Relation to oneself· Body and life

The lived body

Axis: Being or having a body — Am I my body, or do I have a body?

I am not a mind housed in a machine: I am this living body that perceives, acts and inhabits the world. Thought itself arises from this carnal anchoring and from our condition as an animal organism shaped by evolution.

Who holds this position

Movements 2

Phenomenologyexplicit

The description of perception reveals what Cartesian dualism conceals: I never experience my body as an extended object set before a consciousness, but as the lived body from which a world is ordered, with an up and a down, a near and a far. My body is not in space, it is my anchorage in space: perspective, sidedness and touch prove that every point of view on the world is first a bodily position. Hence the refutation of 's disembodied subject: there is no thought that would own a body as an instrument, but an embodied subject for whom perceiving and inhabiting the world are one and the same.

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception; Husserl, Ideas II

Existentialismexplicit

Against the dualism of , who makes the body an extended thing distinct from the mind, existence is said to be embodied: I do not have a body as one owns an instrument, I am my body, the anchored point of view from which the world opens to me. makes it the lived body, neither pure object nor pure consciousness, and adds that it is also that by which I expose myself to the gaze of others, who grasp me from outside as a thing. It is through the body that I am situated, and so committed.

Sartre, Being and Nothingness; Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

Philosophers 4

Nietzscheexplicit

There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom. For Nietzsche, the conscious self is but an instrument of the bodily self, which thinks, evaluates and wills through us. To despise the body is the resentment of the despisers of the body.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "On the Despisers of the Body"

Schopenhauerexplicit

The body holds a unique metaphysical position in the system: it is the only thing given to us twice, as one representation among others and as will felt from within. This double knowledge is the keystone of the whole edifice: it is through the body, not through reasoning, that we know what the world is at bottom.

The World as Will and Representation, §18

Sartreexplicit

I do not have a body like an object: I exist my body. In Being and Nothingness, the body is the point of view I am upon the world, and the body-for-others makes me feel my objectness under the gaze. The body is lived, not an instrument.

Being and Nothingness, Part III, "The Body"

Show inferred positions (1)

Husserlinferable

In the fifth of the , Husserl distinguishes the body-object (Körper), a thing among things, from the lived body (Leib), the living body I am, seat of my sensations and organ of all perception. It is through my lived body that I experience the other as another self, by an analogising apprehension of their body. He thus opens the analysis of lived corporeality that will carry further, but without making the body the ultimate subject of perception: there the lived body remains subordinate to constituting consciousness, which holds the score back from the extreme.

Cartesian Meditations, Fifth Meditation · Ideas II

Foundations and implications

↑ What grounds it

↓ What it implies

↑ What grounds it

Nature of reality

If there is no immaterial soul to inhabit the body, I do not "have" a body the way a pilot has a ship: I am this living organism that perceives, acts and ages. Materialism thus supports the naturalist side of the lived-body thesis, the human being as an animal body shaped by evolution. It does not, however, deliver the "subject" in the sense of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, where one's own body is the original locus of all perception and meaning, a content that does not follow from materialism alone.

↓ What it implies

Bodily pleasures

If I am not a soul housed in a machine but this living body itself, then its pleasures are not traps but a part of the good life. The lived-body thesis grounds the celebration of bodily pleasures: Nietzsche sees in contempt for the body a resentment against life, and invites us to savour its joys with gratitude.

Can a machine think

If thinking is first of all being a living organism coupled to its environment, then manipulating symbols is not enough to understand: a program with neither body nor life does not truly think. The lived-body thesis supports the idea that only the living think: for Jonas, mind is rooted in the organism's life and its concern to endure.

Interiority

If I am not a soul folded in on itself but a living body engaged in the world, then it is by acting, not by examining myself, that I discover and shape myself. The lived-body thesis, which Merleau-Ponty places at the heart of existence, supports the primacy of action: for Marx, the point is less to interpret the world than to transform it.

Practices

Bracketing the natural attitude (the epochē)ExerciseAttested · Husserl

called the epochē a deliberate suspension of the , the automatic belief that things simply are as we take them to be. In this you bracket that belief and describe an experience purely as it gives itself, its appearings and the way you aim at it, before any theory. Today it works as an exercise in attention and clarity: it slows perception, separates what you actually live through from what you infer, and loosens the grip of habit.

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