Meaning and Embodiment : Human Corporeity in Hegels Anthropology

Examines Hegels insights regarding the complexity and significance of embodiment in human life, identity, and experience.

Meaning and Embodiment provides a detailed study of Hegels anthropology to examine the place of corporeity or embodiment in human life, identity, and experience. In Hegels view, to be human means in part to produce ones own spiritual embodiment in culture and habits. Whereas for animals nature only has meaning relative to biological drives, humans experience meaning in a way that transcends these limits, and which allows for aesthetic appreciation of beauty and sublimity, nihilistic feelings of meaninglessness, and the complex and different systems of symbolic speech and action characterizing language and culture. By elucidating the different forms of embodiment, Nicholas Mowad shows how for Hegel we are embodied in several different ways at once: as extended, subject to physical-chemical forces, living, and human. Many difficult problems in philosophy and everyday experience come down to using the right concept of embodiment. Mowad traces Hegels account through the growth and development of the body, gender and racial difference, cycles of sleep and waking, and sensibility and mental illness.