed whenever a fluid and effective motor spontaneity is prevailing.
In short, the physical body speaks out as soon as it steps back (in a broad sense), whenever the spontaneously ecstatic orientation of the felt-body, as Nullpunkt, is paralyzed or at least made clumsy and comical. The respective perspectives of the two types of body indeed are very different—from the outside or from the inside (Jonas)—as well as radically independent of one another. Yet they are, though in different ways, both representable, granted that the retrospective inquiry about the antepredictive and the preintentional—that is, about a felt-bodily being-near that’s more fundamental than the subject/object distinction—does not entail a necessarily primitivist regression.
As a quasi-thingly coordinate of every other coordinate (be it itself quasi-thingly or not), the lived-body plays the role of an absolute location: it appears multifunctional, as it relates us to ourselves, to the world, and to the other from us. As we learn from the usual difficulties we face when we try to recognize what we felt-bodily sense in the mirror or in a photograph, the external representation of the lived-body appears misleading. It has to be either internal or mediated by some peculiar quasi-thingly experience such as pain (cf. infra 4) or that double sensitive reflexion we have when the (physical but partly also felt-) body is both percipient (touching) and perceived (touched) (Husserl, 1989, vol. 2, 155–156). Or, again, it may be mediated by those involuntary experiences that are fulfilled when one gives in to them, which are so familiar that they look theoretically opaque—consider, for instance, the moment when we fall asleep or are involved in a sexual act. Just as an engaging event makes us unaware that our eyes blink, or grabbing an object may presuppose the vanishing of our hand (citing Merleau-Ponty and Sartre), the prereflexive, proprioceptive sense of the lived-body is a dimension that’s normally not thematized: it’s conceptually vague, yet atmospherically—hence in a quasi-thingly way—pervasive and certain (we may well say that we are “nervous,” while ignoring what the anatomy of nerves properly is!).
Finally, we need not exotically search in the East what can be also found in the West—namely, an anti-dualistic phenomenology (in primis, Schmitz’s) that’s so rigorously accurate as regards the phenomenal-sensible—notoriously already theoretical per se, according to Goethe—that it excludes whatever manipulation and measurement, allowing us to legitimately and provokingly state that the brain is not a phenomenon.
From a neophenomenological point of view, we might therefore say that, unlike the body-thing (which extends within a dimensional and dissectible space, is composed of organs and is delimited within cutaneous boundaries), the lived-body is, as a quasi-thing and as the resonance board of quasi-things, the set of what one feels independently of sensory organs (pain, hunger, thirst, pleasure, vigor, relaxation, etc.). Furthermore, we can perceive it in our own surroundings, to the extent that something salient can be embodied (and disposed of),22 as in the case of the weather, of the above-mentioned atmospheric feelings and, in general, of the qualia or affordances, whose intermodal analogueness is grounded in existential and felt-bodily resonances.
Let us start with the localization.
When a burning sensation, an itch and so forth seem to indicate the undesired visit of a parasite, the prevailing hand gets swiftly, with no need to look for it in a relative place (defined by position and distance); we locate just as rapidly the place of the sting, although such place is usually not yet recorded into the bodily perceptive schema: that is, it is identified in a place that is no less absolute than that of the hand heading for it. (Schmitz, 2007b, 266)
The first localization, to which we get “guided only by the absolute place of the felt-bodily isle now manifest and by the habitual trajectories of the motor-bodily schema” (Schmitz, 1990, 291), is evidently the absolute one. The second one, which is instead possible only by means of subsequent focalizations of our finger, is relative. As a first rough characterization, this is a communication between two felt-bodily isles (I get back to this later) on the basis of absolute localizations, simply driven by the motor scheme.
The first and most vivid property of the felt-body is that of being a “system concentrically closed around an absolute center, within a space and time whose directions are absolute” (Plessner, 1975, 294). That is, it is based on an absolute spatiality,23 which is surfaceless and not three-dimensional. The reference to a “here” that’s both physical and metaphorical in fact invariably hints to a “point-zero” of the physical and the lived-body, which entails a direction that’s neither perceivable in third-person, nor linkable to the one which leads us to the objects in the world, on pain of falling back to the pathological.24 Such a decentralization is surely necessary for the development of rationality as much as the integration of the pathic with the gnostic is—with a simile, it is like the integration of the landscape with geography.25 If the purpose of this decentralization is to truly identify the subject of this or that bodily movement, as well as to know “what it feels like” to be such a subject, it has to constantly refer to the centric perspective, to an absolute spatiality that’s irreducible to both the allocentric and the egocentric space. Rather, this spatiality is in fact similar to a “spatiality of situation” that’s difficult to observe (Merleau-Ponty, 2005, 115).
