Wittgenstein's distinction between the self as subject and the self as object supports treating the lived body as subject rather than object.

The first objection comes from Merleau-Ponty (1945: 92), who claims: “The body is not one more among external objects”. He draws the distinction between the objective body made of muscles and bones, and the lived body (corps propre), that is, the body that we experience in pre-reflective awareness. He argues that the lived body is not an object that can be perceived from various perspectives, left aside or localized in objective space. On the contrary, it is the zero-point (Husserl 1913), from w