(A Carnal
Introduction)
Study Project in
Phenomenology of
the Body
P. O. Box 66
Ferndale, WA 98248 U.S.A.
360-312-1332
sppb@openaccess.org
Ninth Annual
Meeting,
Merleau-Ponty Circle
Concordia
University
Montréal, Sept.
1984
Table of Contents
Aim of the Investigation
Methodological Note
Introduction to the Problem
Phenomenological
Description #l:
A Visible Thing
Typicality—Perspectivity—Distance
Alienation—Staticity—Summary
Phenomenological
Description #2:
Bodily
Awareness
Eliciting the
phenomenon—Qualitative
(self)-sensing
‘from within’—Dynamism—
“Spread” and
“Depth”—Dilation of the
localized
“self”—Summary
Phenomenological
Description #3:
Touching/Touched
“Customary”
functional zones—Initiation—
Bodily
intentionality/Bodily reflexivity—
Qualitative
correlations—Reversibility of
motivation—Summary
Phenomenological
Description #4:
Touching/Being
Touched/Touching-Through
Reciprocity—Flexible
interface—
Diakinaisthesis—Articulation
without
opposition—Intertextual
commentary
Phenomenological
Description #5:
Integrative Body
Work/Movement Re-education
Remarks
Closing
Reflections
Appendices
A. Touch/Kinaesthesis/Body Feeling
B. “Inner-Outer”/‘From Within’
C. “Bodily Intentionality”/ “Bodily
Reflexivity”
D. On that which cannot be made into
an “object”
E. Description and Evidence
F. Perception and Paradigm
Notes
* * * *
Author’s Preface
to the 2002 Edition
The following paper is
based on research begun in the 1970s, and especially on my work from around 1977
to 1983. It was initially presented at the 1984 meeting of the Merleau-Ponty
Circle in Montréal and was first published under the imprint of the California
Center for Jean Gebser Studies (1984), with reprints after 1990 appearing under
the auspices of the Study Project in Phenomenology of the Body.
Shortly after the work first appeared, I
came across a fascinating article that seemed to have important points of
connection with my own essay: “Trigant Burrow and the Phylobiological
Perspective,” Somatics 5:1
(Autumn/Winter 1984–1985), 56–61. I wrote the author and sent her a copy of my
paper. This author—Alfreda S. Galt—turned out not only to be a remarkable
scholar in her own right, but also to be the mother of George Galt, a friend
from my high school and college days who had wound up living only a few miles
from where I was located at the time. Thus for a number of years I was able to
meet with Alfreda (and practice cotention together!) whenever she came to
California for family visits.
I well remember my first encounter with
Alfreda: we sat under an apple tree on a lovely warm day, and somehow her
ability to set the “I-persona” out of play created a calm and generous
atmosphere where I too could speak of matters I cared deeply about without
feeling I had to “defend” them or prove that I was “right.” One of the fruits
of this and subsequent discussions was the volume Toward Integral Consciousness for an Integral World, published in
1987 by the California Center for Jean Gebser Studies with the support of The
Lifwynn Foundation and including essays by Georg Feuerstein and Alfreda S.
Galt, as well as contributions of my own. Moreover, it was through Alfreda that
I was later also able to meet Mary Alice Roche for further work in communal
proprioception—eventually leading to a joint presentation with Mary Alice at
another Merleau-Ponty Circle meeting.
Although the paper offered below is
framed in terms of the language and concerns of Maurice Merleau-Ponty
(1908–1961) and Jean Gebser (1905–1973), the descriptive research on which it
is based stems from an attitude and approach derived from the founder of
phenomenology, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). (For more on the phenomenological
tradition, see the website of the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology
at www.phenomenologycenter.org
or consult the Encyclopedia of
Phenomenology, edited by Lester Embree et al. and published by Kluwer
Academic Publishers in 1997.) This paper opened a research trajectory that I am
still working out today, including several conference presentations, guest
lectures, and workshops on the lucidly lived body; further publications along
this path include “Matching,” Somatics 6:4
(Spring/Summer 1988), 24–32, rpt. in Bone,
Breath, and Gesture, ed. Don Hanlon Johnson (Berkeley: North Atlantic
Books, 1995), 317–37; “Ghost Gestures: Phenomenological Investigations of
Bodily Micromovements and their Intercorporeal Implications,” Study Project in Phenomenology of the Body
Newsletter 7:2 (Fall 1994), 19–41, rev. in Human Studies 20:2 (April 1997), 181–201; and “From Merleau-Ponty’s
Concept of Nature to an Interspecies Practice of Peace,” in Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and
Animal Life, ed. H. Peter Steeves (Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press, 1999), 93–116 (the latter essay also refers to the work of Trigant
Burrow). More recently, I have taken up the intertwined themes of the turn to
experiential evidence in general and the exploration of bodily awareness in
particular by way of a series of experiments in phenomenological practice; one
of these has been published as Part II of “Phenomenology of Embodiment/Embodied
Phenomenology: Emerging Work,” Chapter 5 in The
Reach of Reflection: Issues for
Phenomenology’s Second Century, ed. Steven Crowell, Lester Embree, and
Samuel J. Julian, published in 2001 by the Center for Advanced Research in
Phenomenology through www.electronpress.com (available for purchase at
that site).
The Study Project in Phenomenology of the
Body is now located in the Pacific Northwest; my current research interests
include phenomenological methodology, embodied ethics, and the intersection of
phenomenological practice and transformative somatic practice. I would like to
thank Lloyd Gilden for making this work available here, and I encourage all
readers to test the phenomenological research findings presented below against
the touchstone of your own lived experience, confirming or correcting these
findings accordingly.
p. 1
This paper stems
from a mute and “pre-theoretical” conviction that when Jean Gebser wrote
of “die Welt ohne Gegenüber”
and Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote of “la chair du monde” they were
“talking about the same thing.” In exploring this possibility of convergence
between the two thinkers, I have been guided by the attitude expressed in the
following words of Husserl:
Obviously, one
cannot read and understand [a phenomenological work] in the way one does a
newspaper. One can understand
descriptions only if he knows that which is described, and he can only know
what is described if he has brought it into clear intuitive experience. Therefore, it is this intuitive experience
which demands a step-by-step presentation, the whole effort and technique of
which consists precisely in directing [the reader] ... to the production of
intuitive experience ....
Let the reader try just once to read every assertion which I make in
phenomenological contexts just as he reads a zoological or botanical
description of an object—thus as an expression standing for something
intuitively experienced or intuitively experienceable and as something that is
really originally understandable only through direct intuitive experience.
The entire being
and life of phenomenology is nothing more than the most radical inwardness in
the description of purely intuitive givens.
[Thus]
phenomenology demands a direct personal production of the pertinent phenomenon
.... (1)
The thesis that
“flesh of the world” and “world without opposite” are two ways of describing
the same complex of phenomena ought then to be approached by way of the
researcher’s “direct personal production” of the pertinent phenomena. But the success of the enterprise is by
no means guaranteed in advance.
“La chair”—the
flesh: What does Merleau-Ponty mean by this word? Is there really a possible experience of the “flesh” or only
an experience of one’s own body? (2)
In other words,
can la chair du monde and die Welt ohne Gegenüber themselves be
given leibhaft (in, of course, the mode appropriate to their essential
meaning), or are they mere “concepts” or “poetic images”? Can they be “cashed in” for firsthand
experiential evidence?
p.2
According to
Spiegelberg, Husserl himself
“insisted on the need of carrying the ‘small change’ (Kleingeld)
of specific examples.” (3) Thus although both “flesh” and “world without
opposite” are terms claiming a high degree of universality, I will attempt to
proceed toward them by way of a series of descriptions of concrete perceptual
experiences: looking at a visible thing; bodily awareness while lying quietly;
touching oneself; touching and being touched by a tangible thing, as well as
touching one thing “through” another; and touching and being touched by another
person in body work. The
description of each of these experiences is necessarily limited in this
context, but taken together they sketch out a path toward the “direct intuitive
experience” wherein something named by both Gebser and Merleau-Ponty may itself
be given “in the flesh.”
Finally, this
essay provides some hints toward a concrete experiential praxis arising from
the themes that are discussed and the structures that the descriptions are
meant to elucidate.
The process of
writing this essay involved a “zig-zag,” beginning as simply as possible with
an experiential example, then attempting its phenomenological elucidation, then
returning to the experiencing process to confirm, correct, fine-tune, or
abandon the descriptive schematization. (Each of the descriptions offered here
is, of course, still open to experiential correction.) The notes and textual
sections that relate my researches to the work of other phenomenologists, and
to further issues in the field, were written last. (4) The reader is urged to “actively produce the phenomena in
himself/herself” as a guide to understanding what it is that such references
hope to clarify.
The “working
problem” addressed by many phenomenological studies is the way we live the
world in the natural attitude. (5) The particular focus of my own efforts is the
corporeal foundation sustaining the natural attitude itself, sustaining at the
same time the correlative world of everyday life. (6) More specifically, I am investigating the
correlation between the typical perceptual style of the lived body, as it is
habitually lived in a given historical and cultural context, and the pervasive
structural features of the lifeworld (again, in the given historical and
cultural context). The term
“perceptual style” necessarily carries several related meanings here. By “perceptual style of the lived
body,” I mean its habitual—and nearly always tacit—style of perceiving. (7) Yet “perceptual style” can also refer to the
perceived world itself. (8)
Finally, since the body not only perceives, but can also be perceived,
the “typical perceptual style of the lived body” can refer to our habitual way
of experiencing this lived body itself.
In short, the general “style” of the world in which I live is
necessarily, and intimately, interwoven with my style of corporeal existence
and my habitual style of perceiving. (9)
“To
perceive,” says Merleau-Ponty, “is to render oneself present to something
through the body” (Primacy, 42).
Yet within the natural attitude, this very “rendering oneself present
through the body” is silent, operative.
Perceiving, and its bodily roots, are passed over in favor of the
perceived, so that we tend to live at the term of our intentional arc, with the
things themselves, oblivious to our complicity with their givenness. I see my black cat flash by, but I am
not normally aware of the quick turn of my head that her movement elicited, nor
of the narrowing of my eyes as I peer into the foliage to see what she has
pounced on. I experience the train
of thought I am struggling to follow as I write, but I am not normally aware of
the nervous eagerness with which my fingers grasp the pen I write with, nor of
the way I hold my breath when I’m on the brink of finding just the right
word. I pick up a small bottle and
turn it over to look at the bottom side of it, but the movements of my hand
remain outside the focus of my awareness. I palpate the object, and I discover
its slightly resilient hardness, but in the natural attitude, I am seldom aware
of the way my thumb must oppose my fingers in order to squeeze the object, or
of the slightly uncomfortable feeling inside my thumb as I exert pressure
p. 3
while squeezing,
or of the lingering “afterecho” of this feeling in my thumb after I have set
the object down. “The body,” says
Merleau-Ponty, “is our general
medium for having a world” (PP, 171/146); the lived body is pivotal for
all experience. Yet for the most
part, it is “passed over in silence.” Everyday life does offer us several types
of situations in which this “silence” is broken: for example, the times when,
due to illness or injury, my body will no longer obey me; the awkward surge of
self-consciousness when the look of the other impales me; the way I become
“other” for myself, when looking in the mirror, for example, or scrutinizing
the calluses on my hands. (10) Such occasions do bring the body
thematically to awareness. But they display a common structure, in which the
body becomes an object for a subject.
What is the typical perceptual style sustaining this structure?
Phenomenological
Description #1: A Visible Thing
There is
sufficient light. I am at the proper
distance from it. I can see it
plainly: it is a ball, round, primarily red, with other colors (yellow, blue)
in a pattern on its surface. It
shows up quite plainly against its background. I move closer, move around, look at it from various angles,
obtaining a different view from each position I take up. Its weight, its consistency, its
texture, the sounds it might make and the way it might move if I drop it, and
indeed the various ways I might manipulate it (rolling it, tossing it up and
catching it, dropping it, etc.)—these are already given to me as I see it,
without my needing to calculate them (and if I am proved wrong when I pick it
up—for example, if it turns out to be steel instead of rubber—my surprise
already testifies to the ubiquitousness of my tacit expectations). I perceive this object as a real ball,
here in the room with me, in no way a mere figment of my imagination or trick
of the light; though I know that I can be mistaken with regard to individual
cases, I know what “real” and “illusory” mean, a knowing that may be tacit and
vague, but which nevertheless serves to guide everyday business.
If I now turn to
a description of the invariant structures shaping my experience of this round,
red (and yellow and blue) ball resting on its background, I find that I can see
several such structures (in a different sense than that in which I see the ball
itself, but clearly nonetheless).
I will specify these structures by referring to typicality, perspectivity,
distance, alienation, and staticity.
p. 4
Typicality: I see quite
clearly that I could have chosen a ball that is primarily blue, or green; for
purposes of my description, its exact color is irrelevant. Furthermore, I need not have chosen a
ball; its roundness is not an essential condition of its visibility. This ball, here, is merely an example
of a thing that is seen. Some
examples—for example, my black cat in a very dark room—may prove to be limit
cases, but to the extent that the ball is a typical example of a visible thing
(replaceable at will by other examples, real and imagined), my description is
not a description of it, but of a style of perceiving. It is not the object per se, but its
mode of givenness that is at stake, and this mode of givenness has its own
typical structure—a power that “seeing” exercises over the “seen.” Thus the
structures to be specified in the description are those that are swung into
play whenever a certain perceptual style is at work; they are features not so
much of a certain class of things as of a certain style of rendering oneself
present to the things.
Perspectivity: From here, I can
see three slivers of color appearing against the overall red of the ball:
yellow, then blue, then yellow again. I move, and now see blue, yellow,
blue. I move again, and obtain yet
another aspect. It would be
inaccurate to say that one view absolutely or irrevocably hides the others, for
each implies another. Yet only a
certain aspect at a time can have full visual givenness, and what I can see
shifts in correlation with my own changes in standpoint. I do not suspect for a moment that such
perspectivity is peculiar to this ball, but can readily confirm that no matter
what vantage point I adopt, only a sector of the visible world faces me.
Distance: Continuing
(necessarily) to respect the rule of correlation between standpoint and view, I
bend over the ball until my forehead and nose embrace its curve, or,
alternatively (and perhaps more typically), I pick it up and bring it as near
to one eye as possible. Though I
have lost my range of “proper
distances” from which to render myself present to the ball as a visible
thing, I can still see “something,” even when the proximity of the ball
occludes the light I need to make out its details. Yet
p. 5
this “something”
is still at a distance. Even if I
close my eyes, cup my palms over them to block light, and place in brackets the
“fact that” I “must” actually be seeing the backs of my eyelids, the
experiential field present to me as I continue to adopt the perceptual style of
“seeing” retains its character of being “over there.” Seeing “opens upon” a
visual field that “spreads away” from me even when there is nothing to look at;
there is always distance between seer and seen.
