Embodiment and bodily becoming

1 Draft. The final version of this paper will be published in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology, ed. Dan Zahavi, Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2017– 2018. Embodiment and Bodily Becoming Sara Heinämaa Academy of Finland University of Jyväskylä One of the strengths of contemporary phenomenology is the rich conceptual arsenal that it offers for the analysis of the bodily aspects of human experience. The base of this conceptual arsenal is in the methodology that Edmund Husserl developed at the beginning of the last century for the analysis of sense constitution and then applied with his pupils in the inquiry of many different sorts of experiences, including bodily experiences and experiences of different types of bodies. Even though several pupils and collaborators, most importantly Edith Stein, Eugen Fink and Martin Heidegger, later departed from the strictly Husserlian methodology and engaged in philosophical projects of different types, their discussions of human bodies remained indebted to the original account outlined by Husserl during the first decades of the century. In addition to Husserlian sources, contemporary phenomenology of embodiment also draws heavily from the subsequent inquiries that French phenomenologists, e.g. Emmanuel Lévinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion, have conducted on the basis of Husserl’s groundbreaking studies, starting in the 1940s. These inquiries were influenced by French history of philosophy and science, most importantly by new readings of Descartes, Pascal, Maine de Biran, Kant, Hegel and 2 Kierkegaard. Thus, we find a mixture in which phenomenological inquiries are combined with insights into the tradition of modern philosophy. The main Husserlian result here is the thesis that the living body has several related but different senses in our experience and that some of these senses are crucial to the constitution of intersubjectivity and everything that depends on intersubjectivity. Living bodies do not just appear to us as biological organisms but are also given as practical tools, as communicative means, as emotive expressions and as our very means of perceiving and acting on environing things. When a medical surgeon, for example, works to remove an opaque lens in the eye of a patient with cataract, she needs to relate to human bodies in several different ways or intend human bodies in several different senses (cf. Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1993: 111/82).1 On the one hand, she must be able to regard her patient as a physiological organism composed of purely material elements, such as the epithelium, nerves, connective tissues, chemical compounds and electrical currents, and manipulable by the very same means as other material things. On the other hand, she needs to relate to her team members as free and responsible agents motivatable by requests, questions and arguments. This requires that she apprehends their bodies as expressive and communicative units. Moreover, in order to perform her operation, she may need to pose questions or give orders to the person she is operating on. For this end, she has to be able to relate to the patient, a bodily person, in the same communicative and motivating manner as to her team members. Finally, her 1 The pagination given first refers to the original source, and the pagination that follows this, after the slash, refers to the English translation. Both sources are given in one and the same entry in the list of references below. 3 relation to her own body is different from all her relations to environing bodies. She does not need to enter any communicative or manipulative stance in order to move her fingers, to alter their directions and speed in case of emergency; what is needed is merely her decision and determination to cut deeper or faster. So, several different ways of intending living bodies are integral to our communal and social lives. The bodies of human beings are not just given to us as material things but also operate as instrumental and communicative means and as our very way of perceiving and handling things. This insight is summarized in contemporary phenomenology by stating that human bodies are not just perceptual things or observational objects, but also (i) expressive wholes, (ii) conditions of action and will, (iii) zero-points (Nullpunkt) of spatial orientation, and (iv) original modes of intending perceptual things (e.g. Behnke 2011, cf. Taipale 2014; Welton 1999; Dodd 1997).2 These different senses contribute in different ways to the constitution of intersubjectivity and objective reality. Similar distinctions also figure in our relations with animals. In order to ride a horse, for example, we must be able to motivate the animal and this requires that we apprehend it, not as a biochemical unit, but as a perceiving, desiring and feeling individual. Or to use an example discussed by Husserl himself: our habitual ways of dealing with hunting dogs imply that we consider these animals intrinsically as sensing perceiving beings and, even more, as subjects that have better sensory capacities than we ourselves and thus are 2 For classical accounts, see, e.g., Husserl 1952: §38–41; 1973a: 75–77, 90; Stein 1917; Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1993: Part I. 4 comparable to us.3 Thus, the equivocation of the sense of a living body is not specific to human life but also characterizes our experiences and conceptions of animals. These distinctions between different senses of bodiliness can effectively be explicated and clarified by phenomenological methods.4 The explications do not just contribute to philosophical anthropology or philosophy of life; they also help to clarify the structure and organization of the perceivable world,5 contribute to epistemological debates on other minds and our “access to them,” and advance our ethical and political discussions on freedom, justice and responsibility. Ultimately, phenomenological accounts of embodiment touch on fundamental ontological and metaphysical debates that concern the sense and the type of being that we are ourselves are. 3 In his studies on intersubjectivity (Hua15), Husserl contends: “One might object that in the case where animals are considered as relating themselves to the world, to the same as ours, they might sometimes contribute to the constitution [mitkonstituierend] of the world as world. When one understands a dog sensing the hunt, the dog as it were teaches us something we did not already know. The dog enlarges the world of our experience” (Husserl 1973b: 167; cf. Husserl 1954: 230/227; 1973a: 114–120, 126, 133–134; 1973b: 625–626). 4 Thus, the term “embodiment,” when used in a phenomenological context, does not refer to any ontological thesis according to which human brains or animal brains (or neural systems) are parts of larger organic and non-organic systems (e.g. the organism-environment system or the eco-system). In other words, the idea of embodiment in phenomenology is not devised to counter any skeptical brainsin-the-vat scenarios. Nor does the term refer to the methodological stance according to which human brains or animal brains must be studied as parts of such larger systems. What is meant by “embodiment” in phenomenology is the constitutive process in which an egoic subject of experiencing is constituted as a worldly being and as a bodily person in a world, i.e., a process in which the ego receives the senses of object and experienceable reality. 5 Cf. Jacob’s article in this volume. 5 This chapter will clarify Husserl’s philosophical approach to embodiment by first explicating a set of basic analytical concepts and transcendental arguments (sections 1–2). It demonstrates that Husserlian phenomenology does not establish any simple opposition between naturalistic and phenomenological inquiries but instead offers a comprehensive account of the many senses of embodiment and the body operative in human practices, including those of the natural and the human sciences. The second part of the chapter discusses recent applications of Husserlian philosophy of embodiment in the investigation of human plurality (sections 3–5). The focus here is in the phenomena of sexuality and sexual difference, but the main interest is to show, by a study of these exemplary phenomena, that the phenomenological concepts of style and stylistic unity can serve investigations into human plurality and diversity more broadly. 