own body (soma) on the basis of experiencing the latter as experienced from the first-person perspective (ich lerne meine selbsterfahrene Leiblichkeit, mein Leib untrennbar vom Somatologischen, in geistlicher Beziehung zum Ich-Organ). However, the identification process occurs in a mediated way, i.e., by means of another bodily organ (erst auf dem Umweg über den Andern).203
Experiencing bodily reality (corporeality), identifying and recognizing it subjectively as ‘my’ personal body would both meet and transgress the criterion of one’s own body. That criterion does not predetermine one’s own body to be limited to natural or actual body landscape. It also applies, e.g., to lost organs and phantom limbs still identified or even experienced as integral parts of my body landscape, and a part of my body’s functionality. With the experiential body, a novel level of body concept will be achieved. It transcends the ‘preoriginally mine’ corporeality and its limited, egological ontologies to finally acknowledge “that a human body is not a discrete entity ending at the skin, and that material ←61 | 62→technologies constantly disorder our boundaries,”204 opening them to various kinds of somatechnics, and crosscorporeality. However, before addressing these new phenomena, a basic experiential body approach needs to be introduced.
To humans and probably also to a large number of animals, one’s own body is a lived, sensed, and experienced body on the one hand, and living/sensing body with a huge sensorium on the other. Husserl described this,205 in a manner impressive to contemporary scholars combining phenomenology and embodied mind theory, as follows: “When my hand touches the table and when I pay attention to the very touching, I am, after all, conscious of an experiencing organ and not of an experienced organ.”206 According to Zahavi, “the relation between the touching and the touched is reversible, since the touching is touched, and the touched is touching. It is this reversibility that demonstrates that the interiority and the exteriority are different manifestations of the same (…) Thus, it is exactly the unique subject-object status of the body, the remarkable inter-play between ipseity and alterity characterizing double-sensation, which permits me to recognize and experience other embodied subjects.”207
The body’s sensory dispositions offer plentifulness of impressions and experiences used as a measure of human wellbeing and happiness. It is not only curiosity; the idea of progress and human hubris accelerate the development of technologies and the so-called human enhancement across ages, beyond askesis, commitment, and humility. Being situated in and belonging to the world as an exploratory, agential, and interactive individual and experiencing one’s body and through one’s body, which can be quantified “according to the disposition of my limbs”208 and the functionality of my body. Even in the case of passive touch, our body remains engaged and world-directed. My experiential embodiment provides “non-conceptual feelings of the body” such as exteroception and proprioception, which “constitute a background [existential] sense of belonging to the world and a sense of reality,”209 and objects’ presence and absence, though in some general aspect my body is “an impersonal being.”210 However, there are several special types ←62 | 63→of extended or even ecological experiential body which are groundbreaking for understanding how bodily identity nowadays is evolving, transgressing boundaries, and expanding over various bodily terra incognita-like territories.
6. “… Like Organs of One Single Intercorporeality” 211
“… what Husserl is referring to when he writes that the possibility of sociality presupposes a certain intersubjectivity of the body,”212 initiates the phenomenological discussion around intercorporeality: interhuman,213 biological/environmental, extended,214 and technologically improved. That discussion is crucial to understand a series of most recent conceptualizations of the human embodiment in terms of extended, crosscorporeal, ecological, and hybrid embodiment. These concepts radically expand one’s own body’s ontology and establish a new epistemological framework for defining embodiment today.
It is Maurice Merleau–Ponty’s theory that expands the old frame the most because being one’s own body (one’s “natural self”) cannot be disconnected from objective and intersubjective reality. This might be Merleau-Ponty’s core ontological claim; however, notions of corporeality and intercorporeality should not be reduced to materiality and mechanical connections. Rather, “to be a body, is to be tied to a certain world (…); our body is not primarily in space: it is of it,”215 it has the world, as Merleau–Ponty claims. His claim sounds different than Heidegger’s Dasein as “in–der–Welt–sein” but it essentially connotes a similar sense of an experiential field shared by subjects, thus, intersubjective and social. For sharing something with others requires spatiality; the intercorporeality bridges the gap between me vs. the world around, inner vs. outer, immanent vs. transcendent. According to Merleau–Ponty, “the world is wholly inside and I am ←63 | 64→wholly outside myself.”216 Beyond “inside and outside” there is a “living cohesion” and a continuous, phenomenal “field of experience.” Intercorporeality does not require shaping linear interconnections from subject to object and subject to subject. In my intercorporeal condition, Merleau–Ponty clarifies, “I am neither here nor there, neither Peter nor Paul; I am in no way distinguishable from an ‘other’ consciousness, since we are immediately in touch with the world and since the world is, by definition, unique, being the system in which all truths cohere.”217 That kind of coherence corresponds with Heidegger’s “familiarity” and “being with,”218 but expands them as intelligible and not experiential relations rooted in the reality of all inter-subjects. It is, therefore, not only intellectual but also a preoriginal corporeal “Miteinander-sein” beyond ontological dualisms such as the Cartesian res cogitans vs. res extensa. It is to bridge the gap between “internal mind and external world,”219 which was unacceptable to Heidegger. “The experience of being there is not a matter of being plonked into a [fixed or determined, E.N.] spatial location but of being practically situated in an interconnected web of purposes, an appreciation of which is inseparable from practical activity. We are not in the world like peas sitting passively in a pod [nor are we “thrown” in the world without having any control over our position, E.N.]. Our activities and our sense of being part of the world are inextricable; the world shows up as a space of practical, purposive possibilities that we are entwined with,” while to Heidegger, being–in–the–world was not a matter of intercorporeality, sharing and the “causal facilitation but of a tacit understanding that renders the world intelligible.”220 According to Merleau-Ponty, humans “knit together as a cohesive functional whole” within a shared space–time.221 To make any experience, they need an embodiment that embraces interiority and exteriority.
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