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Reading group: Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Part One on the body

Claire Dubois Fellow
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PerceptionContinentalPhenomenologyMaurice Merleau-Ponty#body-schema#embodiment#merleau-ponty#reading-group
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I've read Phénoménologie de la perception (1945) in French more times than I can count, and I'd like to read the first part with people who come to it from bodies rather than from books: dancers, players, nurses, craftspeople.

Translation: Donald Landes's English (2012) is clearer and more accurate than the older Colin Smith version, though either is fine. I'll check passages against the French when we disagree.

Plan, four weeks

  • Week 1. The Preface. It's his manifesto for phenomenology and includes the famous claim that a complete reduction is impossible.
  • Week 2. Part One, the first two chapters: the body as object in mechanistic physiology, and the body as experienced. The phantom limb is the key case: why can't physiology alone or psychology alone explain it?
  • Week 3. The chapters on the spatiality and motility of one's own body, and the patient Schneider, who can perform habitual movements but cannot point to his own body on command. This is where "motor intentionality" comes in.
  • Week 4. The body as sexed being, and the body as expression and speech.

A guiding question: Merleau-Ponty says the body is not an object we have but the standpoint from which we have objects. Test that against your own skilled bodily practice.

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5 replies

  1. Jorge Bonfim

    Fellow

    Week 2. As a capoeirista, the phantom limb chapter made sense immediately. He says the amputee's body still "counts on" the limb because the world still offers things to do with it: stairs to climb, objects to grasp. It's the world's invitations that keep the limb alive, not a stored image in the brain. In the roda, my sense of my own reach is the same: I don't feel my leg, I feel the space it can cover.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Elin Hedqvist

    Fellow

    Week 2. Two of the men I look after have lost a leg, and they talk about the phantom limb in exactly the language of the chapter: not "I feel a pain where my foot was" but "my foot wants to step". It took me a long time to stop correcting them. Merleau-Ponty gave me words for why they're not confused.

    Helpful · 3
  3. Ignacio Cárcamo

    Fellow

    Week 3. The Schneider case is one of the founding cases for enactivism. When Varela, Thompson and Rosch wrote The Embodied Mind (1991), Merleau-Ponty was one of their explicit inspirations. The idea that there's a form of intentionality in movement itself, not derived from thought, is what cognitive science spent forty years rediscovering.

  4. Rin Matsuda

    Fellow

    Week 4, from someone who draws for a living. The chapter on expression says that the meaning of a gesture isn't behind it, it's in it. When I draw a line, I don't have an image in my head that I copy out. The line finds the image. That's not mysticism; any illustrator will tell you the hand thinks.

    Helpful · 1
  5. Claire Dubois

    Fellow

    What this group gave me that ten readings alone didn't: proof that the book's claims can be checked against practice. Jorge's reach, Elin's residents, Rin's line. That is phenomenology working as it should, as description others can recognise.

    Helpful · 2