Perception and its Development in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology (henceforth Perception and its Development) is a volume of fifteen papers from different authors, each addressing the most significant (or at least the most explicitly addressed) topic of the philosophical path of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that is perception. Merleau-Ponty states the phenomenologist replaces intellectualist and empiricist conceptions of space with a description. Read More: Part 2, Chapter 4: Merleau-Ponty discusses the intertwining of natural and historical time. Nature (world) penetrates to the center of pers. Read More: Part 3, Chapter 1.
Introduction
- Merleau-Ponty wrote that space is existential and that the existence is spatial1. Human being is thus fundamentally related to space. Following Merleau-Ponty’s thought, we would like to investigate the issues regarding the relationship between Being and space in the contemporary architecture.
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological philosophy suggests the search for the self and consciousness need not be focused on the space within our skulls.
- The Debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty provides a balanced portrait of the intellectual relationship between these two men. Essays by leading scholars as well as selections from the primary texts of Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir address the numerous points of contact and cover the major themes of the debate from the different periods in their shared history.
Merleau-Ponty (French phenomenological philosopher, born in 1908 and deceased in 1961) refers to habit in various passages of his Phenomenology of Perception as a relevant issue in his philosophical and phenomenological position. Through his exploration of this issue he explains both the pre-reflexive character that our original linkage with the world has, as well as the kind of “understanding” that our body develops with regard to the world. These two characteristics of human existence bear a close relation with the vision of an embodied mind sustained by Gallagher and Zahavi in their work The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. Merleau-Ponty uses concepts like those of the lived or own body and of lived space in order to emphasize, from a first-person perspective, the co-penetration that exists between subject and world.
Gallagher and Zahavi have regained the experience of phenomenology, especially that of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, to contribute to the development of the cognitive sciences. Via the phenomenological approach to the reality of habit, a new understanding of the body becomes possible for us, such that it becomes characterized “as subject, as experiencer, as agent,” and at the same time we can understand “the way the body structures our experience” (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008). Additionally, the idea of a pre-reflexive understanding is conceived of by these authors as a way for refuting those introspective or reflexive explanations that derive from the Cartesian tradition and which are promoted by certain contemporary authors (see, for instance, Dennett, 1991; Price and Aydede, 2005).
In this article I propose to explain the role that habit plays in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and the use that Gallagher and Zahavi make of his theory in their work on cognitive science. The goal of these authors in the work mentioned above goes beyond that of an analysis of habit: they want to demonstrate that “phenomenology addresses issues and provides analyses that are crucial for an understanding of the true complexity of consciousness and cognition,” and thereby reverse the contemporary situation where this perspective is frequently absent from current debates (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008). For this reason, the neuroscientific community could know a more unified perspective of human behavior. The habit explanation given by Merleau-Ponty shows a kind of body knowledge that cannot be exclusively understood by neurological processes.
This paper could provide the neuroscientific community with a more unified perspective of human behavior. The explanation given by Merleau-Ponty of the habit shows a kind of corporeal knowledge which cannot be only clarified by neurological processes.
Embodied Consciousness
According to Merleau-Ponty, there is no hard separation between bodily conduct and intelligent conduct; rather, there is a unity of behavior that expresses the intentionality and hence the meaning of this conduct. In habits, the body adapts to the intended meaning, thus giving itself a form of embodied consciousness. Indeed, for our author, corporeal existence constitutes a third category that unifies and transcends the physiological and psychological (cf. Merleau-Ponty, 2012; see also Merleau-Ponty, 1964).
For this reason, Gallagher and Zahavi hold that the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty incorporates the body as “a constitutive or transcendental principle, precisely because it is involved in the very possibility of experience” (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008). From the perspective of cognitive science, they propose that “the notion of an embodied mind or a minded body, is meant to replace the ordinary notions of mind and body, both of which are derivations and abstractions” (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008). They note that, by way of confirming the priority of the body, the biological fact of the vertical position of the human body has consequences in the perception and action of the person (cf. Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008).
