The Enactive Body in Husserl's Phenomenology — Epoche B2
Husserl's Kinaesthesis and the Limits of the Enactivist Inheritance Enactive theories of perception routinely name Edmund Husserl as an ancestor [1] . The claim is that Husserl saw [2] , a century early, what recent cognitive science has rediscovered: that perceiving is something a moving body does, not something a brain undergoes. This essay argues that the inheritance is smaller than it is taken to be, and that the reason is not a matter of emphasis but of method. Husserl's analyses of bodily movement are carried out after the transcendental reduction [3] , which sets aside the existence of the body and the world. Enactivism's central claim is about a real organism in a real environment. The two are not versions of one insight, and reading Husserl as an early enactivist requires dropping the operation that makes his analyses phenomenological. What enactivism claims, and what it is not The enactive account of perception was set out by Kevin O'Regan and Alva Noë in 'A Sensorimotor Account of Vision and Visual Consciousness' (2001 [4] ) and developed in Noë's Action in Perception (2004 [5] ). Its claim is not that movement helps us perceive, which nobody denies. It is that perceptual experience is constituted by the perceiver's practical mastery of the ways sensory stimulation varies with movement — the sensorimotor contingencies. What it is like to see something round is a matter of how the stimulation would change if one moved thus. On this view there is no internal picture that movement helps to assemble; the content of experience is fixed by the perceiver's grip on a set of worldly regularities. One distinction needs making at the start, because expositions often run two theories together. The extended mind thesis of Andy Clark and David Chalmers [6] , in 'The Extended Mind' (1998 [7] ), holds that cognitive processes can include parts of the environment — a notebook, a calculator — when those parts play the right functional role. That thesis is functionalist and it is comfortable with representations; it says only that some of them are outside the head. Enactivism denies that perceptual content is representational at all. Clark has argued against the sensorimotor account in Supersizing the Mind (2008). Treating the two as a single embodied package obscures the disagreement that matters here. Where Husserl's kinaesthetic analyses are, and what they say A spatial thing, Husserl argues, is never given whole. A cube presents one aspect at a time, in what he calls adumbrations, and the thing itself is what is given through the ordered series of them. This much is in Ideas I (1913), and it is what most secondhand accounts report. The analysis of the body is not in that book. It belongs to the 1907 lectures published as Thing and Space and to the second book of Ideas , drafted from 1912 and published only in 1952. There Husserl distinguishes Körper , the body as a material thing among things, from Leib , the body as lived: the zero point from which all spatial orientation is reckoned, the one thing that cannot be walked around, the bearer of sensations that are localised in it. And there he introduces kinaesthesis. Each adumbration is correlated with a kinaesthetic situation, and the correlation is a system of conditionals: if I move so, the appearance will alter thus. Husserl calls the resulting structure the 'I can'. Read on its own, this is close to O'Regan and Noë. The likeness is genuine, and it is why the ancestry claim is made. What the reduction does to the likeness The likeness does not survive contact with Husserl's method. Phenomenology begins with the epoché [8] : the existence of the world is bracketed, not denied but placed out of play, so that what remains for study is experience as it is lived, with its own structures. Everything Husserl says about the lived body is said inside that bracket. The Leib under analysis is the body as experienced, and its kinaesthetic systems are systems of experienced possibility. Sensorimotor contingencies are not that. They are facts about how light reflected from an actual surface strikes an actual retina as an actual head turns — regularities in the world, holding whether or not anybody has any experience at all. Noë's claim is that mastery of those regularities constitutes perceptual experience, which is a claim about a relation between an organism and its surroundings. The difference is not verbal, and it has a consequence that can be stated as a test. Husserl's kinaesthetic systems are available in imaginative variation. His method proceeds by varying a case in phantasy to find what cannot be varied without the object ceasing to be what it is, and the 'I can' is exactly the sort of structure that method operates on. A subject who never moved at all, but whose experience carried the same system of motivated anticipations, would on Husserl's account constitute a spatial object. On the sensorimotor account that subject has no perceptual experience of shape to speak of, because there is no mastery of any actual contingency for her to have. Two theories that deliver opposite verdicts on a case are not one theory in two vocabularies. Which side an acquired body falls on Yuasa Yasuo's The Body [9] : Toward an Eastern Mind-Body Theory (1987 [10] ) is useful here because it was written in direct engagement with this phenomenological literature and reaches a conclusion that neither party had provided for. Yuasa's argument is that Western phenomenology of the body treats the mind-body relation as a standing structure, something to be described, whereas the East Asian traditions of cultivation treat it as an attainment. The unity of mind and body, on his account, is not what we start with but what disciplined practice — shugyō — may eventually achieve, and it is achieved in degrees, differently by different people. Whatever one thinks of that as a general thesis, it forces a question that decides the present issue. If the body's contribution to perce