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Affective incarnations: Maurice Merleau-Ponty's challenge to

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 Journal of Theoretical and
Philosophical Psychology
© 2018 American Psychological Association 2018, Vol. 38, No. 4, 205–218
1068-8471/18/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/teo0000101

Affective Incarnations: Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Challenge to

Bodily Theories of Emotion

Tone Roald, Kasper Levin, and Simo Køppe

University of Copenhagen
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

In this article, we outline and discuss Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s description of affective

This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.

and emotional life as found in Phenomenology of Perception, including his portrayal of

the affective body-subject. By relating his central phenomenological claims to bodily
theories of emotion, exemplified primarily by Antonio Damasio’s theory, we demon-
strate Merleau-Ponty’s continued relevance. Merleau-Ponty’s challenge to bodily the-
ories of emotion mirrors the (dis)connection between one’s own body and the mechan-
ical body. He shows that affect and emotion cannot be understood fully without taking
the experiential, existential, and intersubjective situation into account and thereby
challenges traditional bodily theories of emotion by exposing the affective incarnated
body-subject as a fundamental capacity to feel and perceive meaning through incarnate,
constitutive, and intersubjective relations.

Public Significance Statement

In this article, we portray the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theory of
affect and emotion based on his major work Phenomenology of Perception. Here he
analyzed the nature of affective corporeality. We relate Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts
to a contemporary theory of emotion to show what emotion theories need to include
if they want a substantive bodily-based foundation.

Keywords: affect, emotion, Damasio, Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology

“If . . . we want to bring to light the birth of being for
us, we must finally look at the area of our expertise
which clearly has significance only for us, and that is
our affective life.”
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962, p. 178)
[P]ain and pleasure are body-events.
—Damasio (2010, p. 21)
Since the earliest proponents of modern science,
affects and emotions have been thoroughly re-
garded as expressions of our bodily nature.
Tone Roald, Kasper Levin, and Simo Køppe, Department
of Psychology, University of Copenhagen.
Thank you to Thomas Collier, Johannes Lang, and
Thomas Teasdale. This work was supported by grant 09-
070159 from the Danish Council of Independent Research.
Correspondence concerning this article should be ad-
dressed to Tone Roald, Department of Psychology, Univer-
sity of Copenhagen, Øster Farimagsgade 2a, 1353 Copen-
hagen K. E-mail: Tone.roald@psy.ku.dk
Charles Darwin (1872/1998) considered that the
body reveals emotion as outer expressions of
inner feelings, whereas William James (1884)
viewed bodily motor actions as emotion. It is,
however, the French phenomenologist Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962) who first devel-
oped an extensive theory of the lived body as
the basis for subjectivity, including affectivity
and emotion.1 He convincingly countered a
long philosophical tradition that ignored corpo-
rality in favor of detached rationality, and his
work has become a classic within the field. In
Phenomenology of Perception (PP), this corpo-
reality, Merleau-Ponty insisted, is at the heart of
perception, and perception is immersed in af-
1
This work is heavily influenced by that of the founder of
phenomenology, Edmund Husserl (1913/1980, 1952/1989,
2001), who showed that subjectivity begins with the affec-
tive, lived body.

205
 206 ROALD, LEVIN, AND KØPPE
fect. Even the most basic of perceptions, he
argued, are constituted by an affective experi-
ence, “already pregnant with irreducible mean-
ing” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962, p. 25); affect
and emotion are basic orienting features of the
body-subject. Thus, Merleau-Ponty asserted
the constitutive role of affect as he discussed the
bodily foundation of perception and conscious-
ness. But how can it be that he did not address
the topic of affects head on? Other topics central
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to perception, such as intentionality, sensing,
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intersubjectivity, and temporality, for instance,
are debated directly. Although we do not have
an answer as to why the topic of affect is
somewhat veiled in his work, we will in the
following text show how affect and emotion
stand out as cornerstones central to Merleau-
Ponty’s understanding of the nature of expe-
rience as it pertains to PP. He asked and
answered questions about how our bodily ex-
istence forms our emotional life and how our
emotional life forms our bodily existence,
albeit in an indirect manner.1
But what do we, and Merleau-Ponty, mean by
the notoriously complex concepts of affect and
emotion? That is what we will clarify in this
article, but because the field of emotion research
is riddled with conceptual confusion, a few
words on terminology in the beginning are nec-
essary: we use the term “affect” as an overar-
ching term, including both “emotions” and
“feelings.” Unless otherwise specified, “feel-
ings” refer to felt aspects of experience, expe-
riences with affective tonality, whereas “emo-
tions” refer to more distinct experiences that
take place within a more limited time frame and
in a less ambiguous phenomenal field. Such use
of the concepts is consistent with Merleau-
Ponty’s use, as well as many other theories of
affect and emotion (see Roald, 2007, 2015 for a
discussion of this).
Although it is now about 70 years since he
wrote PP, Merleau-Ponty’s insights into the dy-
namic, affective body-subject reveal a compre-
hensive phenomenology of emotion that needs
to be incorporated into any grand theory of
emotion that purports to take embodiment seri-
ously.2 Our task here is, as such, to engage with
Merleau-Ponty as an important contributor to
the understanding of affective life and to show
that doing so has ramifications for current the-
ories of emotion. What we will highlight in
particular is the intrinsic nature of affect in
subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and meaning-
creation, and Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on an
experiential whole, where affect is not gradually
added on in “layers” as partes extra partes, but
instead is present from the beginning.3
The role of affect in Merleau-Ponty’s work
has been largely overlooked. For instance, al-
though the renowned Merleau-Ponty scholar,
Shaun Gallagher (2005), clearly acknowledged
the importance of affect in shaping the mind, he
hardly discussed it. Moreover, when Gallagher
(2012) discussed the phenomenology of emo-
tion, he did not relate it to Merleau-Ponty’s
work. Similarly, when the philosopher Michelle
Maiese (2014) discussed how cognitive and
bodily theories of emotions can be combined,
she did not mention Merleau-Ponty. This is the
case even though she worked within the enac-
tive approach, which is directly and explicitly
inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s work. Founders of
the enactive tradition, Varela, Thompson, and
Rosch (1991), considered their approach as a
continuation of Merleau-Ponty’s “program of
research” (p. xiv), but when it comes to affect,
they did not mention Merleau-Ponty. In her
important book, The Feeling Body, Giovanna
Colombetti (2014) hardly mentioned Merleau-
Ponty, and the same goes for the article The
Feeling Body: Toward an enactive approach to
emotion by Colombetti and Thompson (2006).
