Embodied subjectivity: The phenomenological roots of new cognitive science

Abstract

The flourishing of the embodied/embedded approach in contemporary cognitive science goes hand in hand with the reappraisal of the phenomenological notion of lived body, on the ground of the criticism raised against both the representationalist attitude and the methodological solipsism of standard cognitive science. From this point of view the interest for the phenomenological philosophy of body was initially guided by Merleau-Ponty, whose approach seemed more attentive than the Husserl’s one to the bodily-worldly dimension of subjective experience. Beyond any contraposition between both philosophers, it is true that also Husserl’s considerations on the lived body as common power of sensation and action constitute an essential source of inspiration for the contemporary sensorimotor and enactive theories of subjectivity. Husserl’s analysis of lived body provides to the exponents of embodied cognitive science the theoretical framework for a philosophical legitimization of the sensorimotor approach, since lived body constitutes the zero orientation point that makes possible every perception and action and founds therefore a basic motor intentionality on the ground of the intimate relationship between kinaesthesia and perception. Phenomenology can offer to cognitive science a theoretical framework that allows a rigorous description of the manifold ways the subject make experience of the world starting from its embedded/embodied constitution and a regressive analysis that aims at a genetic reconstruction of its development.