Corporeal Intersubjectivity: Re-evaluating Husserl through Merleau-Ponty's Embodied Other — Epoche C2
In the Fifth of the Cartesian Meditations — delivered as lectures at the Sorbonne in February 1929, published in French in 1931 and in German only in 1950 — Husserl sets himself a problem that he states in the sharpest possible form: within a philosophy that has bracketed every claim about what exists independently of consciousness, how does the sense "another subject, for whom this same world is there" arise at all? The received verdict is that his answer fails, and fails in a characteristic way: the other is reached by a covert argument from analogy, and therefore reached only as a projection of the ego, so that the account never escapes the sphere it began in. This essay argues that the verdict rests on a misdescription of what Husserl wrote, that the corrective standardly drawn from Maurice Merleau-Ponty is drawn from the wrong text, and that once both errors are repaired the resulting position is stronger than either the criticism or its usual rebuttal: Husserl's constitution of the other already turns on bodily reciprocity, and the case for saying so was made by Merleau-Ponty himself in 1959, in an essay that withdrew the objection he had pressed in 1945. What the Fifth Meditation actually does The argument has to be stated before it can be assessed, and three of its moves are routinely compressed into one. Husserl begins with a methodological restriction he calls the reduction to the sphere of ownness ( Eigenheitssphäre ): within the field left standing by the transcendental reduction, he abstracts from everything whose sense already involves other subjects, keeping only what belongs to the ego as its own. This is not a claim that only the ego exists. It is a device for isolating a residue and then asking what, in that residue, could motivate the sense "other". If the sense can be exhibited as arising there, the objection of solipsism — which Husserl names and takes up explicitly rather than being caught out by it — is answered; if it cannot, the phenomenological project of tracing every sense to its constituting achievement has failed at the point where it matters most, since objectivity for Husserl just means being-there-for-everyone. Within that residue two bodies must be distinguished, and the German makes the distinction that English blurs. Körper is the body as a material thing among things, extended, movable, causally embedded. Leib is the animate organism as lived from within: the seat of sensation, the zero-point of orientation from which all "here" and "there" are reckoned, and the organ of the "I can" — the immediately available repertoire of movement. My own body is given to me as Leib ; another's body appears in my primordial field, at first, only as Körper . The transition is effected by two mechanisms. The first is Paarung , pairing: when two data resembling one another are present together in a single field of consciousness, they enter into an associative unity in which each transfers sense to the other. Husserl is emphatic that this is a passive synthesis — it occurs without any act of the ego, in the way a melody organises itself before anyone decides to hear it as one. The second is Appräsentation , appresentation: the co-intending of what is not itself given, on the model already familiar from ordinary perception, where the unseen rear face of a thing is not inferred but co-meant in the very seeing of the front. Pairing installs the other's Körper as a Leib paired with mine; appresentation gives the psychic life belonging to that Leib as co-present without being originally present. The first correction: Husserl denies that this is an inference Here the compressed version of this essay repeated the standard error, and it should be withdrawn plainly. That version said that "the ego, encountering an embodied 'analogue' of itself, infers the presence of another conscious life", and later referred to "analogical apperception" as though Husserl were offering an argument from analogy. He is not, and he says so. His term is analogisierende Auffassung , analogising apprehension, and in the section that introduces appresentation he states that what is at issue is no inference by analogy, no thinking act at all: apperception is a matter of sense already transferred, not of a premise entertained and a conclusion drawn. The point is not verbal. An inference from analogy would need a premise about my own case that I could formulate independently, and would deliver a conclusion held with less than perceptual conviction; what Husserl describes is a founded perception that presents the other directly, with the other's inaccessible side co-meant in the way the far side of a die is co-meant. This matters for the assessment of the objection, because most of the objection's force comes from the inferentialist reading. Edith Stein, whose 1917 dissertation on empathy was written under Husserl's supervision and set out the position before the Meditations existed, had already argued that Einfühlung — the grasp of foreign experience — is a sui generis act whose content is non-primordial although the act itself is primordially lived: I do not have the other's grief, but my having-it-as-hers is itself an experience I actually have, not the terminus of a chain of reasoning. Whatever else is wrong with Husserl's account, the charge that it makes the other a conclusion is not. The second correction: where 'intercorporeality' comes from What survives the first correction is a harder objection, and the standard source for it is Merleau-Ponty. But the source has to be identified correctly, and the compressed version of this essay did not: it attributed the concept of intercorporeality to the Phénoménologie de la perception of 1945. The term intercorporéité does not occur there. It belongs to "Le philosophe et son ombre", written in 1959 for a Husserl centenary volume and collected in Signes (1960); the correlative notion of chair , flesh — the anonymous element common to seer and seen — belongs