Alienation: The ball that I
see is not only spatially distant from me, separate from me in that I am “here”
and it is “over there,” it is also separate from me in another way: it is
alien, other, not-me, not merely thrust apart from me, but set over-against-me,
object to my subjectivity. Insofar
as I give myself over fully to the perceptual style of seeing, as described
here, even parts of my own body can become alien, other, not-me: I stare at my
hands as I type, and as they become visual objects for me, as they fall prey to
the alienating regard, they cease to function—they stiffen involuntarily, and
no longer transmit the flow of thought onto the page. To the extent that I render myself present to them through
this perceptual style, they are no longer on the side of my subjectivity; I am
estranged from myself. Or I may
sit in a doctor’s office, and as I listen to my own body being discussed by the
pathologist or the physical therapist, I become an object-for-myself,
dispassionately and “objectively” contemplating my own body with that curious
calmness familiar to victims of crisis.
At such times, what is here termed “alienation” can be exquisitely
comforting, appearing as “detachment” rather than “estrangement.” Even parts of
my body that I cannot literally see, or see only under extreme conditions (such
as my own viscera), can appear to me as if from the perspective of the other
(e.g., the anatomist), distant and alien and invested with the style of
givenness characteristic of the typical visible thing—for, as the description
thus far has indicated, the “typicality” derives from a style or mode of
perceiving, and it is this style that governs the perceptual object, whatever
it may be.
p. 6
Staticity: I roll the ball,
or I toss it in my hands, but I cannot see it clearly until it comes to
rest. I move this way and that way
to see the ball from this or that perspective, but each time, I arrest my own
motion in order to focus on the chosen view. I decide to take my hand as an example of a visible thing,
and not only do I bring it before me, into my range of vision, I also hold both
my hand and my head as still as possible.
Gradually I detect the lived bodily style of comportment sustaining the
constitutive style responsible for the typical visual object, and find that
when I am looking at a visible thing—especially when I am trying to make out
its details—I often find myself freezing my own motion, holding myself
still. In short, there is a
typical bodily attitude of being-toward-the-other, over there. The visible body constituted by the
objectivating regard is sustained, not merely by this perceptual style, but
more fundamentally by a constituting body whose typical movement style
here is one of “arrest.” Despite
the fact that I move this way and that to attain various perspectives on the
thing, the movement takes place between, not during, the views; the
prototypical staticity of the thing seen is matched by that of the seer. (11)
Summary: The typical
perceptual style emerging in this description is one in which a subject
faces an object, over there and other, in such a way that the
subject is limited to a perspective. Both subject and object are typically static, and the
style as a whole is a general manner of rendering oneself present to something
through the body; its typicality is that of a pervasive and operative style
of corporeal constitution.
Several remarks are now in order.
(1) Not all
visual experience conforms to the model of such a “separative” seeing; the
descriptions of vision given by Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the
Invisible or “Eye and Mind,” for example, display another structure. Thus the typical kind of of seeing I
have described here—for which I will use the term “separative seeing”—is one
major variant of visual experience, not its only possible style.
(2) The separative style is
therefore not coextensive with vision per se, and indeed may be manifested in
other sensory fields. For instance, both
p. 7
sight and touch
may let us “confront the world as a surface over against our face, or beneath
our palm, riveted with the gaze, nailed with the digit” (12)—as
a fixed object, resistant and alien to the perceiving subject.
(3) A
perceptual style may become the paradigm not only for more than one sensory
field, but also for other cultural institutions as well. For instance, David Levin links what I
have called separative seeing with the capacity “to encounter beings in a
detached, calculative, instrumental way” (e.g., in science and technology) and
with the habit of representational thinking analyzed by Heidegger, pointing out
that “our everyday manner of seeing embodies, and tends to perpetuate,
precisely this re-presentational attitude ....” (13) At the
same time, however, “it is not only theoretical science, but our everyday
seeing itself, which, charmed and enthralled by the scientific world-view,
begins to function in this very same hostile and aggressive manner” (14)—i.e., bringing everything that exists under the
calculating control of “a looking-at that sunders and compartmentalizes.” (15) Such an attitude thrusts everything that is experienced
into an enforced distance from a subject that is itself conceived as yet
another object, and the separative style thereby permeates the whole of the
everyday world.
Conventional
modes of perception invariably carry with them the experience of separation,
isolation, and limitation .... Our habitual mode of perception is the ultimate
source of the alienation and estrangement of everyday life. In ordinary reality, we are constantly
bombarded with the “fact” that we are stuck in an “environment” which wholly
consists of what is other, distant, and separate from ourselves. (16)
Thus given the
separative style, the entire world of everyday life will testify to
dualism. In other words, the
lifeworld and the reigning perceptual style display the same pervasive
structural features. (17)
(4)
It must be noted that the possibility of detachment and distance has a
“positive” as well as a “negative” side. (18) What is
implicitly criticized in my presentation is the rigidification of this
capability to the exclusion of all other possibilities, not the distancing
power of sight (and thought) per se.
p. 8
“The
body is our general medium for having a world.” But in the natural attitude,
the constitutive corporeality responsible for a habitual perceptual style is typically
operative, passed over in silence; or else, in our inherited historical and
cultural context, this silence may be ruptured, and the constitutive body
reduced to a constituted body that is an impoverished thing among things. Insofar as the typical perceptual style
described is not only typical, but habitual and paradigmatic,
alternative perceptual styles are suppressed; furthermore, the very project of
description can perpetuate the reigning paradigm, so that, for example, one
decides to pay attention to this body “passed ever in silence,” only to find
that the attending regard disrupts the very process it hoped to elucidate,
“freezing it in its tracks,” as it were, by importing, with its style of
attending, the alienation and staticity typical of separative seeing. (19) Clearly, the further elucidation of the operative,
constitutive body requires a release from the “hegemony of vision” (20) and the adoption of an alternative style of awareness—one
that can diaphanize the silence without rupturing it, that can thematize the
operative without stopping it.
Phenomenological
Description #2: Bodily Awareness
I lie down and
close my eyes. At first, I notice
that merely lying down does not automatically enable me to abandon upright
posture completely. There is an
“attitude” of uprightness that can persist even while supine. Similarly, I notice that merely closing
my eyes does not always enable me to give up the habit of “looking-at”; I
“carry its perceptual style with me” into the project of “paying attention” to
somatic experience. With practice,
though, I can set this habit aside, just as I set out of play the
being-busied-with-the-world that lingered along with the attitude of
uprightness. I take a quick
inventory of my tactile experience—the feel of what I’m lying on, the
temperature and texture of clothes and air against my skin—and for the moment,
I set all this aside as well, in search of bodily awareness itself.
I notice immediately that
I am pulsing. The pulsing,
however, is pervaded by something more subtle, which I do not immediately have
a name for; I try out metaphors such as “a general diffuse dull glow or buzz of
presence,” though this does not literally shine or hum. Rather, the “glow” is one of “warmth,”
and the “buzz” is a quasi-textural ongoing process. Within this shimmer or stream of diffuse yet dynamic
“thereness,” various events spontaneously emerge,
p. 9
though all the
while “I” lie in “stillness.” Some of these events might be called a
coming-to-awareness of tension or “blocks,” while others feel like a
pleasurable “release.” The bodily awareness as a whole is an ongoing,
qualitative process, within which such “saliencies” spring up and fade away. Besides this dynamic, temporal quality
to the experience, there is also a sense of “spread,” a hazy
“being-extended”—though no sharply defined “edges” appear unless I return to
the tactile experience of my “interface” with the world (e.g., where I stop and
what I’m lying on begins) or imagine what I must look like from the
outside. If these sorts of
experiences are once more set aside and I am fully given over to my “body
sense,” I sense myself “finite” (the domain or spread of this sensing does not
go on “forever”), but not clearly “bounded.”
As I continue
merely to “lie still,” exploring possible invariant structures of this bodily
awareness, I sense its “depth” or “volume” as well as its “expanse.”
Often—though perhaps not necessarily—there is a qualitative difference between
my left and right “sides.” I sense here, however, that I may have begun to
experience and to describe something having to do with incipient or potential
movement, distinguishable, albeit inseparable, from the bodily awareness first
described.
Throughout, the
experience of a purely bodily awareness is somewhat difficult to sustain. I seem to shuttle between having an
experience “of” my own body, presented “to” an experiencing agent that seems to
be located somewhere in my head (roughly behind my eyes), and dissolving this
habitual placement of “myself” in such a way that my own lived flesh, or some
vaguely specified “region” of it (which may vary) is itself suffused with
awareness.
Eliciting the
phenomenon: In the natural attitude, we are busied with things and
projects; our own body is habitually “passed ever in silence.” Against this
background, bodily awareness appears as a “special case,” a phenomenon that is
“always there” to be elicited, but is normally ignored. (21)
In the example described,
bodily awareness was voluntarily achieved (in contrast, say, to the unexpected
“rupturing” of the “silence” of the body by a sudden sharp pain) after certain
preliminary steps: lying down, closing my eyes, setting tactile experience
aside, lying still. Are these
essential for the emergence of the phenomenon in question? Further variation finds that bodily
awareness is indeed possible in other postures and while moving; and, as
subsequent descriptions will show, it can also be attained, in varying degrees
under various circumstances, in conjunction with tactile experience. Lying down, lying still, and placing
tactile
p. 10
experience in
brackets are strategic moves to help elicit the phenomenon, not essential
conditions of it. (22) However, as noted in the description,
merely physically closing my eyes is by itself not an adequate strategy. In the first place, I may find “that
closing the eyes has by no means ended the attempt to see, and that behind
closed lids the eyes have remained very active.” (23) And in
the second place, so long as the style of separative seeing persists,
and is manifested across other sensory fields, I may indeed “feel something”—e.g.,
a tension in “my” foot—but I feel it from an “outsider’s perspective.” The
phenomenon I have described under the title “bodily awareness” is not
itself-given in such a mode, though it may be “foreshadowed” or “incipiently
given,” or serve as a prelude or preliminary step to more fully “inhabiting”
the phenomenon in question. What
is required for this phenomenon itself is thus a peculiar shift of
consciousness from experiencing an object known as “my own lived body” to
actively “living-in” this “body sense.” (24)
Qualitative
(self)-sensing ‘from within’: If the perceptual style of the first
example, separative seeing, may be characterized as “from the outside,” the
alternative style presented in this second description may be termed ‘from
within’. (25) While this style of awareness does embrace
features of bodily experience previously noted by phenomenologists—such as the
“mineness” of one’s own lived body and the motility that both Husserl and
Merleau-Ponty referred to with the phrase “I can” (cf., e.g., PP,
160/137)—what I wish to emphasize with the term ‘from within’ is that the very manner
of givenness differs from the habitual style of apprehending an object
“over there” and separate from “me.” The general style of awareness ‘from
within’ admits of qualitative variation.
Whether or not such awareness is possible only in the case of one’s own
lived body is deferred to later descriptions.
Dynamism: Even when I am
“lying still,” without any “voluntary movement” or explicit focus on the
movements “I can” potentially execute—and even if I place the movements of
breathing out of consideration—I sense myself pervaded with dynamic, temporal
process. This may encompass
qualitatively different types of processes, such as
p. 11
rhythmic pulsing;
irregular and spontaneous “coming-to-salience” of “moments” of tension,
release, etc.; and a background “presencing” akin to what Michotte has termed,
in another context, “internal flux” or “microkinesis.” (26) The dynamism, and particularly this
background “microkinesis,” has the sense of being global and diffuse, and of
having been present “all along” (27) whether or not it is
thematized as an object or lived through “from within.” It can be
experientially distinguished from the lived sense of the “I-can,” which feels
less like an ongoing “background” and more like a “potency.” (28)
Such potency is not only lived
as the power to mobilize any part of one’s own lived body, but may also be
constitutive of its articulation into “parts,” e.g., the felt difference
between left and right “sides”; this cannot be pursued here.
“Spread” and
“Depth”: The spatial or quasi-spatial feature of bodily awareness
‘from within’ may be described as “extension without edges.” The sense of
“spread” is meant structurally here, whether I feel myself comfortably
“spreading” or uncomfortably “compressed” in any area; the sense of “depth” is
meant as a lived sense of “volume,” a “fullness” that is not merely
“superficial.” However, it is not yet an explicit consciousness of
three-dimensional spatiality. Nor
is any consciousness of my position within my immediate spatial surroundings at
stake here, though this can be reinstituted at any moment by the appropriate
shift in style of awareness. There are qualitative differences across the
spread of my awareness ‘from within’, but neither the “regions” within the
expanse of the whole nor the whole itself present a definite spatial
shape. Michotte’s remarks are to
the point here:
Whether it is
temporarily motionless or whether it is moving, the body [as kinaesthetically
perceived] appears as a somewhat shapeless mass or volume. ...
There is no clear marking off of the head, trunk, and limbs by precise lines of
demarcation. ... Instead of any precise line of demarcation we find a number of
regions with extensive connexions between them gradually merging into one
another.
We can with some
justification look on the body as a sort of kinaesthetic amoeba, a
perpetually changing mass with loose connexions between the parts, and with the
limbs constituting the pseudopodia.
There are,
p. 12
however, very marked
differences between this kinaesthetic amoeba and the amoeba seen under the
microscope. The latter has a
contour separating it from its background, while this feature is clearly
lacking in the case of the body in isolation. The ‘volume’ of which it consists is not limited by a
clearly defined surface, and there is no ‘contour’. This is a point of considerable interest, and it necessarily
follows as a result that the whole of the kinaesthetic field of bodily
awareness is filled by the body. (29)
Dilation of the
localized “self”: The phenomenon described reveals a feature similar to what
Herbert Spiegelberg has discussed in his article “On the Motility of the Ego.” (30) Without
entering into the questions he raises as to ego-“localization” and
ego-“identification,” the shift described in the turn to bodily awareness can
nevertheless be contrasted with the structure of separative seeing in this
regard. The perspectivity of the
latter requires its own unnoticed “vanishing point,” i.e., the fixed standpoint
(somewhere “behind my eyes”) from which a sector of the world is surveyed. Bodily awareness, however, disrupts
this usual tacit “location” of the self: it displays a global “field awareness”
qualitatively different from the sense of “self” or “consciousness” as a
“point” from which awareness “radiates.” The transition between the two styles
may sometimes be detected as a “flooding” from a point into a whole or the
“shrinking” of a field into a vantage point. The experience of “dilation” of lived selfhood across the
expanse of the aware body is particularly important for analyses of the
“prolongation” of one’s own body through things and tools. Also brought into question, as will be
shown in subsequent descriptions, is any tacit or explicit claim that one’s own
lived body, as single privileged “content” of a somatic awareness, is after all
to be identified with one’s own individual physical organism.
