Why Nakedness? A Justification of our Inquiry
We live in an aged age where it no longer seems fit to ask innocent questions about experience, as throughout history, these questions have accumulated so many answers, few of which seem attractive to us now, that it seems a waste of effort to write down others that will likely follow the fate of the rest and end also on the eternally burning trash heap of culture. Asking these enduring, original questions has become passé, an activity for amateurs and hobbyists that is simultaneously considered too ambitious and too frivolous for most philosophical professionals. This is perhaps due to these questions’ lack of clear utility and their protean contours, which prevent them from fitting neatly into the rigid language games of contemporary intellectual discourse.
This, I believe, is of tragic significance, as it is only by asking these old questions and coming up with new answers, which are really not new at all and always eventually expire, that we realize our fundamental status as experiential beings whose core faculty is question asking (perception and reflection), not question answering (systemization and construction). Thus, our aim in the following inquiry is not to build something new, create something everlasting, or rise to soaring heights, but rather, to go down, down into that original stuff and bring forth the things everyone already knows but has forgotten. To get to the ideas that live eternally but mostly lie dormant in the mind, and express them in a language understood by our age.
Hence, it is not the condition of naivety but forgetfulness that we seek to remedy. Forgetfulness is a cousin of sleep and humbles all our undertakings, but on some special occasions, it briefly lifts and allows us to accurately survey our surroundings. It leaves us with the gentle but terrible realization that we still reside in the original and inescapable dwelling place where everyone else has dwelt before us and everyone else will dwell after. Here, in good company, our ambitions and actions are softened as we see the overlapping paths laid by previous attempts, and how these all eventually curve back to the question itself.
But we have not even reached the beginning. We have not fully remembered our forgetfulness. The first step toward this state of recollection is asking the question, and the second is attempting to answer it by naming, for ourselves, the amorphous elements that arise in response.
What is nakedness?
To answer such a question in any depth, we must engage in the semi-deviant act of intellectual exhumation – clearing away the matter that has crusted over the original concept. Accordingly, the terminology we employ in our inquiry has been designed specifically for this excavation and will not always conform to common parlance.
Some Considerations
We are looking closely at the concept of nakedness, an English word that has some comparable Western translations. We are analyzing it from a purely western perspective and do not take our claims or findings here to be universal in any way. The final section of this essay will explicitly explore the conceptual contingencies of nakedness, which, if accompanied by further empirical work, could lead to conclusions about the cultural contingency of nakedness. This, however, is beyond the scope of this essay. It is also important to distinguish between, nakedness, which we conceptualize as being necessarily related to psychological and emotional revealment, as apart from nudity, which we conceptualize as a more basic form of mere physical exposure that is not necessarily related to psychological or emotional revealment. Someone can feel naked without necessarily being nude, and conversely, someone can be nude without feeling naked in any meaningful way.
Our journey will resemble a gyre or spiral, covering essentially the same ground repeatedly at a range of different depths. This may be considered unconventional, but is fully intended. We will begin with a general survey of nakedness and its basic elements (Section I). We will then proceed to determine the fundamental relation of nakedness to selfhood and its expression through language (Section II). After surveying these foundations, we will track its more everyday operation and seek to understand how things are enabled to render us naked (Section III). We will conclude by exploring the conceptual contingencies of nakedness, seeking to understand how changes in these fundamental concepts lead to changes in the concept of nakedness itself (Section IV).
Without further ado, let us proceed with the inquiry.
I: The Revealing Nature of Concealment
At the surface level nakedness is the uncovering of the parts of the self which are, or are intended to be, covered. It is the feeling of that which is normally withheld being held out into openness and being perceived. This is a fairly abstract yet simultaneously obvious description, but given the variabilities of the experiences where nakedness can arise, I believe only such a broad initial definition would adequately serve our aims. This is our starting point. The aim of the essay is to refine this definition, uncovering its essential elements and operations.
