Homer and Plato: Two paradigms of corporal education

Abstract

This work is a kind of review of my PhD Thesis under the same Title. In the thesis I state that the practice body is not physical, unitary, constant and self-conscious, on the contrary, it is fragmented, inconstant and unable to perceive itself as a unit. Fragments and actions are unified by the significant and not by perception. To reach these conclusions, this work analyses corporal practices in Classic and Hellenic Greece and the ones which took place between the Renaissance and the present. This work reviews the periplus of the western thought about the discontinuous multiplicity to the unit and constant; it analyzes the body in Homer and Plato and the relationships that the body unit and fragmentation keep with primary and secondary oratory and writing. This relation was the Socratic gesture that identified the soul with the "inner world" and gave unit to the body. This gesture was preceded by the One's advent and sstrengthened by the Ones platonic identification with the Good. In this context, the Homeric fragmented body is opposed to Plato's unified body not because the former is more natural than the latter or the latter more artificial than the former, or one more genuine or true than the other but as a consequence of the analysis of the structure or oratory and writing