We Are Bodies: Contra Husserl

Husserl’s “veritable abyss” is a temporal illusion of ocular sensitivity and factical depth. Reality is In-der-Welt-sein (etre au monde) without ontological remainder - and the origins of ontography are in thinking just how this is so. It is about the sensitive recursions of reflective corporeal bodies. 

From Carman & Hansen’s introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty:

I am constantly told that everything I enjoy about Merleau-Ponty's work can be found in Husserl, but I have never found this to actually be the case. The ideas I find most interesting in Merleau-Ponty's books often seem more like subtle departures from his predecessor than the mere reframing of old phenomenological questions.

The terminological boxes into which we press the history of philosophy often obscure deep and important differences among major figures supposedly belonging to a single school of thought. One such disparity within the phenomenological movement, often overlooked but by no means invisible, separates Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception from the Husserlian program that initially inspired it. For Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology amounts to a radical, if discreet, departure not only from Husserl’s theory of intentionality generally, but more specifically from his account of the intentional constitution of the body and its role in perceptual experience (Carman 1999: 205).

For example, in his posthumous works Husserl mentions the role of the body in perception, but the body inevitably appears as a kind of ‘phenomenological anomaly’ (Carman 1999: 206) where the body is neither internal to my consciousness nor external to me in the environment, but is “a thing ‘inserted’ between the rest of the material world and the ‘subjective’ sphere” (Ideas II, 161).

Yet in Merleau-Ponty – and from what I can discern in my own phenomenological practice – we find that it is precisely the body which anchors us in the world opening up the possibility of perspective and thus allowing for the very real actuality of self-affective states and material orientation. At no point is our body merely a thing observed, inserted between our experience (cogito) and the world, but is instead an ever-present nexus of auto-affective activity and tangibility. The sensitive and sustaining materiality of the body is the very source of our reflective activity.

As Carman suggests:

Unlike Husserl, but like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty looks beyond the subject/object divide to try to gain insight into the concrete structures of worldly experience. But whereas Heidegger does little more than mention the problem ofembodiment in passing, Merleau-Ponty bases his entire phenomenological project on an account of bodily intentionality and the challenge it poses to any adequate concept of mind. Embodiment thus has a philosophical significance for Merleau-Ponty that it could not have for Husserl (1999: 206).

Taking the problem of embodiment and corporeality seriously entails a radical reassessment of the very conceptual distinctions on which Husserl’s fame rests. Indeed, “the distinction between subject and object is blurred in my body (and no doubt the distinction between noesis and noema as well?)” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 167). Our bodies do not appear to us through some kind of pure ideation where we might then take ownership, our bodies are always present as the constitutive matrix from which our ideas begin to cohere and take structure. Which is to say, 'we' do not have bodies, rather we are bodies: “we are in the world through our body, and insofar as we perceive the world with our body” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 206).