Tasting, Breathing, Eating—Acknowledging Basic Embodied Experience as a Vital Source for Transformation

In this paper I reflect how basic embodied responses and feelings can be an inspiration to get past dominant patterns of thinking that separate the human from the rest of the world. To make my point, I build on the innovative work of Corinne Pelluchon and Eugene Gendlin. Both demonstrate how pre-reflective abilities of the human organism become powerful philosophical entry-points that have transformative ethical and political implications. Some examples will be presented. The first part of this paper is inspired by Pelluchon’s unfolding of the ethical implications of taste and the epistemological implications of compassion, or pity. The second part of the paper elaborates Gendlin’s experiential and co-generative body-environment concept that, among other things, allows to understand hunger as the red thread between body, mind and meaning. On the basis of these approaches, I strive to exemplify the experiencing body as a vital driving force to feel, think and mean beyond powerful cultural constructions inherent in the catastrophic crisis face today.