The Embodied Self: Changing How The World Thinks

7/14/2020 Merleau-Ponty and the embodied self | Ron McClamrock » IAI TV
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Merleau-Ponty on consciousness and the lived body
Issue 89, 7th July 2020    
Ron McClamrock | Associate professor of philosophy at the University

at Albany
1,528 words
Read time: approx. 8 mins
Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological philosophy

suggests the search for the self and consciousness need not More from this issue:
https://iai.tv/articles/merleau-ponty-and-the-embodied-self-consciousness-auid-1582?fbclid=IwAR1YB9jIzN67_ZooH6tF51nMGQqxD7N2A4WzDYdYJf… 1/7
be focused on the space within our skulls. Instead, we should

turn our attention to the lived body.
Our scientific and philosophical search for the self and the
place of consciousness in the world has tended to focus
between our ears -- although Descartes, as the originator of the Why are we
modern mind-body problem, held the conscious mind had (as conscious?
non-material) no location. In the last hundred years or so,
materialist-leaning theories have been especially inclined to
locate mind and self in the head. In both
computational/information-processing and biological theorizing
about consciousness and the self, the question to be answered
is often seen as one about where to localize this mind/self --
whether those critical properties were best modeled as
information processing or as more fundamentally biological. The
transcendental
This is sometimes such a
self
fundamental background
assumption that it's even
taken by some as fueling a Related Videos:
kind of reductio ad absurdum
argument against
The IAI's online understanding
festival returns consciousness or the self

within a scientific
Read more
perspective: Reasons for
Saul Kripke | In-
skepticism about reduction or
localization of consciousness depth Interview
and self are commonly taken as reasons to infer that we should
either (a) prejudge eventual failure for any attempt to
scientifically explicate consciousness and self (as advocates of
the "unbridgable explanatory gap" like David Chalmers do), or
(b) get rid of the notions entirely, as (as anti-self “illusionists”

like Thomas Metzinger suggest).
Merleau-Ponty focused on the ways in Julian Baggini |

which our embodiment is central to our In-depth
consciousness and self. Interview
But in the second part of the twentieth century and continuing

into the twenty-first, we've seen movement toward a broader
conception of consciousness and self, and no philosopher has

been more central in instigating and supporting this idea then 
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In particular, Merleau-Ponty focused
on the ways in which our embodiment is central to our On Language
consciousness and self, pushing away from seeing these as and Logic
isolatable and reducible phenomena inside the brain and
toward seeing them as more distributed and relational features
of our lives in the world.
To see the nature of this turn, we need to clarify what the body
is taken to be in Merleau-Ponty's outlook. The central role of 
the body for him is not what we (following him) might call the
fleshy body. It is not the body that I see in the mirror, weigh on Limits of
the scale, treat with medicine; it is not my body taken as an Language
object among other objects in the world. Rather, he has in mind
what he calls the lived body, which differs from the fleshy body
most centrally in two ways. One, it encompasses aspects of the
brain, the sensory organs, and the extension of our biological
bodies into the world by means of tools and other familiar
objects (such as the blind person's cane); and two, the lived 
body is our embodiment not as one more object in the world,

but as the implicit conduit and mediator of our consciousness Lies, Damned
of the world. Lies, and Post
Truth
The lived body is most centrally what accomplishes perception
-- the form of consciousness he takes as most fundamental
and primordial. Perception is for him an activity of our body in
seamless engagement (or as he says, "communion") with the
world. It grasps the world, both literally in actions, but more
radically, in perception. The lived body for Merleau-Ponty
extends from the edge of consciousness where we are aware
of things, to the world in which those things are seen felt and
heard.

David Chalmers, Ed Stafford and Joanna Kavenna ask who

does the searching when seek to find ourselves
For Merleau-Ponty, perceptual experience is a distinctive
phenomenon that should not be mistaken for raw sensation;
unlike sensation, perceptual experience is given to us as
structured, a unified whole, and as about things in the world.
But neither should it be seen as our judgments about the world;
how we see things isn't the same as and how we take them to
be. If it were, there'd be no room for understanding the
mismatches of perception and judgment that show up in
persistent illusions and gestalt shifts.
Bodily perception for Merleau-Ponty is most centrally

characterized by three features. First, it is an independent
active synthesis in that it follows its own rules and processes,
synthesizing the perceptual whole. The presentation of the mug
on the table as a mug, or your utterance of "the cat is on the
mat" takes lots of clever synthesis of cues, but not by me as
conscious act. Perception presents the object as already
unified and formed by an automatic and unavoidable activity of
my lived body.
Second, it is opaque in that its synthesizing is often invisible to

