On the Existence of the Human Body

Merleau-Ponty makes a big deal out of the supposed fact that all of our perceptions are wrapped up in the interaction of our bodies in a world, indeed, that the being-in-the-world is therefore the essence of perception. To be in the world is to be perceiving and to be perceiving is to be located in the world, in a body, more specifically. And to be located in a body is to be essentially concerned with the body itself, e.g. the hunger of the body or the sexuality of the body, or it's pains and pleasures in general. The idea of perceiving outside of the context of involvement with the perceived is therefore, for MP a dysfunctional phenomenon to be explained. The famous example of the man for whom the world is non-sexual, who has no interest in sexual contact or sexual activity, but who nevertheless has functioning sexual apparatus, has to be regarded as the abnormal limit case which proves the basic rule, e.g. that we humans are involved sexually in our world. We have to agree that sexual involvement in the world is a core way of being for us humans, but that we could be non-sexual and normal we have to reject. It is this holding the non-sexual perception as the abnormal that we want to examine as a clue to a better understanding of perception than MP's preliminary investigation.

Consider again the case, there is a man who is capable of having an erection, who's erection occasionally is available after being stimulated, but for whom the desire to have the erection or a subsequent orgasm is missing. He neither pursues sexual contact nor rejects it, and does not regard it with either disgust or longing. The asexual nature of the man's perceptions should be clear enough to "us other men" for whom in some ways sexual perception is obvious. We regard sexual situations as fundamentally desirable, as worthy of fulfillment. We conclude from this that there is a "sexual framework" by which we have an option to regard the world (this conclusion is different from MP's). That is, a group of sexual ideas, attitudes, desires, thoughts, etc., which combine to make a sexually-perceived world different from a non-sexually perceived world. Both worlds are equally valid - we can not say that the sexual world is more real than the world devoid of sexual perception, nor can we say that sexual perception is an illusion. Both are genuine perceptions which are unavailable to their perceptive opposites. We can even imagine correctly explaining to both participants how their worlds are different and yet their perceptions remain the same.

This is rather like a wolf being able to perceive ultraviolet light while humans can not. We can understand what it is like to have more colors available to us because we have seen the world at twilight when our color-perception is dimmed, we can extrapolate and imagine a world more vibrant than even our vibrant world. However, we may not be able to imagine a color we can't actually see. These are physiological and psycho-physiological features of our existence that are integrated with us as possibilities for judgements - we can judge the colordness or sexiness of a thing because our bodies are color-aware and sex-aware. If we weren't thusly aware, the world could have no color for us, or no sexiness.

Nevertheless, this color-possibility and sex-possibility is not merely physiological. We can imagine a person who's cones work but who nevertheless cannot distinguish between several colors, nor remember them as different just as we can imagine a man with a working sex organ but no sex drive. This is because it is our entire psychological makeup that is involved in perceiving as well as our physical makeup, and our psychological makeup can contain our social makeup as well. In particular, our language clearly affects our ability to make judgements in a given realm. We hear of aleuts that distinguish among 70 different kinds of snow, whereas I might be able to think of 20 at the most, and likely wouldn't be able to tell the difference between them by perception unaided by further tutelage on the matter. Students of music often learn to distinguish tones after they know of the existence of intervals and their ordering. Similarly with many other matters, our ability to grasp a matter intellectually often is a requirement for being able to perceive examples of it in our world. This is not evidence of error, necessarily, but rather evidence that our thoughts are equally important with our perceptive mechanisms (if there be such things) in generating our actual perceptions.

The body is thought of as the perceptive mechanism - the thing that without bias, in a sense, reports data to our minds for processing. This picture of the matter is almost certainly false. MP would have us believe that the mind extends to the body itself. Alternatively we might think of the mind as constituting the body as its perceptive tool. Either would adequately represent our feelings in the matter. In the second way of conceiving the matter, however, the body as constructed, thus also becomes flexible, bendable to our wills. And this tends to represent reality best. There is no dualism between wishing to type a word and that wish being fulfilled, in general. It is only in the odd-cases when we think of disembodied minds or dreams that the typing and the intent to type don't match up. Our body is an extension of our own wills, in the same way that our culture is.

In the USA there is an obesity problem. People don't "work" per se in order to have food, instead we organize ourselves so that food can be expeditiously brought to us whenever we want it. Our body as "instrument for producing food for survival" is replaced by our "working" body - as a productive member of society, the body serves the purpose it is given, clerk, manager, photographer, priest, etc. Similarly, our body as fighting machine for protection, hunting, thievery and plunder is no longer a working thing as it is subject to modern deterrence in the form of the absolute violence of mechanized warfare of every kind. One can not train one's own body to be an effective weapon against an armored tank. And the drivers of the tank do not fight, they push buttons and pull levers. If we do practice combative skills, they are games, psuedo-fighting to give the body something to do so that the useless appendage feels useful again. Even sex has become a form of entertainment, rather than a sacred responsibility and continuance of the notion of divine family. So everything having to do with sex becomes also entertainment too, we play with our bodies as though they were toys. Even eating is a form of entertainment. When the need to eat for sustenance is replaced by the desire to eat for entertainment, food also becomes a kind of plaything, an unreal version of the previous real thing. Our families, food, friends, fighting, in fact all of the normal activities of body-hood have become functions that are no longer in fact fulfilled by our bodies, but rather by our societies and which are now only mimicked by our bodies - which exist apparently as reminders of our past, of how we came to be such masters of our universe.

And this leaves us with the question of the very existence of the body. If we think of our bodies in their actual function - as a reminder of a past which may or may not have felt like these currently emulated activities of eating, sleeping, drinking, copulating, hunting, etc., we also realize that those activities certainly were not at all as they are emulated now. Even worse, we have no idea what these activities were like "before", since this before is a manufactured idea itself - something we told ourselves bodies were supposed to do. In short we have no idea what our bodies are, nor do we know we "have them" nor do we know what "having a body" would be like, even if we do think we have them. What we think we have - the leftover appendages of body-hood appear to be emulations of some past functional purpose, but what purposes and how accurate the emulations are is completely beyond our ken.

The human body, then, really is nothing at all, nothing but an idea, an idea of humanity put in place by our culture which itself is not produced by our bodies, but by our refusal to be anything but Humans. But if we are humans, why are we humans at all? The idea that humans are different from apes, for instance, comes from the idea that apes don't use tools, don't think, don't calculate and plan. We can demonstrate these facts for ourselves by observing them, the barbarians. But harkening back to the conquest of the Americas and Africa, don't we remember that the "people" we encountered there were also barbarians, apes unable to use language, form tools, and without religion. Remembering that even our idea of humanity changes with time and apparently at the whim of the winds of culture - the distinction between ape and man can be easily seen to be of the same order as our distinction between races of humans. And beyond the ape, there is the distinction between man and nature, man and world, man and god, distinctions which we manufacture as a part of our culture for various reasons, some of them good, some of them not.

With that, happy new year, may this be the year in which we are able to abandon our dualities about the world and our selves and recognize that our world depends on us, and we depend on our world, and that we are therefore the same.


R