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October 3, 2005
I did not realize that Alan Saunder's interview with Christina Colegate on The Philosopher's Zone that I posted on here was continued. It can be found here. What I should say is that the text is less an interview and more a conversation about Colgate's new book, Just Between You and Me: The Art of Ethical Relationships.
In this second part of the conversation we move onto Merleau Ponty. Saunders introduces Merleau Ponty as a critic of Descartes' conception of the subject as a material object in the world:
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a major opponent of Decartes’ views, and whose own view it was that the body is not an object in the world just like any other, as it is for Descartes: remember that Descartes thought you could as easily doubt the existence of your own arm, as doubt the existence of the table it was resting on. No, for Merleau-Ponty, my body is not an object of knowledge but a knowing subject, my point of view on the world.
The key concept is body image. Colgate says:
One of the central aims of the book [is] to introduce readers to new ideas, not just present philosophy as an old tradition, but also one as a progressing tradition. Bodies are becoming more and more central to the way we understand who we are, how we live, how we move through the world, how we manipulate spaces and leave our mark on it, but also how we are dependent on one another, in our understanding of who we are. So in that chapter my big question is, why are we so dependent on others in the creation of our own body image, to get a sense of what we actually look like?
This theme of not presenting philosophy as an old tradition, but as a progressing tradition challenges what I wrote in the earlier post when I said that Colgate was just populizing classic texts. That interpretation was clearly mistaken. What we have is the critical reflection upon the presuppositions of the Cartesian tradition and, at the same time, proposing new directions.
Do we have a progressing tradition or an alternative one that counters the mechanistic naturalist tradition? It depends whether you are thinking in terms of the French tradition of philosophy, or you think in terms of opposing traditions (eg., the mechanism and organic ones).
A little thought. Are we not Australians with our philosophical tradition? Why is that absent? Why do we not engage with what is our own?
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