my consciousness as well. So, for example, I have no real
access to the rules or processes by which my body
synchronizes with the utterances of others to present them to
me as words, assertions, and the like; nor to strategies by
which it synthesizes shapes and objects from the fluctuations
of light. Perception takes for granted these opaque activities
without providing me knowledge of their internal nature. So, my
visual activity is really good at teasing apart the effects on my
retinal image of scene illumination from those caused by
different colors of surfaces. By doing so, it provides me with
information about constant colors across differences in light
and shadow, but how it does all this is hidden from my
consciousness.
And third, perception is non-thetic presentation in that it does

not present itself as an object for experience, but presents
something else -- typically, something like the properties of
distal objects. Perceiving red, or squareness, or a chair, is not
phenomenologically experiencing the result of the independent
opaque synthesis as itself. Rather, it's typically having an
experience where that result itself is in a sense "invisible". We
don't have consciousness of it, but consciousness via it of the
worldly objects and features it presents -- something distal as
red, or square, or whatever. Perception phenomenologically
places what it gives to experience in the world, not in us. As
Merleau-Ponty says, I "abandon myself and plunge into it."
This picture puts the realm of

consciousness in stark contrast to a
Cartesian-inspired view of a separable
realm of indubitably known experiential
atoms of sensory experience or qualia.
This view takes our fundamental perceptual experience as
having the content of external and distal objects (via its non-
thetic nature), and takes the unity of brain, body, and world
(accomplished by independent synthesis) as experientially non-
decomposable (because opaque). This picture puts the realm
of consciousness in stark contrast to a Cartesian-inspired (but
often materialist) view of a separable realm of indubitably
known experiential atoms of sensory experience or qualia. And
perhaps most importantly, this alternative possibility casts a
different light on some contemporary worries about
consciousness and the self.
Because the most basic contents of consciousness are taken

as fundamentally inseparable from the brain/body/world unity,
the unity of the self that presents to us is the embodied self; it
is given to us as our engagement with the physical (and social)
world in perception and action. We should not look for it as
localizable neural or computational activity, but as being
distributed in activity. And if we do stop assuming that there
should be a localized and isolable candidate for reductive
identification of self and consciousness, arguments grounded
in the assumption that there should be such a thing may
dissolve. Objects of "inner" consciousness are deprecated on

this view; the idea that consciousness is constituted by some
kind of sense-data or qualia becomes an artifact of a view left
behind.
The idea that consciousness is

constituted by some kind of sense-data
or qualia becomes an artifact of a view
left behind.
Arguments against the idea of consciousness and self are
often fundamentally arguments against the reductive, localized,
and inner notion. So, for example: Contemporary "explanatory
gap" arguments that claim that conscious experience can never
be given any real explanation by neural, cognitive, or other
kinds of scientific theories standardly rely on the assumption
that the paradigm of conscious experience is something like
qualia -- simple, unstructured, non-intentional, primitive, non-
decomposable components -- which we can consider in
complete isolation from their embodied and functional nature of
our real activity and experience. An atomistic view of
experience encourages puzzling about why we get one
mapping between brain states and consciousness rather than
some other (or none at all); but moving away from it to a more
distributed and embodied our view of consciousness should
discourage thinking of it as only optionally and arbitrarily
connected to states of neurocognition. The more we follow
Merleau-Ponty’s lead here, the more the intuitions these
arguments appeal to may be undermined.
Merleau-Ponty's view of (especially perceptual) consciousness

as fundamentally a matter of the lived body in "communion"
with the world does not demote or minimize the role of
consciousness. But it does share with contemporary "illusionist"
views of consciousness the idea that it's time to reject a kind of
localized internalism of qualia about consciousness, and to
move toward seeing consciousness and self not as things to be
found in an inner place, but to see that the only conscious self
we do have is the one embodied and immersed in the world.
Ron McClamrock
   
   
Issue 89, 7th July 2020
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7/14/2020 Merleau-Ponty and the embodied self | Ron McClamrock » IAI TV

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The embodied self

Merleau-Ponty on consciousness and the lived body

Issue 89, 7th July 2020    

Ron McClamrock | Associate professor of philosophy at the University

Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological philosophy

be focused on the space within our skulls. Instead, we should

Merleau-Ponty focused on the ways in Julian Baggini |

But in the second part of the twentieth century and continuing

conception of consciousness and self, and no philosopher has

body is our embodiment not as one more object in the world,

Subscribe Sign iai iai iai iai iai

David Chalmers, Ed Stafford and Joanna Kavenna ask who

Bodily perception for Merleau-Ponty is most centrally

Second, it is opaque in that its synthesizing is often invisible to

And third, perception is non-thetic presentation in that it does

This picture puts the realm of

Because the most basic contents of consciousness are taken

dissolve. Objects of "inner" consciousness are deprecated on

The idea that consciousness is

Merleau-Ponty's view of (especially perceptual) consciousness

Calculating reality Life without labels Spending won't

Join the conversation

iai Festivals iai Academy Support the iai

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