The Lived Human Body from the Perspective of the Shared World (Mitwelt (original) (raw)

The Lived Body

The Humanistic Psychologist, 2019

This paper begins with the common distinction between lived and physical bodies and shows how and why a conjunction obtains with respect to personally lived bodies, a conjunction furthermore apparent in lived-body experiences of sheer physicality. These beginning expositions set the stage for a detailed phenomenological analysis of the experiential character of the lived body, an analysis anchored in what Husserl identifies as “the zero point of orientation,” narrowed here to the zero point tout court, hence to the hereness of the lived body. On the basis of this analysis, the paper shows how postural, embodied, and purely spatial descriptions of the lived body, all of them in pursuit of validating a self and a prereflective self-consciousness, fail to accord with the spatio-temporal and kinesthetic nature of the lived body, how, in essence, the descriptions short circuit the lived body’s spatio-temporal presence anchored in tactile-kinesthetic-affective realities. In the course of doing so, it draws on psychological studies of infants that not only highlight but validate those lived realities. It furthermore draws on a range of Buddhist writings that clearly describe the self not as a directly lived reality but as a construct. In the end, the paper critically underscores the value of being true to the truths of experience. Keywords: separation and consonance of physical and lived bodies, zero point tout court, self-givenness and “how it feels”, tactile-kinesthetic-affective body, phenomenological methodology.

After the Lived Body (Continental Philosophy Review, vol. 49, 4, p. 445-468)

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.

The Body In Phenomenology And Movement Observation 2

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

Phenomenology of Embodiment (MA/PhD postgraduate seminar, University College Dublin)

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).

Own Body and the Naturalisation of Phenomenology

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.

Embodiment and bodily becoming

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology, ed. Dan Zahavi, Oxford: Oxford University Press., 2017

One of the strengths of contemporary phenomenology is the rich conceptual arsenal that it offers for the analysis of the bodily aspects of human experience. The base of this conceptual arsenal is in the methodology that Edmund Husserl developed at the beginning of the last century for the analysis of sense constitution and then applied with his pupils in the inquiry of many different sorts of experiences, including bodily experiences and experiences of different types of bodies. Even though several pupils and collaborators, most importantly Edith Stein, Eugen Fink and Martin Heidegger, later departed from the strictly Husserlian methodology and engaged in philosophical projects of different types, their discussions of human bodies remained indebted to the original account outlined by Husserl during the first decades of the century.

Helmuth Plessner's Philosophy of Life

Rethinking ‘Nature’ Ripensare la ‘natura’ 2. Authors and Problems/Figure e problemi

The focus of this paper is Helmuth Plessner’s philosophy of life as presented in his opus magnum "Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch" (1928). The special emphasis has been put on the methodological aspect of researching the phenomenon of life, and on the category of positionality, analyzed in both spatial and temporal context. Positionality characterizes a general relation between a living being and the environment. Different forms of positionality determine the whole variety of the world of nature. In the concluding part of the text, a characteristic of three fundamental levels of life have been presented – a plant form, an animal form, and human form – considering the last one as introducing into the issues of philosophical anthropology.

On the transcendental undercurrents of phenomenology: The case of the living body

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.