Habit and Understanding of the World
Merleau-Ponty explains that the lived human body relates to a space that is also lived, i.e., that is already incorporated into the world understood as the horizon of its coming to be. According to this view, habit presupposes a form of “understanding” that the body has of the world in which it carries out its operations. An operant intentionality (fungierende Intentionalität) is established with the world, using the terminology of Husserl (see Merleau-Ponty, 2012). That is, the corporeal subject is inserted into a world that provokes certain questions or problems that must be resolved. Therefore, one can speak of a motivation on the part of the world, although not of a necessity, because the response is not mechanical or determined. Between the movement of the body and the world, no form of representation is established, but rather the body “adapts” to the invitation of the world (cf. Merleau-Ponty, 2012). On the basis of this idea of Merleau-Ponty, Gallagher and Zahavi add: “The environment calls forth a specific body-style so that the body works with the environment and is included in it. The posture that the body adopts in a situation is its way of responding to the environment” (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008). These affirmations are supported by studies that show that the nervous system does not process any information that does not proceed from corporeality (cf. Zajac, 1993; Chiel and Beer, 1997).
Habit bears a direct relation to this form of dialog between environment and subject. Its role is to establish in time those behaviors or forms of conduct that are appropriate for responding to the invitations of the environment. Merleau-Ponty, in establishing the etymological root of the term “habit,” notes that the word have states a relation with what has been acquired by the subject as a possession, which in the case of the body is conserved as a dynamic corporeal scheme (Merleau-Ponty, 2012). Thanks to habit, the person establishes appropriate relations with the world that surrounds him or her without needing any prior reasoning, but rather in a spontaneous or immediate way (cf. Merleau-Ponty, 2012). Gallagher and Zahavi also refer to this form of pre-reflexive understanding, relating it to proprioception, i.e., those sensations by which we know where and how our body is, and that are in our consciousness in a tacit manner (cf. Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008; see also Legrand, 2006). This perspective allows them to distance themselves from representationalist interpretations—for instance, those of Damasio (1999) and Crick (1995), among others—that do not recognize that perception is meaningful in itself (cf. Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008)
We can speak of an engagement of body and world, in which a relation is created that serves as the basis or ground for the rest of the actions of the subject, and which permits him or her to be especially “at home,” comfortable, able to move in an oriented way in a given space (cf. Talero, 2005; Merleau-Ponty, 2012). Just as Gallagher and Zahavi note, this connection with the world does not only mean knowing the physical environment in which the body is situated, “but to be in rapport with circumstances that are bodily meaningful” (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008).
Habitual and Actual Body
Merleau Ponty Philosophy
According to Merleau-Ponty, the situated character of the person explains that there is, at the same time, a “general” existence as well as an existence that is linked with the effectiveness of action, and which we can call “personal.” Being anchored in the world makes the person renounce a part of his or her protagonism because he or she already possesses a series of habitualities. In this counterpoint between the general and the protagonistic, there occurs “this back-and-forth of existence that sometimes allows itself to exist as a body and sometimes carries itself into personals acts” (Merleau-Ponty, 2012). Merleau-Ponty distinguishes the habitual body—that of general and pre-reflexive existence—from the actual—that of personal and reflexive existence—understanding that both always co-penetrate each other. He explains that in the behaviors of mentally ill or brain damaged persons the nexus between the habitual and the actual body are broken (cf. Merleau-Ponty, 2012). In these cases, the person can reproduce certain habitual movements, but not those that require an actual understanding of the situation. For instance, a person can perform movements like touching his or her nose with a hand, but cannot respond to an order to touch the nose with a ruler. In contrast, in the non-pathological subject there is no rupture between either form of movement, since he or she is able to grasp this analogous form of movement toward the nose that the sick person cannot achieve (cf. Merleau-Ponty, 2012). The healthy person is able to come and go from the habitual to the actual. He or she is able to readjust the habitual to the actual. The world appears to the healthy subject as unfinished, offering him or her a set of possibilities such that experience “is shaped by the insistence of the world as much as it is by my embodied and enactive interests” (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008).
