Bodily trust as an unquestioning attitude

Sammanfattning

Much of our embodied experience is characterised by an ongoing sense of certainty about our bodily ability. Havi Carel calls this phenomenon bodily certainty (2013), relating it to health and “normal experience”. On Carel’s account bodily certainty is a fundamentally non- propositional bodily feeling and a tacit belief. These concepts each capture important aspects of bodily certainty, but are, I argue, incompatible. Instead, I propose we understand bodily certainty as bodily trust. Following C. Thi Nguyen’s account of trust as an unquestioning attitude (2023), I define bodily trust as an attitude of not questioning that one’s body will continue to function how it has usually done in the past. I suggest that bodily trust allows us to assume the agential integration of our body and cognition, enabling our effective functioning. We thus experience bodily trust when our body’s abilities align with our personal functional norm. I conclude by suggesting that it is this personal norm that makes us relate health to the notion of normality.