There is a body that moves through the world, a body that is the bearer of all sensations, the zero point of all movement. More than one object among many, we take it in good faith that the body is the absolute here, a privileged phenomenal thing that occupies this known planet, we call “Earth.” The human body is recognised as more-than-a-thing through the power of sensation. It feels its way through the world, thinking in advance of cognition. At the same time, it is raw biology, a physio-chemical unity in action. Flesh, bone, blood—this melancholy hum of life. The body is nature. Merleau-Ponty in Nature: “Before being reason, humanity is another corporeity” (208). Disquiet is the result of this thought. Why? Because human life sediments itself in the patina of arrogance, refusing to contend with its prepersonal materiality—my body, no longer me. As such, phenomenology must become bio-phenomenology as it maps this unfolding of life within life.
Where am I in this flesh-world? Clearly I am not here, have yet to arrive. “The concern is to grasp humanity first as another manner of being a body” (Ibid.). How does the human body find itself? There are other bodies around me, some similar, others different in their silence. How does the human body distinguish itself from other biological bodies, each of which plays a part in this umwelt? It would be arbitrary to assign one particular element—reason, memory, self-consciousness—that gives “life” to the human body. But this is what Max Scheler appears to do. Scheler talks of “spirit,” by which he means he the capacity for an affective relationship to the world—love, kindness, wonder, bliss, anxiety, despair, etc. Thanks to spirit, so he argues, the human body is “existentially liberated from the organic world.” For Scheler, the dignity of the human body is evident through its ability to transform the world. Even the body itself becomes objectified in the human gaze, such that philosophical detachment is afforded. The animal, meanwhile, “is involved too deeply in the actualities of life,” a melancholy state that deprives it of a genuine “self.” Thus Scheler joins Heidegger in assigning a loss of world to non-human bodies. Not being able to sense the world “as world,” the non-human body remains “immersed in [the world] ecstatically.” Scheler’s move toward spirit is too advance, too ready to confer an ethical value upon the term “human.” After all, the impression one gets from reading him is no less different than reading Hegel: spirit is the teleology of human life, and the physical body—this flesh—is incidental to that project.
Scheler is premature in his commitment to spirit. The problem faced is that he speaks of the body on the one hand, and the spirit as descending into that object. Merleau-Ponty suggests an alternative in the form of a “wrapping of a body-object around itself, or rather, a truce of metaphors” (209). This is the brute, wild being that Merleau-Ponty will speak of as being prior to the personal body, with its dramas and affective states. It is the body that coincides with the late rather than the early Merleau-Ponty, the body as belonging to the flesh. Already this incipient body is involved in the world, already directional in its brute structure: “But the eye is entirely external finality made for what is absent made for a future vision” (209). There is a temporal duration to the biological body. More than movement, it occupies a bodily schema, projecting and introjecting the world it finds itself in. This is “the miracle of sensation” Merleau-Ponty talks about, which he will later identify with the libidinal body.
Where am I in this flesh-world? Clearly I am not here, have yet to arrive. “The concern is to grasp humanity first as another manner of being a body” (Ibid.). How does the human body find itself? There are other bodies around me, some similar, others different in their silence. How does the human body distinguish itself from other biological bodies, each of which plays a part in this umwelt? It would be arbitrary to assign one particular element—reason, memory, self-consciousness—that gives “life” to the human body. But this is what Max Scheler appears to do. Scheler talks of “spirit,” by which he means he the capacity for an affective relationship to the world—love, kindness, wonder, bliss, anxiety, despair, etc. Thanks to spirit, so he argues, the human body is “existentially liberated from the organic world.” For Scheler, the dignity of the human body is evident through its ability to transform the world. Even the body itself becomes objectified in the human gaze, such that philosophical detachment is afforded. The animal, meanwhile, “is involved too deeply in the actualities of life,” a melancholy state that deprives it of a genuine “self.” Thus Scheler joins Heidegger in assigning a loss of world to non-human bodies. Not being able to sense the world “as world,” the non-human body remains “immersed in [the world] ecstatically.” Scheler’s move toward spirit is too advance, too ready to confer an ethical value upon the term “human.” After all, the impression one gets from reading him is no less different than reading Hegel: spirit is the teleology of human life, and the physical body—this flesh—is incidental to that project.
Scheler is premature in his commitment to spirit. The problem faced is that he speaks of the body on the one hand, and the spirit as descending into that object. Merleau-Ponty suggests an alternative in the form of a “wrapping of a body-object around itself, or rather, a truce of metaphors” (209). This is the brute, wild being that Merleau-Ponty will speak of as being prior to the personal body, with its dramas and affective states. It is the body that coincides with the late rather than the early Merleau-Ponty, the body as belonging to the flesh. Already this incipient body is involved in the world, already directional in its brute structure: “But the eye is entirely external finality made for what is absent made for a future vision” (209). There is a temporal duration to the biological body. More than movement, it occupies a bodily schema, projecting and introjecting the world it finds itself in. This is “the miracle of sensation” Merleau-Ponty talks about, which he will later identify with the libidinal body.
1 comments:
This really is a fascinating blog-project of yours. Hopefully i can post something more substantial in regards to comments, when I've read through your posts in more detail.
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