Overcoming parallelism: Naturalizing phenomenology with goldstein and Merleau-Ponty

This paper examines two related problems that stand in the way of the development of an interdisciplinary project that spans biology and phenomenology. To be sure, each of these disciplines is interested in the body, but there are two ways through which the body may be understood. Biology examines the corporeal or living body (Kӧrper); phenomenology examines the body of lived experience (Leib). Both problems discussed in this paper stem from this two-fold nature of the body. The first concerns the anti-naturalist position taken by Husserl – a position that emphasizes the lived body and rejects any consideration of the corporeal body. Following Roy et al. (1999), I maintain that Husserl's anti-naturalism is no longer necessary. Kurt Goldstein (1934/1995) is used as an example that demonstrates a biological investigation of the corporeal body that is consonant with a phenomenological perspective, a quality which may also be seen in the many references it receives from Merleau-Ponty (1942/1963, 1945/1962). The second problem is that of parallelism – also called the body–body problem (Thompson, 2004). A parallelist collaboration between biology and phenomenology maintains the assumption that there are two bodies that must receive special attention. The problem of parallelism is viewed within the research program of neurophenomenology (Varela, 1996). It is argued that this problem dissolves when it is recognized that there are not two bodies – Kӧrper and Leib – but that these are two ways of recognizing one and the same body. Once again, Goldstein and Merleau-Ponty are used to help describe a two-fold investigation of the body that avoids parallelism and promotes the collaboration which this Special Issue seeks.