Katherine Morris on Merleau-Ponty on the Body
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This is Philosophy Bites with me, Nigel Warburton. And me, David Edmonds. Philosophy Bites is unfunded. Please help us keep it going by subscribing or donating at www.philosophybites.com or you can become a patron at Patreon. Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus achieved celebrity well beyond France and well beyond philosophy. They had a friend, Maurice Melo-Ponty, who was much less famous.

a leading exponent of phenomenology, the study of how things appear to us, the way we are in the world and experience it, Merleau-Ponty argued that knowledge comes through the body. Catherine Morris, from Oxford University, believes Merleau-Ponty deserves wider recognition. Catherine Morris, welcome to Philosophy Bites. Thank you. The topic we're going to focus on is Merleau-Ponty and the body. Just to begin, who was Merleau-Ponty?

Melo Ponti was a 20th century philosopher, a friend and a colleague of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. And he lectured partly in philosophy. One of the things that's kind of interesting about him was that he engaged very much with the human sciences world.

anthropology, sociology and especially psychology. He died terribly young in his early 50s but when he died he held the chair in child psychology and pedagogy which he took over from Piaget you may have heard of. Melo Ponti was a phenomenologist. Difficult word to say but what does it mean? Phenomenology is a very broad way of doing philosophy and

kind of devised by Edmund Husserl and then taken up in various forms by people like Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre and then Amel Ponti and various others since then. And its basic approach is to, first of all, describe the world of human experience, describe the world as experienced people.

And the further stage is to try to work out the essential structures of human experience. I suppose you could say that it's a little bit similar in some ways to what Kant was doing when he described the structures of the experience world as space, time, and causality. One thing that the phenomenologists add to those basic structures, apart from elaborating them in wonderful detail,

was the body about which Kant said nothing, but also seeing others as an essential structure of human experience.

So this emphasis on describing conscious experience and lived conscious experience led Merleau-Ponty to focus quite heavily on the body. What was his general approach there? I think it might be helpful to begin with a distinction which you can make in German, you can't make in English, between life and Körper. Life is often translated as the lived body, Körper as the sort of body thing.

When most of us, we tend, when we hear the word body, to think of the body thing, that is an anatomical, physiological object. And that's very much not what he means when he talks about the body. He means life, he means a lived body.

Malaponti famously says that my body is my point of view on the world, not just another object in the world. The so-called existential phenomenologists, Sartre and Malaponti, were drawing very much both on Heidegger and on Husserl, but what they took from Heidegger in particular was his basic idea that human beings are being in the world. Those hyphens, you can't hear them when I say them, but being in the world is hyphenated.

The idea is that we would not be human beings unless we were in the world, and the world would not be the world that it is, the lived world, the life world, the Lebenswelt, unless it were a human world. And even if Heidegger never quite noticed that in order to be in the world, you must be embodied, Sartre and Melapointe certainly did.

There is a tradition of talking about our experience of the world through the senses, putting together a picture of the world, a very much a Humean and Lockean empirical position that Merleau-Ponty didn't have much time for. Is that right?

Certainly, I think one of his main targets was empiricism. And one thing that you notice about empiricism is that as soon as you try and make it concrete, it's bound to treat the body as a mere object, as a kind of relay station for sensations and nothing more. But one very characteristic feature of empiricism, partly because it thinks of the body that way, is that it thinks of personality.

as consisting of separate sensations, separate coming from each individual sense. So that when I say I see a lemon, what I'm strictly speaking seeing is a bunch of different sensations. I'm seeing yellow sensations via my eyes. I'm feeling tactile cool sensations via my hands. I'm tasting sour sensations through my eyes.

That seems to Melaponti to be a misdescription of how we actually experience the world. What we perceive are lemons, which are whole, and we don't really distinguish these separate sensory inputs. For Melaponti, it's really important that it's the body which unifies those separate sensations.

Just to be clear, when you say that Merleau-Ponty is anti-empiricist, it's not that he's anti all empirical research. He's not anti the idea that we do science and study how people actually behave. Indeed not. No, what he's anti is what's sometimes called scientism. Scientism is rather similar to what Anglo-American philosophers will call naturalism.

