Phenomenology of embodiment
Explanation
The phenomenology of embodiment is the current developed from Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) in his late writings, continued by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) as central protagonist, and extended in the 20th-21st centuries by authors such as Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, Bernhard Waldenfels, Shaun Gallagher, Dan Zahavi, Evan Thompson. It has been decisive in thinking of consciousness not as something purely mental but as intimately rooted in bodily life.
Husserl had distinguished in Ideen II (written in the 1910s-20s, posthumously published) between Körper (the body as physical object, among other objects) and Leib (the lived body, the body as mine, as vehicle of experience, as the here and now from which the world is presented). The Leib is not perceived as one more external object, but lived from within, as the centre of perspective, locomotion, sensation. This Körper/Leib distinction is fundamental to all subsequent phenomenology.
Merleau-Ponty, in Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and in his later works (Eye and Mind, 1961, The Visible and the Invisible, posthumous 1964), made the body the axis of his philosophy. The body is neither pure physical object (as in Descartes) nor pure disembodied subject (as in idealism), but constitutive "ambiguity": it is at the same time subject and object, sees and is seen, touches and is touched. This reversibility (chair, "flesh" in his last writings) is the ultimate ontological foundation of all experience.
The "flesh" (la chair) is for Merleau-Ponty a tissue common to subject and world, prior to the subject-object distinction. There is no pure consciousness that then touches an external world; there is a carnal "being-in-the-world" (drawing from Heidegger) from which experience emerges as phenomenal relief. This ontology of the flesh (sketched in The Visible and the Invisible, interrupted by Merleau-Ponty's sudden death in 1961) has had great influence on subsequent continental philosophy.
In recent decades, the phenomenology of embodiment has dialogued intensely with cognitive neuroscience (Varela, Thompson, Rosch in The Embodied Mind, 1991; Shaun Gallagher in How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005; Dan Zahavi in Subjectivity and Selfhood, 2005). Fine phenomenological distinctions have been recovered (body-subject vs. body-object, agency, sense of ownership, motor intentionality, lived temporality) and correlated with neuroscientific data (mirror neurons, body schema, interoception, sense of agency).
For the theory of consciousness, the phenomenology of embodiment contributes crucial perspectives: consciousness is always embodied, situated, perspectival; bodily experience is not a layer added to consciousness but constitutive; fine phenomenological distinctions (sense of ownership, sense of agency, embodied self, pre-reflective consciousness) illuminate aspects of experience that science can study empirically. Varela's neurophenomenology (integrating first and third person), contemporary studies on the rubber-arm illusion, body swap, embodiment in VR, autism as alteration of bodily sense, all benefit from this framework. As a synthesis of one of the best philosophical traditions of the 20th century with the brain sciences of today, the phenomenology of embodiment is one of the most sophisticated and humanistic approaches available today for understanding consciousness as the lived experience of a body in the world.
Strengths
- Profound articulation of the embodiment of consciousness.
- Decisive influence on enactivism and somaesthetics.
- Late ontology suggestive for panpsychism.
- Basis for phenomenologically founded body therapies.
Main critiques
- Sometimes elliptical prose.
- Difficulty in operationalising concepts (flesh, chiasm) empirically.
- Tension with representationalist approaches.