Arendt, The Body, and The Self

09-29-2014

(Featured Image - Inner Self Art Inner self by istarlome)

"Every show of anger, as distinct from the anger I feel, already contains a reflection on it, and it is this reflection that gives the emotion the highly individualized form which is meaningful for all surface phenomena. To show one’s anger is one form of self-presentation: I decide what is fit for appearance."

-- Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (Thinking)

We are standing at a crossroads, forced to make a difficult decision in our lives. Conventional wisdom says, “Don’t think too much and follow your heart.” In other words: no matter how well-calculated and reasoned a possible choice might be, if you feel otherwise, you should take the path to which your heart is pointing. The assumption is that our emotions tell us who we really are, that deep down inside of us there is a true self. In feeling, we sense ourselves. Who is that self? Where does it reside?

Arendt rarely talks about human bodies and/or sex. One of the reasons for the absence of discussions on sex in her work lies in her distinction between the “public” and “private” realms. The former is the space of disclosure through words and deeds, and the latter is that of concealment. Human freedom can be found in the public realm, a principle which cannot be reduced to the law of nature, i.e., the law of causality. If everything is explicable by causality, there is no room for human freedom, which by definition must be spontaneous. By contrast, that which is found the private realm has a close affinity to the cycle of nature. This includes sex and the body. Not surprisingly, those who point out that Arendt lacks a positive treatment of sex and body find her distinction between public and private realms problematic. They argue that she refuses to acknowledge bodily issues as part of public discourse. They also worry about the absence of gender issues from her political discourse.

[caption id="attachment_14470" align="aligncenter" width="551"] The human body (Source: Boston.com)[/caption]

But do we always have to start from sex or the body when we discuss gender? If body determines gender, how can we understand the difference between a gay man and a straight man, or a lesbian and a straight woman? Could it be that the mind determines what we desire? Or do our bodies fundamentally shape our desires?

Additionally, there is a problem in approaching the issue of gender based on sex, as Judith Butler suggests. This has to do with the problem of sex functioning as a norm. Traditionally, sexual differences—male and female—were identified with heterosexuality. The presupposition in this tradition is that sex determines gender, i.e., the heterosexual male and heterosexual female. Thus, sex provides the particular thought framework used to define gender, making sex the norm against which non-heterosexuality can be understood as abnormal. In other words, the way we think about sex intrinsically creates a hindrance to our thinking about gender. Acknowledging that viewpoint, it is important to note that Arendt’s public/private distinction with regards to the biological body does not mean we must remove gender from public discourse. Instead it redirects us to Arendt’s account of feeling as a different way to conceive of gender and gender identity. She writes:

Without the sexual urge, arising out of our reproductive organs, love would not be possible; but while the urge is always the same, how great is the variety in the actual appearances of love! To be sure, one may understand love as the sublimation of sex if only one keeps in mind that there would be nothing that we understand as sex without it, and that without some intervention of the mind, that is, without a deliberate choice between what pleases and what displeases, not even the selection of a sexual partner would be possible.

[caption id="attachment_14471" align="aligncenter" width="551"] Love (Source: Jojopix.com)[/caption]

Arendt doesn’t ask what sex is, nor does she say that sex (the body) determines how sexual desire is oriented. Instead, Arendt says that without love, we cannot understand anything about sex. Arendt points out that our emotions are intrinsically tied to our body. When we are sad, we feel an ache in our chest. When we rejoice, we feel our hearts warm up. While the intensity of emotional experiences and how they are caused varies, human emotions share commonalities across cultures; likewise, we have a common anatomical make-up in terms of our bodies. Emotion without speech remains merely bodily gesture. What makes a particular emotion uniquely mine and marks my individuality from yours is the expression of that emotion. Such expression is a deliberate choice as a result of thinking reflection, which involves speech.

The peculiarity of thinking reflection, as proposed by Arendt, lies in the emphasis on speech. When I reflect, I have a silent dialogue in my mind, a dialogue between me and myself. Thinking and speech are inseparable. Without speech or language, the human person can’t think. But Arendt points out that, first and foremost, speech aims to be heard and understood by others, i.e., to constitute communication. In reflecting on our emotions, we think about how we can communicate with others about our feelings. Also, speech always presupposes communication, so in this process we choose how we want to appear to others, i.e., “self-presentation.” How we appear isn’t the “outward manifestation of an inner disposition.” It is a choice with regards to how we want to be in the community in which we live. (Those who are familiar with Arendt’s works will notice that what she calls “thinking reflection” here is the judgment of taste, a notion which Arendt lays out in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy.)

[caption id="attachment_14472" align="aligncenter" width="551"] Humans (Source: Pam Moore)[/caption]

Whatever one’s physical make-up, social status, and/or gender, we as humans are social beings and, by extension, always live in a community with others. It means that “self-presentation” is a choice as to how one wishes to be viewed as a member of a particular community. Therefore, the criterion for selecting one’s appearance is pleasure, which is rooted in a group of others. We wish our appearance to “fit in” so that our appearance pleases members of the community. That is why Arendt says that our choices are predetermined by culture, “because we wish to please others.” (36) However, she also mentions that we sometimes make choices in order to please ourselves or to set an example, one that “persuade[s] others to be pleased with what pleases us.” Feeling of pleasure is derived from our fundamental desire to be accepted and recognized as who we are by other members of a community.

If a woman, who loves another woman, chooses to express her feeling and thus to appear as such, she chooses to be as a lesbian. Her “self-presentation,” the product of her thoughts, mediates between mind and body and makes her appear as a whole person, a member of a community, who loves another woman. She wishes to be recognized by others as a person who loves another woman. She sees how the community is constructed based on heterosexuality and how non-heterosexual persons are marginalized. She wishes that other members of her community would be able to view how she views the community they share, and she wishes other members could recognize her feeling as valid in the community. Her expression of feeling invites other members of the community to see from her perspective and to examine the community they share. By doing so, her feeling allows her to open up discourses about her gender without reducing herself to sheer sex, a body, as a norm. The self we sense in our feeling suggests that we are communal beings, which means that our sense of existence ultimately and mutually relies on others.

-- Kazue Koishikawa