Merleau-Ponty on Bodily Intersubjectivity

[Image from Elena Dawson]

One of the great strengths of Merleau-Ponty’s account of inter-subjective relations is that it avoids arguing for the existence of the other by analogy or indeed any other method that takes the personal self as its point of departure. After all, the tendency of philosophy in its response to the problem of other minds, from Mill to Hegel, has been to employ the other as a vehicle to reinforce the “I,” rendering the other a variation of the self. This egocentric view on others maintains a focus on the personal horizon of phenomenal life, it thus treats others as appearances in that realm, and that alone. Merleau-Ponty’s genius is to account for the existence of the other through an appeal to the “hither side” of the human body, an anonymous, prepersonal realm that ultimately confuses the distinction between self and other.

He does this by providing an account of the self that is not transparent to itself. The reason being: human subjectivity is embodied, and being a body means being placed in a world that avoids absolute interiority. The body is in the world. This transcendental embodiment is a given of experience. At the same time, the body is of the world, but remains attached to the world. This ambiguity between immanence and transcendence sets in place a layering of experience, in which “my” experience of the world is simultaneously not my own, as he says: “I am never quite at one with myself” (347). Never at one with myself, my experience of having one’s own body thus never coincides with the anonymity of what it is for there be a body in the first place. There is much that is perceived by my body, of which the “I” is blind.

Of that which the body perceives on its terms is the atmosphere of otherness in the world. In a brilliant passage, he writes: “An Objective Spirit dwells in the remains and the scenery. How is this possible? In the cultural object I feel the close presence of others beneath a veil of anonymity. Someone uses the pipe for smoking, the spoon for eating, the bell for summoning…” (405). The invitation of things to invoke the anonymity of the other leads Merleau-Ponty to form a common language linking self, other, and thing. This common language is possible thanks to the fact the world belongs to a prepersonal, anonymous subject that is common to all bodies. For every human body that is in the world, there is a common ground insofar as each body partakes of the same prepersonal anonymity. Through the fact of having sensory functions and a visual field, I am already in touch with other living bodies that also have sensory functions.

For this reason, “when my gaze meets another gaze, I re-enact the alien existence in a sort of reflection” (410). This is a reflection that takes place beyond the realm of personal experience. My recognition of the other as an other is not a decision or a dialectic procedure that takes place on a self-conscious level. The other is not for me an opportunity to exercise my ego or to “know myself” through the gaze of other’s response to me. All of this is far removed from Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the prepersonal and the anonymous bond linking bodies with each other.

Irrespective of the whims and neurosis of the personal ego, with its fortifications against other people and its retreat from the outside, being a body means being open to others. In the study of agoraphobia and other disorders of bodily dwelling, this has serious implications. If the human body, owing to neurosis, experiences itself as disappearing under the gaze of the other, then ontologically speaking, this is an error. Only in the obstinacy of the “I” is there a distance between self and other. Such a distance would have to overlook the “interworld” that connects the impersonality of the I with the Thou, “eliminating the individuality of perspectives” (414). The other is not simply in front of me, in the midst of a face-to-face encounter that induces anxiety in the myth of autonomous subject. The other is not a discernable person in the world, but a field of force orchestrated by the fact of being embodied.