Readings of Modernity | 2018 | Architectural Association

The question of spatial experience becomes complex by its inevitable inclusion of consciousness and perception, which are still not fully understood. What is certain is that the human body plays an intrinsic role in the ways in which we perceive and experience the world. The term embodiment has been used numerous times in contemporary art and architecture, but to understand and use it in a comprehensive manner, one needs to go back to its inception and consequently to the emergence of phenomenology as a response within philosophical discourse to the natural sciences. In the essay I would like to briefly explore in what context did phenomenology come to be and the emphasis it places on the human body, while at the same time touching on some of its key terms like intentionality, reduction, the body schema and ultimately, what it can tell us about the role of the body in the subject-object disjunction and the debate around it that goes on from the time Descartes first differentiated them.

In essence phenomenology is the study of appearances (or phenomena), of how things appear to us through the process of perception. The term phenomena was already mentioned before by Kant and to briefly explain the context of its introduction, we need to go back to the debate about idealism and materialism. Idealism asserts that reality, or reality as humans can know it is fundamentally mentally constructed and immaterial. It asserts the primacy of consciousness as the origin of material phenomena. It states that consciousness exists before, and is the pre-condition of the material world, whereas materialism states the opposite. Phenomena are more closely related to Kant’s transcendental idealism, which states that space and time are merely formal properties of how we perceive objects, they are not things in themselves that exist independently to us, or mere relations and properties among them. Objects that we intuit in space and time are just appearances, representations and not objects that exist independently of our intuition. He states that we can know nothing of substance about the things in themselves of which we only perceive appearances. Kant distinguished objects in terms of noumena and phenomena; phenomena were objects defined as grasped and shaped by human understanding, whereas noumena were the things in themselves, which do not appear to us through perception and of which we can make no legitimate judgements. While he was still not a phenomenologist this distinction was a clear step to the domain that phenomenology would one day try to investigate. With the later introduction by Edmund Husserl, phenomenology became the descriptive science of consciousness, it’s main objective gaining understanding of experience through description and in this it differs from the empirical sciences whose aim is explanatory and not descriptive. It doesn’t try to negate science in any way, but instead it tries to bring back to focus something that has been neglected since the dominant role science took in the 19th century - the subjective human experience. Threading a line between philosophy and science, it states we need to focus on describing the experience and not only explaining it. The object of study for phenomenology is consciousness itself, since consciousness is the domain in which things appear to us. The term was firstly coined by its founder Edmund Husserl in the early 20th century, but his work relies heavily on the work of his teacher Franz Brentano; both of them trying to form a counter-argument to the psychologism of their time.

Brentano’s Dilemma

Brentano starts by asking himself what does psychology study? In antiquity, for Aristotle it was the form of the body, Descartes says it is the study of a rational subject and in the 20th century it is human behaviour and the brain. Brentano tries to distinguish psychological and physical phenomena, the feature of the psychological phenomena being intentionality. A state is an intentional state insofar as it is of or about some object or state of affairs (I believe in something, I’m afraid of something, I love someone etc.). Intention does not mean that something is done on purpose, it is more a state of affairs about something. Intentionality tolerates the nonexistence of its object, such as when later Sartre says that when he is expecting his friend Pierre to show up at their meeting in the cafe and Pierre doesn’t show up, his non-existence is something that is clearly experienced. Brentano says that the intentional inexistence is the characteristic of mental phenomena, no physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it.

Intentionality looks like a relation, but it can maintain a relation even without the existence of one of its relata. For instance, an example of the Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon that wants the fountain of youth, an object that doesn’t exist in reality. Since the second relatum does not exist, there is no causal relation between Ponce de Leon and the object of his desire, but there is still Ponce de Leon’s intention towards it.[1] This means that intentionality cannot be reduced to a causal world, and hence the problem of putting it in the domain of science. The fountain of youth is an intentional object (a subject acts towards it in a certain way), but it is not an object that really exists, so an intentional object needs to be mental, because we are able to have intentions towards objects that do not exist in reality. We can then assume that what he really wants is a mental object, an idea of the fountain of youth. But observing this sceptically, he already possesses this idea in his mind, really what the intentional object of his desire is the actual fountain of youth, something that does not exist - so Brentano claims that only psychological states are intentional, and his dilemma is,  are intentional objects then physical or mental, which he fails to give an answer to. From this we can begin to see that the aim of the phenomenological project is to describe the structure of experience. So this ontological disjunction between mental and physical, inner and outer, subjective and objective, private and public is inadequate for phenomenology.[2] This is the lesson we can get from Brentano, if one tries to describe the intentional experience in terms of a divide between the mental and the physical, we arrive at a dead end.

