The Body as Mediator

Dan Nixon

Recently, I’ve noticed something strange about what my body does

while I’m flicking through apps or reading on my phone. I’ve become
conscious of my irregular breathing patterns, and how much tension
I’m holding in my back and shoulders. The technologist Linda Stone
has noted something similar, describing the way her breath becomes
shallow, and sometimes temporarily stops altogether, when she sits
down to work on her emails in the morning. She terms the problem
‘screen apnea’.

Perhaps even more striking for me, though, has been the realization
that I’m often simply unaware of my body altogether. It’s as though,
when I enter into a digital ‘space’, my body as good as disappears.
This perhaps explains why I’ve always found the narrative of online
platforms competing to maximize and monetize ‘eyeballs on screens’
to be vaguely unsettling. The problem is not just that this paints a
totally mechanistic picture of the human organism: it’s also that this
disembodied picture aligns all too well with how it actually feels to be
totally absorbed in some ‘content’ on my phone for 30 minutes at a
stretch.
So while we know by now that tech can hijack the mind, what do we
miss when we ignore what’s going on from a bodily perspective?
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the 20th-century French philosopher and
influential voice within the tradition known as phenomenology, can
serve as our guide here. He went further than any other Western
thinker in placing our embodiment at the heart of an entire
philosophical system. In our technologically mediated lives, Merleau-
Ponty can help diagnose the unease we feel about the disappearance of
the beating, pulsing body – and its reduction to the status of a mere
object. Moreover, he elucidates what we overlook when we don’t

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make the body central to our understanding of our relationships with
others and to the wider ecological context we’re immersed within.
To carry Merleau-Ponty’s insights into our everyday lives, I suggest
that we can apply the simple notion of being present – carefully
attending to the here and now of experience. Doing so flips the
Western cultural tendency to privilege mind over body; it also brings a
fresh perspective to practices such as mindfulness, which we’re often
enjoined to use to counteract the distractibility and dissatisfaction of
our digital lives. Perhaps most importantly, though, a return to
embodied presence can lead us to a powerful critique of other
dichotomies, such as self/other and human/nature. How might centring
ourselves around our embodiment pave the way towards a radically
different relationship with our communities, and even the larger
‘body’ of the Earth?

M erleau-Ponty’s work emerged from a richly embodied context

of his own. The social and intellectual life of Paris in the late-1940s
and ’50s, spilling out from the smoke-filled cafés and jazz bars of the
Left Bank, must have been an exciting one to inhabit after the horrors
and destitution of the Second World War. As Sarah Bakewell recounts
in At the Existentialist Café (2016), Merleau-Ponty became friends
with Simone de Beauvoir when they first studied philosophy together,
both aged 19, and he got to know Jean-Paul Sartre shortly after. Some
years later, the three of them would go on to launch the political
journal Les Temps modernes. In contrast to Sartre (‘loud-mouthed’,
‘uncompromising’) and Beauvoir (‘a creature of strong judgments’),
Bakewell portrays Merleau-Ponty as someone who generally ‘looked
for multiple sides to any situation’.
Perhaps this quality, together with his ‘perfect ease’ in the company of
others, is one reason why Merleau-Ponty was almost universally liked

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by those who met him. In contrast to most philosophers of his time, he
was particularly taken by the mysteries and subtleties of non-verbal
communication and eye contact. He claimed that we gesture and
connect with one another through an expressive, ambiguous space of
‘intercorporeality’ – a space that exists among and between our
bodies. Fittingly enough, Bakewell reports that Merleau-Ponty was
regarded as hands-down the best dancer of all the thinkers in the Left
Bank jazz scene at that time.

Merleau-Ponty’s insights started from the simple idea that we don’t so

much ‘have’ as ‘inhabit’ our bodies, living with them and through
them in a complex social world. To make this clear, he distinguished
between two notions of the body. There’s the ‘objective body’ that,
like other physical objects, has a particular size, weight, buoyancy and
so on; it’s what you assess when you weigh yourself on the scales,
say, or when you pose for a selfie. But far more important is what he
called the ‘lived body’: the body through which we touch and feel and
move. And this latter notion, he wrote, grounds us as being ‘body-
subjects’ before all else.