Along the same lines, Matthew Ratcliffe (2005)
pointed to De Sousa (1990) rather than Mer-
leau-Ponty, as one who saw emotions as world-
orienting and “cognition-enabling” (p. 190).
These scholars have made excellent contribu-
tions to their respective fields, and the point
here is not to critique their work as such but to
show that Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts on affect
and emotion often have been overlooked.
The nature of perception and experience is
central throughout Merleau-Ponty’s writings, so
why do we focus on PP and not his entire
authorship? The reason is that in his first major
work, The Structure of Behavior (SB) (Merleau-
Ponty, 1942/1963), he critically engaged with
2
As Krueger (2014) argued, although radical cognitivist
positions exist where affects are cognitive appraisals with-
out significant bodily constituents, emotion theory most
often includes the body as an essential feature of affective
life.
3
Cataldi (1993) has analyzed Merleau-Ponty’s constitu-
tion of affective life with focus on the perception of depth.
 MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY’S CHALLENGE TO BODILY THEORIES
behaviorism, gestalt psychology, and psycho-
analysis, but affective life remains marginal to
his central theses, and he had not yet reached his
important insight about the body-subject in per-
ception (and, thereby, also in emotional life).
He hardly mentioned affects or emotions at all.
In his later works, he moved away from PP and
faulted it for not transcending the classical di-
chotomies of subject– object and body–mind, as
it is fixed in a language that cannot leave such
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traditional thinking behind. With his focus on
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prereflective life, he realized the importance of
art and artistic language in reaching experience
beyond formal language. His writings gradually
become more like poetry. Exactly for these rea-
sons, it is PP that is best suited to the task of
engaging in a fruitful dialogue with psychol-
ogy4 on the nature of incarnated, affective life:
It is not too remote from or inaccessible to
scientific discourse.
Before we undertake this task, some caveats
are in order. First, all emotion theories include
the body in some manner. It is therefore almost
pointless to say that we cannot treat them all
equally. Consequently, we have selected a fa-
mous example, namely, Damasio’s (1994,
1999, 2001, 2003, 2010) neuropsychological
account. This is because his contemporary the-
ory is strongly inspired by early bodily theories
of emotion, and our critique becomes relevant
for a long-lasting and influential tradition. We
therefore begin with the very early predeces-
sors, namely Darwin and James, in order to
point out some similarities and to substantiate
the complexity of Damasio’s contemporary the-
ory. Also, Merleau-Ponty was first and foremost
a philosopher, and one of his primary tasks—
perhaps the primary task—was transcendental,
not in the manner of a transcendental ego, but in
the manner of investigating the conditions for
experience. As such, our use of Merleau-Ponty
does not include the full scope of Merleau-
Ponty’s critique of empiricism or his assess-
ment of psychology. Although important, we
will neither fully engage in the debates about
naturalization as pertains to phenomenology in
general or to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy spe-
cifically (see, for instance, Petitot, Varela, Pa-
choud, & Roy, 2000; Thompson, 2007; Varela,
1996; and Zahavi, 2004 for thorough discus-
sions). Rather, this article is about Merleau-
Ponty’s affective incarnation and its relevance
207
for bodily theories of emotion, exemplified
through Damasio’s work.
Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology
of Emotion
When attempting to grasp the nature of af-
fective life, Merleau-Ponty drew on philoso-
phers such as Hegel and Sartre, as well as
empirical, psychological case studies, revealing
affect as an orienting feature of the whole body-
subject. Affect, he argued, is a part of all per-
ception. His terminology is not completely pre-
cise or consistent (Roald, 2015), but it is evident
that emotions have a more distinct experiential
form such as “shame,” whereas perception en-
tails sensing and is, as such, felt.
The Active, Affective Body
Affect and emotion are intricately related to
the privileged position Merleau-Ponty granted
the phenomenological body. When Merleau-
Ponty developed his account of the body-
subject, he did so in opposition to what he
named “intellectualist” and “empiricist” ac-
counts and instead argued for a view where the
body is a “knot of living signification” in the
sense that the body secretes meaning immanent
to its own organization. Meaning for Merleau-
Ponty is primarily affective, and the body is a
lived experiential unity, open to the world in an
always affective relation. This privileged posi-
tion of the body is exemplified in Merleau-
Ponty’s critique of the objectivist, empiricist
account of the body. What he famously criti-
cized was the tendency in the sciences to reduce
the body to an object in space, causally linked to
our behavior and consciousness through a sim-
ple stimulus-response mechanism. As he wrote,
The constant error of empiricist and intellectualist psy-
chologists is to reason [about the body] as if a tree
branch, since, as a physical reality, it has in itself the
properties of length, breadth, and rigidity which will
make it usable as a rod, also possesses these charac-
teristics as a stimulus, and so much so that their inter-
vention in behavior would follow automatically. (SB,
p. 114)
4
Although it is not wholly unproblematic to call Mer-
leau-Ponty a psychologist, he was a professor of psychology
and taught psychology at the Sorbonne in the late forties and
early fifties.
 208 ROALD, LEVIN, AND KØPPE
One of his central arguments against such an
objectivist account is that it describes the body
as a passive mechanism, which does not explain
the way in which the body is actively involved
in self-organization and meaning-making. In
other words, our experience of the world
through our body cannot be reduced to objective
variables and causal functions. In what he
named “classical psychology,” the passive ac-
count of the body results in an ontology in
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which the object is considered as a system of
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qualities given to the sense organs and synthe-
sized by cognitive processes that can be pro-
jected on to the body. However, according to
Merleau-Ponty, the body is neither a collection
of passive reactions to external stimuli nor the
projection of actions prompted by the cognitive
or conceptual act of a disembodied mind. In
Structure of Behavior and PP, Merleau-Ponty
drew on gestalt theory to argue that the most
basic perceptual experience is not structured in
terms of atomistic “sense data,” but rather ac-
cording to the totality of the phenomenal field.
