Ever Not Quite? Phenomenology and the Phantom Limb: Part One, Introductions

Rationality is not a problem; there is no unknown behind it that we would have to determine deductively or prove inductively beginning from it. We witness, at each moment, this marvel that is the connection of experiences, no one knows how it is accomplished better than we do, since we are this very knot of relations. The world and reason are not problems; and though we might call them mysterious, this mystery is essential to them, there can be no question of dissolving it through some “solution,” it is beneath the level of solutions. True philosophy entails learning to see the world anew, and in this sense, a historical account might signify the world with as much depth as a philosophical treatise. We take our fate into our own hands and through reflection we become responsible for our own history, but this responsibility also comes from a decision to which we commit our lives; and in both cases it is a violent act whose truth is confirmed through its being performed.

 

                                                            -Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception[i]

This is the first part of a series on teaching phenomenology and more specifically, on phenomenology and phantom limb syndrome. I have a good feeling and the fond hope this will branch out beyond that though. Today’s post concerns context primarily, so I hope readers will hang in there for the ones to come.

It’s been quite some time since my last post, but veteran readers of the blog might recall that in the past I’ve taught courses with a philosopher. By now he and I are good pals. Teaching with another person can do that. We’ve taught some ridiculously roomy ideas together, in order: “democracy,” “nature,” “the soul,” and now, “the body.” He playfully admitted to me not long ago that as it turns out, history is pretty valuable. I never needed any similar convincing about philosophy, but then I suppose intellectual historians are temperamentally predisposed to give philosophy and philosophers a wider berth.

Our “body” course is more or less a phenomenology course. Both of us find phenomenology convincing. When I think about those early years, deep in the conceptual weeds, trying to read formal philosophy, it occurs to me now that I somehow knew intuitively that dualism or “subject-object” distinctions seemed too rigid or somehow misleading. As I learn more about why some people feel the same and others don’t at all, it piques my curiosity about how to do history. Thinking about how to do history in a way dedicated to reuniting knower and known, rejecting dualisms in a way truer to what it’s like to be in the world preoccupies me, as ever.

Now, for A Little Context (Due Diligence)

My friend and I designed the course around yet another challenging book. This time around, we’re reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. Having spent a reasonable amount of time on William James’ Principles of Psychology, I’m primed for Mo Merleau-Ponty. My friend and I have taken to calling him “Mo.” As in, “Did you see that great bit where Mo talked about how we call forth sleep by imitating the posture of the sleeper?” “Yeah, holy shit. Mo was really good today.”

I’ve not read any intellectual history measuring the influence of Merleau-Ponty or this particular book on transatlantic or U.S. thought in the latter half of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, I sense its reach. I do know certain Catholic thinkers are taken with him, but this interests me far less than how Merleau-Ponty has influenced thinking about the body more broadly over the last few decades, at least when I think about that stuff. Michel Foucault’s work takes up lots of space in scholarly body-talk and beyond, whether his influence is explicit or not. The work he inspired, while interesting in some cases, has never got much traction with me, probably because all of it seems to have a persistent form and matter problem: the body describes historically specific, discipline-knowledge matrices (this or that “episteme”) while at the same time being a container or category for historically specific expressions of power/knowledge relations. It all reads like gussied-up dualism: ideas and “docile” bio-machines gesturing ideas. Lots of historical work on empire and/or race and gender from a couple of decades or so ago on that line was pretty cool, but only too cool; those books lacked a certain warmth when I read them.

Yet a remarkable amount of thinking in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century has concerned what it’s like to have a body and about how bodies have an irreducible particularity about them that nonetheless bears the traces of culture, expressing one’s sense of being-in-the world in historically specific ways. Images on screens have miraculous qualities owing to bodies considered phenomenologically. It’s amazing that we can see how others in the past held their bodies differently from us whenever we want nowadays, and we can enjoy the differences—or not. The spell inevitably breaks when we do that. We style our being-in-the-world alongside, against, or even in imitation of, those virtual others. I recently saw re-showing of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) at a local theater with a historian friend, and we talked about who we’d rather be (Paul Newman’s Butch Cassidy is clearly the right answer).

