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In Our Time
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
00:59:02
Insights into the relationship between the body and the mind, habits, language and thought
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- [00:01]
Melvin Bragg
BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts this is.
- [00:05]
Thomas Baldwin
In our time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau Ponty, 1908-1961 was part of the movement known as Phenomenology. While it is less well known than his contemporary Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, his popularity has increased among philosophers in recent years. Merleau Ponty rejected Rene Descartes division between body and mind, arguing the way you perceive the world around us cannot be separated from our experience of inhabiting a physical body. Merleau Ponty was interested in the down to earth questions of what it actually is like to live in the world while performing actions as simple as brushing our teeth or patting a dog. We shape the world and in turn, the world shapes us. With me to discuss Maurice Merleau Ponty, our co Marian Romden Romlook, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, Thomas Baldwin, Emeritus professor of Philosophy at the University of York, and Timothy Mooney, Associate professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin. Timothy Mooney, who was Maurice Merleau Ponty?
- [01:26]
Timothy Mooney
He was a French philosopher of the body. He was born at Rochefort Saumur in 1908 to Jean Bernard and Louise Merleau Ponty. His father died when he was very little and his mother brought Maurice and his brother and sister to Paris to bring them up there. And he was a precocious child. He showed brilliance at a very young age. He studied at the lyces Johnson, Tetaili and Louis Le grand, and after that he got into the Ecole Normale Superior and graduated with flying colors. He studied at the Lyce des Chartres and various other places. He was conscripted in 1939 into the French army. He was injured in the Battle of France. He made a recovery, got married in 1940 to Suzanne Jolibo, and they had one daughter, Marianne Merleau Ponty. When he was at the Ecole Normale, he became very friendly with Simone de Beauvoir and she introduced him to Jean Paul Sartre and the three became fast friends. Both Sartre and de Beauvoir were very taken by his cheerful and modest disposition as well as his intellectual brilliance. His first major book was published in 1942, the structure of Behavior. And then by general acclaim, his greatest work, the Phenomenology of Perception.
- [02:48]
Thomas Baldwin
Can we tell the listener, what philosophical questions he was trying to answer. If there are more than one, that's fine. What was he trying to answer?
- [02:57]
Timothy Mooney
He was trying to get away from what he saw as a very bad picture of the body that comes from what he calls objective thought. And this is the idea that objective thought, it's the idea that all bodies can be understood through physics and chemistry and ultimately reduced to physical processes. And one strain of objective thought called empiricism, claimed that all thoughts, all volitions, could be reduced to physical processes. And another movement accepted the mechanical picture. And this was Descartes move, but said, well, if there's such a thing as freedom and responsibility, and it cannot be explained in terms of a physical body, then there must be a separate realm, a realm of a spiritual self. And this picture, for Merleau Ponty, is a catastrophically bad one. On the one hand, it gives you a physical body, which is an exterior without an interior. All you find when you go through the physical body is moving parts. On the other hand, it gives you a strange spiritual self, something that you never directly experienced. So bodily expressions don't give you consciousness, they only give you indications of consciousness. So what Descartes did was he turned consciousness into an interior without an exterior. There was this dreadful cleft where bodies are extended and unthinking, whereas minds are thinking but unextended. And Merleau Ponty said quite correctly, if you start with that picture, if you divorce mind and body so catastrophically, you're never going to be able to bring them back together. So the entire picture has to be abandoned.
- [04:35]
Thomas Baldwin
Why did that original idea that Milleau Ponty overthrew, why did it hold, hold its place steadily for so long?
- [04:43]
Timothy Mooney
Because of the enormous success first of Galilean mechanics and then of Newtonian mechanics. So the sheer success of the physical or natural sciences had philosophers as were running to try and catch up. And Merleau Ponty pointed out that the notion of it, of just a physical body, will only get you so far. He calls this the objective body. It's the body insofar as physics or chemistry deals with it from. From an exterior third person approach. And it's also the body that's present to me when I pay attention to it. So if I get a pain in my ankle or if I'm brushing my hair, then my body is an object that's present to me. And he calls this the objective body. But he realized that there are other senses of the body, and amongst them there's what he calls the phenomenal. Body and that's the body that's present with me. So I feel myself breathing, I feel myself moving, and I'm in constant tactile contact with the world. So my body's present with me even when I'm not paying any attention to my body. And then he also talked about the body being the body as a repertoire of skills. He called this the habitual body. And beneath that again you find a postural organization which he calls the body schema. So Merleau Ponty realized that there are multiple senses of the body which the approach of objective thought and of Cartesian dualism quite simply misses.
- [06:09]
Thomas Baldwin
We'll come back to some of those thoughts as we go along. Thomas Baldwin, how did his ideas relate to those of other philosophers of the time, including Husserl?
- [06:19]
Melvin Bragg
Well, there were two groups of philosophers that Melle Ponty was particularly drew on. The first was that of Edmund Husserl and his followers, who initiated a kind of reflective inquiry into philosophical, philosophical foundations, seeking out what they called self evident, a priori truths, which would be the foundations of sciences and other intellectual inquiries. Now what's distinctive actually about Merleau Ponty is that he in a way takes over Husserl's method of inquiry, but he no longer seeks to find foundations for self evident truths for a priori truths. So there is quite a big difference between what Melle Ponty takes from this method and what Husserl was offering. The other group of thinkers, philosophers, but actually, you might say scientists, who greatly influenced Melle Ponty's work were the Gestalt theorists. These are German, basically theorists writing about perception, particularly visual perception. And Melle Ponty's first book, well, his first philosophy book, the Structure of Behavior, is a critical account of their work and then an. A critical, in a sense, critique of it just at the end. But what he took from their work was the mistakenness of a kind of atomistic view of our understanding of perception that by and large our perception of the world is, as we would say, holistic. We take in things as a whole. We don't build them up in a sort of atomistic, or one might say pointilliste way, thinking of some French Impressionist paintings. And then see shapes, shapes of people or buildings or whatever emerging from our visual perception. Instead, we take in shapes which we recognize straight away.
