Ethics and body: the silenced relationship

Abstract

The text, of an essayistic nature, investigates the reasons for the body’s denial or silence in ethics, contextualizing the problem within the Platonic, Cartesian, and Christian tradition and its interpretation of the human being and body-soul double, which prioritizes consciousness of itself and reaffirms ethics rational foundation. From the twentieth century, under the inflow of the philosophical trends of aspiration to life, there begins the revision of the understanding of the body. Then, Shusterman’s thesis that the body’s rejection in ethics is due to its strong fundamental ambiguity is presented and the different expressions of this ambiguity inscribed in the how the body experiences them are analyzed. A unified view of body and mind, as proposed by Espinosa and Damasio, recognizes that consciousness and emotion are not separated and that a consideration of the body is decisive in the care for oneself and in the attention to others. Lastly, it is argued that esthetics can operate in favor of the corporeal in ethics, especially for ethics in education, through the work of emotions and feelings, as ethical decisions consistently evoke experiences that are intellectual, but also emotional, whose basis is corporeal. Literature, because of the esthetic experience it arises, presents special conditions to narrate the complexity involved in the ethical life and to work emotions and feelings, as observed in Hermann Broch’s The death of Virgil .