Acting Out of Affections: Embodiment, morality and (post) modernity

This article discusses how the epistemological emphasis given to instrumental reason and cognitive classification (mathesis) during modernity resulted in the disparagement of the role of embodiment in constructions of the moral and spiritual self. I show how the disenchantment and desacralisation of nature which accompanied this shift led to an internalisation of the sources of moral action. I suggest that what is now required is a similar attention to embodiment that the medieval Christian tradition of affective imitation and ritual expression encouraged. Drawing primarily from the work of Durkheim, Bauman, and Mestrovic, I discuss how recent sociological work examines and endorses this need to rediscover the sources of moral and spiritual development in authentic somatic experience.