The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy

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Sara Heinämaa

Introduction

Questions of embodiment are central in feminist philosophy for several reasons. The sexed body is one of the chief themes of feminist politics, but the body is also a historical-philosophical concept that feminist scholars have problematized and scrutinized, and ultimately it is a metaphysical issue the relevance of which is a feminist philosophical controversy. The thematic, historical-critical, and metaphysical interests often converge in concrete debates, but it is important to distinguish them conceptually and methodologically for the clarity of the goals of our investigations.

First, feminist thinkers have developed philosophical arguments and concepts to tackle problems that are central in women’s lives, such as pregnancy, childbirth, abortion, rape, pornography, prostitution, sexual orientation, and the division of labor between the sexes. These classical feminist topics are today expanded by discussions of transsexuality, disability, technology, and animality. All these themes involve problems of bodily integrity and self-determination. In addition, they imply questions concerning physical force and violence, as well as questions concerning sensibility and affectivity and the nature of corporeal life in general. Thus, for strong topical reasons, the concepts of body and embodiment are central to feminist philosophy.

Second, feminist historians of philosophy have questioned the traditional oppositions between soul and body, mind and matter, and reason and sensibility, and critically discussed the adequacy of the concepts of body and embodiment that we inherit from our philosophical forerunners. Feminists have argued that these traditional conceptual oppositions are misleading since they define the two terms in simple contrast, and privilege or valorize one term over the other either epistemologically or ontologically. Moreover, they have demonstrated that our philosophical tradition strongly associates the concept of femininity with the lower terms of these hierarchical oppositions. Thus femininity is conflated with sensibility, body, and matter, while masculinity is coupled with soul, spirit, mind, and reason. With a conceptual repertoire such as this it is hard to argue for the equality of the sexes and for the fruitfulness or productivity of sexual difference. For these critical reasons, feminist philosophy inquires into the genealogies of the concepts of body and embodiment.

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Third, the concepts of embodiment and materiality are pressing for any thinker who starts asking political and ethical questions concerning the relations between human beings and human communities. Insofar as one conceives human beings as bodily beings with material environments and concrete histories, one cannot avoid taking a stand on ontological and epistemological questions on embodiment and materiality. Thus there is also a metaphysical motivation for today’s feminist philosophy of embodiment.

Historical Starting Points

In the early modern period, with the development of the new natural sciences, the task of rethinking the relation between the body and the soul or mind became acute. The previously dominant Platonic and Aristotelian theories were challenged and abandoned.

The old Platonic similes and metaphors had suggested that the soul, or its highest part, governs the body and its lower appetitive and sensible functions, similar to the manner in which a charioteer or coachman drives his horses and a steersman navigates his ship (Plato 2005: 26–36, 246a–254e). Against this, the Aristotelian concepts of form and matter proposed that the function of the soul is formative rather than governmental. In the Aristotelian understanding, the soul does not control or regulate the body but rather organizes it and gives it a proper form. This implies that disputes about the identity or separateness of soul and body are misguided, since the two phenomena are mutually dependent (Aristotle 1931: ii, 1, 412b6–9).

These ancient conceptions were challenged in the seventeenth century by Descartes. He argued that we fail to account adequately for the relation between mind and matter if we assume that the two relata are both known in a similar manner and order. For Descartes, the mind is neither governmental nor formative but epistemologically fundamental. We know ourselves primarily as ensouled or minded beings, as “thinking things.” All our knowledge of other things, including material things and corporeal being as well as ideal entities and the divine being, is grounded on this primary form of knowledge, for Descartes in the Meditations of 1641.

Descartes’ thesis of the epistemic primacy of the mind implies two different views of the mind–body relation (on Descartes, see also Chapter 6 in this volume). On the one hand, body and mind can be conceived in a general manner as two distinct substances with two different primary attributes: extension and thinking. This implies that they are independently existing things (as Descartes argues in the Meditations and in the Principles of Philosophy of 1644). Being distinct and completely different in essence, the two substances cannot interact. On the other hand, we know our minds as each being united with one body in particular and as being capable of interacting with other bodies through this one body. In the Fifth Meditation, Descartes draws attention to this unitary notion of the mind–body relation and accordingly questions the adequacy of the ancient similes of navigation and piloting:

[N]ature . . . teaches me, by these feelings of pain, hunger, thirst, and so on, that I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but that I am very closely joined, and as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a unit.

