What can a body do
Over the course of the 20th century, there has been a significant valorization by philosophers of the body and its centrality in ethical and political discourse.
For a long tradition of thought, dating back at least to Plato, the body was considered the prison of the soul, the noblest element of the human being that distinguished them from other animals. According to this perspective, the body was—depending on the nuances of the thought—at the mercy of passions, deceived by the senses, prone to sin, dominated by fallacious and disordered desires. Only the rational soul could guarantee self-governance and access to clear thinking, if not also to the truth. The body was something to be dominated, redeemed, or transcended.
With the modern age, the body began to be the object of scientific study: dissected, classified, measured. Medicine, anatomy, and physiology progressively reduced it to a biological machine. Descartes, while attributing a dual nature to the human being, did not clearly explain how mind and body could interact, hypothesizing a mysterious connection in the pineal gland. In this vision, the body remains a passive instrument, reified, to be managed, studied, or corrected: as often happens in the West, in dichotomies one pole is noble (the soul) and the other problematic (the body).
In his book The Sociology of the Body, David Le Breton traces a genealogy of the modern reduction of the body to an object: from the first anatomical dissections of the Renaissance to contemporary cosmetic surgery interventions, the body is progressively distanced from lived subjectivity until it is transformed into a product to be shaped according to increasingly artificial aesthetic and functional standards. There have been thinkers who, against this background, adopted a different approach. One of them, Spinoza, overcame the soul/body dichotomy, asserting that mind and body are not two different entities but two attributes of a single substance: God or Nature.
In the 20th century, with Husserl, the father of phenomenology, the body returns to the center of philosophical thought. He distinguished between the objective body (Körper) and the lived body (Leib), that is, the body not as an external mass but as the subject of perception, the vehicle of intentionality, the origin of all experience. This line was deepened by Merleau-Ponty, for whom “we do not have a body, but we are a body.” The body is embodied intelligence that inhabits the world even before reflective thought. Far from being merely a biological support or worse, an obstacle to truth and morality, the body is recognized as a central place of human experience, crossroads of ethics, politics, desire, and power.
Many 20th-century thinkers have explored its political and social dimension. Foucault, for example, analyzed the body as the primary space on which power is exercised: the body is shaped, surveilled, trained, and normalized by disciplinary and biopolitical devices; it is not the soul that is imprisoned by the body, but the body that is imprisoned by the soul, the latter being the product of subjectivation and subjugation (assujettissement) processes by power. Foucault paved the way for numerous studies, including those by Judith Butler on gender and sexual identity, which are the outcomes of performative effects of cultural norms that act precisely on the body.
In his recent work Corpo, umano (Body, Human), Vittorio Lingiardi states he inserted a comma in the title to invite us to pause and reflect on what is happening today to bodies; on one side increasingly evanescent in virtual experiences he calls, with a felicitous portmanteau, “onlife”; on the other, objects of aesthetic and media attention and the stage of clinical symptomatology that expresses distress.
Diversity management should—in my opinion—heed Lingiardi’s suggestion and pause to reflect on how to recognize in the workplace the uniqueness of bodies, their histories, the traumas that mark them, their desires, their potential, revisiting the question posed by Deleuze reading Spinoza: What can a body do?