2025/01/01 by Rebecca K. Esterson · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Psychology · Arts and Humanities · #Posthumanist Ethics and Activism #Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy #Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism
paper · pdf · doi:10.5840/jpd20262933
openalex publication_date 2025/01/01 · openalex created_date 2026/03/07 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Helen Keller’s 1908 book The World I Live In has not received the recognition it deserves as a work of critical phenomenology. In it, Keller responds to her critics regarding her use of sense-language, reimagines the body as culturally constituted and intersubjective, and posits a theory of metaphor that relies on the inner senses or the correspondence between worlds within and worlds without. Reading against the disability-as-a-problem paradigm, Keller understands her disabilities as revealing of the nature of embodiment and perception generally. Like all humans, she writes, her world is fashioned via the faculties of imagination and sympathy and informed by the embodied experiences of those she encounters in person and in text. This study will read Keller alongside others who consider the phenomenology of the senses, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who rejects the biological model that understands the senses to be a mere decoding, in the body, of external stimuli. Rather, sensation takes place in a complex field of meaning determined by the collaboration of related subjects.