The Living body and its position in metaphysics: Merleau-Ponty’s dialogue with Descartes (original) (raw)

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 This article reproduces an unpublished paper presented in 1977 at McGill University (reprinted in I Quaderni del CREAM, 2005, n° IV.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).

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.

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.

On the Phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Merleau-Ponty offers a significant renewal and deepening of the phenomenological project by introducing the body itself as the locus of the “upsurge of the world.” His career represents an unfolding revelation of this fundamental insight, beginning with a realization of the inadequacy of objective/mechanistic psychology and eventually moving toward a never completed project of re-imagining ontology in terms of the self revelation of the world as living existence. In this paper, I concentrate on the first phase of Merleau-Ponty’s career, which includes his challenge to the objectivist tendencies in biology and psychology and his alternative phenomenological vision of life and significance. In Phenomenology of Perception, in particular, Merleau-Ponty argues that scientific knowledge passes over the true nature of perception and, therefore, misses its origin in the silent immersion of the body in a world with which it is always already intimate. Indeed, for Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology reveals, in perceptual experience, the birth of meaning as it is lived by bodies in the subtle dance that is existence.

Merleau Ponty: Subjectivity as The Field of Being within Beings

Transmission: Journal of the Awareness Field - Vol. 4 Awareness as Existingness, 2012

In his later life Maurice Merleau Ponty changed his understanding of how human beings know Being and how human beings know phenomena. His mature understanding went far beyond the early phenomenology of Husserl. His understanding and intellectual position about the subjectivity of mind alone with its corresponding subject object duality dissolved into a experience of non duality within appearance. His dualistic understanding about Being changed to the vast nondual awareness of Being as the source of both subjectivity and objectivity. Before his work on the Visible and the Invisible Merleau Ponty's thought was contained by equating subjectivity with mind alone and with object alone. His view was dualistic and the source of knowing was located in mind alone. Mind means the functions of thinking, feeling, sensation, memory and fantasy.

Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze: Thinking the Lived, Utopic Body (without Organs)

Innen – Außen – Anders: Körper bei Gilles Deleuze und Michel Foucault, Ann-Cathrin Drews, Katharina D. Martin, eds., Transcript: Edition Moderne Postmoderne, 2017

In "Utopian Body" (1966), Michel Foucault presents a complex conception of the body informed by certain phenomenological ideas developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It is a conception that is both paradoxical and unique, inasmuch as it is not found elsewhere in his oeuvre. The utopic body is both here and not here; in its utopic aspects, it always extends beyond its own conceived limits, but at the same time remains a sealed, unified, experiencing entity. In this essay, I will first demonstrate that Foucault's utopic body may be understood as closely related to Merleau-Ponty's appropriation of the lived body. Second, I will show that Merleau-Ponty's lived body and Foucault's utopic body can, together with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Body without Organs (BwO), collectively overcome the dichotomy between a purely utopic body (requiring no actual basis in the real) and the physical, objective body. I conclude by showing that whereas we (as embodied beings) live spatially in a real, concrete world, together , the utopic body-a healthy BwO-and the lived body can promote new, creative ways of pushing the limits of possible experience.

The understanding of the body and movement in Merleau-Ponty

Vol. 42, 1, 2019

The author seeks an explanation for Merleau-Ponty's expression "the body understands", to which a real value is applied: the objects of the world have a signification that the body grasps by way of perception. The analysis focuses on Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of perception and on notes from two of his courses, Le monde sensible et le monde de l'expression and La nature. In these works, there is a constant allusion to the I can as an underlying and grounding mode with regard to the I think. The French philosopher thus grants a central role to movement that demonstrates the interweaving of the body with the world.