Discuss the significance of the phenomenon of the phantom limb for Merleau-Ponty.What does the phantom limb indicate regarding the "in itself" of things in the world?

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty begins his book "The phenomenology of perception" with the demonstration that a merely mechanistic physiology of the nervous system simply cannot account for the experience of our own body. Merleau-Ponty tries to show that the experience of our own body has its basis in our "existence" i.e. in our mode of "existing our body". Utilizing materials from recent psychopathology, his existential analysis deals first with the spatial and motor patterns of the body.

For Merleau-Ponty, my own body, before being an object that I can conceptualize or treat conceptually as a physiological thing, is a dimension of my own existence. The body is a lived body. Consciousness is not just something that goes on in our heads. Rather, our intentional consciousness is experienced in and through our bodies. With his concept of the lived body, Merleau-Ponty overcomes Descartes' mind-body dualism without resorting to physiological reductionism. For Descartes, the body is a machine but a living organism by which we body-forth our possibilities in the world. The current of a person's intentional existence is lived through the body. We are our bodies and consciousness is not just locked up inside the head. In his later thought, Merleau-Ponty talked of the body as "flesh", made of the same flesh of the world and it is because the flesh of the body is of the flesh of the world that we can know and understand the world.

To demonstrate this concept of the lived body, Merleau-Ponty uses the example of the phenomenon of the phantom limb the case where someone who has lost an arm or a leg still continues to "feel" it. How can this phenomenon be explained? A phantom limb would not be possible if our bodies were just machines. If a part of the machine were severed from the rest of the machine, it would not simply go without using the limb. Yet, people who have a limb amputated still feel the limb and they are still called to use this limb in situations that call for it's use, even though it is no longer there. In the same sense, the whole lived body is an intentional body, which is lived through in relation to possibilities in the world. Even when the limb is gone, the possibilities for its use remain but are unable to be taken up as a project in the world. "To have a phantom arm is to remain open to all those actions of which the arm alone is capable, it is to keep the practical field that one had before being mutilated". (Phenomenology of perception p. 81-).

The body is first of all a way of viewing the world and at the same time the way a subjective attitude both comes to know itself and express itself. The lived, phenomenal body must therefore not be thought of as an object in itself but as the way a subject is present in the world and is aware of it. Perceptual consciousness must be seen as a bodily presence in the world, a bodily awareness of the world. Here Merleau-Ponty is breaking with the Cartesian tradition and with a conception present in mush of modern philosophy that there are "two senses and two only of the word "exists" one exists as a thing or else one exists as a consciousness".

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(Phenomenology of perception p. 18). The relationship between the subject and his body is, so to speak, an inner relationship at the level of perception the subject is his body.

It is important to understand that Merleau-Ponty is not resorting here to physiological reductionism. The physiologist at least traditionally sees the body, as separate parts that work together like a machine. For Merleau-Ponty, however, the body cannot be understood as a whole, as it is lived. The body as it is lived is an experiential body, a body that opens onto a world and allows the world to be for us. Physiology is not pointless, it has value no doubt but it does not get at the lived body. If we want to understand the body as it is lived in our experience, we have to use a phenomenological method. Merleau-Ponty would go so far as to argue that physiology is a second-order, intellectual abstraction from the primordial, lived body. In this sense, phenomenology can understand and incorporate physiological insights.

The body considered merely physiologically is a body in itself; it is a body which belongs to no-one. The lived body, which is for everyone his way of inhabiting the world, is a mixture of being-in-itself ands being-for-itself. The phenomenal body escapes in a fashion from the realm of the in-itself and is already a kind of subject the subject of perception. Perceptual consciousness is not a pure-for-itself; it is a body-subject, a knowing body. For Merleau-Ponty the experience that he has of his body thus teaches him a new mode of existence which belongs neither to them in-itself not the for-itself. The lived body is not a "mechanism in itself" and perceptive consciousness is not a "being for itself". This examination of the lived or phenomenal body allows Merleau-Ponty to overcome "the traditional subject-object dichotomy". In summing up the first part of the phenomenology, he is able to say, "the experience of our own body…reveals to us an ambiguous mode of existing" (PhP 18). It is ambiguous because it calls into question the traditional distinctions of object and subject. "The body is thus not an object. For the, same reason, my awareness of it is not a thought". I can only know the phenomenal body by living it, for, not being an object, an in itself, it is me myself, it is what I am, me in so much as I am conscious of the world. "I am my body….and co-relatively my body is as it were a natural subject". (PhP 18)

The lived body is that place where the in-itself and the for-itself mix and lead an ambiguous life. The body is both transcendent and immanent. It is the "third term" between subject and object. I know that transcendent things exist because I can touch them, see them, hear them. But most importantly, I never know things in their totality, but always from an embodied perspective. The thing exists "in-itself" because it resists my knowing it with total certainty. However, the thing exists "for me" because I always experience it in relation to my own body. A chair for example, is something to sit on. A desk is something to sit at and write on. Things allow for certain bodily engagements while closing off others. In this sense, things are both transcendent and immanent, things as given to experience are each an "in-itself-for-me".