(Descartes 1996: vol. 3, 159)

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Descartes develops the idea of soul–body union further in his correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia by distinguishing three different objects of knowledge and three different ways of knowing these objects: mind as pure thinking, body as extended matter, and mind–body union. He explains to Elisabeth that mind as pure thinking is known by the intellect alone whereas body as extended matter is known by intellect aided by imagination. So the faculties of intellect and imagination provide us with knowledge of the two substances and their essential attributes. But to know the mind–body union, Descartes argues, we need to interrupt our intellectual studies and suspend our imaginative activities and pay close attention merely to our sensations: “[W]hat belongs to the union of soul and body is known only obscurely by the intellect alone or even by the intellect aided by the imagination, but it is known very clearly by the senses” (Descartes 1996: vol. 3, 691).

This means that the source of the wisdom that concerns the mind–body union is the sensations, perceptions, and emotions that are part of our everyday dealings with the world and with others. Based on this insight Descartes gave Elisabeth the following guidelines:

Metaphysical thoughts, which exercise the pure intellect, help to familiarize us with the notion of the soul; and the study of mathematics, which exercises mainly imagination in the consideration of shapes and motions, accustoms us to form very distinct notions of body. But it is the ordinary course of life and conversation, and abstention from meditations and from the study of things which exercise imagination, that teaches us how to conceive the union of the soul and the body.

(Descartes 1996: vol. 3, 692)

Elisabeth was intrigued by Descartes’ idea of the soul–body union but not satisfied by his dual characterization of the relation between soul and body, so she asked for further explanations. Recent work in feminist history of philosophy has demonstrated that Elisabeth’s persistent questions led Descartes to develop his account of the mind–body duality (Alanen 2003; Bos 2010; Shapiro 2013; Tollefsen 1999). Elisabeth challenged Descartes by asking him to explain how his definitions of mind and body as separate substances allow him to form any reasonable notion of mind–body interaction, let alone a theory of intermingling:

I beseech you tell me how the soul of man (since it is but a thinking substance) can determine the spirits of the body to produce voluntary actions. For it seems every determination of movement happens from an impulsion of the thing moved, according to the manner in which it is pushed by that which moves it, or else, depends on the qualification and figure of the superficies of this latter. Contact is required for the first two conditions, and extension for the third. You entirely exclude extension from your notion of the soul, and contact seems to me incompatible with an immaterial thing.

(Elisabeth to Descartes May 16, 1643 in Descartes 1996: vol. 3, 661)

Descartes answered Elisabeth, but his explanations did not convince her. She required more clarifications, and their philosophical discussion developed further. Eventually the exchange covered metaphysical as well as ethical topics, ranging from mind–body interaction to the passions and to the efficacy of Stoic philosophical therapy in treating emotional distress, sadness, and desperation. Later Descartes dedicated his works, the Principles of Philosophy and the Passions of the Soul of 1649, to Elisabeth, since her direct questions and ingenious counterarguments helped him to develop his position by theorizing the receptive powers of the human mind: sensation, perception, and emotion.

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Contemporary Alternatives

Descartes devised a partial solution to the problem of the mind–body interaction by introducing a theory of the “animal spirits,” very small hypothetical movements of matter, “very fine air or wind.” According to him these caused images on the surface of the pineal gland, in turn causing experienced sensory perceptions. (The pineal gland is a tiny organ in the brain; Descartes thought it the bodily part in most direct contact with the soul.) Thus extended substance and thinking substance could interact thanks to the mediating operations of the animal spirits.

