Lived body or animate body 193

the United States. Jan Patočka published his Habilitation thesis in Czech
entitled The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem.

Lipps, Theodor (1851–1914) See also descriptive psychology,

empathy, realist phenomenology
German philosopher, aesthetician and psychologist. Born in Wallhalben, he
studied theology and natural science at Erlangen, Tübingen, Utrecht, and
Bonn. In 1884 he became Professor of Philosophy at Bonn, then Breslau
(1890), and finally the took the chair in Munich (1894), replacing Stumpf,
where he remained until his death in 1914. Lipps was influential for his
approach to psychology, for his investigations of aesthetic experience and,
most importantly, for his theory of empathy, which had a strong influence
on Scheler, Stein and Husserl. Lipps followed an introspectionist way of
doing psychology. Psychology is the study of ‘inner experiences’ and inner
experiences can be apprehended by inner perception. Lipps supported the
idea of the unconscious and was greatly admired by Freud (who drew on
Lipps’ book on humour). Lipps thought of empathy as a kind of entry into
the psychic life of another. This is done through an almost instinctive and
motor ‘inner imitation’. His publications include Fundamentals of Psychic
Life (1883), Aesthetics (1903/1906), The Comic and Humour, Guidelines
to Psychology (1909), and Psychological Studies (1926). In the first decade
following the publication of the Logical Investigations, many of Lipps’
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students at Munich became followers of Husserl. Husserl criticized Lipps’

theory of empathy. Lipps influenced the Munich School of phenomenolo-
gists as well as Scheler and Stein.

Lived bodiliness (Leiblichkeit) See also body, lived body

Lived bodiliness is Husserl’s term for the first-person human experience of
being embodied in a way that one experiences oneself as ‘governing’ or
‘“holding” sway in a body with feelings of willful self-movement. See Crisis
§ 62.

Lived body or animate body (Leib) See also body (Körper), ego,
governing, kinaesthetic sensation, lived bodiliness
The lived or animate body (Leib), i.e. the body as organism, is distinguished
by Husserl from the body (Körper) understood as a piece of physical nature
in many of his works, including Ideas II, Ideas III, Cartesian Meditations,

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 194 Lived body or animate body

and Crisis. In one sense, the human living body can behave exactly like any
other body in nature. It enters into causal and gravitational relations with
other bodies in the world. In this sense the body is, borrowing Descartes’
phrase, res extensa; it has volume, mass, weight, physical parts, and so on.
The main difference between Leib and Körper, however, is that the animate
body (Leib) is always given as my own body (Crisis § 28) and I experience
myself as ‘holding sway’ over this body. The lived body is not just a centre of
experiences but a centre for action and self-directed movement. It consists
of a series of ‘I can’s. My own experience of my own body is unique, given in
a unique way. My apperception of ‘my body’ has an absolute primordiality
for Husserl. It is given as a unity but I am not given to myself as ‘human
being’, but rather, as Husserl says, as an ‘I am’ (see cogito) with capacities
of moving (kinesis), fields of sensation, and so on. I can of course genuinely
perceive my body externally (my hand, say) as an external transcendent
object, but at the same time I have an inner sensuous awareness of it.
It belongs to my ‘interiority’ (Innerlichkeit, Hua XIV, 4). This leads Husserl
even to speak of the manner in which my own body is given as ‘subjective-
objective’ (Hua XIV 6). It is not a simple ‘in itself’. Husserl later emphasizes
the sense in which I am always present to myself within my own sphere of
experience. I have furthermore a sense of myself as ‘governing’ or ‘holding
sway’ (waltend) in this region. Husserl speaks of a ‘living embodied egoity’
(leibliche Ichlichkeit, Crisis § 28). Each of us experiences our embodied
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‘soul’ in our individual case in a primordial way (Crisis § 62). The living
body is never absent from the perceptual field (Crisis §28, p. 106; VI 108).
Husserl thinks of the lived body as constituted in ‘strata’ – perceptual,
actional, and so on. The living body, however, is also the centre of my
experience. It is the means of my perceptual encounter with the world.
It is an ‘organ of perception’. Husserl uses many cognate expressions to
emphasize different aspects of our experience of embodiment, including ‘I
body’ (Ichleib), corporeal body (Leibkörper), and so on. The body is grasped
primarily through touch and kinaesthetic sensations. In Ideas III (V 118),
Husserl explains that the lived body (Leib) should not be thought of as a
physical body with a consciousness added on (as in Descartes) but rather
has to be thought of as a sensory field, a field of localization of sensation.
Husserl is interested in the problem of how we constitute the living body in
our experience. A physical body becomes a body in the lived sense not just
be being seen (this would present merely a physical Körper) but by having

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 Lived experience 195

touch, visual, pain, movement sensations localized within it. (Ideas II § 37)
For Husserl, there is a normal optimal situation for the body – upright,
looking forward. The body is only an ‘incompletely constituted thing’ for
Husserl. Husserl lists various characteristics of the lived body. It is a centre of
orientation, the ‘zero point’ of my space. It is also the centre of my ‘now’.
It is a unifying locus for all my sensory and kinaesthetic experiences (vision,
touch, taste, smell, sense of bodily movement).It is the ‘organ of my will’
and through my body I experience my capacities for free movement as a
kind of immediate ‘holding sway’ (see Crisis § 62).

Lived experience (Erlebnis) See also act, cogitatio, cogito,

consciousness, content, Dilthey, life, Lipps
Husserl uses the term Erlebnis to mean the conscious state as personally
lived through and experienced in the first person. It has also been trans-
lated as ‘lived experience’, ‘mental process’, ‘conscious process’, ‘mental
episode’. The more general term for ‘experience’ in German is Erfahrung,
but Husserl uses the term Erlebnis to refer to individual mental events,
states (Zustände) or processes that can be identified in the stream of
consciousness. In Ideas I § 78, Husserl says that every lived experience
is in itself a ‘flux of becoming’. Husserl found the term ‘lived experience’
(Erlebnis) in Dilthey, Lipps, among others. In his Logical Investigations,
Husserl generally refers to these conscious processes as mental acts (Akte),
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although he makes clear in the Fifth Logical Investigation that he does not
mean to include any sense of wilful activity or action. A lived experience is
also called a ‘thought’ (cogitatio, borrowing from Descartes), understood
in the widest sense to include any identifiable or distinguishable episode
in the stream of consciousness. Strictly speaking, no mental episode is
an independent part of the flow; mental episodes are always embedded in
one seamless flow of consciousness. In Cartesian Meditations § 20, Husserl
says that conscious processes have a priori no ultimate elements as such.
Furthermore, conscious life is not a chaos of intentional processes but a
highly structured, layered and unified complex – there is a ‘unified consti-
tutive synthesis’ at work (CM § 21) Under the epochē, consciousness is
considered independently of the existing, physical, causal world, in order
to be grasped as an appearance in its own right, it is understood as made
up of Erlebnisse, mental processes, each of which has a cogito-cogitatio-
cogitatum structure. Every lived experience contains retentions and

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