- [08:20]
Thomas Baldwin
We know that he became a close friend of Jean Paul Sartre, Sinoma de beauvoir. And connecting him to existentialist thinkers. What did that do for his work?
- [08:30]
Melvin Bragg
Well, what that did was that made him focus on what he called existence. And that's a term, we know it in the term existentialism, of course, it's a term that comes from Kierkegaard and its use. It has a special meaning in which it means roughly the same as human life. And to be an existentialist is to be someone who makes the structure of human life the central concern. And so what Meleponte and Sartre and de Beauvoir did was they wanted to use this phenomenological, reflective approach to philosophy, but to address it to questions about the nature of human life. And that's what marks them out as existentialist.
- [09:16]
Thomas Baldwin
Thank you, Kamaran. His most important work is perhaps his Phenomenology of Perception. What does that book argue?
- [09:24]
Marian Romdenh-Romlook
So in the Phenomenology of Perception, one of the things that he's trying to do is reconceive not just the body, but consciousness and our relation to the world, which he also thinks involves a reconceptualization of what the world is and also our relation to other people. So he's got this very grand project in that book and he starts off, I think Tom has already mentioned, beginning with studies of perception. So what is our perceptual experience like? He first of all goes through various scientific specific viewpoints of his day and critiques them. And that sort of clears the way for a new sort of approach to perception. And then he thinks from focusing on what perceptual experience is like, he can then build out from that to a new understanding of the body, our relation to the world, our relation to other people, what human freedom is. So he's got quite a grand project in that book, lots to talk about.
- [10:19]
Thomas Baldwin
Can you relate what he did to the work of a towering figure before him, Rene Descartes?
- [10:25]
Marian Romdenh-Romlook
Yes. So as maybe Tim's already mentioned from Descartes philosophy. Well, there's lots in Descartes philosophy, but one of the central ideas which has been really influential is there being a hard distinction between the mind and the body. And then that dichotomy carries on to the mind versus the world, because the body ends up on the side of the world. It's a physical object, it's amongst the other objects of the world. And then you have the mind, which is a separate soul, substance. And one of the things that Merleau Ponty is interested in is that even after people have, on the face of it, rejected Descartes ways of seeing things, that dichotomy infects our thinking all the way down. So just the language I'm using, where I talk about me and my body makes it sound like we're two separate things and we're not. So one of the things he's trying to do is excavate those Cartesian dichotomies from the bottom of our thinking and then try to give us new ways of understand these phenomena which don't rely on those Cartesian dichotomies.
- [11:30]
Thomas Baldwin
Can you develop with examples?
- [11:33]
Marian Romdenh-Romlook
One of the examples from his work is thinking about the body itself. So in the Cartesian worldview, you've got the body on the side of the world. Consciousness is something separate from the body. And what Merleau Ponty is trying to do is through thinking about very basic skills and habits and ways of interacting with the world, like brushing your teeth or playing with your dog. The body itself has a kind of consciousness. So he's thinking about something like.
- [12:00]
Thomas Baldwin
Just pin that down a bit more.
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Marian Romdenh-Romlook
Yeah.
- [12:02]
Thomas Baldwin
What do you mean by the body having a kind of consciousness?
- [12:05]
Marian Romdenh-Romlook
So if you think about a simple habit such as brushing your teeth, his thought is, what happens when you brush your teeth? You do that thing every day, and through the activity of repeating, you come to see the world in terms of that activity. So you might think when you look at the toothbrush, what you're looking at is a particular object with a size and shape in space that you categorize in a certain way. But for him, through the action of using it in a certain way every day, you come to literally see the toothbrush as inviting you to perform certain actions with it. So the habit becomes kind of embedded in your perception of the world, and you can then respond to that perception if the toothbrush kind of saying, brush your teeth without needing to think about what you're doing. So generally speaking, if I'm brushing my teeth in the morning, I'm not thinking about brushing my teeth. I'm thinking about what I'm going to eat for dinner later and what I'm going to teach my students. The news, all sorts of things. And the reason that I can do this activity whilst thinking about these other things for Melau Ponty is because my body has a grasp of the world and how to act with it, how to interact with it. I'm not like a sort of puppet controlled by the mind. There's this bodily understanding. So that's one aspect of what he means when he talks about the body being a kind of subjectivity.
- [13:27]
Thomas Baldwin
Thomas, do you think his wartime experiences had an effect on his philosophy?
- [13:31]
Melvin Bragg
I can only say no, really. I mean, for Sartre the story is completely different. Sartre was in a prisoner of war camp and so on. Meleponte was not in a prisoner of war camp. He and Sartre worked together with de Beauvoir, trying to establish a kind of resistance movement. But this came to very little.