Since Descartes’ time, the psychological and physiological sciences have taken enormous steps and today can explain much of human behavior. Yet the philosophical problem of interaction lingers. We have abandoned the Cartesian notion of animal spirits, but the theoretical task of mediating between the extended and non-extended realms still remains and is undertaken by new candidates. Neurons are the most recent theoretical entities that are supposed to handle the connection between the two realms of being. They are said to “convert” or “interpret” the quantifiable physiological processes of our bodies into the qualitative “form” that is familiar to us from experience. However, philosophically and conceptually the idea of the neuron as converter is no more satisfying than the idea of animal spirits. Both ideas retain the duality of two distinct realms of being, the material and the experiential (or the quantifiable and the qualitative), and only theorize a kind of unit capable of operating in both realms.

Frustrated by such problems, contemporary philosophers have developed metaphysical alternatives to dualism and suggested strategies that do away with problems of interaction altogether. These include reductivism, eliminativism, epiphenomenalism, emergentism, supervenience physicalism, token identity theories, and functionalism. These all build on the modern naturalistic doctrine according to which the natural sciences—or physics as providing the grounds and the methodological model for these sciences—ultimately determine what there is. According to this paradigm, each being is either physical, belonging to the unified totality of physical nature, or a variable dependent on the physical, and thus at best a secondary “parallel accompaniment” (Husserl 1965 [1911]: 169). Most of these approaches allow multiple explanatory concepts but all demand that the explanatory strategies of psychology accord with physicalism. In this paradigm, the human person is conceived as a two-layered reality, in which a material—biological, biochemical, chemical, physical—basis provides the foundation for the emergence of psychical features. So understood, mental features are not properties of any immaterial entities—souls or spirits—but of immensely complex physical systems.

The formation of the higher levels of the psyche is framed as a causal-functional process in these naturalistic theories. Usually it is not assumed to be a monocausal, purely organic process but is understood as involving both internal organic and external environmental causes (see, e.g., Haslanger 2012: 210; Scheman 2000). Environmental factors are seen as influencing the development of psychic features and structures, together with inborn organic factors.

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Some feminist philosophers are committed to naturalism or physicalism because of their basic philosophical commitments and interests (e.g., Anthony 2005; 2007; Hankinson Nelson 1990; Hankinson Nelson and Nelson 2003). These philosophers have to find ways of explaining the macro-level phenomena that are crucial to the feminist project without compromising the principles of naturalism or physicalism. This does not demand explanations in terms of physical concepts, but explanations that are in agreement with physicalism or do not conflict with it. The most central of these macro-level phenomena is gender, i.e., the difference between women and men. Sally Haslanger offers a naturalistic analysis of gender, compatible with most physicalist approaches (those articulated by the concepts of supervenience). She argues that the biological categories of female and male are natural kinds, composed of objective things with a physical undercurrent. In contrast, the categories of woman and man are positions of subjection and dominance that female and male entities may occupy in contingent constellations of force and power. If all such constellations were resolved exhaustively, thoroughly and permanently, then there would no longer be women or men (Haslanger 2000a: 11–12; 2000b; 2005: 122–124).

Other feminists have challenged the paradigm of modern naturalism and physicalism and offered alternative analyses of the concepts of gender. Some have developed neo-Aristotelian solutions (e.g., Nussbaum 1999; 2000; Witt 1998; 2003). Others have resorted to Wittgensteinian arguments about the multifunctional character of our mental and experiential concepts (e.g., Scheman 2000).

There is also a growing interest within feminist philosophy in the novel ontological approaches that can be loosely classified under the title “new materialism” (on these approaches, see also Chapter 16 in this volume). These approaches are “new” in the sense that they reject the idea of substance characteristic of classical materialism and build their ontologies on dynamic processes, unpredicted events, and conflicting forces with analogous intensities. They are not naturalistic in the sense discussed above, since they do not relinquish to the natural sciences the ultimate word on what there is but rather argue for materialism or monism on independent metaphysical grounds—Whiteheadian, Bergsonian, Hegelian, or Spinozist (e.g., Braidotti 2002; Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012; Grosz 2004; Malabou and Johnston 2013).

