DA AMBIVALÊNCIA SIMBÓLICA À EQUIVALÊNCIA GERAL: O CORPO EM UMBERTO GALIMBERTI

Abstract

The following work aims to present what Galimberti understands by symbolic ambivalence and general equivalence, with respect specifically to the problem
of the human body. In fact, man was traditionally conceived as a rational animal or as composed of soul and body. However, what means "body" and "soul" remains not cleared up. In the Homeric period, the Greeks did not yet know a unitary term to express these two moments of human reality. It was Plato who solved the multiplicity of terms with which the being of man was expressed in the conceptual unity, forging the concept of soul and body as we still understand them today. For Galimberti, however, what Plato did was to reduce the old symbolic ambivalence with which the Greeks lived their corporeality to the general equivalence provided by the concept. The author then criticizes the consequences and presents the unfolding of this equivalence in Western thought. We will finish the work by presenting the distinction to which the author draws attention between body and organism, defending the relevance of thinking of corporality beyond biological materiality.