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The Body as a ‘Legitimate Naturalization of Consciousness’1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 April 2013

Rudolf Bernet*
Affiliation:
Husserl Archives, University of LeuvenRudolf.Bernet@hiw.kuleuven.be

Abstract

Husserl's phenomenology of the body constantly faces issues of demarcation: between phenomenology and ontology, soul and spirit, consciousness and brain, conditionality and causality. It also shows that Husserl was eager to cross the borders of transcendental phenomenology when the phenomena under investigation made it necessary. Considering the details of his description of bodily sensations and bodily behaviour from a Merleau-Pontian perspective allows one also to realise how Husserl (unlike Heidegger) fruitfully explores a phenomenological field located between a science of pure consciousness and the natural sciences. A phenomenological discussion of naturalism thus cannot limit itself to the task of discrimination, it must attempt to integrate what an eidetic analysis has separated: inside and outside, here and there, first-person and third-person perspective, motivation and causality. Husserl's phenomenology of the body thus shows that dualism is at best a methodological but never an ontological option for the mind-body problem.

Type
Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2013

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Footnotes

1

An earlier version of this paper was published as ‘L'extimité du corps et la question du naturalisme en phénoménologie’, Les temps modernes 63 (2008), 174–201. Translated from French by Hanne Jacobs and Trevor Perri.

References

2 Waelhens, A. De, La philosophie de Martin Heidegger (Louvain: Éditions de l'Institut supérieur de philosophie, 1942).Google Scholar

3 De Waelhens, Alphonse, ‘A Philosophy of the Ambiguous’, in M. Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. Fischer, Alden L. (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2006)Google Scholar, xix.

4 Husserl, E., Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch, Husserliana IV (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952)Google Scholar; translated by Rojcewicz, Richard and Schuwer, André as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989)Google Scholar. Henceforth, referred to as Ideas II followed by the pagination of the German edition.

5 Van Breda, H.L., ‘Maurice Merleau-Ponty et les Archives-Husserl à Louvain’, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 4 (1962), 413.Google Scholar

6 Heidegger, M., Sein und Zeit, ed. von Herrmann, F.-W., Gesamtausgabe 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann GmbH, 1977) and (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2006)Google Scholar, §7, 52/38 and §10, 63/47; translated by Macquarrie, J. and Robinson, E. as Being and Time (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1962)Google Scholar. References made to the pagination of the Gesamtausgabe then the pagination of the Niemeyer edition.

7 Heidegger, M., Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, ed. Jaeger, P., Gesamtausgabe 20 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1979), 168Google Scholar; translated by Kisiel, T. as History of the Concept of Time (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 121Google Scholar. Henceforth referred to as GA 20 followed by the German then English pagination. In the posthumous edition of this course, all of Heidegger's references are still to the pagination of the unpublished manuscript of Ideas II rather than to Husserliana IV.

8 ‘Die Konstitution der geistigen Welt’ is cited by Heidegger as: ‘Die personalistische Einstellung im Gegensatz zur naturalistischen’ (GA 20, 168/121).

9 Heidegger, M., Zollikoner Seminare. Protokolle—Gespräche—Briefe, ed. Boss, Medard (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann GmbH, 1987)Google Scholar; translated by Mayr, F. and Askay, R. as Zollikon Seminars: Protocols—Conversations—Letters (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. References made to the pagination of the German edition.

10 Ideas II, §46, 168: ‘the legitimate naturalization of consciousness’.

11 Ideas II, §32, 134.

12 Cf. Ideas II, §21, 94 on the body of a ‘ghost’.

13 Ideas II, §21, 94: ‘components […] most intimately interwoven and in a certain way mutually penetrating […] On the other hand, it is easy to see that the psychic has a priority.’

