Abstract

In avatar, Jake Sully struggles with his sense of self at a variety of levels, including the metaphysical. In Plato's and Aristotle's book Philosophy in the Flesh, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson call this shared conjecture the “folk theory of essences.” In Avatar, the presuppositions about personal identity that ground the linkage process between human beings and avatar bodies seems to follow Locke's insights quite faithfully. This way of talking about the essential self challenges the bodyswapping scenarios of John Locke and Avatar, urging us to attend not to far‐fetched thought experiments but instead to our first‐person experience of how mind and body actually interact, our ordinary sense of “what it's like” to be embodied. This approach, known as “existential phenomenology,” offers an alternative to perspectives like Locke's – perspectives. In many ways, the existential phenomenology coincides with Na'vi wisdom.