On the Felt-body & the Skin
Monarch Meds #2
Monarch meds (meditations) is a series where I instinctively select two books and then, in a stroke of serendipity, open each to a random page. Similar to Tarot, I would consider this a kind of “designed chance” experience. The experience of pulling out the deck with the intension of doing a reading is designed, and then the subsequent chance event occurs. The passages chosen by chance are taken delightfully out of context, with the purpose of bridging them (conceptually or otherwise) to hopefully generate something new.
Passage #1
"What we feel by knowing, and what we know by feeling, of the felt-body, including the incorporation of those habitual structures which are irreducible to the mere sum of cognitive acts and discrete actions, is always also a form of expression. However, by saying this I am not dualistically referring to bringing out (maybe even just by means of signs) an already-given interiority that we're trying to access from the outside, but rather to (literally) an embodied sense that translates into an event. But certainly such an expression—understood in the sense of a rigorously non-introspective, non-dualistic phenomenology—invokes an existential ethics that sees the felt-body as a "task," rather than as a mere datum. That is, an ethics that, depending on how we live it and even in unpleasant moments, reveals the kind of people we are—an ethics that might suggest not just some conceptual criticism, but above all some new life habits, thus also encouraging change." (66)
Quasi-Things - The Paradigm of Atmospheres by Tonino Griffero
Passage #2
“It is only recently that some remarkable thermal characteristics of the skin have been discovered. Apparently, the capacity of the skin to both emit and detect radiant (infrared) heat is extraordinarily high, and one would assume that this capacity, since it is so highly developed, was important to survival in the past and may still have a function. Man is well equipped both to send and to receive messages as to his emotional state by means of changes in the skin temperature in various parts of the body. Emotional states are also reflected in changes in the blood supply to different parts of the body.”
The Hidden Dimension by Edward T. Hall
These texts when read conjunctly speaks to universals of the human condition, straddling the realms of physiology and phenomenology to reveal how skin holds threads of emotional, physical, and existential elements. Tonino Griffero, in his passage, is advocating for an understanding of human experience and ethics that is rooted in our embodied existence. He challenges traditional dichotomies between mind and body, internal and external, suggesting that our emotions, expressions, and ethical lives are all interwoven aspects of our being in the world. Edward T. Hall, interested in the skin, portrays the organ for what it really is: not as merely a boundary or shield but as a dynamic interface for communication. He speaks to the skin itself as a living being, sensitive to the ebb and flow of emotional states. This scientific insight into the skin's capacity to emit and detect heat resonates with the Griffero’s idea of the felt-body as an arena of knowledge. Here, the body is not a passive vessel but an active participant in the world, embodying and expressing our being in a way that transcends dualistic conceptions of inside and outside.
This is fascinating when speaking to the concept of what is knowledge and what is knowing. We sometimes conceive of the world as happening to us, like we are in an environment and then our personal, internal senses perceive the world around us, which then impacts our internal states of being. If we think about ourselves like this, we are, in a sense, buying into the dichotomy of inside vs. outside—mind vs. body. We start to believe that the external world is separate from ourselves, and thus knowing it would too happen in an external plane. Perhaps, though, our internal states actually effect the external environment in a kind of collapsed experience—the internal being projects it’s emotional states outward which then literally impacts the exterior world. If that was the case, it would be so that our environment is directly and instantaneously shaped by our internal states, which is then being mirrored back to us. If this were true, then knowing the external world would be no different than knowing our internal world.
The skin, as the largest organ of the human body, serves as a barrier and a bridge, a protective shield against environmental hazards and a sensitive medium through which we interact with the world around us. The skin too serves as a bridge between various disciplines, from biology and physiology to psychology, phenomenology, etc. The skin acts as a sensorial hub, packed with nerves that detect temperature, touch, pain, and pressure. This sensorial capacity of the skin makes it an active participant in our emotional lives as humans. As Hall mentions in the given passage, blushing, for example, reveals how closely our internal states are tied to our skin. Blood and the skin have themselves an emotional bond—our felt-body mediates instantaneously between external environment and internal emotional states, and sends blood to the areas of the body that require more energy. The skin then conveys this information outwardly and instantaneously in ways such as the warmth of a touch—which can convey comfort and affection—while the skin’s coldness can signal withdrawal or disapproval. This, in turn, impacts the external environment in a cycle undergoing a loop between internal and external, occurring simultaneously.
The skin is a great example of challenging the mind-body dichotomy that Griffero is illustrating in his text, as the skin embodies the intersection of the internal and external worlds. It is a site where the self meets the other, where personal experience is externalized and past, ancestral experience is internalized.
In the realm of phenomenology, the skin transcends its biological functions to become a lived experience, a way of being in the world. It is through the skin that we experience touch, one of the most fundamental modes of human connection and understanding. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French phenomenologist, emphasized the body's role in perception and consciousness, suggesting that our consciousness is embodied, and our experiences are rooted in our physical being in the world. In this view, the skin is not just an organ but an existential frontier, where the self and the world, subjectivity and objectivity, are continuously negotiated and defined.
These texts converge in a space which is trying to understand and consider the body as a site where knowledge, feeling, and ethics converge. Our embodied experiences are not just biological phenomena but are imbued with existential significance. This synthesis gives us a deeper understanding of how our physical responses and the phenomenological experience of our bodies are entangled with the fabric of our identity, ethics, and our very mode of being in the world.
If you liked this, you might like this article on Libra, Beauty and Justice where we also discuss the relationship between objective and subject truths, or Monarch Meds #1: Psycho & the Coniunctio