This premise goes against the grain: from Plato through René
Descartes and the scientific revolution, Western thinking has treated
the body as secondary to the mind, an object in a world of objects.
Merleau-Ponty understood the need to treat the body in this way when
it came to specific scientific or empirical investigations. But as a
general position on ‘how things are’, he found it to be deeply
problematic, since the body as we actually experience it is not a mere
object. You’d never need to ‘look for’ your right arm in the way you
might look for a pair of scissors around your desk, as he quipped
in Phenomenology of Perception (1945). More generally, he
continued: ‘I cannot conceive myself as nothing but a bit of the world,
a mere object of biological, psychological or sociological
investigation.’ The underlying problem, Merleau-Ponty believed, was
that philosophers had become so caught up in abstractions and

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theorisations about the world that they’d moved far away from the
texture of what real life, as an experience and phenomenon, was
actually like.
Merleau-Ponty wrote of the importance of adopting an ‘attentiveness and wonder’ towards the
world

Phenomenology sought to address precisely this issue. The

phenomenologist’s task – dating back to the pioneering work of
Edmund Husserl around the turn of the 20th century – was to do
justice to describing what our everyday, lived experience is actually
like before rushing to explain it. Merleau-Ponty took up this
challenge, and stuck to it throughout his career, with an ongoing
interest in perception: ‘true philosophy’, he wrote in the introduction
to Phenomenology of Perception, ‘consists in relearning to look at the
world’.

In that early work, Merleau-Ponty set out two key insights that would
become canonical. First, he said, we always find ourselves situated in
a particular historical, physical and social setting. Rather than
Descartes’s detached ego or the empiricist’s objective ‘view from
nowhere’, Merleau-Ponty pointed out that, when you enquire into your
everyday experience, you always find yourself in some way involved
with the world around you. Seeing my neighbour leaving her flat at
the same time as me, for example, I experience greeting her as a
familiar person, as someone with meaning within my ‘situated’ life. In
our day-to-day lives, we experience a shared world in which cultural
objects – Merleau-Ponty cites roads, pipes, churches and villages –
have meanings that we share with other people.

Secondly, Merleau-Ponty drew attention to the body being revealed

not as a lump of matter but as the breathing, beating center of our
experience – the ‘lived’ body. And in contrast to the Enlightenment
tendency to abstract towards a theoretical position of perfect
objectivity, Merleau-Ponty described features of our embodiment that

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perhaps seem too obvious, and mundane, to mention: how you always
perceive things from a particular perspective, how the particular
configuration of your body means that you never directly see the back
of your neck. Take the experience of depth: because I encounter a
world that includes both my own body and yet spreads into the
distance, the philosopher David Abram writes, ‘that cloud that I see
can be a small cloud close overhead or a huge cloud far above;
meanwhile what I had thought was a bird turns out to be a speck of
dust on my glasses’. Through perception, the body is always called
upon to engage, to choose, to focus the world before any verbal
reflection comes into play, and sets the scene for whatever we go on to
reflectively think and say and do. This is why Merleau-Ponty
concluded that bodily engagement with the world is more basic than
deliberation about it: not as a way of privileging the physical over the
mental, but as a description of what it’s like to move through the
world, mind and body working as one.
How might we apply this worldview to our highly ‘head-based’ lives?
The notion of being present in the here and now, rather than getting
caught up in the nonstop chatter of the mind, offers us a natural way to
‘live and breathe’ Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. He wrote, in
particular, of the importance of adopting an ‘attentiveness and
wonder’ towards the world. To engage with the world
phenomenologically, he suggested, we must embracebeing ‘a
perpetual beginner’: coming back again and again to what we perceive
before us, remaining ‘open to the adventures of experience’.
This is especially pertinent in the digital era, and not only because of
the ‘noise’ of limitless distractions. More pervasively, it pushes
against the ‘solutionism’ that radiates outwards from Silicon Valley,
in which human lives are interpreted as a series of problems to be
solved through sophisticated analysis of data. On this view, things
such as mindfulness practices – which can involve resting your
attention on the sensations of breathing – become just another ‘life

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hack’. It’s true that these techniques can offer a host of benefits,
including a boost to our capacity for metacognitive awareness –
an awareness of our own negative (or positive) thoughts as
thoughts rather than as unfiltered reality, which can help prevent
relapses into anxiety and depression. But connecting to the aliveness
of the breathing body offers us something more basic: these moments
literally re-source us, putting us in contact, as body-subjects, with our
most primordial mode of being. In tech circles, ‘dwell time’ is used to
refer to how long a user spends on a particular webpage – but perhaps
we can reclaim the expression for time spent intentionally dwelling in
a state of embodied presence without seeking to ‘get’ anything out of
it.

O f course, the word ‘mindfulness’ is somewhat at odds with a

focus on embodiment, and some characterisations of mindfulness
accentuate this apparent contrast. One popular analogy compares
meditation with physical exercise: just as you work out in the gym to
get bigger muscles, the analogy goes, mindfulness offers you a
‘mental workout’. This reinforces a mind/body split, with the role of
the body reduced to little more than an object of attention. But if
mindfulness is cast as ‘an alert participation in the ongoing process of
living’, to cite the elegant definition of the Buddhist monk Henepola
Gunaratana, then it seems to fit particularly well as a practical
counterpart to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological worldview. This
has been my own experience with meditation over the past decade or
so: in exercises that involve observing not body sensations but
thoughts and emotions as they arise, I can maintain an awareness of
the lived body being there in the background. You learn to become
more attentive not only to the lived body, but with it.