The modern framework of subjective vs. objective doesn’t look as adequate in describing human experience. Edmund Husserl offered a possible solution to this subject-object disjunction by introducing an additional element. Take for an example an experience of approaching an object, for instance the Big Ben. The subject is me who is approaching it and observing it, the image is constantly changing, getting more or less detailed, I see different angles and different aspects of the object. The subjective experience is a constant flux, a constant change. What is constant is the Big Ben, an enduring, mind independent Object, this doesn’t change no matter how I observe it. Husserl now adds a third point between the subject and the object and that is the intentional content – a form of my private conscious experience which presents me with an enduring object that I am approaching. Now we have the distinction between the object and the intentional content – the object is the physical entity existing in the world and the intentional content presents the object in a particular way. While the object is not essential of intentional consciousness (as from the example before, I can have intention to something that does not exist in reality), the intentional content is essential. The intentional content is not a private mental item for each subject; Husserl says it is out there in the world, the same for everyone to take, but it is not the real object the Big Ben itself either, but an abstract form or shape of it that can be shared by many different experiences. The benefit of this is that it solves Brentano’s dilemma, because the intentional content is posited between the subject and the object, it is something both particular and universal, so the intentional object doesn’t need to be purely physical or mental. From this we can also see what is the primary position and task of phenomenology. Since the intentional content is not a physical object it is not investigated by physics or natural sciences and since it is not a private conscious mental state, it is not investigated by psychology. It is investigated by phenomenology, an independent “science”, that investigates the structures of form of how a consciousness presents a world. Another example of a phenomenological approach would be examining an image of a cube. The outline of what I actually see is a hexagon, but I am aware that the object is a cube. So how is it that a hexagonal form presents itself as an experience of a cube? Husserl would say that this happens because I am presented not only with this view, but there is an “adumbration” (an outlined suggestion), a horizon of determinately indeterminate further possible views. What I am seeing is not just a fixed image but a horizon of possibilities.

Tracing phenomenological development through Husserl’s Ethics

The founding context in which phenomenology was first conceived as a philosophical idea is best understood through the trail of thought that Husserl followed in the development of his ethics. This development is perfectly summarized in the title of the essay From Logic to the Person[3]. Husserl’s ethics are divided in to an early and late period. In the early period he focuses on the relation between ethics and reason, or more specifically logic. What marks his ethics is foremost that they don’t fit in to the three general categories of classical ethics: virtue ethics by Aristotle, deontological ethics by Kant and consequentialist ethics in the utilitarian sense. In short Husserl’s ethics are based on the concept of a free and active ego capable of shaping life autonomously through its own will.[4] His early ethics are focused on the parallelism between logic and ethics. But his second ethics, from around 1920’s are more interesting in the context of this essay because these ethics consider a phenomenological foundation of the subject as a person who strives towards happiness and blessedness.

In his early ethics, Husserl says that logic and ethics have a practical orientation – to help us find truth and obtain goods. His theory as is universal ethical theory about means and ends. In this theory, ethics are a normative and practical discipline, that tell us which ends are valuable enough to pursue and gives us the supposed means to obtain them. Logic provides us with rules in order to realize the truth and it is a universal theory of science, since sciences are the means of finding a truth. He tries to combine reason with the accomplishments of consciousness, but more importantly he argues against basing ethics on empirical foundations.