Consequently, the body is not a passive collection
of receptive organs that simply receive impres-
sions, and qualities are not things in front of us
apprehended through the representational activi-
ties of our intellect. Instead, perception of the
world is always synonymous with a certain per-
ception of one’s own body, in the same way our
body is also available perceptually among external
objects. In this sense, the body is not to be con-
sidered as a physical object, but rather as a partic-
ular way of having or appropriating a world
through perception. Another way of saying this
would be to state that external perception and the
perception of one’s own body are two facets of the
same act. It is this double-facetted description of
the body that holds the key to understanding the
constitutive role of affect or emotion in Merleau-
Ponty’s thought. This is, perhaps, most clearly
shown in his description of the body’s ability to
touch and be touched:
When I press my two hands together, it is not a matter of
two sensations felt together as one perceives two objects
placed side by side, but of an ambiguous set-up in which
both hands can alternate the rôles of “touching” and being
“touched”. . . in passing from one rôle to the other, I can
identify the hand touched as the same one which will in
a moment be touching. In other words, in this bundle of
bones and muscles which my right hand presents to my
left, I can anticipate for an instant the integument or
incarnation of that other. (PP, p. 106)
Primarily, the reversibility between the distinct
capacities of touching and being touched em-
phasizes how a strict theoretical dichotomy be-
tween subject and object is inadequate when
dealing with human perception, experience, and
consciousness. According to Merleau-Ponty,
the experience of our own body’s double status
as both a physical object and as the subjective
capacity for perceiving exposes the body as the
source of “a first opening upon things without
which there would be no objective knowledge”
(PP, p. 111). It is in this opening that affect, as
well as movement, can be said to be a primor-
dial self-relation that constitutes the subject of
perception. Because we are our body, in per-
ceiving external objects, the body’s capacities
for feeling and moving are always already as-
sumed or immanent to our acts of perception.
Thus, being a body as an object in the world
presupposes a self-relational experience of our
body as being with the world, which constitutes
our capacity to perceive. To have a body is not
a passive state of having or being submitted to
experience, but rather to actively be an experi-
ence, an affective experience.
Self-Relational Affectivity, Movement, and
the Phenomenal Field
Whereas external objects are only repre-
sented in our first-person experience, the feeling
of our own body is immanent to all perception.
This difference involves that objects of external
impression always stand out, as Merleau-Ponty
wrote, “against the affective background which
in the first place throws consciousness outside
itself” (PP, p. 107). In other words, our body’s
self-affectional capacity of sensing and being
sensed expresses itself as an affective precon-
dition for apprehending a world of objects. It is
through the immanent (affective) feelings of
one’s own body that consciousness is con-
sciousness of the phenomenal field. Yet another
way to say this is that consciousness is ex-
pressed by being projected through the phenom-
enal body’s motor intentionality, which ulti-
mately has its origin in a prereflective affective
milieu immanent to the capacity for self-
movement. “To move one’s body,” wrote Mer-
leau-Ponty, “is to aim at things through it; it is
to allow oneself to respond to their call, which
is made upon it independently of any represen-
tation” (PP, pp. 160 –161). On this account, the
 MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY’S CHALLENGE TO BODILY THEORIES
body’s self-relational capacity for sensing and
being sensed constitutes the fundamental affec-
tive openness to the world of objects.
Openness to the world is intimately related to
self-movement in the sense that having or tak-
ing possession of one’s own body through
movement necessarily involves affectively en-
acting a milieu5 of meaningful actions. It is in
this connection that Merleau-Ponty described
the body extended in space as subtended by a
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schema or structure of abstract movements
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made up from habitual movements. The clearest
illustration of this, which Merleau-Ponty re-
turned to, is in the direct relationship between
our objective body and a world of meaning in
self-movement:
I move external objects with the aid of my body, which
takes hold of them in one place and shifts them to
another. But my body itself I move directly, I do not
find it at one point of objective space and transfer it to
another, I have no need to look for it, it is already with
me—I do not need to lead it toward the movement’s
completion, it is in contact with it from the start and
propels itself toward that end. (PP, p. 108)
What Merleau-Ponty pointed out in this de-
scription is that the body in movement cannot
be explained as the response to a stimulus guid-
ing movement or a projection of a mental image
in objective space. For instance, the affective
gesture is not primarily understood by a mental
image: “The gesture does not make me think of
anger, it is the anger itself” (PP, p. 214). The
expressive gesture—the angry movement—
presents the anger (although the anger is not
reducible to the gesture or movement alone).
The point is that bodily movement always orig-
inates in a primordial structure of moving and
being moved, in which the body affectively
invests itself in a phenomenal field. Movement
and affect are not identical, but movements are
felt, and our felt/affective life takes part in
structuring how we move. In other words, Mer-
leau-Ponty’s focus on movement foregrounds
the body as a common vector for acquiring a
world of perception—the potential for enacting
a world of meaning (meaning being affective).
The convergence of body and world in this
sense counters the traditional notion of meaning
as a structure constituted by a collection of
simple elements, ideas, or perceptions. Having a
body is already having a world or being with
objects of the world, which primarily relates to
the totality of our existence in an environment
209
of objects and other bodies. Thus, even the most
simple perception constitutes a meaningful re-
lation with the world because it always relates
immediately to the totality of my situation or
existence. In other words, self-movement re-
veals our bodily situation as a fundamental to-
tality in the sense that self-affection constitutes
an opening to the world which we have to
assume to inhabit it. As Merleau-Ponty wrote,
“The world around us must be, not a system of
objects which we synthesize, but a totality of
things, open to us, towards which we project
ourselves” (PP, p. 450). This is always an in-
tersubjective move in so far that to enact a
world, I must also let myself become a subject
to perception of the world. Thus, the primacy of
affect is described by the fact that having a body
requires the reversible capacity to move and be
moved by objects—that is, to respond to the
world of objects that stand out. It is through
self-movement immanent to corporeality that
affect is described as a fundamental element in
the emergence of subjectivity, and, as such, as
fundamental to prereflective meaning-making.