As well as embracing the body as a place to rest, seeing ourselves as

body-subjects that reach out, touch and feel has profound implications

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for how we view our relationship with other people. The pandemic
experience of 2020 has brought home just how much we
typically rely on close physical contact with other people – and how
much we suffer when this is brought to a halt.

It’s perhaps revealing that, for many philosophers, the very existence
of others has often been presented as a puzzle. You’re talking to the
postwoman, she gives every impression of being a person like you are
– but how do you know she has conscious experience, and isn’t a
sophisticated robot or zombie, lacking an inner life?
This ‘problem of other minds’, as it’s called, ceases to be a problem at
all when we accept from the outset the embodied nature of our actual
experience. As Merleau-Ponty wrote: ‘other minds are given to us
only as incarnate, as belonging to faces and gestures’. To counter with
distinctions such as mind/body ‘is of no use’, he said, if we permit
ourselves to perceive the entirety (known as ‘the gestalt’) of what
actually appears before us. Painters, he suggested, recognise this
point:
Cezanne returns to just that primordial experience from which these
notions [soul and body, etc] are derived and in which they are
inseparable. The painter who conceptualises and seeks the expression
first misses the mystery – renewed every time we look at someone –
of a person’s appearing in nature.
Enquiring into our embodied experience also renders the subject-
object distinction less clear-cut. Merleau-Ponty offers the following
example: ‘when I press my two hands against one another … [I
encounter] an ambiguous organisation in which the two hands can
alternate in the function of “touching” and “touched”.’ Which hand is
touching and which is touched? This ambiguity extends to our
exchanges with other people. Imagine two teenagers, close friends, on
a long walk along the coastline on a summer’s evening. Their hands
brush against each other; but who touched whom, or whether there

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was even any intent at all, might not be clear – and this kind of
ambiguity will always infuse our social interactions at some level.
It’s ultimately a bodily awareness of this ‘intertwining’ that fosters our sensitivity towards other
people

Perceiver and perceived, then, are drawn into the cohesion of life. In
the posthumous collection The Visible and the Invisible (1964),
Merleau-Ponty wrote of the shared ‘interworld’ where ‘our gazes
cross and our perceptions overlap’; it is here, he says, that the
‘intertwining’ of your life with other people’s lives is revealed. Far
from a world of detached egos, or one of mere objects, what we
encounter through embodied perception is this crisscrossing of lateral,
overlapping relations with other people, other creatures and other
things – an expressive space that exists between lived bodies. It’s not
that we are all ‘one’, but that we inhabit a world in which, to quote the
philosopher Glen Mazis, ‘things, people, creatures intertwine,
interweave, yet do not lose the wonder that each is each and yet not
without the others’.

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The Large Bathers (1900 - 1906) by Paul Cezanne. Courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art

It’s ultimately a bodily awareness of this ‘intertwining’ that fosters our sensitivity towards other
people, Merleau-Ponty believed – what Mazis calls ‘embodiment’s access to the heart’.
Intimacy, connection and compassion rest on our perceiving one another: not so much an
intellectual grasp of the other as a ‘conscious agent’ but the felt sense of this embodied, sensitive
and vulnerable being before me. I’m reminded of the powerful image of Patrick Hutchinson, the
Black Lives Matter demonstrator who bravely carried a counter-protester to safety during the
protests in London in the summer of 2020. Describing his decision to step in, Hutchinson told
Channel 4 news:

His life was under threat, so I just went under, scooped him up, put him on my shoulders, and
started marching towards the police with him … You don’t think about it [being scary] at the
time, you just do what you’ve got to do.

It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that detailed descriptions of face-to-face encounters feature
throughout Merleau-Ponty’s work – for it is here that we meet directly with flashes of the joys,
losses, hopes, dreams, interpretations and dedications of the lives of others.

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By contrast, if we render those encounters ‘faceless’, Merleau-Ponty wrote, we experience the
world as ‘only a succession of facts’. This speaks to the tinge of sadness I feel when I board a
bus to find that everyone around me is hooked on their screens. I freely admit, there’s some
nostalgia here. But there does seem to be a social ‘feel’ of disembodiment in this situation – a
sense that all of us are there as just a collection of ‘objective’ bodies, absentees from the
expressive, ambiguous space of the lived interworld.

These insights about the social function of embodied experience can serve as a corrective to the
charge of individualism that is sometimes made against Western mindfulness programmes. True,
sitting still, with my eyes closed, is one way to practice mindfulness. But it builds the capacity to
attend more receptively to the world in general, which Merleau-Ponty makes clear is so often
social in nature. Practitioners often report that mindfulness helps them cultivate a greater sense
of intimacy during interactions with others – to listen more attentively, and to attend to other
nonverbal cues in more detail (empirical research corroborates this). Properly appreciated, then,
mindfulness can be socially connective.

