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.

Emotional Levels

The best analogy for how levels of emotions work is to the figure/ground distinction. This is the distinction between what is the focus of attention (figure) and what forms the background against which the figure stands out. The background is experienced as relatively undifferentiated and static, while the figure is experienced as relatively differentiated and dynamic.

On my account of the emotions, when we experience emotions, it is because we are interpreting something, a focus of attention, as relevant to our concerns in some way. The spread of potential foci of attention form the background against which any particular focus stands out. Thus, we can conceive of a background of emotions corresponding to the background of foci. Both of these backgrounds are experienced as relatively homogeneous, although there is space for being aware of things hovering on the periphery, eliciting one's attention.

The relative homogeneity of the background and the relative richness of the figure account for a general separation into two levels of emotional emotional experience. In other words, we are always experiencing some kind of emotion in response to a figure and having an (background) emotional reaction to the background. This background emotion provides a baseline against which other emotions are measured, and sets the standard of reasonable variation.

A background of joy, then, does two things: it heightens the default emotion, and it makes mourning more acute. The inverse applies to a background of sadness. The background can also color the focal emotion in other ways, perhaps contaminating it, perhaps contrasting with it, perhaps supplementing it. It is important to note that not all emotions occupy the spectrum of happy/sad. Anger, I think, does not fall directly on this spectrum. A background of anger contaminates happiness and sadness both into particular forms of happiness and sadness. Likewise, joy can modify how we experience other emotions, providing resilience and a baseline of expectation that there is joy to be had.

The analogy of figure/ground also fits with how little we are usually aware of secondary emotions. Occasionally, we feel a swirling mass of emotions, but usually we feel one emotion at a time, or even feel like we are feeling no emotions. A background is ordinarily overlooked, and only the figure is noticed. The figure, in turn, is only noticed in its differentiation from the background. Thus, when the figure and ground match, nothing seems to be felt. On the other hand, when we are feeling something, it is usually only the focal emotion. The background only becomes noticeable when it is abnormal, that is, when it stands out against the background over time of our emotional lives, or when it starts having a noticeable impact on the shape of our emotions by constricting them. In the ordinary case, then, we can only tell what our background emotion is by either asking others or noticing how we tend to feel in general, when we attend to a variety of phenomena.

Happiness

There are two dominant concepts of happiness in the west, and perhaps elsewhere. One is the concept which I associate with Aristotle and Augustine, the other I associate with early modern philosophers. We will start with the latter, move to the former, and then try to articulate a synthesis, as we did with the notion of fulfillment. Both concepts are utilized to make the claim that we all always seek to be happy, but because the concepts are different, the claims are different.

The early modern notion of happiness conceives of it as something one essentially feels. One can thus know whether or not one is happy. Happiness is an occurrent mental state: there is something it feels like to be happy. Further, all it is to be happy is to feel happy.

The older notion of happiness ties happiness to doing well. Thus, on this account, one cannot be happy, however one feels, if one is being vicious. One can "feel happy" and yet fail to be genuinely happy, and thus one will remain restless and unsatisfied no matter how many endorphins are soaking your brain. Further, on this account, it is at least questionable whether or not someone has to feel happy to be happy. It would be consistent with this theory to claim that some people who are doing well are happy yet feel unhappy.

What kind of synthesis can be made of this? Let me start by suggesting that the older notion is the more basic, and that the more recent notion is parasitic on it. Feeling happy is evidence of being happy, but does not entail it. Feeling happy--like other feelings--involves a construal. It involves construing oneself as living well, as being happy. Thus, we are generally warranted in moving from "I feel happy," to "I am happy," but not incorrigibly. There are two consequences to this. First, the source of our felt happiness should be what we take the source of our well being to be. Second, if we are unhappy, there are two routes to becoming happy: we can seek what we think we need to feel happy, or we can reorient what we take to be involved in living well.

This first point is the source of Jon Piper's claim that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. If God is the source of our well being, then he should be the source of our happiness. We should be happy primarily in God and only derivatively in other things if we take our well being to be dependent primarily on God and only derivatively on other things.

The second point should not be taken as the claim that we should simply alter our notion of what living well consists in whenever we are unhappy, nor that we should obtain a notion of living well which will be invulnerable. It is simply the point that we can move in either direction. We can seek what we think will contribute to a good life or we can redirect our efforts to a different conception of the good life. It is not always the case, however, that we should do what will most quickly make us happy. I take the goal to be, rather, to have a happy life. Not a life full of happy feelings, but a life which one would rightly feel happy about at the end.

I want to end by articulating a multi-leveled account of happiness. I have noted that we should feel happy because of God who secures our well being eternally. This should not be taken as meaning that we should be perpetually giddy which feelings of happiness. Rather, I take it that we feel at multiple levels. We can have an abiding sense of our own well being while feeling terribly morose. We can recognize our total well being in Christ while also mourning our sin. We can rest in God's sovereignty while striving hard to pursue sanctification. Perhaps I will say more about this later.

