Last week I introduced a series on teaching phenomenology with a philosopher. I raised a few questions and considered some context, sketching out a really rough, idiosyncratic, and speculative intellectual history of Merleau-Ponty and the body in an American context. (To my knowledge, no one has yet done a “Merleau-Ponty in America” book. I really don’t know that we need one. Thanks to Paul Kern for pointing out that he shows up Sarah Bakewell’s Existentialist Cafe.)
Anyhow, I have three essential concerns in this series, and the plan is to connect them. I mean to describe a little of what Maurice Merleau-Ponty means by “phenomenology.” I want to show how something we spent lots of time talking about in class, namely phantom limb syndrome, helps to do that. I also want to experiment with this approach by thinking about how to do history with its concerns in mind. My gimmick works like this: describe Merleau-Ponty’s meaning, show how phantom limb demonstrates it, then use an historical incident of phantom limb syndrome to express a phenomenological approach to history. Today’s post includes the first two parts of that equation.
Again, the central text is Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception. I’ll begin describing what phenomenology isn’t before considering what at least a version of it is. Following that, I’ll discuss the phantom limb.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Embodied Experiences
In PP, Merleau-Ponty opposes mechanistic explanations (empiricist) and “mind-based” explanations (rationalist) for this or that experience we have in the world. Associations of so-called “objective” sensations and stimulus response don’t begin to explain what it’s like to have a body, and “subjective,” merely mental, or “psychological” explanations of different bodily states don’t tell us enough either. Both positions reduce the body to a thing or an object. Mechanistic theories make the body into a stimulus-response machine, and intellectualist theories make the body into a passive thing somehow acted upon by the mind.
Both positions also impoverish the world, because they understand the world as a constant or a ready-made realm of objects somehow “out there” with which something called a body interacts. It doesn’t matter if a complex mosaic of objective associations make it up, or if a world-ordering, universalizing mind designed to knows its fundamental structure makes it up. Parts before whole or universals before particulars, both positions run into similar problems. (Think roughly Locke and Kant, respectively.)
What a body is and does helps us out of this impasse. After all, we don’t experience our bodies as passive objects in the world like other objects we bump into, so it’s strange that we describe them that way. Another way of putting this would be that most of us think of our body as a physical object, the limits of which go only as far as where our limbs end, for example. Merleau-Ponty just points out something obvious but underappreciated, namely that no one experiences their bodies like that. I perceive with my body and I have a sense of space owing to my body. My sense of space is my body, because “far from my body being for me merely a fragment of space, there would be for me no such thing as space if I did not have a body” (104). My body is how I’m in the world. There is no escaping it. I can’t experience the world any other way, but far from closing me off to the world, my body has projects and intentions that open me up in a world that appears to me at every moment unfinished and in the making. My body hardly ends where my fingers or toes end.
Maybe some short examples before the larger example will better clarify the unfinished openness of our embodied being-in-the-world, how it’s always a horizon. My twin brother is a pianist. He’s told me before that sometimes when improvising he gets “lost in the music.” He doesn’t think about the notes or his arm positions or what his fingers are doing. His body is “in the moment” so to speak. We tend to think this kind of experience is extraordinary. It’s actually not that extraordinary, at least not in general existential terms.[1] We might call this, with Merleau-Ponty, “non-thetic” or “pre-objective” consciousness. We do it all of the time only in different modes as we situate our bodies, taking up the world for our projects and intentions.
My brother’s language of “being lost” or being “in the moment” betray something. We use phrases like that to express how we’re aware and how we know what we’re doing even if we’re not explictly representing to ourselves what we’re doing. Writing the previous sentences, I didn’t explicitly represent to myself what I would write and how I would write it before I wrote the words. I wrote the sentence “in the now” so to speak. “Writing” in this way is a situating of my body where I take up the always-coming-up in a unified intentional, space and time arc:
The life of consciousness—epistemic life, the life of desire, or perceptual life—is underpinned by an “intentional arc” that projects around our past, our future, our human milieu, our physical situation, our ideological situation, our moral situation, or rather, insures that we are situated within all of these relationships. This intentional arc creates the unity of the senses, the unity of the sense with intelligence, and the unity of sensitivity and motricity (137).
It follows that how I feel as I write these words is something my body does in the world. My emotional “states” aren’t an illusion or somehow epiphenomenal in this way, rather my body does those emotions, as I situate myself (my body) in the world. I’ve been married for twenty years. My partner can walk into our house, look at me without my saying anything and remark: Well, you’re in bad mood.”