Summary: The “typical”
perceptual style emerging in this description would initially seem to be far
less pervasive (and far more elusive) than that of separative seeing; indeed,
it would seem that awareness ‘from within’ is only given when the separative
style is suspended. And the range
or domain of this alternative style of awareness ‘from within’ has yet
p. 13
to be
addressed. It is “typical” in that
it is a “style,” not a particular instance or sum of instances, but may or may
not be capable of governing the wealth of examples that can manifest the
separative style (for which “separative seeing” is the paradigm). Whereas separative seeing yields static
objects “over there,” optimally given as clearly bounded figures against
ground, bodily awareness ‘from within’ yields a dynamic “hereness” that
displays “spread” without clear “edges.” And while separative seeing transfixes
the ego as well as its objects, bodily awareness ‘from within’ moves in a fluid
self-awareness that does not require perspectival orientation. It is characterized by “mineness”
rather than alienation and by “living-in” rather than contemplating as an
object. In short, bodily awareness ‘from within’—at least as I have presented
it here—serves as a radical contrast to our customary cultural style of
perceiving both the “subjective” and the “objective.”
Phenomenological
Description #3: Touching/Touched
I touch my own
face with my own hand. As I
explore its varying surface textures, I realize that I can also feel different
structures—harder, softer, more or less resilient—beneath or behind the skin I
am touching. The contours of my
face solicit appropriate exploratory moves on the part of my touching hand. Throughout, my hand is the “toucher”
and my face is the “touched.” Can I reverse these roles?
I find, at least
at first, that I do not merely “mentally” shift my intent to “live in” one side
or the other of the experience, but may adjust the relative spatial position of
my body parts. At the same time,
their respective sorts of movement are exchanged: whereas before, I held my
head relatively still (or found that it tended to turn or nod slightly, to make
some area more accessible to my touching hand), now my head takes on the more
mobile, exploratory role that previously characterized my hand, and the hand
remains relatively quiet, offering itself conveniently to my touching
face. As I continue to explore
this reversibility between actively-touching and allowing-myself-to-be-touched,
I realize that the “exploratory intent” of the touching organ can be somewhat
localized: it is not simply a question of “hand” or “face” doing the touching,
but of a “leading region” such that I can touch my face “with” my fingertips,
my palm, the back of my hand, etc.; I can touch my hand “with” my lips, my
nose, my cheek, etc. Though my
hand may feel more practiced at touching than does my face, both hand and face
have alternatives beyond the habitual in executing the function of touching.
p. 14
Up to now, I have
been actively moving the organ playing the role of “toucher.” Now I bring my
hand and face in contact and maintain the configuration without either of them
moving appreciably. While
“living-in” the “hand” side of the configuration, I can still experience myself
as touching something, even if having arrested the exploratory touching
movements limits my ability to feel the texture of my face (and perhaps
enhances my ability to feel its temperature and, at times, its previously
imperceptible pulsing beneath my touching hand). But I can also shift to body awareness, i.e., to the
awareness ‘from within’ the hand itself.
Similarly, I can perform the reversibility of role first discussed, so
that it is my face that touches my hand, and allow the experience to be
primarily an experience-of that which I am touching. But I can also access my face ‘from
within’—and this shift from experience-of to body-awareness, though reversible,
is not the same as the shift that exchanges the respective roles of “toucher”
and “touchee.” There is “another” reversibility intersecting that of roles.
With relatively
“passive” touching—e.g., my hand is resting against my face, and I have endowed
my hand with the role of “toucher,” but am not moving it around my face—the
shift to awareness ‘from within’ the hand somehow eclipses the feel of what I’m
touching. But when I allow the
hand to move while touching, and also check how it feels ‘from within’ while
doing so, I find a profound interplay between the bodily quality of the feeling
hand ‘from within’; the quality of its movement; the tactile quality of my face
as touched; and the quality of the latter experienced ‘from within’
while being touched.
“Customary”
functional zones: The reversibility of toucher-touched roles is commonly
discussed in phenomenological literature with the example of the right hand
touching the left and vice versa.
The choice of hand-face pairing, and the variations of “leading region”
(touching “with” my lips vs. my cheek, my fingertips vs. the back of my hand),
makes it clearer that the touching/touched experience is shaped, but not
necessarily limited, by the organization of the lived body into privileged
“functional zones.” We customarily touch with the hand rather than the head,
the dominant hand rather than the non-dominant hand, the palm side of the hand
or fingers rather than the back side. That certain functional zones rather than
others are “usually” swung into play in executing the “intent” to touch
(whether or not any explicit “intent” is separately present) reveals only what
is “customary,” not what is “necessary,” for I can deliberately vary the
habitual configuration. (31) But the ease with which I
p. 15
can accomplish
certain variations and the difficulty of executing others bear witness to a
“usual” (and asymmetrical) polarization of the body “passed ever in silence”
into zones habituated to the role of “toucher” and zones usually relegated to
the role of “touchee.” Nevertheless, reversibility is more primordial than the
customary assignment of roles.
Initiation: The factor that
seems to be the most important in accomplishing a reversal of a “customary”
touching/touched configuration would seem to be the explicit initiation of the movement
of touching. Even when hand and
face are held in contact without either of them performing any obviously
active, exploratory touching motions, one can invoke a minimal or incipient
sense of “initiation”—perhaps by the slightest of actual movements, or even by
transforming the experience of a “motionless” organ into the experience of an
active “holding still” or arrest of movement—which mobilizes the “I-can” and
accomplishes the reversibility in question. (32)
Bodily
intentionality/Bodily reflexivity: The second sort of reversibility
discussed may be provisionally expressed as a reversibility between “bodily
intentionality” and “bodily reflexivity.” (33) With full
intentive directedness-toward the tactile object, the touching hand recedes, is
“passed over in silence”; with full “living-in” the touching hand ‘from
within’, the object recedes.
Further investigation of the phenomenon reveals that the focus on
intentionality—or better, on the intentional object, for “intentionality” per
se is discovered only by subsequent phenomenological reflection (34)—is
paired with the role of the toucher, i.e., it is the touching organ, not the
touched, which opens upon the intentional object. (Were the touched organ to
seek to “occupy” the intentive “side” of this second reversibility, it would,
by virtue of that very project, become the toucher rather than the touchee.)
But the awareness ‘from within’ that I have here termed “bodily reflexivity” is
available to either role.
Typically, when a bodily region doing the touching without actively
moving accesses the ‘from within’ style of awareness, the reference to an object
becomes ambiguous and vague, or “winks out”
p. 16
altogether (cf. VI,
194/147–48). The bodily region
being touched, however, can detect ‘from within’ not merely the superficial
point(s) of contact (the places “where” one is being touched), but the lived
quality of the touched region in depth, perhaps “radiating” from the surface of
the skin, perhaps arranging itself into salient “lines of force,” and so
on. Thus the shift to bodily
reflexivity can still incorporate a somewhat “shadowy” intentiveness when the
relatively motionless contact is lived from the side of the touched. And when
the organ playing the role of toucher is moving while reflexively
lived-through, the touched part can sometimes be dimly present, though
sometimes it vanishes—as it does when one lives the motionless touching organ
‘from within’—and sometimes the shift to awareness ‘from within’ also shifts me
out of the “touching,” back to the “being touched.”
Qualitative
correlations: Whether or not I am able to simultaneously
experience any pair, or more complex combination, of the four “poles” of the
double reversibility (role of toucher, role of touched; intentive
experience-of, reflexive awareness ‘from within’), I can discern a functional
connection between the quality of the touching organ as lived ‘from within’ and
the tactile quality of the touched.
This is particularly apparent when the touching organ moves and when the
quality of its movement is in harmony with the felt quality ‘from within’. For instance, I make a fist with one
hand, taking time to become clearly aware of its tightness ‘from within’. Then I strike the tip of the opposite
shoulder with my tight fist. Next
I loosen and soften the tight fist, again taking time to vary the quality and
to establish the awareness ‘from within’; then I drape my hand over the same
region of the shoulder, stroking and caressing where I previously struck. Not only does each gesture elicit a
different experience of my own shoulder as touched “from the outside,” but my
shoulder feels differently ‘from within’ in either case, and adopts a different
movement style of its own in response (e.g., steeling itself for the blows, or
greeting the softer gesture with a more supple motility).
Reversibility
of motivation: The example just presented, where
p. 17
touching and
touched, intentive and reflexive, and actual or potential movement style
displayed a qualitative correlation, points toward yet “another” sort of
reversibility (or another distinguishable aspect of a more general
“reversibility”). There is an
“if-then” such that “if I harden my hand, I can elicit the hardness of my
shoulder” and “if I soften my hand, I can elicit the softness of my shoulder.”
Here the “motivation” and variation lie “on the side of” an active
toucher. But the experience
initially chosen for description also found that “the contours of my face
solicit appropriate exploratory moves on the part of my touching hand.” And
were we to interrupt the intentive directedness of the various phases of this
experience, we could discover the way the hand lived ‘from within’ adopts the
appropriate quality correlative to the movement style solicited by the various
tactile possibilities of my face (and perhaps guided by its sensitivity
‘from within’, so that I do not explore more delicate areas with too rough of a
touch). Thus I can explicitly
concern myself with “how” I am touching, or I can surrender any active attempt
to control or vary the style (or habitual range of possibilities) of my
touching, and allow the touched to lead me.
Summary: The touching/touched experience has been invoked by both
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, each emphasizing various features of the experience
and each generating his own statement of the significance of the
phenomenological evidence disclosed. (35) Of the various reversibilities
discussed, the most important for the present paper is the possibility of a
bodily reflexivity at the heart of bodily intentionality. By adopting the appropriate perceptual
style, one acquires an awareness that neither makes the body into an object,
nor construes “bodily subjectivity” on the model of the type of intentional
object typically given in separative seeing. Furthermore, unlike such an objectifying regard—which
“ruptures the silence” of the operative lived body and, as I have suggested,
“freezes it in its tracks”—the awareness ‘from within’ need not disrupt the
activity of touching.
I now
note that the “perspectivity” whereby it seems that “I” can “inhabit” only “one
side at a time” of the reversible toucher/touched roles
p. 18
may be a
carry-over from that perceptual style for which a distance, gap, or gulf
between “subject” and “object” (or “ego” and “world”) is mandatory. What happens if I deliberately ask
myself to “live in” both “sides,” the “toucher” and the “touchee,”
simultaneously?
When I first
experimented with this task, I learned that even giving myself the order could
make the touch less superficial and more gently penetrating, more
transformative, more healing. It
was as if the “interface” between “toucher” and “touched” sank more deeply into
my touched flesh, motivating release even in areas that did not feel “tense” to
begin with. But perhaps this was a
way of discovering bodily reflexivity in the first place, not a fulfillment of
the command to live both roles simultaneously. I have subsequently detected a different and more profound
change in my experience when I perform this experiment, though I do not seem to
be able to sustain the different mode for more than a moment. I have a sense of “short-circuiting” a
habitual “mental” style of experiencing, associated with the separative
style in which “I” seem to be located “behind my eyes.” (36) It is as though by suspending the rule
of mono-perspectivity and fulfilling instead the conditions of a lived
“aperspectivity” or “multi-perepectivity,” I have rendered a deeply sedimented
experiential style not merely “thematic,” but momentarily “inoperative.”
We may now ask
whether the structural possibilities of the lived body revealed in the
description of bodily awareness and the touching/touched experience may be
brought to givenness in other situations as well. The body is so often operative, “passed over in silence”; can we render it diaphanous in its
commerce with things without interfering with its tacit
functioning? Furthermore, the
perceptual style of separative seeing was characterized by a typicality in
which the style subsumes an inexhaustible range of possible examples. Are the findings of the second and
third descriptions limited to the privileged case of my own lived body, or can
the perceptual style I have termed awareness ‘from within’ serve as a clue to a
more general “way” of “world-experiencing-life”? (37)
p. 19
Phenomenological
Description #4:
Touching/Being
Touched/Touching-Through
I return to the
ball. This time I touch it, with
my fingers, feeling the slight irregularity of its surface. Next I halt the small exploratory
movements of my fingers and rest my hand on the ball. I can still feel it.
But when I consult the feeling of the touching hand ‘from
within,’ the felt ball fades. It
is otherwise when I regear the situation so that “the ball is touching me,” and
my hand is in the role of the touched. Its contact reverberates through my hand lived ‘from
within’. Finally, I allow my hand
to be the touching organ once more, but this time resuming active
movement, rather than resting my hand on the ball in relative stillness. I can not only feel the ball that I am
touching, I can be aware of the quality of my touching flesh ‘from within’ and
its link with the quality of my movement and with the felt quality of my
tactile object.
Now I pick up the
ball, and absorb it into my touching hand: I feel “with” and “through” it. There is a way in which the ball can
efface itself, and I can feel the world directly throuh it (as one can sense
the quality of the terrain through one’s footgear), and yet there is also a
sense in which an incipient “reflexivity” of this borrowed amplification of my
hand’s touching power can come into play: I substitute the pencil or the pen
for the ball, for example, and can sense, in and through the act of touching,
the relative stiffness of the one and resilience of the other, as well as the
differences in quality of the same thing touched in two different ways. (So
also is the graveled walk different felt through feet in leather shoes and feet
in socks, or the violin string felt through an exquisitely balanced bow and an
inferior one, etc.)
I return to the
ball and begin to play with it, rolling it back and forth with one hand or two,
tossing it in the air and catching it, with one hand or two. Within limits, I can do this without
relying on sight at all. And
strangely enough, I can retain a felt connection with the ball even when I am
not actually touching it. For even
when it is not touching my skin, the ball is caught up in my bodily sphere of
influence; if it escapes me, it is when I have lost the sensible connection
that incorporates the ball and its movement into my own “mineness.” Even the
look of the ball has changed: it is no longer the separate static object “over
there” of the initial description of a visible thing, though I can reestablish
that intentional object at will by adopting the style of separative seeing.
Reciprocity: I can touch the
ball; reciprocally, the ball can touch me. I do not feel the ball itself ‘from within’ unless I take it
up into my motor project of touching, and perhaps it is my own motor capability
of touching
p. 20
that I lend to
the things when I say “the ball touches me.” Nevertheless, a version of all the
reversibilities previously discussed is experientially discernible if I
transform the experiential style or structure “my own body”– “vs.”–
“the thing over there” into a mutual, reciprocal contact.
