From physical strength to corporal aesthetics: social relantionship transformation impresssed in the body

Abstract

Based on Locke and Rousseau, the aim of the present article is to describe the forms of body understanding in that transitional historical period. Taking into account the unemployment increase in a period of a steady technological development, the human body is seen as occupying a different place from that by which it was characterised in the rising bourgeois society. Both in Locke and Rousseau, body building has an important place in the individual education, since material goods necessary to life produced through physical effort in that time. That is why physical exercise is so important for these authors. Work process transformations, from the beginning of the bourgeois society up to now, show a tendency to replace physical strength by mechanical power and emphasize individual qualities such as body building and aesthetics. This tendency is not limited to the sphere of individual interests, but shows the social demands formed in man’s daily struggles for life. Nowadays, when physical effort becomes more and more unessential and a standardised corporal aesthetics is required by the market it is necessary to rethink the role of education and specially physical education in the individual development and recuperate the historical contents to better understand the forms of struggle for life. Each historical period impresses man’s ideals in his body.