The Primacy of Practical Action and the Grasping of Meaning
In the linkage of the subject with the world, effective, practical action has primacy. In the words of our philosopher, there is always “another self that has already sided with the world, that is already open to certain of its aspects and synchronized with them” (Merleau-Ponty, 2012; see also Talero, 2005). Merleau-Ponty frequently expresses the close relation between body and world with the term “inhabit,” as referring to that which is known by the body and which translates into a knowledge of what to do with an object without any reflexion coming in between (cf. Merleau-Ponty, 2012). Gallagher and Zahavi corroborate these affirmations with research that relates perception and kinesthesia, as well as with the “enactive theory of perception” (see Varela et al., 1991). In their studies, they show that perception is not a passive reception of information, but instead implies activity, specifically, the movement of our body.
Merleau-Ponty explains that habitual behavior arises on the basis of a set of situations and responses that, despite not being identical, constitute a community of meaning (cf. Merleau-Ponty, 2012). This is possible because the body “understands” the situation in the face of which it must act. For example, in the case of motor habits, such as dancing, the body “traps” and “understands” movement. This is explained by the fact that the subject integrates certain elements of general motility that permit him or her to grasp what is essential to the dance in question and perform it with an ease that is expressed in the mastery of the body over the movements (cf. Merleau-Ponty, 2012). The ability acquired “will lead to performance without explicit monitoring of bodily movement; the skill becomes fully embodied and embedded within the proper context” (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008). This corporealization of habit agrees fully with the idea of Merleau-Ponty that the body is a correlate of the world: “Habit expresses the power we have of dilating our being in the world, or of altering our existence through incorporating new instruments” (Merleau-Ponty, 2012). Gallagher and Zahavi take from Merleau-Ponty this non-automatic understanding of habitual acts that, despite not requiring an express intentionality, nonetheless form part of the operative intentionality that was mentioned at the beginning of this article (cf. Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008). Citing Leder, they state: “A skill is finally and fully learned when something that once was extrinsic, grasped only through explicit rules or examples, now comes to pervade my own corporeality. My arms know to swim, my mouth can at last speak the language” (Leder, 1990).
Gallagher and Zahavi are able, over the course of their book, to demonstrate the error of that naturalism that defends objective natural science as the only legitimate manner of understanding the mind (cf. Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008; one example, among others, of this posture is found in Sellars, 1963 and in Dennett, 1991). In contrast, they hold that there is a reciprocal influence between science and phenomenology, just as Varela et al. (1991) understood it via his neurophenomenology based on aspects of the phenomenology of perception of Merleau-Ponty (cf. Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008; see also Gallagher, 1997).
Conflict of Interest Statement
The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Footnotes
1. ^Cf. also the works that these authors cite by Straus (1966); Lakoff and Johnson (1980); Lakoff and Núñez (2001).
2. ^Cf. Merleau-Ponty (2012). In chap. IV of the Introduction, entitled “The Phenomenal Field,” he explains the vital communication with the world that we are given via sensation and perception.
3. ^Gallagher and Zahavi show that Sartre also shares with Merleau-Ponty the idea of being one's own body, rather than possessing it; cf. Sartre (1956) and Merleau-Ponty (2012). In this work he affirms: “But I am not in front of my body, I am in my body, or rather I am my body.”
4. ^For a more detailed analysis, see Kelly (2007).
5. ^These ideas, which were already present in Husserl's thought (1970), are taken up by authors such as Noë (2004); Gibbs (2006).
6. ^This concept deserves a treatment that I cannot give it in this article, especially after the appearance in 1999 of the book Naturalizing Phenomenology.
References
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Crick, F. (1995). The Astonishing Hypothesis. London: Touchstone.
Damasio, A. R. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens. San Diego, CA: Harcourt.
Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness Explained. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co.
Gallagher, S. (1997). Mutual enlightenment: recent phenomenology in cognitive science. J. Conscious. Stud. 4, 195–214.
