Re-educating the Body

Abstract

This article means to investigate the philosophical concept of human embodiment in relation to physical education. As human beings not only do we have a body that we can control, but we ‘are’ our body and live embodied in the world, as the German thinker, Helmuth Plessner, puts it in one of his many contributions to the philosophical anthropology of the twentieth century. Elaborating on this concept of human embodiment, the article explores a form of physical re-education that takes as its starting point this aspect of being in the body which has been and is still being underestimated even in the physical educational system. Re-educating the body in this aspect includes becoming more aware of the states, postures and expressions of the body so as to be able to remain connected to the body and to get to know oneself better as being in the body.