Editor's Note
What follows is the first of a four part series on the final chapter of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, “Freedom.” In it, I consider a variety questions, essentially filled-out notes from a class I just completed with my philosopher friend Andy. We decided to write up our own answers to some of the questions on our final exam, and we took off from there. Mine got out of control, so I decided to post them as a series for the blog. Andy handled a question on “time” and I handled one on “freedom.” We asked students how these terms related to Merleau-Ponty’s account of the body. The body makes Merleau-Ponty’s account unique and compelling to our minds.
So I’m concerned here with what freedom means for embodied humans in a shared world. Most of the time, we talk about freedom in political terms, either as a property that does or ought to govern the sphere of political activity, or in relation to something called “rights,” which human beings have, our ought to have. What follows is more concerned with what might be called existential freedom. In this sense, “freedom” has more to do with discussions we conventionally categorize under the question of “free will.” But as we’ll see, Merleau-Ponty challenges and complicates the meaning of such notions.
It’s important to remember what might be called the “phenomenological reduction” here. By “phenomenological reduction” I mean that technique or method where we do the work necessary to get at what Merleau-Ponty occasionally calls “primordial” experience, recovering or restoring our being in the world, what it feels like to be in the world. I use the terms “non-thetic” or “pre-objective” to describe this reduction in places. These terms refer to a type of knowing or awareness that happens before we represent things or others to ourselves. The common mistake is to assume that our representations of reality or consciousness to ourselves are the experience itself. For Merleau-Ponty, non-thetic or pre-objective, primordial experience/existence happens with our body. So he distinguishes the phenomenal body, which has projects, intentions, and a certain kind of knowing or awareness (the one we experience our being in), from what might be called the “objective” body, which is an assemblage of parts, a.k.a. the physiological account of the body. This account of the body also calls into question ideas of a “mind” in a formal sense as something antecedent to experience, or following Kant, as the a priori conditions or categories necessary for having an experience in the first place. I’m using the Donald Landes translation of Phenomenology of Perception for these posts (Routledge, 2014). I should also mention Andy and I have taken to calling Maurice Merleau-Ponty “Mo” with no small degree of affection, so that appears here. The book is truly wonderful.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Interestingly enough, Merleu-Ponty uses the term “body” only a few times in his final chapter on “Freedom.” He uses the word “consciousness” numerous times instead. Yet if we consider The Phenomenology of Perception as a whole, freedom is how our bodies are in the world. It’s what makes our being-in-the-world worth it, what defines us as humans with commitments.
To begin with, strict causation can’t allow for freedom because it leads down the garden path to determinism. (This object or force acts upon that force or object in a complex sequence leading to some necessary end somehow independent of my consciousness of them, and so on.) Rather, my consciousness does have a certain generality, or “anonymous flow” about it. My consciousness can’t be solely what others might say I am (a six-foot-two, occasionally ill-tempered history professor, let’s say) or even what I might say I am when I represent myself in comparison with others (a hybrid Southerner/Polish-American hailing from Nashville). This would be a “statistical” or “objective” measurement of me, and presumably one might predict my behavior if those description had causal force. (All hybrid Southerner/Polish-Americans will do x, y, or z given circumstances a, b, or c.) Yet I know somehow that, to be in the world at all, I must first experience it as a consciousness, and any sense that I have of a world begins with my consciousness, a subjectivity, it seems, not determined by causes outside of myself.
But an account where, owing to some sort of reality-ordering consciousness or “mind,” I am totally and completely free whatever the conditions or circumstances in which I find myself, doesn’t fit the bill either. While Merleau-Ponty doesn’t say this directly early on in the chapter, we can anticipate the problem. A reality-ordering version of consciousness doesn’t have much regard for being a body at all. By “whatever the conditions,” we could posit that an enslaved person or someone horribly exploited is always completely free in this scenario, simply by virtue of having a sense-making or world-ordering consciousness, which seems a weird proposition. Yet notions like these appear in lots of places. There’s a tendency to whittle away the body and the world and get down to a pure consciousness or mind as the last redoubt of human freedom.