1. Core Phenomena: Two-Layered Reality and Expressive Unity The main results of the phenomenology of embodiment are often reduced to a simple opposition between body as the subject of experience and body as an object of knowledge, informed by the epistemological distinction between subjective and objective qualities of things and the ontological distinction between subjective and objective being. Another dominant contrast is that between the lived body (Leib), invested with psychic powers, and the mere material thing (Körper), dominated by efficient causality. These oppositional senses serve many argumentative ends in contemporary theorization. However, if their constitutional conditions and the complexity of their mutual relations are bypassed, they may obstruct philosophical progress instead of opening up new avenues. Thus, it is crucial to retrace the explication of these distinctions in Husserl’s original exposition. 6 Husserl’s main teaching in the second volume of Ideas is that both human beings and animals can be apprehended in two alternative ways: either as psycho-physical compounds comprised of two types of processes, physical and psycho-physical, or as expressive wholes in which the spiritual and the material are comprehensively intertwined.6 In the first case, we have a two-layered entity: the psychic is layered upon the physical and causally dependent on it. In the second case, no layers can be distinguished: spiritual sense permeates matter through and through and no non-spiritual layer or part stands out. In Ideas II, Husserl characterizes the latter phenomenon as follows: I hear the other speaking, see his facial gestures, attribute to him such and such conscious lived experiences and acts, and let myself be motivated by them in this or that way. The facial gestures are seen facial gestures, and they are immediately bearers of sense for the other’s consciousness, e.g., his will, which, in empathy, is characterized as the actual will of this person and as a will which addresses me in communication. (Husserl 1952: 235/247; cf. 1973a: 77–79) 6 Ideas II (1952) was heavily edited by Husserl’s two assistants, Edith Stein and Ludwig Landgrebe. Stein and Landgrebe used Husserl’s original manuscript from 1916 as the starting point of the composition of the volume, but made corrections and additions on the basis of their discussions with Husserl and their own investigations supervised by Husserl (e.g. Stein 1917). This means that Ideas II (1952) is ultimately a text with several authors, and contemporary Husserl scholarship is still struggling to separate Husserl’s own position from the insights of Stein and Landgrebe. However, a new critical edition, based on Husserl’s own original manuscript versions, has been prepared by Dirk Fonfara and is now ready for publication. 7 Husserl calls the first type of apprehension “naturalistic” and the second “personalistic,” and argues that the naturalistic apprehension grounds modern scientific psychology and related disciplines, while the personalistic apprehension grounds all our communicative dealings with other living beings, including the scientific practice itself as an intersubjective enterprise. The main question of Ideas II then concerns the relations between these two types of apprehensions which both have a central role in our worldly dealings and our pursuit of knowledge. Thus, the naturalistic-causalistic account of the human body and the animal body is not abandoned or rejected by Husserl in favor of the personalistic account, as is sometimes claimed. Rather, since both crucially belong to our conscious lives and to our scientific dealings, the task of the phenomenologist is to chart their limits and to study their conditions of possibility and mutual relations. So, Ideas II distinguishes between two very different types of wholes: the living being as a psycho-physical compound and the living being as an expressive unity of spirit and sensible matter. Consequently, we can apprehend the body of a human being in two different ways. Either the living body is conceived as the physical foundation that sustains psychic states, processes and dispositions and determines their courses, or else the body is grasped as an expressive whole that carries spiritual sense in all its parts and parcels. In the former case, there is a basic layer of purely material (physical, electrochemical) being that operates independently of the mental organization characteristic of the higher layer(s); in the second case, no purely material elements or constituents can be distinguished in the spiritual organization of the whole. 8 Husserl characterizes the personalistic apprehension of the human body by comparing it to the way in which we grasp the units of written and spoken languages, such as words and texts: [T]he imprinted page or the spoken lecture is not a connected duality of word-sound and sense, but rather each word has its sense (…). Exactly the same holds for the unity, man. It is not that the living body is an undifferentiated physical unity, undifferentiated from the standpoint of its ‘sense,’ from the standpoint of the spirit. Rather, the physical unity of the living body there (…) is multiply articulated (…). And the articulation is that of sense, which means it is not of a kind that is to be found within the physical attitude (…). (Husserl 1952: 240–241/253; cf. MerleauPonty [1945] 1993: 186–187/142, 271–272/210) And a few pages later Husserl explicates his main insight according to which the mental life that we capture in the bodily gestures and postures of living beings is not originally given to us as an appendix to physical being but as an organizing power: [T]he spiritual is not a second something, is not an appendix, but is precisely animating; and the unity is not a connection of two, but on the contrary, one and only one is there. Physical being can be grasped for itself (carrying out the existential thesis), by means of the natural attitude, as natural being, as thingly being (…). But what we have here is not a surplus which would be posited on top of the physical, but rather this is spiritual being which essentially includes the sensuous but which, once again, does not include it as part, the way one physical thing is part of another. (Husserl 1952: 239/251; cf. 1973a: 86–88) 9 While distinguishing between these two different senses of the lived body – the naturalistic sense of the body as a psycho-physical compound and the personalistic sense of the body as a signifying expression – Husserl also argues that the former sense is constitutionally dependent on the latter. According to him, the naturalistic apprehension of living beings, their psychic and physiological properties, is not a self-sufficient formation but is dependent on the more profound personalistic attitude. In the second volume of Ideas, the thesis is formulated by the concepts of attitude, as follows: Upon closer scrutiny, it will even appear that there are not here two attitudes with equal rights and of the same order, or two perfectly equal apperceptions which at once penetrate one another, but that the naturalistic attitude is in fact subordinated to the personalistic, and that the former only acquires by means of an abstraction or, rather, by means of a kind of self-forgetfulness of the personal ego, a certain autonomy – whereby it proceeds illegitimately to absolutize its world, i.e., nature. (Husserl 1952: 183–184/193; 1954: 244–245/297) This argument seems to be in direct opposition to the natural scientific paradigm according to which our psychic, mental and spiritual life, however it is organized as such, results from and remains dependent on the purely physical processes of the human brain or the neural make-up of the human organism. The opposition, however, is merely seeming since the dependency relations discussed by Husserl and the natural scientists are different in kind: whereas Husserl studies dependency relations between different senses of bodily being, the natural scientific conception concerns relations of determination between two different types of real properties, the mental properties of veracity, aboutness and 10 phenomenality, on the one hand, and the physical properties of location, electric charge, intensity, length, etc., on the other. However, on the basis of the natural scientific paradigm of explanation one can put forward a comprehensive ontological or metaphysical theory according to which all being – and consequently also all psychic, mental and spiritual being – depends on the fundamental being of purely physical entities and forces. This is not the natural scientific position but is the ontological position of modern physicalism. In its conception, the mental is either identical with the physical or else merely an epiphenomenal and emergent property of the physical, without any power to determine the latter. Against this, Husserl argues that all physicalistic arguments take for granted the possibility of individuating physical being (entities, events, processes) independently of any reference to individual minds. This, he claims, is a groundless prospect. In his analysis, physical individuation in terms of position in objective