- [13:51]
Timothy Mooney
It's true, his work came to very little. He did edit a resistance magazine under the boot for a little while, but not much came of it. What did impress him, I think, from his wartime experience, was solidarity. So at the end of phenomenology perception, he has some nice passages about agricultural workers hear about a strike in town, and they lay down their tools in protest because they have this idea that by making common cause with their urban counterparts, they could gain better conditions. And he also has very moving passages on the resistance fighter who's been captured and is going to be subject to torture. And that person is actually buttressed by others. He feels the imprisible, or he or she feels the invisible presence of those others that are depending on that person not to betray them. So freedom is never without supports in existence. And he starts to move in a direction that's later developed by Beauvoir. And that's an ethics of ambiguity, has to be attentive to other people. And that Sartre, with his emphasis on personal freedom, personal choice, and Sartre's radical division and freedom of intention, on the one hand, from freedom of action, missed really the fact that ethical action is something in which we're entwined with others all the way down.
- [15:09]
Marian Romdenh-Romlook
Part of the reason why Sartre has this radical view of freedom on at least some understandings of his work, is because he was thinking, after the Second World War and all the horrors that had happened there, of people trying to shirk responsibility for what had happened and saying, I was just caught up in these historical events. And his emphasis on, no, you always have a choice, is to get people to see that they have responsibility. No matter what's going on, no matter how restrictive your situation seems to be, there's always a choice on how to deal with it, is what Sartre was trying to get at. And then Merleau Ponty's critique of that was thinking maybe he wasn't so influenced by his experiences in the war in the same sort of ways that you've already talked about. But he was still engaging with that crucial question, what are people's responsibilities? How do you stop something like that happening again? How are social movements of people motivated? How do people act as collectives? These are all questions that are tied up with his account of Freedom. And they are clearly resonating with memories of what has just happened in Europe and around the world.
- [16:20]
Thomas Baldwin
Timothy, why was Merlin Ponty so interested in talking about the human body?
- [16:26]
Timothy Mooney
Because, as Tom and CO Marine and myself have mentioned, there are several different senses of the body. And he recognized that the body, if I'm to be towards the world and geared into the world, the body has to appear in a certain way. And he showed this with reference to a famous case of an amputee. A man had lost his leg 17 years before, but very often during the day, he would try to walk off from a standing position without a second limb. He would swing his stump and fall over. Now, when he was aware that he'd lost the limb, that he'd lost his leg, he wouldn't try this. But then he would seem to forget and try and walk off, and he would fall over. Now, one explanation was that it's a causal explanation that his remaining nerves are producing this use phantom limb. And for Merleau Ponty, that's. That's a good account, but it's incomplete. Another explanation was psychological. The psychological explanation was forget about the nerves or forget about physiology. The patient is in denial because he's in denial about his loss. He's producing a representation of the missing limb. And Merlepont, he realized that both of these accounts went wrong. The empiricist account was incomplete, whereas the psychological account was wrong from the ground up. And when the patient, the amputee, described his phantom limb, he said, in its form, in its situation, it's just like the leg that I had before I moved it. So Merleau Ponty realized, when the amputee tries to move towards the world, to make a pot of coffee, whatever it might be, to go downstairs to greet a friend, he doesn't think about his phantom limb because it's appearing just as the real limb used to appear. And Merleau Ponty's great insight was the amputee's objective body was incomplete, but his phenomenal body, the way his body was present with him, was complete. As Merleau Ponty puts it beautifully, the patient is not denying his deficiency. His deficiency is being hidden from him.
- [18:31]
Thomas Baldwin
Thank you.
- [18:33]
Melvin Bragg
I think, in a way, the most striking example of the way in which the mind body, the traditional mind body distinction, is in a way criticized by Merleau Ponty comes with his discussion of language, because his thesis is that speech, he says, is the accomplishment of thought. So in other words, as he says, we shouldn't think of language as just A way of clothing thoughts which occur anyway in some abstract, purely Cartesian mind. Instead, learning to speak is learning the thoughts that are the content of the things that we say. So that we might think that speech is, just as Merleau Ponty says, the clothing of our thoughts, but instead it brings us the ability to have thoughts. And he then goes into a discussion of the origins of language, which he recognizes is completely speculative, but in which the utterances of sounds is the production of what he calls vocal gestures. So in this speculative anthropology, he thinks of humans, early humans, gesturing first physically and then vocally and thereby developing a means of expressing thoughts to each other, which we then recognize as thoughts. So that it's not that the capacity of thought is some kind of abstractability separate from the body. Instead, it's something which is deeply rooted in some physical ability, the ability to speak.
- [20:24]
Thomas Baldwin
Thomas, why do you think his book on phenomenology of perception proved to be so important?
- [20:29]
Melvin Bragg
It comes. That's a chapter or a couple of chapters in the phenomenology of perception. And it comes in that book because, for the reasons that both Kamarin and Tim have been explaining, his central thesis in that book has been the priority of our phenomenal body. And there is now an important feature of his discussion of the body which we ought perhaps just to briefly mention, which is what he calls sometimes the ambiguity of the body. And he talks quite a bit about touch. And his thought is that you can, with one hand, touch your other hand. And in that moment, the hand that is touching is, in a sense, using its phenomenal abilities, the ability to touch things and identify what is being touched. But equally, the hand that is being touched experiences itself as just something that's there to be touched. And so his claim is that, in a way, the body is something that is, as he puts it, sometimes ambiguous, that we have these abilities. And the most important facet of the body is this view of the body as something that is fundamentally a being of powers and abilities which include, as I said, the power of speech. But equally, we recognize that the body is something physical. It is located within objective space.
- [22:00]
Thomas Baldwin
Thank you, comrade. Can you. You wanted to come in?
