The Ideas of God and Self Within a Phenomenology of Body

Michelle Rebidoux

Were I to give this paper a subtitle, it would be: “Revisiting the metaphor of thebody as house”; and if I were to give it a sub-subtitle, it would be: “The backdoor, the front door, the bedroom, and the hole in the roof.” In the end I decidednot to add these sub-titles, not only for the sake of sheer titular manageability (if Imay put it that way), but also because, in doing so, a certain dualism of body andsoul or spirit1 might be thereby evoked. Of course, the image of the house as ametaphor for the body⎯a house in which the soul or the spirit dwells, in whichperhaps it is even trapped⎯is a familiar one within the Western tradition.Nevertheless, I will be appealing here to the metaphor of the body as a house inthe attempt to articulate an idea of God and of the self from within aphenomenology of the body⎯and in doing so, precisely challenging any suchdualism. To begin with, by “body” I intend the lived body, bound up in some waywith an ipseic phenomenality, itself inseparable from the “sensual” awareness ofitself⎯and, of course, the word “sensual,” or “sensuality,” is what precisely isgoing to be at issue in revisiting the metaphor. Indeed, in the phenomenologicalliterature of recent decades, the word “flesh” is often used to distinguish thisipseic and somehow “sensual” self-awareness from the merely objective bodyappearing in the world, one object among others, capable of being an object, tosome extent, even for the soul or self that “inhabits” it.2 To that extent, if anydualism is to be identified here, it is less that of body and soul or spirit than thatof “lived body” and “objective body” or “body object.”