space-time and in terms of causal role remains dependent on individuation by the “here” and the “now,” and these in turn refer back to subjective individuation, i.e. individuation of experiences and experiencing subjects, and ultimately to the individuation of streams of pure consciousness. In Ideas II, this argument about the primacy of subjective individuation in respect to objective spatial-temporal individuation is compressed as follows: What distinguishes two things that are alike is the real-causal nexus, which presupposes the here and the now. And with that we are led back necessarily to an individual subjectivity, whether solitary or an intersubjective one, with respect to 11 which alone determinateness is constituted in the position of location and of time. No thing has its individuality in itself. (Husserl 1952: 299/313)7 Husserl’s treatment here rests on his account of the constitution of the unity of the stream of consciousness and of immanent time as its basic structure (cf. Summa 2013, Salanskis 1999). In his account, all individuation of things, events, processes, and other types of realities in objective unified space-time rests on the primary individuation of subjects, and these in turn are grounded in the fundamental individuation of streams of consciousness with their egoic poles. Or, to put it more technically: subjectivity alone is independently individual, and all spatiotemporal individuality is only non-independently individual, i.e. it necessarily presupposes the intrinsic individuality of consciousnesses. The main point here is the conceptualization of the stream as a dynamic and open continuum in which new hyletic data is constantly incorporated in the structure of “retention-primal impressionprotention.” The stream is irreversible, and its moments unique and unrepeatable. The main implication of this theory of individuation to the philosophy of embodiment is the insight that bodily persons are not primarily individuated by their positions in objective space-time or in causal nexuses but are individuated by their subjective modes of responding to what is given in experience and of yielding to or withstanding from what draws them. Rather than being differentiated by physical and psychophysical properties, 7 And even more explicitly a few pages below: “Objective thinghood is determined physicalistically but is determined as a this [als Dies] only in relation to consciousness and the conscious subject. All determination refers back to a here and now and consequently to some subject or nexus of subjects.” (Husserl 1952: 301/315; 1954: 222/218, 633/230; 1973a: 99, 150) 12 substances or essences, bodily subjects are distinguished by the unique ways or styles in which they intentionally relate to constantly altering environing circumstances in their gesturing and acting, and to themselves as constantly developing sources of intending (cf. Husserl 1973a: 67–68). As subjective expressions, our bodies are not distinguished from one another by the positions that they hold in space and time or by the properties that they entertain, but are distinguished by their unique ways of moving, gesturing and acting in respect to what is given in their intentional environment. Every man has (…) his style of life in affection and action, with regard to the way he has of being motivated by such and such circumstances. And it is not that he merely had this up to now; the style is rather something permanent, at least, relatively so in the various stages of life, and then, when it changes, it does so again, in general, in a characteristic way, such that, consequently upon these changes, a unitary style manifests itself once more. (Husserl 1952: 270/238; 1973a: 36–37; cf. MerleauPonty 1969: 79/56) Even though our intentional bodily relations to the environment change and develop dynamically, even though they sediment one upon another, confirming or canceling one another, drawing materials from earlier relations for new formations and thus creating new materials, all this fluctuation constantly exhibits an individually unique style of relating. In other words, despite the constant change and development of the relations, a distinctive style of relating manifests itself in this dynamism. Moreover, this stylistic unity has a recursive “fractal” character: whenever it changes, as it does due to the dynamic character of intentionality, each change has the same stylistic form (cf. Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1993: 229–230/177). Thus, we can say that as an intentional whole our bodily existence – the 13 whole of our bodily actions and passions – has the permanence and unity of a style, despite its fluid and fluctuating character.8 We have seen that in Husserl’s account, embodiment is not one phenomenon but involves two core phenomena, the body as a natural organism on the one hand, and the body as an expressive unity on the other. These two phenomena have their own grounds, regions and principles. We have also clarified the relations between the two phenomena and seen that instead of rejecting the naturalistic explication of the living body, as some commentators suggest, Husserl works to specify the conditions of possibility of this account and to chart its limits. He does not dismiss the naturalistic explication as false, misleading or invalid. He merely argues that it is not self-sustaining but remains one-sidedly dependent on the personalistic apprehension of the living body in one crucial respect, i.e., in respect to the task of individuation. This clarification allows us to avoid simple oppositions between the naturalistic philosophy of mind on the one hand, and Husserlian phenomenology on the other, but at the same time 8 A comparison with artistic work may help to illuminate this analysis by showing concretely how the ideas of dynamic change and stylistic unity can combine – and must combine if we aim at making sense of the dynamism of selfhood and personhood. The French artist Paul Cezanne is well-known for radical changes in his painting, both in his practice of painting and in the resulting works. Cezanne started as a Post-Impressionist but went through phases of Cubism, Fauvinism and Expressionism, constantly combining naturalistic and non-naturalistic influences. His oeuvre is a rich and dynamic multiplicity, but through all the paintings, a unique Cezannean style can be recognized. So when Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception states that the unity of subjective life is like the unity of artwork (e.g. Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1993: 177/134), this is not a superficial metaphor but points to a deep analogy between artistic work and the human person: both are open-ended stylistic unities and as such their permanence and identity is found in their manner of changing. 14 it also allows us to see that these two philosophies are not completely interchangeable or complementary, as has been argued (cf. Roy, Petitot, Pachoud and Varela 1999: 43ff.). There is a strong critical potential in Husserlian legacy for the inspection of the transcendental conditions of naturalistic philosophies of mind and all philosophical projects that depend on them – be they epistemological, ethical or political. 2. Constitutional Relations: Own and Alien Husserl’s analysis of embodiment also harbors another crucial distinction. This is the distinction between the givenness of one’s own body and the givenness of the other living body. Like the distinction between the naturalistic and personalistic apprehensions of living bodies, this distinction is also sometimes simplified as a crude opposition. It is argued, for example, that in his early works, most importantly in Ideas, Husserl put forward a solipsistic or egocentric account of embodiment but then later distanced himself from this early account and developed a more relational or dialogical understanding of human embodiment (e.g. Mensch 2001; Ricœur 1967). In order to see what is involved in this second distinction, it is necessary to study somewhat closer the order in which the different senses of a living body are constituted according to Husserl. Effectively, Husserl argues in both Ideas and in Cartesian Meditations that all sense of living bodiliness (Leiblichkeit), both naturalistically and personalistically apprehended, depends on the primary sense of my own living body and on the empathetic sense of another living body which is grounded on the fundamental sense of living that one 15 originally constitutes in one’s own case (Husserl 1950: 126–149/95–120, 1952: 80–82/85– 87). On this ground, Husserl’s account of the ultimate foundations of the sense of embodiment can be characterized as “individualistic” and even “solipisistic.” However, one should be careful with such characterizations, since by sense-foundation Husserl does not mean any