Pavel Hlavinka

The paper asks the question, whether nakedness embodies a potential wisdom. It deals with two different approaches to the phenomenon of nakedness: the first one rejecting, the second one appreciating the corporeality. The authors show different meanings the various cultures and civilizations attributed to nakedness, e.g. nakedness as a religious symbol of social subordination or belittling or of a specific national dominance . Attention is paid also to the meanings of nakedness in Jainism, where the nakedness is a symbol of non-possessiveness; in Christianity, where the approach to nakedness is ambiguous, in tantrism with its vision of a person with numerous bodies, where the role of nakedness and sexuality is seen in cosmic context. Thus the meaning of nakedness remains multiple, depending on its context and visualization. The authors reject the pornography culture of contemporary society in favor of gymnosophy as the hierophany of the naturalness of nakedness

The paper is an interdisciplinary study, which describes the results of applying phenomenological analysis in Sartre’s analysis of being, as well as the main emphases in Merleau-Ponty’s explorations of body/consciousness problem. It also shows the possibilities of applying the phenomenological approach in psychotherapy, in particular in the logotherapy of Victor Frankl. The author’s intention is to show the relationship between the intentional consciousness with its possibilities and limits and the conception of phenomena, which differs strongly with the respective thinkers. While for Sartre the phenomenon is a means of selfalienation and for Ponty a means of embedding the embodied consciousness, with Frankl the phenomenon is a medium of meaning for the intentional consciousness itself

The paper tries to shed light on the development of the phenomenological thinking of two founding fathers of phenomenology: Brentano and Husserl. Through the criticism of psychologism it approaches the classical modern thesis articulated already by Descartes in his Meditations, namely that our inner being and consciousness are given to us more directly than the being of nature. This psychic/physical dualism as well as holding the psychic independent of its physical environment (i.e. Husserlian preserving a transcendental position), were ever more inconsistent. It was approaching the objectified soul in the same exact way as the nature that paved the way to empirical psychology. Husserl’s aiming at so called “pure psychology”, even though underpinned by the transcendental subjectivity, resulted in the rise of a phenomenological stream, which hoped to justify its claims by recourse to the original encounter of humans with things within the pre-scientific frame of natural world.