Gallagher, S., and Zahavi, D. (2008). The Phenomenological Mind: an Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. New York, NY: Routledge
Gibbs, R. W. (2006). Embodiment and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Husserl, H. (1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An Introduction to Phenomenology. Transl. ed E. D. Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Kelly, S. (2007). “Seeing things in Merleau-Ponty,” in The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, eds T. Carman and M. B. N. Hansen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 74–110.
Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, G., and Núñez, R. E. (2001). Where Mathematics Comes from: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Leder, D. (1990). The Absent Body. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Legrand, D. (2006). The bodily Self. The sensori-motor roots of pre-reflexive self-consciousness. Phenomenol. Cogn. Sci. 5, 89–118. doi: 10.1007/s11097-005-9015-6
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). Signs. Transl. ed R. C. McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). The Phenomenology of Perception. Transl. ed D. A. Landes. London; New York: Routledge.
Noë, A. (2004). Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Price, D. D., and Aydede, M. (2005). “The experimental use of introspection in the scientific study of pain and its integration with third-person methodologies: the experiential-phenomenology approach,” in Pain: New Essays on its Nature and the Methodology of its Study, ed M. Aydede (Cambridge MA: MIT Press), 243–273.
Sartre, J. P. (1956). Being and Nothingness. Transl. ed H. E. Barnes. New York, NY: Philosophical Library.
Sellars, W. (1963). Science, Perception and Reality. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Straus, E. (1966). Philosophical Psychology. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Talero, M. (2005). Perception, normativity and selfhood in Merleau-Ponty: the spatial ‘level’ and existential space. Southern J. Philos. XLIII, 443–461. doi: 10.1111/j.2041-6962.2005.tb01962.x
Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., and Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Pubmed Abstract | Pubmed Full Text | CrossRef Full Text
Recently, I’ve noticed something strange about what my body does while I’m flicking through apps or reading on my phone. I’ve become conscious of my irregular breathing patterns, and how much tension I’m holding in my back and shoulders. The technologist Linda Stone has noted something similar, describing the way her breath becomes shallow, and sometimes temporarily stops altogether, when she sits down to work on her emails in the morning. She terms the problem ‘screen apnea’.
Perhaps even more striking for me, though, has been the realisation that I’m often simply unaware of my body altogether. It’s as though, when I enter into a digital ‘space’, my body as good as disappears. This perhaps explains why I’ve always found the narrative of online platforms competing to maximise and monetise ‘eyeballs on screens’ to be vaguely unsettling. The problem is not just that this paints a totally mechanistic picture of the human organism: it’s also that this disembodied picture aligns all too well with how it actually feels to be totally absorbed in some ‘content’ on my phone for 30 minutes at a stretch.
So while we know by now that tech can hijack the mind, what do we miss when we ignore what’s going on from a bodily perspective? Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the 20th-century French philosopher and influential voice within the tradition known as phenomenology, can serve as our guide here. He went further than any other Western thinker in placing our embodiment at the heart of an entire philosophical system. In our technologically mediated lives, Merleau-Ponty can help diagnose the unease we feel about the disappearance of the beating, pulsing body – and its reduction to the status of a mere object. Moreover, he elucidates what we overlook when we don’t make the body central to our understanding of our relationships with others and to the wider ecological context we’re immersed within.
To carry Merleau-Ponty’s insights into our everyday lives, I suggest that we can apply the simple notion of being present – carefully attending to the here and now of experience. Doing so flips the Western cultural tendency to privilege mind over body; it also brings a fresh perspective to practices such as mindfulness, which we’re often enjoined to use to counteract the distractibility and dissatisfaction of our digital lives. Perhaps most importantly, though, a return to embodied presence can lead us to a powerful critique of other dichotomies, such as self/other and human/nature. How might centring ourselves around our embodiment pave the way towards a radically different relationship with our communities, and even the larger ‘body’ of the Earth?
