Monday, August 11, 2008

Imaginary Bodies




Sartre's position would hold that meaning-giving is dependant on the subject, that the freedom of the relevant human is what deems a boulder or cliff too hard to climb. Merleau-Ponty's position is that there are spontaneous evaluations created by our relationship to the world around us; that we are pyschological/physical entities means that our relationship to the world is one of comparison, identification and separation.

“Without the latter (spontaneous evaluations) we would not have a world, that is a collection of things which emerge from a background of formlessness by presenting themselves to our body as 'to be touched', 'to be taken', to be climbed over'.”

Merleau-Ponty's theory of an embodied epistemology is similar to Lacan's 'mirror-stage' at this point, a concept which was directly referenced in Merleau-Ponty's essay “The Child's Relationship with Others”. Both thinkers realise the importance of the subject seeing itself as both object and subject in order to be able to relate itself to the world around it, both thinkers also offer the analogy of looking in the mirror in explaining this point.

“Indeed this act ... in eventually acquired control over the uselessness of the image, immediately gives rise to a series of gestures in which he playfully experiences the relationship between the movements made in the image and the reflected environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality it duplicates – namely the child's own body, and the persons and event things around him.”

Meaning then for Merleau-Ponty and Lacan is inherent to our existence as physical beings, this physicality automatically expresses a relationship, which is initially mimetic for the child, but then takes into account separation and identification in Lacan's terminology and the intentionality at play in the phenomenal field according to Merleau-Ponty. “All the more conscious and elucidated structures of meaning, including philosophy and the shape of history and politics, therefore arise, in the final analysis, from this preconscious level ...”

Sartre is then still trapped within his violent relation to other where his/her own facticity is penetrates the subject is such a way as to enable the dread and anxiety of 'Nausea' to become the norm of human life. But for Merleau-Ponty we see ourselves as “ ... unified persons who form intentions and act in the world, but can do so only because our bodies function mechanically in certain ways.” But deliberations which result in the knowledge of free acts must take into account our social position in order to overcome the problems encountered by positioning human freedom at a level more fundamental than the human condition, i.e. it must take unto account societal relations.

The point then here is to work out a way of looking at the imagined body which deals with the situation from a standpoint which ignores the so-called dissolution of traditional metaphysics, through the encounter with the 'imaginary whole' or lacan, 'imagination' for sartre and the reason why this account of traditional metaphysics needs to be seen within embodied epistemologies.


- paul, does this clarify things?
(next time; Habermas vs. Adorno, the ethical imperative within epistemology.)