In the Meantime: Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“We grasp exteral space through our bodily situation. A ‘corporeal or postural schema’ gives us at every moment a global, practical, and implicit notion of the relation between our body and things, of our hold on them. A system of possible movements, or “motor projects” radiates from us to our environment. Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument, and when we wish to move about we do not move the body as we move an object. We transport it without instruments as if by magic, since it is ours and because through it we have direct access to space. For us the body is much more than an instrument or a means; it is our expression in the world, the visible form of our intentions. Even our most secret affective movements, those most deeply tied to humoral infrastructure, help to shape our perception of things.” (italices mine) Maurice Merleau-Ponty (MMP), The Primacy of Perception

It has been noted by several of you that I seem to be rehashing some of Merleau-Ponty’s work. This is partially true, thus partially not. I encountered Merleau-Ponty through Marjorie Grene (the philosophical task-master of Michael Polanyi and a monumental force in her own right). So yes, Merleau-Ponty is in the background of my thinking and I wholly endorse much of what is exemplified by the above quote. Merleau-Ponty is influenced by Heidegger and there is resonance with Husserl and Satre. But the overlap is not complete. The reason I find him compelling is his insistence on the body as central to humanity.

I wonder how Nietzsche would have reacted to Merleau-Ponty’s project? Besides his disdain for all academic scholarship, the centrality of the body, not the ego, is the contribution I find most useful. To reiterate what I explored in somatic epistemology, if one takes an egocentric view of the person, then one is forced into certain conversations that end up in dualisms of the theist or physicalist strains. MMP avoids these by insisting the centrality of the body qua person. I am not fully conversant with how this works out in the totality of his framework, but he is plainly trying to work from a quasi-scientific explanation towards his view. So he wants us to wrestle with the historical-spatial reality that leads to phantom-limb syndrome (a spectacular discourse in itself; see Phenomenology of Perception, “The ambiguity of the phantom limb”).

But MMP does accommodate something in personhood when he talks of ’symbolic functioning’. He accounts for the symbolic reality that portrays what Schillebeeckx calls our interiority. Here he says, “…this intentionality which admits of no degrees of more of less, as a starting point, everything that separates us from the real world – error, sickness, madness, in short incarnation – is reduced to the status of mere appearance.” What is appreciable here is that there is no reduction from person haunting space to ego attached to body.