In correspondence to the absolute spatiality of the whole felt-body, we can find a similar absolute spatiality in the indivisibly extended felt-bodily motions, as well as their correlated locations (which are first felt-bodily, rather than physical) coexisting with no contradiction whatsoever with the physical-bodily locations in which we can perceive them. Feeling warm (for personal reasons) does not contradict the measurable external cold: this is because warmth, with its absolute spatiality, is perceived within the multiple felt-bodily isles.26 These are voluminous, yet surfaceless quasi-things that we perceive as the sources of our impulses, and which we cannot identify with the many and articulate discrete parts examined within the naturalistic analysis—after all, it is so fine-grained that it would be content only with subatomic particles.
As they incarnate an existential and symbolic salience, which in part is also culturally and historically variable, such isles are relatively stable sometimes (oral cavity, anal zone, chest, back, belly, genitals, soles, etc.), while at other times they can come forward or dissolve on the basis of excitement (itch, palpitation, burst of heat, ache, etc.), or even they can be subsumed in general movements (vigor, prostration, pleasure, uneasiness). On the one hand, at the practical level the felt-bodily isles are concealed by the permanent integration carried out by the perceptive-sensorial bodily scheme, and, at the theoretical one, by the dominant dualistic-psychophysical paradigm. On the other hand, they are perfectly revealed within the strictly phenomenal experience, as Kant himself also acknowledged,27 or within that experiment (be it mental or not) by which we verify what we feel of our own selves and of our surroundings, while leaving the five senses aside.28 It is precisely in this context that, for instance, our chest, inasmuch as it is the felt-bodily isle dedicated to the perception of the emotional involvement, becomes other than the organs thereby located (a fortiori from the cells, the genes, the chromosomes, the atoms, etc.). Or, again, it is in such a context that our head, which we in fact perceive as busy (actualized) when we think in a particularly intense manner, becomes other than the brain anatomically understood. And finally, when we say that we feel butterflies in it when we are in love, the stomach becomes other than the stomach as an organ. And so on, and so forth.
The difficult representability of the lived-body also pervades—even more so—the quasi-thingly felt-bodily isles. It is probably true that a relatively unitary perception of the entire felt-body is possible thanks to some unstable equilibrium between—in Henry Head’s neurophysiological terms, loosely used by Schmitz—epicritic sensibility (well-defined and fine-grained) and protophatic sensibility (diffuse and coarse-grained): otherwise said, between the maximal contraction numbing the felt-bodily isles, and the maximal expansion, which instead melts them by integral dilution. By contrast, as soon as it is felt within its own isles, the felt-body appears as a “vast, profusely articulate landscape, or even [as] as a vast continent” (Schmitz, 1965, 157). It is a landscape which exceeds the physical-cutaneous boundaries so much—as in the case of the phantom limb or the stick of the visually impaired as sensible-experiential extremities—that it cannot be topographically defined, requiring a surrealist representation.29 Or, more simply, it requires a fine-grained phenomenological perception—an autoscopy that’s naïve precisely because it lacks those anatomical and syntactic-ontological biases.30 On such basis we are not even entitled to affirm: “‘I feel my hand,’” because “what is felt, namely the hand, is but the feeling itself. And such a feeling is not even that of an ‘I’ owning the hand like an object; rather it is nothing but the conscious being-the-hand. Such a consciousness is not habitual, though: it has to be practiced” (Böhme, 2003, 120).
In psychology, everyone seems satisfied with the theoretical discourse revolving around the body schema. But the felt-body, spatially absolute and composed of extra-anatomical isles—as a quasi-thingly entity—naturally transcends the body schema, that is, “the three-dimensional image everybody has about himself [and that], although it has come through the senses, it is not a mere perception. There are mental pictures and representations involved in it, but it is not mere representation” (Schilder, 1999, 11).31 It is perceived as natural, as it capitalizes experiences, attitudes and beliefs whose object is the body; and, again, it appears this way because it consolidates at the social level particularly through the others’ objectivizing glance,32 but also because it alleviates the modern epistemic anguish insomuch as it allows us to locate the feeling within some delimited anatomical substrate. However, in the context that interests me, the body schema appears to be a piece of scrap metal. Surely we are reluctant to leave it behind, as it allows us to “cope with” (Schmitz, 1965, 32) the situations we face, but we have to acknowledge that it provides us with only some “cultural” guarantee of the unitary livability of the physical body. Of course its context-independent abstractness cannot be reduced to the associationist approach, which does not put forward any rule for the associations; nor can it be reduced to the holistic-Gestalt one, which does not explain how to reach that totality; nor, again, can it be reduced to the dynamic one, whose pragmatic concretism wouldn’t even explain the possibility of the “as if.”33 But this does not mean that the body schema has that fundamental immediacy of the felt-bodily and emotional feeling, whose disintegration it is an outcome of. Though preferable to the single, reciprocally unrelated mechanisms brought about by means of experimental artifices, it’s still largely insufficient.