Nakedness as a phenomenon is most viscerally and clearly understood in reference to the human body. It seems that the dynamic we negotiate in withholding, framing, and displaying certain sites of the body are somehow a microcosmic display of the openness and closedness of our greater self. This is not to say that either one imitates, mimics, or echoes the other; rather, the rule of their correlation seems entirely culturally and historically contingent, related often in ironical and inverted fashions. Still, it is to say that there seems to be some meaningful evocation and connection between the two. The fact that the body reveals something and says something about us indicates that the body is a sign (within language) which has revelatory power. Many would believe that the body possesses an almost immanent power of signification and self-revelation. However, we only need to look to different cultures and history to see that bodily exposure is not essentially self-revealing, a body can be nude, that is, uncovered and unobstructed, but not naked, not taken to reveal anything meaningful about the self. Rather, the body’s current role in contemporary western culture and meaning is a product of the cultural and psychological contingencies particular to this time. As we are situated in the present we will accordingly we will interrogate it for answers about the deeper experience of nakedness, beyond that of mere bodily exposure, seeking to understand how it acquired this privileged ability to reveal, and discovering what we conceal by covering it up.
The salient insight about nakedness that arises from observing the way we interact with our bodies is that nakedness only appears in cases when there is an active dynamic between forces of both concealing and revealing. Nakedness only arises with things that are covered up or concealed and then revealed or exposed. Something that is assumed by others to be displayed, consentingly displayed, and then perceived is not naked, it is merely a form of standard presence. In contrast, nakedness only appears to arise in the contexts of things that are known to be in existence but are expected to be withheld, unrepresented or covered up.
What then is the significance of this covering up or withholding? What is worth being withheld?
The only things worth being withheld are those that are meaningful and revealing. The only reason for us to cover them up is because we do not like, or rather, do not have control over what they say and when they say it. To put it succinctly, things that can be naked are those that are normally withheld, and we withhold them because they are revelatory. A fundamental and evocative paradox consists in this fact: that the act and decision of concealing is ultimately revealing, as the concealing of a thing says that a thing is meaningful and must be concealed. If the thing were not concealed then it would not be perceived to be revealing or meaningful.
Concealment is hence revealing.
It is in this tension and paradoxical causal relationship between concealment and revealment that the experience of nakedness lies bound. The body operates in culture today as one of these signs that needs to be covered up due to its ability to reveal us to others. Yet as we established earlier, there is nothing inherently revealing about the body itself, and rather, it has only acquired meaning due to its ability to reveal the self. This poses a larger question: Why do we conceal and withhold the self?
II. Language and Selfhood
We hope to understand our proclivity to conceal the self from others, in order to do this, we must first unearth the qualities of the self that impel us to conceal it. Establishing this will then allow us to articulate how the self interacts with language, which is necessary as language is the medium through which all revealing and concealing occurs.
The ultimate subject of nakedness is the self. The self being the psycho-spiritual dwelling place of unmediated awareness, that is, of complete presence. A pure embodiment of the self means awareness is aware of itself and therefore the world directly, not caught up in representations (concepts, images) of itself and the world. When I say ‘caught up’, I mean mistakenly reifying concepts as actually there and thus forgetting the representational nature of representations – mistaking our particular mental images and representations of things as things themselves. A pure embodiment of the self can therefore be described as contact with being’s all-encompassing, simple, always-already-here-ness, with no separation between self and world, subject and object. Individuals rarely, if ever, embody this pure state of selfhood and interact with being in this unmediated way. Far more common is a significantly diluted embodiment of the self, where we are less aware of our own awareness, which leads us to mistake concepts as being real, not representations of the real.
Concepts tell us what particular experiences mean, and as such, provide us with a degree of power over being through the technique of interpretation. Interpretation enables us to categorize and name being, providing us with explanatory and predictive power over being. This, at least in theory, provides us with a means to be less conditioned by experience, and exercise greater agency over our actions. Concepts hence dilute the intensity of self-hood through mediating being, and as such, provide us with a means to get outside of our own experience. Understandably, when we lack or shed these concepts that provide us with power over being, and embody the self in a more pure form, we feel vulnerable, and experience is felt as more intense and uncertain. It is this fundamental association of the openness of selfhood with vulnerability, intensity and powerlessness that makes the self a thing to protect from others through concealment and only engage in carefully ourselves. We resist exposing our totally open selves to others who might harm us, since in that state we lack the concepts needed to defend ourselves or retaliate. We don’t want others knowing or seeing us as we ‘actually are’ because many of us believe that our authentic selves represent us at our most vulnerable. The qualities of vulnerability and powerlessness are the fundamental elements of the self that impels us to withhold it from others and the world.
