A short introduction to the philosophy of embodiment of Merleau-Ponty
Merleau-Ponty criticised the science of his day of still being stuck in a Cartesian and dualistic ontology, an ontology which according to him blurs our scientific understanding of the world. This dominant Cartesian self-interpretation of science sees the world only from a disengaged and objectifying stance. The world and the human body in this perspective are seen as objects from the outside whose behavior is determined by objective laws that are determinable by natural science. Because the scientistic inclined scientist gives a higher priority to his objectifying stance towards the world he also tends to give a higher authority to his scientific models over our everyday involved experience of the world. That scientism is not something of the past but something very prevalent in contemporary medicine, cognitive science and psychology to name a few. Scientism in the end results in a deterministic worldview which is inconsistent with our everyday experience.
This crisis in science according to Merleau-Ponty can only be ended if we break with our objectifying stance towards the world and return to our perceptive life, our original openness towards the world . In perceptual life the world is never fully given to us as an object outside of us, we are situated in and involved with it. The perceptual world always retains a certain ambiguity and openness. This ambiguity of the perceptual world becomes apparent in for example the way we perceive objects. We perceive the unity of an object not through an intellectual reconstruction of it, rather it is the result of our practical engagement with the world. We know that a building we see has a backside not through reflection, but because we can move around it and can therefore anticipate it. Breaking with the objectifying stance towards the world reveals the importance of our body in the perceptual process, Merleau-Ponty explains this:
“The perceptual synthesis thus must be accomplished by the subject, which can both delimit certain perspectival aspects in the objects, the only ones actually given, and at the same time go beyond them. This subject, which takes a point of view, is my body as the field of perception and action.”
Perception necessarily has this perspectival aspect; phenomena are never fully given but always present themselves in a kind of partial way. Merleau-Ponty calls this the paradox of immanence and transcendence in perception:
“Immanence, because the perceived object cannot be foreign to him who perceives; transcendence, because it always contains something more than what is actually given.”
But while the objects I perceive can be both present as well as absent in my perceptual life, my body as a point of view from which I perceive the things in the world is an always present companion that remains hidden in the background. It is the continuous presence of my body that constitutes my subjectivity in relation to the changing environment of my perceptual world. In Merleau-Ponty’s view the perceiving subject does not precede the perceived environment, it comes into being in the recognition of the perceptual world. The perceiving subject constitutes its environment as a surrounding world but at the same time can only experience itself in relation to this surrounding world. Merleau-Ponty therefore rather speaks of ‘being towards the world’ instead of speaking about the subject and the world as two separate domains . Only from this primordial unity it becomes possible differentiate a subject and its environment.
In perception we do not experience an atomic world of disconnected parts and scientific laws we experience an immediate meaningful whole that is already constituted before our reflective and scientific inquiries and reconstructions of the world. We can thus say that our conscious and reflective subjectivity is preceded by another subject that constitutes the world before us. This subject is the body-subject that presents the world to me with an certain coherence and wholeness which precedes my conscious reflection and willing. I can not choose my body or the way I experience the world, my body rather creates a space from which all willing and knowing first become possible. This pre-reflective incarnate being towards the world provides our world with an irreducible background of significance which precedes conscious reflection.
How our body-subject provides our world a pre-reflective meaning becomes apparent if we observe how we experience space. We do not experience an abstract and infinite Newtonian space that we create in thinking about space, we experience a lived space in which things are nearby, far away, left or right from us. This lived or oriented space is a space that surrounds us and is not something that exists independent from our embodiment. Terms like nearby and far away, front and back only become meaningful for an incarnate subject that has a front and a back and experiences absence and presence. The constitution of space is not done by a free and thinking subject. In thought I can imagine seeing the earth from the moon or seeing myself from an external perspective. In my real incarnate existence though I can not escape the way my body constitutes my world. The abstract notion of space that is present in science is only understandable on the basis of the already given lived space .
A return to the perceptual world thus reveals how our world has an already given meaning and that our body as the seat of our subjectivity plays a central but hidden role in the constitution of this meaning. It is only from this given integral experience of the world that we come to a conscious reflective explication of the world. The body-subject as a point of view from which I experience the world thus poses a daunting problem to the intellect which discovers that it not autonomous but founded on a deeper pre-conscious subjectivity which precedes its own conscious life.
Merleau-Ponty thinks that the classical methods of philosophy and science; reflection and induction, are not able to retrieve the body-subject. This is an important break between him and Husserl. Husserl thought that through the phenomenological and eidetic reduction we would be able to bracket the world and describe how we as a subject constitute the world. But according to Merleau-Ponty even the most deepest reflection and self-observation can not reveal how meaning like space, the experience of colour or sexuality is constituted in the dialogue between body-subject and world. The same problem arises with induction, the inductive method tries to connect different facts into a general idea or law. This general idea though can not be found in the facts and can never find a exhaustive final confirmation in experience. In addition as we argued before, we do not experience a world of isolated facts, we isolated facts from an already given meaningful whole, a whole which we do not constitute ourselves but is the result of the dialogue of the body-subject and world. Merleau-Ponty consequently argues against subjectivism and objectivism which both try to show how meaning is founded in either our ideas and accessible trough reflection or in the features of the objective world accessible through induction.
In order to go beyond subjectivism and objectivism Merleau-Ponty tries to find new ways to get a deeper insight in the constitution of subject and world in perception. He does this by studying people whose normal relationship to the world is disturbed by either neurological dissease or psychological experiments. In these cases the hidden-role that the body-subject plays in constituting our world comes to the fore. In his main work The Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty tries to reveal through a variety of cases the hidden presence of the body-subject in different domains of our lives such as sexuality, speech, motility, sensual experience and intersubjectivity. But although these disruptions provides us with certain insights in the body-subject Merleau-Ponty nevertheless still holds that we can never fully represent our incarnate being towards the world, because it would require that we as subjects would somehow precede our own birth as a body-subject in this world.
By emphasising the primacy of our perceptual experience and revealing the covert role that our body plays in the constitution of our perceptual world Merleau-Ponty wants to refute the Cartesian philosophy that was present in philosophy and science of his day. Merleau-Ponty thus does not argue against the disengaged stance of the scientist when he objectifies the world but against a perspective that absolutises this disengaged stance and separates the reflective subject from the perceptual world it is situated in. A disembodied ontology will inherently distort the investigative and explanatory efforts of science itself. This is especially the case in cognitive science an area of science which adresses what thinking, acting and perceiving actually is. An ontology that understands cognition as a strictly mental process that is separate from the natural world will therefore disregard the importance of the embodiment and the situatedness of the cognizing agent.
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