Body – Person – Consciousness
We feel the basic things of life directly as a bodily experience. This goes for pain, hunger, tiredness and depression, as well as joy, vitality and sensual ecstasy. Our bodily consciousness is essentially the consciousness of process. The relevant processes are various. They include, for example, daily rhythms such as waking and sleeping, recurring cycles such as health and illness, or longer-term linear and irreversible processes such as growing, ageing and dying. As conscious and environmentally sensitive organisms, physical process have for us a ‘felt interior’, whereby bodily states (e.g. colour-blindedness, invalidity or being burned out) always have a mental presence and effect: bodily states cannot be attributed to us only externally. Moreover, we know what is it like to be in these states.
This duality and unity of body and consciousness is the subject of extensive theoretical reflection (e.g. the interplay of emotion and cognition in human behaviour, the distinction between the objectively and the subjectively perceived body, the qualia problem and the theory of the psychosomatic) and of extensive practical attempts to self-shape and manipulate human life. To the latter belong, for example, genetic enhancement, anti-aging products, doping, strategies for resilience and self-efficacy, psychotherapeutic interventions, moral autonomy as access to and responsibility for one’s own emotional and behavioural dispositions.
In theoretical and practical terms, it is a matter of our self-understanding, which, on the basis of the familiar unity/distinction between body and consciousness, we essentially conceive as personhood. None of the concepts involved – body, consciousness, person – is unproblematic and uncontroversial. This is obvious when we consider, for example, debates about the criteria for brain death, or about the rights of ownership of and freedom over one’s own body (e.g. self-mutilation, prostitution, abortion, euthanasia), or about traumatic violations of integrity (e.g. war experiences, sexual abuse) and public assaults on persons (e.g. cyber-mobbing, stalking).
Integral concepts of body/consciousness/person also often underlie discussions focusing solely on one of these concepts. This is the case, for example, in discussions about the ‘queerness’ of moral intuitions as specifically human, yet allegedly non-natural cognitive forces, or about the social impact and explicability of collective feelings and collective intentionality, in view of phenomena such as mass-hysteria, hatred and sect-formation. Integral concepts of human existence also operate latently in negotiations over the special dignity or autonomy attributed exclusively to persons and, by extension, negotiations over accusations of speciesism, or over spiritual or theological concepts of the person.
As these examples illustrate, this research area is characterized by broad thematic variety and genuine interdisciplinarity, as well as by social-political, intellectual and personal-existential relevance. Under the title ‘Body – Person – Consciousness’, we want to link up diverse kinds of research project that have chosen to use human-scientific, social scientific and natural-scientific methodologies. The intentional and productive ‘fault-lines’ in the interdisciplinary research in this research core area include: quantitative vs. qualitative research methods (e.g. observation versus participation); descriptive vs. normative dimensions of the categorization of the human body in public space; normality vs. pathologization of the consciousness/the body/the person.
Coordinators
Ulla Kriebernegg, Sonja Rinofner
