Embodied Phenomenology: The Sexual Body and The Formation of Identity

Identity is inseparable from the body. Indeed, in many ways, the body determines an individual's action and subsequent identity. And while meaning within human existence is not entirely dependent on the body, the body serves as a lighthouse for which meaning is created from the dark sea of physical and personal context. The lived-body can be used to create a schema of importance, crafting various levels of meaning that form the identity of an individual. It can then be said that the meaning one attributes to the lived-body is dependent on the actions the lived-body engages in. Sexuality allows for the creation of an intentional and objective self that differs from the lived-bodies it engages with. 

Sexuality has an existential significance as it implies existence. Moreover, sexuality is an expression of the relationship between mind and body. The vessel of the body can not engage in a communicative activity without the ability to interpret communicative symbols. Sensual acts carry a special importance with them due this duality. It is not only the action between two bodies, but the relationship between two points of intentionality. The affordances of another and the affordances of self are simultaneously considered. Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes the existential significance of sexuality in Phenomenology of Perception. It should be noted that Merleau-Ponty breaks from positions within psychology that reduce sexuality to an instinctual level. It is precisely the intentionality of sexuality that allows for meaning. Subsequently, this meaning is necessary to the creation of personal identity within the human experience. 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s embodied phenomenology directs the question of meaning to lay directly in the human experience. Merleau-Ponty provides a phenomenological account of the body that many thinkers before him, including Heidegger, had failed to do. While maintaining that consciousness is not a priori, Merleau-Ponty sought to discover how intentionality arises from the body. 

The body can be understood to be the experiencer of the world. It is the object that understands phenomenon subjectively. The body itself is not something that is ever observed on an objective level. According to Merleau-Ponty, the body can not be removed from meaning-giving acts. Thinking objectively of the body reduces it to a “highly polished machine which the ambiguous notion of behavior nearly made us forget”. Perception arises from the body. One can not gain access to an object without the perception that must come through the body. Indeed, it is impossible to “acquire detached knowledge” of stimuli and other objects. Perception is the combination of different modalities. All of these modalities necessitate the body to actualize whether this be the motoric or perceptual. 

Many thinkers have reduced sexuality to instinct, as if it is simply a necessary reflex of the body to maintain livelihood. Freudian psychology characterizes sexual desire as libido and lessens sexuality to an instinctual level that control human behavior. This is not the case. There can be no unintentional reflexes. The body at its adult state has organized its actions to be dependent on context and ability. Merleau-Ponty describes “reflexes themselves are never blind processes: they adjust themselves to direction”. Thus sexuality can not be minimized to an action of pure human physiology. The context dependency of sexuality requires consciousness; the lived-body is not simply responding to specific stimuli within a specific location. Rather, the lived-body is actively engaged in sexual activity and is communicative through movement. The communication presupposed verbal language and requires another to receive communicative acts. It is in this convergent space of multiple bodies, that the separation of lived-bodies is created. 

Touching is automatically communicative. The touch between humans implies the existence of one while simultaneously creating a relationship between the two. Touch can convey dispositions that exemplify or define this relationship and thus touch is an expression that carries a wealth of meaning. Moreover, the same act of physical touch can be implicative of different dispositions depending on the context. The motility of the lived-body allows for different interactions with others, a conversation between bodies that allows for individual agency to be realized. It is only within the sexual context, can a sexual identity, one the is unique to the individual, be built. Merlea-Ponty holds sexuality and gender to be at the core of human beings. This is not the case. Rather sexuality and sexual acts are one component of body schema. The body serves as a realm of possibilities, serval of those being illuminated by the acknowledgment of the sexual identity of one’s self. 

Anne Carson states that “the self forms at the edge of desire” and indeed a sense of self is inevitably extracted from sexual encounters as they necessitate desire. While Carson is addressing desire and eros more broadly as a mental phenomenon, the relationship between desire and the body. Merleau-Ponty points to the significance of body language and its use as communication in sexuality. Moreover, desire derived from the affordances of both the lived-body and the bodies of sexual partners. Thus it is due to the body’s role in sexuality that desire and subsequently self can be formed. The subjective self extracted from the sexual experience exists in the context of lived-bodies. 

Bibliography

Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 

1986. 

Moran, Dermot, and Timothy Mooney. The Phenomenology Reader. Routledge, 2010.