The point is, no one ever stacks up. Much of the cultural history of the recent past recovers the disingenuousness, disillusionment, or discontentedness that followed this or that discovery of bodies-in-the-world on screens. Where Merleau-Ponty’s account of the body suggests openness and possibility, ideas about mass culture can ruin things. Depending upon your pet critique of visual/virtual culture, the miraculous becomes promethean, and the promethean can look a whole lot like an another damned faustian bargain. So it’s no surprise to me either that, according to a very unscientific study I recently made of people who have studied philosophy in “Continental” programs, Iris Marion Young’s “Throwing Like a Girl” counts as a classic. (We happened to have read it for our class, too.) Young drew directly upon her own experience, using Merleau-Ponty in that influential essay to get the point across. My desk copy of Phenomenology of Perception has a blurb from Judith Butler on the back, for example, which interests me. I do wonder how Mo’s influence, whatever it is, has worked, because learning how to understand bodies and notice their range of possibilities has brought on ambivalent feelings about them in some cases. Merleau-Ponty, for some thinkers, seems to have articulated lived experience in a way that confirmed lived experience on the street or in politics, enlivening their projects. There are innumerable ways of being a body, after all. We know this by now. Body-talk is everywhere in our culture. So Merleau-Ponty seems more current than ever, or more useful than ever, if this really cursory reading of contemporary culture seems right at all.

Teaching Blues

So it seemed to me the up-and-coming generation should be down with Mo. They seem to be down with all kinds of stuff. Not surprisingly though, teaching the Phenomenology of Perception has been rough going. It poses too many reading problems for students. This is so because twentieth century works in philosophy come loaded with baggage. Oddly enough, we’ve taught Aristotle in the past, and, different from Merleau-Ponty, he took longer than usual to catch on for me. I suppose Aristotle’s On the Soul or Physics, being far less domesticated beasts than the books I’m accustomed to reading, got my wires crossed a bit. At the same time, Aristotle was also easier to teach, because he dealt directly with being rather than respond to anyone’s arguments (he did respond, but often to thinkers completely or partially lost to history).

Merleau-Ponty’s book first appeared in print in 1945, and the field has only grown more specialized. Seeing how our class is part of general education curriculum, a consistent problem has been over history of philosophy. Students in our class just aren’t familiar with even the broadest outlines of philosophical positions. The don’t know how the field divides itself up (words like epistemology, ontology or metaphysics), and they don’t know how different thinkers responded to one another (stories like how and why Hume awakened Kant from “his dogmatic  slumber”). I don’t know how to fix this. It’s hardly their fault. I just know we have to patient, and we have to make sure we don’t lose them.

Merleau-Ponty consistently shows how certain schools of thought only give partial or just plain wrong explanations for lived experience, so students tend to get confused in the text. They have a hard time discerning the difference between passages in the text where he rehearses a position he disagrees with and those places where he answers those different schools of thought. Teaching them how to read so they recognize the transitions between those things has been the challenge.

The fortunate thing is that Merleau-Ponty opposes two “classical prejudices” in the tradition, empiricism and rationalism, which calls by different names in different instances. He sometimes uses words like “physiological” or “associationist” for the classical empiricist position and “psychological” or “intellectualist” for the classical rationalist position. Of course, he mentions different variations on these positions and different thinkers who hold them sometimes. This nuance only confuses our students even more.

Luckily, once you get a handle on how Merleau-Ponty uses these positions, the rest drops into place. I stopped fighting the text a few chapters in. Problems persist for students though, even after it seems they “get” him. Signposts that appear obvious to me and my friend seem incredibly subtle to them. For my part, I do what teachers anywhere do. I step through the door in my memory that leads to what it felt like to be their age and to struggle, being mostly unfamiliar with this kind of thinking and these arguments. I forget too often that students don’t read philosophy in high school very often, whereas most students have at least some acquaintance with history. Depending upon the day, one of us writes a chart on the board enumerating the two positions with specific reference to how Merleau-Ponty describes them in a given chapter. Effectively, we’re working up a glossary of terms to use.

My general impression is that, in a class of about two dozen students, half are making a genuine effort. They mean to hear the gospel of the intellectual historian and the philosopher. The other half betray different levels of effort. The reactions among this unregenerate half-dozen range from uninterested, to occasionally interested, to a little freaked out.

Next time out, I’ll set up the positions in the book and begin to make some connections with William James and the phantom limb phenomenon.

[i] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (Routledge, 2012), lxxxv.