His foundation of both his ethics and logic are based on:

1. The refutation of empiricism – especially psychologism, which would imply that ethics are a by product of our psychological functioning

2. a priori laws – laws that are absolutely valid

3. the phenomenological investigation of those laws

Thinking, evaluating and willing are for Husserl based on a priori laws whose character cannot be traced back to psychological or empirical facts. But he also says that they have no factual value, they are only formal. One of his main a priori laws in this sphere is the categorical imperative; do the best that is attainable.[5] It is through phenomenology that Husserl tries to investigate these laws that govern his ethics, since phenomenology is the discipline that aims to discover the essential structures of consciousness, or the way something is given to us in ways of this consciousness.[6] Phenomenology initially had an epistemological basis (about the basis of our knowledge), which  it then tries to clarify, specifically the meaning of its objects through a descriptive investigation of the subjective acts in which these objects are given to us. This is what makes Husserl’s ethics unique at the time; it tries to combine the existence of universal, absolute ethical laws with a demand for the phenomenological analysis of our emotional (feeling) and volitional (willing) consciousness. Our evaluations are performed by feeling consciousness and not the intellectual one, because in feelings we originally evaluate things positively or negatively, even before applying thought to them. This phenomenological investigation has the task to reveal the forms and the structure in which we experience the world with objects of different value. His categorical imperative supposes that values are organized in an hierarchical order, but the question is how exactly? Why is one value better than another one? Values from different classes could be compared if they have a material basis, and for Husserl they didn’t and this was a problem he had to solve. He clearly distinguishes between non-objectifying acts based on feelings and emotions, and objectifying acts that are theoretical. Feelings are the subjective basis for the experiences that the objectifying acts from the sphere of theoretical or intellectual acts cannot accomplish. The question that raises the problem for Husserl is how can feelings tell us anything about the world when they are not acts that make something objective? He tries to answer this in his second ethics.

In Husserl’s late 1920’s ethics, the ethical life is thoroughly shaped by reason, but not anymore through logic but by the phenomenology of the person. Ego is at the centre of all intentional life. The ego as a person is characterized by the variety of its lived experiences and the dynamic processes between them.[7] The person has an individual history whose previous experiences define and influence the upcoming lived experiences. Husserl says that the essence of human life is continuous striving, and the ultimate end of this striving is a state of fulfilled happiness he called eudaimonia, its meaning in the Aristotelian sense being the perfect life, or the best possible one. Ethics, as a practical discipline has a task to discover the aims of our striving and give us the means to realize them. The phenomenological point he makes is that the free, autonomous activities of the ego, it’s experiences, build up a foundation that is the individual history of a person, and this history later passively influences the thinking and acting of the person. This is the main point that separates his ethics, this interplay between the free activity of the subject and the passively constituted habits by that free activity, which later affects it. 

The Body

Husserl’s phenomenology has two categorical distinctions. The first one is between the subjective sphere of conscious experience and the “transcendent” domain of external objects. The second one is between the real, concrete objects existing in space and the abstract ideal essences. The question lies how does the human body fit in to these distinctions? For Husserl it is inserted somewhere between the subjective sphere and the external world. Merleau-Ponty goes beyond the subject-object divide and makes embodiment the main focus of his philosophical opus. He considers the very notion of mental activity as firmly grounded in the human body, for him thought and sensation occur against a background of perceptual activity that we are constantly registering. For him, the distinction in subject and object is blurred in the body.[8] What is certain is that for both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, the body itself is not just an object. As Merleau-Ponty says , “Insofar as it sees or touches the world, my body can therefore be neither seen nor touched. What prevents it ever being an object, ever being ‘completely constituted,’ is that it is that by which there are objects”[9] The most important notion to take from this is that we are not pure egos in an external relation to our bodies, as owning them, a directly opposed concept to that of Carthesian dualism, but instead the body is the main mechanism of our perceptual acts - “In perception, that is, we understand ourselves not as having but being bodies.”[10] This is the main divide between the two philosophers; Husserl’s theory still rests on the conceptual dualism where Merleau-Ponty goes beyond it by equating the perceptual subject with the lived body.