Merleau-Ponty’s work emerged from a richly embodied context of his own. The social and intellectual life of Paris in the late-1940s and ’50s, spilling out from the smoke-filled cafés and jazz bars of the Left Bank, must have been an exciting one to inhabit after the horrors and destitution of the Second World War. As Sarah Bakewell recounts in At the Existentialist Café (2016), Merleau-Ponty became friends with Simone de Beauvoir when they first studied philosophy together, both aged 19, and he got to know Jean-Paul Sartre shortly after. Some years later, the three of them would go on to launch the political journal Les Temps modernes. In contrast to Sartre (‘loud-mouthed’, ‘uncompromising’) and Beauvoir (‘a creature of strong judgments’), Bakewell portrays Merleau-Ponty as someone who generally ‘looked for multiple sides to any situation’.
Perhaps this quality, together with his ‘perfect ease’ in the company of others, is one reason why Merleau-Ponty was almost universally liked by those who met him. In contrast to most philosophers of his time, he was particularly taken by the mysteries and subtleties of non-verbal communication and eye contact. He claimed that we gesture and connect with one another through an expressive, ambiguous space of ‘intercorporeality’ – a space that exists among and between our bodies. Fittingly enough, Bakewell reports that Merleau-Ponty was regarded as hands-down the best dancer of all the thinkers in the Left Bank jazz scene at that time.
Merleau-Ponty’s insights started from the simple idea that we don’t so much ‘have’ as ‘inhabit’ our bodies, living with them and through them in a complex social world. To make this clear, he distinguished between two notions of the body. There’s the ‘objective body’ that, like other physical objects, has a particular size, weight, buoyancy and so on; it’s what you assess when you weigh yourself on the scales, say, or when you pose for a selfie. But far more important is what he called the ‘lived body’: the body through which we touch and feel and move. And this latter notion, he wrote, grounds us as being ‘body-subjects’ before all else.
This premise goes against the grain: from Plato through René Descartes and the scientific revolution, Western thinking has treated the body as secondary to the mind, an object in a world of objects. Merleau-Ponty understood the need to treat the body in this way when it came to specific scientific or empirical investigations. But as a general position on ‘how things are’, he found it to be deeply problematic, since the body as we actually experience it is not a mere object. You’d never need to ‘look for’ your right arm in the way you might look for a pair of scissors around your desk, as he quipped in Phenomenology of Perception (1945). More generally, he continued: ‘I cannot conceive myself as nothing but a bit of the world, a mere object of biological, psychological or sociological investigation.’ The underlying problem, Merleau-Ponty believed, was that philosophers had become so caught up in abstractions and theorisations about the world that they’d moved far away from the texture of what real life, as an experience and phenomenon, was actually like.
Merleau-Ponty wrote of the importance of adopting an ‘attentiveness and wonder’ towards the world
Phenomenology sought to address precisely this issue. The phenomenologist’s task – dating back to the pioneering work of Edmund Husserl around the turn of the 20th century – was to do justice to describing what our everyday, lived experience is actually like before rushing to explain it. Merleau-Ponty took up this challenge, and stuck to it throughout his career, with an ongoing interest in perception: ‘true philosophy’, he wrote in the introduction to Phenomenology of Perception, ‘consists in relearning to look at the world’.
In that early work, Merleau-Ponty set out two key insights that would become canonical. First, he said, we always find ourselves situated in a particular historical, physical and social setting. Rather than Descartes’s detached ego or the empiricist’s objective ‘view from nowhere’, Merleau-Ponty pointed out that, when you enquire into your everyday experience, you always find yourself in some way involved with the world around you. Seeing my neighbour leaving her flat at the same time as me, for example, I experience greeting her as a familiar person, as someone with meaning within my ‘situated’ life. In our day-to-day lives, we experience a shared world in which cultural objects – Merleau-Ponty cites roads, pipes, churches and villages – have meanings that we share with other people.
