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The Body and Individualism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

David Le Breton
David Le Breton*
Affiliation:
Université catholique de l'Ouest, Angers

Extract

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Nothing is more mysterious for man than the substance of his own body. Every society has attempted in its way to give a particular answer to this primary enigma in which man has his roots. Innumerable theories of the body that have followed each other during the course of history or that still coexist today are directly connected to the world views of these different societies. Even more, they are dependent on the conceptions of the person. The modern view of the body, that which anatomo-physiology incarnates, is a direct function of the emergence and development of individualism within the European societies of the Renaissance, especially in the 17th century, that marks a crystallization, very clear at the social level, of this tendency. Moreover, the explosion of the present knowledge of the body that makes anatomophysiology one theory among others, even though it is dominant, denotes another stage in individualism, a yet stronger falling back on the ego: the emergence of a society in which the atomization of individuals has become an important fact, an atomization submitted to or desired, according to the case, which does not appear in contradiction to present research in new ways of socializing, new forms of tribalism and so on, as is clearly indicated by what we agree to call the associative phenomenon. This is a characteristic of societies in which individualism is a structural fact: the development of an infinitely plural and polyphonic character. In these societies, in fact, the initiative is assumed by individuals or groups more than it is in a culture that tends to become a simple formal framework.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 33 , Issue 131 , May 1985 , pp. 24 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 The unrestrained research into other theories of the body, borrowed from the Orient, astrology, a more important esoterism; recourse to traditional forms of healing, that also carry various theories of the body and without rapport with the medical model; disillusion with modem medicine and its somewhat mechanistic view of the body, etc. We will come back to this in more detail.

2 Yves Barel and Michel Maffesoli demonstrate this each in his own way: Yves Barel, La Société du vide, Seuil, Paris, 1983; Michel Maffesoli, L'Ombre de Dionysos, Librairie des Méridiens, Paris, 1983.

3 The associative phenomenon shows the two tendencies of our age when faced with individualism: it illustrates on one hand the crisis of sociability, the rupture of traditional solidarities and on the other hand an aspiration toward contacts with others, a search for sociability but one that is "voluntarist" and passes through mhrough mediations that are at times quite singular.

4 We will see that this is not just a manner of speaking. The Melanesian conceptions of the body never autonomize it as a separate reality.

5 Maurice Leenhardt, Do Kamo, Gallimard, 1947, pp. 54-70.

6 Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage, Plon, Paris, 1962, p. 285.

7 For the importance of individualization in Christianity, see Marcel Mauss, "La Notion de personne", in Sociologie et Anthropologie, PUF, Paris, 1950; Louis Dumont, Essais sur l'individualisme, Seuil, Paris, 1983, pp. 33-67.

8 Emile Durkheim, Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, PUF, Paris 1968, p. 386 et seq.

9 Any conceptual field, whatever its object, contains a certain view of the world and assigns man (if only as a negative) a certain position, especially at the level of the practices he upholds. This is why we can say that certain conceptions (modern medicine, for example) contain an important coefficient of individualism.

10 Jacob Burckhardt, La Civilisation de la Renaissance en Italie, Vol. I, Gonthier, Paris, 1958.

11 The fashion of portraiture began in the 15th century. The promotion of the person was largely that of the face. There would be much to say on this point.

12 Jacob Burckhardt, op. cit., p. 118 et seq.

13 Their collusion in the development of capitalism, as Weber has shown, also found there its point d'entente: an individualist dimension carried to its extreme.

14 Lucien Febvre, Le Problème de l'incroyance au XVIe siècle, Albin Michel, Paris, 1968, p. 404.

15 See Marie Christine Pouchelle, Corps et chirurgie a l'apogée du Moyen-Âge, Flammarion, Paris, 1983, p. 123.

16 Idem, p. 137 et seq.

17 Medicine has never really issued from this dilemma. The usual argument brought against it, rightfully, is that it is interested more in the illness (the reified body) than in the patient (psychosocial unit). On the body-symbol, the anthropologi cal structure of the body, see David Le Breton, Corps et Sociétés, Librairie des Méridiens, 1985.

18 René Descartes, Méditations philosophiques, PUF, Paris, 1970, p. 39.

19 Alexandre Koyré, Du Monde clos à l'univers infini, "Idées", Gallimard, Paris, 1973. It is of course out of the question to develop this radical metamorphosis of the Western view of the world that began in the 17th century and continues to this day, with a larger and larger efficacy, at least on the level of the mastery of nature that is its main objective. We refer to the interesting works of R. Lenoble, G. Gusdorf and A. Koyré, but here we are concerned with the incidences of this change of mind on the social representations of the body.

20 See René Descartes, Discours de la méthode, Garnier-Flammarion, Paris, p. 53, in which Descartes puts the accent on knowledge "that is useful in life". He rejects "the speculative philosophy that is taught in the schools". The engineer would become the support of this useful and productive knowledge.

21 Robert Lenoble, Histoire de l'idée de nature, Albin Michel, Paris, 1969, p. 335. We find similar positions, but applied to political fervor, in Machiavelli, for example. See Max Horkheimer, La Philosophie bourgeoise de l'histoire, Payot, Paris.

22 Lucien Febvre, op. cit., p. 406.

23 This change in indices of individuality with regard to a group does not affect the common people who remain faithful to their traditions. Their view of the body, for example, is not isolated from the nature that gives it its rhythms.

24 David Le Breton, "Aux sources de la violence institutionnelle: le corps et la philosophie cartésienne", Corps et langage, n. 4, Strasbourg, 1982.

25 We know the importance it assigns to the body. See Mikhaïl Bakhtine, L'Oeuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen-Âge et à la Renaissance, Gallimard, Paris, 1970. Two opposing views of the body were then polarized: one that exalted, the other that deprecated it and kept it at a distance.

26 On this idea, see David Le Breton, "L'Effacement ritualisé du corps", Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, Vol. LXXVII, 1984; and Corps et Société, op. cit.

27 This is not the only one, of course; the manipulation of culture is indissolubly linked to the rise of middle class values, to the progressive extension of its ethos toward other social groups drawn into its orbit as it came to dominate economic rapports and increased productive forces. See Norbert Elias, La Civilisation des moeurs, Calmann-Lévy, Paris.

28 Descartes, op. cit., p. 206.

29 Descartes, Traité de l'homme, Garnier, Paris, 1963 (or in Discours de la méthode). "Every body is a machine and machines built by the divine artisan are the best arranged, without however ceasing to be machines. There is not, to consider only the body, any difference in principle between man-made machines and the living bodies created by God. There is only a difference in improvement and complexity" (p. 102).

30 Giséla Pankow, L'Homme et sa psychose, Aubin, Paris, 1969; Structure familiale et psychose, Aubier, Paris, 1977.

31 The intolerance of official medicine with regard to folk knowledge of the body, healing, etc., has widened the gulf between these two views of the world, since the essence of the debate is the conflict between two systems of intelligibility of the body.

32 We took up this question in Corps et Sociétés, op. cit. We will return to it in more depth in other contributions.

33 Georges Balandier, Sens et puissance, PUF, Collection "Quadrige", Paris, 1981, p. 7.

34 See the essential studies by Jean Baudrillard.

35 A modem avatar of the centuries-old conflict between popular knowledge and the savant culture that claims the sole legitimacy.

36 Georges Balandier, Sens et Puissance, op. cit., p. 109.

37 For a fuller description of traditional knowledge of the body, see Françoise Loux, Le Corps dans la société traditionnelle, Berger-Levrault, Paris, 1979; under the direction of Françoise Loux, "Penseurs de secrets et de douleurs", Autrement, n. 15, 1978.