Incarnation, Pain, Theology: A Phenomenology of the Body

Abstract

This book intends to present a phenomenological approach to the body. There is no scarcity of phenomenological literature on the body as it has occupied phenomenology almost from its begninng. Already in 1907, Husserl provides lectures where the body is given lengthy treatment which is expanded and revised in his later writings. Helmuth Plessner and Gabriel Marcel also elaborate on phenomenological perspectives on the body from early on. However, the theme of the phenomenology of the body has for good reasons been attached to the name of MerleauPonty. While Merleau-Ponty does not intend to provide a phenomenology of the body as such, but rather a phenomenology of the appearance of the world through the body, his persistent return to the body throughout his authorship, warrants his status. In recent decades phenomenological perspectives on the body have spread to different fields, such as environmental thinking, theology, pedagogics, medical philosophy, and gender studies. Most recently, a new “carnal turn” in continental philosophy has even been heralded.1 Whether we will witness a turn is too early to say, but it will anyway not be completely new since significant works in the field have been produced for more than a hundred years already.