The body is constituted as the totality of its meaningful relations to the world

Evidence

Traditional philosophy has no name for this ‘visibility’, says Merleau-Ponty, so he uses the word ‘flesh’, meaning something much more than a physical substance. Flesh is what we share with the world. ‘It is the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body, of the tangible upon the touching body.’ It is because I am flesh that I move and respond to things while I observe them. It is what makes me ‘follow with my eyes the movements and the contours of the things themselves’. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 744 (#expands, via linked claim)

One result of Bourdieu’s neglect of the manner and process by which a person comes to acquire a habitus is that we lose a sense of how specifi con.. ceptions of the self ( there may be different ones that inhabit the space of a single culture) require diff rent kinds of bodily capacities. In contrast, the Aristotelian notion of habitus forces us to problematize how specifi kinds of bodily practice come to articulate diff rent conceptions of the ethical subject, and how bodily form does not simply express the social structure but also en.. dows the self with particular capacities through which the subject comes to enact the world. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 965 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The body constitutes meaning and marks the limits of interpersonal relations; Flesh names the shared substance linking perceiver and perceived world. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 744; Bodily practice endows subjects with capacities to act in the world — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival…, 965 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• The body constitutes meaning and marks the limits of interpersonal relations #expands (0.85)
• Flesh names the shared substance linking perceiver and perceived world. #expands (0.80) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 744
• Bodily practice endows subjects with capacities to act in the world #expands (0.80) — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 965
• African thought defines the human person as a relation to others, world, and God. #expands (0.75)