Phenomenological philosophy diverges from all these approaches in building on the Cartesian insight that it is crucial to keep distinct two different ways of studying human bodies. One proceeds under the guidance of the intellect and imagination and the other is informed by sensations, perceptions, and emotions—and we are not to explain one of these in terms of the other. The French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the irreducibility of these epistemic alternatives and argues for a pluralistic understanding of bodily being:

Thus experience of one’s own body runs counter to the reflective procedure which detaches subject and object from each other, and which gives us only the thought about the body, or the body as an idea, and not the experience of the body . . . Descartes was well aware of this, since a famous letter of his to Elizabeth draws the distinction between the body as it is conceived through use in living and the body as it is conceived by the understanding.

(Merleau-Ponty 1995 [1945]: 231)

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In the next sections I will introduce some basic concepts of phenomenology, which offers a powerful way of understanding the body, not just as an object of natural scientific knowledge but also as a source of meaning and subject of intending. This alternative has proven fruitful in the study of the multiple differences between women and men as well as the differences between sexed and non-sexed ways of being human.

Phenomenology of Human Embodiment

Phenomenology is a philosophy of experience. It studies human experiences in their qualitative richness, with the aim of clearly distinguishing between different forms of experiencing and identifying their subjective and objective components and the points of correlation between the subjective and the objective. In this context, the term “subjective” does not refer to any inner realm of private states or processes or to the mere qualitative aspects of our immanent lives but refers to the ways in which external (and internal) objects are given to us. (On phenomenology, see also Chapter 12 in this volume.)

The objects experienced come in different sorts: some are material things but others are ideal items, such as numbers and functions; yet others are sources or carriers of meaning, such as novels, theories, and persons. Also, the types of experiences that give us objects are multiple and various. They may be emotional experiences, such as shame, love, and resentment, but they may also be cognitive experiences of believing, knowing, arguing, and criticizing, or practical experiences of projecting goals and determining means. Both individual and collective experiences need to be investigated as well as familiar experiences and historically or culturally distant forms of experiencing.

The aim is not to survey the details of individual experiences or generalize over them to construct a theory of experiencing. Rather, the phenomenologist works on concrete human experiences, and compares and analyzes their features in order to illuminate their necessary structures and forms of change and development. The most important of these structures are temporality and intentionality or directedness. All our experiences flow in time. They pile one upon another and motivate one another, forming complex temporal wholes that can be described and analyzed by the phenomenological concepts of sedimentation and habituation. On the other hand, all experiences are also directed at objects; and the experienced objects characteristic of human lives come in many types. We attend to and focus on not only things but also values and goals; and we are interested in not just states of affairs and facts but also persons, organizations, institutions, and comprehensive histories of such complex objects. All these different types and kinds of objects must be carefully described and their relations of dependency clarified.

Among the pivotal objects of our experience is the human body. We can call the human body a “core object” since it has a central role in our lives both as an experienced object and as an experiencing subject. Most if not all objects of interest relate to human bodies in one way or another, and it is through our sensing, perceiving, and desiring bodies that we relate to things and events in the first place. In The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir formulates this idea by writing that our body is “our grasp upon the world and the outline of our projects” (Beauvoir 1991 [1949]: 66). But she then argues that traditional philosophical discussions of human bodies are dominated by an androcentric bias that leads us to interpret phenomena characteristic of femininity or femaleness as derivative of masculinity or maleness. In Beauvoir’s account, this is a fundamental mistake: human embodiment is not a unitary or homogenous phenomenon but involves two main variations—the feminine-female and the masculine-male.

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To describe and analyze this duality, Beauvoir resorted to the phenomenology of embodiment developed by Edmund Husserl in the 1920s. While studying the experiential grounds of spatial things and spatiality, Husserl had developed a powerful set of conceptual tools that account for the different ways in which living bodies are given to us in experience (see Husserl 1993 [1952]; 1988 [1954]; see also Heinämaa 2011). Beauvoir and her philosophical colleagues, Emmanuel Lévinas, Jean-Paul Sartre (1956 [1943]), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1995 [1945]), applied these concepts to a whole new set of phenomena and complemented Husserl’s studies with analyses of affective, sexual, and erotic bodily relations.