- [22:04]
Marian Romdenh-Romlook
Yes, I was going to say it might be helpful. Another phrase that's sometimes used to mean the phenomenal body is the body is lived to get at this idea that what he's talking about, when he's talking about the phenomenal body, is the body as we live it every day. So as we experience it as we go around our daily life, whereas the objective body, sometimes understood as the body as studied by science. And it's maybe worth emphasizing. I don't know whether it's come across in what we've been saying already, but Meliponte and the other phenomenologists are not anti science. They think science is obviously a very important way that we know about the world. It's more a question of what the limits of science are. And coming against the view that's sometimes called scientism, which is the thought that the ultimate authority over everything and every aspect of human life is science. And the thought that that's not true, science has a proper place, but there are areas of human existence which it can't explain.
- [23:02]
Thomas Baldwin
What are they?
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Marian Romdenh-Romlook
Well, things such as morality, for example. So thinking back to Husserl in his later work, the kind of science that he's engaging with is Galilean science. And one of the main ideas of that was that anything that cannot be measured is not real. The only real things are those that can be quantified, and the only rational inquiries are into the things that exist. That kind of seems obvious, but if you've said the only things that exist are the things that can be measured, that then means that inquiry into ethics and justice and those areas of life, they're no longer rational because you can't literally measure something such as moral goodness.
- [23:43]
Thomas Baldwin
Thank you, Timothy. How does he depict consciousness?
- [23:47]
Timothy Mooney
Consciousness from Merleau Ponty begins as perceptual consciousness. And he thinks a great mistake of modern philosophy, and indeed of some contemporary philosophy of mind, is that it puts concepts and judgments all the way down. And the thought here is that there's a preconceptual significance or a sense of things before intellectual interpretations come on the scene. And furthermore, he makes the point that the very structure of the human body, its form as it were, is necessary for the emergence of rationality. So to say simply that we're rational animals or animals with the capacity for reason, as Aristotle does, is not quite enough. The thought more specifically is we are the beings that learn to stand upright. And that means that our hands are freed up for manipulating, for caressing, for healing. And. And it's no accident, he says, that the rational being is the being who stands up and has opposed fingers and thumbs. And as one scholar has pointed out, we can see the internal complexity of things at a distance because with our fingers and thumbs we have seen ourselves taking things apart and putting them back together. That means that the first analysis we ever carried out from the Greek analuzine, which means untying or Taking apart was bodily analysis. We took things apart, as the child does, with bakers and spoons and forks and pots and pans. Children take things apart, they disassemble them, then we learn to put things back together, and that's synthesis. So the body, as it were, has performed proto rational activities before rational articulation could ever come on the scene. And the great insight of Merleau Ponty was that unless we had built up our habitual body as a repertoire of skills, we could never engage in rational activity because we would have to concentrate on everything. A habitual activity is something I don't have to think about, and because, as Komarine has pointed out, we have this repertoire of familiar activities. Brushing one's teeth, making the coffee, cycling a bicycle. I can think about other things when I'm engaged in these habitual activities, because my body, as it were, is doing everything for me.
- [26:04]
Thomas Baldwin
Before we move on, I'd like to take a sidestep to something which I think we must mention is the influence of childhood.
- [26:10]
Marian Romdenh-Romlook
Yeah. So before he held the chair of philosophy, he held a chair in child psychology. And some of his lectures, which I find really interesting, are on child psychology. And one of the things that he says about the condition of childhood is that you see, in children there's a kind of synesthesia to experience. So synesthesia is where the senses cross over into each other, and people as adults who have synaesthesia have experiences such as seeing the colour of numbers, for example, which is obviously quite unusual. But he says in children the norm is synesthetic experience. And he thinks that that can tell us something about the way that we develop as adults. So another claim that he makes about childhood is that for the very young child and the infant, they can't distinguish between themselves and other people. To them, at an early stage of experience, there's just kind of a collective. And we then have to learn, as we mature into adults, to distinguish ourselves from other people. So that's a kind of turning on its head. Going back to Descartes, a kind of Cartesian picture where you start off sort of inside your own self, and you've then got to work out from this very individual perspective that there are other people in the world. And then Merleau Ponty thinks, from Descartes point of view, that's kind of impossible because all you see are other bodies and you don't know whether there's a conscious mind inside the other body when all you're looking at is a physical object. From Descartes perspective, Whereas Merleau Ponty says, that's not how it goes. You don't start off from this individual perspective and have to work out to the existence of others. You start off from this collective awareness of yourself as just one amongst many, where you haven't actually made any distinctions between yourself and others. And you then grow into adulthood learning to distinguish yourself from others. So it's one of the reasons that I think he's interested in childhood. He thinks looking at how he sees the child developing can tell us something about adult consciousness and existence.
- [28:19]
Thomas Baldwin
Thomas, what were Melaponti's political views? Can we switch now? And did they change over time?
- [28:27]
Melvin Bragg
Yes, they did change. He starts off in the 1930s as a pretty devoted Marxist, in that his first book, in fact, is called Humanism and Terror. And it's a book in which it's being written at the time of the Spanish Civil War, at the time when it seemed as though liberal democracies were not able to stand up to fascism and other extreme points of view. And basically Merleau Ponty says, look, it's tough. Marxists don't all do wonderful things, but look at the alternatives. However, he changed his mind after the end of the Second World War in the mid-1940s, and he came to see the Soviet Union and its activities in Eastern Europe are so awful that actually Marxism was not a political doctrine that should command our approval, that instead we should work within the framework of attempts at socialist democracy. And he wasn't, I think, very active in French politics in the post war period in the way that Sartre was.
- [29:41]
Thomas Baldwin
Did this have a radical effect on his expressed thought?
