Rethinking educationfrom an intersystemic perspective. Between body-object and body-subject

Abstract

Over the centuries, the mind and body relationship has been the subject of numerous reflections, which significantly influenced ways of thinking, designing, and acting education. Undoubtedly, the corporeality philosophical dispositive has significantly contributed to that indissoluble union between the mental and the corporeal, a union that has acquired ever greater credibility in the neuroscientific reinterpretation of this dispositive. One learns by doing, but one does it in the same way by watching others doing it, which has precisely underlined the weakness of those dichotomies that, for centuries, have been at the basis of prevailing philosophical and cultural perspectives. Despite this, however, it seems that new antinomies are coming back to the fore, and that no longer concern the body and mind relationship, but what is established between the body-that-I-have and the body-that-I am. In this sense, having a body seems to be today the (almost univocal) condition to be placed at the center of the identity construction process. Virtual environments are a good example of this, in which corporeality and identity dissolve their bonds. Being or having to be, form or content, appearance or substance are just some of the questions on which pedagogy is called to reflect. And then, if the body has now become a place of crossings and hybridizations - of cultural, scientific and technological changes that now define all around - what spaces does pedagogy have to re-think human training in the light of all this, also in reference to the great impact that the pandemic has had on our way of living and inhabiting contemporaneity?