axiom from which other senses can be derived but means a necessary starting point on the basis of which further constitutive steps are able to produce new senses. So his argument is that our concrete everyday experiences as well as our scientific, philosophical and aesthetic understandings of living beings involve several senses of bodily being that all enrich and develop the primitive sense of self-embodiment. Both tactile and kinesthetic sensations are needed for the constitution of the primitive sense of my own living body. The former provide a pre-objective primitive spatiality and the latter provide the sense of spontaneous movement. Both are necessary for the constitution of sense organs and the body as an organ of movement and action. On the basis of these two types of sensations, our bodies are constituted primarily as double beings, both sensing and sensible, perceiving and perceivable. Touching my left hand, I have touch appearances, that is to say, I do not just sense [softness], but I perceive and have appearances of a soft, smooth hand, with such a form. The indicational sensations of movement and the representational sensations of touch which are objectified as features of the thing, “left hand,” belong in fact to my right hand. But when I touch the left I also find in it, too, series of 16 touch-sensations which are “localized” in it though there are not constitutive of properties. If I speak of the physical thing, “left hand,” then I am abstracting from these sensations (…). If I do include them, then it is not that the physical thing is now richer, but instead it becomes body, it senses. (Husserl 1952: 144–145/152; cf. 150: 128/97; 1973a: 75) This means that a consciousness that would lack the sense of its own living bodiliness, could not establish the sense of another living body and thus could not experience any other being as a living being. Husserl gives an example of such a consciousness in the second volume of his Ideas in order to highlight the dependency of the sense of living on tactility. He proposes that we imagine a consciousness the only sense of which would be vision, i.e. a consciousness that would lack tactile sensations altogether (Husserl 1952: 150/158). Such a consciousness, he argues, could not perceive its own body as living, and in so far as the sense of one’s own living bodiliness is necessary for the constitution of the sense “other living bodies,” this consciousness would not have any living bodies in its field of experiencing.9 Since elsewhere Husserl also argues that the full sense of the world depends on the empathic sense of another self and on the communal relation between such others (e.g. Husserl 1952: 167/175–176; 1954: 256–259/252–256; 1973a: 99–102), it follows that the imagined self without the capacity of touching and self-touching would neither have other selves in its experience nor the objective world in the full sense of the term (cf. Heinämaa 2014). 9 In Husserl’s analysis, qualitative distinct localized expanses are originally constituted in touch sensation. Husserl then argues that all perception – both the constitution of perceived objectivities and the constitution of the lived body as the subject of perception – depends on such units and on kinesthetic sensations. In this way perception is dependent on touch. 17 Husserl’s argument about the constitutive primacy of the sense of one’s own body is sometimes presented as an early view that he later abandoned. For these reasons it is important to study some paragraphs from Husserl’s late publications. In The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, we read the following: Everyone experiences the embodiment of souls in original fashion only in his own case. What properly and essentially makes up the character of a living body I experience only in my own living body, namely, in my constant and immediate holding-sway [over my surroundings] through this physical body alone.10 Only it is given to me originally and meaningfully as “organ” and as articulated into particular organs (...). Obviously it is only in this way [i.e. by having sense-organs] that I have perceptions and, beyond this, other experiences of objects in the world. All other types of holding-sway, and in general all relatedness of the ego to the world, is mediated through this. (Husserl 1954: 220/217; cf. 109–110/108)11 10 Husserl’s argues that the primary senses of subjectivity and ego are bound to activity, to “I move” (Husserl 1954: 220–221/217, cf. 108–109/106–107, 215–216/211–212, 310–311/331–332) and “I can” (Husserl 1952: 151–/159–160; 216–217/228, 254–257/266–269, 330–332/241–243). The sense of passive subjectivity is dependent on the sense of active subjectivity and act (Husserl 1952: 332– 333/344). For him, the subjective and egological in the proper and original sense is “the ego of ‘freedom’” (Husserl 1952: 213–214/224), that is “the subject of intentionality, the subject of the acts” (Husserl 1952: 214–215/226). This means that while Husserl accepts the idea of the passive subject and the passive ego, and also thematizes and discusses this ego at length, he argues that the sense of this type of subjectivity is constitutionally dependent on the sense of the active subject, i.e. the passive subject is dependent on the active one in its sense of subjectivity. Cf. Summa 2013. 11 Earlier formulations are similar. In 1921, he wrote: “The original givenness of a living body [Leib] can only be the original givenness of my living body and no other. The apperception ‘my living body’ 18 The other body is grasped as living when the primitive sense of living, as sensing, as constituted in my own case, is transferred over from my own body to another corporeal body in the environing space (Husserl 1950: 142–143/112–13; 1952: 164–166/172–174; 1973a: 97, 126). The transfer is motivated by the similarity of perceived movements. Some things that I detect and observe in space resemble my own living body and its sensory organs in their perceived movements (Husserl 1950: 141–144/112–114; 1973a: 3–4; 1973b: 183; cf. Merleau-Ponty 1960: 286/233; Ricœur 1967: 46–47). A body over there reacts to external stimulation in the same way as my own arms and hands. And when it bumps into another thing, it does not halt or bounce back but “restores” its balance and circumvents the obstacle (Husserl 1973a: 118). Moreover, without any detectable causal influence by other material elements or things, it “spontaneously” turns in this or that direction. And finally: it also manifests the type of “reflexive” movement that is familiar to me from my own case.12 is essentially the first and the only original one. It is only when I have constituted my living body that I can apperceive living bodies as such. This [latter] apperception is necessarily a mediate one; insofar as it associates the alien living body with a co-presentation of it in inner attitude [by the other], it always requires an antecedent apperception of my living body” (Husserl 1973a: 7). In Cartesian Meditations, he characterizes the primacy of the sense of one’s own living body (Leib) by an abstractive reduction to the so-called sphere of ownness as follows: “I find my animate body as uniquely singled out – namely as the only one (…) that is not just a body but precisely an animate organism: the sole object (…) to which (…) I ascribe fields of sensation (…), the only object ‘in’ which I ‘rule and govern’ immediately, governing particularly in each of its ‘organs’” (Husserl 1950: 128/97). 12 The terms “restore,” “spontaneous,” and “reflexive,” used here to characterize the movements of the other, need to be put in quotation marks since prior to the empathetic transfer of the sense all terms with subjective connotations are merely applicable to my own body and since it is only the empathetic transfer of sense that allows us to extend the use of these terms to environing bodies. 19 Such behavioral similarities motivate a complex of synthesizing experiences that terminates in an act in which the sense of sensing is transferred over to a body perceived at a distance. As a result, a new type of being is given to me: a body with its own systems of sensations and appearance-systems, sensations that I cannot have or live through but that are given to me via the thing’s movements and behaviors. This is not an inferential step that produces a new proposition but an associative synthesis. The living thing detected in perception does not appear as an amalgam or compound of two separate realities, one psychic and the other physical, nor as a two-layered psychophysical reality. Such conceptualizations belong to the psychological sciences and the life sciences, not to straightforward perception, and they depend on the goals, the methods and the techniques of these sciences. Instead of manifesting itself as a compounded or layered structure, the living being appears as a uniform whole of governed movements, meaningful gestures and significant behaviors (Husserl 1950: 150–153/121–124; cf. 1952: 234– 241/245–253). 