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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Merleau-Ponty: embodiment « Previous | |Next »
August 25, 2004

Trevor,
What I have been trying to show with the turn to Merleau-Ponty is he enables us to distinguish between the objective body (the body regarded as a physiological or biological entity conceptualized as an object in Australian materialism) and the phenomenal body, or my body as I experience it in the social world.

I am suprised by your silence on this. Why the avoidance of this overcoming of our philosophical tradition?

I experience my body (tacitly) as a unified potential or capacity for doing this and that-going for a walk, catching a ball, running with the dogs in the parklands, shopping, playing tennis or other bodily acts that involve tacit knowledge.

Hence the shift in language: from the 'body' as physical object to ‘embodiment’.

Embodiment signifies an opening to bodily being-in-the-world.This is understood to be a way of living or inhabiting the world through one's acculturated body.

From this perspective I see Australian materialism as a form of reductionism (eg., reducing an encultured social body to a biological one). This tradition, with its suspect promise of simplicity, has a tattered reputation because of its reductionism.

What suprises me is that you still adhere to this kind of materialist metaphysics and say you are a Marxist. Marx worked with a social labouring body in Capital that is quite different to the biological body of Australian materialism.

The latter could not see beyond physics. It was besotted with physics. It did not even operate with a biological account of bodies as organisms because it reduced that to a fundamental physics.

So your materialism reduces historical materialism to physicalism and, as a result, it is an impoverished materialism. We need better kinds of materialism than what the Australian materialists (physicalists) had to over.

What I got when the issue was raised was dogmatism. To move away from their scientific account of the body was to embrace idealism and non science.

No wonder the amalgam of historical materialism and Australian materialism died, with few attending its funeral.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:27 PM | | Comments (0)
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