Flexible
interface: The line of demarcation where “I” and “the world” are
divided is fluid; as other researchers have noted, a thing may be taken up into
my phenomenal body, “extending” my motor schema beyond the limits of the skin
that marks “my own” boundary when I myself am seen as a separate visual object.
(38) The body visibly confined to its sack of skin is the
intentional object of a separative style of perception; the kinaesthetic amoeba
is lived ‘from within’ in abstraction from the sensible interface where I touch
something other than myself, where I am both toucher and touched. But the experience of “prolonging”
myself through the thing or tool I take up demonstrates that even in commerce
with tangible things, the phenomenal body is a protean body, reaching, as it
were, “pseudopods” of awareness through those “detachable” members whose
inorganic independence from my organic body is so readily recognized and analyzed
by separative seeing. There is
thus no absolute or preordained opposition between “sentient subject” and
“sensible thing,” not only because I am sensible as well as sentient, but also
because I presume upon this kinship with the things to appropriate them into
the functional structure of my own lived flesh.
Diakinaisthesis: I have coined
this term (as a companion to Gebser’s notion of diaphaneity, not Sartre’s
concept of transparency) to specify the awareness ‘from within’ that can, for
example, pervade (albeit to different degrees) both the touching hand and the
thing that it is “touching-through.” The term is a reference not only to
kinaesthesis and aisthesis, but also to the body sense that is a “feeling-through”
my lived body (including its appropriated “extensions”). In other words, the term
“diakinaisthesis” names the perceptual style that need not be automatically
effaced in favor of the experience-of its object, but rather can also
incorporate a concretely reflexive living-through the moving corporeal
“conditions” by which we are “rendered present to something.”
p. 21
The claim for a diakinaisthetic style of awareness is
radical in at least two ways: it rests on a claim for a bodily reflexivity
(rather than limiting reflexivity to “consciousness,” understood as “mental,”or
denying reflexivity entirely in favor of an absolute intentionality); and it
claims that we can be bodily self-aware even in the process of our activities
(for unlike the alienating effect of self-observation in the separative style,
diakinaisthesis does not “stop the flow” or “rupture the silence,” but
illuminates it ‘from within’). In
short, it is a claim that the operative can be thematized and still continue to
operate (though it may change).
Articulation
without opposition: As I play with the ball, integrating it into my lived
motility and touching-through it, feeling-through it, the ball is no longer an
object facing a subject or a dead thing vs. a living being. It is not opposite to me; but neither
is it fused (or confused) with me in total confluence. Rather than enforcing distance by
virtue of its essential structure, as does separative seeing, the style of
awareness in question dissolves the experience of ob-ject “over-against-me,”
or, perhaps more accurately, dismantles the entire structure of “ego-subject
facing object” (for it is not as though I am still a classical “ego” or “mind”
simply experiencing “its body” in a new way). Yet this awareness does not require that I be touching the
ball, only that I maintain the “felt connection” with it. Thus the experiential example
described—which offers an instance of a lived awareness that does not posit an
“opposite”—already surpasses the purely tactile and raises once again the question
of the range of typicality of the perceptual style discussed in the second,
third, and fourth descriptions. If
we adopt a global perceptual style that allows for reciprocity and
reversibilities, an awareness ‘from within’ that does not confront an alien
world from a distance, will we receive visible as well as tangible evidence of
a “world without opposite” (just as separative seeing can find its counterpart
in manipulative and unfeeling touch)?
And can such a perceptual style become paradigmatic for the lived world
as a whole?
p. 23
Intertextual
commentary: For Gebser, the locution “world without opposite”—which
names not an impoverishing loss, but a release to a new world-openness—refers
to a new world-horizon emerging in correlation with a radical mutation of
consciousness. (39) He describes its manifestations at
length, drawing examples from many areas of modern culture and often focusing
on the theme of a “supercession of dualism” (e.g., a subject-object
antithesis). For Gebser, Cézanne
was one of the first to accomplish this in painting. The pictorial image that is governed by classical rules of
representation and perspective is “constantly experienced as an opposite,” as an
object “for its creator and its observer alike.” (40) But we
find Cézanne saying “Je me sense coloré par toutes les nuances de
l’Infini. Je ne fais plus qu’un
avec mon tableau.” (4l) Thus the painting-in-progress is not
a separate object before the painter—and neither is the scene he or she is
painting. “‘The landscape thinks
itself in me,’ he said, ‘and I am its consciousness.’” (42)
This consciousness is corporeal (“The painter ‘takes his body with him,’ says
Valéry”—Primacy, 162) and capable of the reversibilities that mark the
kinship of “my” flesh with the flesh of the world.
Inevitably the
roles between [the painter] and the visible are reversed. That is why so many painters have said
that things look at them. As André
Marchand says, after Klee: “In a forest, I have felt many times over that it
was not I who looked at the forest.
Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me
.... (43)
Gebser writes,
Just a few
decades ago there existed for us matter, the material world, forming an insurmountable
wall of being standing opposite us ... a limit-establishing opposite. In the meantime, this wall has been
demolished. Painting achieved this
through spatial dissolution, through dematerialization, and through its efforts
on behalf of nonrepresentationalism.
On its side, nuclear physics has taught us that the components of the
ostensible density of materiality themselves consist of atoms whose materiality
disappears into the impalpable, the invisible, and the unenvisionable. (44)
And he says that
Cézanne’s art is
the first visible expression of that which bestows new possibilities of
realization upon our
p. 23
consciousness and
by way of which reality and the world begin to emerge into new modes of
appearance. The perspectivally
fixed positions, representations, systems and postulates break up. Their represented opposition collapses
in itself and frees the glance ... to the openness of the whole. It was a question of openness only to
those who would be able to catch sight of it with a new manner of becoming
aware, and who broke through the quantitative, objective wall of being with a
new vision, which was to experience themselves as opening the world itself. (45)
It is thus “a
question of a new reality, one which naturally is not representable, and which,
because it has ceased to exist as an opposite, we can no longer fix before us.”
(46)For Merleau-Ponty, as well, such a “mutation within the
relations of man and Being” (Primacy, 179) is not only inscribed in the
works of Cézanne or the findings of modern physics, but in the everyday:
As I contemplate
the blue of the sky I am not set over against it as an acosmic subject;
I do not possess it in thought, or spread out towards it some idea of blue such
as might reveal the secret of it, I abandon myself to it and plunge into this
mystery, it ‘thinks itself within me’, I am the sky itself as it is drawn
together and unified .... (PP, 248/214)
Here “the
relation between what I see and I who see is not one of immediate or frontal
contradiction; the things attract my look, my gaze caresses the things, it
espouses their contours and their reliefs, between it and them we catch sight
of a complicity” (VI, 107/76).
The open “secret” is this complicity among sensible and sentient.
Thus the lived
body through which I “go unto the heart of the things”
is not itself a
thing ... but a sensible for itself ... hence an exemplar sensible,
which offers to him who inhabits it and senses it the wherewithal to sense
everything that resembles himself on the outside, such that, caught up in the
tissue of the things, it draws it entirely to itself, incorporates it, and,
with the same movement, communicates to the things upon which it closes over
that identity without superposition, that difference without contradiction,
that divergence between the within and the without that constitutes its natal
secret. ... One can say that we perceive the things themselves,
p. 24
that we are the
world that thinks itself—or that the world is at the heart of our flesh. In any case, once a body-world relationship
is recognized, there is a ramification of my body and a ramification of the
world and a correspondence between its inside and my outside, between my inside
and its outside. (VI, 178–79/135–36)
The “identity
without superposition,” which is at the same time a “difference without
contradiction,” speaks of a body-world articulation that is neither confluence
nor opposition. (47) But that we are not opposite to
the flesh of the world can itself be given leibhaft only when, like
Gebser and Merleau-Ponty, we accept the task of overcoming dualism. And to the extent that the world
without opposite is a task, Merleau-Ponty’s account of the flesh of the
world does not merely “describe,” but, perhaps, transforms. It may then call for a fulfilling
praxis.
Phenomenological
Description #5:
Integrative Body
Work/Movement Re-education
I see Anne down
at the bottom of the driveway, visible to me across distance, clearly separate from
me. Once she is on the table for her Trager session, I no longer see her that
way: vision becomes diffuse and blended with the tactile and the kinaesthetic
in a single global style. I take
her limb and for a moment feel its weight, assessing it with respect for the
subject whose limb it is, gauging its density through my own lived
density. Then I gather this limb
into my own lived body, moving it gently from the whole of me and sensing ‘from
within’ its freedom and ease of movement, aware of “holding patterns” where the
streaming “glow” of presence falters, where the flow is blocked. Perhaps I
relinquish her limb for a moment and find ‘from within’ myself the sense of
lightness and mobility I know lived flesh can yield; then I reestablish her
limb as moving member of my own body, and move us both, initiating throughout
this shared system not only a certain quality or style of movement, but the
correlative quality lived ‘from within’ by both of us.
Or it is I who lie an Marky’s table, receiving a Trager session. I am not an object under her hands, being manipulated from the outside (even at my own command and for my own benefit); rather, I borrow her hands, her skill, her capacity for bodily awareness ‘from within’, to be multifoldly, carnally present. With some amazement, I realize that I can feel my own body from her hands’ “point of view,” sensing the tangible quality of my own shoulder in precisely the same way as I can feel Anne’s when I give her a session, and at the same time I can partner this sensing with deep awareness ‘from within’, learning anew that this flesh can be flowing self-sentience, not numb thing.
p. 25
Even when, after
the table work, Marky and I stand face-to-face and move together, confirming
and integrating what I learned on the table, I do not confront her
separatively; our relation is mutual and “lateral,” not “frontal.” Without
mechanically mirroring her actions, I pick up the shape and rhythm of the
movement and it passes through us, ripples of a shared wave.
Remarks: Such a
description is not merely an account to be read indifferently among other
accounts, but a recommendation for a bodily praxis. I began this essay by asking whether “la chair du monde”
could be given leibhaft (in the deepest sense of the latter term—cf. Signs,
167). I now answer that this is
possible, though it may require preparation and training in awakening the numb
flesh of one’s own lived body, through “living-in” the awareness ‘from within’
and through the compassionate touch of the other. By restoring a bodily reflexivity at the heart of bodily
intentionality, we find ourselves sentient, sensible, and truly self-sentient
as well. Learning this style of
awareness may allow us to mobilize the rigidity born of repression or neglect,
to heal the wordless wounds where separative dualism has torn the flesh and to
melt these scars. And we cannot
always do this alone. But we need
not see ourselves as alone, for recovering “my” flesh, I find that it is
more than “mine.”
It is already the
flesh of things that speaks to us of our own flesh, and that speaks to us of
the flesh of the other. (VI, 246/193)
... there is not
simply a for-Oneself for-the-Other antithesis ... there is not only a me-other
rivalry, but a co-funotioning. We
function as one unique body. (VI, 268/215)
[The other and I]
are like organs of one single intercorporeality. (Signs, 168)
Were this rather than the separative style the touchstone for our everyday way of being-in-the-world, we might find ourselves involved in win-win, rather than win-lose relationships and negotiations; we might sense ourselves integral participants in the natural world, rather than exploiting its “natural resources” then sending our toxic wastes downstream or across the border. In short, we might find the “flesh of the world without opposite” given concrete expression not only in modern painting and
p. 26
modern physics,
but throughout our interpersonal, social, political, and ecological contexture.
The act of perceiving—which,
in the silent transivity of perceptual faith, constitutes (or co-constitutes) a
perceptual object—is an intentional act.
Though others have shown that not all intentionalities need be “acts” in
any strict sense, the “directedness” of intentionality itself, as openness
toward..., remains a fundamental finding of phenomenological research. Merleau-Ponty’s insistence that there
is a “bodily intentionality” (rather than a solely “mental” intentionality, for
which the body can be but an object) does not weaken but rather strengthens
this fundamental finding. The
present essay does not dispute intentionality, but does suggest that the notion
of the “intentional object” has been tacitly interpreted according to the model
of what I have called “separative seeing.” (48) Thus bodily
reflexivity has been “overlooked” (yet cannot be found by merely “looking
harder”).
The
“natural attitude” embodied in the everyday perceptual style of separative
seeing involves us in perspectival (sectorial) and rational-technological
(manipulative) confrontation with the “wall of being” that we face
everywhere. Ultimately, the
divisive, separative style has the possibility of dominating every aspect of
life. This essay suggests that
lived awareness ‘from within’ is an alternative style with equally global
possibilities. This integral
possibility of awareness does not preclude other possibilities—for instance,
retaining the strengths of our ability to survey the world from a distance and
direct it accordingly. (49) Nor does the possibility of
making the body “passed over in silence” diaphanous (or better, diakinaisthetic)
preclude our living with the things, reaching them on routes of habit,
unconscious of the “how” of our actions.
The “alternative” does not lie in choosing either the pre-reflective or
the dawning awareness I have termed “bodily reflexivity”; instead, we may say
that both are alternatives to the sort of representational consciousness
for which movement can only be thought “about” movement (and never the
p. 27
pre-reflective
immediacy of lived movement, nor its “how” self-sensed ‘from within’). (50)
Representational
thought cannot do justice to its own embodied natural attitude, for each time
the thinker reflects on his/her body, it becomes an other for the self that is
doing the reflecting. Thus an
entire history of alienation and dualism is reinstated even in the very effort
to overcome this unhappy legacy.
But Merleau-Ponty explicitly fashions an alternative to such disembodied
reflection.
We have relearned
to feel our body; we have found underneath the objective and detached knowledge
of the body that other knowledge which we have of it in virtue of its always
being with us and of the fact that we are our body. In the same way we shall need to reawaken our experience of
the world as it appears to us in so far as we are in the world through our
body, and in so far as we perceive the world with our body. (PP, 239/206)
“The body is our
general medium for having a world.” But we can live and know our own body in
more than one way, and are thereby open to more than one style of lived world,
for it is the “deep structure” of corporeal perception that keeps the world in
play.
