The body in the works of Gejza Vámoš

Abstract

The body can be seen as a point of intersection between Gejza Vámoš’s (1901-1956) areas of interest, encompassing medicine, philosophy and literature. Vámoš transferred knowledge and insights from medicine and philosophy into the field of literature. His materialist and decadent understanding of the body denied the perfection of creation, which was considered rather provocative in Slovak milieu. The body and physicality appeared as themes and motifes of Vámoš’s works; they intervened in the categories of character and plot; they implied social values and moral meanings. Vámoš’s double optics, as a physician and philosopher, brought a different perception of the body: proximity, contact, fragmentation on one side; and distance, objectification and wholeness on the other side. Vámoš’s understanding of the body, manifested in his philosophical and literary works, shows similarities with several concepts (vitalistic, mechanistic and existentialist; the paper also implies a possible inspiration from Jewish mysticism). Vámoš’s views correspond to those varieties of philosophical naturalism that identify reality with the material world (nature), but also admit of higher, non-material levels of reality. His understanding of the body raises moral, legal, and political questions, including the right to life, the right to property, the right over one’s own body, the right to die, and others.

Keywords

• gejza vámoš
• modernism
• naturalism
• jewish thought
• modern jewish mysticism
• body
• physicality