Merleau-Ponty and Incarnation

We are embodied. This is not a generally contentious claim, but its implications are not well thought out. In this post, I want to sketch an argument for using Merleau-Ponty to fill in this claim and its impact on ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is famous for returning the body to philosophy, particularly in the existentialist tradition. His arguments push against scientific reductionism without holding the mental to be independent of the physical. This emphasis on our intimate connection to our bodies as lived allows us to use him to think through how our embodiment has and provides value.

Merleau-Ponty views the body as the center-point from which we live and discover the world. It is the condition of our awareness of the world. On the other hand, the body as center-point is dependent on the world--it must be an opening on a world, or it is nothing. The body and the world are thus correlates. We therefore must discover them together.

This is an important point: once we have accepted our embodiment, we must accept that our awareness of ourselves as active and perceptual beings (more accurately: active-perceptual beings, as there is little distinction) depends on our awareness of the world. We discover both ourselves and the world through engaging the opening onto the world which we are with the world which we open out onto.

In this active-perceptual engagement the world and our bodies arise for us as significant--having significance. The world offers us options in relation to the body, which offers us correlated capacities. The options the world offers others are options we know through intersubjectivity--our awareness of others--which, Merleau-Ponty argues, occurs through our bodies. We subtly use our own bodies to understand the activities of others.

This centrality of the body and its capacities for knowledge of the world and others entails that differences in embodiment result in different ways of understanding the world. Furthermore, the body as condition of action presents itself as a Good without which we could do and know nothing. The body constrains our way of being toward the world, and thus, while Merleau-Ponty agrees with other existentialists that we have the ability to construct our identities, and that what we do produces us, he nevertheless leaves the initial substrate outside our ability to choose. The restraints of nature, and particularly body and the culture we are born into, provide a basis on which to stand when choosing. These restraints do not inhibit agency but rather enable it. This at the very least puts the question of the validity of sex change operations into question: is it a way of developing the bodies we are, or a way of bucking the very condition of our freedom? The same kind of question may be asked of other transhumanist technologies, whether reproductive or otherwise.

The biggest metaphysical commitment I see in Merleau-Ponty is to the value-ladenness of things prior to our choices. Perception is, for Merleau-Ponty, the activity of answering a question from the world. The world offers us puzzles which demand solutions, and those solutions must form the world into a comprehensible form. The solution is demanded by the world, and includes the values of the things seen, its potentialities for reception of activities of various sorts. There are occasionally multiple viable solutions, yet not just any solution will do: it must guide our interactions with the problem of the world productively. The solution must, as it were, harmonize the world's witness. This means that form is necessary to the world's existence--it must be viewed as formed--yet form is a perceptual category, and so the world must be viewed as given perceptually, not as though the real world were a world of imperceptibles.

Once we have attuned ourselves to this notion of form, of self-sustaining orderings, we can begin to recognize much of our work as the work of producing form. This is the aim of every valid institution: to be formed in a way which harmonizes and preserves its parts in order to exhibit its form by seeking some telos. Likewise, we can see the environment and our bodies both as forms whose structure is self-sustaining and not to be violated without good reason. We will have to recognize the fact that we deal in these and many other cases with systems which are complex and which seek their own continuance until they cannot, and which then tend to decline rapidly.

Hopefully this post has shown how Merleau-Ponty may be useful to Christian thought on how to think about ethics in light of our embodiment, which we must insofar as we think of ethics in light of Christ's incarnation. There will, of course, be much to think through about what Merleau-Ponty gets wrong in virtue of denying the existence of a sovereign God, but there remains much which is profitable for our thought, and even where he goes wrong, he will offer a sympathetic interlocutor on many points.