Merleau-Ponty And Bergson: Bodies of Expression and Temporalities in the Flesh (original) (raw)

Perception as Body: Body as Perception: Reading Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception

In his preface of the "Phenomenology of Perception," Merleau-Ponty explicitly claims that "[P]henomenology is accessible only through a phenomenological method." 1 This statement is more than a direction to any discourse made on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. Clearly, it is a warning that to understand phenomenology-if understanding could suffice to mean grasping the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty-one has to be acquainted, primordially, with the phenomenological method. The phenomenological method, on the one hand, is made accessible only by a thorough understanding of phenomenology. In a sense, this statement presents a difficulty in entering the world of Merleau-Ponty because of the enigma of whether to know the phenomenological method first in order to understand phenomenology, or to know phenomenology first in order to understand the phenomenological method.

Preface to Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: On the Body Informed

2022

Never quite eclipsed by other and more fashionable approaches, the account of engaged awareness set out in Phenomenology of Perception has come back into its own in recent years. The new movements of embodied and situated cognition owe much to it, and their leading proponents have been careful to acknowledge its importance. 1 In his magnum opus Maurice Merleau-Ponty exploits both physiology and psychology in the service of his project. He also draws on the diverse expressions

Merleau-Ponty on Embodied Subjectivity from the Perspective of Subject-Object Circularity

The phenomenological point of view of the body is usually appreciated for having introduced the notion of the 'lived' body. We cannot merely analyze and explain the body as one of the elements of the world of objects. We must also describe it, for example, as the center of our perspective on the world, the place where our sensing is 'localized', the agens which directly executes our intentions. However, in Husserl, the idea of the body as lived primarily complements his objectivism: the body (Leib) is an objective and mental reality, a 'double unity', as he writes. In contrast, Merleau-Ponty's later considerations of the body in Phenomenology of Perception tend to the idea of a circular relationship between the objective and subjective dimensions of the body – between the objective and the lived. One of the means to overcome the idea of the body as a site of the correlation between two opposite and complementary realms is, for Merleau-Ponty, the philosophical interpretation of an early neurological notion of 'body schema'. Body schema is neither an idea nor a physiological-physical fact, it is rather a practical diagram of our relationships with the world, an action-based norm in reference to which things make sense. In the recently published preparatory notes for his 1953 courses, Merleau-Ponty dedicates much effort to further developing the notion of body schema, and interprets fresh sources that he did not use in Phenomenology of Perception. Notably, he studies various possibilities of how this practical 'diagram' can be de-differentiated (pathology) or further refined (cognitive and cultural superstructures, symbolic systems), which shows the fundamentally dynamic unity of the body. This paper summarizes the basic elements of Merleau-Ponty's 1953 renewed philosophical interpretation of the notion of body schema, while contrasting it to the more traditional understanding of the body in phenomenology and in recent philosophical texts dealing with body schema.

Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body

Malighetti R. 2005, Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body, in I Quaderni del CREAM, 2005, n° IV. pp.147-160.

Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the body subject arises as a specific problem in the course of a critical exposition of the traditional theories of sense perception. Basically he argues that every theory of perception presupposes a theory of sensuousness, which is itself a theory of the body. On a few occasions he explicitly states that “the body is the subject of perception”. This article reproduces an unpublished paper presented in 1977 at McGill University (reprinted in I Quaderni del CREAM, 2005, n° IV. pp.147-160).