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August 26, 2004
Merleau-Ponty's category of embodiment enriches our understanding of human subjectivity in ways which avoid some of the pitfalls of Australian materialism (a reductionist conception of the body as a non-cultural ahistorical phenomenon) and postmodernism (the subject as an effect of discourse).
It also opens up space of "lived engagement" of the embodied subjects of within their environments. As Marjorie O’Loughlin says embodiment:
"...captures a sense of the human being's "immersion" in places, spaces and environs in which, as gendered subjects, they encounter the world as dwelling place."
What is disclosed is the body as the centre of our worldly encounters: we activate and react to the world via our bodies and the extensions of our bodies (canes, glasses, technological mediates). For Merleau-Ponty, the body exists primordially in the sense that the world exists for me in and through my body. Hence our practical knowledge is based on the more practical exigencies of the body's exposure to the world.
Embodiment offers an alternative pathway to the age-old the mind and the body dualism to that of Australian materialism, which reduces mind to body in opposition to idealism that sees consciousness (reflecting mind) as primary and the body as secondary (ie., it prioritises the mental above the physical).
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