If we can understand this idea of the "in-itself-for-me" we can see how experience as it is given to us is always a subject-object dialogue. I can never experience things independent of my experience as a bodily engaged being in the world; the meaning I bring to my perception is a perceiving which is embodied. It is by virtue of my embodiment that I can experience things as being up or down, as having insides or outsides, as being close or far away.

Space is always in relation to my body as situated within the world. We discover ourselves in a world, as part of a world, but not as simple objects in a spatial world. For Merleau-Ponty, it also seemed as if the world is made to be discovered by, and to respond to, our sense organs. It is this mutuality of the relation between self and world which fascinated Merleau-Ponty. The same is true of time. I can never be two places at once as a body. I am always situated in the present, on the way somewhere, as having been somewhere. Thus, experience is always in the process of becoming. Just as I am aware of things as determinate and thematic, new possibilities emerge on the horizon and the past fades away as more ambiguous.

At the level of perception, consciousness and the body together constitute "the junction of the for-itself and the in-itself" (PhP 7) and thereby form a system which is approachable from two sides. This system which Merleau-Ponty calls being in-the-world, is thus one which could be termed circular. The knowing-body possesses the power of re-reflecting itself. There are times when the "body catches itself from the outside engaged in cognitive process". I am in the process of touching an object with my right hand, suddenly my two hands cross and I touch my right hand with my left one. The hand which was "touching" becomes at that very second "touched", it ceases for a moment to be a sensing "subject" and becomes a sensed "object". The body turns back on itself and takes itself for it's own object. In this situation the body is neither completely a subject nor completely an object, it manifests an ambiguous union of the two, it is a reversible circularity.

Even though the body can turn back on itself and in this way accomplish a kind of reflection, it never succeeds in coinciding with itself. This circularity never results in an identity. When for instance, ones two hands touch each other, there is always one which acts as a subject and another which exists as an object, a single hand is never subject and object at the same time. Being neither a simple object nor a pure spirit, the lived body is dialectic of the in-itself and the for-itself, and bodily existence is an ambiguous existence.

It is ambiguous, at the level of perception existence is not in-itself existence, as the being of things is, but it is still not a "personal " existence. My existence as perceiving consciousness is closely tied up with my existence as a body, and consciousness and body are two sides of a presence to the world. The conception of the lived body as a circular system wherein "consciousness" and the "body" are but two aspects which are to a certain extent reversible requires a new conception of the world in relation to which the perceiving subject is but a global and massive presence. If the perception of the body is at the same time the perception of the world as was seen in the case of the phantom limb the perception of the world must be the other side of the perception of the body. The lived body and the perceived body are seen as co-relatives by Merleau-Ponty "The lived body is in the world as the heart is in the organism it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system". (PhP 0) The relation of the perceived world and the lived body is thus an internal relation such that the world and the body together constitute a system.

Space furnishes us with a good example of the circular system that is constituted by the lived body and the perceived world together. In the second chapter of the second part of the phenomenology Merleau-Ponty attempts to show how "objective" space, "objective" movement etc.. are in reality founded on our being in the world and are "encompassed in the hold that our body takes upon the world". In the "in-itself" world there would be no here or there, no high or low. Everything would be an equal distance from everything else, nothing would stand out from anything else and there would be no movement since there would be no place a "here" and a "there" to change. The world we rediscover through reflection is a world we have always inhabited through our bodies and the body is that "I can" which gives structure to the world by dividing it up and making things stand out from each other. The perceived world is structured according to the hold the body has or can have on it. Thus "everything throws us back onto the organic relations between subject and space, so that hold of the subject on the world is the origin of space". (PhP 51)

Magnitude, height, depth and all other variations of the perceived worlds spatially are "existential dimensions". "Things co-exist in space because they are present to the same perceiving subject" (PhP 75) because things and subjects co-exist through the body. The body and the world form a circuit and co-exist internally. It is because of this that there can be something like space "we have been led to bring out as the condition of spatiality, the establishment of the subject in a setting, and finally his inherence in a world." (PhP 80)

The notion of the body-subject cannot be reached through the sciences, it is more like a specific characterization of what Heidegger more generally calls 'Dasein'. The body, for Merleau-Ponty has its own set of motivations, just as we have seen in the phantom limb phenomenon. The body discloses the world for us in a certain way. It is the transcendental condition for the possibility of experiencing objects at all, our means of communication with the world.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Merleau-Ponty, M The Phenomenology of perception (London Routledge, 18)

Madison, G The phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (Ohio UP, 181)

Moran, D Introduction to Phenomenology (London Routledge, 000)

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