Philosophy of Mind and Phenomenology

Conceptual and Empirical Approaches

Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Andreas Elpidorou, Walter Hopp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781134516346
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

This volume identifies and develops how philosophy of mind and phenomenology interact in both conceptual and empirically-informed ways. The objective is to demonstrate that phenomenology, as the first-personal study of the contents and structures of our mentality, can provide us with insights into the understanding of the mind and can complement strictly analytical or empirically informed approaches to the study of the mind. Insofar as phenomenology, as the study or science of phenomena, allows the mind to appear, this collection shows how the mind can reappear through a constructive dialogue between different ways—phenomenological, analytical, and empirical—of understanding mentality.

Section II

Embodiment and Sociality

3 Lived Body, Intercorporeality, Intersubjectivity

The Body as a Phenomenological Theme

Dermot Moran

Phenomenological intentional description begins from the living body as subjectively experienced, or, simply, from what Husserl calls “lived experiences” (Erlebnisse) that are always necessarily embodied and subjective, that is to say, first-personal or “egoic” (in Husserlian language). Human consciousness is itself sustained by the pre-reflective and pre-objective unity of the lived body, as Merleau-Ponty points out (1964, 184/1968, 141–42). Embodiment and subjectivity, moreover, are not themes that can be treated fully in isolation from each other or from the wider context of the environing lived world (Husserl’s Lebenswelt or Lebensumwelt; Merleau-Ponty’s monde de vie). Although embodiment is always in each case mine (cf. Heidegger’s Jemeinigkeit), the experience of embodiment is also always already expressive and communicative, intersubjective and intercorporeal, and intimately and seamlessly integrated into and mediating the social and collective cultural and symbolic worlds.

Phenomenology begins from intentionality and the manner in which objects in the experiential field are constituted through intendings that are always sense-giving (sinngebende) or meaning-constituting. Human beings weave their elaborate meaning-constructions around events and experiences that are experienced “naturally.” Husserlian phenomenology in particular examines the manner in which the shared, objective, commonly experienced world that forms the backdrop for all possible experience is co-constituted by embodied intentional subjects cooperating together in meaning-making and who constitute even their own bodies and their selves in intentional interaction with one another (Ineinandersein), shaping and being shaped by their surrounding worlds.

Long before philosophy of mind and cognitive science started to talk of the human mind as extended, embodied, embedded, and enactive, the classical phenomenologists were carefully describing the nature of intersubjective embodied being-in-the-world. This life-world, furthermore, should never be understood objectively or naturalistically as the sum total of “the furniture of the universe” but rather as a set of living enfolding and unfolding contexts and horizons, presences and absences, open to the future and carrying the past. The life-world is through and through historical. Indeed, the temporality and historicality of the body, its facticity, fragility and finitude, its closures and disclosures, are the themes of phenomenological inquiry. As we shall also emphasize in this chapter, the peculiar lived and subjective character of embodiment as understood within phenomenology puts it at a distance from the more naturalistic approaches to the body found in contemporary philosophy of mind (and indeed sometimes imputed to Merleau-Ponty).

The Husserlian phenomenological tradition (in which we shall include Merleau-Ponty) operates with two different and parallel approaches to human embodiment in the world. As Husserl puts it in the Crisis of European Sciences (1954/1970), the human being is both “in the world” and “for the world.” That is to say, the human conscious embodied subject is both an animate organism intimately connected to the organic biosphere, a “child of the world” (Weltkind), as Husserl says, and also a transcendental source of all “meaning and being” (Sinn und Sein). In the Crisis, Husserl calls this the “paradox” or “enigma” (Rätsel) of subjectivity (1954, 3/1970, 5), according to which human subjects must be considered both as transcendental subjects “for the world” as well as embodied subjects objectified “in the world.” All the major phenomenological figures—including Merleau-Ponty, as we shall see—defend this dual role of the human subject that is, as Husserl himself says, a deep paradox, but which also expresses a deep and mysterious truth. The lived body is at the intersection of the transcendental and the empirical (Taipale 2014). It is therefore worth reviewing the phenomenological conception of the body for its extremely rich and still not fully exploited dimension of phenomenological research (for an overview of this area, see Todes 2001 and Welton 1998, 1999).

It is a central claim made by Husserl, Stein, Merleau-Ponty, and other phenomenologists that the lived body (Husserl’s Leib or Leibkörper) is inextricably present in all perception and is an organ of sensation, action, and voluntary movement, although it is rarely noticed in this role “in the natural attitude.” The body, including its sensory, imagistic, and volitional capacities, also plays a role that is only now being made prominent in the phenomenology of cognitive experiences. The lived body plays a central role in the constitution of the physical objects encountered in the environment, in terms of their disclosed profiles, their resistance, visible and tactile surface character, and so on. The lived body also mediates the encounter with others in what phenomenologists, following nineteenth-century German psychology, call Einfühlung, or “empathy” (Moran 2004).