- [29:45]
Melvin Bragg
It affected his relationship with Sartre because Sartre went in the opposite direction, particularly after the Second World War. Sartre felt that capitalism was so exploitative and so closely connected to imperialism that although Marxism was not in many ways, in all ways attractive, it was a price to pay in order to clear away the injustices of capitalism and imperialism. Sartre and Merleau Ponty had, together with Simon de Beauvoir, founded a journal after the end of the Second World War called in French l'temps Modernes Modern Times, and they worked together in editing this until 1950, when they moved away from each other. And Melle Ponty then wrote an essay called Sartre and Ultra Bolshevism, which was a very vituperative attack on Sartre and I think probably unfair, and an essay which put a barrier between the two of them. They had been close friends, but they separated for many years.
- [30:56]
Thomas Baldwin
Timothy An Important later work was called the Visible and the Invisible. What was that concerned with?
- [31:02]
Timothy Mooney
That's right. Merleau Ponty thought that his work in the structure of behavior and phenomenology perception had not sufficiently unseated or got rid of what he called the subject object distinction. And in the Visible and the Invisible, he laid stress on bodily expressivity coming before language. It's a point he'd already made in phenomenology perception. But the range of expressions that we have prior to language is given much more attention. And he also began to talk about what he called the flesh of the world. Each thing in the world is exposed in the world. It's open to damage. And when we get to organisms, we find, and Tom has already pointed to this, every organism that's in the world that touches is also touchable. In fact, it feels itself being touched when it touches something else. Every organism in the world that can see is seeable. So with hearing and all the other modalities of sense. And in fact, he pointed out that sometimes painters get the sense of being looked at by inanimate objects when they're painting and they actually are onto something. Because every point in the world is a perspective from which something else might be looking at you. Every position in the world is a possible perspective occupied by a perceiver who might be taking me something within its perceptual field. And this flesh of the world, it's between what we call bare matter and it's between so called disembodied thought. It's like one of the ancient elements between matter, between thinking and as it were, it mediates the flesh of the world. Mediates and comes. Comes between these extreme things, so called bare matter and so called disembodied intellect.
- [32:48]
Thomas Baldwin
You want to come in?
- [32:49]
Marian Romdenh-Romlook
Yeah. So there's a place when he's talking about flesh, Melau Ponty died before he finished the Visible and the Invisible. So it's an unfinished text, including all this new terminology that he dies before he properly explains. But at one point he calls, he says that flesh is visibility. And as Tim's already said, he's trying to conceive of it somehow as an element like the ancient elements like earth, air, fire and so on. So it's this very peculiar notion.
- [33:16]
Timothy Mooney
That's right. It's inherently ambiguous.
- [33:18]
Marian Romdenh-Romlook
Yeah.
- [33:18]
Thomas Baldwin
Do you like to come in there, Thomas?
- [33:20]
Melvin Bragg
Yes. I just want to go back to speech and language for a second. That Tim emphasized that Mello Ponty has a distinct view about consciousness. Now, what he takes to be central to a Certain kind of consciousness, self consciousness, which is what's captured in French by being for oneself, which is what Jean Paul Sartre and others had taken to be characteristic of us. Merleau Ponty wants to say, this being for oneself, this self consciousness, is precisely a kind of consciousness which we have because we have the capacity for speech. Because we have speech, we can accomplish thoughts. We have thoughts, and we are self conscious when we have these thoughts about ourselves. So that this capacity for rationality, which is built into the capacity for having thoughts, is itself dependent on the bodily skill that we have of speaking. Now, when he comes in this late work, the Visible and the Invisible, to talk about the reversibility, as he says, of the sense and the sensible, he applies that also to language. So he wants to say that there is a kind of sensible speaking in which we are heard, and then there's a way in which the language itself, or what is said, the sounds that we make, can be, in a sense, conceived as flesh themselves. Now, that's the part of the visible and the invisible that's really hard to follow.
- [35:07]
Thomas Baldwin
Is it a big distance from what you've said to the effect he has had on the thinking about cognitive science and anthropology?
- [35:16]
Marian Romdenh-Romlook
So I guess the ideas that we've talked about a lot from Merleau Ponty's ideas of embodiment and embodied consciousness, these are some ideas that have had quite an influence on certain strands of cognitive science. So in cognitive science, you have a strand of thinking called inactivism, which takes direct and explicit inspiration from Merleau Ponty. And rather than trying to model the mind as a kind of thing that makes calculations and then controls the body, they've taken on board some of Melle Ponty's ideas about this immediate engagement with the world and tried to model the mind in those kinds of ways. And then in anthropology, the idea that we live in a world that reflects us as human beings and reflects our existence, that's been influential in trying to understand features of different communities. You also find it in fields as diverse as nursing, for example, Merleau Ponty's ideas talked about there.
- [36:14]
Thomas Baldwin
It's not, how did it come out in nursing?
- [36:16]
Marian Romdenh-Romlook
Nursing is precisely about caring for the vulnerable and understanding what that means. I guess beyond just the sort of physical giving of medicine to somebody and the physical aspects of healing, there's also this experiential engagement with another person. And then nurses, like other professionals, have a set of skills which are embodied skills, which, as well as being embodied skills, embody a kind of practical Knowledge, which isn't the sort of thing that can be explicitly written down so that someone can learn it just from reading about it. They have to do it, they have to engage in the practices which to acquire that knowledge.
- [36:56]
Thomas Baldwin
Can I come back to you again, Timothy? Is this a long way from what British philosophy is up to at the time?
