Sentio, Ergo Sum

Abstract

Body sensation or corporeality has been proposed by postmodernists since the 80s as the patent recipe, to overcome central problems of epistemology in modern times such as formalistic and mechanistic rationalism, technicism, or reducing everything to an object of measurement, quantification, and conceptualization.¹ Boehm,² Hartmut and Gemot Böhme,³ Hart Nibbrig,⁴ Hoffmann-Axthelm,⁵ Kamper,⁶ zur Lippe,⁷ Manthey,⁸ Mat-tenklott,⁹ Schipperges¹⁰ and others follow the general turn toward the body that was initiated after the second World War, by Merleau-Ponty among others.’ ‘ The main target of criticism is that rationalism, inherited from the Enlightenment, reduces perception to the subjective conditions under which one perceives. The individual richness of the object and the particular set of distinct characteristics looked upon as being unique and ineffable, is and must be left aside in the process of universalization. Perception, if reduced to the subjective conditions, seems to be nothing but self-perception.