Despite the silent, Gestaltically background presence of the felt-bodily feeling, the body schema is subject to huge geographical, historical, and even individual variations. The body hasn’t always been represented as a unity, pace Lacan’s mirror stage,34 nor have all of its parts been attributed with the same meaning (think of the heart and the head, for instance): they have been symbolized in many different ways, based on the gender, on the way to use them (some of them were much more disciplined in more “military” times), and, last but not least, on the way we think they are looked at by others.35 However, it is the historical-cultural permeability of the body schema and its linking function between the “for-me” and the “for-others” (following Merleau-Ponty) that reveals its non-fundamental nature, besides the above-mentioned characteristics as the sensory-organic mediation and the (only relative) localization. One might insist on its not only visual, but also motoric representability, or on its representability as a commitment within the world (see Sartre and Merleau-Ponty); however, this schema presupposes a quasi-thingly and felt-bodily feeling which is prior and more fundamental.
As it is composed of successive representations gained through sight and touch, the body schema represents, say, the foot as a unitary configuration (also semantic) that’s durably localizable. On the other hand, the felt-bodily feeling is able to perceive in it—be it in normal conditions (falling asleep, waking up, sunbathing), pathological conditions (intoxications, phantom limbs,36 etc.) or artificial ones (autogenic training, massages, caresses, unction)37—a peculiar voluminosity, intermittent and vaguely delimited isles, such as the ankle, the malleolus, the sole, etc. Were it a schema of the felt-body,38 the body schema would nevertheless be too late and, besides, it wouldn’t result as explanatory as regards the perception (already present in newborns) of the unity and insular structure of the felt-body, also because it is tied to two non-fundamental forms of spatiality: the local (perceptive body schema) and the directional (motor body schema) ones.39
The “non-observational proprioceptive and kinaesthetic awareness,” too generously attributed to the body schema, together with the intrabodily absoluteness for which “one cannot put one’s hands in front of one’s body since they are part of the body and cannot be put in front of themselves” (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008, 143–144), should therefore be integrated with the pathic qualia provided by the felt-body. Such qualia, at the level of bodily capabilities—which aren’t silent only when they no longer work—are a bit like “the darkness needed in the theatre to show up the performance” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, 115). For instance, could a woman who feels “her body desired and looked at by imperceptible signs, and without even herself looking at those who look at her” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, 245) sense this indiscreet glance, as it points to those anatomical parts which correspond to her own body schema? Or, rather, could she sense it as it points to those felt-bodily isles which, though felt within the movement, she cannot represent any more than a musician could represent the knowledge embodied in his or her own hands?
Even though it’s now hard to conceive or—even more—to represent, the felt-body was probably the norm in the past. In ancient Greece, before the “discovery” of the spirit or mind (citing Bruno Snell), for which the Körper was something “dead” and thus alien to the cosmos, the body was referred to only in the plural form, indicating different limbs or, using my terminology, the various felt-bodily isles.40 The psycho-somatic and therefore dualistic turn (soul/spirit vs. body) can be located in the Odyssey, settled down in the fifth century BC, thanks to Plato and the Stoics, and still lives on. As I have previously mentioned, it has been pedagogically functional so as to assure the human rational domination of both the internal and the external world, while downplaying the role of the involuntary, vital experience and of the bodily-emotional involvement. As soon as feelings got secluded within a fictional internal container (the psyche) and conveniently set against a purely material corporeity, there was no more space for (not only emotional) qualia of the external world and for a dynamic felt-bodily dimension of experience. This dimension, which can be easily revealed in everyone’s life, was compensatively projected onto certain dimensions (nature, God, etc.) that are relatively alien to humankind in itself.41 The result was the correlated felt obligation to associate every experience no longer with a felt-bodily isle, but rather—with little success—with a quantifiable organic-anatomical object medium.