What one senses =
the sensible thing, the sensible world = the correlate of my active body, what
“responds” to it — — What senses = I cannot posit one sole sensible without
positing it as torn from my flesh, lifted off my flesh, and my flesh itself is
one of the sensibles in which an inscription of all the others is made, the
sensible pivot in which all the others participate, the sensible-key, the
dimensional sensible. (VI, 313/259–60)
To be born of the flesh is to be initiated into this
corporeal complicity. And it is by
our global perceptual style that we perpetuate the lifeworld we live.
p. 28
A. Touch/Kinaesthesis/Body
Feeling: There is some ambiguity in the use of such terms as “tactile” and
“kinaesthetic” within the literature on sensory perception and bodily
awareness. This derives, in part,
from an inherited division of sensory experience into five “senses” (sight,
hearing, touch, smell, taste), to which a sixth, a “kinaesthetic sense,” is
sometimes added. Some
writers—e.g., J. J. Gibson—have challenged this division. Gibson proposes a schema of perceptual
“systems” characterized by the type of environmental “information” they obtain:
the visual system, the auditory system, the taste-smell system, the
basic-orienting system, and the haptic system. The basic-orienting system, which is indeed basic to all the
others, has to do with upright posture and body equilibrium; it provides
orientation with respect to gravity and the ground plane, along with front-back
and right-left orientation. The
haptic system refers to the activity of touching, but also includes the
inner-bodily sensations commonly named by such terms as “kinaesthetic,”
“proprioceptive,” “coenesthetic,” etc. (51) Thus in Gibson’s
scheme, the body as a motile “null-point” (52) is described
in terms of the basic-orienting system, while other aspects of lived
motility—e.g., kinaesthetic “information” concerning movement of one’s own
joints and muscles—is categorized as haptic, i.e., as functionally implicated
in the tactile perception of an object outside the body (or, in some cases,
inside the body—e.g., a fishbone stuck in the throat). Such an approach is consistent with Gibson’s
explicit focus upon perceptual systems as active ways in which an organism
obtains “information” about the outside world: for Gibson,
proprioception participates in perception, but proprioceptive “sensations” per
se are relevant only insofar as they are subsumed in this project of achieving
and maintaining perceptual contact with the environment.
Gibson’s
presentation of the intertwining of tactile and kinaesthetic aspects in the
haptic system can easily find support in the phenomenological analysis of the
foundational role of the kinaesthetic field for sensory perception, which is
particularly clear in the case of tactile
p. 29
experience. (53) But it does not address the question of
the direct experience of one’s own body.
The contrast between the experience of “touch” and “body feeling” may be
approached with the following descriptions by Elisabeth Ströker:
In touch the
world is manifested in the primordial sense as standing in opposition. Touch touches something, and
indeed something material, something thing-like, which it encounters and which
simultaneously confronts it.
This leads to the experience of the thing’s resistance.
Closer
consideration of the resistance by virtue of which “something” is first present
at all to touch reveals its dual nature: experience not only shows that the
tactile thing resists the lived body, but that the touching lived body resists
the touched thing. The lived body
thereby experiences itself with respect to its touchability; it is a “physical
body,” a thing among things—and yet at the same time, it remains
unbridgeably separated from them in that it is a felt body, and indeed,
one that is felt “from within” [“von innen”].
Where the lived
body itself becomes given, it does so in a way not comparable to any other mode
of being given. In sensation as
“corporeal feeling” [“Leibgefühl”] it is present in a specific,
qualitatively and intensively unique state. This state does not signify objectivity. It is an awareness [Innewerden]
of the lived body in a nonthetic mode of consciousness, which, however, has two
particular characteristics. First,
consciousness of one’s own lived body is consciousness of the lived body as a whole. Even with strictly localizable organ
sensations, the organ is not sensed alone; rather, the lived body as a whole
functions as the phenomenal background of all these single sensations. Second, each actual consciousness of
one’s own lived body already belongs to the latter’s entire existence [Da-sein]
prior to all differentiated states.
Each corporeal consciousness already and always assumes the prior being
of the entire lived body, which is not exhausted by the singular states given. (54)
In no way do
Ströker’s descriptions of a “corporeal feeling from within” contradict the
analysis of the constitution of one’s own body as a material thing, and this
precisely through the experience of “resistance” mentioned above.
But while it is comparable to things,
this does not mean that the lived body thereby becomes a thing among things. A thing does not experience its
thinghood in its
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encounter with others; it does not have
any “thing-experience” of “itself.” Yet the self-experience of the corporeal
“thing” is entirely different in kind from experiencing all other things. While apprehending myself as a
body, I am present to myself “in
the flesh” [leib-“haftig”] in an incomparable way. Thus the sensory intuition of my body
is not accomplished in the same way as my intuition of other things. ...
Rather, my body as a whole is present to me immediately and actually; it is not
given objectively, but felt through in an order of depth clearly differentiated
according to quality and intensity. (55)
A. Michotte
concurs with Ströker’s statement that “the sensory intuition of my body is not
accomplished in the same way as my intuition of other things,” pointing out
that “‘sensations’ are not experienced in the ordinary way in the case of the
body.” (56) He
devotes several pages to describing
Unfortunately
there is some confusion on this subject, since people generally attribute to
the ‘sense’ (so-called) of kinaesthesis not only the impressions of movement in
our limbs and our postural awareness (stataesthesis), but also our impressions
of the resistance, hardness, weight, and shape of external objects. This approach derives from the
traditional theory of sense-perception and the custom of classifying
‘sensations’ according to the different receptor organs by which they are
mediated. In fact, however, the
stimulation of the organs of deep sensibility gives impressions of two very
distinct types, according to the conditions of the total situation in which
they occur, which determine whether they are ‘objective’ or ‘subjective. ...
Somatic
impressions, in the strict sense, form a special class, and there is only one
object whose boundaries they mark, viz. our own body. (57)
Thus for Michotte,
as for Ströker, one’s own body is given in a unique experiential way, despite
the fact that it also participates sensuously (and essentially) in the
givenness of other objects in tactile (and other perceptual) experience. Their descriptions distinguish
tactility, in the strict sense, from what Ströker calls “corporeal feeling” [Leibgefühl]
and Michotte calls “somatic impressions” or “kinaesthesis.”
Husserl, however,
has distinguished between kinaesthesis as the pure “I-can” (which, as is well
known, plays a crucial role in Merleau-Ponty’s
p. 31
presentation of bodily intentionality) and the lived
feeling of bodily movement:
What Husserl
means by kinaesthesis is not the bodily sensations accompanying movement or
muscular tension, or the inner sensations, but rather something volitional or
quasi-volitional that remains when one abstracts from such sensations. (58)
A similar
distinction is drawn by Richard M. Zaner in his discussion of Marcel’s description
of the experience of one’s own body. For Marcel, the body as lived is not an
object, but a “felt kernel” (“noyau senti”), a special type of “sentir”
referred to as an “Urgefühl.” (59) Zaner
points out that Marcel only occasionally and tentatively equates “sentir”
with coenesthetic sensations. (60) For Zaner, that which
plays the primordial role that Marcel assigned the Urgefühl is not
coenesthetic “data,” but the kinaesthetic flow-patterns described by Husserl:
... not only are
these kinaesthesias, or kinaesthetic flow-patterns, functionally correlated
with certain Wahrnehmungsempfindungen ... but also ... these
kinaesthetic flow-patterns are themselves, in their correlation with perception,
experienced by consciousness, “felt,” as Marcel puts it, in the sense of being urgefühlt.
(61)
This “felt
nucleus” is not composed of coenesthetic, proprioceptive, or other somatic sensations,
but is rather “a unified ensemble of powers or potentialities,” which
govern the if-then correlation between the perceiving corporeal consciousness
and the things thereby perceived (e.g., if I turn my head to the left, I can
see my black cat):
... these
organized and unified potencies ... are experienced as that which embodies me
but which I cannot make into “objects,” in the etymological sense of the term.
... these potencies are indeed “felt,” but are not specific types of
coenesthetic data but rather are kinaesthetic flow-patterns which are
experienced or “felt” as that which places me in a world of objects: they
embody me “at” the world by actualizing my strivings. ... It is not the case,
then, that these kinaesthesias are themselves “objects” for consciousness; rather,
it is by means of them that consciousness directs itself to “objects” as
transcendent
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to itself; they
are lived, not “looked at.” (62)
Such distinctions
may be schematized in at least two ways: (1) Bodily intentionality requires
some sort of co-perception of one’s own body. However, the latter cannot be thematized in the same way as
are other intentional “objects”; kinaesthesis is not a “datum,” an “object”
given for “consciousness,” but a “means.” Thus I have referred to “bodily
reflexivity” and “diakinaisthesis” to indicate that the lived body so
understood or co-perceived is not, strictly speaking, the object of an
intentional act, but is that which is felt-through. (2) If an
“object” known as “my own lived body” is given, even given uniquely in its
“mineness” through the special experiential class of somatic sensations
mentioned earlier, this can only be the body-as-constituted; the
body-as-constituting—which is foundational for the mineness of my own lived
body (Leib) as felt (Leibgefühl), for the materiality of my body
as physical body (Körper) in resistant encounter with the things of the
world, for the synthesis of the latter two, and indeed for spatiality and the
perceptual fields—can be described with the term “kinaesthesis” in the sense of
Zaner, but not in the sense of Michotte.
Several other
observations may now be made with respect to the constellation of terms
discussed above.
(1)
Terminological ambiguities in this area are not simply the result of inherited
schemata concerning sensory fields, but are founded in functional
interconnections within the phenomena themselves. For example, any concrete instance whatsoever of touching
will necessarily swing kinaesthesis (in the sense of the I-can, as emphasized
by Husserl and Zaner) into play, and, given the appropriate experiential shift,
a correlative qualitative “corporeal feeling” can also be brought to givenness.
(2) Various
experiential disciplines and strategies in the practice of “body work” may
focus on one or another of these intertwined aspects (tactility, I-can, Leibgefühl),
yet bring about changes in the others as well. For example, in the Alexander technique, based on the work
of F. M. Alexander,
p. 33
the practitioner’s touch helps the client change habitual
patterns in upright posture as the global field of the pure “I-can”; corporeal
feelings of ease or release do occur, though they are not posited as an immediate
goal of the process. Sensory
Awareness, developed by Charlotte Selver (based on the work of Elsa Gindler),
often uses tactile contact with things to awaken the feel of the lived body
itself as well as its motility.
The practice of Awareness Through Movement, developed by Moshe
Feldenkrais, improves the functioning of the I-can through awareness of the
feel of the “how” of the movement, as well as awareness of how, say, the prone
body contacts the floor. And in
Trager Psychophysical Integration, developed by Milton Trager (cf.
Phenomenological Description #5 above), the practitioner first evokes the felt
quality of freedom and lightness in his or her own living, moving body, then
communicates this feeling to the client through touch, eliciting in the recipient
not only pleasurable bodily feelings of ease, but an enhanced capacity for
light and easy movement as well. (63) Often ease and freedom of movement is
accompanied by a waning of “corporeal feeling,” as though one’s “body sense” is
accustomed to a certain degree of “tension” tacitly recognized as “normal.”
Nearly all experiential body disciplines emphasize the felt bodily experience
of the person over any “intellectualization” of the experience. Nevertheless, I believe that all such
disciplines could benefit from developing experientially-grounded terms capable
of articulating the richness of this “non-verbal” realm.
(3) The ultimate
court of appeal for all terminological questions must be the phenomena
themselves, given leibhaft:
For, with respect
to all objects there exists the difference between a simple, empty process of
presenting, or reproduction, of merely verbal intention, on the one hand, and
the “self-presence” and consciousness of self-givenness corresponding to this
self-presence, on the other. (64)
Thus choices between terms can only be decided on the
basis of the itself-givenness of that to which the terms refer. In addition, we must respect the
principle
p. 34
that every originary
presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition,that everything
originarily (so to speak, in its “personal” actuality) offered to us
in “intuition” is to be accepted simply as what it is
presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is
presented there. (65)
Thus no
“experience” given leibhaft is to be suppressed on the grounds that it
cannot be accomodated by current theories—or even by the “standard”
phenomenological descriptions of such experience. But in addition, no experiential evidence is to be
“explained away” or replaced by theoretical or terminological constructs,
whatever their source may be.
B. “Inner-Outer”/‘From
Within’: In philosophical usage, terms such as “inner” and “outer,” “interior”
and “exterior,” tend to carry an implicitly Cartesian history, expressing “the
clear distinction between the private ‘internal world’ of mind-spirit and the
‘external world’ of extension.”(66) When “inner perception”
and “outer perception” are philosophically discussed, the question is often one
of the immediacy, certainty, infallibility, or apodicticity of “inner
perception.” (67) However, these historical overtones of the inner-outer schema
are not presupposed, but are rather set out of play, by the experiential
“style” for which I have used the technical term ‘from within’. (68)
This latter mode
of experience need not imply a mind-body dualism, though in the inherited
language of that tradition it might be hinted at by such phrases as the “mind’s
body” (corps de l’esprit) or “incarnate cogito.” Nor can
‘from within’ be given a merely spatialized sense, as though it meant “from
inside the ‘container’ of my own skin.” (69) Lived awareness
of one’s own body ‘from within’ is not inimical to the more universal notion of
“extension,” but rather exhibits its own sort of “spread” and “depth” (see
Phenomenological Description #2).
Yet it is not identical to the experience “of” one’s own body as an
object that “I” contemplate, which assumes precisely that style or paradigm of
separative seeing from which awareness ‘from within’ diverges by contrast. Thus neither res cogitans nor res
extensa can claim the phenomena revealed by awareness ‘from within’, and
the Cartesian schema falls by the wayside. (70) In
p. 35
addition,
an absolute dichotomy between the “internal” as “private” and the “external” as
“public” is undermined. But far
from being “immediate” or “certain,” as “inner perception” has been claimed to
be, lived awareness ‘from within’ is—at least for many people—initially far
more elusive than perception of the things of the world. (71)
The term ‘from
within’, as used here, refers more to a manner of givenness than to a class of
givens. Erazim Kohák writes,
In Saint
Augustine’s or Whitehead’s usage, the distinction of “inward” and “outward” did
not suggest a compartmentalization of entities into two categories, the world
of objects, conceived as the region of meaningless matter in motion, and the
world of meanings, locked within the privacy of each individual’s mind or even
brain. In their usage, both terms
apply equally to all being, referring not to classes of entities but to modes
of being and modes of understanding anything that is. (72)
In this case “the
crucial distinction is not between an ‘outer’ and an ‘inner’ reality but, as
Bergson recognized, between understanding any and all reality from within
and explaining it superficially from without.” (73) The
contrast is thus not only between “understanding” and “explanation,” but also
between an “inwardness” and a merely “outward” view.
