THE BODY AS LOGOS OF PERCEPTION

Abstract

This paper advances the thesis that the body cannot
be adequately understood either as a biological object, a symbolic
representation, or a technical carrier of cognitive functions, but rather as
the logos of perception—an ontological and phenomenological principle
through which the world becomes manifest, meaningful, and oriented in
the first place. Drawing on the phenomenological tradition of Husserl,
Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, corporeality is articulated as the structural
condition of appearing, that is, as the medium through which ontological
potentiality passes into concrete, lived reality. The study is directed
toward an analysis of contemporary cultural and techno-philosophical
reductions of the body, in which corporeality is marginalized or replaced
by symbolic, functional, and calculative models of subjectivity. In this
context, the paper develops the idea of the body as a “lost middle term”—
Philological Studies Vol. XXIV, No.1 (2026)
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a mediating structure that links space and orientation, duty and action,
meaning and personal reality. The analysis shows that the disappearance
of the body does not constitute merely an anthropological
impoverishment, but a rupture in the very synthesis that holds the world
together as a phenomenological, moral and historical whole. From a
cultural-studies perspective, the paper traces the genealogy of embodied
forgetfulness, from Platonic dualism, through the transformations of
rationality in Kant and Hegel, to the contemporary calculative and
computational paradigm (Dreyfus, 1977: 221–222). Particular attention is
devoted to the metaphysical diagnoses of Béla Hamvas (Hamvas, 1999:
15–21) and to posthumanism projects that treat corporeality as a
replaceable technical interface.
In contrast to these reductions, the paper turns to Eastern Christian
thought—especially St. Maximus the Confessor and St. Gregory
Palamas—where the body is understood not as a symbol or a secondary
enclosure, but as a real mode of presence grounded in logos and energy.
The aim of the paper is to show that posthumanism interventions into the
body are not merely technical or cultural phenomena, but ontological
interventions into the very condition of appearing, with far-reaching
consequences for the concepts of world, personhood and responsibility