The Sojourning Animal: An Anthropology of Detachment and Attunement

This dissertation develops a constructive and interdisciplinary reformulation of the classical Christian account of the human as a sojourner in this world for whom being at home in the world is a complex task. I characterize this sojourning condition as the way of being an embodied animal distinctive of the human. I focus primarily on the unique human mode of embodiment from which arises the need for the development of cognitional, sensorimotor, and affective habitus. I offer what I call a “biological-metaphysical” account of habitus as the means by which the human comes to inhabit or be at home in both its body and its correlate “umwelt” or “lifeworld.” The task of being at home in the world therefore has as its correlate the task of being at home in the body. My account of this twofold inhabiting draws from three main sources: the ecological biology of Jakob von Uexküll, the philosophical anthropology of Helmuth Plessner, and the metaphysics of habitus developed by Thomas Aquinas. By developing a 'biological-metaphysical' account of habitus in relation to the unique form of human embodiment, this project also provides a theoretical framework for further theological engagements with social theory and the social sciences that do not bypass the life sciences.