3. An Exemplary Application: Sexual Identity as a Stylistic Whole One of the best-known areas in which the classical Husserlian distinctions between different senses of bodily being are applied today in the philosophy of mind, or more precisely the philosophy of perception. Starting from Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of embodiment and the body as a sensory-motor agent, several theorists have attacked the computational, formal-semantic and internalistic approaches that dominated 20 the theorization of the mind at the end of the last century.13 Today, phenomenological discussions of perception are often paralleled with the models developed by externalists and enactivists and contrasted with McDowell’s conceptualistic theory of perception. Another important area of application is in the philosophy of illness and medicine. Here phenomenological analyses illuminate the bodily and intersubjective aspects of psychopathologies, e.g. anorexia, depression, schizophrenia and dementia, but they also shed light on the paradoxical character of medical technologies, for example, life support systems, organ transplants and cosmetic surgery.14 In addition, classical phenomenology offers a set of general operative concepts for the analysis of the phenomena of normality and abnormality, including the concepts of concordance, optimacy and liminality.15 13 Computational approaches were developed in the 1970s and 1980s most importantly by Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn on the basis of Turning’s groundbreaking definition of computation. The early critics of these include, for example, Hubert Dreyfus and John Haugeland, who both were influenced by Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of intentionality. Externalistic approaches have later been developed, for example, by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, and most recently by Alva Noë and Daniel Hutto. 14 This particular area of application has a long history, including authors such as Kimura Bin, Eugène Minkowski, Karl Jaspers and Ludwig Binswanger. Contemporary contributors include Thomas Fuchs, Josef Parnas, Mathew Ratcliffe, Louis Sass, Fredrik Svenaeus and Dan Zahavi. New dimensions have been also introduced by Lisa Käll, Dorothée Legrand, Stefano Micali and Jenny Slatman. 15 The concepts of normality and normativity have been clarified, most importantly, by Bernhard Waldenfels, Anthony Steinbock and Steven Crowell; new contributions also include those by Maxime Doyon, Théo Breyer and Maren Wehrle. 21 In addition to the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of illness, phenomenological distinctions also figure prominently in today’s social and political philosophy. The phenomenologically informed concept of the body-subject, as distinct from biological organisms, provides a starting point for many approaches in gender and race studies. Some of these approaches discuss the human body as an expressive unit with ethical and political dimensions, while others emphasize the body’s mediating role in practical, instrumental and technological settings. Moreover, the phenomenological account of the body as an subject of action and experience provides a viable alternative and complement to the dominant Foucaultian mode of theorization in which the body is conceived as a socialcultural product and an inscription of discursive power. All these areas of application are developing rapidly today and produce new conceptualizations and completely new research questions in the fields of the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of medicine, political philosophy, and social ontology. As such, each deserves its own individual discussion and assessment in comparison to competing paradigms. Such accounts are available in several recent volumes presenting the field of contemporary phenomenology.16 In this historical-philosophical framework, I want to draw attention to one particular discussion that has developed within the intersection of the aforementioned two areas of investigation which both draw from classical phenomenology of embodiment, i.e. the philosophy of perception and political philosophy. This is the phenomenological 16 Discussions of these areas of application can be found in this volume as well as in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology (Zahavi (ed.) 2015), and in The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology (Luft and Overgaard (eds.) 2012). 22 discussion on sexual identities and sexual difference.17 An excursion into this particular topic is especially clarifying since it demonstrates how critical and normative philosophical perspectives have been developed within phenomenology, a discipline still often assumed to be preoccupied with purely theoretical matters or else historical-exegetic problematics. In order to see the philosophical relevance of this particular area of application, it is crucial to recall that our contemporary theoretical debates on sexual difference have long and deep roots. The philosophical discussion of sexual difference began with Aristotle’s political theory of women as rational animals with non-authoritative practical reason and, through the egalitarian and ethical alternatives developed by the Stoics, it ranged to the Enlightenment discussions concerning the capacities and excellences of men and women. From its very beginnings, the discourse combined biological, medical, moral-philosophical and metaphysical interests. In the twentieth century, it culminated in the controversy between biological determinists and social constructivists. While the former suggested that most, if not all, observable differences between women and men result from organic differences that are hardwired in their neurological makeup of the human species, the latter argued that most, if not all, such differences are cultural-historical constructs, and as such highly variable and liable to radical changes. Here phenomenology offers an original perspective that helps to overcome the common assumptions of both biologistic and constructivistic arguments. On the basis of its 17 Phenomenology of sexual difference and gender started to develop systematically at the end of 1980s, and was advanced by the contributions of Bernhard Waldenfels, Iris Marion Young, Linda Fisher, Sara Heinämaa, Silvia Stoller and Gail Weiss. Most recent contributors include Alia Al-Saji, Sara Ahmed, Lisa Käll, Anne Leeuwen and Lanei Rodemeyer. 23 elaborate concepts of embodiment it is able to bypass the late modern disputes over nature versus nurture and open new grounds for inquiries into the experiential relations between men and women. At the same time it contributes to contemporary social ontology by offering explications of the concrete meaning of being human – man or woman. The Husserlian account of embodiment offers the possibility of conceptualizing the question of sexual identity and sexual difference in a new way. We do not need to restrict ourselves to explaining such identities and differences by empirical realities: hormones, genes, stimulus response-systems, social roles, or historical facts. More fundamentally, we can understand sexual difference by intentional and temporal concepts as a difference between two different modes or styles of intentionally relating. As types of bodily subjectivity, masculinity and femininity, manhood and womanhood, are not anchored on any particular objects, but are given as two different modes of relating to objects, acting on them and being affected by them. Sexual identities are thus constituted together or parallel with our own living bodies, those special “things,” that connect us to all material things and to the world as an open totality. When sexual identity is understood as a modal or stylistic identity, it runs through one’s whole life as a way or manner in which lived experiences and acts follow each other, continue and change. And when this manner of changing itself changes – for example, in childhood, adolescence, sickness, or old age – then “it does so in a characteristic way, such that a unitary style manifests itself once more” (Husserl 1952: 270/283; cf. 1973a: 37–38; 2002, 200). 