The Wild Body

Faced with a “very lonely region of boundless horizons, under a perfectly cloudless sky, trees and plants in the perfectly motionless air, no animals, no human beings, no moving masses of water, the profoundest silence”—faced with all of this, Schopenhauer presents us with a body that is wholly divested of all corporeal intentions, reduced to a “vanishing nothingness” (p. 206). How do we get to this disembodied, affective state having previously been in a state of shared identity with the natural world? The answer is through a consummation of the subject-object relation. During moments of sublimity, we are “lost” in the object of contemplation, our own individuation suspended in a spectral chamber.

All that matters is the place. A lonely region summons a particular state, undermining the split between nature and human subjectivity. Precisely this commitment to content and context is where Schopenhauer enters into an unborn dialogue with Merleau-Ponty. Turning to the posthumously published “working notes” of Merleau-Ponty, then much of what is left unsaid about the flesh – not least its basically homogenous structure – can be modified with an appeal to Schopenhauer’s account of the will in nature.


How does the “brute being” of which Merleau-Ponty speaks come into an affective encounter? The problem is really that for Merleau-Ponty we are forever embodied, whereas if we are to link the classical sublime with the idea of a wild being, where “wild being” refers to a pre-reflective world, then the body – the cultural and cognitive body – must be carried along with us. All of this is a rather convoluted way of dealing with the body as a self-conscious thing. How to travel from the body as a cultural thing, affected with anxieties and passions, to the body as a region of the earth, in which all accounts of personal identity and the personal body are replaced by the anonymity of the wilderness?


The opening of Herzog’s Aguirre, The Wrath of God (from where the above pictures are taken) gives us a nice instance of this tension between the anonymity of nature and the shared depth of the visible and the invisible. At first, the impression of this scene can be formulated as thus: human being, finite and egotistical, swallowed by the infinite and boundless grip of the surrounding world, the result of which instigates an aesthetic of the sublime in the viewer attending to this movement. Human being is literally dwarfed by the mountains, with all that is peculiar to human life – above all, the face – smouldered in the foggy presence of the Amazonian mountains. But this formula lends itself to the desire of the viewer, pre-empting the sublime in advance. Recall Merleau-Ponty: “There is a fundamental narcissism of all vision.” The scene is too easily read as a classical vision of the sublime. But if we reformulate the opening as less a mode of human life colonised by barren, anonymous wilderness and more as a scene of deep ambiguity between the microcosmic animation of human movement and the colossal stillness of the mountain, then the result is more of a hybrid. The mountain moves. Who is doing the moving, who commands the mountain: human life or the materiality of the mountain itself? The answer would be both. But this is not a harmonious agreement (as Herzog outlines in his inspiring philosophy of nature). Rather, what we are witnessing is a literal chiasm, a literal intersection of two pathways. As a viewer, the landscape touches a part of our embodied being that was there all along, and this is the flesh coming alive—a sentiment that is best expressed in Merleau-Ponty’s claim that “It is impossible to say that nature ends here and that man…starts here.”

The Natural Body

A strange path was taken in Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the body: beyond more than its physical appearance, the body became a site of knowledge to an inner world, a world in which a secret teleology is unfolding. Given that will and body are one and the same, there suddenly follows a leap from the human body as a manifestation of the will to nature in general. “It appears in every blindly acting force of nature, and also in the deliberate conduct of man, and the great difference between the two concerns only the degree of the manifestation, not the inner nature of what is manifested” (110). The will remains unbreakable, yet its phenomenal appearance is subject to a gradient of objectification, filtered through the principle of individuation. This language of “objectification” and “manifesting” is not arbitrary: by it, Schopenhauer avoids the Kantian problem of attempting to account for a causal relationship between the thing in itself and the phenomenal appearance of that thing. How does the empirical will interact with the general will? The answer is to subtract the language of “interaction.” The particular and the general will are reversible, each an aspect of the same thing. It is nonetheless a troubling and strange problem: namely, of how my self-consciousness, manifest as the empirical ego, experiences the thing in itself that inhabits my own body.