- [37:02]
Timothy Mooney
In some ways, but not another. He's certainly close to British philosophy of the classic empirical period, because John Locke, the great British empiricist, took childhood very seriously and so does Merleau Ponty. And he said, if you want to find out how we build up the world, how we enact it, as Komarina said, you have to look at the behavior of children. Now, at the time the predominant philosophy was ordinary language philosophy in both Oxford and Cambridge. But Merleau Ponty's work had an immediate impact on. A philosopher called Gilbert Ryle wrote a famous book called the Concept of Mind only a few years after Merleau Ponty. And Merleau Ponty said, for example, that we have to get rid of the specter of consciousness as an inside without an outside and the body as an outside without an inside. And Gilbert Ryle famously called this the dogma, the Cartesian dogma of the ghost in the machine.
- [37:56]
Marian Romdenh-Romlook
So I was just going to add, there's an example which I think is quite nice if you think about what it's like watching somebody play sport. And typically people watching football will be shouting instructions to the player. And in Merleau Ponty's terms, you're seeing the world as it invites that other person to act. Which is kind of an example to illustrate what Tim's talking about, that we see each other as centres of behaviour.
- [38:21]
Thomas Baldwin
How are Merleau Ponty's ideas regarded by philosophers today?
- [38:25]
Marian Romdenh-Romlook
They're pretty well regarded. He's a bit of a touchstone for anybody who's interested in the body these days. But we talked a bit already about fields in which he's being influential. But it's maybe worth mentioning as well his influence on figures such as Frantz Fanon, who you may know is one of the most important, perhaps the most important, anti colonial thinkers of the 20th century. He was a psychiatrist from Martinique and he studied medicine in France. And whilst he was studying medicine in France, he attended some of Merleau Ponty's lectures in philosophy. And then some of his work is inspired by some of Merleau Ponty's ideas. Because one of the things he was trying to do was understand how an ideology such as colonialism affected our bodily existence. So he was drawing on Merleau Ponty to understand that. So he's also been influential in people trying to understand action, because for a very long time people have understood action in terms of a mind that forms thoughts, makes decisions and forms intentions, which then trigger the body to perform movements. And one of the things that Merleau Ponty's work shows us is that is kind of hopeless as a way to understand action. He also has things to tell us about emotions. People have thought of emotions in terms of a kind of feeling that's inside something like a Cartesian theatre, a sort of interior space of the mind. And one of the things that Merleau Ponty's tried to do in his re conceptualization of the mind is, is think of emotions as a kind of affective way. Affect in the sense of feeling, of engaging with the world. So if you think about something like love, he wants to argue that rather than being a feeling contained inside the mind, it's a way of seeing the loved one. So when I see the person that I love, I see them as inviting me to engage in all sorts of loving forms of behavior towards them. And that's partly what love is for.
- [40:26]
Thomas Baldwin
Malau Ponty, we're coming to the end now. Is there anything that you would like to add to this, Timothy?
- [40:32]
Timothy Mooney
One thing I would like to add, and I think Merleau Ponty was particularly strong in this, that the lived world, the world of existence, is a world of possibilities. And Merleau Ponty recognized that as the child gains more and more skills, that means the child's perceptual field increasingly points beyond the so called bare givens to things that might be done with them. For the very young child, things are like meteorites from another planet, as Merleau Ponty puts it. But once a child learns how to deal with something through imitation, through watching others, then the child has taken up for himself or herself that particular mode of existence. So we don't just see actuality, we see possibility and in very moving ways. And Komarine's touched on this already. The more present your body becomes to you through injury or illness, the more that the world recedes. In other words, when my body's working very well, it's present with me. I have it as an undivided power of action. But when the body is in pain, when there are other injuries, it gets between me and the world. And he goes far as to say, for a person who's bedridden, let's say, or close to Death, bodily events have become the events of the day. The world actually has shrunk into the body. There are no longer the same possibilities, the phenomenal of perceptual field and world of possibilities that there were before.
- [41:53]
Thomas Baldwin
Well, thank you very much. Thank you very much. Timothy Mooney, Thomas Baldwin Comorin Rom Denrum. Look next week how reforms to the Roman Republic advanced by the Gracchi brothers may have hastened the Republic's collapse. Thank you for listening.
- [42:09]
Marian Romdenh-Romlook
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [42:16]
Thomas Baldwin
The question I always ask is a question I always ask it. It seems to me there was a limited time. You've covered it so well. But even so, starting with you, Thomas, was there anything you would like to have said that you didn't get a chance to say?
- [42:28]
Melvin Bragg
Well, where Merleau Ponty's work seems to me to be, in a sense undervalued and underused, is in what is called philosophy of mind. It's the understanding, so to speak, of our mental capacities. The dominant approach to that in much English speaking philosophy, both in this country and in the United States, is what is often called physicalism, which is the view that ultimately we are just neurological structures and that we just have to wait for the neurologists to tie up the neurons for us and then we'll understand how the mind works. Now, it seems to me that Merleau Ponty's discussions in Phenomenology of Perception indicate that although there's lots of value in work of that kind, and no one would ever deny that, nonetheless there need to be ways of understanding or approaching our abilities and our capacities which get beyond that appeal simply to understanding the basic biology and neurology of a human body. Really. And my own view, going back to things that I've said earlier, is that his discussion of speech and thought is a really key insight, that speech speaking is of course a physical ability, but it's that which facilitates the capacity for thought. And it's only when you've got thoughts that you can be a rational animal. So that one of the features of human life, which in a way seems to be very hard to comprehend from a straightforward physicalist approach, is our capacity for rational action, for doing things for reasons rather than just causes. But if you come through these issues from Merleau Ponty's starting point, point that we are animals with sophisticated bodily skills, including speech, then we get thoughts and then we can use the contents of those thoughts to engage in actions.