Our experience of selfhood is highly individual. It is believed that I can only experience the world as my self and you as yours, that I cannot see the world through anyone else’s eyes but my own. In order to overcome this divide, we learn and adopt others’ concepts, which are, as we established earlier, the interpretative systems and frameworks through which we engage with being. Adopting others’ conceptual frameworks allows us to approximate and share in others’ experiences. By adopting others’ interpretative systems of experiencing, I am able to get closer to others’ experience of the world. This process of assimilating the way you see the world to another is the process of getting closer to someone and is a fundamental element in the broader experience of friendship, fellowship, and intimacy. This is a negotiated and controlled process where selves approach gradually.
Concepts, through language, are hence the mediator of being and selfhood. Language is any medium (a thing between selves) that is understood to and intends to mean; hence, meaning is essential to language. Under this definition, it is important to note that language is not necessarily conceptual, as there are significant repositories of meaning that cannot be expressed through concepts. The body, as we’ve spoken about it thus far, is one of these non-conceptual signs, as it is deeply meaningful, but it’s self-revelatory power is not expressed through concepts. Concepts are only that small part of language which names parts of being according to the appearance of consistent sets of qualities, and bundles these sets of qualities under distinct names, which fall into logically ordered categories. Forming concepts provides people with a degree of explanatory, predictive, and deductive power over being.
Now that we understand how the self is more commonly revealed in the gradual process of friendship and communion, the distinctive element of nakedness comes into view, that being, the suddenness and magnitude of exposure of the self to others.
These two types of revealment are naturally practiced together in experience, as the adoption of others’ interpretative systems allows selves to gradually approach each other and creates the safety needed for people to feel comfortable revealing themselves in greater proportion – undertaken through the exposure and perception of the body. In many contemporary cultures, the body is the fundamental sign which often reveals too much about the self and forces us to suppress its semantic power through concealment until we feel safe knowing that others actually want to ‘see’ us, and know that we will not be harmed by their interpretive conceptual systems.
Now that we understand the self and its relation to others through language a little better, we can formulate a closer definition of nakedness: nakedness is the rapid advance of others towards the self, engendered through language of extreme revelatory potency. Having gotten a grasp on the fundamental operation of nakedness in regards to the self and language, we go up towards the surface of experience and ask the question: How has the body acquired the power of self-revelation, and how does it reveal us?
III. How We Are Revealed
The most common experiences of nakedness concern the exposure of the body. This is because today the body is taken to be a deeply powerful, self-revealing sign. It is one of the key signs that signifies and reveals too much of us, and as such, needs to be concealed. Notice that bodily exposure lacks clear conceptual content or signification, it does not provide us with a conceptual means to calculate the qualities of an other’s self but rather simply radiates meaning similar to instrumental music or abstract art which is then interpreted through concepts. Let us not be shy about the particulars, the body parts that engender this feeling most potently are the vagina, penis, nipples and anus. But how do these sites actually reveal us? How do they enable others to rapidly advance upon the self and create a moment of total exposure?
Similar to the body as a whole, these sites are what we might call, non-conceptual signs —they don’t communicate through concepts but rather radiate meaning about us to others. These sites are also physiological gateways with the function of mediating between inside and outside, ejecting substances from the body’s interior to its exterior environment.
Their status as physiological gateways is indicative of the body’s interior, and as such, the perception of these body parts enables us to get a sense of other’s physiological insides. Through cultural processes, this physiological interior-exterior relationship has acquired additional layers of meaning. I argue that in our cultural context, the physiological ‘inside’ has come to signify the inner psycho-spiritual self in its entirety. Consequently, perceiving these body parts hence enables one to see ‘inside’ of others psycho-spiritually and perceive an other’s complete self.