24 In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty uses the Husserlian concepts of style in a comprehensive manner to characterize the individuality and the unity of dynamically evolving totalities, persons and their works on the one hand, and the world as a whole on the other (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1993: 377–381/293–296; cf. 100/73–74, 176/133–136, 214/164–165, 461/359, 465/361–362, 519/406; Husserl 1973a: 128–129). He also applies these concepts explicitly in his analysis of the variety of human sexuality and the difference between men and women. In a late essay “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” we read: A woman passing by (…) is a certain manner of being flesh which is given entirely in her walk (…), a very noticeable variation of the norm of walking, looking, touching, and speaking that I possess in my self-awareness because I am body. (Merleau-Ponty 1960: 54) Ultimately, maleness and femaleness are, in the phenomenological account, two variations of our basic corporeal way of relating to the world; they are two general types that include uncounted individual styles of behavior.18 Every individual creates a modification of these two principal types. Most modifications develop and amplify the duality, but some work to undo or annul it. The development of a sexual identity, in any case, is not accounted for by objectivities, but by imitation and mimicry, repetition and modification of action (and 18 My discussion of woman and man as two experiential and intentional types depends on Husserl’s distinction between two different kinds of generalities – (i) types and (ii) concepts – as explicated in his Experience and Judgment (Erfahrung und Urteil 1939). The main point here is that whereas the concept woman includes individual women as equal and interchangeable instances, the type woman includes women as partially similar singulars that cannot be replaced one for the other. For a fuller account of woman and man as two types, and for its Husserlian background, see Heinämaa 2011. 25 passion).19 This does not mean that sexual identity is a question of choice. To suggest that we decide to be men and women is to commit an intellectualistic fallacy. Sexual identities are not and cannot be determined at will, they are experienced and formed already on the level of perception and motility. In order to see how this view of sexual identities emerged and developed in the twentieth century, it is important to study the debates of French existentialists after the Second World War. A central figure here was the French philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir who, in her magnum opus, The Second Sex, based her discussion on sexual difference on the phenomenological concepts of embodiment that she found articulated in the works of her philosophical collaborators Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.20 I have argued elsewhere that it was the Husserlian distinction between the lived body (Leib) and the organism (Körper) that allowed Beauvoir to develop her radical philosophical account of sexual relations (Heinämaa 2003; 2012). I will focus my discussion here on her understanding of sexual difference as an existential-phenomenological category that refers to two fundamentally different ways of being human. This historical excursion is crucial to 19 For a full account of the relations between the phenomenological analysis of sexual difference, on the one hand, and empirical scientific accounts of sex/gender (bio-scientific and social scientific), see Heinämaa 2010. 20 More precisely, Beauvoir found Husserl’s distinctions discussed and developed by Sartre in Being and Nothingness (1943) and by Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception (1945), but she also knew Lévinas’ doctoral dissertation The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology (La théorie de l'intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl 1930) and his innovative account of erotic intentionality in Time and Other (Le temps et l'autre 1947). 26 contemporary phenomenology since it allows us to notice that from its very beginnings twentieth-century phenomenology discussed human existence not as a homogenous unity, but as a plurality that involves endless variations and two generative types. 4. A Philosophical Debate on the Existential Status of Sexual Difference Simone de Beauvoir found herself involved in a peculiar philosophical controversy over the phenomenon of sexual difference. This involved her nearest philosophical collaborators, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, but also their common phenomenological sources, Heidegger and Lévinas. On the one hand, there was Sartre’s understanding, spelled out in Being and Nothingness (1943), according to which Heidegger’s Daseinsanalysis renders maleness/femaleness and masculinity/femininity as contingent and accidental configurations without existential or transcendental relevance.21 In Sartre’s 21 Concerning this point, Sartre argues, Heidegger fails to question the philosophical tradition. His analysis repeats the ancient prejudice according to which human sexuality is merely a dimension of instinctual animal life and has nothing to do with the essence of the human psyche: “The term ‘instinct’ always in fact qualifies contingent formations of psychic life which have the double character of being co-extensive with all the duration of this life (…) – and of nevertheless not being such that they can be deduced as belonging to the very essence of the psychic. This is why existential philosophies have not believed it necessary to concern themselves with sexuality. Heidegger in particular, does not make the slightest allusion to it in his existential analytic with the result that his ‘Dasein’ appears to us as asexual. Of course, one may consider that it is contingent for ‘human reality’ to be specified as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’; of course, one may say that the problem of sexual differentiation has nothing to do with that of Existence [Existenz] since man and woman equally exist. These reasons are not wholly convincing. That sexual differentiation lies within the domain of facticity we accept with reservation. But does this mean that the For-itself is sexual ‘accidentally,’ by the pure contingency of having this particular body” (Sartre [1943] 1998: 423/383). Cf. Henry 1965. 27 understanding, the difference between men and women was for Heidegger merely an ontic formation without any fundamental ontological dimensions, comparable to the difference between left-handed and right-handed human beings or that between tall and short people. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir’s argues that such analyses trivialize our perceptual experience and neglect our historical understanding. She pointed out, first, that human kind seems to divide itself, constantly and universally, into two different groups, not just biologically but also in terms of its activities and passivities. She then resorted to the phenomenological notion of humanity, not as a natural species, but more fundamentally, as an open-ended totality of possibilities. This suggested to her that the sexual divide is not just a biological formation or a cultural variable but more fundamentally a mode of our being and becoming. In The Second Sex, she articulates this insight in reference to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology as follows: As Merleau-Ponty very justly puts it, man is not a species: he is a historical idea. Woman is not a completed reality, but rather a becoming, and it is in her becoming that she should be compared to man; that is to say, her possibilities should be defined. (Beauvoir [1949] 1993: 71–73/66; cf. 19–20/19–20; [1949] 1991: 661/740) To be sure, Heidegger’s analysis gives the sexed body an ontic significance, or a role in regional ontologies, to put it in Husserlian terms. More precisely, according to Heidegger’s account, the categories of femaleness/maleness and womanhood/manhood may serve several regional ontologies, for example, those of the biosciences and medicine (sex) and those of anthropology and the social sciences (gender); but despite such regional roles, the sexed body has no fundamental ontological significance. In other words, the categories of 28 womanhood and manhood are mere empirical categories for Heidegger, and Dasein is “sexually neutral.” In the light of Beauvoir’s analysis, this is an untenable view and a prejudiced notion: sexual difference is not an empirical accident but pierces down to the very foundation of human existence. The categories of womanhood and manhood may be incidental or idle in some other existential situation than ours, and they may become obsolete to us in the future, but as we now stand here, in this particular existential-historical situation, these categories do not just serve the sciences or some particular practices (e.g. those of reproduction) but relate to the fundamental temporal structures of human Mitsein.22 Sartre’s existentialism offered an alternative way to inspect the ontological dimensions of sexual difference, but the ontological distinction that Sartre introduced between in-itself and for-itself was problematic for Beauvoir, since its two poles were mutually exclusive and as such limited possibilities to account for our bodily being-for-others. The Sartrean concept rendered human bodies as instrumental means and as meta-instruments for the manipulation of other instruments and neglected the fundamental character of the body as an expressive unit.23 For this reason, Beauvoir preferred Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of phenomenology that allowed her to conceptualize one’s own body (corps propre) as the nexus of being-for-oneself and being-with-others. Her Merleau-Ponty quotation, given above, refers us to the last page of the chapter on sexuality in Phenomenology of 22 For a more complete account, see, Heinämaa 2010. 