Page 94 - Contribution To Phenomenology

THE BODY AS PAN-CULTURAL UNIVERSAL 87

perceptual modes in which we are bodies for ourselves and for others,
but of the epistemological ordering of those perceptual modes. There is
to begin with a recognition of the tactile-kinesthetic mode in which I am
first and foremost a body for myself. Second, there is a recognition of
the visual mode in which I am a body for others and to a more limited
degree, a body for myself. Third, there is a recognition of the fragmented
object body of Western science.
Now the visual body that is perceptually distinct from both my tactile-
kinesthetic body and the body that, with all its tubules, organs, nerve
fibers, and so on, is an object of science, is a body that Valery says
"goes little farther than the view of a surface." As I shaU hope to show,
however, that surface is a compUcated tapestry on and within which two
principal modes of meaning are constituted. On the one hand, our social
relations, like the relations of many social animals, are anchored in our
visual bodies. Because our visual bodies are part of what we are as
animate forms and because animate forms are evolutionary forms of life,
our visual bodies are the ground of an intercorporeal semantics whose
roots run both deep and wide. It is not surprising, then, that that
intercorporeal semantics is foundationally describable in terms of
corporeal archetypes; thus, with respect to humans and to other culture-
bearing creatures, it is a semantics that in the most fundamental sense
is not culturally relative. Moreover because visual bodies are animate
forms and because animate forms are evolutionarily linked in distinctive
ways, it is furthermore not surprising that the intercorporeal semantics
that fundamentally defines our own human social relations defines the
social relations of many extant primate species and by the same token,
necessarily defined the social relations of ancestral hominid species as
well. On the other hand, our visual body is consistently related to our
tactile-kinesthetic body, our first body. Indeed, the underside of the
tapestry is interwoven in fundamental ways with meanings transferred
from the tactile-kinesthetic body. The two bodies are thus coordinated
and in myriad ways, as any close analysis of empathy or close observation
of normally competent adults, growing infants, gymnasts, and choreog-
raphers attest. Tactile-kinesthetic concepts are in consequence open to
visual elaboration; that is, concepts originally formed on the basis of the
tactile-kinesthetic body are—or may be—the spawning ground of visual
concepts—the concept of an edge giving rise to the concept of line, for
example.