The more I think about Merleau Ponty the more I realize the significance of what he has achieved in terms of the Cartesian mind body problem. The complement of this is mind/body dualism, the separation of the interior mind of the individual from his/her own material body. The "theater of the mind" metaphor generates a root absurdity: the individual speaks what his or her mind is thinking. This separation of language and mind implicitly privileges the individual to the exclusion of the crucial notion of person. The focus becomes the mind (not language) and the individual as the subject, not the person as a social being.

The dualistic conception of body and mind gives rise to the problematics of subjectivity and objectivity: i.e., there is a split between subjectivity and objectivity, as in the subject of the body and soul. This provides the foundational inside/outside dualism; a nonmaterial world comprised of an inner mind substance versus an outside world of material substances or things -including other people.confusing the body with the "organism." The human organism is an asocial, complex, biological entity. The human body is a social, complex, cultural entity. So we have the disconnection of mind from language, and the conflation of body with organism,

Merleau-Ponty addresses this problem through the category of “embodiment.” Embodiment is the answer to this dualism: according to it, we are neither purely mind/soul/spirit nor are we body/object/thing – 'embodiment' is the essential link between these two seemingly separate entities. 'Embodiment' is quite different from the conception of the body as an object/thing. To explain this embodiment, Merleau-Ponty incorporated the early 20th century French philosopher, Henri Bergson’s concept of “le vecu,” or “the lived.” Taking this, Merleau-Ponty added “body,” to create “the lived body.” This presupposes a world that is experienced phenomenologically: we experience the world perceptually and in an embodied way.

In his The Phenomenology of Perception. Merleau-Ponty theorizes that we experience the world in an embodied, gestural, ambiguous and meaningful way. The key chapter of this work is entitled “Body as Speech and Expression,” which discusses to the extent that we are embodied in the world as subjects. In addition to this, we are also speaking (gestural speech is regarded as language here) through our own embodiment. Additionally, this speech is expressive. As a result, embodiment is both meaningful and expressive.

The body-subject is Merleau-Ponty's major attempt to overcome mind-body dualism. Merleau-Ponty suggested that mind and body are both centered in, and mediated by, the subject's being-in-the-world. If mind is a ghost in the machinery of the body (moving or not), the body is the only reality left for the location of agency. If the body as machine (the objective body), is rejected as such because of its deterministic status, then the body as "lived," the subjective-body, must be accepted as the only remaining alternative to determinism.

The problem I have here is that the 'lived body' is structured around the primacy of perception Teven though there is no experience without speech. Where is language in relation to lived body? What we have is the tacit or pre-reflective cogito ---the idea that there is a cogito before language, or to put it crudely, that there is a self anterior to both language and thought that we can aim to get in closer contact with. The notion of a pre-reflective cogito hence presumes the possibility of a consciousness without language, and it exhibits something of a nostalgic desire to return to some brute, primordial experience.