Building on the last episode where we explored the thoughts of Merleau-Ponty, in today’s episode we look at this fabulous article by philosopher and researcher Brentyn Ramm entitled Body, Self and Others: Harding, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on Intersubjectivity in which Ramm tackles the differing ways Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean Paul Satre, and Douglas Harding all address the topic of intersubjectivity.

I love the way this paper looks at the problem of how it is that we all have our own private view of the world and yet we all agree at some level about what is happening “out there”. In this paper, Ramm walks thru Merleau-Ponty’s views on the merged body-subject where subject and body are inseparable, the notion of Sartre's “Look” where our own self-consciousness comes from the gaze of others, and (my personal favorite) Harding’s explanation that “mind” is the view-out and “body” is the view-in.

By walking through some of Harding’s experiments, Ramm also shows the reader how to see for themselves that the view-out is nothing but spaciousness encompassing the whole world, while simultaneously the view-in from another’s perspective is a small and limited body (at least at the range of a few feet or so). I find this to be an elegant solution to the mind-body problem — there is no problem. We don’t have to solve the question of how a “mind” can spring up from a “body” when we realize that mind and body are two different points of view on the same phenomenon. Or as Douglas Harding puts it:

My mind is your body, and my body is your mind

I hope you enjoy listening to this one and follow along with the experiments to see for yourself whether this is true for you.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit headlessdeepdive.substack.com

Brentyn Ramm - Body, Self and Others