Page 93 - Contribution To Phenomenology

86 MAXINE SHEETS-JOHNSTONE

Many times in the course of thinking of ways in which I might begin
this essay, my thoughts turned back to Paul Valery. While it would have
been appropriate to attempt to situate the essay in the context of
Schutz's work, Valery's provocative piece titled "The Problem of the
Three Bodies''^ proved in the end too magnetic. In this short piece, first
published in 1943, Valery proposes that each of us in our thoughts is not
two but three bodies—"at least." That Valery diverges numerically from
phenomenological and existentialist accounts is precisely what is of
moment.^ He distinguishes not only the felt body from the physical body
but the seen body from both. This "second" body comes after what
Valery terms "the privileged object" that is "My Body" and before the
imaginatively unified but visually disjoint and fragmented body of science,
the body which, as Valery puts it, "has unity only in our thought, since
we know it only for having dissected and dismembered it." In sharp
distinction from the privileged object that is My Body, the second body,
Valery says, "knows no pain, for it reduces pain to a mere grimace."
Valery's three-body schema invites us to consider the living body in
what I call sensory-kinetic terms, and in turn to realize that the usual
living body/physical body distinction can be more finely analyzed and
understood, indeed, to realize that corporeal analyses can be generated
on the basis of sensory-kinetic understandings. Valery's first two bodies
coincide actually with what I have elsewhere described as the tactile-
kinesthetic body and the visual body,^ and his third body with what I
have elsewhere described as the progressively materialized body of
Western science.^ The distinctions constitute a phenomenologically-
informed insight, an insight suggestive not only of the distinctive

^ The essay is actually an essay within an essay. See "Some Simple Reflections
on the Body," in Aesthetics (Collected Works, vol. 13), translated by Ralph Manheim
(New York: Pantheon, 1964), 35-40.
^ One might well wonder whether Husserl's distinction between two bodies, and
two bodies only, is a function of the German language. Having no such ostensibly
complete and ready-made linguistic corporeal categories, Valery's "thoughts" may
have been open to the possibility of a range of bodies.
^ Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Roots of Thinking (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1990). See also Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, "Existential Fit and
Evolutionary Continuities," Synthase 66 (1986), 219-248.
^ Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, "The Materialization of the Body: A History of
Western Medicine, A History in Process," in Giving the Body Its Due, edited by
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 132-
158.