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Embodiment

Embodiment refers to the perspective that perception, thinking, feelings, desires—the way we behave, experience, and live the world—are contextualized by our being active agents with the particular kind of body human beings possess. The kind of body we have is a necessary precondition for having the kind of behaviors, experiences, and meanings that we have. Embodiment includes the notion that physical structures of the body and their various psychological functions (e.g., perception, thought, emotions, motivation, behavior) depend empirically, or causally, on particular states of our body (e.g., not being able to see with our eyes closed). However, embodiment strongly emphasizes the centrality of the body as a form of lived experience, actively engaged with the world of sociocultural and physical objects. This entry discusses the nature, origin, history, and life-span developmental implications of embodiment.

Embodiment is the affirmation that the lived body plays a central role in understanding life-span psychological development. Embodiment implies that the development of the person cannot be understood in terms of a decontextualized, disengaged organism that simply moves around looking at a preformed world, drawing meaning directly from that world. Embodiment also implies that it is not a set of genes that causes behavior and development, nor an isolated brain, nor an isolated culture. The development of behavior, meaning, and psychological functions (e.g., perception, cognition, emotions, and motivation) all emerge from the fully embodied person actively engaged in a sociocultural and physical world.

Embodiment is a concept of synthesis, a bridge that joins broad areas of inquiry into a unified relational whole. Through embodiment, each focus of inquiry—biological, sociocultural, psychological—becomes a lens or point of view; together these constitute the whole of inquiry into human functioning and development. The body as form references a biological lens; the body as lived experience actively engaged references the psychological or person-centered lens; and the body as actively engaged in and with the world points to a contextual sociocultural and environmental point of view. Recent and continuing developmental and nondevelopment empirical investigations have explored the embodied brain, cognitive embodiment, perceptual embodiment, linguistic embodiment, emotional embodiment, sociocultural and anthropological embodiment, aesthetic embodiment, embodiment of human movement (e.g., performing arts, dance, sports), embodiment and religion, the embodiment of desire, sexual embodiment, and embodied aging.

Embodiment as a Reaction Against the Cartesian-Split-Mechanistic Paradigm

The concept of embodiment arose as a reaction against what came to be termed the Cartesian-Split-Mechanistic research paradigm. Although across the years many others further developed this paradigm, it was the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes who firmly anchored and fleshed out its central features. Descartes began this course in his Meditations I and II by inventing what would become called foundationalism: the idea of a bedrock fixed point where we can attain absolutely certain knowledge. Thus, from the beginning, Descartes would split the world into independent pieces: one constituting a fixed immovable foundational “reality” and the other a derived “appearance of reality.” This split led Descartes to his second splitting of nature, which was the assumption of bodies and minds as disconnected independent, individual substances, each existing in its own right apart from any necessary reference to each other. This is Descartes’ well-known res extensa and res cogitans, an extended substance (body) and an unextended substance (mind): These ideas created a double ontological split; the world appearance–reality split, and the mind–body (subject–object) dualism. Descartes—and all others who have since accepted the Cartesian categories—was then faced with the issue of how to put the individual pieces back together. The favored mechanistic epistemological tool used for this purpose has been reductionism, the principle that mind or subject constitutes mere appearance and ultimately will be explained by body or object (i.e., the real), which, in this paradigm, is mere matter.

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