In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov concludes, for a time, as his situation grows ever more dire, that if given the choice between nothingness and being, he would just as soon inhabit “a square yard of space” for eternity. In that case, he could not move. But in some strange way, he thinks this bare sort of existence, however wretched, is what makes him what he is—his desire to at least have a mind—however imprisoned and without any world to speak of. Dostoevsky, rightly I think, has Raskolnikov imagine in that square yard a pretty hellish existence. A better example is probably Ralph Ellison’s protagonist Invisible, who, after a long series of bodily humiliations, ends up down in his hole at the end of the novel, totally defeated. From the hole, he extols the possibilities of “the mind” because at least that part of himself can only be somehow free no matter what the circumstances. I’ve always found it strange that a novel so rich in what Merleau-Ponty calls, later on, the “sedimented” quality of lived experience (a rich cultural/historical world of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, stories, jokes, speeches) ends up shrinking things down to some illusory “mind.” Then again, we might read in the conclusion of Invisible Man Ellison’s effort to represent the dark irony of a life without a world, a disembodied consciousness or spectral existence in a hole with 1,369 light bulbs. As the old song goes, “Oh, no, they can’t take that away from me.” Prisoners often mention this too. They say occasionally something like, “I might be locked up, but I gotta keep my mind free in here.” Yet, their bodies are still there, and “thinking,” for good or ill, is something they do with their bodies, even when their bodies inhabit limited spaces. It pains me to think about that.
Freedom is all or nothing in the two aforementioned positions. Either it doesn’t exist because I am determined by causes outside of myself, or my freedom is “total” because I have a pure, inescapable reality-ordering consciousness, as Merleau-Ponty writes, “as great in the worst tortures as in the peace of my home” (459).
Yet, as I read him, Merleau-Ponty does think we tend to confuse freedom with explicit volition or deliberation. In this way, we often think freedom means deliberating before making a choice, or consciously willing a choice as a matter of course. William James did this, or at least has been said to have done this, following his careful reading of Charles Renouvier, “My first act of free will,” he wrote (to paraphrase), “shall be to believe in free will.” His biographers customarily report this affirmation (written down) as somehow decisive in his life, but that’s a judgment historians have made. I’ve long been a bit skeptical of that reading, and Merleau-Ponty makes me more confident. Mo reminds us that deliberation and willing in this way happen only after decisions have been made. Explicit deliberation and willing in this sense are second order, or representational rather than primordial, yet we tend to regard the second order as somehow primordial, even though we don’t experience them that way.
This is complicated, of course. Next time out, I’ll say more about this issue of volition, get the body into our discussion, and set up the problem of history.
2 Thoughts on this Post
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Good stuff. This “primordial” business is throwing me for a bit of a loop, but I’ll hang on till the end.
I haven’t really cracked open PP yet, but if I’m catching your drift, is MP arguing Being (not necessarily in the Heideggerian sense) precedes consciousness? Where do you think he would land on Heidegger’s argument about Being is time? Based on one of your previous posts, it seemed MP saw time almost as a conduit through which we are Being? So is it both Being and our experience of Being, which we are too?
Clearly, I should just read the dang thing.
As I read him anyway, Merleau-Ponty is making the same essential moves Heidegger and especially Husserl did before him. So it comes down to what is meant by “consciousness.” If you mean by “consciousness” something like “thought” according to which we explicitly represent things to ourselves, then he’s not writing about consciousness. His unique contribution has to do with the body. I suspect what many would call “consciousness” he would say is something our body does. I encounter a world. I’m already in it. What does it mean to be already in it, to perceive it? He follows Heidegger here in the sense that we are “thrown” into the world. It’s worth going all the way back to the beginning of the book, where he describes what he means by a “body.” Recall that experience of improvisation, where, say, a jazz pianist plays but doesn’t explicitly represent to herself what she plays. We improvise in the world this way. But this world, as we experience it (perceive it) isn’t fully formed or complete. It’s shot through with ambiguity and openness.
I look at the lamp on my desk. I can’t see the back of it. I “know” that the back of the lamp is there though. I experience the lamp front and back despite not seeing its back. It’s incomplete, ambiguous in the way I perceive it. But this is not necessarily because I walked around to the back of the lamp and verified it empirically. Nor is it because I have a category of the mind already there that makes possible its extension in space. The “thing,” in this case a lamp, I encounter according to my body’s intentions and projects. I’m doing something, and my body knows there is a back to the lamp without me explicitly representing that to myself, as I move in the world. I’m “conscious” of it without, again, representing it to myself, as I perceive it according to what I mean to do and how the thing I perceive (which is different from an empirical object) prompts what I meant to do.