For better or for
worse, though, that is no longer how we understand the terms “inner” and
“outer.” In our ordinary usage, those terms have acquired a distinctively
spatial significance, as if they designated regions of entities rather than
modes of being and understanding. (74)
But the contrast
at stake in the present paper is definitely between two perceptual styles or
experiential modes rather than two sorts of “entities.” In this connection it
is worthwhile to refer to Marcel’s distinction between a “first reflection” and
a “second reflection,” as presented in Zaner’s study, The Problem of
Embodiment:
First, by
treating whatever presents itself to me as an object ..., [first reflection]
necessarily sets up to begin with a separation between a “here” which is
“subject” and a “there” which is “object” .… Aiming at “pure objectivity,”
secondly, it excludes what is “here” (“subject”) from the “there” (“objects”)
deeming it a taint on objectivity to have anything “merely
p. 36
subjective”.…
First reflection is thus at once an act of alienation and of desertion, seeking
an ideal non-involvement by the spectator in the spectacle. (75)
But for Marcel,
such an approach is not adequate to self or consciousness. “Accordingly, it becomes necessary to
reapproach the entire domain of subjectivity, in order to be able to apprehend
it from within .…” (76)
‘From within’,
then, can serve to indicate, not something spatially “inside” something else,
nor even a class of sensations belonging to a single privileged “object” (e.g.,
my own lived body), but rather a “style,” “attitude,” or “approach” that may be
manifested in various modes of experience—e.g., phenomenological reflection on subjectivity,
as well as bodily awareness or diakinaisthesis. Ultimately, however, the term ‘from within’ is shorthand for
its experiential fulfillment, which alone legitimates it as a term or working
category.
C. “Bodily
Intentionality”/ “Bodily Reflexivity”: Mohanty notes that Husserl may have
spoken of a “bodily intentionality” for the first time in the 1925 lectures
published as Phenomenological Psychology, (77) but
credits Merleau-Ponty with developing this theme, and indeed says that “the
notion of bodily intentionality is an original contribution of Merleau-Ponty.” (78) Merleau-Ponty’s description of the role of bodily motility
as “basic intentionality” (cf., e.g., PP, 160/137) is in no way challenged,
but rather presupposed, by the present essay. However, the enrichment of the notion of “intentionality”
accomplished by the specification of a “bodily intentionality” may be
complemented by the parallel enrichment of “reflexivity” by a “bodily reflexivity.”
According to Mohanty,
... what we have
called ‘reflexivity’ of consciousness has been misconstrued either as inner
perception ..., or as the possibility of intentionally directing an act of
reflection towards the conscious state in question ..., or as a peculiar
doubling back of consciousness upon itself. But the reflexivity of consciousness is neither of these, it
is prior to all these. It is not a function of intentionality, it is not just
another mode of it. The original
mode of
p. 37
givenness of
consciousness to itself is not its being an object of another intentional act.
... this
self-givenness without being directed towards itself, this non-positing,
pre-reflective self-givenness of consciousness is exactly what we have called
its transparence or reflexivity .… (79)
In other words,
the term “reflexivity” refers to an awareness that does not open upon an
“object,” whether what is meant is an object “other than itself” or “itself qua
object,” and whether or not what is reflexively given is (or can be)
subsequently made into an object of reflection. (80)
According to
Mohanty’s discussion, intentionality is “a necessary condition of
reflexivity.” (81) It is in light of his presentation of
this priority of intentionality that I have introduced the term “reflexivity”
in the context of describing touch and its intentional structure, rather than
in discussing bodily awareness per se.
Though I have assumed Mohanty’s presentation of reflexivity in choosing
the term “bodily reflexivity,” he himself does not explicitly allow the latter
term. However, it is implied by
his discussion of “degrees of intentionality” and “degrees of reflexivity” (82) and his statement that “even the bodily motility is not
just in-itself, wholly opaque, lacking self-awareness.” (83)
It must be
mentioned that the lived awareness here termed “bodily reflexivity” is not
automatically identical with the sense in which the lived body is said to be
“reflexively related to itself” (84) solely because it is
not only seeing and touching, but tangible and visible to itself. Despite the importance of this
circumstance for both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, if it is conceived as “a
procedure in which the functioning organ must become an Object and the Object a
functioning organ,” (85) it is not identical with the
reflexive turn wherein, say, the touching hand feels itself ‘from within’. The difference is that with the latter,
“the self-perception (sentiment of oneself, Hegel would say) or perception of
perception does not convert what it apprehends into an object ...” (VI,
303/249). In the same passage from
which the latter remark is drawn, Merleau-Ponty equates “the reflexivity of the
body” with “the fact that it touches itself touching, sees
p. 38
itself seeing .…” In the language of the
present study, however, reflexivity is not merely a “fact,” but may also itself
be given leibhaft, e.g., in the case of bodily self-awareness ‘from
within’.
My use of the
term “reflexivity” should also be distinguished from Zaner’s use of the term in
The Context of Self, (86) though I believe his
presentation of corporeal experience there to be thoroughly compatible with the
present essay.
D. On that
which cannot be made into an “object”: As other sections of this essay have
suggested, many writers describing the mode of givenness of one’s own body
contrast it with that of an “object,” a point which Merleau-Ponty also
emphasizes (cf., e.g., PP, Part One). Scheler, for example, writes: “To live in a lived body does
not mean to possess it objectively.” (87) As Marcel says,
“there is ... a certain fundamental way of feeling that cannot in any way be
converted into an object ,” (88) a point echoed in Zaner’s
remark that “coenesthetic, proprioceptive, and kinaesthetic data are not
apprehended by me as objects.” (89)
But in his
discussion of Sartre’s analysis of the body, Zaner writes,
... my
body-as-lived by me cannot become an object for me just because, so far as I live
it, I am it; and, being my body, I cannot realize the “distance”
necessary to make it appear as object over against me, the subject. The implicit argument here is the same
as Marcel’s, and as Merleau-Ponty’s ...: the moment I attempt to grasp my
body-as-lived ..., the body I succeed in apprehending reflectively is no longer
my body-as-lived, nor is the body I sensuously perceive with other parts of my
body, my body-as-lived, but rather only my body-as-object, i.e., for Sartre,
the body of the Other. (90)
The structure of experience referred to here—a subject with an object over against it at a distance—is what I have called the separative style, for which separative seeing is an exemplary instance. According to Zaner, however, the problem whereby the body “cannot become an object”
p. 39
involves an
unjustified reification of the notion of “object.”
In short, it
is to confuse “objectifying” with “objectivating”: to attend to some
state of affairs (whatever it may be, and whether reflectively or not) is not
necessarily, as Sartre assumes, to make it into an object divorced from the
subject. (91)
Using Marcel’s
notion of an alternative sort of “reflection” (cf. Appendix B above), Zaner
then maintains that “to make any activity ... thematic is by no means to
take it as a mere object (in Sartre’s sense, as a Gegenstand, something
standing-over-against-me, who am subject) .…” (92) Thus for
Zaner the error “is to reify the meaning of object beyond any reasonable
sense and to ignore the ‘objective sense’ which this ‘object’ has for me.” (93)
It is true that
“thematization” need not be identical with “reification.” However, the problem
may not be fully resolved by distinguishing between a “thing-object” and an
“intentional object.” It has been noted that “self-perceptions, in many cases,
are not what Husserl calls intentional acts.” (94) In other
words, one’s own body may be “co-perceived,” “co-present,” “co-experienced”
without standing at the term of an intentional arc (though it may, of course, become
the object of an intentional act performed by myself or another). Mohanty points out that the notion of
operative intentionality—an important theme in Merleau-Ponty’s reading of
Husserl—includes intentionalities that are not acts, e.g., retentions and
horizon-intentionalities; they “do not in the strict sense possess an
intentional object .…” (95) As Merleau-Ponty says, “the
present still holds on to the immediate past without positing it as an object
...” (PP, 83/69). And with
regard to space, he writes: “It is neither an object, nor an act of unification
on the subject’s part ...” (PP, 294/254). His analyses of movement—both of one’s own motility and of
the perception of movement—reveal a similar effort to liberate the phenomena
from the paradigm of the “objective” (see PP, 127–44/109–24,
309–24/267–80).
p. 39
Thus among the
“candidates” for that which cannot invariably be considered an “object” we find
not only one’s own lived body, but also space, time, and movement. (96) To these must be added what they already imply: world,
as phenomenologically understood.
A world is not
one object among others; rather it is that which embraces all possible objects
of our experience, and functions as the basis for every particular
experience. For this reason it
does not attain original givenness in the manner characteristic of particular
objects. (97)
But it has its
own manner of givenness, which, says Landgrebe, is that of the horizonal,
“pervaded by a most general style of being (and a correlative style of
experience) ....” (98) Now if lived body, time, space,
movement, and world are thus most genuinely given in a manner other than as the
“object” of an “intentional act,” then the paradigm of “acts” of an
“ego-subject” perspectivally directed toward an “object” (of whatever
ontological status) is no longer sufficient for describing experience per se.
There must also be room for consciousness that is not an “act,” that need not
possess an “object” separate from or opposed to a “subject”-pole, that may be
characterized by both reflexivity and intentionality, and that is a
“witnessing” to the whole (as horizon or “silent background”) ‘from within’.
(Such an alternative paradigm is explored in depth by Gebser under the title
“integral consciousness.”) This is not to deny that there is experiential
evidence for the familiar ego-cogito-cogitatum scheme; it is rather to suggest
that the latter, particularly when conceived using the language that opposes
“subject” and “object,” is not the sole and privileged model for all experience
whatsoever.
Thus the
recurring references to that which cannot be made into an “object” not only
indicate certain areas of experience for which the “object” model is not satisfactory,
but may also point to a shift in how experience as a whole is understood and
lived. Such a shift then need not
be limited to the specific experiential examples mentioned (lived body, space,
time, movement, world); it is a transformation of “style” (of both
p. 40
“being” and “experience”) that may be displayed across
many other examples as well. The
“shift”—which Gebser characterized in a variety of ways, e.g., as the
“supercession of dualism”—is manifested in both of the phrases serving to guide
the present study, “flesh of the world” and “world without opposite,” and is
the experiential foundation making the emergence of such new terms or
expressions necessary.
E. Description
and Evidence: The difficulty one may experience in eliciting some of the
phenomena described in the text, or in “cashing in” terms such as la chair
du monde and die Welt ohne Gegenüber in experiential evidence,
raises several interesting points with regard to phenomenological
description. First of all, since
certain phenomena (or constitutive elements thereof) emerge with clarity only
in the retrogressive inquiry (Rückfrage) from our everyday entanglement
in the world (Weltbefangenheit), they tend to be given to the practiced
rather than the naive “observer.” (99) But are the phenomena
thus revealed mere constructs of the investigation? In other words, if a phenomenon is not to be found in
everyday experience in the natural attitude, but only emerges with painstaking
phenomenological interrogation, is the phenomenologist’s description of it
suspect, because the description does not match the initial experience of most
other observers?
Phenomenologically speaking, this question is irrelevant so long as what
arises to fulfill a new term or style of investigation (or whatever else has
become necessary in the course of the phenomenologist’s labors) is itself-given
in the appropriate experiential evidence.
David M. Levin has addressed this question—and indeed, taken it
further—in several essays, notably “The Poetic Function of Phenomenological
Discourse.” (100) Though certain phenomenological
formulations may at first appear to run counter to experience as it is superfically
lived in the natural attitude, they are true to our experiential depths, and
function transformatively:
Our
interpretation of the poetic function in phenomenological discourse invites us
to approach that,
p. 41
and also how, a poetizing
of experience is intended to possess the power, almost magical, to let
happen and make true what it describes ..., opening up our essential
capacities and our preunderstanding of them and really moving or transporting
us. Articulations that are not
true of our experience become true by moving us to change in ways that make
them true. (101)
To say, for
example, that the other and I “are like organs of one single intereorporeality”
(Signs, 168) is, perhaps, not merely “descriptive,” but
prescriptive. “The poetizing
descriptions of depth phenomenology prescribe, schematize for us, the
goal to be attained. They belong
to the conversation of culture.” (102)
Here Levin’s work
finds support in the work of several other thinkers, e.g., in Herbert
Spiegelberg’s notion that phenomenological description can enrich human
experience; (103) in Landgrebe’s presentation of
transcendental subjectivity as directed to an “open future,” such that even “a
priori” possibilities “are not possibilities in themselves,” but rather
“are constituted through their accomplishment,” in the “execution of freedom”; (104) and in Jean Gebser’s insistence that the “world without
opposite” is not a fait accompli, nor an automatic result of the
“progress” of some history, but a task of conscious enrichment and integration.
(105) What Levin’s point rests on, though, is the
profoundly phenomenological claim that descriptions can be “redeemed” leibhaft,
fulfilled in experiential givenness.
The difference between a description that transforms the natural
attitude and one that merely reinstates it therefore rests on this more
fundamental difference, namely, the difference between the way in which
something “can be merely intended in speech and the way in which it can be known
This is not to
minimize the power of words and descriptive schematizations in general or to
set up a dichotomy between a supposed “pre-linguistic” realm and a “linguistic”
one: it is to honor the phenomenological commitment to experiential
evidence. Ultimately my claim is
not that the terms “separative seeing” and “lived awareness ‘from
within’” are the best, or the only, formulations to specify these
p. 42
phenomena. Rather, I am claiming that an experiential
distinction between these two styles is there to be found, and that others who criticize
or improve my formulations can legitimately do so only on the basis of their
own firsthand acquaintance with the phenomena I have attempted to schematize
with my terms. (107)
F. Perception
and Paradigm: The entire theme of “perception and paradigm” may be
discussed with respect to several interrelated theses:
1.
Phenomenological descriptions of perception within a particular sensory field
can bring to light “styles” and “structures” characteristic of experience
within that sensory modality. (108)
2. These “styles”
and “structures,” however, are ways in which experience is structured
rather than “contents” of experience (e.g., visual “data,” auditory “data,”
etc.): they specify not merely a class of givens, but a manner of givenness,
and indicate a possible typical “how” rather than a category of “what’s.” (Note
that this remark does not apply to experience in the natural attitude, but to
the findings of the appropriate phenomenological investigations.)
3. Thus an
experiential style initially discovered as characterizing a particular sensory
capacity can also be detected as “transferred” or “translated” to other sensory
modalities and fields (or simply “also manifesting” in them, thus deferring the
question of any implicit or explicit “transfer” of style from one sensory
domain to another). (109) The style in question may become,
in other words, a paradigm or model; though often called by the name of
its exemplary range of examples (e.g., “visual”), it may shape experience in
other sensory fields as well. (Note that the habit of referring to a perceptual
style by the name of a traditionally/physiologically conceived “sense” tends to
occlude the status of the style as a typical manner of givenness, e.g.,
“separative.”)
4. In addition,
the style (or constellation of structures) in question may become paradigmatic
for experience as a whole, as well as
p. 43
establishing the typical way in which experience
explicitly singled out as “perceptual” is organized (cf. the summary to
Phenomenological Description #1 above and the theme of the “primacy of
perception” in general).