In the Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty says to see an object is to either have it on the fringe of the visual field and being able to concentrate on it, or it can be lying dormant on the peripheral field. He states that the world of objects is an interconnected complex system where the perception of objects are dependant one on another and each having infinite aspects. We can only put one at a time as the central object, the one we focus on and let the others fade in to the background. We can see a house from the street, from across the city or from an aeroplane, but the house itself is none of these appearances, the house is an completed object is “an translucent object seen from everywhere, being shot from all sides by an infinite number of present scrutinise which intersect in its depths leaving nothing behind”. [11]To look at an object is to inhabit it, and from this habitation to grasp all things in terms of the aspect which they present to it.[12] Merleau-Ponty states that the body is the centre point of the perspective act of objects, while at the same time being an object itself and an intrinsic part of the world it perceives. “I regard my body, which is my point of view upon the world, as one of the objects of that world… My eyes take place in the same objective space in which I am trying to situate the external object and I believe that I am producing the perceived perspective by the projection of the objects on my retina. “[13] Further on, not only is the body a counterpoint in the perception of spatial phenomena, but temporal as well. “In the same way I treat my own perceptual history as a result of my relationships with the objective world, my present, which is my point of view on time, becomes one moment of time among all the others, my duration a reflection or abstract aspect of universal time, as my body is a mode of objective space.”[14] Therefore to posit one single object in the full sense demands the composite bringing into being off all these experiences (temporal and spatial) in one act of manifold creation, and the body is the object through which achieve this.

Husserl describes the role of the body in a different way since his phenomenology is based on a categorical distinction between reality and consciousness, between transcendent and immanent objects. An object is transcendent if it is given to consciousness partly, by just an aspect, whereas an immanent object is given in its totality. Therefore for him physical bodies, external affairs and conceptual ideas such as mathematics are transcendent objects; but the contents of consciousness are immanent because we have our thoughts and experiences in their totality. His whole theory lies on this fundamental distance between two opposed units, as he says “Between consciousness and reality there lies a veritable abyss of meaning”.[15] This dualism extended to his understanding of the body, where he also distinguishes between the soul (Seele) and the material body (Korper). In contrast to this, Merleau-Ponty views the body as the conceptual space where consciousness and reality meet.[16] Husserl views the body more as a bearer of sensations. There is an I, the subject, the consciousness that acknowledges the feeling, the body being a “field of localizations of its sensations.”[17] He distinguished between the touch and the others senses. You can look yourself in the mirror, and you can see your eye, but you cannot “see your eye seeing”. But if I touch one hand with another, I can feel my hand feeling. For him, the body becomes the body only through the introduction of tactile sensations; a subject with eyes only could not have an appearing body at all. When holding such a view, that the body is only a field of localized sensations, the question rises of who is feeling them? Without a prior self-identification of the subject, there is no one to register the sensations.

For Husserl, this is the transcendental subject, that is logically prior to and independent of anything outside of consciousness – the awareness of myself as the pure, transcendental “I” standing in the centre of all my intentional acts.[18] But he fails to explain how this transcendental self-consciousness is more essential to our experience than our bodily perception and the main point that Merleau-Ponty makes that indeed it is not. “The body is not a thing I identify myself with only by recognizing it as the bearer of my sensations; it is a permanent primordial horizon of all my experience: The body is our general means of having a world.”[19] He critiques Husserl on his distinction between transcendental “pure” consciousness and the “opaque” reality of the sensations. This leads to the impossibility of relating sensation to intentionality, since for Husserl the sensations are mere stuff of real experience that are abstracted from its real intentional form. This raises the question of where does sensation lie in relation to consciousness and if objective awareness can be based purely on it. For Merleau-Ponty perception and sensation are not a mechanism through which we constitute these “ideal essence” in the domain of transcendental subjectivity, but instead a “logic lived through that cannot account for itself, it’s immanent meaning clear to itself only through the experience of natural signs” For him, these “natural signs” that mediate our embodied perceptual experience are not internal, transparent and mental objects; nor objective external events but instead lie in the precognitive bodily engagement with the world. [20] Merleau-Ponty always talks about perception as a constant occurring background against with consciousness happens. This leads us to his concept of a “body schema”, something between a mental attitude and a physiological state.

