Embodiment

That mind and experience are shaped by having a body, and are not merely housed in one.

Theme: Mind, self and consciousness
Tradition: Continental
Term fixed: 1945

In plain terms

There are two ways to consider a body. One is as an object among objects, with a weight and a temperature, which a doctor can examine. The other is as the thing you are looking out of and reaching with, which no examination reaches.

The second is not a description of the first from a worse angle. You do not perceive your own hand's position by looking; you know it. You do not calculate how to duck under a branch; the ducking is the knowing.

Embodiment is the claim that this second body is not a decoration on the first. Perception, thought and even the shape of concepts are formed by having limbs of a particular reach, an upright posture, a front and a back - and a mind attached to a different body would not have the same thoughts more awkwardly expressed. It would have different ones.

As a philosopher would put it

Husserl distinguishes Körper, the physical body, from Leib, the body as lived and as the zero-point of orientation. Merleau-Ponty develops this into a full account: the body is neither subject nor object but a third term, and perception is the achievement of a body already geared into a world rather than a mind processing data.

The body schema is the technical notion. It is not an image of the body but a practical pre-reflective familiarity that reorganises around tools, so that a cane, a car or an instrument is incorporated and ceases to be something one perceives.

The claim has since been made in cognitive science under the heading of embodied and enactive cognition: that cognition is constituted by sensorimotor engagement rather than by internal representation, and that concepts retain traces of bodily origin. Feminist philosophy adds that there is no generic body - Beauvoir's argument that the situation of a woman's body is lived rather than merely possessed, and Young's analysis of how comportment itself is learned, make embodiment social as well as biological.

Where you meet it

A long-cane user does not feel the cane. They feel the pavement.

The report is consistent and is the basis of how the skill is taught: mobility instructors train the sweep and the grip until attention moves to the far tip, and a cane that is the wrong length or badly balanced is described as blocking the ground rather than as being uncomfortable. The sensations at the hand are the same in either case; what changes is where perception lands.

The same reorganisation happens with any well-fitted tool, which is why a surgeon feels tissue through an instrument and a driver feels the road through a car. What is being claimed here is not a metaphor. The boundary of the perceiving body is not the boundary of the skin, and it moves with practice - which is a fact about ordinary skill acquisition and also an argument that the body is a way of accessing a world rather than an object located in one.

What is actually disputed

How much of cognition embodiment explains.

The strong claim is that cognition is constituted by bodily engagement and that representational accounts are the wrong shape. The moderate claim is that the body deeply influences cognition without replacing the need for internal representation. Critics point out that mathematics, planning and reasoning about absent things are exactly the cases where sensorimotor accounts strain, and that the successes of embodied cognition cluster in perception and action, where they were always least surprising.

A second dispute concerns whose body. If experience is shaped by embodiment, then differences in bodies produce differences in experience that no general account can absorb - which is the feminist and disability-studies argument, and it cuts against the phenomenological tradition's habit of describing the body as if there were one.

Commonly confused with

having a body Everyone grants that minds come with bodies. The claim here is that the body shapes what thinking is like, which is much stronger and much more contestable.
embodiment in the theological sense Incarnation is a claim about a particular being. This is a general claim about how any mind works.

Defined against

Mind–body problem Merleau-Ponty's claim is that the problem is created by treating the body as an object, and that the lived body is not either of the two terms

Philosophers

Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty The body as a third term, neither subject nor object
Edmund Husserl The distinction between the body as object and as lived
Simone de Beauvoir The body as a situation rather than a thing one has
Martin Heidegger Equipment that withdraws from notice in skilled use
Judith Butler The body as constituted through repeated performance

Works

Phenomenology of Perception The central text
Being and Time Tools that withdraw when they are working
The Second Sex Embodiment as situation, and as unequally distributed
Gender Trouble The body as an effect of practice rather than a substrate
Logical Investigations The phenomenological groundwork

Schools

Phenomenology Where the concept is developed
Existentialism Where it becomes a claim about freedom and situation
Classical Pragmatism Where experience is bodily transaction with an environment
Lebensphilosophie Where life precedes reflection

Related concepts

Mind c. 450 BC · Consciousness 1641 · Perception c. 330 BC · Agency c. 340 BC · Intersubjectivity 1913

Husserl's distinction between Körper, the body as object, and Leib, the body as lived, is the groundwork; Merleau-Ponty in 1945 makes it the centre of an account of perception.