The Body, Thought Experiments, and Phenomenology

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

Theoria et Historia Scientiarum

Analecta Husserliana

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.

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.

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.

Dialogue and Universalism, 2015

Stating that experience is the testing ground for scientific theories is undoubtedly a sort of truism. In the case of the investigation of human perception, however, it is worth pinpointing and understanding exactly what kind of experience science must avail itself of. Cherishing and taking into account the lessons learned from Goethe's Farbenlehre, Ewald Hering inaugurates a type of phenomenology which believed in the fertility of the connection between the phenomenological description and the empirical investigation. The direction indicated by Hering will be embraced by important authors of non-Husserlian phenomenology in the first three decades of the twentieth century: Carl Stumpf, Karl Bühler, the Gestaltpsychologie of Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, to name a few. This paper intends to show the interest and topicality of this approach.

The topic of this paper is phenomenology. How should we think of phenomenologythe discipline or activity of investigating experience itselfif phenomenology is to be a genuine source of knowledge? This is related to the question whether phenomenology can make a contribution to the empirical study of human or animal experience. My own view is that it can. But only if we make a fresh start in understanding what phenomenology is and can be.