Abstract
This chapter focuses on the early writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception). Firstly, an introduction to the science of phenomenology places the reader within the correct philosophical framework in order to understand the aim of Merleau-Ponty’s work on the body. Concepts from these two early works, such as “the lived body”, “the intentional arc”, “motor intentionality”, “structure” and “structure transformation” are presented. These concepts will be used in Chap. 5 as a new way to understand the “mystery” of psychosomatic pathology. Merleau-Ponty’s explication of the meaning-constitution of the (lived) body solves many of the mind–body problems associated with psychosomatics. In this chapter (and Chaps. 3 and 4), the philosophical groundwork for a phenomenological theory of psychosomatics (Chap. 5) is laid out.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The un-problematized belief in the reality of the world is also called the thetic/positional/existential/ontic reality character of perception. Ricoeur has poetically called this positing of realness as “the vehemence of presence.”
- 3.
This insight was also formulated already by Dilthey in the 1800s. Dilthey, the father of the so-called “human sciences” is known for the motto, “nature we explain, the life of the soul we understand.” The point here being that the methodologies used and results obtained from the natural sciences (causal, nomothetic type of knowledge) are not appropriate to the study of man. Terms like “meaning”, “value”, “signification” and “motivation” would be appropriate terms to use when studying man, according to Dilthey, rather than the objectivistic language used to describe things in nature.
- 4.
See Spiegelberg (1982) for a comprehensive overview of the phenomenological movement.
- 5.
“We must rediscover, as anterior to the ideas of subject and object, the fact of my subjectivity and the nascent object, that primordial layer at which both things and ideas come into being.” (1945/1962), p. 219.
- 6.
See Bredlau (2011) for a Merleau-Pointian account of the figure/ground structure of sense experience.
- 7.
Translated from the French le corps propre, which means literally owns own body, the actual body, the pure/clean body. Sometimes the term le corps vivant is used as well, which translates as “the living body”. The distinction between the objective and lived body was described in Husserl as a differentiation between the body’s thing like aspects (körper) from the intentional, living aspects (Leib).
- 8.
Merleau-Ponty has even said that his philosophy can be seen as drawing out “the un-thought thought” already present in Husserl’s work.
- 9.
“The ego as a center from which his intentions radiate, the body which carries them and the beings and things to which they are addressed are not confused, but they are only three sectors of a unique field.” (1942, p. 189).
- 10.
In Structure of Behavior Merleau-Ponty writes of the painter El Greco: “If one supposes an anomaly of vision in El Greco, as has sometimes been done, it does not follow that the form of the body in his paintings, and consequently the style of the attitudes, admit of a ‘physiological explanation.’ When irremedial bodily peculiarities are integrated with the whole of our experience, they cease to have the dignity of a cause in us. A visual anomaly can receive a universal signification by the mediation of the artist and become for him the occasion of perceiving one of the ‘profiles’ of human existence”. (p. 203) A similar comment on Cézanne, “Heredity may well have given him rich sensations, strong emotions, and a vague feeling of anguish or mystery which upset the life he might have wished for himself and which cut him off from humanity; but these qualities cannot create a work of art without the expressive act, and they have no bearing on the difficulties or the virtues of that act.” (1964, p. 69).
- 11.
“Visual contents are taken up, utilized and sublimated to the level of thought by a symbolical power which transcends them, but it is on the basis of sight that this power can be constituted. The relationship between matter and form is called in phenomenological terminology a relationship of Fundeirung: the symbolic function rests on the visual as on a ground: not that vision is its cause, but because it is that gift of nature which Mind was called upon to make use of […]” (1945/1962, p. 127).
- 12.
Descartes usually gets blamed for the dualistic conceptualization of man in his famous divide between Res extensa and Res cogitans, resulting in the influential definition of man as “the thinking reed/thing”.
- 13.
All perception takes place in an atmosphere of generality and is given to us as anonymous. I cannot say I see the blue of the sky in the sense in which I say I understand a book, or again in which I say I decide to devote my life to mathematics […] if I want to render precisely the perceptual experience, I ought to say that one perceives in me, not that I perceive. (1945/1962, p. 215).
- 14.
“My flat is, for me, not a set of closely associated images. It remains a familiar domain round about me only as long as I still have “in my hands” or “in my legs” the main distances and directions involved, as long as from my body intentional threats run out towards it”. (ibid, p. 130).
- 15.
Other thinkers have further developed this terminology, see Gallagher (1995) on “pre-noetic work” or Seamon’s (2000) “pre-cognitive intelligence of the body.”
- 16.
“It is not easy to reveal pure motor intentionality: it is concealed behind the objective world which it helps to build up. (1945/1962, p. 138 footnote).
- 17.
The word sens in French has a variety of meanings lacking in the English “meaning/signification”. Sens can mean: sensation, skill, intelligibility or direction. Meaning is thus connected to the body in its sensations, abilities and mobility, reiterating the intertwining of body, meaning and being-in-the-world. Merleau-Ponty uses the term Être au monde for being-in-the-world, which translates literally into being towards the world, again drawing attention to bodily tasks and engagements rather than being “in” the world, as being placed in a container.
- 18.
“Space is not the setting (real or logical) in which things are arranged, but the means whereby the position of things becomes possible” (1945/1962, p. 243).
- 19.
Dreyfus (1996) points out that when uses the word “habit” he often means skill, that is, to be able to do.
- 20.
“In short, my body is not only an object among all other objects, a nexus of sensible qualities among others, but an object which is sensitive to all the rest, which reverberates to all sounds, vibrates to all colors, and provides words with their primordial significance through the way in which it receives them.” (1945/1962, p. 236).
- 21.
Even simple reflex behavior is critically examined by Merleau-Ponty in The Structure of Behavior, where he demonstrates that even these seemingly automatic behaviors are never completely indifferent to both the internal and external situation. The rhythm and location of the stimulus, for example, will determine whether or not the reflex is released. The classical account of reflex as blind automatic is thus called into question, in favor of understanding reflexes as behavior which tends to balance itself in accordance with preferred patterns of distribution. See pp. 10–33.
- 22.
This example is also from The Structure of Behavior.
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Bullington, J. (2013). The Lived Body. In: The Expression of the Psychosomatic Body from a Phenomenological Perspective. SpringerBriefs in Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6498-9_2
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