This affective dimension of our bodies is easily one of the most fascinating things about the book. Drawing from the work of psychologists, Merleau-Ponty uses what appear to be extraordinary experiences or “disorders” of one kind of another to better reveal his position and exclude the others. He uses any number of technical terms for such things, but he consistently draws on case studies. Teaching the book would be the worst slog imaginable if he didn’t offer so many rich examples. So obviously, for someone like me, who cut his teeth on William James, Merleau-Ponty fits right in.
Phantom Limbs, Finally
Phantom limb syndrome has the benefit of being a truly puzzling condition. Those looking for a definitive explanation for why most people who have lost a limb continue to feel it in any number of ways and in any number of positions come up empty, even today. Exclusively physiological explanations deal with nerve endings and pathways, so it’s a mystery why a memory or mood or emotion can conjure up the feeling of a lost limb. If the explanation were purely mechanistic or physiological, then the experience of phantom limb would happen only when some stimulus generated some response. In a crude sense, something would have to touch something else wherever along the pathway.
Yet, purely “mental” or “psychological” explanations having to do with memory aren’t completely satisfying either. A memory or an emotion might trigger the experience of a phantom limb, but Merleau-Ponty mentions that if you completely sever the sensory pathways to the brain in what remains, the condition goes away. In any case, it’s certainly not as simple as convincing someone that the limb isn’t there so said person can just stop believing it is.[2] Somehow the stimulus-response faculty must be confused (physiology) or the representation faculty must be confused (psychology). Whatever the case, we just don’t know enough—presumably yet. (This is the siren song of too much popular neuroscience. Apodictic certainty can, will, and somehow must be had in all cases.)
Merleau-Ponty shows that neither account tells us much about what it’s like to have phantom limb syndrome. At bottom, that’s what really matters. In the search for causes or definite explanations, the person with the condition can drop out of the picture pretty quickly, so Merleau-Ponty brings the person back in:
In the case phantom limb, the subject certainly seems to be unaware of the mutilation and counts on his phantom as if on a real limb, since he tries to walk with his phantom leg and is not even discouraged by a fall. But in other respects he describes the particularities of the phantom leg quite well—such as its strange motricity—and, if he treats it in practice as a real limb, this is because, like a normal subject, he has no need of a clear and articulated perception of his body in order to begin moving. It is enough that his body is “available” as an indivisible power and that the phantom leg is sensed as vaguely implicated in it. Consciousness of the phantom limb itself therefore remains equivocal. The amputee senses his leg, as I sense vividly the existence of a friend who is, nevertheless, not here before my eyes. He has not lost his leg because he continues to allow for it, just as Proust can certainly recognize the death of his grandmother without yet losing her to the extent that he keeps her on the horizon of his life. The phantom arm is not a representation of the arm but rather the ambivalent presence of an arm (83).
Plucked out of context, one could simply read this as Merleau-Ponty indulging in metaphorical fancies and literary flourishes. That would miss the point entirely. The experience is not merely “like” Proust knowing his grandmother is gone while “keeping her on the horizon of his life.” He means that phantom limb is the same kind of experience as knowing someone is gone but not losing that person. This is often called denial when it comes to grieving. We live the loss, and we do it in “pre-objective” or “non-thetic” consciousness. We know it, and we are aware of it without being explicit to ourselves about it or representing it to ourselves. People with phantom limb syndrome situate their body in the world and experience space according to this knowing but keeping. For body’s sake, the limb is still there in this “ambivalent” way. Telling someone their limb isn’t there won’t make phantom limb go away. Telling someone their friend is gone won’t make that friend go away either.
I’ve been in interested in phantom limb syndrome for a while. This is partly so because some years ago I learned that William James’ father Henry wore a cork leg. Henry Sr. lost his leg at the age of thirteen in a terrible accident. I think this had a largely unappreciated influence on William James. I’ll talk about this next time out.
[1] In fairness, it’s a highly accomplished, ecstatic mode of being a body, if I were forced to be more specific about it.
[2] Merleau-Ponty doesn’t say a great deal about this, and I could be thick here, but I wondered about where you do the cutting. I’d love to hear from someone who knows anatomy and physiology better than I do. It seems potentially like some sort of weird variation on Zeno’s Achilles Paradox. Would the phantom limb potentially just emanate from wherever you cut in this or that circumstance? It seems like you could never catch it, or at least you’d have to go hacking around in the brain to catch it? But we don’t know exactly where that is. Whatever the case, something “physiological” is happening, and something “psychological” is happening, and frankly, no one, even to this day, can fully explain, in a completely certain, mechanistic, causal sense, what is happening. At the very least, cutting things out seems totally impractical as treatment, because it would make prostheses impossible.
4 Thoughts on this Post
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Peter–Two brief issues. First, is the phrase/experience “be in the zone” when playing tennis or singing or even lecturing roughly what you are explaining in the first part of your piece? Something like what your brother was describing when playing the piano?