Through self-movement, we can also under-
stand the difference between abstract or virtual
movements on the one hand, and concrete or
actual movements on the other. Both concrete
and abstract movements reveal the centrality of
affectivity to subjectivity, and the abstract
movement shows a link between reflection and
affectivity. Abstract movements, like drawing a
circle, are related to more abstract thought,
whereas concrete movements are directly re-
lated to a motor project. Both concrete and
abstract movements are felt, but the motor proj-
ect is generally more intensely driven by affec-
tivity; abstract movements are related to reflec-
tion, whereas an example of a concrete
movement is using a tool. In normality, Mer-
leau-Ponty argued (through the famous Schnei-
der example), abstract movements are founded
on concrete movements. It therefore follows
5
The concept of “milieu” in French is wider than its
common association with environment in English. Milieu
means both surroundings or environment, middle and me-
dium. In Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the body, this is
important to note because the body traverses these under-
standings of the milieu. Schematically, this can be described
in the sense that the body emerges or appears through an
environment and constitutes a middle, which then becomes
the medium of our perceptual experiences.
 210 ROALD, LEVIN, AND KØPPE
that reflection presented in abstract movements
are related to prereflective, affective life. It
serves as a foundation for a central claim of the
book, namely, that reflective life builds on the
prereflective.
Affect, as exemplified in the immanent ca-
pacity for moving and being moved, can also be
further nuanced as the abstract, centrifugal
throwing of consciousness out of itself—the
projection of the phenomenal body—whereas
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the concrete or actual emotional feeling intro-
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duces the centripetal constitution of a subjective
feeling or emotion. As Merleau-Ponty wrote,
The abstract movement carves out within that plenum
of the world in which concrete movement took place a
zone of reflection and subjectivity; it superimposes
upon physical space a virtual or human space. Concrete
movement is therefore centripetal whereas abstract
movement is centrifugal. The former occurs in the
realm of being or of the actual, the latter on the other
hand in that of the virtual or the nonexistent; the first
adheres to a given background, the second throws out
its own background. (PP, p. 128)
The abstract movement throws consciousness
outside itself with reflection and imagination
(the virtual), whereas concrete movement cen-
ters subjectivity in the given. The differentiation
between abstract and concrete movement is not
to be understood as a chronology of primary and
secondary features of affect, but as two sides of
the same event of being in the world. Just as the
body-subject is simultaneously both phenome-
nal and objective, concrete movements presup-
pose the abstract potential for movement at the
same time as the abstract movements presup-
pose actualization as a possibility through its
projections. In other words, the centrifugal
throwing of consciousness outside itself presup-
poses the centripetal carving out an affective
inner world of selfhood or ipseity.
Affect and Milieu
In the abovementioned description, we have
focused on the prereflective aspect of affect as
an operative element at the core of subjectivity
through the immanent affectivity of the body. In
the following text we will continue this explo-
ration through investigating the relationship be-
tween immanent affectivity and the experience
of emotions and feeling in PP. In this work, the
most intense and direct presentations of emo-
tions are in the chapter entitled The Body in its
Sexual Being, where the existential density or
significance of emotions is in focus through the
experience of the phantom limb and in the ex-
perience of love.
Merleau-Ponty revealed the existential af-
fecting of the past in the present through his
discussion of the phantom limb. He argued that
although affective experience can be ambigu-
ous, it can reign over the appearance of the
objective body because the phantom limb is an
emotional phenomenon. The emotional attach-
ment to the phantom limb takes precedence and
carries the limb’s physical presence in the past
into the present. The current physical lack of the
limb is veiled through its emotional, existential
presence. In a somewhat similar manner, the
presence of love, or lack thereof, can also be
veiled. Merleau-Ponty discussed the phenome-
non of love in three different forms that each
have different inward structures, but which out-
wardly have similar appearances. “True love” is
about continuous commitment, an existential
feeling most aptly expressed through the meta-
phor of music: to love is to “believe that my life
is committed to that feeling . . . a form which,
like a melody, to be carried on” (p. 440). “False
love,” however, lacks this inward commitment,
and instead, it is the circumstances that have
made me act as if I love, whereas in “misinter-
preted love,” the inwardness of “true love” is
present, but in retrospect I may realize that the
fondness was not true love, but rather attach-
ment to certain qualities or expressions con-
nected to affectionate memories. Thus, the
“true” inward depth, musicality, or existential
density of the feeling is mostly available as the
present becomes past and retrospection a possi-
bility. “Illusion is possible” in affective life.6
Although retrospection in some circum-
stances can help determine the nature of the
emotion, a central aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s
interpretation of the meaning of emotions lies in
his description of emotion as coinciding with its
own embodied expressions or gestures. It is in
this sense that Merleau-Ponty argued that “it is
no more natural, and no less conventional, to
shout in anger or to kiss in love than to call table
‘a table.’ Feelings and passional conduct are
invented like words” (p. 220). Consequently,
according to Merleau-Ponty, emotional expres-
6
For a discussion of these aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s
theory, see Roald, 2015.
 MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY’S CHALLENGE TO BODILY THEORIES
sions do not just represent underlying feelings
naturally given in the objective body’s physio-
logical organization. Rather, the expression of
an emotion is in itself constitutive of emotions.
We have seen that the emotion is not identical
with the gesture, but the gesture nevertheless
contributes to the emotion even if it can be
“misinterpreted” or false. In the same manner as
we acquire a body by living or acting through it,
the feelings of love and anger are only actual-
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ized as emotions by living them, for example,
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through acts of kissing or shouting. It is in this
sense that emotions that did not exist before as
other than virtual possibilities are invented
through embodied expressive acts. As Merleau-
Ponty argued, “Everything is both manufac-
tured and natural in man” (PP, p. 220). Conse-
quently, emotional expressions take on different
forms and behaviors in different cultures de-
pending on the milieu in which emotions are
actualized:
The fact is that the behavior associated with anger or
love is not the same in a Japanese and an Occidental.
