The Body

The Body Paper/ Philo 101

A Human is not a “being” divided into a mind and a body but is a “being living in the world”. The aim of the compiled works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty is to refute the Cartesian ideology and define the essence of a human being. Several chapters concerning the body (that explain consciousness, motility; perception and meaning) will be presented and linked to Merleau-Ponty’s aim.
In the chapter “Situating the Body” Maurice begins with examining the problem presented with the instances of phantom limb. Maurice seeks to understand how he can connect this problem that deals with the mind and the body. To explain this he brings up the essence of animals. He states that animals are different from other types of mass such as oil. But animals do much more than just adapt to their surroundings as oil does. He states further that animals react and interact with their environment. However, he firmly explains that this is not comparable to the human experience. They do not have perception or an objective conscious of their environment. Humans have a very unique aspect which is their “attention to life” in which humans are aware of the experience their bodies are going through. Maurice tries to further distinguish the differences from animals and humans by discrediting the idea that human’s experience are just a pattern of reflexes. He elaborates that reflex has no objective concept of the danger presented.
He states that reflexes only exist in specific situations. There are things in this world that are independent of stimuli which would not make it plausible to say that being in the world is a “collection of reflexes”. In his last point to this specific argument Maurice states that man has the ability to react to this world but also there is a part of him that can see it and know what he sees, and know that he knows what he sees. During the last portion of this chapter Maurice starts winding down. Concerning the consciousness Maurice concludes that man is not a mind joined to a body, but the movement and the specific motion through point A and point B is existence. Through this “motion” we are able to experience and perform acts. He breaks down this description and labels actions either acts of the psychic or somatic. Our body is consciously acting or acting on reflex while in time. In conclusion Maurice refutes the Cartesian ideology and pulls the finishing blow with the stating that the mind and body are not a combination of separate terms, Therefore the body is a process that occurs at every moment during motion which is existence.
In the chapter “The Lived Body” Maurice starts to describe Consciousness and its prerequisites. Consciousness is our mediator between objects and our body. With this firm definition of consciousness Maurice expands upon consciousness and the body and defines that the body exists in the “now”. We have the ability to understand where we are, and we know where we are because we have a clear concept of what “here” is. If we did not know where we were we would just be caught up in past memories. Our position in the present can be defined as a succession of prior positions. To further expand this point he describes the properties of space and time, not as environments but as aspects of the body. Maurice at the ends of this chapter alludes to the theme of his writings. He states how the essence of humans is not made from the bodies experience but of the bodies “being” in the world. Maurice comes to the conclusion that he has discovered a new meaning for meaning. Meaning is acquired through our bodies experience and not a consciousness, because it is our bodies that are forced to notice the potential of meaning.
In the chapter “The Body In Its Sexual Being”, the focus is not so much on what is sexual about our being but more deeply discusses the relationship between our body and being in the world. In the beginning of this chapter Maurice discusses things of sexual significance. He describes how sexual significance is not derived from this consciousness but something that he doesn’t mention now but later alludes to. This is where the concept of “meaning” is brought up again. Maurice quotes Freud in saying that every action has a meaning. Maurice attempts to define the meaning of sexuality now. He states that sexual life is not a function of sexual organs but that sexual life is a section of our life that has a connection to the existence of sex. Maurice concludes that sex is just another manifestation of personal experience like sight, hearing and the body. The existence of these manifestations is absorbed into the personal experience. What Maurice is saying is that these concepts are how we are “connected”, “belong”, and how we “communicate” with other manifestations. We are connected with colors and lights through our vision, and to sounds with our hearing, and how sexuality is connected with our body.
In this same chapter Maurice digresses and fixates his arguments on how our body relates to feelings. Maurice gives an example of a girl who is forbidden to see a man who she is interested in. Through this frustration she somehow loses her ability to speak. When she loses her ability to speak it is displaying her desire to give up her link to communal existence. Maurice tries to make a point with this in how what the girl is doing is not a representation of how she feels, but this act is the representation of itself. She is not talking because she is trying to keep silent, because when she lost her voice that gave her the inability to deliberately keep silent. She is forced to keep silent. Maurice describes this “hysteria” of losing your voice in that the subject never lost their voice but in reality overlooked the ability that the subject could. This loss of voice is categorized as a situation. When Maurice discusses freedom in relation to different situations, is that we do not have freedom but are constrained to the “situation”. When Maurice laid the foundation of the “situation” he goes on to further elaborate that personal existence is the acquiring and presence in a situation.
In the last chapter “The Natural World and The Body” Maurice tries to explain the relationships that our bodies have with our senses and the outside world. Maurice defines what we can sense as invasions into our senses. He states that he senses things because the things themselves attract his senses. These things that attract him are made up of component parts/aspects which belong to the whole of the object. These different aspects translate into a single being. He further elaborates that the ideas we have about objects that make the object, but the aspects which make it self-evident. Objects are not component parts with meaning but forms that are able to be observed by our body. This refers to how objects do not have meaning but only the meaning that we infer after experiencing them. The only things that we can experience from an object are what we are able to experience from it. After laying this foundation Maurice declares the reality of what he has been discussing. He declares that a thing is a thing because it imparts to us the organization of its aspects that we can sense. Therefore we can never know a thing by its aspects that we perceive and sense but only though living and being in the world to experience it.
At the end of this chapter are where the summaries lie and how all the previous chapters are tied in. Maurice states that a thing is not something we can understand through perception but something that is sensed by us and how we organized the information sensed and how it is experienced by us. This conclusion points back the theme through out all the chapters, that the essence of a human being is a being living in the world.