Secondly, Merleau-Ponty drew attention to the body being revealed not as a lump of matter but as the breathing, beating centre of our experience – the ‘lived’ body. And in contrast to the Enlightenment tendency to abstract towards a theoretical position of perfect objectivity, Merleau-Ponty described features of our embodiment that perhaps seem too obvious, and mundane, to mention: how you always perceive things from a particular perspective, how the particular configuration of your body means that you never directly see the back of your neck. Take the experience of depth: because I encounter a world that includes both my own body and yet spreads into the distance, the philosopher David Abram writes, ‘that cloud that I see can be a small cloud close overhead or a huge cloud far above; meanwhile what I had thought was a bird turns out to be a speck of dust on my glasses’. Through perception, the body is always called upon to engage, to choose, to focus the world before any verbal reflection comes into play, and sets the scene for whatever we go on to reflectively think and say and do. This is why Merleau-Ponty concluded that bodily engagement with the world is more basic than deliberation about it: not as a way of privileging the physical over the mental, but as a description of what it’s like to move through the world, mind and body working as one.
How might we apply this worldview to our highly ‘head-based’ lives? The notion of being present in the here and now, rather than getting caught up in the nonstop chatter of the mind, offers us a natural way to ‘live and breathe’ Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. He wrote, in particular, of the importance of adopting an ‘attentiveness and wonder’ towards the world. To engage with the world phenomenologically, he suggested, we must embrace being ‘a perpetual beginner’: coming back again and again to what we perceive before us, remaining ‘open to the adventures of experience’.
This is especially pertinent in the digital era, and not only because of the ‘noise’ of limitless distractions. More pervasively, it pushes against the ‘solutionism’ that radiates outwards from Silicon Valley, in which human lives are interpreted as a series of problems to be solved through sophisticated analysis of data. On this view, things such as mindfulness practices – which can involve resting your attention on the sensations of breathing – become just another ‘life hack’. It’s true that these techniques can offer a host of benefits, including a boost to our capacity for metacognitive awareness – an awareness of our own negative (or positive) thoughts as thoughts rather than as unfiltered reality, which can help prevent relapses into anxiety and depression. But connecting to the aliveness of the breathing body offers us something more basic: these moments literally re-source us, putting us in contact, as body-subjects, with our most primordial mode of being. In tech circles, ‘dwell time’ is used to refer to how long a user spends on a particular webpage – but perhaps we can reclaim the expression for time spent intentionally dwelling in a state of embodied presence without seeking to ‘get’ anything out of it.
Of course, the word ‘mindfulness’ is somewhat at odds with a focus on embodiment, and some characterisations of mindfulness accentuate this apparent contrast. One popular analogy compares meditation with physical exercise: just as you work out in the gym to get bigger muscles, the analogy goes, mindfulness offers you a ‘mental workout’. This reinforces a mind/body split, with the role of the body reduced to little more than an object of attention. But if mindfulness is cast as ‘an alert participation in the ongoing process of living’, to cite the elegant definition of the Buddhist monk Henepola Gunaratana, then it seems to fit particularly well as a practical counterpart to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological worldview. This has been my own experience with meditation over the past decade or so: in exercises that involve observing not body sensations but thoughts and emotions as they arise, I can maintain an awareness of the lived body being there in the background. You learn to become more attentive not only to the lived body, but with it.
As well as embracing the body as a place to rest, seeing ourselves as body-subjects that reach out, touch and feel has profound implications for how we view our relationship with other people. The pandemic experience of 2020 has brought home just how much we typically rely on close physical contact with other people – and how much we suffer when this is brought to a halt.
It’s perhaps revealing that, for many philosophers, the very existence of others has often been presented as a puzzle. You’re talking to the postwoman, she gives every impression of being a person like you are – but how do you know she has conscious experience, and isn’t a sophisticated robot or zombie, lacking an inner life?
This ‘problem of other minds’, as it’s called, ceases to be a problem at all when we accept from the outset the embodied nature of our actual experience. As Merleau-Ponty wrote: ‘other minds are given to us only as incarnate, as belonging to faces and gestures’. To counter with distinctions such as mind/body ‘is of no use’, he said, if we permit ourselves to perceive the entirety (known as ‘the gestalt’) of what actually appears before us. Painters, he suggested, recognise this point:
The Space In Between Merleau Ponty 2017
Cezanne returns to just that primordial experience from which these notions [soul and body, etc] are derived and in which they are inseparable. The painter who conceptualises and seeks the expression first misses the mystery – renewed every time we look at someone – of a person’s appearing in nature.
