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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Merleau-Ponty + the body « Previous | |Next »
November 17, 2009

I've previously dug into the Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty over at conversations, where I'd briefly explored the Introduction and here at philsophy.com. in relation to traditional epistemology. Here I am interested in the body for it is Merleau-Ponty who shows the body’s primacy in human experience and meaning.

Richard Shusterman in the chapter entitled The Silent Limping body of Philosophy says that philosophy has traditionally devalued the body compared to the mind:

For philosophy, bodily weakness also means cognitive deficiency. As the body’s senses distort the truth, so its desires distract the mind from the pursuit of knowledge. The body, moreover, is not a clear object of knowledge. One cannot directly see one’s outer bodily surface in its totality, and the body is especially mysterious because its inner workings are always in some way hidden from the subject’s view. One cannot directly scan it in the way we often assume we can examine and know our minds through introspection. Regarding the body as at best a mere servant or instrument of the mind, it as a torturous prison of deception, temptation, and pain.

One strategy for defending the body against these familiar attacks from the dominant Platonic–Christian–Cartesian tradition is to challenge them in the way Nietzsche did:
Radically inverting the conventional valuations of mind and body, he argued that we can know our bodies better than our minds, that the body can be more powerful than the mind, and that toughening the body can make the mind stronger. Concluding this logic of reversal, Nietzsche insisted that the mind is essentially the instrument of the body, even though it is too often misused (especially by philosophers) as the body’s deceptive,torturing prison.

Shusterman says that this strategy is not that persuasive. The problem is not simply that the reversal seems to reinforce the old rigid dualism of mind and body. Somatic deficiency is, unfortunately, such a pervasive part of experience that Nietzsche’s inversion of the mind–body hierarchy seems too much like wishful thinking.

Merleau-Ponty’s argument for the body’s philosophical centrality and valueis more shrewdly cautious. He embraces the body’s essential weaknesses but then shows how these dimensions of ontological and epistemological limitation are a necessary part and parcel of our positivehuman capacities for having perspectives on objects and for having a world. These limits thus provide the essential focusing frame for all
our perception, action, language, and understanding.

The limitation the body has in inhabiting a particular place is precisely what gives us an angle of perception or perspective from which objects can be grasped, and the fact that we can change our bodily place allows us to perceive objects from different perspectives and thus constitute them as objective things. Similarly, although the body is deficient in not being able to observe itself wholly and directly (because the eyes’ view is fixed forward in one’s head, which it therefore can never directly see), this limitation is part and parcel of the body’s permanent, privileged position as the defining pivot and ground orientation of observation.
Moreover, the apparent limitation that bodily perceptions are vague, corrigible, or ambiguous is reinterpreted as usefully true to a world of experience that is itself ambiguous, vague, and in flux.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:28 AM | | Comments (1)
Comments

Comments

Seems to be pointing to the determinism free will issue which of course was what Nietzsche was responding to in his era, which was also the era of the Darwinian Freudian and Marxian critiques of classic liberalism involving concepts of identity and consciousness as identified from the Enlightenment of Hume and Smith.
Later we got the Weber Tawney refinement of these, one aspect of modernleft theory.