Merleau-Ponty’s knowing, vibrant bodies replace the day of the living dead

I remember the haunting, ongoing feeling I had when I became a teenager and observed the adults around me. It seemed to me that everyone I encountered was not really alive. It was difficult to discern exactly what “being alive” meant, but I could tell what it wasn’t: rushing through the world, not making eye contact, finding the worst in most things, and being bored. I couldn’t see excitement in the eyes of those around me, even though I found life itself to be an ongoing delight.

On the streets of New York City, I found my daily life reflected in the words of T. S. Eliot, “Under the brown fog of a winter dawn / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many / I had not thought death had undone so many / Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled / And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.” 

I wondered whether I was caught in one of those spooky Twilight Zone shows that my mother let me stay up to watch. I was stuck in a zombie world of only half-alive people. Yet when reaching puberty, with its myriad self-doubts, I thought maybe the problem was just me. Then, I was lucky or cursed enough to stumble across a copy of Thorton Wilder’s Our Town. I read the play with fascination. The dead people in the cemetery were horrified after watching the      citizens of the town. It seemed as though everyone was acting dead already, not open to the miracle of being alive. I wasn’t crazy, after all: a famous playwright had seen the same thing!

Soon after that, I read Sinclair Lewis’ book, Arrowsmith, and decided I had to be a biological researcher to seek out the mystery of life. I was swept away by the protagonist’s love of scientific discovery and his willingness to travel to distant lands and risk his safety to save lives. Caught by this inspiration, I spent a summer in high school at the special biology program at the Rockefeller Institute for New York City students. Afterward, I became a biology major in college. Only in my junior year of college did I have to take a philosophy course. It was then that I realized that the secret of life wasn’t to be found in a lab, at least not the meaning of life. 

I switched majors. When all the kids went home for Christmas break, I stayed at school in my apartment reading Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time at the tortoise pace of a page per hour, utterly fascinated. Heidegger’s idea that we had to find Being in our daily experience clicked for me in a way that no other philosopher had until then (like Plato saying the true reality was in some other realm, unreachable).

However, when I began studying philosophy at Yale as a graduate in 1972, I realized something was missing that not many philosophers could appreciate: it was our bodies that were the key to our experiences, not just our minds. 

The mind is great, don’t get me wrong, but as Steve Martin put it, our current culture sees the body merely as “something the mind rides around on.”

But I am not just my mind, and my body is not just a tool. I am my body. When I started to do Zen meditation in 1970, I experienced this reality firsthand. Then, during my time at Yale, I found a philosopher from the Greek-to-European tradition who had realized this as well. That is when I began my lifelong love affair with the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Who was Maurice Merleau-Ponty?

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a Frenchman, born in 1908 in Southwestern France in the city of Rochefort-sur-Mer, a port on the Charente estuary. His father had been an artillery captain and a knight of the Legion of Honor. After his father’s death in 1913, Merleau-Ponty and his family moved to Paris. Merleau-Ponty felt that his childhood was “incomparably happy,” perhaps, in part, because he was very close to his mother. They remained close until her death in 1953. 

Jean-Paul Sartre noted this closeness somewhat satirically in his memorial essay in the French journal Les Temps Modernes. It seemed to Sartre and others that Merleau-Ponty’s closeness with his mother made him feel too much of the debt we have to the nurturance and inseparable bodily connection with others that is afforded to us by the experience of mothering. Sartre returned to this idea repeatedly in the essay, saying at one point, “Everything was too wonderful, too soon” as the son was “enveloped” by “the Mother Goddess, his own mother, whose eyes made him see what he saw.” I have often wondered whether this reaction was inspired by Sartre’s masculine pride in keeping a distance from what was identified by the cultural and philosophical traditions as feminine sensibilities. 

For quite some time, a long line of male philosophers had defined the human self as separate from nature, the body, and other people. Like Merleau-Ponty, my mother was a dear friend of mine until her death when I was already in my late sixties. It could be said that seeing the world through female eyes helped Merleau-Ponty to question this masculine discomfort with emotional closeness, sensitive sensuality, and embracing our interdependence with others. Merleau-Ponty’s senses of the world came from another kind of bodily sensitivity that was at odds with the masculine zeitgeist of his time.