This is rather beside the point, however. What I want to focus on is exchange between the lived body as a manifestation of willing and the world of nature as a representation of the will. At first, it appears as though the human contact with the world of nature is asymmetrical in terms of non-human animals being guided by a drive that is blind to their knowledge. Accompanied by knowledge but not guided by it, as Schopenhauer says. Other differences and similarities emerge. The human being catches sight of the animal in its habitat, and since we can “presuppose with perfect certainty an identity with ourselves, we have no hesitation in attributing to it unchanged all the affections of will known to us in ourselves” (W2, 204). Yet what looks like an instance of anthropomorphism is soon contested, given that “as soon as we come to speak of phenomena of mere knowledge, we run into uncertainty” (Ibid). Speculation stretches over the human relationship with the animal as a thinking machine. Despite this ambiguity in the intellect of the animal, what remains intact is the insubordination of the will, which bring together the human and the non-human animal into a single system. “The will everywhere retains its identical nature, and shows itself as a great attachment to life” (206).

What is important in Schopenhauer’s account of the will in nature is its dynamism. The will is not a homogenous structure binding the human with the world, but an affective and manifold appearance in the world. And here, I think, Schopenhauer’s idea of gradients of objectivity is very powerful. Again, the manifestation of the will is not uniform in its appearance. Rather, what emerges in Schopenhauer’s philosophy of nature is a topography of the will coming into action (and a topography which reappears, of course, in his classification of the arts). Now, even if we do away with the “pessimistic” aspect of the will – i.e., its orientation toward perpetual striving and circular boredom – then what remains is the idea of an elemental agency preceding the split between subject and object, and binding all things into a unitary phenomenon. With its qualitative character suspended, what we are dealing is an adhesive thing, only accessible via the privileged space of the lived body.

A final point, then, on the pre-cognitive existence of the will. In chapter 23 of the second volume of World as Will and Representation, a fascinating passage crops up: “The will is that primary and original force itself, which forms and maintains the animal body, in that it carries out that body’s unconscious as well as conscious functions” (293). We could almost be in realm of Merleau-Ponty’s account of motor intentionality here. Forming and maintain the “body’s unconscious” life assumes a parallel role to Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the intelligibility of the body. Here, too, the will’s pernicious character does nothing to detract from a prior state of order. Indeed, it is almost as though if we were to suspend the will as a blind striving that leads to perpetual unfulfillment, then what would emerge is not only an order but a state of harmony.

My broad question is whether we can approach this reversibility between nature and subjectivity in a more phenomenological orientation; that is, in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s “wild being.” But I’ll take that point up next time.

The Knowing Body

There is something of a Husserlian strand in Schopenhauer’s account of embodiment, and it takes form in the transition from book one to two of his World as Will. If the first book is taken up with a broadly idealistic worldview, in which subjectivity imposes order onto the world, then at the turn of the second book, this current will leave the subject as a “winged cherub without a body” unless the tension between myself as an object in the world and myself as the centre of subjective experience is addressed (99). How is the lived body different from other objects in the world? The answer is through its relationship with the will, of course. “This and this alone gives him the key to his own phenomenon, reveals to him the significance and shows him the inner mechanism of his being, his actions, his movements” (100). In Husserlian terms, we are plotting the distinction between the physical (Körper) and the lived body (Leib). Yet Schopenhauer permits a peculiar epistemic dimension to the lived body that is lacking in Husserl, perhaps even in Husserl.

This epistemic dimension has a hazy formation to it, given that in the second book of WWI, the body is presented as being at the service of the will. The will and the motion of the body are said to be “one and the same thing” (100). Further still, the very objectification of the body is nothing less than the will rendered perceptible. A curious side-effect occurs. Ethically, pain and pleasure are determined, not according to second-order concepts, but to the denial and gratification of the will. This privileging of the body is truly a great move, even though the more tragic parts of Schopenhauer frame the body as something to be overcome. After all, what Schopenhauer is presenting us with is a unitary self, in which “mind” is not the guarantor of knowledge, action, and agency. Rather, “mind” is already body in Schopenhauer’s framework, already implicated in the anxieties and horrors of the body. The body is not an autonomous entity that can be “blamed” for its gestures, habits, and indiscretions—our freedom remains exposed to the circumstantial contingencies of willing, but not to the act of willing itself.