This transformation is significant because it fundamentally alters how we approach others. Rather than the gradual, negotiated process of getting to know someone’s inner self—which normally occurs along a continuum of increasing intimacy—the exposure of these bodily thresholds creates an almost instantaneous sense of complete exposure. The act of covering and uncovering of these sites therefore compresses what would typically be a gradual process of revealment into a single moment of total exposure. Through this compression, a rigid binary replaces the natural continuum: we experience either complete self-exposure and openness and complete self-concealment and closedness.
Given the perceived hostility of the outside world and our sense of inner vulnerability, we are culturally conditioned to conceal these parts of ourselves except in carefully controlled circumstances.
However, to be clear, these sites’ power to engender nakedness is not inherent or ‘natural’, their operation as thresholds does not necessitate self-revelation or the compression of proximity, but rather, they have accumulated these meanings and functions within this particular cultural and historical context. The reasons ‘why’ these sites hold such potency are over-determined, resulting from complex historical developments that cannot be fully traced within the scope of this essay.
There are other biological factors at play that increase the revealing nature of these body parts, but these too are insufficient to claim that these sites are the ‘universal’ locations of nakedness. One such important biological consideration is that these sites register sexual arousal more so than others and as such are erotically stimulative/suggestive, and are hence, in a very basic sense, psychologically revealing. The implication of this is that it is in people’s interest to conceal them to prevent other people from perceiving their arousal if it is not mutual or otherwise deemed inappropriate. However, this additional function of indicating arousal is also not sufficient evidence to argue that these body parts universally engender nakedness. If this naturalistic definition of the sites of nakedness was true, then firstly, we would expect to see these parts of the body covered in all cultures, which they very clearly are not (we will explore the implications of historico-cultural contingency of nakedness in the final section of this essay). Secondly, the mouth would necessarily be categorized as one of these sites of nakedness, as the mouth similarly ejects stuff from inside the body to the outside, that being language, the most meaningful and revealing of all substances. Additionally, the mouth is an erogenous zone that registers sexual arousal and is used for a range of sex acts. Yet, the mouth’s perception is not semantically charged with self-revelation like the other areas we explored. So, if these sites are not naturalistically defined then how does a site become a sign that is deeply self-revealing and render us naked?
In the absence of solid anthropological and historical evidence that would enable us to construct a genealogy of nakedness backwards from the body parts which currently do have this power, we will do the opposite: conduct a thought experiment where we will hypothesize a future in which a body part that could have this power but doesn’t (i.e. the mouth) gains it. This will hopefully reveal the conditions that facilitate a site’s acquisition of self-revelatory semantic power. If we have any luck, we can then cross-reference these conditions to the sites that do have this power to see if there could have been circumstances where these body parts went through the same or similar conditions.
The thought experiment: let us imagine the global pandemic was considerably more drawn out, deadly, and the evidence of it being air-borne and spread through breathing was accepted by all. In a situation like this, where people genuinely feared for their lives, it is conceivable that mask wearing would become the norm in all public places with almost no exceptions. Masks would only be removed in private, protected places and as such, only people you deeply trusted would be allowed to see and be near your mouth. The sight of a mouth would hence accumulate meaning, it would signify safety, closeness and trust. Similar to the sex organs that hold self-revelatory power today, the mouth’s physiological function as a threshold could also be semantically charged, similarly binarizing the continuum of proximity between the self and other into a concrete inner private – outer public relation, whose perception would suddenly bring others into the inner, private world of the self. It is also conceivable that the amplified connotations of privacy, trust, and safety with mouths would also amplify the mouth’s erogenous qualities and suggestibility, further creating a sense of a more encompassing private-public distinction created by the mere perception of the mouth.
What does this tell us about how things, in this case, body parts, acquire meaning? That environmental constraints appear to precede and enable the semantification (process by which things acquire meaningful) of objects and the body. Once something is taken to mean and reveal, it takes on a life of its own and proceeds to mean even if the environmental constraints are lifted. Once objects are a part of language they are taken and utilized to mean independent of their functional qualities.