Phenomenology carefully describes this insertion of the body in the world, of embodied being-in-the-world, this “incorporation.” Husserl himself speaks of it as an “en-worlding” (Verweltlichung, see Bruzina 1986, or Mundanisierung, Husserl 1954, 210/1970, 206), and as the “humanization” (Vermenschlichung, Hua XV/1973c, 705; Hua XXXIX/2008, 120) of transcendental subjectivity. Likewise, Sartre in Being and Nothingness (1943/1995) and Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception (1945/1962) both speak of this incorporation as “incarnation” (incarnation) with all the implied resonance of Christian theology, albeit secularized (but see Frank 2014 and Henry 1996). Sometimes, it is suggested that embodiment is not a major theme in the phenomenological writings of Martin Heidegger (see Aho 2009), but his whole effort to describe Dasein”s involvement in the world through care (Sorge), as well as his account of human practical comportment (Verhalten) in a world of pre-given significance, his accounts of Vorhandensein and Zuhandensein, are all ways of expressing embodied being-in-the-world (Dreyfus 1991, Overgaard 2004).

In the past two decades especially, embodiment has also gradually become a central theme in analytic philosophy of mind (Bermudez et al. 1998, Haugeland 1998, Proudfoot 2003, Rowlands 2010, Shapiro 2004), in the philosophy of consciousness and action (Noë 2004, 2010, 2012), in psychology, especially in discussions of the emotions (Prinz 2003), and in the cognitive sciences more generally (Clark 1997, Damasio 1999, Gallese 2014, Thompson and Varela 2000, Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991). Increasingly, it is an emerging theme in the medical humanities (Aho and Aho 2008, Matthews 2007, Svenaeus 2009), as well as in the arts and humanities more generally (Sheets-Johnstone 2009). There is a general concern that the medical sciences have objectified the body such that its subjective and intersubjective comportments are not fully appreciated.

While contemporary philosophical discussions of embodiment (Carman 1999; Dreyfus 1996, 1999) very often acknowledge the importance of the classical phenomenological discussions of the “body-subject” (le corps sujet), as found in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945/1962), and also recognize that Merleau-Ponty drew heavily on Edmund Husserl’s unpublished research notes on the “lived-body” (Leib) and its “embodiment” (Leiblichkeit), especially as found in his Ideas II (Husserl 1952/1989), there is not a widespread understanding of the full depth of phenomenological treatments of the body. In fact, the phenomenological tradition has a very rich heritage of discussions of embodiment and indeed of the relations between bodies. Merleau-Ponty’s intercorporeity (intercorporéité), Sartre’s provocative analyses of the “body for others” (le corps de l’autrui), the “look” (le regard) of others, and the “caress” (la caresse, Sartre 1943/1995), and Levinas’s conception of “the face of the other” (le visage d’autrui, Levinas 1961/1969) have all contributed to a much richer, more sensuous, emotive, and indeed sensual and erotic appreciation of lived embodied experience with other embodied subjects (see also Henry 1975, Leder 1990, Moran and Jensen 2013, Ratcliffe 2008, Strasser 1977, Welton 1999).

Phenomenological explorations of embodiment have also had an enduring impact outside of philosophy, influencing the writings of the neurologist Oliver Sacks (Sacks 1985) or the neuroscientist Francisco Varela (see Thompson and Varela 2000). Phenomenological accounts of the body have also deeply stimulated and influenced feminist discussions (see Butler 1989, Heinämaa 2003, Shildrick and Price 1998, Weiss and Fern Haber 1999, Young 2005), including Judith Butler’s critique of Merleau-Ponty for his alleged privileging of the male heterosexual body and its assumed erotic desire (Butler 1989). Butler praises Merleau-Ponty for recognizing the plasticity of the body and its normative character, but goes on to criticize him for assuming the priority of the heterosexual outlook and the implicit universalization of the male perspective as normatively “natural.”

Feminist discussions of embodiment often take their starting point from critical analyses of the foundational analysis of the female condition in Simone de Beauvoir’s classic The Second Sex (1949, 2009). Although not explicitly a committed phenomenologist in her methodology, Beauvoir draws heavily on phenomenological insights, especially those of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, in discussing the nature of gender and male and female identity in that work (see Deutscher 2008, Heinämaa 2003). As Merleau-Ponty puts it in his Phenomenology of Perception, the body is a “historical idea” rather than picking out a natural kind or species (1962, 170). The body, for Merleau-Ponty, as Judith Butler puts out, is a “place of appropriation” and a mechanism of transformation and conversion (Butler 1989). Although Butler finds fault with a certain assumption in Merleau-Ponty concerning the “natural” aspect of human embodied desire, she approves of his conception of the social constitution of the body.