Thanks to this groundwork, contemporary phenomenology contains a powerful toolkit for examining human embodiment. In this framework, several different meanings of the human body and embodiment can be distinguished and their relations clearly defined. The human body is not assimilated to an organism or biomechanical system. Rather the human body is conceptualized in a number of different ways depending on the evaluative, practical, and cognitive aspects of the situation in which it is grasped: thing and machine, to be sure, but also tool, expression, sediment, trace, and dwelling (general introductions to feminist phenomenology include Fisher and Embree 2000; Fisher, Stoller, and Vasterling 2005; Heinämaa 2003).

The traditional oppositions of mind/body and culture/nature can be avoided, since all phenomena—mental and bodily, cultural and natural—are studied under their subjective and objective aspects and under the correlation between the subjective and the objective. Instead of two separate realms of reality, the mental and the material, we discover a variety of phenomena with intentional as well as sensible determinants. The human body is not merely grasped as a material thing, a bio-mechanism, or an information-processor, but also as our fundamental way of relating to the material world and worldly objects. The human mind is not a self-enclosed pure spirit or mere epiphenomenon on top of material reality, but a power necessarily expressed in bodily gestures and corporeally related to other “embodied minds” or “minded bodies.” Nature is not just an object of the physical sciences but also the common field for all perceiving, moving, and acting bodies, human and animal.

Unlike the traditional concepts of mind and body, the phenomenological concepts of consciousness and intentional objectivity imply one another. Intentional consciousness is always consciousness of something, and the intended objectivity is always valid for someone. Beauvoir captures this mutual dependency of subjectivity and objectivity: “It is impossible to define an object in cutting it off from the subject through and for which it is object; and the subject reveals itself only through the objects in which it is engaged” (Beauvoir 2004: 159–160).

This means that all bodily experiences and phenomena involve both subjective and objective factors. By differentiating their types and forms, we can disclose several aspects and layers of human embodiment. Most importantly, distinctions between different ways of being a body, of having a body, and transforming as a body allow us to analyze problems central to feminist and post-feminist theory and politics. These include phenomena as diverse as pregnancy, physical work, and artistic expression, cosmetics and body transplants, eating disorders, sexual pleasure and violence, and transsexuality. The next sections discuss more closely some of these phenomena in the framework of contemporary phenomenology.

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Bodies as Instruments and Expressions

When human and animal bodies are studied by the experimental and mathematical methods of modern natural sciences—in medicine, physiology, and zoology, for example—they are thematized as complicated mechanisms. They appear as individuals belonging to biological species, as biochemical structures, or as information systems. These causal-functional categories are necessary for natural scientific theorization of bodily relations and behaviors but do not exhaust the senses of human embodiment. Several other senses are essential to and central in our conscious lives.

In everyday practical contexts, our own bodies and those of other humans and animals appear to us primarily as means of perception and manipulation of material things. I roll the ball towards a child who sits on the floor opposite to me, and when the ball comes into her reach, the child catches it with her fingers. I can do this because I see the child’s fingers as potential means of controlling environing things and their movements. I do not have to infer or reason that the child’s body involves such manipulative means. I immediately see her body as orienting and controlling its environment in a peculiar manner common to all humans (or primates).

The simple example of the child and the ball captures the main idea, but the phenomenon proves more complex in most practical situations involving co-operative, communicative, and historical factors. When a woman in labor is asked to “hold back” and “push,” she is asked to use her body as means for the delivery of the child. But her reaction to such instructions depends on the specific condition of her body, on her personal history, and on the social-cultural practices in which she participates. When soldiers are commanded “Left shoulder, ARMS!” they are attended to as functionaries ready to manipulate their weapons with their bodies. But their promptness in obeying the command depends on the situation in which they operate, its social and historical boundaries, and their personal relations to this situation.

The practical framing of the human body involves variations that are crucial to feminist theory and politics. In “Throwing Like a Girl,” the American phenomenologist and critical theorist Iris Marion Young draws attention to the fact that women’s relations to their own bodies as means of practical governing are delimited and compromised by their training and education (Young 1990). And even before entering such institutional settings, their bodily capacities are shaped and molded by the positive and negative reactions of their elders and their peers (Chisholm 2008). By combining critical-theoretic and phenomenological insights, Young argues that environmental social-historical conditions of experiencing shape us as motor agents and bodily subjects. Further, she suggests that this in turn affects our possibilities of governing our spatial environment. Thus a vicious circle is established in the formation of types of experiences and conditions of experiencing. The concepts of sedimentation and habitation allow a purely phenomenological account of such processes (Heinämaa 2014b; Jacobs 2016).