Or, to be more precise, the difference of behavior
corresponds to a difference in the emotions them-
selves. It is not only the gesture which is contingent in
relation to the body’s organization, it is the manner
itself in which we meet the situation and live it. The
angry Japanese smiles, the westerner goes red and
stamps his foot or else goes pale and hisses his words.
It is not enough for two conscious subjects to have the
same organs and nervous system for the same emotions
to produce in both the same signs. What is important is
how they use their bodies, the simultaneous patterning
of body and world in emotion. (PP, p. 219)
In other words, although our body as a medium
gives our life a form of generality in terms of
affect as a stable dispositional tendency of our
body, for two bodies to have similar emotions,
it is not enough that they are physical bodies
with a general affective potential; they must
also be lived or actualized in an environment
that affords the same expressions of it. Thus,
emotions cannot simply be reduced to a physi-
ological body but include the totality of the
body’s milieu (middle, medium, and surround-
ings). In turn, that feelings and emotions are
conventional and “invented like words” does
not mean that they are arbitrary conventions,
but rather that there are “several ways to sing
the world’s praises and in the last resort to live
it” (PP, p. 118). To kiss in love or shout in
anger then are conventional, but not arbitrarily
created. They are different forms of bodily con-
211
figurations and they are not arbitrary, but
whether these expressions arise ultimately de-
pends on the totality of the body’s situation—its
milieu.
Thus, the constitution of emotion happens
in the tension between the sedimentation of
emotional life and the transcendence of it. Emo-
tions are continuously created in relation to the
environment where the differentiation between
self and environment is mutually constitutive;
the borders are hard to demarcate: “The interior
and the exterior are inseparable. The world is
entirely on the inside, and I am entirely on the
outside of myself” (PP, p. 430). Still there is a
separation, and it is not the case that Merleau-
Ponty denied habituation, inwardness, and sed-
imentation as being central to subjectivity, but
he contended that they are constituted intersub-
jectively through and through: “I am everything
that I see and I am an intersubjective field, not
in spite of my body and my historical situation,
but rather by being this body and this situation
and by being, through them, everything else”
(PP, p. 478).
Affective Intersubjectivity and the Origins
of Bodily Theories of Emotion
As we have seen in PP, affect, feeling, and
emotion not only permeate all perception and
carve out ipseity and intersubjectivity but also
have different, existential functions for the
body-subject. The first-person givenness of ex-
perience is felt, and to sense the world is to be
in a dynamic, affective relationship with it.
Emotions, however, are experientially more
complex and differentiated in the way that they
reveal a difference between the external and the
internal world. The two do not completely co-
incide: An expression of the emotion does not
necessarily refer to an identical internal reality.
But it is this internal reality—together with the
external aspect of the expression—that lends the
situation its significance and that engages us, or
is our engagement, in the world. To Merleau-
Ponty, affect must be viewed as a part of the
bodily totality that is in a constant meaning-
exchange with the world; affection and move-
ment open up for a “deep” exchange with the
world. The body is, for Merleau-Ponty, an ac-
tive, foundational part of meaning-making.
This theme of affective life and the body has
earlier origins, however, as Darwin (1872/1998)
 212 ROALD, LEVIN, AND KØPPE
described the nature of change in the natural
world and investigated similarities in emotional
expression between animals and humans. He
discovered that certain groups of expressions
were identical across species (including hu-
mans), viewing the emotional expression as an
external sign of an internal feeling. His topic
was the expression of emotion and not the con-
curring, internal experience. Darwin was inter-
ested in how both animals and humans could
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communicate emotions, and this could only take
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place through formal conventions for motor ex-
pression or gesticulation.
Darwin did not describe affect solely as
bodily expression. The premise for Darwin’s
emotion theory is that first an internal affect is
created. This can take place before or concur-
rent with the creation of a motor expression. It
is not until the James-Lange theory that emo-
tions become identified as identical with the
motor reaction. James, physiologist, psycholo-
gist, and philosopher,7 famously proposed that
feelings are determined by the body. In fact, in
the article What is an Emotion? (James, 1884),
he notably claimed as follows:
Our natural way of thinking about these emotions is
that the mental perception of some facts excited the
mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter
state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My
thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow
directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and
that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS
the emotion. (pp. 189 –190; original italics and
capitalization)
James argued that bodily, not mental, changes
cause an emotion. His reference to the body is
not to the bodily totality as emphasized by Mer-
leau-Ponty, but to autonomous nervous system
activity as the cause of emotion. He regarded
emotion as being the felt aspect of a reflex, an
automatic motor reaction, which precedes any
action of the cogito.8 James was not alone in his
claim. Concurrently with James, the Danish
physiologist Carl Lange (1885/1967) proposed
that physiological responses were necessary and
sufficient for the experience of an emotion.
Even more reductionistic than James, he de-
scribed emotion as the constriction or dilation of
blood vessels. Consequently, the James-Lange
theory regards feelings as feedback from iso-
lated physiological responses. Perception is sep-
arate from the physiological reaction, and, as
reflexes, these emotions lack intentionality. Of
course, the emotions are a function of the per-
ception of an object, but it is not a phenomeno-
logical intentionality that is presented. It is not a
perception that is a part of the body-subject as
described by Merleau-Ponty. The perception
comprises a sense-imprint in which the object is
physiologically imprinted as a unit of experi-
ence in which the subject has no say.
The James-Lange theory is very close to a
behavioristic description: Emotions are felt as-
pects of a mechanical reaction to specific exter-
nal stimuli to which the body reacts in standard-
ized ways. It is a mechanical view of the body,
where bodily movements can take place without
subjectivity. Darwin’s model is somewhat more
complex, though also more diffuse; it is difficult
to know how Darwin regarded the subjective
side of experience. In his account, the body is
primarily something that has value as a sign, a
kind of semiotic expression of the presence of
affect. Both in Darwin’s theory and in the
James-Lange theory, affect is closely connected
to bodily expression, wherefore it easily could
be assumed that the difference between these
theories and Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions is
less than it is. The main characteristic of the
7
This is James’ early view on the nature of emotion.
