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189 13 Active and Passive Bodies: Don Ihde’s Phenomenology of the Body Andrew Feenberg Don Ihde’s Bodies in Technology explores the technical entanglements of the human body from a phenomenological standpoint. The essays in this book cover a wide range of topics, from virtual reality to growing up male in America. Ihde’s account of the body seems to me one-sided. Perhaps it is his orientation toward scientific perception and technical action that limits his focus. He is interested in the similarities and differences between the extension of the senses by scientific instrumentation, computer simulations, and virtual reality. This tilts the weight of his discussion toward activity, but activity is only one dimension of the body. I will introduce the complementary passive dimension in what follows. I find this dimension missing on the whole from Ihde’s account, yet it is the essential correlate of the activities he analyzes insofar as we are finite beings in the world. Let me begin by remarking on Ihde’s distinction between what he calls “body one,” the sensory body, and “body two,” the body informed and shaped by culture. I like this multiplication of bodies. It corresponds to a phenomenological insight into the specificity of our lived experience. To body one and two I would like to add body three and four, which I will call the “dependent body” and the “extended body.” I discovered the dependent body in the course of coaching my son’s elementary school soccer team. We had a very energetic but undisciplined team member named Gabriel who could not seem to learn the rules and codes of children’s soccer. But he did understand one profound fact about the game: once when a team member was injured on the field, Gabriel shouted “parents !” at the top of his lungs and we all rushed over to help the fallen child. 190 Andrew Feenberg Afterward I realized that Gabriel was giving us the body of this child: injured children’s bodies belong to parents. All children know this. Several years later, long after Gabriel had left the team, he showed up one day at my doorstep with three comrades, one of whom had broken his collar bone in a fall from his bike. Gabriel handed over his friend Jose to me for care and I spent the rest of the afternoon finding Jose’s parents and getting him fixed up at the local hospital. Reflecting on these experiences I realized that we live our body not only as actors in the world, but also as beings who invite action on our bodies by others. This is most obvious in medical situations. We bring our body to the doctor to be poked at and examined. We, like little Gabriel, know to whom our pains belongs. Inside our dependent body, we attend to unexpected sensations we have solicited. Our time horizon shrinks as we no longer control or plan the next sensation, yet we remain exquisitely alert. This is a peculiar passivity since we have set the stage for our own inaction and can at any moment reverse the situation and take control again. In a modern context, it is also a highly technologized experience: we are operated on by a whole panoply of devices. From the user of tools we become the object of tools. The phenomenological point is of course not just this objective reversal of perspective, visible to third parties, but the deeper import of our lived firstperson experience of our own instrumentalized status. That this condition cannot be analyzed in instrumental terms should be obvious from its regressive quality: the dependent body belongs to our childhood, returning in the present in this peculiar voluntary form. A phenomenology of the patient experience would be needed to work out the implications of the dependent body in medicine. The dependent body also makes its appearance in sexual behavior. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty have brilliantly analyzed this phenomenon.1 The body as “chair” or “flesh” becomes the immediate form of consciousness, which hovers on the surface of the skin soaking up pleasurable sensations rather than watching as spectator from out of a situated identity in the world. Sartre rejects the notion that sex can be explained in terms of instincts or needs. Phenomenologically considered it is a relation between subjectivized bodies. He begins his analysis with the caress, which he treats as an incarnation of consciousness in the body of the subject attempting to achieve...

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