Abstract
Husserl's account of intersubjective recognition in the Cartesian Meditations seems to suffer from an obvious difficulty. It is based on the appearing behavior of Others, which the recognizing subject compares with his own behavior.
If they are harmonious, then the recognition is successful. As Husserl writes in this regard, "The experienced animate organism [Leib] of the Other continues to manifest itself as actually an animate organism solely through its continually harmonious behavior ...
The organism is experienced as a pseudo-organism [Schein-Leib] precisely when it does not agree in its behavior." "Harmonious" means harmonious with the observing subject's behavior: I regard myself and my Other. To the point that the Other behaves as I would in a similar situation, I recognize him as a subject like myself.
The basis for this recognition is the similarlity of our appearing bodies. Yet, as Lanei Rodemeyer has pointed out, "my experience of my own body is nothing like my experience of another person's body." Thus, the supposed "natural' similarity between the two bodies would never be automatically given" as a basis for intersubjective recognition.
How, then, do we resolve this difficulty? The solution, I argue, is to be found in Husserl's account of how we constitute the sense we have of ourselves as embodied. In this account, touch will turn out to be foundational not just for our sense of embodiment but also for our recognition of others