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Thesis Classical phenomenology described one kind of body and called it the structure of experience

Where it stands

This term my reading circle read the fifth chapter of Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, the one translated as "The Fact of Blackness" in the older English edition and "The Lived Experience of the Black Man" in the newer. My students understood it faster than any philosophy I've given them.

Fanon uses Merleau-Ponty's idea of the body schema, the tacit sense of your body that lets you reach for a cigarette or a match without thinking. Then he describes what happens when a child points at him and says, in effect, "Look, a Negro!" The easy body schema collapses. In its place comes what he calls a historico-racial schema, and below it a racial epidermal schema: he is made to experience his own body through the gaze of others, as an object with a history attached.

My thesis: classical phenomenology, which claimed to describe the universal structures of experience, was describing the experience of a particular kind of body, white, male, healthy, unmarked, and presenting it as the body as such. Fanon's chapter doesn't just add a case; it shows that what Husserl and Merleau-Ponty took as basic was a privilege.

Iris Marion Young's essay "Throwing Like a Girl" makes a parallel argument about women's bodily comportment. Beauvoir's The Second Sex had already made it about woman as "other".

So: was classical phenomenology's universalism wrong, or merely incomplete?

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5 replies

For the thesis 1

  1. Femke Bosman

    For Fellow

    For. Young argues that feminine bodily existence shows an "inhibited intentionality": reaching toward a task while also holding back, experiencing one's body as a thing as well as a capacity. If Merleau-Ponty's "I can" is the universal structure, then half of humanity was described as a deviation from it. That's not incomplete; it's a mistaken universal.

    Helpful · 2

Against the thesis 2

  1. Claire Dubois

    Against Fellow

    Against, or at least against "wrong". Reading Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir in French, what strikes me is that Fanon, Beauvoir and Young all use the classical tools to make their critique. Fanon needs the body schema to show it collapsing. That suggests the method was sound and the descriptions too narrow. A method that can correct its own results is doing what a method should.

    Helpful · 1
  2. Kenneth Lam Chi-ho

    Against Fellow

    Against, from comparison. The claim that some structures are universal isn't only a European pretension. Yogācāra thinkers and Husserl, working independently, both describe consciousness as structured, directed and layered, and they converge on things like the way past moments are retained in present awareness. Convergence across traditions with no contact is evidence that at least some structures aren't local. The structures of embodiment are another matter, and there I agree with Femke.

    Helpful · 3

Other replies

  1. Aiko Tanabe

    Fellow

    A note on Kenneth's point. Nishida, in An Inquiry into the Good, tried to describe "pure experience" before the split into subject and object, drawing on Zen practice as much as on William James. His descriptions overlap with the phenomenologists' in places, but his starting point is not a detached observer at all. So even among those who sought universal structures, the European starting point wasn't the only one.

  2. Keisha Monroe

    Fellow

    Claire and Kenneth have moved me. Revised thesis: the method survives; the claimed universality of particular descriptions didn't, and it took Fanon, Beauvoir and Young, working inside the method, to show that. Which is a point I'll make to my students about every discipline: the tools you're handed can be used to correct the people who handed them to you.

    Helpful · 1