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197 14 Body and Machines Donn Welton Several of the most important discoveries of the German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl took place not in front of him but, so to speak, behind his back. In pursuing his account of the “teleological” structures of logical reason and the “archaeological” structures of transcendental, phenomenological method, he would often pause, sometimes for hundreds of pages, and write materials that illustrated or contributed to his larger account, but were not his primary focus. His analysis of passive synthesis, which he excluded from his systematic account of “logical reason” in Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929), is one example of this.1 But perhaps the most important of his oblique discoveries, first developed in Ideas II (composed around 1912), was his account of the body.2 In contrast to the treatment of the body in the tradition of Modern Philosophy since Hobbes and Descartes, Husserl argues for a distinction between Körper and Leib, between physical body and lived body. The topic that I will be addressing in this paper is the relationship between the body and machines. But the distinction that Husserl introduced means that the topic is more complicated than we first thought. We must first sort out what we mean by body and then see if the way we are thinking of it gives us insight into how the body is involved with machines. Indeed, the term machines needs to be qualified as well, for I will not follow Don Ihde’s unique trajectory of dealing with technologies in a broad sense but only attend to a certain set of machines that are directly used or incorporated into the body. One could, therefore, think of this essay as complementing Ihde’s seminal work on technology. While he has studied the way in which perception may be “materially extended” through devices or artifacts that are worn or used by embodied subjects, he has yet to address the direct implanting of devices into the neuro-physical body. Toward the end of this essay we will look at two scenarios in which machines or devices not only extend but also transform the very material structure of the body. 198 Donn Welton *** It would require yet another paper to do justice to Husserl’s provocative but laconic account of the difference between physical and lived body. Let me instead give a general description of the somewhat superficial way this contrast is often understood and suggest several problems with it, leaving aside the question as to whether my criticisms do justice to the full scope of Husserl’s analysis. The lived body is often analyzed as the body experienced “from the inside,” while the physical body is treated as the body experienced “from the outside.” This difference is then justified by a series of contrasts, some receiving more attention than others. The first appeal is to two different kinds of sensations: kinaesthetic sensations, which convey information about the posture and position of the body, and “presentational sensations,” which form the content of perceptual acts. Placing them in relation to each other, the kinaestheses account for our awareness of the movements of the body that attend acts of perception, while acts of perception proper employ a different type of sensation that contributes to the way in which an object is presented to consciousness. This difference in types of sensations was supported by a second difference in types of perceptions. In an effort to secure the strong contrast between physical body and lived body, the physical body is understood as what is experienced through “external” perception, while the lived body is taken as that same body but given in “internal” perception. As a consequence, Körper was characterized as “object” body while Leib was understood as “subject” body. In some existentialist versions this led to the identity of the ego and the body: I am my body. But let me suggest difficulties in using phenomenal differences in types of sensations or types of perceptions as the sufficient criterion for the characterization of lived-body: 1. Defining the contrast between physical and lived-body by means of a classification of different types of sensations is thoroughly phenomenological in the sense that it appeals to different categories of experience. But it is thoroughly unphenomenological in the sense that it must assume that sensations are freestanding and internally differentiated entities that can be identified and brought under a description apart from an analysis of the act...

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