Embodiment and bodily becoming

The experience of embodiment has been neglected in modern philosophy. Descartes and modern philosophy (e.g. LaMettrie) thought of the body as a machine. This seminar aims to explore classical phenomenological approaches to the body, especially as found in Husserl, Scheler, Stein, Sartre, de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty. Themes covered include Husserl’s conception of phenomenology, the distinction between ‘body’ (Körper) and ‘lived body’ (Leib), the phenomenological approach to sensation, perception, imagination, motility, the feelings and emotions, agency and willing, the experience of flesh (la chair), the experience of others in empathy, the phenomena of intersubjectivity (interaction with other subjects), the body-for-others, and intercorporeality (interaction with other bodies, e.g. the caress).

E-motion Association For Dance Movement Therapy ( …, 2006

One of the most important philosophical movements of the 20th century, Phenomenology began as a theory of 'knowledge'; became later a theory of idealism; and finally "a new method of doing philosophy" (1995, p. 659). As a 'method' one 'brackets' as much as possible one's preconceived expectations and assumptions, and focuses instead on remaining open to immediate experience-or on the appearances of the things themselves, which includes the way in which they appear. Of concern in this paper, (and an important element in Phenomenology), is the qualifying distinction posited between the experience of the 'lived body', and the 'anatomical' body which falls under purely physical description. Edmond Husserl, the official founder of Phenomenology, was interested in developing a science of phenomena, which would help to illuminate how objects present themselves to consciousness. Husserl saw this presenting of objects in consciousness occurring through intentionality, (as did Brentano before him), which is the fundamental action of the mind reaching out to stimuli in order to translate them into its realm of meaningful experience. Due to the multifaceted and complex personal nature of intentionality, the

In this paper I will tackle the question of the naturalisation of phenomenology by addressing one of the most important concerns within phenomenology: the own body. Following Dan Zahavi, my suggestion will be that the reflection of this particular topic, while avoiding reducing the body to mere naturalistic considerations, opens the path for a fruitful dialogue with the natural sciences. I will briefly discuss Husserl’s rejection of naturalism (understood in his time as positivism psychology) and the distinction he presents in Ideas II between Körper, i.e. the body as a physical thing with all the proper features of matter – space, time, extension – and Leib, i.e. the body as lived and sentient. This distinction led Husserl to consider that the body is not a mere object amongst others objects in the world, concluding that the lived body cannot be fully accounted for with the means of the natural sciences alone. I will move to assess Merleau Ponty’s ideas of the own body in his Phenomenology of Perception, in particular by considering his insights on the experienced phenomenological body, offered as a reaction to both mechanistic physiology and behavioural psychology. While mid-twentieth century physiology and behavioural psychology conceive the body as being another object in the world, Merleau-Ponty argues that the lived experience of the own body seems to escape a mere scientific treatment. Indeed, for Merleau-Ponty, the own body presents itself as having an ambiguous existence in which we do not have bodies, we are bodies, i.e. we are embodied beings. Given that our bodies present physiological and psychological events related in such a way that there can never be one without the other, our bodies are not merely objects, but subjects, they are the subjects of perception, our access to the world. Thus, our lived experience reveals our ambiguous existence inasmuch as we are simultaneously subject and object, first person and third person. Notwithstanding this objection to naturalism, i.e. to reducing the own body to an object among other objects, Merleau-Ponty is far from criticising science per se. Indeed, he established an open dialogue with the psychological and physiological findings of his time. This critical engagement with psychology and neurology is disclosed by his analysis of the phantom limb and the clinical case of Schneider’s motor disorder, among others. In a similar fashion, phenomenologist Dan Zahavi has of late offered an analysis of the possibility of a naturalisation of phenomenology focusing on the lived body. One possible way Zahavi conceives of a naturalisation of phenomenology is by establishing a fruitful dialogue between phenomenology and the natural sciences, where both disciplines inform, contribute, and challenge each other. As a result of this proposal, for example, Zahavi suggests comparing neuropsychological descriptions of body-awareness disorders to phenomenological descriptions of the lived body presented in both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Hence, following some traditional phenomenologists, one could argue for the naturalisation of phenomenology as long as one understands this as creating a dialogue with the natural sciences, without reducing the ‘phenomenon’ to scientific explananda.

Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2020

The aim of this essay is to flesh out the body subject in ways anchored in Husserlian phenomenology. In accordance with this aim, it begins with clarifications essential to veridical phenomenological accounts of experience. The specific Husserlian insights that follow these clarifications are grounded in experienced realities of animate nature, a nature Husserl consistently describes in terms of an animate organism, a subject body. The ensuing two sections show how and why various descriptions and claims of contemporary phenomenologists, descriptions and claims commonly anchored in Merleau-Ponty's writings on the body, fail to elucidate this body subject, and how and why, in bypassing Husserlian insights, the descriptions and claims are phenomenologically wayward.

Analecta Husserliana

In recent years, the body and the related notion of embodiment have become pervasive objects of inquiry in numerous disciplines, ranging from cognitive science to philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, cultural anthropology, and so on. This article aims to investigate more closely the characteristics of the notion of 'body' presupposed by these different theories, which often naturalize the body by taking it as a non-gendered, pre-discursive phenomenon, and thus hiding the concrete reality of the many different bodies we all as persons possess, with all their specific social, cultural, and discursive determinations. The body is not an isolated entity, but the result of a complex set of interactions with the environment and with others, where intersubjectivity plays a crucial role. Much research over the last few years has focused on the ways in which the body has inscribed in itself a predisposition to intersubjectivity: this article discusses another, complementary, question: the way in which intersubjectivity itself shapes bodies. Here the body is seen as the result of a process that takes place in a socio-cultural environment and in intimate interaction with others, rather than the starting point for a process that, beginning from the single organism, expands and opens up towards a wider relational world. In this approach, intersubjectivity becomes a semiotic dimension of the social coconstruction and sharing of meaning. All forms of intersubjectivity imply, and at the same time produce, a work of continual interpretation and reinterpretation which lies at the very basis of the peircean concept of semiosis. Finally, to exemplify how intersubjectivity, semiosis, and embodiment intimately intertwine with one another, one particular field of investigation is considered: the very the first stages of human development, where it is shown how the body becomes a semiotic entity: something much more than -and very different from -a purely natural organism.

Studia Phaenomenologica, 2012

Theoria et Historia Scientiarum

Husserl’s phenomenology of the body constantly faces issues of demarcation: between phenomenology and ontology, soul and spirit, consciousness and brain, conditionality and causality. It also shows that dualism is at best a methodological but never an ontological option for the mind-body problem.