In addition to operating as our means of manipulating things and governing space our bodies serve other practical purposes. Vitally and symbolically, the most important of these is the function of housing and sheltering another living being attributed to female bodies in pregnancy. The topic of pregnancy is widely discussed in feminist philosophy and its multi-faceted nature is illuminated by bio-ethical, historical, social-scientific, and critical-political inquiries (e.g., Labouvie 1998; Martin 1987). Feminist phenomenologists have contributed by analyzing the experiential structures of pregnancy and childbirth. Their inquiries show how social and practical significances intertwine with deeply emotive, vital, sensory, and subliminal forms of experiencing (Gahlings 2006; Heinämaa 2014a; LaChance Adams 2014; Stone 2012; Young 1990).

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It is important to emphasize that the experiential fact that our bodies are given to us as our means of manipulating things also involves the possibility of treating the bodies of all living beings—other bodies as well as our own bodies—as mere material things. In other words, we can “objectify” living experiencing bodies, and we do this for many different purposes. Some of these purposes are violent, alienating, and exclusionary, while others are beneficial, empowering, and consolidating (Haslanger 1993; Morris 1999). Examples range from pornography, torture, and sadism to physical therapy and play.

For political reasons feminist philosophers have mainly discussed the negative senses of objectification (Nussbaum 1995; Papadaki 2014). By combining phenomenological, pragmatic, and critical-theoretical perspectives, Susan Bordo, for example, argues that in modern societies women are urged to treat their bodies primarily as aesthetic and economic objects and to neglect the practical and vital significance of their corporeality. In Bordo’s analysis, this inflicts distortions on the body-images of young women and leads to an increase in eating disorders (Bordo 1993). Dorothea Legrand has questioned this explanatory paradigm using the phenomenological theory of bodily intersubjectivity or intercorporeality. Legrand argues that eating disorders should be interpreted not merely in terms of social-historical conditioning but also as special forms of exchange in which the victim is not a passive recipient but a communicating agent. She shows that food, eating, and the body operate in anorexia as means of transmitting emotional desires to others lacking in sensitivity and responsiveness (Legrand and Briend 2015). On this understanding, anorectic starvation is not a neglect of one’s own practical-vital body, but rather an attempt at communication in an extreme social-emotional setting.

Legrand’s analysis demonstrates that the concepts of objectification do not merely describe situations in which human or animal bodies are subjected to external ends that harm them. Rather, living beings can treat their own bodies as objects of different sorts (e.g., expressive or thingly), and they do so in order to pursue their values and to promote their ends. This means that the concepts of objectification as such are ethically and politically neutral and allow us to analyze several types of corporeal and intercorporeal relations, both harmful and beneficial (Slatman 2014; Weiss 1999; 2009).

A well-known example is provided by Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness (1956 [1943]). Sartre describes a situation in which a young woman avoids the advances of a male companion by systematically neglecting his words’ sexual significance. When the man takes her hand, the woman changes her relation to her own body in order to limit the sexual meanings of this bodily gesture. Instead of identifying with her hand, she distances herself from it and acts as if it were just another thing lying on the table: “the hand rests inert between the warm hands of her companion—neither consenting nor resisting—a thing” (Sartre 1956 [1943]: 97; translation modified).

Sartre studies this example while developing his theory of self-deception (“bad faith”) as a structure of human existence. Several feminist commentators have argued that Sartre’s choice of examples betrays androcentric or heterosexist bias (Barnes 1999; Hoagland 1999; Le Dœuff 2007 [1989]). Indeed Simone de Beauvoir already argued in The Second Sex that Sartre’s analysis starts from a simple opposition between attraction and repulsion. She claimed that such concepts could not account for the complex character of feminine desire or the varieties of human sexuality (Beauvoir 1991 [1949]: 81; Heinämaa 2006).

