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ABSTRACT
It is well-known that Husserl denies bodily behaviour as expressive in the I. Logical Investigation but he dramatically changes his view and holds that bodily behaviour is essentially expressive in works such as Ideas II. A mainstream explanation of the change is that Husserl develops a more cogent conception of embodiment such that he can ultimately include bodily behaviour into the category of expressive phenomena. In this paper, I explore another source of this change by examining the by and large overlooked “1914 texts.” I argue that the change is significantly informed by Husserl’s revised conception of indication, such that he can offer a proper account of the intimate relation between the body and the spirit and, eventually, opt for a new view of bodily expressivity. By doing so, I also elucidate some intrinsic characteristics of bodily expressivity, such as its demand feature and its twofold unity.
Acknowledgements
This paper is supported by Guangdong Provincial Fund of Social Sciences and Humanities (No. GD18YZX01). I’d like to thank two anonymous reviewers at this journal for their helpful comments and suggestions.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 In her Transcendence et incarnation, Natalie Depraz seems to hold a similar reading, and she thinks that Husserl’s theory of the lived body bears a similar sort of expressive relation as that we can find in language; as she writes, “the other’s body corresponds to language, just as the other’s spiritual experience to thought” (Depraz 1995, §14).
2 A related line of interpretation is to stress the difference between the naturalistic and the personalistic attitude. For instance, Steven Crowell (1996) suggests that, whereas Husserl’s account of the body as an indicative sign of the mind in Logical Investigations can be labeled “naturalistic,” he develops a “personalistic” account of the lived body and takes it to be expressive of mental states in Ideas II (for a further elaboration, see, e.g., Römpp (1992, chapter 3), Reynaert (2001), and also Flynn (2009, 68)).
3 For a fuller review of Husserl’s revision of his theory of signs, see Bernet (1988), Melle (1999, 2002), and some recent works, e.g., Byrne (2018, 2021), D' Angelo (2019), De Palma (2008) and Dieter Münch (1993).
4 Although Rudolf Bernet does hold that Husserl’s revised theory of “genuine signs” gives rise to a revised theory of interpersonal communication in terms of lingual signs (see Bernet 1988, 20f.), he hasn’t touched upon the issue of bodily expressivity, nor has he explored why Husserl systematically changes his view thereof.
5 Husserl himself characterizes this dualism as a sort of “parallelism” between the body and the mind (Hua 13/7).
6 Flynn (2009) argues that Husserl expands his conception of meaning in Ideas I and holds that all subjective acts are characterized by a “meaningfulness” in the sense that they intend objects as they are given or intended in consciousness (63–65). As a result, “significative meaning is recognized as only a special type of meaning or sense” (65). In view of the “1914 texts,” it seems that Husserl’s conception of meaningfulness (Bedeutsamkeit) remains the same as in the I. LI, yet he reckons that genuine signs such as artificial signs are also expressive in the sense of making present the signified states of affairs, as I show in section 3.1 (see also Melle 2008).
7 My interpretation of Husserl’s revision of his theory of indication in this subsection is mainly based on Rudolf Bernet (1988); and Ullrich Melle (1999, 2002), where they discuss in greater detail how Husserl has radically revised his earlier and comparatively narrower theory of indication in Logical Investigations. My focus in this subsection is primarily to further elaborate to what extent Husserl has revised the motivational structure of the indicative relation in signs from the Logical Investigations to the “1914 texts” so as to show that Husserl thereby also develops a new account of bodily expressivity.
8 Husserl makes a somewhat parallel distinction between “non-categorical and categorical signs” (Hua 20-2/52), see also Byrne (2018, 2).
9 See the original: “im Bewußtsein der Anzeige ist ein sukzessiver Übergang vorgezeichnet: Das Sein von A steht anschaulich da oder ist sonst wie erfasst. Und von da aus geht ein ‘Hingewiesen-Sein‘, ein Zug, eine Tendenz auf das «also ist B’ oder auf das B-Sein als angezeigtes.”
10 See the original: “so liegt im Zeichenverhältnis […] ein Verhältnis vor, in dem das Zeichen ‘als bloßer Durchgang’, als ‘Mittels’, als thematisch Ungemeintes mit einer Sollenstendenz ausgestattet ist, in ein thematisches Meinen des B überzuführen. […] Also ein Sachfremdes ist im Blick, kommt zur Daseinserfassung.”
11 Clearly, this characterization of significative intention essentially resembles what Husserl would later speak of as empathic intention. For instance, in Experience and Judgment, Husserl writes, “If I turn toward a man, this act of turning-toward, the thematic ray of activity, goes first of all simply and straightforwardly to the body, as a matter of sensuous perception. But this ray does not terminate in the body; in the understanding of the expression, it goes beyond, to the ego-subject, therefore, to his being in the doing of this or that” (Husserl 1973, 55-56; an essentially similar statement can also be found in Ideas II (Hua 4/240)).