Several authors have relatively recently pointed out that this
famous version of James’ theory of emotion is but a cari-
cature of James’ thoughts on affective life. Redding (2011)
and Averill (1992) refer to James’ later works such as
Essays on radical empiricism (James, 1912/2003), where,
contrary to the James-Lange theory, bodily feelings have an
evaluative function. Instead of distinguishing between ear-
lier and later versions of James’ thoughts, Ratcliffe (2005)
shows how James’ philosophical ontology altogether re-
veals a more nuanced picture of emotions present in all of
James’ work, where affect is a part of intentionality and, as
such, not only part of revealing a world but also constitutive
of it. This, however, does not negate the fact that James’
theory has for decades been presented as the James-Lange
theory in psychology text books throughout the world and
serves as the foundation for much research (Friedman,
2010). The James-Lange theory therefore needs to be dis-
cussed and debated, both in terms of how James actually
viewed affects and the problems he himself would find in
such an account, but also what the problems with the
James-Lange theory in itself are, independent of James’
more complex thought.
8
James (1884) himself, however, claimed that his theory
was “only” valid for “emotions that have a distinct bodily
expression,” and the “standard emotions.” The standard
emotions include some which today are considered basic
ones, such as fear, anger, and surprise, but also much more
functionally complex emotions such as grief, curiosity,
love, lust, and greed.
 MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY’S CHALLENGE TO BODILY THEORIES
James-Lange theory is that first we have a mo-
toric reaction, then the felt affect. The body
reacts in and of itself, and it is the product of
this reaction that becomes felt. According to
Darwin, the opposite happens: First, affect
arises and then this is expressed through the
body. To Merleau-Ponty, affect must be viewed
as a part of the bodily totality, which is in a
constant meaning-exchange with the world.
This view is very far from the one in the James-
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Lange theory. In the latter, emotion is the con-
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sequence of a mechanical, behavioral sequence.
There is no affective and motoric intentionality
present that opens up for a “deep” exchange
with the world, as Merleau-Ponty proposed.
The body is, for Merleau-Ponty, an active, foun-
dational part of meaning-making, and parts of
this meaning are affective.
Following the James-Lange theory, distinct
physiological reactions lead to distinct emotions
or feelings. The theory is, as such, representa-
tive of a long line of research that in this context
can be compiled into the same category of
bodily emotion theories with focus on the pres-
ence or lack thereof of autonomic nervous sys-
tem activity (and differences in autonomic ner-
vous system activity according to different
emotions), and on a more general level, of re-
search into the physiology of emotion. So, al-
though the Cannon-Bard theory was developed
in opposition to the James-Lange theory and
claimed that the bodily expression of emotion
and it’s felt aspects have different origins, the
basic understanding of the body is the same.
Although Bruce Friedman (2010) reviewed9
Jamesian emotion theory and the autonomic
specificity of emotion, and illustrated its rele-
vance for contemporary emotion research, the
significant challenge to such psycho-physical
theories came with the Schachter and Singer
Study (1962). Martha Nussbaum (2001, p. 98)
wrote, “the primary importance of the Schacter
& Singer study was the impetus it gave to the
rising generation of researchers to try out more
complex paradigms and to loosen their connec-
tion to a simple type of physiological reaction.”
So, with the emerging cognitive focus, the psy-
cho-physical understanding of emotion was
weakened,10 but the discussion of the relation-
ship between thought and feeling ensued
(Dixon, 2003). Still, the role of the body re-
mained marginal and was not conceptualized
213
beyond the mechanistic, psycho-physical pre-
sentation.
Self in Mind—Damasio on Affect
The neuropsychologist Antonio Damasio,
strongly inspired by James, worked on the func-
tions of emotions throughout his career. His
work has already been discussed in relation to
phenomenology,11 but this discussion took
place before Damasio wrote his latest book, Self
Comes to Mind. Constructing the Conscious
Brain (Damasio, 2010), in which he wanted to
“start over” because he was dissatisfied with his
own, older portrayal of emotional life, “partic-
ularly the nature of feelings” (p. 6).
Damasio made a central distinction between
emotions and feelings. He assigns emotions to
the mechanical body as neurological activity,
whereas feelings are the resultant felt aspects.
These felt aspects (feelings) exist in a variety of
configurations in a variety of situations, from
the more simple “primordial feelings” to com-
plex “social emotions.” Still, feelings, as as-
pects of the lived body, become mechanical in
the sense that what Damasio, as a neurologist,
described are the neurological underpinnings of
feelings and their functions in the biological
system that is the self. His primary task is not to
describe the lived body—not the intersubjec-
tive, cultural, or otherwise lived/phenomeno-
logical aspects of affective life (although he
certainly recognized these aspects as important
in the constitution and continuation of feelings).
His work is about intricate brain processes in-
carnating mind processes and not about the in-
tricate intersubjective bodily incarnations,
which were of so much interest to Merleau-
Ponty. Damasio’s investigation into the interac-
tion of discord and harmony focuses on the
9
The article only reviews James’ early emotion theory.
10
For a phenomenological critique of cognitive theories
of emotion, see Kym Maclaren, 2011.
11
Ratcliffe (2002) argued for the goodness of fit between
Damasio’s theory of emotion and Heidegger’s view of
mood and emotion because both theories show how affects
“bind us to the world in a fundamental way that is presup-
posed by the possibility of theoretical cognition” (p. 300).
Ratcliffe’s account is illuminating, but it contains no critical
comments on combining Damasio’s and Heidegger’s theo-
ries. What we will point to instead is some places of tension
where Merleau-Ponty’s delineation is at odds with Dama-
sio’s theory.
 214 ROALD, LEVIN, AND KØPPE
brain (body) to mind,12 not body to body, in
dialectical processes between self and other. He
investigated the neurological underpinnings of
emotion within the framework of a theory of
how consciousness arises. He presented us with
a detailed grand theory, emerging with empiri-
cal support (albeit not unequivocally so).13
Although he discarded much of his own ear-
lier work, Damasio retained the centrality of
emotions and his somatic marker hypothesis.