Enquiring into our embodied experience also renders the subject-object distinction less clear-cut. Merleau-Ponty offers the following example: ‘when I press my two hands against one another … [I encounter] an ambiguous organisation in which the two hands can alternate in the function of “touching” and “touched”.’ Which hand is touching and which is touched? This ambiguity extends to our exchanges with other people. Imagine two teenagers, close friends, on a long walk along the coastline on a summer’s evening. Their hands brush against each other; but who touched whom, or whether there was even any intent at all, might not be clear – and this kind of ambiguity will always infuse our social interactions at some level.
It’s ultimately a bodily awareness of this ‘intertwining’ that fosters our sensitivity towards other people
Perceiver and perceived, then, are drawn into the cohesion of life. In the posthumous collection The Visible and the Invisible (1964), Merleau-Ponty wrote of the shared ‘interworld’ where ‘our gazes cross and our perceptions overlap’; it is here, he says, that the ‘intertwining’ of your life with other people’s lives is revealed. Far from a world of detached egos, or one of mere objects, what we encounter through embodied perception is this crisscrossing of lateral, overlapping relations with other people, other creatures and other things – an expressive space that exists between lived bodies. It’s not that we are all ‘one’, but that we inhabit a world in which, to quote the philosopher Glen Mazis, ‘things, people, creatures intertwine, interweave, yet do not lose the wonder that each is each and yet not without the others’.
It’s ultimately a bodily awareness of this ‘intertwining’ that fosters our sensitivity towards other people, Merleau-Ponty believed – what Mazis calls ‘embodiment’s access to the heart’. Intimacy, connection and compassion rest on our perceiving one another: not so much an intellectual grasp of the other as a ‘conscious agent’ but the felt sense of this embodied, sensitive and vulnerable being before me. I’m reminded of the powerful image of Patrick Hutchinson, the Black Lives Matter demonstrator who bravely carried a counter-protester to safety during the protests in London in the summer of 2020. Describing his decision to step in, Hutchinson told Channel 4 news:
Maurice Merleau Ponty Written Works
His life was under threat, so I just went under, scooped him up, put him on my shoulders, and started marching towards the police with him … You don’t think about it [being scary] at the time, you just do what you’ve got to do.
It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that detailed descriptions of face-to-face encounters feature throughout Merleau-Ponty’s work – for it is here that we meet directly with flashes of the joys, losses, hopes, dreams, interpretations and dedications of the lives of others.
By contrast, if we render those encounters ‘faceless’, Merleau-Ponty wrote, we experience the world as ‘only a succession of facts’. This speaks to the tinge of sadness I feel when I board a bus to find that everyone around me is hooked on their screens. I freely admit, there’s some nostalgia here. But there does seem to be a social ‘feel’ of disembodiment in this situation – a sense that all of us are there as just a collection of ‘objective’ bodies, absentees from the expressive, ambiguous space of the lived interworld.
These insights about the social function of embodied experience can serve as a corrective to the charge of individualism that is sometimes made against Western mindfulness programmes. True, sitting still, with my eyes closed, is one way to practise mindfulness. But it builds the capacity to attend more receptively to the world in general, which Merleau-Ponty makes clear is so often social in nature. Practitioners often report that mindfulness helps them cultivate a greater sense of intimacy during interactions with others – to listen more attentively, and to attend to other nonverbal cues in more detail (empirical research corroborates this). Properly appreciated, then, mindfulness can be socially connective.