12 See the original: “wenn ich meine psychischen Erlebnisse mit leiblichen ‘Äußerung’ begleite, so lebe ich meinen Akten, und zudem erlebe ich, sei es auch in Einheit damit, gewisse Empfindungsgruppen, die zu den leiblichen Äußerungen gehören, eventuelle fasse ich sie dunkel als Gesichtsbewegungen, Handbewegungen, etc. auf. (…) Wenn wir den anderen sehen und ‘in’ seinen leiblichen Erscheinungen sein Seelisches miterfassen, so haben wir schon ein Zweierlei, aber eine Zweiheit in der Einheit. Wir sehen die leiblichen Äußerungen und durch sie sehen wir ‘mit’, als sich in ihnen bekundend, das Geistige. (…) Wir sehen ihn, wir verstehen ihn, wir sehen seinem Blick, seinem Mienenspiel etc., den Zorn, Hass an.”
13 In this paper, I primarily discuss the givenness of the other’s bodily manifestation from the perceiver’s perspective, and explain in what sense the other’s body is expressive in the view of the perceiver, rather than from the view point of the other herself. Thanks to a reviewer for making this distinction.
14 See the original: “Die vielgestaltigen Zeichen <SIND> organisierte Komplexe: Jedes Bestandstück ‘bedeutet’ etwas, jedes aber in diesem Zusammenhang der Koexistenz und in diesem Sukzedieren, sich zeitlich Vereinheitlichen der Koexistenzen. Der auffassende Blick muss den gesamten einheitlichen Typus dieser komplexen Veränderungen erfassen, muss dabei die Daten in ihrem Zusammenhang erfassen.”
15 For instance, as Husserl puts it in Ideas II, “Rather, the physical unity of the Body there, which changes in such and such a way or is at rest, is articulated in multiple ways, in ways that are more determinate or less determinate, according to the circumstances. And the articulation is one of sense, which means it is not of a kind that is to be found within the physical attitude as if every physical partition, every distinction of physical properties, would receive ‘significance,’ i.e., significance as Body, or would receive a sense of its own, its own ‘spirit.’ Rather, the apprehension of a thing as a man (and, to be more exact, as a man who speaks, reads, dances, is vexed and rages, defends himself or attacks, etc.) is precisely such as to animate multiple, though distinguishable, moments of the appearing corporeal objectivity and to give to the individual sense a psychic content” (Hua 4/241[253]; italics added).
16 See the original: “wichtig sind evtl. noch die Affekte Zorn, Scham, Angst, usw., die in ihrem mannigfaltigen Verlaufstypus, ihrer inneren Erscheinungsstruktur im wesentlichsten Grundstück zur Innenleiblichkeit gehören, anderseits auch Aussenseiten haben. (…) In der ‘brennenden’ Scham spüre ich auch in den Wangen das Brennen. Das Erröten sehe ich nicht, aber wenn ich den Andern als Andern schon apperzipiere, und in einer Scham anderwärts anzeigenden Situation, so ‘sehe’ ich ihm auch die ‘brennende’ Scham ‘an’.”
17 For a further discussion of how mental experiences “discharge” through bodily behaviour in Husserl, especially in the recently published volume of Husserliana 43, Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, Teilband 2: Gefühl und Wert, see Rudolf Bernet’s masterpiece Force, drive, desire: a philosophy of psychoanalysis, chapter 5.
18 For a further elaboration of the particular “seeing-in” and its twofold intentionality in empathic perception, see Luo (2019).
19 This analogy of course essentially anticipates some of Husserl’s analysis of the analogy between bodily expressivity and linguistic expressivity in Ideas II (especially Hua 4/234-247[245-259]), where Husserl not only compares the constitutive relation between a word and its meaning, and that between corporeality (Leiblichkeit) and mental states, but he also draws an analogy between reading a text and comprehending another human person. For further discussions on this analogy, see Flynn (2009), Taipale (2015).
20 Signa, plural form of the Latin term signum. Husserl clearly notices the difference between the body and the sign, no matter how similar they are to each other with regard to their expressivity, as Husserl clearly states that when we see the other’s body, “we have no signitive consciousness” (Hua 20-2/72), and “[w]hat I actually see is not a sign and not a mere analogue, a depiction in any natural sense of the word; on the contrary, it is someone else” (Hua 1/153). That is, when Husserl explores into similar manner of givenness between genuine signs and human body, he is by no means suggesting that they are the same. For a further elaboration of the difference between word and body as discussed in Ideas II, see also Flynn (2009), Taipale (2015).
21 See the original: “die leiblichen ‘Zeichen‘, die der ‘Einfühlung‘ dienen, haben darin Analogie mit sprachlichen Zeichen, daß Systeme von ‘Zeichen‘, einheitliche Mannigfaltigkeiten, auf seelische Einheiten in der Mannigfaltigkeit hindeuten. Sie haben natürlich keine Bedeutung im logischen Sinn; freilich sind sie aber insofern nicht signa, als sie mit dem, was sie andeuten, einig sind in der Einheit der Apperzeption. Sie konstituieren Einheiten der sachlichen Zusammengehörigkeit, sie konstituieren ja die reale Einheit Leib-Seele.”
22 Husserl’s analysis of the demand character of bodily behaviour and its significance for social understanding clearly echoes some recent enactivist accounts of social cognition that emphasize the affective aspect of the other’s embodied appearance within a living context, see, e.g., Gallagher & Varga (2014), Colombetti (2017), and Kiverstein (2015).