Philosophy of Body: Merleau-Ponty and the Philosophy of Mind

Abstract

Merleau-Ponty shows to what extent accurate and illusive views could be indistinguishable. His philosophy reveals how it could be hard to tell the truth and falsehood of perception apart from each other. We rightly lay claim to true perception when our body has a precise handle on its object; yet we are not right to make a claim to an all-embracing handle or hold on our object, and, invariably, on truth, because an articulate perception of all the sides, perspectives, and horizons of our object is hardly possible. In perception, we place our faith in a world, and in a not yet, and we do this in the now, in a “present” that is incapable of invariantly guaranteeing the not yet, the future of our perception. The long and short of it all is that the general world we have received is of an “absolute certainty;” beside it, no other particular thing is anything near a certainty that cannot be faulted (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 297). Thus a world does exist for one given that one is not unaware of oneself; and given that one has a world, one cannot be that hidden from oneself. Hence, one’s awareness of the world does not hinge on self-awareness, since both are co-extensive and contemporaneous (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 298). Modern philosophy of mind needs Merleau-Ponty’s insights. Modern philosophy of mind has its origin in Descartes, even as its fundamental worries date well back to ancient philosophy (Recall Heraclitus and Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle). Even as the psycho-physical dualism of Descartes remains popular, and even as philosophers occasionally argue in its favour, yet majority of philosophers of mind deny its viability as an option and doubt whether Descartes would subscribe to it in our day. What Descartes bequeaths to philosophy of mind is his shaping of our conception of mind and body. His hold is so pervasive that thought habits of his psycho-physical dualism continue to find their way even in the works of those who reject his theory of mind (Burwood, Gilbert, Lennon, 1999, 2). The dominant paradigm in contemporary philosophy of mind articulates a theory of mind in line with that of the physical and mathematical sciences. Here the study of the mind is confined to scientific experimental methods, and the mental is reduced to the physical. Contemporary philosophy of mind is thus reductionist. Reductionist accounts of mind are decidedly materialist, frequently physicalist, often scientistic, and definitely monist.