Our intertwinement with others extends, equally, to our relationship with the natural world – a theme that Merleau-Ponty was increasingly drawn towards in his later writings. In The Visible and the Invisible, he introduced his nuanced notion of the ‘flesh of the world’ (or simply the ‘flesh’). Beyond the usual meaning of the word, he uses the term to refer to a primordial and mysterious tissue that underlies, and gives rise to, both the perceiver (such as the human subject) and the perceived. The flesh, then, underlies not just our interwovenness into the world through looking and being looked at, but equally ‘the staring eyes of cats [and] the raucous cries of birds who fly in patterns we have yet to decipher’, as Abram puts it. Fundamentally, Abram writes, the flesh is the elemental tissue that gives rise to the web of Earthly life that comprises both the organic and inorganic together.
Mirroring his emphasis on the primacy of the lived body, Merleau-Ponty believed that this web of life can be taken first and foremost not as a set of objective entities and processes, as is generally assumed in environmental debates. Rather, it’s the biosphere as it’s lived from within – from the particular vantage point that we ‘human’ animals happen to have (as creatures that are sensitive, intelligent, social and so on). Just as we inhabit our bodies, we also inhabit the greater ‘body’ of the Earth.
The more we open up to seeing ourselves as radically intertwined with the natural world, Merleau-Ponty felt, the more this relationship comes to resemble a two-way dialogue, recognising that there is always some of ‘us’ in ‘nature’ and some of nature in us. By letting go of cognitive or biological hierarchies in favour of a system of lateral relations between us and other life forms, we are invited to really listen to what ‘speaks’ to us from the nonhuman world when we let the usual noise levels subside. Citing the French poet Paul Valéry, Merleau-Ponty even questioned whether there’s a sense in which language is, before all else, ‘the very voice of the trees, the waves and the forest’.
Which technologies help us inhabit a shared world, rather than one in which we each see vastly different realities?
The practice of returning to the breath can be an ideal way to capture what Merleau-Ponty is getting at here. In my own experience, I’ve noticed that the more often I meditate and check in with my breath throughout the day, the more receptive I am to my natural surroundings. When I walk through the woods near my house, for example, I’ll notice much more fully the sound and feel of the breeze, the raucous squawk of a crow overhead or, if I’m lucky, the briefest moment when a small mouse, perched on a log, meets my gaze before scurrying off into the undergrowth. Returning to the breath and the body, Abram writes, we recognise and affirm ‘our corporeal immersion in the depths of a body much larger than our own’.
What would Merleau-Ponty prescribe as a corrective to some of the problems of the present moment – the polarisation of our political views, the sense of constant digital overwhelm, the erosion of a shared space for intercorporeality?
What’s needed, at the most basic level, is an ongoing attentiveness to what’s there before us – and an ongoing vigilance regarding what we are normalising in both our online and offline environments. Fittingly, Merleau-Ponty came to the view that ‘philosophy is not a particular body of knowledge; it is the vigilance which does not let us forget the source of all knowledge’.
That vigilance means regularly checking in with our own state of embodiment, appreciating the value of doing this for its own sake. We can call out worldviews that treat the body as a mere object – which reduce us, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, to ‘puppets that move only by springs’, that experience the world as ‘only a succession of facts’ in which the lived body is absent.
It means staying alive to the depth and quality of our interactions with others, noticing how intimacy depends upon our participation in a shared perceptual world in which our lived bodies ‘show up’. We must interrogate for ourselves which technologies genuinely support this kind of connection and help us inhabit a shared world, rather than one in which we each see vastly different realities.
And it means slowingdown, even – especially – when that’s the hardest thing to do, if we are to allow a two-way dialogue with the natural world to emerge, if we are to hear the ‘message’ nature is sending us, as Inger Andersen, the head of the UN Environment Programme, put it at the outset of the coronavirus outbreak in January 2020.
Our lived bodies are here to facilitate just this kind of vigilance. The silent body is ‘the hint half guessed, the gift half understood’, to quote T S Eliot in Four Quartets (1943). We cannot grasp it or ‘own’ it or subject it to an ultimate analysis. But if we’re willing to slow down, to pause, to touch in with the pulsing, breathing lifeworld of the body throughout the day, then we can restore our presence, our aliveness, our precious connection with other beings and things no less vital for the fact that they are other to us.