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Despite these problems, Sartre’s analysis illuminates the experiential fact that we can relate to our bodies in several different ways, and can intend our bodies both as mere things and as our necessary means of having things at the same time. Sartre’s case study also allows us to highlight the fact that in many communicative contexts, the practical articulation of human bodies makes way for expressive intentionality, which renders human bodies into expressive vehicles of meaningful gestures. The caressing hand of the lover does not merely appear as a tool for the manipulation of things but is given as an expression of his or her desire.

Erotic situations in general frame human bodies as expressions of desire, passion, and pleasure. The face, the hands, the genitals, and the whole body of the desiring person indicate the presence of his or her passion and express or manifest its particular form. The ecstatic face is not given to us as a goal or a means to a goal, but appears as a manifestation of delight that grows with each turn in the expressive exchange. If we characterize emotional expressions as means that serve predetermined ends, then we subject the phenomenon to inadequate concepts and neglect its specific structure and dynamism. Moreover, in The Second Sex, Beauvoir argues that the confusion of erotic intentionality with practical intentionality has lead to a neglect of feminine eroticism and its specific character. Luce Irigaray builds on this insight in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, arguing that preoccupation with reproductive goals has blinded us to the true generativity of corporeal love that happens between the sexes:

[L]ove can be the motor of becoming, allowing both the one and the other to grow. For such love each must keep their bodies autonomous. The one should not be the source of the other nor the other of the one. Two lives should embrace and fertilize each other, without either being a fixed goal for the other.

(Irigaray 1993: 28)

The Limits of Naturalism

In light of the phenomenological analysis of embodiment, the natural scientific concepts of organism and bio-mechanism prove insufficient for feminist philosophy. They only capture human bodies as components of causal-functional nexuses and thus overlook broad areas of human experience in which bodies appear as motivational, purposeful, and expressive. These latter types of relations are not reducible to causal relations, because their relata—the motivating and the motivated, the intended and the intending, and the expressed and the expressive—are mutually dependent and are not separable parts of a fixed whole. Human bodies are not merely nodes in chains of causal-functional relations but are also expressive units tied to other expressive units by internal relations of sense, motivation, and communication. By definition, the natural scientific concepts of organism and bio-mechanism do not capture such bodily relations.

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It is no use to add psychic or psycho-social systems of significance on top of a body defined in purely causal-mechanical terms. Such an addition may present the body as invested with individual and communal significations and meanings, but it does not help us to capture the sense-forming aspects of embodiment or the body as a source of meaning. More precisely, the idea of cultural and social construction of meaning does not contribute to the philosophical understanding of the experiential foundations of the psycho-physical compound.

Husserl’s phenomenology of embodiment offers a philosophical analysis of the grounds and the limits of the psycho-physical articulation of human embodiment. In addition, it includes strong arguments that question the ontological primacy of the biomechanical understanding of the living body and demonstrate its dependency on practical and expressive bodies. I have explicated these arguments elsewhere (Heinämaa 2003: 2011). For present purposes it suffices to point out that Husserl’s main strategy is to question the internal consistency of the naturalistic project and to argue that, to promote her philosophy, the naturalist has to presuppose in practice what her doctrine denies in theory, i.e. the ideality of sense and reason. That is: to secure the scientific character of her judgments, the naturalist has to submit them to the critical inspection of the scientific community. This demands that she address her fellow scientists as subjects bound by the laws of logic, ethics, and grammar, and not (merely) by the contingencies or probabilities of nature (Husserl 1965 [1911]: 169; Wittgenstein 1997 [1953]: §109, 47e, §531, 145).

Even if one does not accept this argument about the conditions of human reasoning, the conceptual innovations that Husserl and his followers made to distinguish different ways of experiencing living bodies have proven beneficial to feminist philosophy in several areas of study. An adequate account of the relations between women and men must not confuse the alternative ways in which we approach living bodies, or slide from one sense of embodiment to another without an explicit account of their relations. Keeping these senses distinct allows us to discuss critically the co-existence of human beings, not just as female and male animals, but as women and men with divergent histories and prehistories.