The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

I

In the ancient legend of Cupid and Psyche, Venus was jealous of Psyche’s beauty and plotted to punish her by binding her through love to a hideous creature that would appear once Cupid scratched Psyche with his arrow of desire while she slept, so that she would fall in love with the next thing she saw upon awakening. But when Cupid saw her beauty, he was so overwhelmed that he accidentally wounded himself with his own arrow and thus fell deeply in love with her. The tale then describes how Venus unsuccessfully tried to keep Cupid and Psyche apart, which makes a nice allegory for the difficulty of separating the soul from desire. Though this mission may seem as undesirable as it is unlikely to achieve, we should recall that philosophers have frequently embraced it, seeking a therapy from desire. But this tale of desire and soul evokes an equally difficult mission that has been even more central to our philosophical tradition: the separation of Soma from Psyche, of body from soul. Because so many thinkers see the body as the irrepressible source of problematic desires (including erotic ones), we could identify soma with Cupid in this legend. But in another [End Page 205] reading, the soma could be likened to the vile thing with which Psyche (the beautiful soul) was meant to be punished by being bound to and enslaved by it through desire. In any case, since Plato’s Phaedo, one famous definition of philosophy has been learning to die by separating the soul from its troublesome bodily prison that hinders its pursuit of knowledge.

Though we may reject this philosophical project on ontological grounds or axiological grounds, affirming that there is a basic union of body and soul (or of body–mind) and that it is essentially valuable, there remains the problem of how to characterize this union, if not explain it. Even if we regard the union as an ontological given that does not require explanation (in the way that dualist views of body and mind need to explain how such ontologically different entities can be united and smoothly interact in a single self), we still face the philosophical question of how to characterize that aspect of ourselves we call body and how we distinguish it from our mental life so that we can better determine how they are related in the body–mind union.

There is also the question of how to render this union more harmonious and fruitful, how to create better coordination between the mental or psychic aspects of our experience and our somatic functioning. If soma and psyche are indissolubly bound together, how do we treat tensions and malfunctions in their connection and collaboration? Should we try to improve their coordination by raising our mental consciousness of bodily feelings and actions, by thinking through the body more attentively, by developing a heightened, reflective body consciousness? Or does such increased awareness only magnify our problems of coordinated body–mind functioning by distracting us from its goals in the external world of action and leading us to a psychologically unhealthy self-awareness and critical self-examination. If so, how do we reconcile the dangers of somatic self-study with the central philosophical quest for self-knowledge through critical self-scrutiny, without excluding the body from the self?

The articles collected in this special issue were written specifically to address these questions. With one exception, they were first presented (in German) at a conference entitled “Leiblichkeit und Reflexion,” held November 13–14, 2009, at the University of Potsdam, just outside of Berlin.¹ The conference was organized in the framework of a three-year collaborative research grant by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung that was devoted to the topic “Personale Verschränkungen zwischen Körper und Leib. Philosophische Anthropologie und pragmatist Soma Philosophy [End Page 206] im systematischen Vergleich.” This project was directed by Professor Hans-Peter Krüger and me. We hereby thank the Humboldt Stiftung for its generous support of our research (including the translation of the following texts into English), just as we thank the editors of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for publishing them...