Re-Thinking Husserl's Fifth Meditation

Abstract

I would like to begin by stating my conclusion and by offering a pertinent aside on the term "embodiment." My conclusion is that the Fifth Meditation is replete with clues leading to genuine understandings of the foundations of intersubjectivity.1 To be able to work with these clues, we need to leave the term "embodiment" behind. The term--and all of its variations--is a lexical band-aid that consistently distracts us from the task of understanding our bodily selves and the bodily selves of others.2 We neither perceive ourselves as "embodied" nor do we perceive others as "embodied." We perceive ourselves and others as animate, precisely as Husserl indicates in his consistent use of the term "animate organism," and as I have indicated in my phenomenologically-derived use of the term animate form.3 Clue 1# In his Fifth Meditation, Husserl briefly identifies five characteristics of the sphere of ownness, that is, five characteristics of the non-alien animate organism he identifies as "his own:' He identifies these characteristics on the way to spelling out phenomenological structures undergirding our experience of others, namely, analogical apperception and pairing. Being only briefly identified, the characteristics are incompletely analyzed, both in themselves and, most importantly, as a composite whole. Although one may certainly find references to, and fuller or complementary discussions of, each of the characteristics in other Husserlian texts, they are not fleshed out here, in this context, as the integrally-related structural units of "ownness" that Husserl identifies them to be. Indeed, Husserl explicitly states with respect to the intentionalities of self constitution that "admittedly we have not investigated them in these meditations. They belong to a distinct stratum and are the theme of vast investigations into which we did not and could not enter" (Cartesian Meditations [hereafter CM], p. 110). Grasping the basic interrelatedness of these characteristics of the sphere of ownness, however, is crucial to a foundational phenomenological understanding of the non-alien, in turn, crucial to the fulfillment of the task of elucidating how we come to constitute others as living subjects like ourselves, and finally, crucial to an all-encompassing elucidation of empathy. In other words, the characteristics Husserl identifies are neither isolated features nor are they merely casually related characteristics. On the contrary, they are foundational aspects of ownness that "[bring] to light my animate organism" (CM, p. 97), and as such have a common point of origin and reference, namely, the kinetic/tactile-kinesthetic body. Having a common point of origin and reference, they need to be elucidated in its terms. The first clue in the form of five characteristics of the sphere of ownness thus leads us directly to a recognition of the kinetic/tactile-kinesthetic body and to the task of elucidating (obviously, here, in quite beginning ways) its foundational role in the constitution of others. The five characteristics of the non-alien that Husserl specifies are: 1 ) fields of sensation, 2) an "I govern," 3) a repertoire of "I cans," 4) a reflexive relationship between organs of sense and objects of sense, and 5) a consummately and uniquely singular psychophysical unity (CM, p. 97). Each of the five characteristics originates in kinetic/tactile-kinesthetic experience. Let me specify their origin briefly, each in turn. Fields of sensation are first and foremost tactile-kinesthetic fields that: are there in a full-bodied sense from the very beginning of life and that derive their meaning and value from moving and having moved. An "I govern" is patently a bodily capacity to move spontaneously and freely, to initiate movement to begin with, to speed up, to slow down, to exert more force; to let go, to change directions, and so on, and finally, to terminate movement. An "I govern" is hence a capacity that has its origin in a kinetic/tactile-kinesthetic body and a capacity that is intimately connected with a sense of effective agency. …