身体的主体としての人間とは誰のことなのか <研究論文 : 学習開発学の今>

I consider what constitutes the human being as a bodily subject. Against any conception of a subject as embodied only in a contingent or secondary manner, contemporary research in neurosciences, cognitive sciences, psychology, anthropology, philosophy invigorate the view that the body participates constitutively to subjectivity: being a subject requires being a body, inescapably. This voice, however, is heard in various ways and the term ‘body’ ends up holding contrastive meanings. Hence the question: What does constitute bodily subjectivity? Is it neural maps of the body, cognitive representations of the body, conscious experiences of the body, bodily practices? While focusing on the bodily subject, the phenomenological approach mostly pushes materiality in the background－like a reader privileges meaning over its materialization in letters. Such view has thus forcefully and convincingly defended that one’s body is not reducible to mere materiality. It is however just as important to underline that one’s body is just as much irreducible to subjectivity, as it wouldn’t be a body without its materiality. If it is accepted that the subject is bodily, and that the body is material, the question arises, how does materiality participate in subjectivity? To address this question, I consider the structure of self-experience from a phenomenological point of view, and ask: how can the subject be experienced without being reduced to the material body and without being separated from the material body? I propose that bodily self-consciousness goes beyond the skin boundary of the body proper, as it corresponds to the experience of the world as disclosed by the body. At a primary level, self-experience is thus given by the subject’s relation to otherness. I conclude by considering how this view may shed light on the subject’s relation to others, and on the consequences of the rupture and restoration of such intersubjectivity in psychopathological cases.