Abstract
I argue that we find the articulation of a problem concerning bodily agency in the early works of the Merleau-Ponty which he explicates as analogous to what he explicitly calls the problem of perception. The problem of perception is the problem of seeing how we can have the object given in person through it perspectival appearances. The problem concerning bodily agency is the problem of seeing how our bodily movements can be the direct manifestation of a person’s intentions in the world. In both cases what, according to Merleau-Ponty, obscures a recognition of the phenomenon in question is a conception of our bodily capacities, i.e. our sensibility and our motility, which reduces these to the workings of mechanisms that are blind to meaning. I argue that both the problem concerning perception and the problem concerning bodily agency can be properly called transcendental. The problem of perception is transcendental because it concerns the very intelligibility of appearances and judgements with empirical content. The problem of bodily agency is transcendental in the sense that it concerns the very intelligibility of our bodily capacity to carry out intentions and by implication the intelligibility of our intentions as such.
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Notes
- 1.
I use “SC” to refer to Merleau-Ponty’s La structure du comportement/The Structure of Behavior (1942). I refer first to the pagination of the English translation of SC (1983) and then to the page numbers in the French edition (1990). I shall use “PP” to refer to phénoménologie de la perception/Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and refer to the page numbers of Donald. A. Landes’ recent translation, which contains indication of the corresponding pages in the French edition.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
At times Merleau-Ponty seems to use Husserl’s expression the natural attitude as synonymous with Objective Thought and contrasts it with the transcendental attitude (PP, p. 41, p. 510, n. 60). Qua natural attitude the assumption of scientific naturalism doesn’t seem to be a necessary feature of Objective Thought, but given the historical development of modern science, such naturalism has, on Merleau-Ponty’s reading, become an almost inescapable conception of the natural world.
- 5.
Merleau-Ponty mentions different conceptions of causality: as transmission of movement or energy and a functional conception which doesn’t constrain the possible variables of the function to for instance spatio-temporal, physical events (PP, p. 75). Merleau-Ponty sometimes indicates that he takes modern physics to have undermined “Causal Thought” from within: He refers to Goldstein’s analogy between a proper understanding of organisms and the break with the classical notion of causality which Goldstein finds in quantum mechanics (SC 1983, p. 154/1990, p. 167; 1983, p. 193/1990, p. 208). Most likely it is also quantum mechanics Merleau-Ponty has in mind when he states that even physics itself recognizes the limits of its determinations and demands a reworking and a contamination of its own pure concepts (PP, p. 57).
- 6.
Kant writes: “Now we find that our thought of the relation of all knowledge to its object carries with it an element of necessity; the object is viewed as that which prevents our modes of knowledge from being haphazard or arbitrary, and which determines them a priori in some definite fashion. For in so far as they are to relate to an object, they must necessarily agree with one another, that is, must possess that unity which constitutes the concept of an object” (Kant 2007, A104–105).
- 7.
Quine claims to go beyond the discussion on whether sense-data or Gestalt has epistemic priority by replacing the concept of sense-data with the concept of observational sentences, i.e. sentences with a constant causal connection between stimuli and judgments manifest in behaviour (Quine 1969, p. 76). Merleau-Ponty’s arguments against the possibility of a finding a lawful connection between intentional or content-involving understandings of behaviour and stimuli describable in non-intentional terms delivered in The Structure of Behavior, seem, if successful, also to rule out Quine’s proposal.
- 8.
See Jensen (2013) for a comparative analysis of Merleau-Ponty and McDowell’s versions of the negative transcendental argument.
- 9.
In his discussion of the Schneider case and related neuro-pathological cases Merleau-Ponty distinguished between empiricist and intellectualist psychology, where the latter explains disturbances of motor behaviour with reference to disturbance of a representational function and the former explains the same disturbances in purely mechanistic, causal terms (PP, pp. 125–126, see Jensen 2009 for a discussion of these two models of action as they are played out in Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the Schneider case).
- 10.
The exact formulation of the Standard Causal Theory is a matter of controversy. This definition is appropriated from the one provided in Aguilar and Buckareff (2010). See Romdenh-Romluc’s contributions to this volume for a detailed discussion of how Merleau-Ponty’s positive account of bodily agency can be read as challenging the Standard Causal Theory (Romdenh-Romluc 2013).
- 11.
The assumption of the agency-neutrality of bodily movements involved in bodily action is the common starting point of much modern philosophy action. For a survey of recent authors who ascribe to the idea of agency-neutral movements see Grünbaum (2008, p. 246, n. 4). The assumption is opposed with different versions of a so called disjunctive conception of bodily movements by amongst others Hornsby (1997), Haddock (2005) and Stout (2010).
- 12.
The argument via Liepmann’s patient Mr. T. is structurally similar to at least one strand in Merleau-Ponty’s argumentation via Gelb and Goldstein’s case of Schneider. See Jensen (2009) for a more detailed analysis of the structure of Merleau-Ponty’s arguments for the existence of non-representational motor intentionality via the case of Schneider.
- 13.
I leave it an open question to what extent a modern defenders of a representationalist picture of the mind could defend a model similar to Liepmann’s by restricting the model to the sub-personal level.
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- 15.
This line of argument draws heavily on Hornsby’s way of arguing for the alienating character of the picture in question (Hornsby 1998, pp. 388–89; Hornsby 2004a, b). Hornsby borrows the image of telekinetic powers from Bernhard Williams account of Descartes’ mind-body problem (Hornsby 1998, p. 389). McDowell indicates a comparable line of argument against the functionalism of Loar, which drives the explanandum of psychological explanations inwards and “away from the agent’s involvement with the world” (McDowell 1998, p. 333). Hornsby pursues a similar argument against a functionalist conception of the mental (1997, p. 114).
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Johan Gersel for his very helpful comments on a prior version of this paper.
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Jensen, R.T. (2013). Merleau-Ponty and the Transcendental Problem of Bodily Agency. In: Jensen, R., Moran, D. (eds) The Phenomenology of Embodied Subjectivity. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 71. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01616-0_3
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