Embodiment, Leib vs. Körper: is the lived body structurally distinct from the body considered as object, or is this distinction collapsible?

Edmund Husserl, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The lived body (Leib) is structurally distinct from the physical body (Körper) considered as object.1 The lived body is not given in the same way as other objects in the perceptual field.2 It is the zero-point of orientation (the here from which all other heres are measured), the subject of kinaesthetic sensations (the felt sense of one's own movement), the organ of will (the 'I can' as the formal expression of bodily capacity), and the bearer of localized sensations (the touched-touching structure of tactile experience).3

When I look at my hand, the same body is given doubly — as physical object in the visual field and as lived organ of the touch — and the doubling is constitutive, not illusory.4

Sources

  1. Hence when we approach the constitution of the natural Object, "man," we may not already presuppose his Body as a fully constituted material thing but instead must at first pursue what 25 is already constituted prior to, or correlative with, material nature, as regards the psychophysical subject. And here, as before, let us first try to see how far we can advance in a solipsistic consideration. 36.
    Ideas II, p. 170
  2. How the consciousness originates through which my living body nevertheless acquires the ontic validity of one physical body among others, and how, on the other hand, certain physical bodies in my perceptual field come to count as living bodies, living bodies of "alien" ego-subjects—these are now necessary questions.
    The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, p. 150
  3. The Body is "not yet" consti- SUBJECTIVE SELF-MOVEMENT AND OBJECTIVE CORPOREAL MOVEMENT 335 tuted here. Therefore, the question then is: how does the lived experience of the J move (Lam the subject of free sequences of sensations of movement) change into the apprehension: my corporal Body is a moving body just like any other, and the I move has the significance of an Objective, corporeal movement?
    Thing and Space, Lectures of 1907, p. 343
  4. Differences between the visual and tactual realms We find now a striking difference between the sphere of the visual and that of the tactual. In the tactual realm we have the external Object, tactually constituted, and a second Object, the Body, likewise tactually constituted, e.g., the touching finger, 5 and, in addition, there are fingers touching fingers.
    Ideas II, pp. 173–174

Where the argument is made

  • Ideas II §§35-42 on the body as zero-point of orientation, kinaesthesis, the I-can
  • §§54-60 on the personalistic attitude and the body as bearer of the soul
  • §§43-47 on the constitution of psychic reality through the body
  • Cartesian Meditations §44 on the primordial sphere and the lived body

How the argument was received

Ideas II was drafted between 1912 and 1928 but published only posthumously in 1952. Its analyses of the lived body shaped Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945) decisively and through that text the entire phenomenological tradition of embodiment. Modern readers (Welton, Carman, Behnke, Gallagher, Stoller) continue the analysis. The cognitive-science extension (Gallagher, Thompson, Varela's Embodied Mind tradition) takes up the Leib-Körper distinction as a starting point for empirical research.