[Michel_Henry]_Philosophy_and_Phenomenology_of_the body

There is no question more urgent for phenomenology than the question of "one's own body" [corps propre], as it has come to be called since Husserl. But neither is there a question that has been more neglected by contemporary phenomenologists. At first sight, this claim seems incongruous given the nearly exponential production in the literature around this topic for more than thirty years, as much in the history of philosophy as in various efforts to cross the phenomenological perspective with contributions from cognitive sciences. The trouble is that this ample literature does not pose any of the preliminary questions relevant to adopting the concept of one's own body or lived-body (Leib) in phenomenology; for the most part, it takes this concept as self-evident and limits itself to considering the ways in which the concept of the lived-body may "fertilize" more positive scientific approaches. The legitimacy of the concept of Leib itself and of its legacy within the phenomenological tradition is never questioned as such.

CPR, 2020

Today the phenomenological concept of the lived body figures centrally in several philosophical and special scientific debates, from the medical sciences to the social and political sciences. Examples of disciplines that use the concept in fruitful new ways include the neurosciences, psychopathology, social psychology, qualitative sociology, political science and critical anthropology. Moreover, the concept also serves several broadly interdisciplinary fields, such as gender studies, race studies, disability studies and nursing studies.

The problem of determination of the limit of conscious and unconscious, in some meaning is adequate to the problem of segregation of rational soul in the structure of internal life. From what does consciousness begin?

In Merleau-Ponty's lectures at the Collège de France, there is a surprizing expression about the body: "machine à vivre", or "machine à voir", that he takes up from the writings of Paul Valéry. This metaphor occurs in the first lectures, when Merleau-Ponty describes the implicit coordination of perception and motility. It is the arrangement, or what he also calls the montage, of our sentient body that defines the meaning of what we perceive, or in other word the "body schema", defined for example in the Résumés as "open to all other bodies that I see, a lexicon of corporeality in general, a system of equivalences between the inside and the outside" (p. 178). This sensing body is also a desiring body, and both these aspects intertwine to form the realm of the unconscious as "sensing itself"; the "primordial unconscious" is this machinic dimension of the body. Merleau-Ponty's approach to the unconscious can be compared and confronted to Lacan's conception under this notion: the automaton, the machine. Such a confrontation should help answering the question of the nature of the unconscious, and thus bridge the gap between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. I will start with describing the use of the word "machine" in Merleau-Ponty's lectures; I will then show the link between this notion and his discussion of psychoanalysis; the third stage will be to present Lacan's conception of the automaton, and then Guattari's notion of the desiring machine. My conclusion will be to articulate and combine those three conceptions and show in what direction Merleau-Ponty might have gone if he had had the chance to develop his views further.

2020

The current thesis discusses the being and sense of the body in Jean-Luc Nancy's philosophy. Nancy criticizes the metaphysical tradition which wishes always that the body makes sense outside of itself. The representational logic inherent in the Western metaphysics reduces the body into a sign. Therefore, the body loses its corporeality and its materiality. Instead, Nancy seeks to think the sense of the body without appropriating it. The relation between the corporeal and the incorporeal can be thought as a touching instead of an appropriation of the corporeal by the incorporeal. This touching happens in writing which touches upon the body without signifying it. At this point, the sense of the body is not the sense that the body has, but it is shared out among bodies. This thesis argues that the body doesn't have any determinate sense but it is the sense itself as a relation to the outside. The body doesn't exist, but bodies are always singular and plural. Nancy, therefore, brings forward a local bodily ontology which corresponds to the ontology as such. In the last chapter, the relationality of bodies is considered through the figures of community, of being singular plural and of being with. This questioning involves a close reading of Nancy's texts and of the commentaries and critiques related to them. Hence, this thesis discusses the bodily ontology through Nancy's various texts instead of focusing on a determinate text.

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.

There is no unique and definitive definition of phenomenology. It is rather a method and an experience always open and always renewing itself. Phenomenology involves a change in the “sense of the world”: everything acquires its sense and value only when it becomes the content of the lived experience of the subject correlated to his intentional acts. This is the main thesis of the phenomenological method aiming at overcoming the traditional opposition between rationalism and empiricism. Starting from Husserl, the father of this approach, the history of phenomenology undertook different and unexpected developments which in some cases were rather far away from Husserl’s original thought. In the U.K. attention has been given to an analytical-epistemological phenomenology focused on the relationship between intentionality and logical semantics. In France it is mainly an anthropological-existential phenomenology. In Germany an hermeneutic phenomenology was developed, mainly by Heidegger and Gadamer. Regardless of these raw distinctions, a big question is so far unresolved: how to reconcile the phenomenological/existential stance claiming for the irreducibility of each lived experience and the scientific paradigm? Is it possible to imagine brain mechanisms and physiological systems explaining the endless mysteries and manifold paradoxes of the human being?Phenomenology claims that a human being can never be considered as an object, as if he was a natural thing; rather the task is to understand him as the focus of a relationship linking subjective attitudes to the objects showed by the experience. In this sense, an important contribution was Merleau-Ponty’s view that man is not something psychic joined to an organism, but a sort of fluctuation of the existence that sometimes is a bodily one, sometimes refers to personal acts. Consequently, he proposes to reinstate in the existence both its “physiological” and “psychic” sides both being intentionally oriented towards a world.

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the …, 2006

The notions of "body"and "soul," within the dual universe of the Marubo from southwestern Amazonia, intersect other contributions to this volume: first, in view of the present concern, from a universalizing perspective, on epistemological issues in Amazonia; and second, in view of a now ever-present relevance of indigenous ontology (here more as the "presentation," rather than the "investigation" or "account" of the origins of the cosmos and all forms of being therein) vis-à-vis the knowledge, with a particularizing tenor, of the performance of a cognitive ethos.