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?

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

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).1

The Visible and the Invisible's flesh ontology radicalizes this account into a generalized ontology of the sensible — same project, deeper apparatus.23

Sources

  1. This only displaces the problem. It is unclear in Sartre's theory why a pure consciousness is afraid and how it can delude itself. In the I920'S Gabriel Marcel pointed out that "I am my body." Merleau- Ponty takes up this suggestion and is the first to argue-and herein lies his originality in the phenomenological movement-that the perceptual habits are formed by the embodied person..
    Sense and Non-Sense, p. 8
  2. "lace-works")------Then problems such as those of Scheler (how to understand the relation of the intentional with the affective which it crosses transversally, a love being transversal to the oscillations of pleasure and pain -" personalism) disappear: for there is no hierarchy of orders or layers or planes (always founded on the individual-essence distinction), there is dimensionality of every fact and facticity…
    The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 270–271
  3. 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.
    La Nature - Cours du Collège de France 1956-60, p. 234

Where the argument is made

  • 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

How the argument was received

settled-with-late-radicalization