Merleau-Ponty and the Body

The body is completely unobjectifiable! What are the philosophical consequences?

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Tags:

• Merleau-Ponty
• phenomenology
• perception
• existentialism
• body
• dualism
• objectify
• science

[argenys]

Ok.....i have been doing alot of reading about quantum mechanics and have made my own conclusions about spirituality, i do not believe in religion but i have got an intrest in "kabbalah" wich is not a religion......and what you are saying interests me...and would like to ask you if you could give me a better "idea: of what merleau is speaking about....because this gives me the sence that the whole "uncertantly principle" in quantum mechanics may agree with this view...but i still cannot grasp it

[redliterocket4]

Ponty is suggesting that the assumptions a scientist makes about objectivity are false. The world we perceive and act in is not the world as such, but the world as our bodies can relate to it. I have not read Ponty's take on quantum physics, but I am guessing he would take an approach more like the Copenhagen interpretation, specifically Heisenberg's idea that physicists do not investigate reality itself, they investigate what we can say about reality.

[Tzschoum]

(Waouw! Moreover he speeks french! Thank you very much for the video, I should have seen it before I made a catastrophic homework on Merleau-Ponty. The idea is great, maybe I will make such a video myself, but on another philosopher!)

[redliterocket4]

haha, actually my computer speaks french for me.

[Tzschoum]

Your computer still needs french lessons! (It would have been very unpolite to tell it to you but I think I can criticize the french level of a computer). The funny thing is that I tried to translate the first sentence I wrote in english with an automatic translator and, if you used it, I think you really did not understand what I said.

[redliterocket4]

yeah, i guess computers aren't really intelligent yet. but i'll try to make up for what it lacks!

[uremove]

In his later unfinished "The Visible & Invisible", MP talks about the "Chiasm". As "flesh", we experience the chiasm between the body as object (which can touch & be touched) and as subject (who feels the touch). It sounds like this is what you are also describing from PP.

What I find fascinating in MP, which fits in with QM, is his idea that there is no pre-determined "world-in-itself". We determine the undetermined world through our perception. We collapse the Schroedinger wave function.

[baermtn]

the body is not objectifiable because there is no point from which we are split from it. it's not that my perception or perspective is constituting the world -- there are 'objects', but not in opposition to 'subject'.

[baermtn]

well, i don't think merleau-ponty is leaning toward kantian idealism, the kind that says man constitutes his perceptions and comes to know the world in that way. instead, i think merleau-ponty is looking to break the barrier between such subject/object splits and dualities. he is looking, in my naive reading, to re-integrate the subject in the world of objects -- the experience of mind is not split from the world, but rather can only be a mind if it is engaged and immersed as part of it.

[2506TJB]

Don't slip into solipsism, and I'm not sure if you are, but it seems like you may be leaning there. The idea of the Subject from a phenomenological standpoint is not the same Cogito that Descartes wrote about. The world isn't something that is existing as "I" constitute it, because the world presents itself to me already constituted. My body is my means of engagement with this world, so my perception is the world itself. I extract meaning out of the world based on my perceptual awareness of it.

[kofferk]

Regarding what you say about not being able to have an objective view of the body, this is not entirely the case. Somehwere in the Phenomenology he speaks of being able to look at yourself in a objective statistical sense, with the example of the cripple/invalid. Complaints always take this form of looking at oneself objectively and thus never are genuine. Once we are back in our own intentional body, we appreciate our consciousness more than that.

[Israe5l]

horizon of perceptional experience can lead us to pain, tho. Because, we are only given finite concrete instances. we are given a lot of "phenomenology" and construct one's own world. "phenomenology" has a lot of baggage (not all bad. such as "written by European philosophers"). Let me repeat, from the "phenomenological" instances we jump to "phenomenological" world. The instances I do not object. But "phenomenology" is open to all sorts of readings. (all of them can be correct.)

[sunsh1ne22]

I don't know if you truly understand what Merleau-Ponty is saying in his lectures. M-P mentions mirrors when referring to the way classical, or Renaissance art depicts objects. He mentions this to make a point about the way modern art does not resemble or "mirror" what the artist sees when he or she paints. This point is made in the claim that modern art reveals something to the viewer in a way that philosophy does to the reader. Re-read Lectures 1 and 2 from "The World of Perception."

[theprophet20]

There is an almost uncanny similarity of this channel's originator with that of another young man, that of the guitaoist channel. Both are around the same age, both have broadly similar interests, both have read widely and both are possibly of the same ethnicity? A Cosmic coincidence?

[theprophet20]

I find Merleau Ponty fascinating, the little I've read of him. In particular I love that section of the Phenomenology of Perception dealing with night and dreams, which is almost poetic... Regarding how we peceive our own bodies, it's occurred to me that identical twins are the only people who really know how they appear to other people. Because as Merleau Ponty pointed out, we don't get a true impression of ourselves from mirror images. They can see themselves in the round, as it were.

[HaleyMary]

Interesting stuff. I'll have to read some Merleau-Ponty sometime. The part of looking into the mirror and seeing an imitation of self and the body not being able to be objectified makes me think of how everyone can have their own perception of everyone else. Not like people are judging others, but just that everyone has their own point of view of the world.