File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_1998/heidegger.9806, message 116


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




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