The Body Subject: Being True to the Truths of Experience

Abstract

ABSTRACT The aim of this essay is to flesh out the body subject in ways anchored in Husserlian phenomenology. In accordance with this aim, it begins with clarifications essential to veridical phenomenological accounts of experience. The specific Husserlian insights that follow these clarifications are grounded in experienced realities of animate nature, a nature Husserl consistently describes in terms of an animate organism, a subject body. The ensuing two sections show how and why various descriptions and claims of contemporary phenomenologists, descriptions and claims commonly anchored in Merleau-Ponty’s writings on the body, fail to elucidate this body subject, and how and why, in bypassing Husserlian insights, the descriptions and claims are phenomenologically wayward.