Second, a point of clarification(I hope). The term “world” as used in the phenomenological tradition refers not to a SPATIAL zone or region but to a zone or region of MEANING. So we can talk about the “public world” and mean more than just what is literally visible to a group of people. Rather, It is where certain things are done or thought about in this way rather than that. We have come to call this “politics.” It is close in meaning, I think, to “mode,” a specific way of acting and thinking and feeling.
Yes, “being in the zone” has that same character. The image that comes to mind for me is Michael Jordan hitting yet another incredible jump shot and shrugging his shoulders, as if to say, I can’t explain it. But M-P’s point is that what we call “in the zone” is just another mode what we are all of the time in this non-thetic or “pre-objective” sense. The cool thing about the book is how M-P repeatedly shows how what seems extraordinary is pretty ordinary, and what seems ordinary is actually extraordinary. That’s a critical move in the book.
As for space, I do see your point about the distinction between it and meaning in the tradition. Yet, I would stick to my guns here. M-P means here that space is meaning. Seeing how my body makes space, gives it its sense, space is loaded with meaning. Thus phantom limb is a spatial problem that is at the same time a meaning problem. “Space” in this way is not ready-made or empty and out there waiting to be filled in. It’s not a universal category in the Kantian sense, for example. Different senses make sense of space in different ways. So M-P encourages us to move away from thinking about space in the conventional way we tend to think about it, and this is so because “sense” isn’t simply “sensation” (as if the body is a passive receptor of stimuli) but “sense” in the way I might say “In the sense of that term.” Of course I had to distill a whole lot in this post, but I hope not in a way that betrays or distorts too much what Merleau-Ponty is up to.
Good stuff, Pete. The post has sparked a few thoughts.
This sense of space, or more precisely how our senses of it change, really strikes me. At the risk of sounding crass, I suspect anyone who has had a psychedelic experience knows what MP means.
And MP’s comments on phantom limbs and death reminds me of John Berger’s thoughts on death and “the dead” at large, often commenting about how the dead never really leave us. In his work on French peasants, it was one of the things he admired most about the yeomen (their innate understanding that the dead were with them). It was a sense the modern capitalist Frenchmen and women had lost. For the longest time, I have thought Berger was just speaking poetically about his spirituality; he always struck me as a Marxist who loved a little magic (possibly guilty of romanticizing these farmers, too). Now though, I wonder if he may have been touching on this same thinking as MP. He was often saying in interviews “a story only begins after death” (which baffled Susan Sontag in conversation). Our sense of our loved ones, our memories, have this unique space-time relation. They are all that remain after death, and thus story really begins in the person’s “absence.”
I’m really free-wheelin’ here for this last thought, but I wonder how this line of phenomenological thinking applies in an almost inverse phantom-limb scenario: someone in a vegetative state. If the mechanistic and intellectualist theories don’t apply, how would MP best go about explaining a person in such a state’s sense of their being-in-the-world. Or maybe this thought is beside the point.
I don’t think that’s crass at all. I’d freely admit that those kinds of experiences are helpful for understanding what Merleau-Ponty is doing. He does discuss mescaline in a few places in the book, especially in a section sensing and synesthesia, but only to show something that’s really not that extraordinary. William James was always good on this too. Our senses are geared into one another in such a way that, for example, we can hear the hardness of cobblestones as a car runs over them, and so on (a tactile hearing in that case). Psychedelics can draw out or make explicit what’s already there. That drawing out though, isn’t non-thetic or pre-objective consciousness once we represent it to ourselves. It just allows us to represent to ourselves something like the life-world or the anonymous systems of functions beneath our constant representing to ourselves.
That “anonymous system of functions” are the history beneath our history, the ways of being in the world necessary for us to be in the world how we are. I think you’re on the right path with that Berger observation. That was really good. It’s not simply romantic or mystical in some way. It’s imprinted in how we are in our bodies and how we intend our projects. It runs deep.
As for a vegetative state, I don’t know if M-P discusses that anywhere. I assume you mean someone being “kept alive” by machines without “brain activity” or movement, and so on. In that case, I think it’s clear that this person has an incredibly limited world, at best. I suspect the source of the question comes from said person somehow having a “body,” in this a case a physical “object” doing its processes and not having a “mind” understood here as brain activity. This attempt to eliminate every kind of perceptive capacity to isolate a “body” in the physical object and apart from a mind (subject) just looks for causal explanations and doesn’t tell us much about what it’s like to have a body. As in, well, there’s such a thing as a vegetative state, so that must mean that mind and body are distinct. Therefore, let’s build everything from that condition. Should vegetative states be the foundation for our understanding of being-in-the-world? That doesn’t make sense. Why would you start there?