Let me be clear on this: today it makes no sense to speak of the body, pretending to be an ancient Greek, for whom the name “Descartes” means nothing at all.42 However, we can still start a campaign of depsychologization and somatic diversification, which nowadays is counterintuitive and thus genuinely kulturkritisch, as we abandon the suggestive, yet exaggeratingly nihilist Frankfurtian view for which the transformation of the physical body into felt-body (which is by the way impossible43) is but the fascist exaltation of the somatic functionality.44 Against this, it seems worthwhile to mention another “critical” consideration, for which those who don’t reduce a walk to mere movement or the meal to mere calories—hence reducing the body to the dimension of measurement—are the ones who haven’t lost their hope yet. In short, we simply need to rethink in terms of felt-body, following the example of what is accessible without any reflexive self-attributing mediation, most of what we exile into the physical-anatomical and the psychical dimensions.45 This way we’ll be able to bring back to light, also in scientific terms, the vast sphere of naïve experience that was segregated first within the soul (from a religious point of view) and then (from a psychological point of view) within the psyche. And today, it’s once again secluded (from a neuroscientific point of view) within the brain, as it’s subject to hyper-technological manipulations, which are legitimated by likewise hyper-technological perceptions (CAT, NMR, etc.).46 Besides, such a rediscovery has an antisolipsistic value, since the emotional involvement fully includes the felt-bodily communication—namely, that process which embodies47 not just our tools,48 but also all those things whose continuity—which we experience in the pericorporeal space—with the peculiar voluminosity of our felt-body we sense: the car we drive, the bystander we miraculously avoid on the sidewalk, or, as in the two cases I thematize further on (cf. infra chap. 6 and 7), the others’ glance and luminous phenomena.
What we feel by knowing, and what we know by feeling, of the felt-body, including the incorporation of those habitual structures which are irreducible to the mere sum of cognitive acts and discrete actions, is always also a form of expression. However, by saying this I am not dualistically referring to bringing out (maybe even just by means of signs) an already-given interiority that we’re trying to access from the outside, but rather to (literally) an embodied sense that translates into an event.49 But certainly such an expression—understood in the sense of a rigorously non-introspective, non-dualistic phenomenology—invokes an existential ethics that sees the felt-body as a “task,” rather than as a mere datum. That is, an ethics that, depending on how we live it and even in unpleasant moments, reveals the kind of people we are50—an ethics that might suggest not just some conceptual criticism, but above all some new life habits, thus also encouraging change.51
As we can see, the neophenomenological approach goes hand in hand—as it has to, without any illusory purism—with a “pragmatic” philosophy. The purpose is that of integrating the pathic sphere in an antireductionist way, atmospheric feelings included, without seeing it solely as a more plastic development of the fixed animal instinctual system, or as a mimetic resource supported by mirror neurons (which are the grotesque equivalent of handymen nowadays).
From this point of view, the solely theoretical problem of representation definitely sounds reductive compared to the ethical-aesthetical one of how to live our bodily-emotional involvement with what happens, starting from “what it feels like” as we live it. As “the me or the to-me, by means of which I articulate my involvement with the felt-bodily happening, it is even prior to and more fundamental than the notorious ‘I’ of the person” (Böhme, 2008, 156), we learn who we are52 much more from our passing pathic feeling (ethical-aesthetical), from the way we can “expose” ourselves and be correctly heterodetermined—after all, “felt-body” properly means being able to get scared!53—rather than from our actions. The latter have been certainly pathologically overestimated in Modernity, along with the autonomy of the subject.
Our initial question on which body and, as we have seen, which quasi-thingly entity is the specific sounding board of external quasi-things thus appears to be rather intricate. Referring to the body as the “great reason” (Nietzsche), it now suggests a critique toward a civilization whose grounding is the removal of the felt-bodily presence in favor of the physical presence54 together with the privilege of what can be translated into a propositional content. Also, it suggests the valorization of the indispensible naïve knowledge we often find summed up in instructions (“try doing more or less like this!”), which are semantically and functionally rich as much as they are informatively vague—in fact, they cannot be understood (for now?) even by the most perfect artificial intelligence. Furthermore, let us not forget about the ambitious project, though only sketched and a bit too performative and optimistic, of a (practical and theoretical) somaesthetics, understood as “the critical, meliorative study of the experience and use of one’s body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aisthesis) and creative self-fashioning” (Shusterman, 1999, 302).55
Whatever the “alphabet” of the felt-bodiliness we might use56 to explain its peculiar “economy,” the body seems to express a dispositionality, thanks to which subjectivity can act fluently and learn of its own self without any third-person self-attribution. In conclusion, all of this is far from being extraordinary or mystic: it is something that, after all and even though it’s not objectively knowable, we’ve always known. To be fully felt-bodily aware of it, the right “exercise” is often sufficient.57