Page 107 - Contribution To Phenomenology

100 MAXINE SHEETSJOHNSTONE

it is clear not only that phenomenological studies are needed, but that
what Husserl described in the name of "psychophysical organism" is
directly related to descriptive renderings of animate form. Husserl himself
consistently emphasizes the animateness of bodies, nonhuman as well as
human, and even including works or products fashioned by bodies: they
too are psycho-physical unities that "have their physical and their spiritual
aspects, they are physical things that are 'animated'.'*^'
Now to realize this psychophysical unity is to realize that sense-making
is a built-in feature of animate life. Making sense to others and making
sense of others is, in the most fundamental sense, in our bones—in
archetypal forms of sensing and moving. We are indeed rational animals:
we make sense of our bodies—and the bodies of other creatures—and
we make sense with our bodies. Fundamental human behefs and practices
are testimonial to this double form of sense-making. But all creatures are
rational in this sense; they all make sense of their bodies and with their
bodies, in manifold ways and to radically different degrees. They
communicate with each other—not only social primates or mammals
generally, for example, but social insects such as ants and bees. They
care for themselves—by licking, by scratching, by preening, and by other
bodily acts. They furthermore both sense and understand their own
bodies and those of others: "If I do this, then I can reach the fruit"; "If
I give chase, the other will run." In particular, any creature that must
learn to move itself discovers—in the deepest Husserlian sense—its own
kinestheses. From a paleontological viewpoint, we could indeed ask how
otherwise such animals, including we humans, could possibly have evolved.
Sense-making is a corporeal fact of life. Our own intercorporeal seenness
is part and parcel of this corporeal fact. Social animals are "born to see
and bound to behold" each other as animate forms.^ More than this,
creatures from butterflies to mountain sheep, from coral fish to humans
are patterned in morphological ways that correlate with eyes that behold.
Were paleoanthropologists to balance renditions of behavior with

^^ Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book^ translated by R. Rojcewicz and A.
Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic: 1989), 333.
^ I borrow the phrase from Erwin W. Straus. ("Born to See, Bound to Behold:
Reflections on the Function of Upright Posture in the Esthetic Attitude," in The
Philosophy of the Body, edited by Stuart F. Spicker [Chicago: Quadrangle Books,
1970], 334-361.)