The idea that the methods of the natural sciences are the only methods for achieving knowledge, and secondly, the idea that what the natural sciences say there really is exhausts the nature of reality, so-called ontological scientism or ontological naturalism.

If one can do science without scientism, then he's all for it. He really engages with the sciences most prominently of psychology in all of his works. One feature of our body is that we do things repeatedly, we get into habits. And I know that for Merleau-Ponty, the study of habit was quite revealing about humanity and our position in the world.

It's really interesting that very few philosophers have actually looked closely at habits. Let's just perhaps be clear that by habits, melapointe doesn't just mean bad habits like smoking cigarettes or biting your nails. A better term might be something like motor skill, skills like being able to drive a car or being able to type.

I think there are a number of reasons for his interest in this topic. One is that, as he says, the acquisition of a habit is really difficult for either empiricists or, I'll use another term, intellectualists to explain. For an empiricist, a habit, a motor skill, can really be nothing but a kind of concatenation of kind of atomic reflexes.

And Meloponti argues very persuasively that that's precisely not what skills are. If I'm a pianist, I can play a piano sonata with very, very little new practice on a piano that's bigger or smaller than what I'm used to. Even if I'm used to driving with a right-hand drive car, I can, without having to learn over again from scratch, pick up the habit of driving a left-hand drive car.

We really can't make sense of habits as the empiricists would suggest as a kind of concatenation of reflexes. But likewise, the intellectualist really would be troubled by habits because when we're actually acquiring a habit, for example, learning how to drive a car, our minds have to be going all the time. We have to be thinking about it. I remember because I relearned how to drive a car when I came over here and literally only about 10, 12 years ago.

I really did have to learn over from scratch. And you're there thinking, oh my goodness, there's so many things I have to think about all at once. I have to think about pressing on the gear shift and pushing it forward and pressing on the clutch and looking in my mirror and all these things at once. And you're almost paralyzed with all the things you have to think about. Once you learn how to drive, your body does your thinking for you, so to speak. You no longer have to think about it at all.

And of course the intellectualist is going to say, oh, that's because all the thinking has now become unconscious. Intellectualism meaning rationalists, he's talking about transcendental idealists like Kant, who imagines that it's all got to be done by the mind, by thought.

And if it's not conscious thought that goes into my just being able to do it as it were automatically, it must be unconscious thought. For Merleau-Ponty, it's the body doing your work for you. It's relieving you of the necessity of having to think about what you're doing. You've mentioned that Merleau-Ponty is an existentialist, that he's allied with Sartre and de Beauvoir in that respect. Does that mean that he thought that we are fundamentally free, unconstrained in our choices with what we do with our bodies?

I think the notion of habit is really, really important to him here. Habits, as he understands them, are both constraining and liberating. If we didn't have the motor habit of being able to speak, being able to read, those are all motor habits, if you like.

Then we couldn't speak, we couldn't read. They're clearly liberating. I mean, the whole process of socialization is a process of the acquisition of motor habits. We could not do anything unless our body had this wonderful ability to acquire habits.

But at the same time, they can be constraining. In fact, Melaponti, when he's arguing against Sartre's rather radical version of freedom, he points out that if I've been going about in the same way, he uses an example that Sartre uses of having an inferiority complex, which may not sound like a motor habit, but it does truly involve motor habits, the way you walk, the way you speak, the way you interact with others.

If you've had the habit, so to speak, of the inferiority complex for the past 30 years, then it's really difficult to change. And that's something that Sartre really never recognizes. He recognizes that it's difficult, but he doesn't see why. Melapointe has this wonderful notion of sedimentation, the way in which your past practicing of a skill on the one hand, but the past ways of behaving on the other hand,

becomes sedimented in the body and much as it's harder for a river then to move in different directions, it becomes harder, though not impossible, for you to start moving in different directions if you've always been doing something in a particular kind of way. We talked about relations with lemons, with cars, but the body in its relation to other people seems fundamental for us.