Self-Awareness

When one is aware, one are aware of something. To be self-aware is to be aware of oneself. One can be aware without being aware of oneself if, for instance, one is aware of a ball in front of oneself instead. But is this right? If one is aware of a ball in front of oneself, isn't one implicitly aware of oneself? This turns on what we mean by awareness.

There are, potentially, at least two ways in which one can be aware of something. One can have the object of awareness before one, or one may have the object of awareness as an understood correlate of one's experience. When one is aware of a tree, for instance, one is aware of the part of the tree facing one, but one is also aware of the whole tree. The back and insides of the tree are merely understood as the correlate of the front of the tree. Likewise, then, one may be aware of oneself as one examines oneself or as one recognizes oneself as a correlate of one's experience as centered on a body.

When one views a tree, the existence of a front and behind, of a left and right, involves a relation to the point of view from which it is viewed, and thus the experience entails a perceiving being. This may be noted more or less. It is possible that animals might have experiences which imply their particular beings without noticing this implication. They would thus be self-aware in a very weak sense. We are able to direct our awareness to the implied particular being, ourselves, and thus shift from being aware of ourselves as an understood correlate to the direct object of awareness.

If one means by awareness only direct awareness, then one can be aware of things without being aware of oneself. If one means both varieties of awareness, then any being with awareness at all is aware of itself. I suspect that, when we are discussing self-awareness, we mean awareness of the direct kind.

We may be peculiar in being able to reflect on the perspectival nature of our engagement with the world. One can notice that One is seeing things only from one's own point of view, and one can reflect on how one's point of view may alter what one sees. One can do this at several levels, not only with perception of objects, where one can consider the possible effects of optical illusions, obstructions, and deception, but also with our thoughts. One can thus consider how ideas appear to one perspectivally, and hence how one's considerations may be being altered. One can ask, for instance, what would make one's argument stronger or weaker.

We might structure kinds of self-awareness by what elements of the self the awareness takes in. Some creatures might be self-aware in recognizing that their perceptions are perspectivally bound and might therefore engage in a particular kind of exploratory or group behavior. One might suppose that the use of lookouts hints at this degree of self-awareness in many creatures. Others may be aware that their thoughts are perspectivally bound in that they are restricted by the ideas they are aware of and their cognitive capacities. Others may recognize that their emotions are perspectivally bound, and this in one of two ways. Their emotions are perspectivally bound in being elicited by what they are aware of from their perspectival vantage point, but their emotions are also perspectivally bound by being an expression of their particular values. The former kind of self-awareness, I would suspect, would be more common, or stronger, than the latter. As humans, we are capable of all of these varieties of self-awareness. Some of these come more naturally than others. The perceptual and the first emotional kinds are likely the most straightforward, whereas those relating to thoughts and the latter emotional kind take more effort or reflection. Thus, it is incredibly difficult to genuinely wonder whether one's conclusions are accurate and whether one's emotional reactions are fitting.

Reflexive Awareness and Other Awareness

Reflexive awareness enables us to be aware of ourselves. We are also aware of others as subjects of consciousness, that is, beings who are aware. The question of this post is how the two capacities are related.

Object-awareness suffices for being aware of others as beings. It may, however, present others as mere objects. Something further, or a special kind of object-awareness, is needed to be aware of the fact that someone has a mental life of some sort.

There are five ways in which these two capacities might be related. Reflexive awareness might depend on other awareness, other awareness might depend on reflexive awareness, both might depend on a third thing, the two capacities might be interdependent, or they might be independent. In addition, in the first three cases, the dependence may also be such that what is depended on is also sufficient for what is dependent on it, and, since it seems quite implausible that one might find one of these two capacities without the other, these are the varieties of the first three hypotheses which I will be interested in. For the same reason, I reject the final possibility.

Let us take these possibilities in order, then. If reflexive awareness only depends on other awareness, then reflexive awareness should be able to be explained in terms of other awareness. There are at least two varieties of this idea. One is the idea that we are aware of our own awareness by the same means as we are aware of others' awareness. The idea is that we turn our capacity to understand others on ourselves. Another is the idea that we first recognize awareness as distinct from the contents of awareness in virtue of recognizing that others also possess awareness. The idea here is that, in order to recognize our own awareness, we must recognize it as one instance among others.

If the dependency is switched, so that other awareness depends on reflexive awareness, then the idea is that we generalize from our own case of awareness to others' cases of awareness. This need not be the claim that we actually go through an argument for other minds by analogy. It may be that we directly recognize others as like us, and presume that they are like us in their experiences as well as their behaviors.

