Body Consciousness in Modern Urban Surroundings: Freerunning and Parkour

Abstract

BREAKING THE LINEOne year ago I came across the online parkour documentary entitled "Breaking the Line" 1 .The edit directed by British traceur Dan Edwardes did not stand out as something exceptional among the whole line of similar productions.Both the level of tricks and technical advancement of the footage fit perfectly into the "medium" category on the scale of industry standards 2 .However, what caught my attention was the narration carried by the author, especially one direct sentence that appealed to me as worth remembering: "We are Cro-Magnon bodies living and operating in a digital world".For me as a philosopher interested in somaesthetics, this short statement brought to life all consequences of the famous body -mind problem and put them in a modern urban context 3 .The fact that functions of our bodies and also their motor skills seem to be adequate to those developed by our ancestors living 30,000 years ago is a striking one.Indeed skeletons of Homo sapiens fossilis found in Cro-Magnon in France were thoroughly investigated many years ago and since that time the so-called "Cro-Magnon Man" is believed to be identical to modern people in an anatomical sense.However, it is also known that those Cro-Magnon people used their bodies in different modes and led their lives according to other patterns than us.It is believed that humans living in this period developed coordinated group hunting techniques, demanding a level of fitness 1 Edwardes Dan, Breaking the Line, a British parkour documentary.2 Traceur is a term that comes from French and is used to define a person who practises parkour.3 Somaestehtics is a sub-discipline of modern aesthetics.It was established by American pragmatist philosopher Richard Shusterman at the end of the 20 th century as a corpus of meliorative studies concerning the matter of body.

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