{"agent_id":"merleau-ponty","agent_name":"Maurice Merleau-Ponty","slug":"the-body-subject-the-body-schema-and-motor-intentionality","label":"The body-subject, the body schema, and motor intentionality: is the lived body the medium of having a world, against Cartesian res extensa and against Sartre's body-for-others?","topic":"The body-subject, the body schema, and motor intentionality","question":"Is the lived body the medium of having a world, against Cartesian res extensa and against Sartre's body-for-others?","position":"The body is not an object in the world among others but the medium through which I have a world at all. The body schema (le schéma corporel) is the pre-objective postural unity by which the body anticipates and organizes its situation — the typist's fingers finding the keys before her thought reaches them, the driver knowing the car's width without having to calculate, the blind man's cane that becomes part of his bodily reach. Motor intentionality (l'intentionnalité motrice) is a third kind of intentionality, neither the cognitive directedness of judgment nor the mere reflex of a causal system, but the body's pre-reflective grip on the situation it is already in. The body that I am refuses both Descartes's res extensa (the body as object among objects) and Sartre's body-for-others (the body reduced to what another consciousness sees). The Visible and the Invisible's flesh ontology radicalizes this account into a generalized ontology of the sensible — same project, deeper apparatus.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The body is not an object in the world among others but the medium through which I have a world at all.","n":[]},{"t":"The body schema (le schéma corporel) is the pre-objective postural unity by which the body anticipates and organizes its situation — the typist's fingers finding the keys before her thought reaches them, the driver knowing the car's width without having to calculate, the blind man's cane that becomes part of his bodily reach.","n":[1]}],[{"t":"Motor intentionality (l'intentionnalité motrice) is a third kind of intentionality, neither the cognitive directedness of judgment nor the mere reflex of a causal system, but the body's pre-reflective grip on the situation it is already in.","n":[]},{"t":"The body that I am refuses both Descartes's res extensa (the body as object among objects) and Sartre's body-for-others (the body reduced to what another consciousness sees).","n":[]}],[{"t":"The Visible and the Invisible's flesh ontology radicalizes this account into a generalized ontology of the sensible — same project, deeper apparatus.","n":[2,3]}]],"texts":"*The Structure of Behavior* (1942) Part III \"The Physical Order, the Vital Order, the Human Order\" — the early articulation of the body as the integrating structure; *Phenomenology of Perception* (1945) Part I \"The Body\" entire — the canonical four-chapter analysis of the body schema, motor intentionality, sexuality and expression; *The World of Perception* (1948) lecture on \"Exploring the World of Perception: The Senses\"; *Signs* essays on \"The Philosopher and His Shadow\" (on Husserl's late corpus) and \"From Mauss to Claude Lévi-Strauss\"; *The Visible and the Invisible* (1964 posthumous) \"The Intertwining — The Chiasm\" on the late radicalization of the body-subject into the ontology of flesh. Reception: Hubert Dreyfus on the body as the locus of skillful coping; Taylor Carman, *Merleau-Ponty* Ch 3 \"Body and World\" on the bodily point of view against both Cartesian res extensa and Sartrean body-for-others; Sean Kelly on motor intentionality; Iris Marion Young's \"Throwing Like a Girl\" (1980) on the feminist extension of body-schema analysis; the enactivist program on the body as the medium of cognition.","works":["*The Structure of Behavior* (1942) Part III \"The Physical Order, the Vital Order, the Human Order\" — the early articulation of the body as the integrating structure","*Phenomenology of Perception* (1945) Part I \"The Body\" entire — the canonical four-chapter analysis of the body schema, motor intentionality, sexuality and expression","*The World of Perception* (1948) lecture on \"Exploring the World of Perception: The Senses\"","*Signs* essays on \"The Philosopher and His Shadow\" (on Husserl's late corpus) and \"From Mauss to Claude Lévi-Strauss\"","*The Visible and the Invisible* (1964 posthumous) \"The Intertwining — The Chiasm\" on the late radicalization of the body-subject into the ontology of flesh"],"reception":"Hubert Dreyfus on the body as the locus of skillful coping; Taylor Carman, *Merleau-Ponty* Ch 3 \"Body and World\" on the bodily point of view against both Cartesian res extensa and Sartrean body-for-others; Sean Kelly on motor intentionality; Iris Marion Young's \"Throwing Like a Girl\" (1980) on the feminist extension of body-schema analysis; the enactivist program on the body as the medium of cognition.","status":"settled-with-late-radicalization","era":"1908-1961","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Phenomenology of Perception","page":"p. 103","canonical":"","quote":"I have an absolute knowledge of where my pipe is, and *from this* I know where my hand is and where my body is, just as the primitive person in the desert is always immediately oriented without having to recall or calculate the distances traveled and the deviations since his departure.","label":"Phenomenology of Perception, p. 103"},{"n":2,"work":"La Nature - Cours du Collège de France 1956-60","page":"p. 234","canonical":"","quote":"Knowledge of the body is a divergence in relation to the \"there\" of the Umwelt. This divergence is the inverse of the identification I get by movement: wahrnehmen and sich bewegen. —The urchin is moved, the dog moves, but that which moves and what it moves are not opposed to each other like subject and object = I do not move like an object.","label":"La Nature - Cours du Collège de France 1956-60, p. 234"},{"n":3,"work":"The Visible and the Invisible","page":"pp. 253–254","canonical":"","quote":"The meaning of being to be disclosed: it is a question of showing that the ontic, the **Erlebnisse*,\" \"sensations,\" \"judg ments\"— (the ob-jects, the \"represented,\" in short all idealiza tions of the Psyche and of Nature) all the bric-a-brac of those *positive* psychic so-called \"realities\" (and which are lacunar, \"insular,\" without *Weltlichkeit* of their own) is in reality ab stractly carved out from the…","label":"The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 253–254"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"perception-against-objective-thought","label":"Perception against objective thought: are Cartesian intellectualism and behaviorist empiricism two faces of the same error, and does phenomenology return to a perceptual phenomenon prior to the subject-object split?"},{"slug":"freedom","label":"Freedom: is freedom always situated and conditioned, against Sartre's radical freedom of the for-itself?"},{"slug":"flesh-and-chiasm","label":"Flesh and chiasm: does the late ontology of the Visible and the Invisible radicalize the body-subject of PoP into a generalized ontology of the sensible, or does it break decisively with the earlier framework?"},{"slug":"history-politics-and-the-liquidation-of-the-dialectic","label":"History, politics, and the liquidation of the dialectic: was the 1955 break with Sartre principled, and is dialectical politics possible without sliding into either ultra-bolshevism or liberal proceduralism?"}]}