While I am not an anthropologist, you could easily envision a similar chain of events leading to the semantification of the body, where climatic or broader environmental constraints create a practical need for bodily covering (warmth, sun protection, insect protection – the examples are numerous). The covered body could then acquire meaning in culture related to when, where, and who the covered parts of the body are revealed to. It would also acquire dynamics power dynamics regarding its control within public and private realms. As long as the perception of the body is taken to mean, and intentionally framed to mean, then its meaning and revealing power will remain. Things can only be de-semantified through language itself; where language is actively used to illustrate that revealing things are not revealing of anything other than their immediate sensual qualities, and hence that their representative quality is purely representational, not actual. Language must be used to illustrate that the object does not refer to anything other than itself, which hence dilutes its meaning and power of signification. Tracking this process illustrates the contextually and culturally contingent nature of how things acquire meaning. We now move on to explicate more thoroughly the implications of this contingency.
IV. The Conceptual Contingency of Nakedness
Our inquiry has revealed that nakedness rests upon the nature and relations between fundamental concepts. These concepts are not uniform in their constitution, their relations to each other, or their function across different groups and cultures. Differences in these concepts could therefore lead to different dynamics and conceptions of nakedness, and in some cases, could lead to nakedness not existing at all. Here we will examine how variability in these fundamental concepts could lead to different expressions of nakedness.
Earlier, we established that nakedness rests on the relations between the self – other – world and inside – outside. Some people have a considerably more porous understanding of the self’s interaction with the world and others, and as such, conceive of the barrier between inside-outside and public-private as less binary. Given that nakedness rests upon the presence and relation of these concepts, we can therefore posit that the experience and existence of nakedness could vary to the extent that people have differing (if existent) conceptions of these fundamental concepts. That is to say, that there could be a correlation between a person’s experience or non-experience of nakedness and their beliefs about the porosity between individuals (relation between the self-other) and the environment (relation between the inside-outside). The implication of this could be that people who do not have as rigid conceptions of the self, world, and others would have a fundamentally different conception of ‘nakedness,’ if one at all. When the self and world are porously connected, no rigid binary can emerge, and no distinction between public and private realms would be made. Consequently, bodily sites would not acquire the status of self-revealing thresholds, which could eliminate the need to cover parts of the body—as there would simply be nothing to conceal. At a deeper level, this porous interconnection between the self, world, and others could mean that everyone inherently participates with others’ selves more directly. This fluid and shared identity would likely mean that the self would not be seen as naturally vulnerable, pathetic, or powerless, which could further reduce the impulse toward concealment. Conversely, people who conceive of the self as distinct and separate from the world and others could be expected to develop stronger complexes of concealment and revealment, hence creating the conditions for an abrupt advancement towards the self through potent language – the essential experience of nakedness. It is important to keep in mind that this brief speculative explication is a theoretical analysis and is not empirically grounded. Let us hold our conclusions here only as initial hypotheses, not concrete answers. Empirical research with people who have different conceptions of these fundamental concepts would be needed to test the above assertions.
Concluding Remarks
The aim of this inquiry was to unearth and articulate the meaning of a common but deep concept that is often overlooked as obvious and/or uninteresting. As such, I wrote this attempting to articulate the essential elements and illustrate the fundamental role it plays in regards to how we view ourselves and others. To do this, I’ve attempted to be phenomenologically descriptive, not moral or normative.
There are two natural next steps for this inquiry: first, to conduct primary empirical research to determine with greater confidence the stability or variance of nakedness across cultures. Second, to utilize this inquiry’s descriptive conceptual findings as foundations for more specific, particular and immediately relevant socio-ethical critiques concerning the role and operation of self-exposure in culture, relating to the representation of the body, gender, colonialism, historiography and marketing to name just a few adjacent areas. The task essentially being, to build on the existing literature and decode the entrenched social issues and power dynamics tied to dynamics of self exposure through history, and formulate coherent moral principles that would lead to more equitable outcomes today.
I ask you to pretend video calling doesn’t exist in this hypothetical world either.