14 Ideas II, §18a, 56.

15 Ideas II, §38, 151.

16 The German term ‘Empfindnisse’, rather than the English translation ‘sensings’, is used throughout the text.

17 Ideas II, §36, 145.

18 Ideas II, §37, 149: ‘The localization of Empfindnisse is in fact something in principle different from the extension of all material determinations of a thing. The Empfindnisse do indeed spread out (breiten sich aus) in space, cover, in their way, spatial surfaces […] But this spreading out (Ausbreitung) and spreading into (Hinbreitung) are precisely something that differs essentially from extension in the sense of all the determinations that characterize the res extensa.’

19 Cf. Ideas II, §45, 165: ‘sensation of the heart (Herzgefühl)’.

20 Ideas II, §36, 146. To show that the late Heidegger must have read the Second Section of Ideas II, one can cite the following passage from the Zollikon Seminars: ‘When I grasp the glass, then I feel the glass and my hand. That is the so-called double sensation (Doppelempfindung), namely, the sensation of what is touched and the sensation of my hand. In the act of seeing, I do not sense my eye in this manner’ (Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars, 108).

21 Merleau-Ponty, M., Le visible et l'invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964)Google Scholar, 189 et passim; translated by Lingis, A. as The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968)Google Scholar, 146.

22 Ideas II, §37, 150: ‘A subject whose only sense was the sense of vision could not at all have an appearing lived-body.’

23 Ideas II, §21, 95, note.

24 Ideas II, §46, 169.

25 Ideas II, §42, 161.

26 Ideas II, §41b, 159: ‘The same lived-body which serves me as a means for all my perception obstructs me in the perception of it itself and is a remarkably imperfectly constituted thing (ein merkwürdig unvollkommen konstituiertes Ding).’

27 Ideas II, §18b.

28 Ideas II, §§18b, 18c, 32.

29 Ideas II, §40, 155.

30 Ideas II, §32, 135.

31 Ideas II, §32, 133.

32 Ideas II, §32, 133.

33 Ideas II, §20, 92: ‘a stream (Strom), with no beginning or end of “lived experiences”’; §32, 133: ‘a flux (Fluss)’.

34 Ideas II, §40, 155.

35 Ideas II, §18a, 57.

36 Ideas II, §18b, 64.

37 Ideas II, §18b, 64.

38 Ideas II, §18b, 65.

39 Ideas II, §42, 161.

40 Husserl's effort does not seem to interest Heidegger who is content to highlight its inadequacy in his well-known style. He writes in his course from the summer semester of 1925: ‘Husserl here merely returns again to his primal separation of being under another name. Everything remains ontologically the same […] in the question of the interplay of the personalistic and the naturalistic attitude, then in the question of the relationship of soul and body, spiritual and physical nature. Also raised here is the old problem of psychophysical parallelism, much discussed in the 19th century’ (GA 20, 170/123).

41 Bergson, Henri, Matière et mémoire (Paris: PUF, 1939)Google Scholar; translated by Paul, N.M and Palmer, W.S. as Matter and Memory (New York: Zone Books, 1991)Google Scholar.

42 Ideas II, §63, 294.

43 Ideas II, §45, 164.

44 Ideas II, §63, 293.

45 Ideas II, §41, 158.

46 Husserl, Edmund, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Drittes Buch, ed. Biemel, Marly, Husserliana V (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1971)Google Scholar, 124; translated by Klein, Ted and Pohl, William as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Third Book (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1980).Google Scholar

47 Ideas II, §41a, 158.

48 Heidegger, Being and Time, §23, 144/107, English translation modified.

49 Ideas II, §45, 166 and §56g, 235.

50 Ideas II, §45, 166.

51 Ideas II, §45, 166.

52 Ideas II, §45, 166.

53 Ideas II, §37, 148, note: ‘Obviously, it cannot be said that I see my eye in the mirror since I do not perceive my eye, that which sees qua seeing. I see something, of which I judge indirectly by “empathy”, that it is identical with my eye as a thing […] in the same way that I see the eye of an other.’

54 Ideas II, §47.

55 Ideas II, §54.

56 Heidegger, Being and Time, §23.

57 Cf. Bernet, Rudolf, Conscience et existence. Perspectives phénoménologiques (Paris: PUF, 2004)Google Scholar.