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"When I read the 'lines and pages' of a book or when I read in the 'book' and grasp the words and sentences, then we are dealing with physical matters. The book is a body, the pages are sheets of paper, the lines are black marks and physical imprints at certain spots of these papers, etc. Is that what I grasp when I 'see' the book, when I 'read' the book, when I 'see' that what is written is written, and what is said is said? "
One of the unusually sane, though little known, communities in the world is a group of thinkers inspired by the groundbreaking work of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who developed methods for the systematic investigation of the roots of knowing and value in bodily experience.
There are certain people who stand out as important in my own journeys of investigating the implications of bodily experience:
 Elizabeth Behnke, creator of The Study Project in the Phenomenology of the Body. She calls herself a barefoot phenomenologist, living in a hut with a cat and without a car, a jazz violinist, and daily practitioner of Husserlian meditations, Elizabeth has taken on the challenge outlined by Husserl to get back to the things themselves. She has created an extraordinary cross-over network between academic phenomenological studies and practitioners of methods that reveal various regions of bodily experience. She occasionally publishes a newsletter which features book reviews, outstanding essays, and ongoing discussions.
Write her directly at
PO Box 66
Ferndale, WA 98248
360-312-1332
sppb@openaccess.org
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Eugene Gendlin, the creator of Focusing, a method for helping people remain in their own experience of a problem, question, difficulty. . ., long enough so that fresh words come as solutions, instead of rushing to ready-made, ineffective formulations. Here are only two tastes of his many rich investigations of these topics
Beyond Post-Modernism
The Primacy of the Body
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David Kleinberg Levin, author of a magisterial Talmudic series of texts on the profound implications of sorting through the intricacies of bodily experience: The Body's Recollection of Being; The Opening of Vision; The Listening Self.
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Edward Casey, author of several texts on little noticed regions of bodily experience: Getting Back Into Place; Imagining; Remembering; Earth-Mapping.
- Susan Bordo, author of Unbearable Weight; The Male Body.
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