Date: Sat, 27 Jun 1998 16:22:50 -0500 (CDT) From: Allen.scult-AT-drake.edu (Allen Scult) Subject: Re: Mind & Body, One More Time There are a number of strands of the present conversation I found myself picking up on as I read, but feeling a bit lazy, I just read on, found other strands to think with, and eventually I found myself at the end with nothing written and too many strands to tie together. What to do at this point, but to start yet another! My apologies. What if we begin with the depressed person as a particular embodied subject and "think" that particular embodied subject as what Sartre calls a " singular universal." The following characterization of this concept is from a recent piece in JBSP by Daniel and Homes: as a singular universal, the embodied subject is seen as " a particular project flowing from his particular way of experiencing, reconciling and pusuing his needs and desires in all their contradictions and complexity; and as a universal in the sense of being responsive to and responsible for being an example of someone who was inserted in this particular context."This perspective gives us a way to assess the particular subject's management of his thrownness-now-having become-depression from outside his own emodied subjectivity, while still accounting for his coming-to-be-depressed through his response to his own particular thrown-ness. Responsibility for this response can only be truly assessed from outside the subject, which of course the subject himself is incapable. The perspective of thinking and speaking about the embodied subject as a singular universal also permits a plurality of interpretations of the coming-to-be of his depression and perhaps even a goal-oriented converstaion about how this particular coming to be depressed might be returned to a state ( not the only one to be sure) of well-being. We might call this process "depressed patient as constucted subject," the constuction being done from outside the embodied subject ( thought he might well participate in it) and thereby being able to partake of a mind-body integrity not available to the ambodied subject alone. In a different sense, I think this sort of subject construction from inside-the-oustide is what we do on this list with Heidegger, enlisting his texts in cooperation with our shared efforts at understanding Heidegger. The heidegger we are constructing is a "corporate" product, but as a corporate body, it does not suffer ( necessarily) from the limits of his own ( or any of our) individual embodied subjectivity. And so as Charles taylor says ( quoted in the same piece): A person is a being who can be addressed and who can reply." Thanks, Allen --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005