French Philosophy, Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Maurice Merleau-Ponty - Spaciality

‘Merleau-Ponty presents his main concerns in section b., "The problem of the body" (especially in the final paragraph), and you'll want to think about the problem of thinking about our bodies on the model of the object. But Merleau-Ponty also mentions the problem of "forgetting" perspective (p. 73), and so it's also worth thinking about the importance of recognizing the irremovably perspectival nature of our experience. On this issue, it might be helpful to think about Merleau-Ponty's claim that "the house itself is not the house seen from nowhere, but rather the house seen from everywhere" (p. 71). 

The main issue in Part One, Chapter I, "The Body as an Object and Mechanistic Physiology" is obviously the phantom limb phenomenon, and the way that both physiological and psychological explanations of this phenomenon are inadequate. In their place, Merleau-Ponty insists that we must appeal to the Heideggerian notion of "being-in-the-world." For this reason, much of what Merleau-Ponty says will be familiar, in terms of understanding our experience as primarily prereflective (or "non-thetic"), as a matter of lived and practical engagement, and as undermining the "knowledge" paradigm. In terms of Merleau-Ponty's specific argument, one would be on the way toward grasping the main point in being able to explain his claim that "the phantom arm is not a representation of the arm, but rather the ambivalent presence of an arm" (p. 83). The distinction between the "habitual body" and the "actual body" (p. 84), and the reason why both physiological and psychological explanations participate in objective thinking, are also worth thinking about.’

3 main parts:

Challenging representationalism

Much of merleau ponty is channeling what we’ve read in sartre

Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of embodiment 

• Perceptual experience in general

Sartres point - being for others

• Body is the form

• Argues that other people constitute a formal dimension of our world

Merleau ponty is making the same claim about the body

• The body is not just a “thing” in the world, but it’s a formal thing in which our experiences take place

Phenomenology of perception

• Lived experience...situated lived experience in our world

Lived engagement, situated in our world - understood as embodied

Being in the world - sartre -- form of being in the world is being embodied

Embodiment is just one example of how we are experiencing the world

• Phenomenology of experience, people

  
  

We are embodied

• Embodiment is co-extensive with experience

  
  

To talk about experience is to talk about the body

• Our experience is embodied and needs to be understood in terms of our embodiment

  
  

Representational thinking that phenomenology is teaching - subjects in the world 

• “It’s only when we attend to the body we get out of dualism”

  
  

Corrects the course of western philosophy, european philosophy - corrects it’s ignorance of the body

Spaciality

• Our body is not some vehicle, machine that our body inhabits (“inmaterial subject” - our body is our subjectivity - our subjectivity is our body

  
  

Our body is our condition of experiencing other people

• Not just how we navigate space, but also the level of communication

• Body is experience of thought and truth

  
  

Truth and thinking - will reflect inescapable body situation

• Only way to experience body in the world - existentially

  
  

Dualistic view of the world is not adequate for handling phenomenology

• Limb lost == demonstrate inadequacies of physiological 

• Phantom limb - eludes 

• It cannot be understood causality 

  
  

Mind body dualism

Heidegarrian approach (human world exists before subjects, objects, systems andd detached rational reflection)

Object subject to laws of causality -- influential in how we talk about our bodies (medical context) 

Body - object...a thing amongst other things

Notes for reading merleau ponty

• Seems to be more in control of his writing than sartre (all over the place)

• Poetic way of saying things as opposed to putting things clearly

• Sometimes he’ll say more clear statements

  
  

Physiological and psychological accounts -- those aren’t absolutely essential

• Material causality rather than psychological causality (cartesian cogito) - rene descartes...demonstrating the attainability of certain knowledge

• Trying to pave a path between overly physiological or overly psychological 

  
  

He often writes in the voice of the empiricist or rationalist (then you realize later he’s talking through different voices - or of his opponent)

Physiological and psychological ideas of the phantom limb

• Key passage: page 84

Our bodies are key in the world -- our body cannot be reduced to simply worldy objectivity (worldy causality)

• Objective thinking

“For if it is true that I am conscious of my body through the world and if my body is the unperceived term at the center of the world toward which every object turns its face, then it is true for the same reason that my body is the pivot of the world. I know that the objects have several faces because I can move around them, and in this sense I am conscious of the world by means of my body. At the same moment that my usual world gives rise to habitual intentions in me, I can no longer actually unite with it if I have lost a limb. Manipulable objects, precisely insofar as they appear as manipulable, appeal to a hand that I no longer have.”

We must understand the world and body as coupling - rendering mind body dualism

Mind- body dualism - can’t really appreciate the lived source of the phantom source experience

Page 79 - phantom limb