Philosophy of the Body

What is needed is a philosophy of the body. This is not to say a philosophy of matter, or a materialist philosophy. The body is more than matter - encompassing that which is present through the body, the mental, that 'epiphenomenal' which can breach its own boundaries and, overflowing, exercise power over that which gives it birth.

A philosophy of the body, of human physicality, seeks to determine the humanistic aspects of the body; how the body functions in cultures, how physicality can determine and effect (even, affect) our internal and interpersonal realities.

What happens when we scratch this surface? What comes to pass when we open the body for an examination which is transphysical in nature?

In this case the body becomes not just matter, not a concentration of particles, tissue, blood and bone; neither is it a hollow vessel, second to the spirit which moves it. Instead it is the very presence of the internality which exists through it; the medium by which minds interact, through which expression occurs and as which the human being is real. In this case the body is the manifestation of the spirit in action, bloodied, strained and taut or limp, reduced and languid. The body is both unreal and the most real; it's the closest we get to presence of the incorporeal; it's the opaque presentation of the diaphanous, illogically concealing that very - postulated, always postponed - Real which we can never reach.