Abstract
Is the phenomenological concept of “body” not, in general, an ideal? The purpose of this article is to defend this thesis within the scope of the French phenomenological tradition. The French phenomenological concept of “lived body” points to an ideal, rather than to our actual experience of the body; and this ideal is none other than that of the soul. The Cartesian ideal of the soul becomes, in the French phenomenological tradition, the ideal of the body—of a body that is determined, in return, by the soul’s properties. The French concept of “lived body” results indeed from two forms of idealization that will be exposed successively: the epistemological idealization that consists in attributing, to the body, the soul’s mode of knowledge as a cogito; the practical idealization that consists in attributing, to the body, the soul’s mode of power and action as an unlimited will. This twofold gesture finds its paradigmatic expression in Michel Henry’s phenomenology of the body, but can also be seen at work in Sartre, Ricœur and Merleau-Ponty.
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Notes
See Freud (1946, p. 161).
This article is an extended version of a paper presented at a Phenomenology Workshop organized by J. Bloechl in Boston College on “Phenomenology of Bodily Consciousness/ Body and Consciousness.”
This gesture, that consists in defining Leib from the soul—itself defined by contrast with matter and extension—clearly appears in the Ideas II. In the second section, Leib is first defined from the sensitive soul (sinnliche Seele) of the animal subject, as the support of immaterial sensations. In the third section, Leib is then conceived from the spiritual soul (Geistesseele) of the intentional and personal subject, as consciousness and will. For a more detailed exposition of this point, see our paper “De l’âme à la chair. Les Ideen II de Husserl,” to be published soon in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale.
Maine de Biran (2001, p. 9).
Ibid., p. 117.
Ibid., p. 151.
Let’s note however that Henry’s reading of Biran seems to shift from this first thesis of a primordial knowledge of the body integrated to the acting cogito, to the second thesis of an absolute identity between this acting consciousness and the body. Yet, in the first volume of the Essay at least, the body is less identified with the effort itself, than with the first resistant term to which it applies and that Biran calls the “continuous resistance”. In this sense, Biran’s “lived body” remains an “organic body.” It is Henry’s reading of Biran that completes this identification between the primordial fact of consciousness and the lived body, then conceived as a “subjective body.” On Henry and Biran, see Frogneux (2005) and Devarieux (2018). See also our article “The Lived Body: From Maine de Biran to French Phenomenology” to be published in E. Boublil (Ed.), The Roots of Desire: Reframing 20th Century French Philosophy, Lexington Books (in progress).
Maine de Biran (2001, p. 77).
Ibid., p. 79.
Ibid., p. 142.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Henry (1975, p. 54).
Ibid., p. 55.
Université catholique de Louvain, Plateforme technologique “Fonds Alpha,” Fonds Michel Henry, Ms A 26,212: “un corps qui ne ment pas/pas plus qu’une cogitatio.” We warmly thank Pr. Jean Leclercq, director of the Fonds Michel Henry, for authorizing us to access these notes in Michel Henry’s Archives.
Henry (2015, pp. 134–135).
Maine de Biran (2001, p. 80): “What more could we ask for, or what could we look for that could be clearer and more evident? Why can’t we stick to the knowledge or to the internal immediate apperception of the thinking subject? It is the most perfect of its kind (elle est parfaite dans son genre).”
Université catholique de Louvain, Plateforme technologique “Fonds Alpha,” Fonds Michel Henry, Ms A 026,412: “Si c’est la chair qui doit manifester l’âme il faut se demander en quoi consiste ce pouvoir de manifestation propre à la chair on s’apercevra alors que c’est précisément celui de l’âme et qu’ainsi (contre le dualisme grec) il n’y a aucune différence entre chair et âme.”
One could say that, if Husserl’s definition of Leib in the second section of Ideas II—as the support of immaterial sensations and impressions—announces Henry’s and even Merleau-Ponty’s idealization, its definition as an intentional cogito in the third section—following that of the Cartesian Meditations—announces Sartre’s idealization.
Husserl (1952, p. 218).
See part 3 of the Introduction entitled “The pre-reflexive cogito and the being of the percipere.”
Sartre (1978, p. 305); pp. 344–345 of the French Edition.
Ibid., p. 324.
See Alloa (2008).
See Saint-Aubert (2005).
Merleau-Ponty (2002, p. 468).
Saint-Aubert (2005, pp. 23–52).
See Malebranche, The Search After Truth, Book 3, part 2, chap. VII and Elucidation XI.
Malebranche (1997b, p. 32).
See Malebranche, Elucidation XI and the third Dialogue on Metaphysics and on Religion.
Merleau-Ponty (1968b, p. 18, p. 22).
Ironically, this critique has already been addressed to Merleau-Ponty by Henry, the latter claiming, in Incarnation, that the former maintains, within the body, the oppositional structure of the constituting and the constituted—the body remaining partly transcendental (cf. Henry, 2000). See, more recently, R. Barbaras’ critique according to which Merleau-Ponty still attaches the body to consciousness, soul and spirit—missing the body by lack of matter, not by excess (2019); and C. Romano’s critique according to which Merleau-Ponty still conceives the body from the opposition between Leib and Körper, or thought and extension—the body partly remaining a non-extended and immaterial flesh (2020).
Merleau-Ponty (2002, p. 105).
Merleau-Ponty (1964, p. 172): “This is what animalia and men are: absolutely present beings who have a wake of the negative. A perceiving body that I see is also a certain absence that is hollowed out and tactfully dealt with behind that body by its behavior. But absence is itself rooted in presence; it is through his body that the other person's soul is soul in my eyes.”
Merleau-Ponty (1968a, p. 147).
Ibid., p. 148.
Merleau-Ponty (2002, p. 105).
