The Musicality of Being. Embodiment and Temporality in the Development of Selfhood

Drawing on the work of classic phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, my paper aims to show that our subjectivity and our emotional life strictly depend upon two fundamental structures: embodiment and temporality. Thus, I account for embodiment and temporality as fundamental elements for raising self-awareness, intersubjective understanding, and world perception. I argue that musicality characterizes the subject in terms of rhythm, synchrony, and coordination, respectively. In the second part, I apply this account to a specific case study: autism spectrum disorder—the so called high-functioning autism in particular in which I describe the subject’s detachment from the intersubjective world caused by problems in bodily synchrony. This view affirms that autism spectrum condition is characterized by an “interbody-blindness”—a different way of attunement of the intercorporeal, temporal self.