Phenomenology, the Body, Freedom, and History: Part Two

I post today with serious misgivings. As our editor here at USIH has eloquently written, “death stalks the land.” And as Anne Lamott has written here, “we are being changed.” Our shared world is, I hope, changing as people in the streets fight for freedom. We see, in our midst, the devaluation of black bodies by white ones, the callous removal from the world of so many human beings with unique worlds or styles of their own by people who believe they have some ownership, power, or ultimate fiat over others’ bodies. We have powerful institutions of control–the prison-industrial complex and thoroughly militarized local police forces with obscene taxpayer budgets—whose very raison d’etre involve the gross objectification of black bodies. People in these institutions far too often refuse to consider what they have extinguished, or mean to extinguish, from the world. They would close off countless possibilities for freedom in a world shared with others, as if they have any such unambiguous existential right. They don’t.

With this weighing heavily on my mind, I continue my series on freedom and the body despite the misgivings. Maybe Merleau-Ponty can be useful for some of us even if his considerations seem technical, because his sense of freedom and its location in the phenomenal—rather than objectified—body seems important right now. The body is where and how human beings experience the world. Our bodies, with their multiplicity of existential styles, bear with them the influence of other bodies in the form of personal and collective histories. When we devalue bodies, we impoverish the world. Merleau-Ponty repeatedly shows the profound mistakes that happen when we consider the body only in a physiological sense, as an inert object in a world of objects like any other object. He also challenges notions of “mind” that would somehow locate human activity somewhere prior to or apart from, the world we share with other bodies. And, as I’ll discuss in later posts, Merleau-Ponty shows just how revolutions must be lived by those who make them.

A Novel on the Eve of the Civil Rights Era, Phenomenologically Considered

At the very beginning of Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust (1948), Chick Mallison, a middle class white boy, narrates the story of “deciding” to honor a demand from Lucas Beauchamp, a black man accused of a murder he didn’t commit, by telling the reader he knew he would do it before the critical events in the novel happen. The “choice” had already been made before Lucas demanded Chick’s payment of a moral debt. He attributes motives to his “decision” after the fact and upon reflection. These motives are complicated, involving deep considerations of Southern social etiquette under Jim Crow at midcentury. Chick is hardly a crusader for social justice. He’d offended Lucas in his home months earlier. On that occasion, Lucas had saved him. After Chick had fallen in a creek during a winter hunt, Lucas plucked him from the freezing water, took him to his home, fed, clothed and warmed him up. Chick responded then and there by offering Lucas money. Obviously Lucas refused it, and so Chick knew he had to make amends for the offense.

So when Lucas, in jail and fresh out of any other options, enlists Chick to get the evidence necessary to exonerate him, Chick takes up the responsibility owing to his pride as a respectable white boy with a highly cultivated sense of honor, and frankly, adolescent adventure. Chick is tortured over doing the right thing for a man who refuses to play the socially inferior role designated for him in that world. Owing to the literary conceit kicking off the novel, Chick reflects on those motivations, considering them only after all the events in the novel have transpired, when things got deadly serious. Faulkner had an almost unparalleled way of representing entangled social worlds where things like “decisions” are rarely simple. Just when does a “decision” happen anyway?

If not properly understood or taken to an extreme, there are dangers lurking here too. (To Faulkner’s credit, he doesn’t fall prey to these. Faulkner sometimes fell prey to plenty of bad impulses, but not this particular epistemological one.) If freedom is already there before all actions, by virtue of having a consciousness or a mind in the first place, then freedom has nothing to work with. Freedom doesn’t mean anything if it somehow comes from a realm of pure consciousness, if it has no world or situations within which it might take place. If freedom is everywhere, that is, simply the necessary condition for having a world in the first place, then it’s nowhere at all.  There must be some “cycle of behavior” some “open situations that call for a certain completion and that can act as a foundation” (462). We see something like this is in Chick’s gnawing desire to complete the circle of his obligation to Lucas. He knows he must act, whatever his mixed emotions and dubious motivations.

Even closer to the Faulkner example, Merleau-Ponty describes a trap he elsewhere in the book calls “intellectualist”: “Choice of an intellectual character is not only excluded because there is no time before time [as if emanating from pure consciousness or subject prior to the world and thus not in time] but also because choice assumes a previous commitment and because the idea of a first choice is contradictory [as if one could recognize something being a choice without ever having chosen before].” So,  “[i]f freedom is to have a field to work with, if it must be able to assert itself as a freedom, then something must separate freedom from its ends, freedom must have a field; that is, it must have some privileged possibilities or realities that tend to be preserved in being” (462, emphasis M-P).

To my mind anyway, this is far more interesting and complex than commonplace notions of a “freedom to” or a “freedom from” and the like. Merleau-Ponty is interested in what it feels like to be free, what freedom is like as being-in-the-world, in a body. This is what Merleau-Ponty means by “preserved in being.”

So what is this “field” and how does it work? It’s made up of what Merleau-Ponty calls those  “spontaneous valuations” I make as I structure or make sense of the world around me, intentions my body has as I (being a body) perceive the world, interacting with it. My perceiving, phenomenal body takes its measure within the world of which I’m a part, in the play between me, things and others. My body, non-thetic, pre-objective, gears into the world presented to me, that perceived, experienced world in all its various shadings, sizes, frequencies, or intensities, as I have my projects, the things I mean to do. This measuring-up or non-thetic adjusting and gearing my body does is the playing field for freedom. Freedom, it so happens, is something our body does. There is no freedom without a body. People tend to forget or disregard this.

Merleau-Ponty is most explicit about it in a section of the final chapter. It’s worth quoting at length:

Now, a pure consciousness can do anything except be unaware of its own intentions, and an absolute freedom cannot choose itself as hesitant, since this amounts to allowing itself be drawn in several directions, and since by definition the possibilities [here the different ways phenomena offer us to perceive them] owe their entire force to freedom, the weight that freedom allocates to one of them is simultaneously withdrawn from the others. We can certainly decompose a form by looking at it askew, but only because freedom makes use of the gaze and its spontaneous valuations. [He means here quite literally looking at a series of shapes, seeing them one way, then after that explicitly squinting or angling our vision to see them another way.] Without these spontaneous valuations, we would not have a world, that is, a collection of things that emerge from the formless mass by offering themselves to our body as things “to be touched,” “to be taken,” “to be climbed” ; we would never be aware of adjusting ourselves to the things and of reaching them where they are, beyond us; we would merely be aware of rigorously conceiving of objects that are immanent to our intentions; we would not be in the world, ourselves implicated in the spectacle and, so to speak, intermingled with things; we would have merely a representation of a universe. Thus, it is certainly true there are no obstacles in themselves [as if, say, a steep rock face is an obstacle without me perceiving it as such], but the “myself” that qualifies them is not an acosmic subject; this subject anticipates himself among the things in order to give them the shape of things. There is an authochthonous [roughly indigenous] sense of the world that is constituted in the exchange between the world and our embodied existence and that forms the ground of every deliberate Sinngebung [sense-giving act] (466).

So this bodily account of freedom accounts for how we interact with things in the world as we are in the world. It remains to be seen how freedom works in our interaction with others in the world in both an individual and collective sense. As I’ll show in subsequent posts, this is where history comes in.