Intimacy

"Why must we have bodies?"

Embodiment is a nasty business, there's no way around it. We're beautifully complex machines, but we also fall apart and are subject to various grossities and pains - basically, there's never any dignity in death, messy always messy. We are the sorts of beings who want to be more than what we are; we want the experience of being to transcend being itself! But our existence entails an existent and we can't help but stay subject to those physical whims. And honestly having a body can be fun. There are certain moments in pleasure (like feeling the sun on your skin) or even pain (like ritual fasting) that although we are reaffirming our being chained to a body, we somehow also feel like we are exactly as we should be; more aware, more alive.

I feel like intimacy is a great example of this tango between body and spirit (by spirit I mean the part of us that feels like we are more than our body). Generally speaking one possesses emotional intimacy and physical intimacy. The dance between the two is a delicate process, with one subsuming the other frequently, what Sartre terms "bad faith." Yet, what is so moving about intimacy itself is not just the fact that it occurs on both phenomenal and nuemenal realms, but that it requires the presence of an other. It is as if somehow through the mediation of another person who appears to me as the absolute mystery that I can still confide and find comfort in, that I am finally wholly myself - in spirit and in body

So, paradoxically we must have bodies so that we can reach beyond ourselves. To discover what is otherwise in a moment of alterity and have it ground us in being in return.