5. If a single
perceptual style becomes predominant in the life of an individual (or of a
culture), it may not only act as a paradigm in the manner described—i.e., as a
pattern borrowed from one area of experience yet manifested in many—but may
also suppress or override other possibilities.
Given these five
theses (which cannot be further explored here), the following scheme emerges:
In the natural attitude, sensory experience embraces various capacities
(touching, smelling, tasting, hearing, seeing, kinaesthetic awareness) normally
integrated in synaesthetic perception of objects. For example, I not only see the violin and hear its sound, I
am aware of how it feels to me as I touch it and how this feel of the fiddle is
linked with my own movement style lived ‘from within’; at the same time, I can
smell its characteristic odors, and it lies within my power to taste it if I
wish. As Merleau-Ponty shows, the
object’s intersensorial givenness is not the result of a painstaking synthesis
performed by the intellect upon diverse “sense data,” but is founded on an
operative and dynamic synthesis of the lived body and its kinaesthetic/sensory
capacities. Phenomenological
analysis of the various “senses” (taken simply as given within a particular
historical/cultural context) allows us to identify the structures of experience
“typical” of each of these sensory capacities—“native” to it, as it were. For example, when I consider the violin
solely as seen, I am struck by its standing out “over there” as a figure
against a ground given from a particular spatial perspective, etc.; when I
devote myself to the violin solely as heard, I discover myself caught up in a
rhythm that is as much “here,” at the site of my own lived body, as it is “over
there,” where the visible violin “really is,” etc. But the structures disclosed by this type of analysis are
neither necessarily confined to a single sensory modality nor necessarily
uniquely determinative of it.
Thus, for example, instead of simply giving myself over to the ebb and
flow of moving sound played by the violin, I may examine a printed score,
looking
p. 44
for
the formal patterns shaping the music (e.g., “ABA form”), or I may analyze the
characteristics of the violin’s sound, studying it visually by way of the
oscillograph, and so forth.
There is some
empirical research to indicate that individuals tend to prefer a particular
sensory mode and that reliance on one mode may damp abilities in other modes. (110) Other
writers have drawn attention to the pervasiveness of the visual in the Western
cultural tradition, (111) and some have criticized
phenomenology itself for its reliance on a visual paradigm (cf., e.g., the
visual language in thesis #1 above). (112) My own investigations have led me to
appreciate the importance of distinguishing between a perceptual style
and a particular sensory modality typifying this style. In addition, the availability of
a certain style as an experiential possibility is to be distinguished from its
implicit or explicit enforcement as “the” style of experience. It is true that many disciplines are
apparently still
caught up in systems whose key terms are borrowed from the visual, are
carried-over (meta-phor) from the vocabulary of sight and thus are imposed on
the vocabularies of the other senses, which do exist, but which may have been
prevented from flowering because of this imbalance. (113)
Thus the critique of “visual metaphor” may be
liberating. But the kind of
experiential enrichment that the present essay ultimately demands cannot be
achieved simply by shutting one’s eyes (literally or metaphorically). It is not a matter of renouncing the
separative style, but of gaining fluency in other experiential styles as well. There are many ways for the body to be
a body, many ways for consciousness to be conscious, and in the open world
described by Gebser, such ways coexist without contradiction. They are the very depth of our human
possibility and the core of our freedom.
1) Edmund Husserl, Introduction
to the Logical Investigations: A Draft of a Preface to the Logical
Investigations (1913), ed.
Eugen Fink, trans. Philip
J. Bossert and Curtis H. Peters (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), pp. 56,
57, 58, 61. In this “Preface”
(unpublished during his lifetime and intended for the revised second edition of
the Logical Investigations), Husserl insists that the attentive reader
must have “actively produced the phenomena in himself” (p. 55) in order to
understand a phenomenological work and judge its merits. Such active cooperation of the reader
is especially crucial for the present paper. (Note that the term “intuitive”
must be taken in a strictly Husserlian sense.)
2) Françoise Dastur,
“Consciousness and Body in the Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty: Some Remarks
Concerning Flesh, Vision, and World in the Late Philosophy of Maurice
Merleau-Ponty,” in A.-T. Tymieniecka, ed., Analecta Husserliana, vol. 17
(Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984), 119.
3) Herbert Spiegelberg, The
Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, 3rd ed., rev. and
enl. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), p. 697.
4) Two especially fruitful studies by
other phenomenologists must be acknowledged here: David Michael Levin, “The
Opening of Vision: Seeing Through the Veil of Tears,” Review of Existential
Psychology and Psychiatry 16: 1/2/3 (1978–79), 113–46, and Tadashi
Ogawa, “‘Seeing’ and ‘Touching’ or Overcoming the Soul-Body Dualism,” in A.-T.
Tymieniecka, ed., Analecta Husserliana, vol. 16 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel,
1983), 77–94 (first published in Phenomenology Information Bulletin 4,
1980). M. C. Dillon,
“Merleau-Ponty and the Reversibility Thesis,” Man and World 16:4 (1983),
365–88, should also be mentioned.
5)
“The term ‘natürliche Einstellung’ <natural attitude> is
dangerous, as suggesting a sort of (arbitrary?) ‘attitude’. Fink prefers to say ‘Weltbefangenheit’
<entanglement in the world>”—Dorion Cairns, Conversations with Husserl
and Fink (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), p. 95 (Conversation with
Fink, 23/9/32). Landgrebe is also
wary of the term “attitude.” See, e.g., Ludwig Landgrebe, The Phenomenology
of Edmund Husserl: Six Essays, ed.
Donn Welton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 35.
6) Cf. Landgrebe,
op. cit. (note 5), p. 189: “The task of a phenomenological clarification of the
life-world is to comprehend, first of all, the style of the world-life.”
7) Cf., e.g., Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945),
pp. 177–78; Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 152–53 (henceforth cited as PP,
with page numbers first for the French, then for the English translation).
8) Cf., e.g., Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 5–6, 16 (henceforth cited as Primacy);
cf. Linda Singer, “Merleau-Ponty
on the Concept of Style,” Man and World 14:2 (1981), 153–63.
9) Thus I am assuming,
with Merleau-Ponty, both the “primacy of perception” and its foundation in the
lived body. Cf., e.g., Primacy,
pp. 3, 5, 25.
10)
This is a typically Sartrean analysis; see Being and
Nothingness, Part Three, Chapter 2. See also J. H. Van Den Berg, “The Human
Body and the Significance of Human Movement: A Phenomenological Study,” in Psychoanalysis
and Existential Philosophy, ed. Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek (New York: E. P.
Dutton, 1962), pp. 90–129 (first published in Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 13: 2 [Dec. 1952], 159–83);
cf. Richard M. Zaner, The Context of Self: A
Phenomenological Inquiry Using Medicine as a Clue (Athens, Oh.: Ohio
University Press, 1981), Chapter 3; cf. also Herbert Spiegelberg, “On the
Motility of the Ego: A Contribution to the Phenomenology of the Ego,” in Conditio
Humana: Erwin W. Straus on his 75th birthday, ed. Walter von Baeyer
and Richard M. Griffith (Berlin: Springer, 1966), pp. 298–99.
11)
Cf. PP, 261/226, on “fixing one’s gaze.” The description of
“arrest” in “looking-at” should be construed as an instance of, rather than an
exception to, the constitutive role of kinaesthesis for visual perception: see,
e.g., Ulrich Claesges, Edmund Husserls Theorie der Raumkonstitution (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964); John J. Drummond, “On Seeing a Material
Thing in Space: The Role of Kinaesthesis in Visual Perception,” Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research 40:1 (Sept. 1979), 19–32; and John J.
Drummond, “Objects’ Optimal Appearances and the Immediate Awareness of Space in
Vision,” Man and World l6:3 (1983), 177–205. On the notion of the body as constituting (rather than
merely as constituted), see Landgrebe, op. cit. (note 5), pp. 44, 56, 60, 63,
160; cf. Alphonso Lingis,
“Intentionality and Corporeity,” in A.-T. Tymieniecka, ed., Analecta
Husserliana, vol. 1 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1970), 75–90; cf. also PP,
171/146. Throughout this essay, I
assume a methodological rather than metaphysical interpretation of
“constitution” (cf., e.g., Landgrebe, op. cit., pp. 155–56).
12)
John Derrickson McCurdy, Visionary Appropriation (New York:
Philosophical Library, 1978), p. 145. See also my Appendix A, and cf. Appendix
F.
13)
Levin, op. cit. (note 4), p. 122; cf. Ogawa, op. cit. (note 4), p. 86.
14)
Levin, op. cit. (note 4), p. 123.
p. 47
15)
Martin Heidegger, The
Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New
York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977), p. 166; cited in Levin, op. cit. (note 4), p.
124.
16)
Arthur Egendorf, “Human Development and Ultimate Reality: The
Perceptual Grounds for Transformation,” in Ralph H. Moon and Stephen Randall,
eds., Dimensions of Thought: Current Explorations in Time, Space, and
Knowledge, vol. 2 (Berkeley, Cal.: Dharma Publishing, 1980), 26–27.
17)
Cf. Donald M. Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), for some concrete work along
these lines, and see Appendix F of the present paper.
18)
See, for example, Hans Jonas, “The Nobility of Sight: A Study in
the Phenomenology of the Senses,” in The Philosophy of the Body: Rejections
of Cartesian Dualism, ed.
Stuart F. Spicker (New York: Quadrangle, 1970), pp. 312–33 (also in Hans
Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology [New York:
Harper & Row, 1966], pp. 135–56; first published in Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 14:4 [June 1954], 507–19). For the entire
question of pervasive structures of consciousness and their cultural
manifestation, and the notion of efficient and deficient modes of such
structures, see Jean Gebser, Ursprung und Gegenwart [written 1947/48 and
1951/52, rev. and enl. 1964/65] (Stuttgart: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1973);
English translation by Noel Barstad and Algis Mickunas, under the title The
Ever-Present Origin (Athens, Oh.: Ohio University Press, 1984).
19)
Cf. PP, 66–67/54–55 on the “freezing of being.”
20)
Lawrence W. Goldfarb, “Sensory Syntax: An Introduction to the
Language of Movement” (photocopy, 1984), p. 50.
21)
In conversation with Cairns (28/12/31), “Husserl replied that, as
we live in the natural attitude, we have no immediate awareness of the already beherrschte
<governed, controlled> kinaesthetic fields. In our decisions we do not direct our conscious active will
to the bringing about of certain trains of kinaesthesias but rather to the
changes in nature which we desire to bring about. Only through Rückfrage
<regressive inquiry, asking back> do we come upon the kinaesthesia”
—Cairns, op. cit. (note 5), p. 62.
22)
Abandoning upright posture is an excellent strategy for the “Rückfrage”
mentioned in the preceding note, for it places in brackets the sedimented basis
for nearly all activity in the natural attitude. See Erwin W. Straus, Phenomenological Psychology: The
Selected Papers of Erwin W. Straus, trans. Erling Eng (New York: Basic Books, 1966), pp. 137–65. (The
essay in question—“The Upright Posture”—was first published in Psychiatric
Quarterly 26 [1952], 529–61.)
23)
Charles V. W. Brooks, Sensory Awareness: The Rediscovery of
Experiencing (New York: Viking, 1974), p. 25.
p. 48
24)
On various terms for “bodily awareness,” see Appendix A. I am
distinguishing “bodily awareness” from the experience-of the body. Although in both cases it is a question
of Leib rather than Körper, the mode of givenness differs. (See
also Appendices C and D.)
25)
This term is placed within single quotation marks to indicate its
technical status; see Appendix B.
26)
A. Michotte, The Perception of Causality, trans. T. R. Miles
and Elaine Miles (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 197.
27)
Husserl has remarked that kinaesthesis is never totally at a
standstill; see Edmund Husserl, Zur
Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass, vol. 3
(1929–1935), ed. Iso Kern, Husserliana, vol. 15 (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1973), 652.
28)
Cf. the discussion in Appendix A.
29)
Michotte, op. cit. (note 26), p. 204.
30)
See note 10. Cf. Edith Stein, On the Problem of
Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), p. 40.
31)
There are anatomical limits, even for the contortionist, to the
configurations in which one part of the body can touch another part. But any possible configuration can, in
principle, display the reversibility of “toucher” and “touched” roles, though
some variations are harder to elicit than others. Cf. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der
Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass, vol. 2 (1921–1928), ed. Iso
Kern, Husserliana, vol. 14 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 121.
32)
On this “incipient” or “potential” movement (which Merleau-Ponty
refers to as the “germ of movement”), see, e.g., PP, 110/94, 126/109;
cf. 243/204, 271/234. On
holding-still as a mode of the I-can, see, e.g., Edmund Husserl, The Crisis
of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to
Phenomenological Philosophy, trans.
David Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp.
106, 161.
33)
See Appendix C.
34)
Cf. Jitendra Nath Mohanty, The Concept of Intentionality
(St. Louis: Warren H. Green,
1972), p. 182.
35) For this example in Husserl, see, e.g., Ideen zur einer
reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische
Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. Marly Biemel, Husserliana, vol.
4 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), 144 ff. Cf. Husserliana,
vol. 15 (note 27), 295 ff., where Husserl uses a moving-moved example as well
as the touching-touched example; cf. also, e.g.,
p. 49
Husserliana, vol. 14 (note
31), pp. 75–76, 239, 448–49 (and see 451–53). Merleau-Ponty uses the
touching-touched example in a number of places: see, e.g., PP,
108–109/92–93, 364/315; Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 166, 168, 170 (henceforth cited as Signs);
Le visible et l’invisible, ed. Claude Lefort (Paris: Gallimard, 1964) / The
Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 164–65/123, 175–76/133–34,
191–92/146, 194/147–48, 257/204, 303/249, 307–309/254–56, 313/260, 214/261
(henceforth cited as VI, with page numbers first for the French, then
for the English translation); Primacy, 162–63.
36)
Cf. Spiegelberg, “On
the Motility of the Ego” (note 10), p. 291, and cf. the discussion in
Phenomenological Description #2.
The “short-circuiting” is qualitatively different from the “flooding” of
awareness from a point to a fuller body experience; both, however, set out of
play the more usual identification of the “self” with a location somewhere in
the head.
37)
This question signifies a return to the question posed at the opening of this
essay: “Is there really a possible experience of the ‘flesh’ or only an experience
of one’s own body?” See also Appendix F.
38)
The classic example is the blind man’s cane—see PP, 167/143.
Cf. McCurdy, op. cit. (note 12),
e.g., pp. 165–67, 230–32, 254–56.
See also PP, 169–70/145–46 and Elizabeth A. Behnke, “At the
Service of the Sonata: Music Lessons with Merleau-Ponty,” Somatics 4:2
(Spring/Summer 1983), 32–34.
