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The problem of the body occupies a central place in the concerns of a philosophy of existence. However, is the latter immune from the reproach which is made against practically all theories and opinions which treat of the body, a reproach which must be expressed as follows: The ensemble of problems relative to bodily life and the phenomenon of incarnation have never been raised to the clarity of a concept nor submitted to the jurisdiction of ontology. Outside such jurisdiction, thought can only move in vague and uncertain representations regardless of the permanence of the experience to which these representations refer, regardless of the number and the depth of the moral or religious conceptions which present us with a knowledge of man and his destiny because of the role and the status which they assign to his body. Precisely because we have not previously asked ontology for a rigorous determination of this status, we cannot get a precise notion of the value which we must assign to the interpretations which can stem from true experience, but which are frequently attributable [254] to an insufficient idea of the body (for example, the idea of the objective body) and, consequently, from an idea incapable of playing the role which is almost always and exclusively assigned to it.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-010-1681-0_8

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