The Body: Focal Point of 20th Century Cultural Contradictions

Abstract

The article claims that the changes taking place both factually and attitudinally with respect to the body in the 20th century can be used to exemplify the cultural contradictions that many contemporary critics have been emphasizing. Eight dimensions indicative of these changes in relation to the body are discussed: world (environment), space, time, sexuality, health and sickness, limits of existence (birth and death), growth and aging, and philosophy. An analysis shows that all of the contradictions emerged in part, at least, because of the presence of a technological attitude and its achievements which emphasize (a) a fragmentation of wholes, (b) a manipulative attitude, (c) isolation and explicitness, (d) statistical communities and a quantitative perspective, (e) a refusal of limits and (f) reductionism. The pervasiveness of the attitude that supports such characteristics sharpens all the more clearly that how to study human phenomena in a human way is the crisis of the 20th century.