- [44:42]
Timothy Mooney
I Always thought in reading Merleau Ponty that he's never trying to score points, he's trying to find what's true in empiricism, what's true in intellectualism, what you can extract out of these extreme poles and synthesize them. And in that sense he's something of a latter day Hegel. He wants to get a synthesis that will take what's true in earlier accounts and get a better account of how the world is, of how we build up the world through our bodies. And the other thing that's always struck me about Merleau Ponty, he's a very cheerful philosopher. I cannot read Merleau Ponty without feeling happier. And Tom's already referred to Merleau Ponty's childhood. He said he had an incomparable childhood. Something he said to Sarf. He writes about it in phenomenology, perception. And he thinks that one of the tragedies of adulthood, and this runs with having a skilled body, is we pass over the novelty of the world. It's an extraordinarily varied world, a beautiful world, and in fact different species, with their peculiar organs of sense, articulate the world in ways that we don't, and vice versa. And it's this attentiveness in his earliest work to other species, even to insects and others, that I think really draws. Draws the reader in. And the perceptual world is one that's inexhaustible. The simplest of things can never be exhausted by no matter how many perceptions I might have. So there's a singularity or a style to each thing. And in the same way there's a style to another, just as you never have just one performance of a piano sonata. Similarly, every. Every body is stylized. Each person brings a certain way of expressing comedy or sadness or whatever it might be. So I mean, to give some light hearted examples, idiocy is expressed in one way by Steve Coogan, in another way by Laurel and Hardy, and so on and so forth. We are stylized, singular, once off existence. He was very, very attentive to this. And also he anticipated a later philosopher called Levinas in stressing the expressivity of the face. The face is the very center of human experience, expression. It's what the baby first responds to, to joy, to melancholy, and so on and so forth. And then the baby gradually becomes aware of itself as a center of action here, as opposed to other centers of action over there. We emerge from the collective that Comarine's already referred to.
- [47:20]
Thomas Baldwin
Interesting, as you say about the bas Bergman said that the most interesting shot he ever took was of somebody's face, despite all the films he made, all the things that was the key, more than the key, that was supremely important.
- [47:35]
Timothy Mooney
Someone's face, I think it's so important. And of course, film brings out the expressivity of the face and of the body as a whole. Certainly in the 50s, some people thought they were studying faces, but they weren't. They were studying photographs of faces. And as Merleau Ponty puts it, joy and sadness, they're not signified in the face. They are present in the face. They are expressed through the face. So mind, as it were, is out in the world, certainly from not that person's perspective, from their firsthand perspective, but nonetheless, I'm directly experiencing somebody's joy or sadness or happiness and so forth.
- [48:11]
Thomas Baldwin
What would you like to say?
- [48:13]
Marian Romdenh-Romlook
So, actually thinking about what you just said, doesn't Merleau Ponty say somewhere that philosophy is wonder in the face of. Of the world? Yeah, which really captures some of the things you were talking about. But I suppose one of the things we didn't really cover in any detail was Merleau Ponty's account of freedom. And that seems pretty important. It was one of the disagreements, philosophical disagreements, that he had with Sartre, because the way that he understood Sartre was as claiming that we are radically free. Of course, we're confined by bodies. I can't literally fly out of this room. But the thought is that our situation, the physicality of our bodies, our current environment and so on, gives us a range of options to choose from. But then I'm radically free to choose any of those options. And Merleau Ponty totally disagreed with that. He thinks that that is not how we live our freedom. And thinking about what he said about habit and the way that the more we do something, the more that that habit becomes embedded in the structure of the world. So that I see the world as inviting me to act in certain ways, and I can respond without needing to think about what I'm doing. He thinks in understanding freedom, we've got to understand that. So the person who is in the habit of gambling every day, when they get up, they will just see the world in terms of that habit. They'll see the way to the casino as inviting them to walk along it. And then they can respond without really needing to think about what they're doing. So it's a very different picture of freedom that you get from Merleau Ponty. He's not saying that our habits determine what we do, but they weigh on us in a way that he thinks Sartre didn't recognize. And from that picture, he then wants to understand things like social movements. So that is, again, a really interesting aspect of Melle Ponty's philosophy, understanding how collectives of people are moved to action. Because it's not just about conscious decisions.
- [50:09]
Melvin Bragg
THOMAS I'd just like first to add to what we've heard about his discussion of freedom. The view that he's opposing of Sartre was a view that runs through a lot of Sartre's work, actually, which is that we make a radical choice of ourselves. For each of us, being an agent is living a life that in some strange way, we've chosen to live. And Sartre writes lots of biographies, and always he's looking for the choice that that person, that Flaubert or Baudelaire or himself.
- [50:45]
Thomas Baldwin
People who work down a mine have a choice.
- [50:47]
Melvin Bragg
Sorry, do you think people who work.
- [50:49]
Thomas Baldwin
Down the coal mine have a choice?
- [50:50]
Melvin Bragg
Satre would say yes. I mean, look, I'm not defending that.
- [50:55]
Thomas Baldwin
No, okay.
- [50:56]
Melvin Bragg
No, no, not at all.
- [50:57]
Thomas Baldwin
No, no. Well, I interrupted you, sorry.