23 Sartre’s discussion of flesh did not extend the analytical potential of his concepts since it described flesh as a residue left after the reduction of all instrumental relations of active and potent bodies. 29 Perception, where Merelau-Ponty redefines the relations between the contingencies and necessities of human life as follows: Human existence will force us to revise our usual notion of necessity and contingency, because it is the transformation of contingency into necessity by the act of taking in hand. All that we are, we are on the basis of a de facto situation which we appropriate to ourselves and which we ceaselessly transform by a sort of escape which is never an unconditioned freedom. There is no explanation of sexuality which reduces it to anything other than itself, for it is already something other than itself, and indeed, if we like, our whole being. (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1993: 199/152) In addition to this debate on the ontological significance of sexual difference between Heidegger and his existentialist followers, Beauvoir was also influenced by the discussion of femininity that she found in Lévinas’ early work, Time and Other (1947). In this book, Lévinas developed a forceful critique of Heidegger’s account of the constitution of time and temporality by substituting the model of fecundity and generativity for Heidegger’s paradigm of mortality and being-towards-death.24 This led him to develop an account of the plurality of human existence. Beauvoir sympathized with this goal, but it seemed to her that Lévinas was able to shake the Heideggerian framework only at the price of a disappointing analysis of erotic intentionality (cf. Marion 2003). In a now notoriously well-known paragraph, Lévinas 24 The aim of his lectures,” Lévinas explained, was “to show that time is not the achievement of an isolated and lone or solitary subject, but that it is the very relationship of the subject with the Other” (Lévinas 1947b: 14/39). 30 opposed femininity to consciousness by writing: “[O]therness reaches its full flowering in the feminine, a term of the same rank as consciousness but of opposite meaning” (Lévinas 1947b: 81/88). Beauvoir saw Lévinas’ description as a late modern version of an ancient form of thinking that mystifies women by confusing two different uses of the term “other.” First, the term was used for another similar being (semblable). When we identify ourselves as perceivers, for example, then we use the term “other(s)” to refer to other perceivers. If we are discussing experience and consciousness more generally, then we are talking about other consciousnesses and other selves (e.g. Beauvoir [1949] 1993: 17–18/17, 120ff./100ff; cf. Husserl 1973a: 94–98). However, in Lévinas’ discussion, the term also carried a second meaning. It was not only another experiencing self or another consciousness that was at issue, but rather what was alien to all consciousness (Beauvoir [1949] 1993: 655/265). In Beauvoir’s reading, Lévinas’ discussion of erotic intentionality and fecundity confused these different senses, the relative sense of “other” in respect to some specific self or community of selves, and the absolute sense of “other” in respect to all selfhood. And, what is worse, it assimilated absolute otherness with femininity. Beauvoir argued that the opposition between consciousness and femininity is based on mystifying habits of thought that associate femininity and women with animality, sensibility, and instincts, and masculinity and men with the intellect, the spirit, and pure ideas. In her reading, this associative mode of thinking impaired both classical and contemporary analyses of the human condition. She lays the basis of this argument at the beginning of The Second Sex, in the introductory chapter, but continues her discussion throughout the extensive first book to its final pages, where she summarizes her view as 31 follows: [E]ach can grasp in immanence only himself, alone: from this point of view the other is always a mystery. (…) But in accordance with the universal rule I have stated, the categories in which men think of the world are established from their point of view, as absolute: they misconceive reciprocity, here as everywhere. A mystery for man, woman is considered to be mysterious in essence. (Beauvoir [1949] 1993: 653/263) In the light of the conflicting debates of her contemporaries, Beauvoir realized that a philosophical account of sexual difference must be grounded, first, on a critical reexamination of the traditional ideas of embodiment and sensibility and, second, on a firstperson account of the experience of being woman. Traditional conceptions of the human condition were in her analysis systematically biased and in need of a fundamental revision. 5. Toward the Understanding of the Twoness of Human Embodiment Beauvoir could not find a re-examination of the human body in Heidegger’s Being and Time. Heidegger offered elaborate descriptions and analyses of our being-in-the-world (inder-Welt-Sein), a corporeal relation to be sure, but he refrained from thematizing and conceptualizing the living body (e.g. Heidegger [1927] 1993: 104–113/97–105). The reason for this was Heidegger’s conviction that all philosophies of consciousness, spirit, soul and person – and the related philosophies of embodiment – are fundamentally defective in building on naïve taken-for-granted notions of being (e.g. Heidegger [1927] 1993: 48/44–46, 117/110; cf. [1925] 1979: 172–173). Moreover, since Heidegger was struggling to liberate his thinking from the epistemological legacy of classical 32 phenomenology and its analyses of intentionality, his discourse of being-in-the-world was preoccupied with the practical-instrumental relations and bypassed the aesthetic and erotic variations of existence that Beauvoir saw as more revealing for the task of articulating sexual difference.25 Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception both offered detailed and elaborate distinctions between different senses of bodily being, informed by classical phenomenological analyses. Both works discussed human bodies as objects of natural sciences, as instruments in multiple practical settings, as expressive gestures in communication and as our very means of having the world – or our “anchorage” in the world, as Beauvoir herself formulates it in the review that she wrote on Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology for Les temps modernes in 1945. But in Beauvoir’s reading, Sartre’s account was impaired by his indebtedness to Hegelian dialectics and its idealistic metaphysics which suggested the notion that our bodies are given to us either as fully active instruments or else as viscous sensible flesh. MerleauPonty’ analyses were free from such dualistic notions, mainly because of his interest in the philosophy of nature and the life sciences. In the aforementioned review, Beauvoir puts great emphasis on the fact that Merleau-Ponty’s modification of phenomenology does not oppose consciousness with being but describes a living bond or, better, a stratification of such bonds. For Merleau-Ponty, she writes, quoting his words, the subject “is not a pure for-itself, nor a gap in being, as Hegel wrote, and Sartre repeated, but it is ‘a hollow, a fold which has been made and can be unmade’” (Beauvoir 1945: 367).26 25 E.g. Beauvoir [1949] 1991: 485/609, 501/622. But see also Heidegger 1987. 