For phenomenologists in general, indeed gender is “constructed” or “constituted”; that is to say, it is meaning-loaded and shaped by cultural norms and societal practices (including those of the current medical sciences), rather than belonging exclusively to whatever might be construed as “biological” nature (“sex” is used by some theorists to refer to the biological differences between male and female, but see Butler 1990 and 2004, who argues that both sex and gender are discursively constructed; see also Edward S. Casey, “The Ghost of Embodiment: Is the Body a Natural or a Cultural Entity?” in Welton 1998). Phenomenology, however, also recognizes human finitude and frailty.

The starting point of the phenomenology of embodiment is that the body is never simply a physical object or body (Körper) in nature, although it certainly is a natural physical body that is governed by the laws of nature, physics (e.g., gravity), causal interaction with other bodies, and so on. The living organic body is not purely a spatial material object that has its “parts outside of its parts” (partes extra partes), as Merleau-Ponty puts it (1962, 73). As Merleau-Ponty constantly underscores, the body is that which mediates world to the experiencing subject:

My body is the fabric into which all objects are woven (la texture commune de tous les objects), and it is, at least in relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of my “comprehension” (l’instrument general de ma ‘compréhension’). (1945, 272/1962, 235)

The body is indeed an object in space but it is also an object that inhabits space, creates space, defines its place and space. As Merleau-Ponty writes in his wonderful essay dedicated to Husserl, “The Philosopher and His Shadow”:

And yet my body must itself be meshed into the visible world; its power depends precisely on the fact that it has a place from which it sees. Thus it is a thing, but a thing I dwell in. It is, if you wish, on the side of the subject; but it is not a stranger to the locality of things. (1960, 210/1964a, 166)

The body not only is acted upon but also acts. Just think of the different scenarios that unfold between a body falling out of a window or jumping out of a window (as in the horror of the World Trade Center attack). The body domesticates space into place (Casey 1998, Malpas 2012), and indeed orients space from the “zero-point of orientation” (Husserl’s Nullpunkt der Orientierung, Ideas II) of its own body. As Edith Stein writes in On the Problem of Empathy, “bodily space” (Leibraum) and “outer space” (Aussenraum) are completely different from each other (Stein 1917/1989, 43).

Following Fichte and earlier German idealism, the phenomenological tradition—i.e., Husserl, Scheler, Stein, Schutz, and others, e.g., Helmuth Plessner, Ich habe meinen Körper, ich bin mein Leib (Plessner 1981, 1982, 1983)—speaks of the animate, “lived body” (Leib) and distinguishes this from the physical material “body” (Körper). Furthermore, the German term Leib is rendered as la chair or “flesh” in Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and the French tradition generally (indeed Husserl”s favorite adjective to characterize the presence of the object in direct perception, i.e., leibhaftig, “bodily present” is rendered in French as en chair et os, literally: “in flesh and bone”). In fact, it was Sartre who, in Being and Nothingness (1943/1995), first introduced the terminology of “flesh” (la chair) now more usually associated with Merleau-Ponty (1964/1968). For Sartre, flesh is “the pure contingency of presence” (1995, 343). We experience ourselves, Sartre claims, as a living flesh, neither pure thing nor pure consciousness, but as something in between, sui generis, what Merleau-Ponty will speak of as the “monism” of flesh. Husserl will write on a research note written on holidays in St. Margen, Switzerland in 1921: “My body is among all things the closest, the closest in perception, the closest in feeling and will. And so I am, the functioning I, before all other worldly objects united with it [the body] in a special way (Hua XIV/1973b, 58).

Moreover, one’s flesh interacts with and even constitutes the other’s flesh, especially in the acts of touching and caressing as Sartre writes:

The caress reveals the Other’s flesh as flesh to myself and to the Other. But it reveals this flesh in a very special way. To take hold of the Other reveals to her her inertia and her passivity as a transcendence-transcended; but this is not to caress her. In the caress, it is not my body as a synthetic form in action which caresses the Other; it is my body as flesh which causes the Other’s flesh to be born [qui fait naître la chair d’autrui]. (1995, 390)

Sartre in fact offers a phenomenological analysis that distinguishes three different levels of encounter with the body in his famous chapter on “The Body” in Being and Nothingness (see Moran 2010a). There is the body as it is lived and experienced by me. This is, in Sartre’s terminology, the body “for me,” the body as it is existed or lived (le corps-existé). This is equivalent to Husserl’s experience of the body as “governing” (walten) over its organs. The body is experienced under the mode of “I can.” I can move my limbs, I can turn my head, and so on. As Drew Leder puts it, there is the experience of a “tacit command over my body, accomplishing without the slightest difficulty actions I could not begin to comprehend or carry out in a reflective fashion” (Leder 1990, 20). As Merleau-Ponty says, echoing Husserl, my experience is not first and foremost an “I think” but an “I can.”

There is, in Sartre’s provocative analysis, also the body as it is experienced by and for ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• SECTION I Introspection and Phenomenal Consciousness
• SECTION II Embodiment and Sociality
• SECTION III Self-Awareness and Knowledge
• SECTION IV Perception and Dreams
• SECTION V Affectivity
• SECTION VI Naturalism and Cognition
• Contributors
• Index