- [50:58]
Melvin Bragg
Yes. No, as Kamarin said, what's really important about Melle Ponty's criticisms of this is that Sartre claimed that when we try to rationalize our decisions, actually we're just talking. We've already made those decisions in choosing to be the kind of person that we are now, where the discussion that both Kommarine and Tim have made very clear for us comes into play, is that they have emphasized, by and large, that it's our perceptual and physical abilities that are at work in structuring our life. And what men aponti brings to the surface at the end of Phenomenology of Perception, where he's talking about this, is that our motivations also are at work, so to speak, in not a subconscious, necessarily way, but just within the structure of our ordinary existence. And so those motivations are not things that we have typically chosen. They just come from our needs, from our pleasures. And rational choice of a kind which is the exercise of freedom, has to presuppose that we have ordinary motivations which haven't been chosen. And that's what's the whole Sartrean picture of human life missed out.
- [52:25]
Thomas Baldwin
Can we bring in Sonia Orwell here?
- [52:28]
Melvin Bragg
Thomas okay, well, Sonia Orwell and the surname shows us one connection here. She was the second wife of George Orwell, whom she married shortly before George Orwell's death, but before that, she had had a very Close and very overwhelming affair with Merleau Ponty. So Sonia Brownell, as she was before she was married, was a very attractive, active young woman in London in the 1940s, and she helped Cyril Connolly edit Horizon. And when the war ended, Cyril Connolly took her to Paris. And this very attractive English woman, who spoke perfect French, in a sense, fell in with this group of friends of Cyril's, namely Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau Ponty. And fairly soon, Maurice Merleau Ponty and Sonia began a very passionate love affair which lasted from, I think, 1947 till the end of 1949. And basically, Sonia wanted to marry Maurice, but he was already married, and he didn't want to leave his wife for Sonia. But it was a very passionate affair. Sometimes they were in Paris together, sometimes they were in London. And there was a thought Maurice Merleau Ponty might come back to London with Sonia and start a new life with a position at University College London, which is where Freddie Ayer was professor. And Freddie Ayer was another member of this group in Paris. He was apparently an excellent dancer, and that helped to, in a sense, engage him with all these young Frenchmen and French women.
- [54:20]
Thomas Baldwin
That's all fascinating, but what's this got to do with the philosophy we're talking about?
- [54:25]
Melvin Bragg
Nothing close, except that there's a sort of tantalizing thought that Meroponti, this characteristically French philosopher, might have moved to University College London in 1946, 47, and become a very powerful new figure within British philosophy at precisely the time that people like John Austin and all the Oxford school of ordinary language philosophers were coming into. Into. Into their dominance.
- [55:00]
Timothy Mooney
Ludwig Wittgenstein in Cambridge, in some ways was close to Merleau Ponty. So Wittgenstein says, for example, the best picture of the human soul is the human body. And that's a very Merleau Pontian thesis. Wittgenstein also says, to see another is to see a soul. I'm not of the mere opinion that they're a soul. And this again shows a proximity between Merleau Ponty and the Wittge Constinian school. As Merleau Ponty pointed out, when I see another when I'm a child, when I've established the difference, when I've gone out of the anonymous intercorporeality that Comarines referred to, what I see is an expressive center of activity. The child who distinguishes itself from another doesn't see a body governed by a mind. The child sees an expressive center of Activity. And the whole point here is the distinction between mind and body is a theoretical distinction that you can only make when you're an older child and when you've entered the realm of language, concepts and judgments.
- [56:05]
Melvin Bragg
Thomas There is one British philosopher of the the post war period whose work is in a way very close to Mello Ponti's Brian O'Shaughnessy. He was based in London and he wrote a wonderful book called the William which is what he calls a dual aspect theory. And the thought is that human life has two aspects, the mental and the physical. And these have to be understood as two aspects of a single life. And Brian has a wonderful capacity for fantastic examples. And he developed this book, so far as I can see, without much familiarity with Merleau Ponty. There are one or two references, but basically it's a Merleau Ponty esque book written in London in the 1950s and 60s, and it deserves, I think, much more attention than it receives. But the other thing I was just going to say is that it's actually a very disappointing feature of Merleau Ponty's corpus, so far as I can see, is that there is only one explicit reference to Wittgenstein and it embodies a complete misunderstanding of Wittgenstein's work. He simply says Wittgenstein treats language as if it was cut off from the world. Well, I don't know what he had in mind. Wittgenstein's later writings are full of views which are comparable to Merleau Ponty's, but for some reason which I don't understand, Merleau Ponty never gave them much attention.
- [57:41]
Thomas Baldwin
Anything else before we leave this subject? You could be here for the rest of the day, but you're shaking your heads. Thank you very much indeed. That was terrific.
- [57:51]
Timothy Mooney
Melvin, would you like tea or coffee?
- [57:53]
Thomas Baldwin
I think I've had enough tea. I'll have a bit of small coffee, please.
- [57:57]
Marian Romdenh-Romlook
Can I have some tea, please?
- [57:58]
Melvin Bragg
Yep.
- [57:59]
Timothy Mooney
Tim, I'd love a cup of tea as well, please.
- [58:01]
Melvin Bragg
Yeah, same for me, please. Three teas and one small coffee.
- [58:04]
Thomas Baldwin
No, I love it. I love you. Only I'll have a coffee. I'll felt a bit too.
- [58:07]
Timothy Mooney
Yeah, it brings me with you.
- [58:09]
Melvin Bragg
Thank you very much. I do Tim too.
- [58:11]
Thomas Baldwin
Gosh.
- [58:12]
Timothy Mooney
In Our Time with Melvin Bragg was produced by Elianne Glaser and It is a BBC Studios audio production for Radio 4.
- [58:22]
E
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