26 The contrast with Hegel’s philosophy is part of Merleau-Ponty’s original text (Merleau-Ponty 33 The tension between these divergent conceptions of subjectivity, Sartrean and MerleauPontyan, pervades Beauvoir’s discussion of sexual difference in The Second Sex. She formulates her main theses with Sartrean concepts of immanence and transcendence, being-in-itself and being-for-itself, but her descriptions of the bodily experiences of women and men, and the world as experienced by these two types of subjectivities, systematically undermine the oppositional Sartrean concepts. The Second Sex demonstrates that women’s lived experiences (expérience vécue) of their own bodies and the bodies of others undermine traditional accounts of the self-other relation and the dominant notion of intersubjectivity as a relation between subjects of equal capacities and potentials. In her view, two forms of feminine experience especially attest to [1945] 1993: 249/192; see also Merleau-Ponty 1960: 249/196, 286/233), but the comment on Sartre is added by Beauvoir. Her juxtaposition suggests that our choice is between two principal notions of consciousness and subjectivity. On the one hand, we have philosophies that define consciousness in opposition to being. For Hegel, she says, consciousness was a “gap in being,” for Sartre it is a nothingness, a pure activity of negating or nihilating (néanisation). On another hand, we have philosophies in which consciousness is not opposed to being, but is consistently conceptualized as a dynamic relation with being. This view Beauvoir finds elaborated in MerleauPonty’s Phenomenology of Perception: “While Sartre in Being and Nothingness emphasized from the beginning the opposition between being-for-itself and being-in-itself, the spirit’s power of negation in relation to being and its absolute freedom, Merleau-Ponty, on the contrary, sticks to the description of the concrete character of the subject which for him is never a pure being-for-itself. He thinks in effect that our existence never knows itself in its nudity, but only in so far as it is expressed by our body; and this body in not shut in an instant, but involves a whole history, even a prehistory” (Beauvoir 1945: 366). 34 the complexity of the structure of human existence. These are the experiences of pregnancy and erotic desire. In both cases, women’s ways of experiencing their own bodies and the bodies of others confuse the traditional account that presents living bodies as tools or instruments for well-defined ends and as neutral media of communion (Beauvoir [1949] 1993: 485/609). She ends her inquiry by arguing that sexual difference is a permanent condition of being human: [T]here will always be certain differences between men and women; her eroticism, and therefore her sexual world, have a singular form of their own and therefore cannot fail to engender a singular sensuality, a singular sensitivity. Her relations to her own body, to that of the male, to the child, will never be identical with those the male bears to his own body, to the feminine body, and to the child. (Beauvoir [1949] 1991: 661/740) Beauvoir’s argument is exceptional in twentieth-century philosophy, since it rejects the idea of one homogeneous or harmonious human kind, not merely by conceptualizing an open-ended plurality, but also by theorizing a twoness.27 For methodological reasons it is important to notice, however, that Beauvoir’s work is not completely unparalleled in the 27 The two types woman and man cut across most social groups and surpass all cultural and historical boundaries known, but they do not coincide with the chromosomal categories XX-individual/XYindividual and their distinction is not exclusive or predetermined. Thus, it is possible that we humans – as subjects of our intentional lives – develop in such a manner that we cannot anymore, at some point of our common time, distinguish between the two types, or are no longer motivated to do so. However, this distinction always remains part of our lives, since these lives, as intentional, are essentially intersubjective and historical (genetic and generative). So even if the distinction between the types woman and man were erased in some common future, it would still characterize us as humans: no longer as posited or re-posited, but now as erased and overcome. 35 field of phenomenology. Similar analyses of the twoness of the human condition were developed by early phenomenologists before the First World War and between the wars, most importantly by Edith Stein and Max Scheler. Stein and Scheler both utilized classical Husserlian concepts of embodiment and personhood, but developed them for their own ethical and social theoretical interests, Stein in relation to Thomistic anthropology, and Scheler in relation to neo-Kantians and Brentano.28 Despite these differences, both Stein and Scheler presented arguments about a fundamental twoness of the human condition, analogous to the arguments that we find in Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. In her lectures on women, Stein contends: I am convinced (…) that the essence of human being, whose features cannot be lacking in either one [“man” and “woman”], becomes expressed in a binate way; that the entire essential structure demonstrates the specific stamp. It is not only the material body [Körper] that is structured differently; not only is there a difference in particular physiological functions, but the entire living-body life [Leibesleben] is different; the relationship of soul and living body [Leib] is different, and within what pertains to the soul, the relation of spirit to sensibility as well as the relation of spiritual faculties to one another, is different. (Stein 2015: 167/187) In Scheler’s “Zum Sinn der Frauenbewegung” (1913/1914), we read: 28 We also find reflections of sexual difference in Eugen Fink’s philosophical anthropology (1977, 1987, 1992) but his main starting points are in Hegel’s moral and political philosophy, Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, and the cosmological tradition of Western philosophy, not in Husserl’s reflections on bodily persons. 36 (…) sexual difference is spiritual as originally as it is bodily or biological. (…) In general closer inquiries will show here that sexual difference pierces down to the deepest sources [Wurzel] of the spirit itself, that for example the womanly concept, womanly judgment, and womanly feeling of value is built in a fundamentally different way. (Scheler [1913/1914] 2007: 205) Moreover, in “Zur Idee des Menschen,” Scheler argues that the idea of an androgynous human being is a prejudiced idea, typical of the mental makeup of men: “Also the idea of a human being that includes man and woman is only a manly idea. I do not believe that this idea would have originated and developed in a culture ruled by women. Only man is so ‘spiritual’, so ‘dualistic’ and so (…) childish, to overlook the depth of the difference that is called sexual” (Scheler [1914] 2007: 195; cf. [1915] 1955: 205). The conceptual innovation that allowed these reflections on the twoness of human existence was Husserl’s distinction between different senses of the living body. By introducing the analysis of the body as the center of perception, action and communication Husserl made possible a whole new set of philosophical question concerning human bodies and their relations to the environing world, to other bodies, to human minds, and to themselves. These questions did not concern causal and functional relations between spatiotemporal worldly entities but concerned human bodies as centers and sources of meaning. 6. Conclusion 37 We have seen that classical Husserlian phenomenology offers powerful conceptual tools for the analysis of different senses of bodily being. These tools include (i) the conceptual distinction between the body as a material thing (Körper) and the body as our way of being in the world (Leib), (ii) the distinction between one’s own body as a double structure of sensing-sensed and the other’s body as an analogous structure, and (iii) the distinction between two alternative ways of apprehending bodies as environing objects: the naturalistic apprehension that articulates the human body as a two-layered reality and the personalistic apprehension that articulates it as an expressive whole. I argued that these Husserlian distinctions must not be understood as oppositions but must be seen as differentiating between mutually complementing and supplementing structures of possible experience. However, the Husserlian framework also includes a strong critical line of thought that renders the naturalistic attitude as a secondary formation, dependent on the personalistic attitude. I discussed the grounds of this argument in Husserl’s theory of individuation. My essay has also referred to several themes and topics, the treatment of which demonstrates the relevance of Husserlian concepts of embodiment to contemporary philosophy. The most important areas of application are found in the fields of philosophy of mind and perception, social ontology, philosophy of medicine, and social and political philosophy. However, attention was drawn to one contemporary area of application: the problematics of sexual identity and difference. Through the discussion of sexual identities and sexual difference, we came to see that the Husserlian concepts of embodiment explicated in the essay allow us to conceive the generality of human embodiment, not as a universal that encompasses equal instances, but as a stylistic whole that involves unique variations. 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