Chapter 4 - Back to the Experience of the Body

Summary

This chapter begins with an exposition of Husserl’s phenomenology of embodiment, oriented around his fundamental distinction between the body as object and the body as lived. The lived body can only be apprehended as mine through the double-sided experience of touching and being-touched, and its movements are needed for the articulation of a three-dimensional spatiality in which we apprehend fully bounded things both far and near. Its kinaestheses or capacities for skilled movement also underpin the ‘I can’, the awareness of immediately available agency. I show what Merleau-Ponty takes up from Husserl and adapts for his own purposes, and go on to sketch out the influence of Jakob von Uexküll’s ethology and of Heidegger’s account of our being engaged in the world and being ahead of ourselves projectively. Against the backdrop of what Merleau-Ponty calls our intentional arc or fundamental function of projection, I give a preliminary overview of his positive account.