Ibid., p. 115.
Ibid.
See Passions of the Soul, Article 17.
See Principles of Philosophy, Article 37. Descartes (1991, p. 17).
See Principles of Philosophy, article 32.
See the quotation above-mentioned, Maine de Biran (2001, p. 9).
Henry (1975, p. 53).
Maine de Biran (2001, p. 9).
The unlimited dimension of the Cartesian will—claimed in in the 4th Meditation and in the §35 of the Principles—is not an unlimited power and action. As Descartes says in the Passions of the Soul (art. 4) will is a mode of thought that has no extension, and that is not the direct cause of movements. As such, it cannot directly act on the movements caused by the soul’s passions (art. 41) but only on the representations that come along them (art. 46).
Ibid, p. 123.
Ibid, p. 163.
One could say that Henry’s shift, from Biran’s concept of “will” to the concept of “power,” is explained by this power’s primordial pathos or passivity. Likewise, Sartre in Being and Nothingness, criticizes the identification between will and freedom: Will, as opposed to passions, is only a possible manifestation of a primordial choice that does not chose itself. Henry’s thesis of the power’s passivity or Sartre’s thesis of freedom’s facticity diminishes will’s significance—at least in its Cartesian definition as an action of the soul, opposed to its passions. But this critique of will only reinstates it at a lower level, as a fact or a pathos, as this primordial choice, act or power that can only be such. The concept of “body” is not central in Sartre’s explanation of freedom’s facticity (this is why we did not develop it here). But one can still say that, in Sartre as well, the body is only experienced through this primordial and necessary choice. Sartre even says that freedom’s facticity—or facticity’s freedom—is nothing but “the body as a point of view on the world” (See Sartre 1978, p. 487). The body’s fatigue for instance can only be experienced from my primordial project. And, if my body is revealed as weak by my inability to scale a rock, this weakness still depends on a free choice (i.e. lack of training added to a sportive life, etc.). The way Sartre always retrieves freedom within the body’s apparent facticity, suppresses as well any possible experience of a corporeal involuntary.
See Henry’s critique of the “I can” in the Sections 34 and 35 of Incarnation. The human body does not get its power from itself but from God’s Absolute Life and Power. And it is “a transcendental illusion of the ego” to think himself at the origin of his own power. In fact, this critique of the “I can” is less a critique of a primordial power of the body, than a critique of its autonomy. If the body does not get its power from itself, it is powerful anyway.
Université catholique de Louvain, Plateforme technologique “Fonds Alpha,” Fonds Michel Henry, Ms A 026,116: “Impossibilité du corps de différer de soi = sa possibilité d’agir.”
Henry (1975, p. 123).
Ibid., p. 58. If Biran seems to maintain an irreducible resistance, Henry who acknowledges this irreducibility, still thinks the possibility to overcome this resistance—i.e., through culture in Barbarism.
Merleau-Ponty (1968b, p. 59).
Ibid., p. 58.
Merleau-Ponty (2002, p. 159).
Ibid., p. 169.
Ibid., p. 121.
Merleau-Ponty (1964, p. 166). This expression is to be found in “The Philosopher and his Shadow,” but Merleau-Ponty also uses the expression of “exploratory movements” in the Phenomenology of Perception and in the Visible and the Invisible.
Merleau-Ponty (2002, p. 115).
Ibid., p. 117.
Ricœur (1966, p. 6).
Ibid., p. 40.
Ibid., p. 203. See also, p. 41: “An intention is an authentic decision when the action it projects appears to be within the power of its author”; p. 48 (p. 72 of the French edition): “It is myself who wills, it is I who is able to (Moi qui veux, je peux). It is myself who decides to be, who can do (Moi qui décide de faire, je suis capable de faire).”
Ibid., p. 202. See also p. 201: “THE WILL IS A POWER of decision only because it is a power of motion.”
Ibid., pp. 87–88.
Ibid., pp. 9–10.
Ricœur criticizes for instance Biran’s translation of the voluntary effort into these physiological terms of an “hyperorganic force” (Ibid., p. 220), or his pretention to ground the possibility of knowledge upon a philosophy of the will (Ibid., p. 424).
Ibid., p. 14. “the Cogito is broken up within itself (“Le cogito est intérieurement brisé,” p. 32 of the French Edition).
Ricœur in the introduction asserts “the reciprocity of the voluntary and the involuntary”: “Need, emotion, habit, etc., acquire a complete significance only in relation to a will which they solicit”; “This reciprocity of the voluntary and the involuntary leaves no doubt even about the direction in which we must read their relations. Not only does the involuntary have no meaning of its own, but understanding proceeds from the top down, and not from the bottom up. Far from the voluntary being derivable from the involuntary, it is, on the contrary, the understanding of the voluntary which comes first in man. I understand myself in the first place as he who says ‘I will’.” (Ibid., pp. 4–5).
Ibid., p. 12. (p. 30 of the French Edition).
Ibid., p. 85.
Henry (1975, p. 217). See also p. 219: “Thought of as subjective, this existence is then recognized as an absolute existence, even when it would be the existence of our body.”
The history of this practical idealization of the body from the concept of will, should be traced back long before Husserl, at least from the beginning of the nineteenth century—in France (as, for instance, in Maine de Biran), but also in Post-Kantians and German Idealism (as in Fichte or in Hegel and, at least partially in Schelling or in Schopenhauer).
Freud (1946, p. 161).
See Descartes’ letter to Mesland (May 1644) where he distinguishes abstraction from exclusion, claiming that the idea of the soul is not only obtained by abstraction, but by exclusion of the body.
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Lorelle, P. The body ideal in French phenomenology. Cont Philos Rev 54, 1–15 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-020-09522-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-020-09522-9