It's interesting that you should say that. It seems to me that Melaponti sees a role for the body in our relations with others that even really brilliant philosophers like Sartre don't quite see. If you think about the tradition in Anglo-American philosophy, there's a so-called problem of other minds.

where the idea is somehow that what I encounter when I encounter another person is just this body, this kherpa, this body thing, this physical object moving about, then there seems to be a real issue about whether that body hides a consciousness or a mind.

But Sartre made some really important moves against this simply by pointing out that what we encounter when we encounter another person isn't a mere physical object moving about. We don't see, for example, a clenched fist and a face turning red. What we see is a man in a certain situation, perhaps a little urchin has just stolen his wallet,

And his face turns red and he clenches his fist. And if we see the body of the other holistically in a situation, then there's no issue about whether we can see his anger. Now that seems to me a really important move that Sartre makes. But Malaponti makes a really interesting further move because he wants to say that we actually understand others with our bodies, right?

And he starts out this discussion with the example of an infant who, when I take one of his fingers playfully and pretend to bite it, the infant opens its mouth. Surely the infant is not arguing from analogy that when the other person opens his mouth he intends to bite, and when I do that I intend to bite, so I'm going to play the game and pretend to bite. Of course not. It would be ridiculous for an infant to do that.

Rather, the infant's body contains within it a body schema, which is what Malaponti calls a kind of system of equivalence, which is such that the look of your mouth when it opens and the feel of its mouth when it opens are equivalent equivalents.

There's no issue about making any inferences. When you open your mouth, it's as if it feels your intention in its own body. Now, he does say that at a very early stage, an infant doesn't fully distinguish itself from its caregiver. So it's not even an individual. So there can't be this kind of gap between the infant and its caregiver.

But he also crucially says that, of course, we do become individuals and we gradually separate from our mother and we become an individual. But we retain something of that bodily reciprocity so that even now, especially with somebody with whom I share a class and a culture and so on,

I retain that immediate bodily understanding so that when I reach for my glass here, for example, it doesn't even occur to you to wonder, what am I doing? Your body immediately recognises that my intention and my gesture. I mean, this is all fascinating and it seems to me important, this idea of the body understanding other people, understanding society.

the world. And it's odd that it's featured so little in recent philosophy. There's no sense that Merleau-Ponty, for me, has rippled through the subsequent history of philosophy. He seems to be an eclipse by people like Sartre and Heidegger and other philosophers of mind who've emphasised the cerebral

I find it puzzling, but I also think it's probably explicable. The fact is, first of all, that I don't think Sartre and Heidegger figure that much yet in mainstream Anglo-American philosophy. They perhaps figure a little bit more simply because they were perhaps better self-publicists than Malaponti.

Something that Malaponti talks about, I've talked already about his opposition to what I called scientism or what Anglo-American philosophers call naturalism. And the trouble is that it seems to me that a great deal of at least Anglo-American philosophy very much adheres to naturalism.

Has Merleau-Ponty had an influence beyond philosophy? Interesting that you should ask that. I think he's been hugely influential outside philosophy in other disciplines. And certainly one discipline in which he's been very influential is in anthropology. And what I happen to be most familiar with is medical anthropology, where on the one hand, you've got biological understandings of diseases and

And on the other hand, you've got cultural and social understandings of diseases, illnesses, suffering, and so on. And I suppose that the notion of the body as a thing, a körper, goes very nicely with the biological understanding of disease.

But for an understanding of disease from a cultural, social perspective, a Melapontian understanding makes a good deal more sense. He's also been very influential in sociology. More recently, I thought at first bizarrely in theology. He's certainly been very influential in literary studies. Feminist studies have picked up a lot on Melaponti. I've even heard of Melapontian geographers.

So all over the place, it's just philosophy, at least Anglo-American philosophy, tends not to have recognised him yet. Catherine Morris, thank you very much. Thank you. For more Philosophy Bites, go to www.philosophybites.com. You can also find details there of Philosophy Bites books and how to support us.