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He was deeply inspired by James, both in his
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conception of the nature of the self and of the
emotions, but also distanced himself from cer-
tain aspects of James’s thought. He criticized
James for conceptual confusion and for ignor-
ing specific cognitive aspects in assessing ob-
jects. Emotions, according to Damasio, should
be located at the neurological rather than at the
phenomenological level. Had emotion research
done this, Damasio (2001) claimed, it would not
have suffered so many setbacks. With regard to
the cognitive aspects, both the initial and final
cognitive acts of the emotion process are more
complex than James proposed. Many emotion
researchers today would concur with Damasio
that at the initial stage, at the point of perceiving
the object, perception can occur without much
cognitive interference, but most of the time ob-
jects are not processed directly without cogni-
tion. Appraisal of the situation takes place
where some parts of the situation are regarded
as more salient than others. This is ignored in
James’ account. Damasio wrote (p. 116) that
“James’s view in this regard becomes a carica-
ture: the stimulus always goes to the hot button
and sets off the explosion.” Damasio’s view of
James suffers at times from a bit of hyperbole,
caricaturing James’s claim as his theory is only
about strong bodily emotions. Nevertheless, for
those emotions having strong bodily character-
istics, James’s conception of their completion is
also insufficient. Damasio rightly pointed out
that complexity in emotional life is present
through and through. Most of the time the ex-
perience of an emotion is not just the result of
perception of an object and of the physiological
body, but involves more extensive cognitive
scripts (scripts being cognitive brain maps laid
down and altered through one’s experiences,
causing anticipations or expectations for future
situations). In this way, Damasio integrated the
past, present, and future in the experience of an
emotion. But what are emotions, and how do
they function? Damasio answered this question
not only in terms of their neurobiology but also
in terms of phenomenology (understood in its
widest sense) of the self.
Damasio proposed distinctions between self-
aspects and ordered them gradually, with vari-
ations according to degrees of complexity in
affective life. First comes the “proto-self” with
the primordial feelings. Primordial feelings are
a constant aspect of experience—“direct expe-
rience of one’s own living body” (p. 21). They
are direct in the sense that they are directly felt
experiences of complex brain maps that repre-
sent the body in its actual condition in variations
of pleasure and pain. All kinds of feelings are
based on primordial ones. The proto-self is the
basic building block of the self and is awareness
of primordial feelings. Damasio described the
proto-self as “the elementary feeling of exis-
tence.” These primordial feelings become more
complex as the person acts and moves in the
world, and at this level of action, Damasio in-
serted the “core self,” which is the self as agent,
centered around action. As the person moves
about in the world, the primordial feelings are
colored by the interaction with the environment.
At the third stage of the self, “the autobiograph-
ical self,” affective life becomes more complex
as feelings are represented in memory. It is at
the second and third levels of the self that other
main categories of emotion operate: back-
ground emotions, universal emotions, and so-
cial emotions. Background emotions— enthusi-
asm and discouragement, for example—are
similar to moods, but more closely related to
particular stimuli, and are, therefore, also more
specific in terms of temporality. Universal emo-
tions have distinct bodily expressions (face) and
are present cross-culturally (“fear, anger sad-
ness, happiness, disgust, surprise”), whereas so-
cial emotions are indisputably social in nature
(examples are “compassion, embarrassment,
shame, guilt, contempt, jealousy, envy, pride,
admiration”).
12
As Martha Nussbaum (2001) described, Damasio was
a nonreductive physicalist, a description that holds also for
his latest book. Here he (Damasio, 2010) hailed introspec-
tion as “the only direct view of what we want to explain,”
(p. 184), yet remained open to a parsimonious neurological
explanation for mental life. He proposed “brain-mind equiv-
alence” (p. 17).
13
See Dunn, Dalgleish, and Lawrence (2006).
 MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY’S CHALLENGE TO BODILY THEORIES
Emotions function at a primary level as so-
matic markers. This is an idea that Damasio had
maintained since Descarte’s Error (Damasio,
1994). With the somatic marker hypothesis,
Damasio proposed that feelings arise in relation
to what is viewed as “mine” and demarcate the
border between self and nonself:
When contents that pertain to the self occur in the
mind-stream, they provoke the appearance of a
marker, which joins the mind-stream as an image,
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juxtaposed to the image that prompted it. These
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feelings accomplish a distinction between self and
nonself. They are, in a nut-shell, feelings of know-
ing. (Damasio, 1994, p. 9)
The nature of the emotion and the resultant
feeling state—the somatic marker—serve as an
experiential sign (and a brain sign) pertaining to
the personal importance of the situation.14
Merleau-Ponty’s Affective Incarnation
Revisited
Merleau-Ponty would have, most likely, ac-
knowledged the usefulness of certain aspects of
Damasio’s theory. Merleau-Ponty was, in gen-
eral, not dismissive of neuropsychology as a
field of investigation, and used neuropsycholog-
ical references in his work. But there are limi-
tations to his embrace of neuropsychology and
aspects of it that Merleau-Ponty would have
certainly rejected. One serious problem is that
Damasio hardly recognized or described the
constitution of the lived body and its dynamic
relation to the world. He thereby ignored how
affects and emotions arise through self-
movement; he overlooked one’s own body as a
living, dynamic affective opening that takes part
in the continuous process of meaning-making.
Damasio’s claim that all complex feelings are
preceded by primordial feelings has the conse-
quence that any kind of feeling is just the end-
point of a process with roots in the most prim-
itive parts of the nervous system. Even though
Damasio named primordial feelings “the ele-
mentary feeling of existence,” it is far from any
relation to the phenomenological way of under-
standing ontology. Damasio’s system builds on
normative principles that guide processes in the
organism—including emotions and feelings.