39)
See Gebser’s Ursprung und Gegenwart (note 18), as well as
Jean Gebser, “Die Welt ohne Gegenüber,” Gesamtausgabe V/I (Schaffhausen:
Novalis, 1976), 267–81; English translation by Tim Widman (photocopy, n.d.).
40)
Ursprung und Gegenwart (note 18), p. 634 (in Part Two,
Chapter 9, section 3).
41)
Cited in Liliane Brion-Guerry, Cézanne et l’expression de
l’espace (Paris: Albin Michel, 1966), p. 226. Gebser cites the Cézanne quote in Ursprung
und Gegenwart (note 18), p.
635, crediting Brion-Guerry’s 1950 edition of this work (Paris: Flammarion,
1950), p. 180, and refers to the
same quote in other works as well. See, e.g., “Die Probleme in der Kunst,” Gesamtausgabe
V/I (Schaffhausen: Novalis, 1976), 131–47; English translation by John Kadela
(photocopy, 1984). It is also
interesting that Cézanne is reported as having said, “Let us begin to paint as
if we held things in our hands, not as if we were looking at them at all”—cited
in Edmund Carpenter, They
Became What They Beheld (New York: Ballantine, 1970), n.p. (section
entitled “Keep in Touch”).
42)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in his Sense and
Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia A. Dreyfus (Evanston,
Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 17.
43)
Primacy, p. 167; cf. p. 169 and VI, 183/139. But also cf. Dillon, op. cit. (note 4),
pp. 372–73.
p. 50
44)
Gebser, “The World Without Opposite” (note 39), Eng. trans., p. 16.
45)
Gebser, “Problems in Art” (note 41), Eng. trans., p. 5.
46)
Gebser, “The World Without Opposite” (note 39), Eng. trans., p.
18. Cf. Dastur, op. cit. (note 2), p. 117: “... world and
consciousness are no longer opposed ‘face to face’ in a ‘frontal relation’.…”
47)
Cf. Ogawa, op. cit. (note 4), pp. 88, 91.
48)
Cf. Appendix D and Appendix F, especially note 112.
49)
Cf. note 18 above.
Erwin Straus’s notion of “contraposition”—in which a living being first
gains its motility by rising up in “opposition” to the ground and the force of
gravity—is, as he says, a “connection in separation,” and (I would add) need
not be uniformly lived in the separative style. See, for example, Erwin W. Straus, “Psychiatry and
Philosophy,” trans. Erling Eng, in Psychiatry and Philosophy, ed.
Maurice Natanson (New York: Springer, 1969), especially pp. 33–38.
50)
As Merleau-Ponty says, “... there are several ways for the body
to be a body, several ways for consciousness to be consciousness” (PP,
144/124); thus “... we have no right to level all experiences down to a single
world, all modalities of existence down to a single consciousness” (PP,
335/290).
51)
See James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966).
See pp. 33–34 and 110–11 for his critique of the notion of a separate
“kinaesthetic sense”; cf. Michotte, op. cit. (note 26), p. 202.
52)
Cf., e.g., Husserl, Ideen II (note 35), 56, 158; VI,
302/249, 308/255.
53)
See, e.g., PP, 364–66/315–17; cf. Gibson, op. cit. (note 51), pp. 111–14.
54)
Elisabeth Ströker, Philosophische Untersuchungen zum Raum
(Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1965), pp. 147, 154, 160. Translation after Algis Mickunas.
55)
Ibid., pp. 162–63.
56)
Michotte, op. cit. (note 26), p. 205.
57)
Ibid., pp. 202, 203.
58)
Cairns, op. cit. (note 5), p. 64; see also pp. 4, 7–8 (but cf. pp.
73, 83, 84). Cf. VI, 309/255: “the flesh, the Leib,
is not a sum of self-touchings (of ‘tactile sensations’), but not a sum
of tactile sensations plus ‘kinestheses’ either, it is an ‘I can’...”; cf. PP,
110/94; cf. also Lingis, op. cit. (note 11), p. 78.
p. 51
59)
Richard M. Zaner, The Problem of Embodiment: Some Contributions
to a Phenomenology of the Body (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), pp. 33,
35–38.
60)
Ibid., p. 53.
61)
Ibid., p. 54.
62)
Ibid., p. 55. Note the
contrast between being “lived” and “looked at.” On the kinaestheses as not
being “objects,” cf. Appendix D of the present paper.
63)
See, e.g., Edward Maisel, ed., The Resurrection of the Body: The
Writings of F. Mathias Alexander (New York: University Books, 1969);
Charles V. W. Brooks, op. cit. (note 23); Moshe Feldenkrais, Awareness
Through Movement: Health Exercises for Personal Growth (New York: Harper
& Row, 1972); Deane Juhan, “The Trager Approach: Psychophysical Integration
and Mentastics,” in The Bodywork Book, ed. Nevill Drury (Sherborne, Dorset [England]: Prism Alpha,
1984), pp. 34–47.
64)
Landgrebe, op. cit. (note 5), p. 150; cf. Appendix E of the present
paper.
65)
Edmund Husserl, Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to
a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to a
Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), p.
44 (§ 24).
66)
Ogawa, op. cit. (note 4), p. 78. Cf. Husserl, Crisis
(note 32), § 63, and Psychiatry and Philosophy (see note 49), p. vii.
67)
Cf., e.g., Mohanty, op. cit. (note 34), pp. 11 ff.
68)
The expression “von innen” is sometimes used by Husserl; see, e.g.,
Husserliana, vol. 15 (note 27), 300, 301, where the expression is used
in context of the “I move” experience, and cf. Ideen II (note 35), p.
161. For an example of an expanded
sense of the expression “von innen her” in Husserl, see Ideen II, p.
180, and cf. Merleau-Ponty’s comment on this passage in Signs, pp.
178–79.
69)
Cf. Ströker, op. cit. (note 54), p. 162.
70) For remarks on
related dissolution of dualistic inner-outer schemes, see Landgrebe, op. cit. (note
5), pp. 45, 63. For remarks on the
contribution of Leibniz in interpreting the Cartesian dualism of res
cogitans and res extensa in terms of inner-outer dualism, see Eugen
Fink, Zur ontologischen
Frühgeschichte von Raum-Zeit-Bewegung (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1957),
p. 34
71)
Cf. Richard Schmitt, “On Knowing One’s Own Body,” in A.-T.
Tymieniecka, ed., Analecta Husserliana, vol. 1 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel,
1970), 161.
p. 52
72)
Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry
into the Moral Sense of Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1984), p. 206.
73)
Ibid., p. 207.
74)
Ibid., p. 207.
75)
Zaner, Problem of Embodiment (note 59), pp. 6–7. As Zaner points out, Marcel explicitly
links “first reflection” with natural-scientific inquiry; cf. McCurdy, op. cit. (note 12), p. 210.
76)
Zaner, Problem of Embodiment (note 59), p. 7.
77)
Mohanty, op. cit. (note 34), p. 152; cf. Edmund Husserl, Phenomenological
Psychology: Lectures, Summer Semester, 1925, trans. John Scanlon (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1977), p. 151.
78)
Mohanty, op. cit. (note 34), p. 139; see pp. 137–43.
79)
Ibid., pp. 168, 170.
80)
Cf. ibid., p. 92.
81)
Ibid., p. 174; see pp. 171–74.
82)
See ibid., pp. 171 ff.
83)
Ibid., p. 167. The
notion of a bodily reflexivity—a “lived reflexivity” of the corporeal self—is
invoked, though not explicitly justified, in Ghislaine Florival, “Structure,
origine et affectivité: Quelques réflexions à propos de la corporéité,” in Études
d’anthropologie philosophique, [ed.
Ghislaine Florival] (Louvain-la-neuve: Éditions de l’institut supérieur
de philosophie, 1980), pp. 97–119 (see especially pp. 105, 112, and 114).
84)
See, e.g., Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An
Introduction to Phenomenology, trans.
Dorian Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), pp. 97, 116.
85)
Ibid., p. 97.
86)
See, e.g., Zaner, Context of Self (note 10), pp. 145–51.
87)
Max Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale
Wertethik [1916] (Bern/Munich: Francke, 1966), Part II, Ch. VI; trans.
Manfred S. Frings, in Spicker, ed. (note 18), p. 181.
p. 53
88)
Gabriel Marcel, Journal Métaphysique (Paris: Gallimard,
1927); trans. Bernard Wall, in Spicker, ed. (note 18), p. 197 (see also p. 195).
89)
Zaner, Problem of Embodiment (note 59), p. 81.
90)
Ibid., p. 90.
91)
Ibid., p. 90.
92)
Ibid., p. 110.
93)
Ibid., p. 90.
94)
Schmitt, op. cit. (note 71), p. 161.
95)
Mohanty, op. cit. (note 34), p. 88; cf. pp. 121–23, 137–43.
96)
Cf. Fink, op. cit. (note 70), p. 37. Merleau-Ponty refers to “the corporeal schema, which is the
foundation of space and of time” (VI, 244/191), and, as is well
known, he takes the corporeal schema to be one of motility. The four elements mentioned—time,
space, movement, and lived body—may thus be shown to be essentially
intertwined. Another approach
to that which cannot, strictly speaking, be considered an object is provided by
Merleau-Ponty’s turn to “reflections, shadows, levels, and horizons between things”
(Signs, p. 160); cf., e.g., Primacy, p. 166.
97)
Landgrebe, op. cit. (note 5), p. 138; cf. pp. 94–95.
98)
Ibid., p. 138. This
correlation of styles is what Gebser explores as the correlation of “world” and
“consciousness-structure,” expressed in terms of structures of time and
space. See Gebser, Ursprung und
Gegenwart (note 18).
99)
Cf. Husserl, Introduction
to the Logical Investigations (note 1), pp. 56–57.
100) David Levin, “The
Poetic Function in Phenomenological Discourse,” in Phenomenology in a
Pluralistic Context, ed.
William L. McBride and Calvin O. Schrag (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1983), pp. 216–34; cf. “The Opening of Vision” (note 4), p. 115.
See also David Michael Levin, “Tarthang Tulku and Merleau-Ponty: An
Intertextual Commentary,” in Ralph H. Moon and Stephen Randall, eds., Dimensions
of Thought: Current Explorations in Time, Space, and Knowledge, vol. 1
(Berkeley, Cal.: Dharma Publishing, 1980), 186, 209–10, 214–15.
101) Levin, “The Poetic Function in Phenomenological Discourse”
(note 100), p. 232. I find Levin’s use of the term “transcendental” as roughly
equivalent to “transformational” (see, e.g., p. 218 of the same essay) to be
somewhat confusing, although I appreciate the point he wishes to make with this
terminological shift.
102) Ibid., p. 233.
103) See Herbert Spiegelberg, “Existential Uses of
Phenomenology,” in his Doing Phenomenology: Essays On and In Phenomenology
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), pp. 54–71.
p. 54
104) Landgrebe, op. cit. (note 5), pp. 199–200.
105) See Jean Gebser, “The Integral Consciousness,” Main
Currents in Modern Thought 30:3 (Jan.–Feb. 1974), 107–109; see also Ursprung
und Gegenwart (note 18).
106) Landgrebe, op. cit. (note 5), p. 150.
107) Cf. E. T. Gendlin, “Two Phenomenologists Do Not Disagree,”
in Phenomenology: Dialogues and Bridges, ed. Ronald Bruzina and Bruce Wilshire (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1982), pp. 321–35.
108) In addition to the works of Katz cited by Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology
of Perception (Der Aufbau der Tastwelt, 1925; Der Aufbau der Farbwelt,
2nd ed., 1930), works such as the following can be mentioned: Straus, Phenomenological
Psychology (note 22), pp. 4–11 (“The Phenomenal Modes of Color and Tone,”
in the essay “The Forms of Spatiality,” which was first published in Der
Nervenarzt 3 [1930], 633–56), and p. 285, Table 15-1, “Phenomenological
Comparisons of Color and Sound”; Jonas, “The Nobility of Sight: A Study in the
Phenomenology of the Senses” (note 18); and Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: A
Phenomenology of Sound (Athens, Oh.: Ohio University Press, 1976). See also Ogawa, op. cit. (note 4),
e.g., pp. 83, 85–87. Cf. Martin
Heidegger and Eugen Fink, Heraclitus Seminar 1966/67, trans. Charles H.
Seibert (University, Ala.; University of Alabama Press, 1979), pp. 139–42, on
the difference between sight and hearing (as distance senses) and feeling and
touching (as proximity senses) and the ontological implications of such
phenomenologically grasped differences.
109) What is at issue is whether a given sensory modality
intrinsically possesses features proper to it, such that these features are
manifested in other sensory fields only by some sort of “translation,” or
whether “styles” and “structures” refer to experience per se, such that a given
style may be manifested in any sensory field. By adopting the term “paradigm” rather than, say,
“metaphor,” I intend to suggest that certain sensory experiences provide
“paradigmatic cases” of certain experiential structures; the question about the
ultimate “assigning” of an experiential style to a particular sensory capacity
is left open.
110) See, e.g., David Gordon, Therapeutic Metaphors: Helping Others Through the Looking
Glass (Cupertino, Cal.: Meta Publications, 1978), pp. 90–93, 109–11,
135–37, and 218 ff.
111) See, e.g., Algis Mickunas, “The Primacy of Movement,” Main
Currents in Modern Thought 31:1 (Sept.–Oct. 1974), 8–12, especially 8–9;
cf. Antonio T. de Nicolas, Meditations through the Rg Veda: Four-Dimensional
Man (Boulder, Col.: Shambhala, 1978), pp. 10, 64, 84–85, 103–104, 122–26,
134, 171, 190–92, and see also his Avatara: The Humanization of Philosophy
through the Bhagavad Gita (New York: Nicolas Hays, 1976), pp. 265–70, 316.
p. 55
112) See, e.g., David Michael Levin, “Husserlian Essences
Reconsidered,” in Explorations in Phenomenology: Papers of the Society for
Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, ed. David Carr and Edward S.
Casey (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), pp. 168–83 (see especially pp.
173–76); Waltraut J. Stein, “Cosmopathy and Interpersonal Relations,” in Phenomenology
in Perspective, ed. F. J.
Smith (The Hague: Martinus Nihhoff, 1970), pp. 217 ff.; Ogawa, op. cit. (note
4), pp. 80, 84, 92 n. 18; and F. Joseph Smith, “A Critique of Visual Metaphor,”
in his The Experiencing of Musical Sound: Prelude to a Phenomenology of
Music (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1979), pp. 27–64.
113) Smith, op. cit. (note 112), p. 61.