FROM EMBODIEDNESS TO COMMUNITY:RECOGNITION, ALTERITY AND THE EXISTENTIALIST SOCIAL CONSCIENCE
FROM EMBODIEDNESS TO COMMUNITY:RECOGNITION, ALTERITY AND THE EXISTENTIALIST SOCIAL CONSCIENCE

Summary/Abstract: The argument presented in this paper hinges on the abolition or at least rethinking of the public—private distinction as it has already been performed in much of contemporary feminist and “postist” theories. The strong separation of the public from the private sphere has led to the marginalization of various issues—among which the general neglect of an embodied understanding of the world is my prime concern in what follows. I approach these issues from a perspective that can loosely be termed one of “existential phenomenology”. While grouping quite diverse thinkers together under such a rubric in no way does justice to their individual philosophies, the term conveys a shared prioritizing of lived experience. I concentrate on separate stages in the thinking of Jean-Paul Sartre, briefly discussing the contrasting approaches to intersubjective relations and their grounding put forward there. I explore those approaches in connection with those of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Samuel Todes and Emanuel Levinas. The contrasts and parallels that can be drawn between the thoughts of these thinkers regarding the embodied subject and the ways in which intersubjective or social understanding may be reached provide a way of addressing the formation of what I here refer to as an “existentialist social conscience”—and, I would argue, a distinctive approach to the thinking of “community”. My aim is less an exegetic reading of any of these thinkers than the outlining of a way in which communal understanding could be—and on occasion has been—grounded in an existentially-oriented phenomenology or “existentialist” social theory.

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