“Das Schema unseres Leibes”: Scheler’s Forgotten Influence on the Contemporary Debate About Embodiment

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate the concept of the body schema in Scheler’s works and to show the importance of his wrongly neglected viewpoint in the international debate on embodiment. The concepts of body schema and body image, describing the relation with our own bodily spatiality that enables us to have a sensorimotor engagement with the world, have been discussed for over a century in the fields of phenomenology, psychiatry and the neurosciences. Yet, although the influence of Scheler’s Formalismus is explicitly recognized in Schilder’s Image and Appearance of the Human Body, he is rarely quoted as a source of inspiration concerning the problem of the Leibschema and everybody’s spatial relation to their own body. My purpose is then to show that Scheler has indeed major relevance in the contemporary debate on embodiment. On the one hand, his very early distinction between Leib and Körper (The Idols of Self-Knowledge, GW III, 1912) is of vital importance to pinpoint the phenomenological primacy of the lived dimension, as regards the originary givenness of it over the abstraction of a pure physical sphere. Scheler’s intuition echoes in today’s theories of the embodied mind which, beyond any dualism or reductionism, assert the intrinsic unity of body, movement in the world, and cognition. On the other hand, as far as the specific problem of body schema and body image is concerned, his relevance to the debate becomes partly manifest through the well-known works of Schilder, who abandons his term of Körperschema and agrees with Scheler’s concept of Leib. I also intend to prove that in Shaun Gallagher’s criticism of the historic vagueness of the two terms the clear distinction between a non-aware system of sensorimotor capacities (schema) and an intentional attitude toward the body as object (image) draws on concepts already sketched in Scheler’s Formalismus book, The Human Place in the Cosmos, and Knowledge and Work. As a potential confutation of his account, I take Lisa Guenther’s analysis of the body schema disruption in solitary confinement, which seems to go against Scheler’s thought experiment of the jail in the Formalismus. I argue, instead, that Scheler’s theory is valid if we interpret such a bodily reaction through the notions of a sense of agency and a sense of ownership.