Phenomenology by Dan Zahavi

Author:Dan Zahavi [Zahavi, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138216693
Google: bqTxswEACAAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-11-15T00:03:13.643535+00:00

THE LIVED BODY

Given a certain theoretical framework, it might seem obvious that the body is first and foremost a spatial object in the world. Just as we can perceive a bunch of grapes or a bonfire, we can see, touch, and smell the body. Is this also the view of the phenomenologists? A phenomenological investigation of the body should presumably focus on the body as a phenomenon. But how exactly is the body given when we admire a painting or use the vacuum cleaner? How is it present? Is it among the perceptually available objects? Am I aware of my own body as a perceptual object in space? As Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre all insist, the body is not simply one object among many. Its mode of appearance is, consequently, very different from ordinary objects. Whereas I can approach and remove myself from spatial objects, the body is always present as that which makes it possible for me to adopt a perspective on the world. Indeed, the body is first and foremost this perspective on the world, and, therefore, not originally an object that I take a perspective on. To claim otherwise is to commence an infinite regress.16 Sartre even writes that the lived body is invisibly present, exactly because it is existentially lived rather than known.17

Under normal circumstances, I do not need to perceive the hand visually in order to know where it is located. When I reach for the racket, I do not first have to search for the hand. I do not need to look for it, since it is always with me. The bodily “here” is not one point among many, but the anchor that makes other coordinates meaningful. Originally – i.e., pre-reflectively – the body is not given perspectivally, and I am not given to myself as existing in or as a spatial object. To claim otherwise is to misunderstand the true nature of our bodily existence:

The problem of the body and its relations with consciousness is often obscured by the fact that while the body is from the start posited as a certain thing having its own laws and capable of being defined from outside, consciousness is then reached by the type of inner intuition which is peculiar to it. Actually if after grasping “my” consciousness in its absolute interiority and by a series of reflective acts, I then seek to unite it with a certain living object composed of a nervous system, a brain, glands, digestive, respiratory, and circulatory organs whose very matter is capable of being analyzed chemically into atoms of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, etc., then I am going to encounter insurmountable difficulties. But these difficulties all stem from the fact that I try to unite my consciousness not with my body but with the body of others. For the body which I have just described is not my body such as it is for me.18

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