Before the tragic finale, however, Schopenhauer’s insertion of the will into the body makes a phantom out of the body yet at the same time, confers a tremendous visceral reality to that spectre working behind the scenes. What is my relationship to my body, for Schopenhauer? How do I regard the will that is not only manifest empirically but present beyond phenomenality within my body? All I see and experience is the tip of a Kantian iceberg. Visibility is a limit, and there exists a teleology to my own body that is in some sense alien to my self-consciousness. And here we come to the precise knowledge of this particular mode of willing: my experience of my own body, quite apart from it being an object of representation, is also a specific striving, as evident in my hunger as it is in “the force that turns the magnet to the North Pole” (110).

Les Silences de Léon Spilliaert

A Storm at Sea

In a celebrated passage, Lucretius writes: “What joy it is, when out at sea the stormwinds are lashing the waters, to gaze from the shore at the heavy stress some other man is enduring!” (p. 38). Perhaps something of a pessimist (“All life is a struggle in the dark”), the comment is less a matter of schadenfreude and more a gesture of self-affirmation. The man “gazes” toward the sea, but are his eyes passive contemplators of a scene of wilderness? The eyes straddling the sea, while the body remains in place: a prototypical Kantian stance. A “negative pleasure” involving attraction and repulsion. In both Kant and Lucretius, this ambivalence is resolved through aligning the sublime with a motif of overcoming. We are faced with a move which, for Kant, “raise the forces of the soul above the height of vulgar commonplace.” The limit of finite subjectivity breaches its own borders, in the process creating a realm of infinite power, termed “rationality.” Throughout, the sublime is never posited as being in the world, never does it dwell in “Things,” but forever remains bound in the “mind, in so far as we become conscious of our own superiority over nature within.”

(Max Klinger, "Rescue")

In Lucretius, too, the terror of the world, amplified in the darkness, is an invitation for self-renewal of the composed mind: “The mind by itself experiences thought and joy of its own at a time when nothing moves either the body or the spirit” (p. 70). But this contemplative stance is not absolute, and when pressed to explain how mind and body interact, then Lucretius invokes the notion of a “vital spirit”: “This basic substance lurks at our very core….this nameless element….It is by the interacting motions of [mind and body] that the flame of sentience is kindled in our flesh” (p.73–75). The flesh is alive with the vital spirit breeding amidst its alcoves and recesses. The result: a fluidity which subjects all mental life to an embodied perception.

(Theodor Kittelsen, "Draugen")

The eye gazing toward the sea. Faced with this “groundless terror” the eyes do not hover in an amorphous landscape, but retain their flesh and carry the body with them: “As the eye uprooted and separated from the body cannot see, so we perceive that sprit and mind by themselves are powerless” (p. 81). How, then, do the eyes resist terror in this materialistic body-subject? Does the “vital sprit” manifest itself when, in Kant’s terms, we find “the courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature”? The body of Lucretius is prone to putrification—maggots creep in the spiritless realm where life once existed, and all accounts of a “personal” identity are banished to memory.

(Alfred Kubin, "Fright")

How do the eyes remain composed? The answer is clear: the sea returns the gaze of the viewer, imbuing both with a depth that is peculiar to the affectivity of the sublime. The passage can be rephrased: What joy it is when the formless sea, dark and tumultuous in its presence, becomes sentient in its motion, sharing in the vital spirit that saves the voiceless movement of Nature from cosmic indifference! The sea feels me just as I feel it. But this is no plea to mysticism less even Pantheism. No, the affective experience of turning toward the storm at sea need not involve overcoming or dominating, although to some extent the view toward the sea is a mirror, albeit a strange and indirect one, of human existence, as Mikel Dufrenne puts it: “The human aspect of myself encounters the human elements in the object. Thus we meet…that reciprocity of two depths by which we have defined feeling” (p. 483). Encountering the human within the object, the object discerns itself a trace of itself in the human. The sea as a humanism? Only a humanism with limited vision. “You cannot be embraced in a single look,” so writes Lautréamont of the “old ocean," before confessing that "I have often wondered which is the easier to fathom: the depths of the ocean or the depth of the human heart!"