One of these principles is bodily equilibrium,
where deviation from this equilibrium generates
a feeling (Damasio, 2010, p. 190 –193). This is,
in principle, a mechanistic view that places bi-
215
ological purpose as the ruling factor. Merleau-
Ponty focused on the reciprocal action or the
dynamic interchange between body and world
and showed how this relation is an unbreakable
unity that generates feelings and emotions. This
is not something that happens in the head (or the
nervous system) alone—it is generated in an
intersubjective relation.
Although Merleau-Ponty’s description of the
body-subject shares a focus with Damasio re-
garding the body as the locus of affect and as
the frame or condition for what can and cannot
be felt, Merleau-Ponty’s critique of such emo-
tion theory can be found in his critique of em-
piricism, and with it a mechanistic physiology
that objectifies the body. Empiricism treats and
investigates the body as an object, not as lived
experience with existential density. The body is
viewed as a system that receives stimuli or input
from the world and processes it in a causal or
mechanistic manner. Cause and effect are pred-
icable with predetermined patterns of behavior;
external and internal causes have predictable
effects on the body.
Merleau-Ponty was not the first to recognize
that such an account was too limited. Philoso-
phers and psychologists have long known that
stimulus-response models are too simple be-
cause the same object does not necessarily
cause the same event across persons or situa-
tions. Instead, there exist a wide variety of re-
actions, and “dispositions” were introduced to
account for this variation. Adding dispositions
creates the foundation for a more complex model:
Experience is seen as comprising both the phys-
ical and the psychological, where the nervous
system produces signals by way of representa-
tions, from internal or external stimuli, to the
mind. But there are errors in such accounts too.
A main error here, Merleau-Ponty pointed out,
lies in the strict separation between the physio-
logical and psychological, which, following this
line of thought, would then need to unite in
some (obscure) manner. Instead, Merleau-Ponty
14
Experimentally, it was tested with the Iowa gambling
task, but repeated experiments failed to produce similar
results (Dunn et al., 2006). The Iowa gambling task refers to
an experimental setting where healthy participants were
compared with patients with brain damage. The conclusion
of the original experiment was that the healthy participants
made their decisions about which card to pick based on
somatic markers, that is, their bodily feelings.
 216 ROALD, LEVIN, AND KØPPE
showed how experience is intrinsically situated
in such a way that both the physiological and
the psychological, the “psychical” and the
“physiological,” refer to much broader fields of
existence—much broader fields of the human
body—than usually imagined. Take the exam-
ple of reflexes. Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962) ar-
gued as follows:
The reflex does not result from objective stimuli, it
turns toward them, it invests them with a sense that
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they only have when taken one by one or as physical
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agents, a sense that they only have when taken as a
situation. The reflex causes them to exist as a situation;
it establishes a “knowledge-relation” with them, that is,
it points to them as what it is destined to encounter.
Reflex, insofar as it opens itself to the sense of a
situation, and perception, insofar as it does not first of
all posit an object of knowledge and insofar as it is an
intention of our totality of being, are modalities of a
preobjective perspective that we call “being in the
world. (p. 81, original italics)
To describe the nature of bodily experience—to
describe “being in the world” in such a way that
it rises above the Cartesian dichotomy of body
and mind—is Merleau-Ponty’s task. He de-
scribed the bodily totality in its immediacy, in
its primordial experience of the world, which
takes place before any such theoretical distinc-
tions. The physiological and psychological are
not (entirely) distinct modes of action in “being
in the world.” Intentionality, perception, and
affection meld together in the temporal body-
subject.
As described by Merleau-Ponty, the lived
body is a dynamic body with rhythms and pul-
sations, and it engages or withdraws from the
world and its phenomenological field. The body
is familiar with its surroundings, it “knows” its
way around. It has tacit knowledge and operates
in the experiential dimension of spontaneity on
the one hand and sedimentation of habits on the
other. The body is inherently involved in the
production of meaning, and subjectivity is con-
stituted intersubjectively or dialectically; thus
there is always an element of alterity and famil-
iarity in experience. Our bodily being is the
foundation of our existence. It forms and in-
forms consciousness and produces not just the
constraint conditions for consciousness, that is,
sets limits for what it can be, but takes part in
creating its form. Having said this, we must
recognize that our bodily being does not inform
our emotions: it is our affects and emotions
(albeit not in a Jamesian manner). Our emotions
are part and parcel of bodily existence—they
are integrated.
Conclusion
Although the theories we have been discuss-
ing here investigate affect with a focus on its
bodily incarnations, there are huge variations in
conceptual complexity. The James-Lange the-
ory is the most reductive, as feelings are viewed
as strictly determined by the automatic reac-
tions of the body. Darwin’s theory is (almost)
biological because it does not investigate the
role of subjectivity. These theories specify pre-
determined, bodily reactions. They promote a
primarily mechanical notion of the body: There
is a series of connected physiological or biolog-
ical reactions that produce a specific set of emo-
tions. Certain parts of emotions are created
“bottom-up,” with very little potential for vari-
ation.
In the abovementioned models, some way of
handling complexity is obviously missing. Does
Damasio’s model resolve this problem? Seen
through the lens of Merleau-Ponty, it does not
because Damasio reduced primordial feelings to
biological mechanisms. Even complex emo-
tions are basically primordial feelings, which
are connected to other narrative emotions and
modified primordial feelings. The theory com-
prises bottom-up descriptions where the ner-
vous system, by and large, determines feelings.
In comparison to the other models, Damasio’s
theory is without a doubt an improvement. He
differentiated between levels of emotions and
feelings, as well as levels of components of the
self. But Damasio’s theory does not account for
the fundamental interaction with the surround-
ing world and is still embedded in a behavioral
paradigm that holds on to fundamentally empir-
icist principles—principles that Merleau-Ponty
criticized in the beginning of PP. Merleau-
Ponty showed us that we feel the world in
movements of sensing and perception in bodily
based intersubjective relations. Affects are, as
such, inseparable from, but also not reducible
to, the subject or the world. As such, Merleau-
Ponty’s affective incarnation reveals a body-
subject where the affects express a most signif-
icant aspect of the subject’s existence.
 MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY’S CHALLENGE TO BODILY THEORIES
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Received December 14, 2017
Revision received June 27, 2018
Accepted August 1, 2018 䡲