Next, there may be third capacity, or other feature, on which both capacities depend and which is sufficient for both. Clearly, both capacities need a perceiving subject if there is to be awareness at all, but the idea here is that something more in the subject would produce both reflexive awareness and other awareness. This, it seems to me, is roughly Merleau-Ponty's view, since he holds that the distinction between self and other arises out of an original undifferentiated subjectivity from which we abstract ourselves and others. On his account, as I understand it, we understand our own and others' bodies, originally, simply as bodies, and gradually learn to distinguish ourselves from others. This is, incidentally, compatible with the next option, and Merleau-Ponty's articulation of it involves the next option.

Finally, the two capacities may be interdependent. The question here is whether we wind up with the best of both worlds or the worst of both worlds. We can easily see that the distinction between self and other requires both terms if it is to make sense. I am a self only as distinct from some other, and others are other only to me. This is an idea taken from the idea that reflexive awareness might be dependent on other awareness. We can also take the idea that we use roughly the same capacity to recognize our own and others' awareness. We can also recognize the fact that my own experience of the world through my body affects how I interpret others. We tend to project ourselves onto others, and this makes some sense if we use ourselves as models of subjectivity (this idea comes from Alvin Goldman, Simulating Minds). This may be understood as a neutral process, however: it is not as though I am solid and project my solid self on others, rather, I and others are fluid, and pass into and understand one another via projecting ourselves onto others and accepting others into ourselves. I hope that metaphor makes some kind of sense. It is roughly how I understand Merleau-Ponty's view. The idea is that we learn to be selves by using ourselves to model others' selfhood, and at the same time learn about others through how we have learned to be selves. The same body both models others and mimics others via the same mechanism. It becomes less porous over time, as one learns to be a self more, but it retains some degree of porosity.

Are You Aware of Your Awareness?

When one is aware of something, say, your mug on a table, are you automatically aware that you are aware of it? That is the question I will ponder in this post.

There are multiple levels of awareness, and this plurality of levels complicates the question. When I am aware of my mug on the table, surely I am aware that I am aware of the mug on the table, but I might not be aware of the color of the mug, or the angle of the mug. I might be aware of the angle of the mug in a practical way, but not in such a way that I am also aware that I am aware of the angle of the mug. Let me unpack some of these distinctions here.

First, conscious awareness is the kind of awareness required for discourse. When I see the mug and can talk about whether it has coffee or tea in it, I am utilizing this form of awareness. In this case, the ordinary case of awareness, we might say, when I am aware of something, I am aware of the contents of that awareness in such a manner that the contents are accessible for reflective thought and speech.

Second, there is a form of unconscious action-awareness. At least with sight, we process perceptual information along two streams, so that one stream is not conscious but guides action, while the other is conscious, yet does not hook up to actions (at least in the smooth way that the first does). When this second kind of consciousness is in play, we are not aware of what we are aware of. One might pick out obstacles visually in this manner without noticing what one is doing or even being able to direct one's attention to it. Here, one is aware of the contents of awareness only practically, that is, in such a way that the contents are accessible for action-guidance, in particular, for fine-tuning actions directed toward the object in some way (adjusting angle of approach of one's hand to the coffee mug, for instance).

Conscious awareness can also be more finely distinguished into different levels. At the object-level, I am aware of objects, such as my mug and the table it sits on. At a more fine-grained level, call it the property-level, I may pick out the properties of these objects: I may notice the color of the mug or the texture of the table. At a less fine-grained level, the event-level, I do not notice individual things, but arrangements, such as something passing through my visual field, some odd noise, or a mass of objects. One may be consciously aware at any of these levels or none of them, and this awareness may or may not co-exist with the unconscious action-awareness. Each level is conscious, and hence transparent, but the transparency of one level does not entail any awareness of other levels. One cannot decompose higher levels in finer ones, nor assemble finer ones into higher ones, except by directing one's attention in particular ways. When one attempts to decompose an image from memory, one often finds that some of the lower-level facts are not available.

Ordinarily, one's conscious awareness is a certain combination of levels of conscious awareness, with action-awareness seeming to come along free. I am now aware of my computer, the way the text forms paragraph blocks, and the background's whiteness. Nevertheless, I am not particularly aware of what all the words say, until I direct my attention to them. Most of what I am aware of is a background, which is only fleshed out when I direct my attention to it.

Thus far, I have not endorsed transparency about conscious perception. There is a third level of awareness, however, which I will call reflexive awareness. This is the kind of awareness which allows me to be aware of my awareness as an instance of awareness. With conscious awareness, I can be aware of the contents of my awareness. With reflexive awareness, I can be aware of the fact that those contents are contents of awareness. This form of awareness enables us to think about thinking, talk about how we see, and recognize that we are aware of something fallibly.

It is in virtue of our capacity for reflexive awareness, I would claim, that we feel as though it suffices for being aware of being aware of something that we be aware of that thing. That is, it feels as though it suffices for my being aware of being aware of a mug that I be aware of the mug, but in fact that is an illusion produced by the fact that it takes no effort for us to make ourselves aware of that awareness because we are capable of reflexive awareness.