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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+bodies « Previous | |Next »
July 14, 2006

A quote from here:

For Merleau-Ponty, consciousness is not just something that goes on in our heads. Rather, our intentional consciousness is experienced in and through our bodies. With his concept of the lived body, Merleau-Ponty overcomes Descartes' mind-body dualism without resorting to physiological reductionism. Recall that for Descartes the body is a machine and the mind is what runs the machine. For Merleau-Ponty the body is not a machine, but a living organism by which we body-forth our possibilities in the world. The current of a person's intentional existence is lived through the body. We are our bodies, and consciousness is not just locked up inside the head. In his later thought, Merleau-Ponty talked of the body as "flesh," made of the same flesh of the world, and it is because the flesh of the body is of the flesh of the world that we can know and understand the world

And:
It is important to understand that Merleau-Ponty is not resorting here to physiological reductionism. The physiologist, at least traditionally, sees the body as separate parts that work together like a machine. For Merleau-Ponty, however, the body cannot be understood as separate parts but must be understand as a whole, as it is lived. The body as it is lived is an experiential body, a body that opens onto a world and allows the world to be for us. Physiology is not pointless; it has value, no doubt. But it does not get at the lived body. If we want to understand the body as it is lived in our experience, we have to use a phenomenological method. Merleau-Ponty would go so far as to argue that physiology is a second-order, intellectual abstraction from the primordial, lived body. In this sense, phenomenology can understand and incorporate physiological insights, but physiology is unable to incorporate phenomenological insights when it begins with a reductive approach.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:07 PM | | Comments (0)
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