O ur intertwinement with others extends, equally, to our relationship with the natural world –
a theme that Merleau-Ponty was increasingly drawn towards in his later writings. In The Visible
and the Invisible, he introduced his nuanced notion of the ‘flesh of the world’ (or simply the
‘flesh’). Beyond the usual meaning of the word, he uses the term to refer to a primordial and
mysterious tissue that underlies, and gives rise to, both the perceiver (such as the human subject)
and the perceived. The flesh, then, underlies not just our interwovenness into the world through
looking and being looked at, but equally ‘the staring eyes of cats [and] the raucous cries of birds
who fly in patterns we have yet to decipher’, as Abram puts it. Fundamentally, Abram writes, the
flesh is the elemental tissue that gives rise to the web of Earthly life that comprises both the
organic and inorganic together.

Mirroring his emphasis on the primacy of the lived body, Merleau-Ponty believed that this web
of life can be taken first and foremost not as a set of objective entities and processes, as is
generally assumed in environmental debates. Rather, it’s the biosphere as it’s lived from within –
from the particular vantage point that we ‘human’ animals happen to have (as creatures that are
sensitive, intelligent, social and so on). Just as we inhabit our bodies, we also inhabit the greater
‘body’ of the Earth.

The more we open up to seeing ourselves as radically intertwined with the natural world,
Merleau-Ponty felt, the more this relationship comes to resemble a two-way dialogue,
recognizing that there is always some of ‘us’ in ‘nature’ and some of nature in us. By letting go
of cognitive or biological hierarchies in favor of a system of lateral relations between us and
other life forms, we are invited to really listen to what ‘speaks’ to us from the nonhuman world
when we let the usual noise levels subside. Citing the French poet Paul Valéry, Merleau-Ponty
even questioned whether there’s a sense in which language is, before all else, ‘the very voice of
the trees, the waves and the forest’.

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Which technologies help us inhabit a shared world, rather than one in which we each see vastly
different realities?

The practice of returning to the breath can be an ideal way to capture what Merleau-Ponty is
getting at here. In my own experience, I’ve noticed that the more often I meditate and check in
with my breath throughout the day, the more receptive I am to my natural surroundings. When I
walk through the woods near my house, for example, I’ll notice much more fully the sound and
feel of the breeze, the raucous squawk of a crow overhead or, if I’m lucky, the briefest moment
when a small mouse, perched on a log, meets my gaze before scurrying off into the undergrowth.
Returning to the breath and the body, Abram writes, we recognize and affirm ‘our corporeal
immersion in the depths of a body much larger than our own’.

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Photo courtesy the author

What would Merleau-Ponty prescribe as a corrective to some of the problems of the present
moment – the polarization of our political views, the sense of constant digital overwhelm, the
erosion of a shared space for intercorporeality?

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What’s needed, at the most basic level, is an ongoing attentiveness to what’s there before us –
and an ongoing vigilance regarding what we are normalizing in both our online and offline
environments. Fittingly, Merleau-Ponty came to the view that ‘philosophy is not a particular
body of knowledge; it is the vigilance which does not let us forget the source of all knowledge’.

That vigilance means regularly checking in with our own state of embodiment, appreciating the
value of doing this for its own sake. We can call out worldviews that treat the body as a mere
object – which reduce us, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, to ‘puppets that move only by springs’, that
experience the world as ‘only a succession of facts’ in which the lived body is absent.

It means staying alive to the depth and quality of our interactions with others, noticing how
intimacy depends upon our participation in a shared perceptual world in which our lived bodies
‘show up’. We must interrogate for ourselves which technologies genuinely support this kind of
connection and help us inhabit a shared world, rather than one in which we each see vastly
different realities.

And it means slowing down, even – especially – when that’s the hardest thing to do, if we are to
allow a two-way dialogue with the natural world to emerge, if we are to hear the ‘message’
nature is sending us, as Inger Andersen, the head of the UN Environment Program, put it at the
outset of the coronavirus outbreak in January 2020.

Our lived bodies are here to facilitate just this kind of vigilance. The silent body is ‘the hint half
guessed, the gift half understood’, to quote T S Eliot in Four Quartets (1943). We cannot grasp it
or ‘own’ it or subject it to an ultimate analysis. But if we’re willing to slow down, to pause, to
touch in with the pulsing, breathing lifeworld of the body throughout the day, then we can restore
our presence, our aliveness, our precious connection with other beings and things no less vital for
the fact that they are other to us.
Thinkers and theoriesTechnology and the selfPhilosophy of mind
7 December 2020
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