Phenomenological Dualities

What is the status of dualisms in Merleau-Ponty? In several ways this question has emerged for me recently (not least the question session following my paper on David Cronenberg last week, but also in large-scale writing projects, [which have been the cause of my absence]). On the one hand, I have been thinking through the prejudice against dualism in general, at least from a phenomenological perspective. There is a kind of trend, long established in cultural studies, to rally against dualisms because they exploit a set of binary divisions, each of which is involved in an interplay of power. Fine. Phenomenology, of course, is similarly resistant to dualisms, especially those which house the “subject” in an autonomous relation to the “world.” I worry, however, that the prejudice against dualisms is itself contrary to a phenomenological orientation. Too often, it seems, the concern is a reflex action inspired by an already existing socio-political agenda—which, in my estimation, is a second-order of experience. Phenomenology should not be the spokesperson of a social policy.

But beyond the academic-social context, there is another worry. Central to this overcoming of dualisms is the body, particularly the body-subject of Merleau-Ponty. Indeed, the very idea of “one’s own body” entails a reversible fluidity between cognition and corporeality. No mere mass of materiality contingently inhabited, the body is a perceiving organ, both physical situated in the world but also lived from the inside-out. Agreed. But one thing, for me, stand out in this great tradition of embodied subjectivity. One: the body is not a machine mechanically responding to stimuli in the world. Two: how I experience the world is through my body as an intersensory whole, with cognition and embodiment overlapping into a shared realm. Three: cognition and embodiment is not strictly identifiable with one another, and to demonstrate this, Merleau-Ponty explicitly speaks of “motor intentionality.” (P.127).

How does “motor intentionality” fit into this tradition? Merleau-Ponty views it as “something which is an anticipation of, or arrival at, the objective and is ensured by the body itself as a motor power, a motor project, a motor intentionality in the absence of which the order remains a dead letter.” In other words, motor intentionality is a field of force that is precognitive, working in an anticipatory way to guide oneself through the world. This is the “bodily point of view,” as Edward Casey puts it. This is the view of world, as taken from the primacy of the body, yet to be abstracted as a concept—a transcendental body-subject. What this means is that some of our experience is “presented to us anonymously.” He says: “If I wanted to render precisely the perceptual experience, I ought to say that one perceives in me, and not that I perceive.” (p. 250). And yet: the “one” who perceives in me is this anonymous body, this prepersonal self.

At this point, I find it hard to see how we can avoid veering into some tacit dualism between the cognitive self and the anonymous body operating behind the scenes. True, much of this backstage work is to bring about unity and the coherence of the “absolute here.” To this end, so long as the perceiving “one” aligns with cognition, then any sense of the body dissenting need not be an issue. But where is self-consciousness in this operation? What is my body for, as both an object and the source of all experience? How do I experience my own motor-intentionality as a phenomenon in the world of Things? Merleau-Ponty has a striking passage: “Every sensation carries within it the germ of a dream or depersonalization such as we experience in that quasi-stupor to which we are reduced when we really try to live at the level of sensation.” (P. 230). A strange confession: isn’t the “quasi-stupor” which Merleau-Ponty refers to a moment of collision in which our body becomes an issue for us? And why does every sensation give itself over to depersonalization? The answer: because the body’s work is autonomous from self-consciousness, and the visual sight (since it would always be a case of “catching sight” of one’s body) of that process necessarily entails contact with a force paradoxically outside of myself.

An appendix on Cronenberg: I think the seeds of “body horror” have already been implanted in this seemingly benign distinction between motor and mental intentionality (See here and here). This may sound like a rash move, but how else to conceive bodily disturbances as involving anything less than the motor intentionality of the body becoming sentient—of becoming too sentient. Here, we can think of certain auto-immune disorders, in which the body’s regulating activity goes awry, harming the very thing it was sent to protect. But what is the horror of the body? Yes, the sense of the body as not simply decaying—that is easily rationalised within the narrative of life—but the body as disembarking from the project of self-consciousness. Horror is not simply the facticity of the body as occupying space and time, and then being forced to depart from that world—tragic though that is. Rather, horror begins with the idea of the self as a body-subject, unified in its opacity, only to discover that that “I” am not wholly identifiable with my body: but that something more than my lived experience dwells alongside me.