IEP 405: Phenomenology and Environment

AWAYMAVE - The Distance Mode of MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University

Wk 6. Body-Subject and "Flesh"

The Body-Subject

"We have relearned to feel our body; we have found underneath the objective and detached knowledge of the body that other knowledge which we have of it in virtue of its always being with us and of the fact that we are our body. In the same way we shall need to reawaken our experience of the world as it appears to us in so far as we are in the world through our body, and in so far as we perceive the world with our body." PP 206.

Getting to grips with the idea of the body-subject or mindful-body is never easy because it breaks the conceptual habits of a lifetime and the culturally conceptual habits of several hundred years at least. However, if M-P is even vaguely right it shouldn't be too difficult to glimpse the world and ourselves as being how he describes it because it is a picture of our pre-reflective selves and the way we are in the world. Looking at how we learn skills is useful in this way because it reveals an aspect of our embeddedness in and engagement with the world that our conceptual picture of being a mind (almost arbitrarily) contained in a body tends to conceal. If we try to stick with a view of the mind (our subjectivity) directing a body (as object) and try to let this drive the process we never get to learn to ride a bike, play the piano, knit a scarf or (perhaps more contentiously) to appreciate a landscape.

Merleau-Ponty doesn't want to draw us away from reflection - customarily associated with the mind - he is a philosopher after all, but he wants to demonstrate how our reflection is grounded in and informed by our embodiment and the world.

Phenonmenology of Perception, and indeed all of his writing, is engaged in a dialectical process so rather than say 'this is how the world is' he tends to reveal his own position via an explanation of what is wrong with other ways of seeing the human being (as we have seen his main targets were empriricist and a kind of idealist intellectual approach). This way of writing makes it hard to draw out exactly what he is saying, but at the same time it could be argued that this makes it easier for us to get a handle on his ideas which might be impossible to think if they were not presented as arising out of a dialectical process on our usual ways of thinking. Note that a dialectical process does not only reject what it criticises, but also carries over that from the old view that should be retained.
In his later writings M-P does seem to break free from many aspects of these older views when he presents a new term to characterise how he sees us and our engagement in the world - this is the term 'flesh'.

Flesh

M-P uses the idea of flesh to bring about (conceptually) the most radical breaking of the subject object dichotomy. He saw in his earlier work, e.g., Phenomenology of Perception, a residual objectification the world and he wants to expunge this from his work. This would mean that being-in-the-world is no longer an accurate depiction of our state because it still involved a kind of movement between me and the world. Subject and object are no longer separate but because of the way the idea is developed in PP they remain two moments of a dialectical circularity. This for M-P is not radical enough to express how he understands our state hence the need for a new term to bring this out explicitly.
But what does 'flesh' actually mean?

The key to this is in the way that M-P finds the idea of flesh through a particular aspect of our being embodied. We are both the seer and the seen the toucher and the touched. In one and the same movement ,e.g., touching my own hand, I both feel and am felt AND I can reverse the sensations. If my right hand touches my left hand I can switch between feeling my left hand with the palm of my right hand and feeling my right hand with the back of my left hand.

Try it and see

OK I hear you say - but so what?
Let's hear what M-P makes of it.

"That which looks at all things can also look at itself and recognise, in what it sees, the 'other side' of its power of looking. It sees itself seeing; it touches itself touching; it is visible and sensitive for itself. ...This initial paradox cannot but produce others. Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is one of them. It is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself. Things are an annex or a prolongation of itself; they are encrusted in its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the very stuff of the body."
'Eye and Mind' in Johnson, G. ed The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993, p.124.

The immediate suggestion that springs to mind is that he is saying that we and the world are basically made of the same stuff, but is that what he is really saying? It sounds a bit too much like what the empiricists were saying all along - or perhaps even what the idealists were saying. As he has spent a lifetime criticising those views this stuff - flesh - must be very different from matter as understood empirically and very different from the world being made of our concepts. In his final work, put together from working notes and published posthumously, The Visible and the Invisible the idea of flesh is more fully worked through although we need to remember that the text is just a few sections of a much larger planned work and so any interpretations have to be rather tenuous. In this he describes the body as "a remarkable varient" of the stuff of the world - "a grain or corpuscle bourne by a wave of Being". He describes the sensible sentient (human) aspect of being and to get across the idea of layerings and things being enfolded into one another he speaks of "a cross section upon a massive being". The section of the book where this idea is fully laid out - in as much as it ever is- is called 'The Intertwining - the Chiasm' and here he returns again and again to the dual aspect of us as being both seen and seeing. He also says that "the flesh we are speaking of is not matter" (p.146) and he describes it as "an element". In this way flesh as element is not just a way of bringing me and the world together it describes me and the world as sharing a "texture", it is because we share in this element we can know the world, but there must be some differences in order for me to experience the world. M-P is not saying here that the world, e.g., a mountain experiences as I experience there must be some distinction made in order for me to experience in the first place. He describes this sameness and difference as two circles that are slightly offset, one from the other, thus we can experience the other.

Sorry this doesn't seem terribly clear and I am not sure I fully understand it, but it seems to me that he is getting at something very new and very exciting here.
One thing we can take hold of is this: if what M-P is trying to express is a better explanation for our experience as experienced we can put the ambiguities of the text to one side and explore our experiences to see if what it feels like to be-in-the-world chimes with the way he seems to be describing it.

Think, does it describe your experience? Pick a small chunk of experience to examine.

Also all contributions to the interpretation of flesh - especially those gleaned from experience would be welcome on the discussion site.

Another way in would be to look at what other writers have made of this notion of flesh and the way M-P's work can be used in environmental thinking.

Now read Melissa Clarke's 'Ontology, Ethics and Sentir: Properly situating Merleau-Ponty' from Environmental Values 11 2002 pp 211-25. This is in your reader.

There is quite a lot of material on environmental thinkers' use of Merleau-Ponty, see the bibliography. Also see one of the dissertations from 2002. Bram de Jonge took this as his dissertation subject and it is available here.

Web notes by Isis Brook updated March 2005