Merleau-Ponty’s body schema or body image shares similarities with Kant’s schemata, namely as “a notion of an integrated set of skills poised and ready to anticipate and incorporate a world prior to the application of concepts and the formation of thoughts and judgements”.[21] In short, it is a sense of the body of what it can and cannot do in reference to a certain task and this structures perception itself. The crucial point here is that the body schema comes before perception itself, it is not a product but a background condition of cognition. It is a precognitive self-awareness of the body of itself and the world it inhabits. “I am conscious of my body via the world just as I am conscious of the world through the medium of my body.”[22] I do not view the body as an object of which I have an internal image, but instead it itself exists around its tasks, it gathers itself up to reach toward them. But it also goes beyond just a global consciousness of the existing bodily parts; it is more like a dynamic attitude towards concrete and possible tasks that the body is capable of performing. What he is trying to say is that the understanding of our own body and the bodies of others goes beyond just an analogy that we entertain in our thoughts, the only way we can understand the function of the living body is by enacting it. So for instance there is a significant difference between understating the movements of another person in thought only and reproducing the movements yourself, and actual experience comes through the latter, made possible by the body schema – which acts as a stable perceptual background against which I perceive and respond to changes in my environment[23]. In this way the body schema opens me up to the world of identifying with other bodies and when interacting with my environment my body acts as a reference point, “it is my point of view in the world”[24]. In this sense the body acts as a permanent background of perception and in this way goes beyond just the five senses which is clearly a different approach of understanding the body as a locus of sensations which was the case with Husserl.

The conclusion of the phenomenological role of the body firstly differs from the psychological one, for it is not based on our self-identification with it and the processes related to it, the understanding of which we will best get by empirical research in psychology. The phenomenological inquiry is based on the mature perceptual self-understanding of our embodied state. In the philosophical debate on the relation of subjects and objects, for both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty the body holds an important position, but for Merleau-Ponty it is the central focus of his inquiry. As Taylor Carman points out in his essay, for Husserl the body is not a discrete object, it is a sort of a quasi-object that has the sole role of serving the disembodied transcendental ego as the locus of its sensations. The body is not itself the source of intentionality in the phenomenological sense, that is left to the transcendental ego. The crucial difference with Merleau-Ponty’s role of the body is that we do not firstly recognise ourselves as pure egos and then identify ourselves with our bodies and our sensations. Intentionality and cognition for him does not come from the pure I, but the body itself with its perceptual mechanisms is exactly the I in its most primordial aspect, it is a permanent background of intentionality. We do not understand ourselves as having bodies, but as being bodies.

[1] Wayne Martin, “Phenomenology Beginnings and key themes”, (Lecture, University of Essex, 2010.)

[2] Ibid

[3] Henning Peucker, “From Logic to the Person: An Introduction to Edmund Husserl's Ethics”. The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 62, No. 2 (Dec., 2008): 307

[4] Henning Peucker, “From Logic to the Person: An Introduction to Edmund Husserl's Ethics”. The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 62, No. 2 (Dec., 2008): 308

[5]  Henning Peucker, “From Logic to the Person: An Introduction to Edmund Husserl's Ethics”. The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 62, No. 2 (Dec., 2008): 315

[6] Ibid

[7]  Henning Peucker, “From Logic to the Person: An Introduction to Edmund Husserl's Ethics”. The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 62, No. 2 (Dec., 2008): 319

[8] Carman Taylor, “The Body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty”. The Philosophical Topics, Vol. 27, No. 2, (Fall 1999): 206

[9] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Basic Writings, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2004.), 92

[10] Carman Taylor, “The Body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty”. The Philosophical Topics, Vol. 27, No. 2, (Fall 1999):

[11] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Basic Writings, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2004.), 81

[12] Ibid

[13] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Basic Writings, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2004.), 83

[14] Ibid

[15] Carman Taylor, “The Body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty”. The Philosophical Topics, Vol. 27, No. 2, (Fall 1999): 208

[16] Carman Taylor, “The Body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty”. The Philosophical Topics, Vol. 27, No. 2, (Fall 1999): 209

[17] Ibid

[18] Carman Taylor, “The Body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty”. The Philosophical Topics, Vol. 27, No. 2, (Fall 1999): 214

[19] Ibid

[20] Carman Taylor, “The Body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty”. The Philosophical Topics, Vol. 27, No. 2, (Fall 1999): 218

[21] Carman Taylor, “The Body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty”. The Philosophical Topics, Vol. 27, No. 2, (Fall 1999): 219

[22] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Basic Writings, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2004.), 82

[23] Carman Taylor, “The Body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty”. The Philosophical Topics, Vol. 27, No. 2, (Fall 1999): 220

[24] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Basic Writings, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2004.), 70