L.I.S.A.: Let’s stay with the object of your investigation, the body. In the German-language reception of Merleau-Ponty, the French word “corps” is not only translated with “Leib” instead of with “Körper”, but this “Leib” is also imbued with a meaning that differs from that of “Körper”. You call that a “Romantic” conception of the body and take a critical view. What exactly should we understand by this? Why do you think “Leib” is a misleading word here?
Prof. Kastl: For Merleau-Ponty, the body did not primarily mean something “subjective”, “intimate”, or “private”. The body is, he says, the point of access to our world and thus an operational vessel, a “carrier” of social and cultural structures. It always already has the dimension of an open generality in development – what Merleau-Ponty calls “généralité”. Unfortunately, the German translation “Generalität” sounds very static. We actually need a word in which the common root of genus, general, and genesis resonates more clearly.
The German word “Leib”, meanwhile, has its pitfalls. It is outdated and ambiguous. There are, for example, all the theological associations with sin and mortality. “Leib” might refer to part of the human body, namely the torso or abdomen as, for example, in the words “Leibbinde” (an abdominal truss), “beleibt” (portly or stout), or “Leibchen” (a camisole or bodice). It can be used as a synonym for “real”, “material”, “in flesh and blood”, or “in person”, for example in the word “leibhaftig” (incarnate). The phrase “wie er/sie/es leibt und lebt” (“that’s her/him/it all over”) suggests that “Leib” refers primarily to living, feeling, and moving bodies. But that’s not the case, although it is often claimed that way. It could equally refer to a dead, previously living body – for example the body of Jesus Christ in the Luther Bible, which Joseph of Arimathea asks to bury, or the torso of the dead Holofernes, whose head Judith had cut off. Many German phenomenologists and sociologists favor the word “Leib” over “Körper” and translate the French “corps” with “Leib” whenever they perceive that here it is about the body experienced and perceived from within. Behind this is a tendency to artificially purify the term “Leib”, which then sometimes leads to nonsensical and confused statements in translations. This purified notion of “Leib” does justice neither to the factual use of language in German nor to the intentions with which Merleau-Ponty adheres to the expression “corps” = body.
The German word “Körper”, derived from the Latin “corpus”, is also an expression that is marked by ambiguity, as Merleau-Ponty likes to say. Yet this ambiguity is scientifically more productive than the vagueness of the concept of “Leib”. It can refer to that which is “material”, “substantial” in the human being, but also to the moving, expressing, living body perceived from the outside or inside. We also talk about the “corpus” of a violin or of physical bodies. According to this logic, “Körper” can be anything that takes up space, that has mass and expansion. Precisely this is true of the human body. Ever since Descartes, it has been precisely this dual nature that makes it philosophically interesting: being able to be a living, feeling, and felt body and at the same time always also a physical, corporeal, extended, expansive body like any other material thing. This is exactly what Merleau-Ponty points to in his later work above all. We can only deal with “things” because we have something in common with those things. Our bodies are – including from an evolutionary-theory perspective – themselves a “thing”, whose nature and possibilities can only be explained and understood from this interaction with other things, including the bodies of others. Therein, at the same time, lies the fruitfulness and topicality of a revised, “moderate” Cartesian perspective.
Playing off the concept of the German “Leib” against the Latin essence of “Körper” leads only to a certain sacral aura, a spiritualization, which does not, however, bring any gain in knowledge. At the same time, this carves a deep chasm between a humanistic and a natural-scientific understanding of the body, as if worlds lay between the body of natural sciences and that of the humanities. All this is more disciplinary self-assertion politics than convincing in its content.
This spiritualization can be found as far back as the German philosophy of the 19th century, for example with Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche, where the body is pitted against the intellectualism of Idealist systems and their concept of reason. The “Leib”, the body, becomes the “deeper”, “actual” reason or spirit, the “true” subject behind the thinking and speaking subject. This is poor Romanticism, if only because the concept of the subject that is rightly criticized in Idealist philosophy is dishonestly perpetuated. Even in Merleau-Ponty’s early work, the oft-cited Phenomenology of Perception, this kind of Romantic component still resonates without his resorting to the German word “Leib” when he says, for example, that the hand “knows”. It is precisely this use of language, which Merleau himself later recognized as erroneous and corrected, that the sociology of the body latches onto to this day. The body “knows”, “believes”, “acts”, becomes the actor behind the actor. Yet this is just as mythological as the rightly criticized notion of some neuroscientists of the brain as an actor.
There is another, less harmful variety of a Romantic concept of the body that the sociological discussion is currently “jumping on”. And that’s where, for me, it becomes considerably more critical. In the work of philosopher Hermann Schmitz, the “Leib” is considered the epitome of an anti-individualistically conceived “bodily sensing”, from which everything that has to do with the classic five senses – with the visible, audible, touchable, smellable, tastable world – is artificially excluded. You then end up with an abundantly vague visceral principle that reeks of Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner.
This concept of the body is blatantly linked by Schmitz to a neo-fascist, collectivist idea of society and played off against what he sees as a one-sided Western Enlightenment, including against Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the body. In Schmitz’s book about Hitler, the “deutsche Leib”, or “German body”, is stylized into an occidental, historical, and “philosophical” mission for Germany, in which the reunification of Germany supposedly only acquires its true meaning as the beginning of the reunification of the Western and Eastern Roman Empires. I’m not kidding! Read it for yourself in Schmitz’s quite unspeakable book, in which he also dedicates entire sections, for example, to the “positive aspects” of the National Socialist “Volksgemeinschaft”. For me, all this definitively discredits the “Leib” concept, which was already vague in German phenomenology. “Leib” brings us nothing that could not be expressed by a differentiated concept of “Körper”. We should abandon these German mutterings and rather make them the object of ideology-critical investigations.
This changes nothing of the inner tension of the modern concept of the body, for which, strictly speaking, there is nothing incorporeal anymore. This tension is unavoidable in the matter. The body is undoubtedly – from a phenomenological and natural-scientific perspective – physical, material, expansive; it belongs to the world of things. At the same time, it is the bearer of all temporally constituted processes, starting with movement and communication through to our thoughts and meanings. All this is not within the sphere of things – in that much Descartes was right. We still refer to the “soul”, “psyche”, or “mind”, without really having a clear understanding of what we mean by it. In any case, movements, acts of speech, or efforts of consciousness are not “expansive” in the same sense as the body as a physical mass. And yet, at the same time, they are something “on” the body; they are not “free-floating” and are strictly tied to the body itself. A small lesion of the neuronal substrate, a dementia, can evaporate them into nothingness. This is the paradoxical core of experience of Cartesian dualism which – contrary to all grandiose claims of its overcoming or abolition – no academic discipline has yet resolved, be it philosophy or brain research.