 The Child as Clue to How Bodies Connect Us

Merleau-Ponty was drawn to philosophy at an early age, winning awards for his study of the discipline in his lycée years. He attended the École Normale Supérieure from 1926 to 1930, where he befriended Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, and Claude Lévi-Straus. He formed a close friendship with Beauvoir, who said that only Merleau-Ponty could have taught her “the art of gaiety.” Of course, Beauvoir and Sartre became the famous couple who spent their lives together in an unconventional way, but the three of them were good friends until Merleau-Ponty’s well-publicized falling out with Sartre in 1953.

Merleau-Ponty first taught university philosophy at the University of Lyons in 1945, but in 1949 was appointed Professor of Child Psychology and Pedagogy at the University of Paris, succeeding Jean Piaget. This back and forth between philosophy and psychology, as well as his avid interest in the arts and literature, were expressions of his ability to bring disparate fields together into a cohesive vision.

During the next three years, before being appointed head of philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1952, he explored and lectured about child development. He came to realize that, due to the lack of ego boundaries, children are first inseparable from those immediate persons in their environment: their parents and family, and even other children.

In his essay, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” Merleau-Ponty gives a striking example of what he calls “syncretistic sociality” or “transitivism”: when one child in a group of very young children has their hand slapped, all the children cry because “the hand” is all of theirs in a felt state of indivision among their bodies. Merleau-Ponty argued that persons only come to see themselves as separate individuals later in childhood, usually after three years of age. This argument rejected the common notion that humans are individuals at their core, and they must work to forge bonds with others.

This layer of experience remains in our adult life, within our psyches, through what he calls “an abiding acquisition” that gets drawn upon when we fall in love, for example, or form close bonds with others. Our body’s openness to the world is an openness to others, and our perceptions are, to some extent, shared. As well, our sense of who we are comes from the shared felt experience with others, not only as infants but throughout life. Our bodily sense of ourselves, which is our primary sense for Merleau-Ponty, is of a “we-self” and not an “I-self.” Philosophy’s stress on “subjectivity” is to be replaced by “intersubjectivity.” Another way to say it might be to replace Descartes’ famous “I think, therefore I am,” with “we feel and perceive, therefore we are.”

Objectified Bodies

In the twentieth century, Merleau-Ponty became the thinker who articulated how the body was our inseparable link to other people and the natural world. He believed that the body was our saving grace for ongoing creativity. 

What is so important for our current culture to heed in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is his warning that for all the modern attention to the body, it remains an unknown territory. The world as accessed through the body, with its immediate sense of the world, is discounted and unfamiliar. I believe he would think that is even more the case in the last half-century of global and American culture. 

The body as the object of fitness, of fashion, of health, and as displayed in art, media, and advertising in postmodern culture, especially in North America, seems to have become the widely celebrated object of desire and an integral part of self-identity and the good life. This suggests that after a long tradition of treating the body as inferior to the mind (or spiritual realm), the body is finally being seen as an important aspect of a fulfilled life.

The body-hating tradition in philosophy goes as far back as Socrates and Plato. Socrates asks his friends to “give a cock to Aesculapius,” the doctor, as payment for his being cured once he drinks the hemlock, dies, and is rid of his body. Plato states in The Republic and the Timaeus that the body nails us to the Earth, which is a slimy, corrupted, and corroded realm. He adds that “seeing through the eyes is full of deceit, and so is perception through the ears and other senses.” He warns that the soul must withdraw from the body or else stagger around as if drunk. 

The religious condemnation of the body cannot be portrayed any more vividly than the twenty pages of Catholic sermons in James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man when the priest warns Stephen and his classmates that heeding the “corrupt nature of our lower instincts…gross and beastlike” of the body not only forfeits all that is good about humans but leads to unending torture. This excruciating torture is detailed page after page in the most fantastic terms.

By objectifying the body in this way, we come to view the body as something separate from our souls, something that we should overcome and disown. The current emphasis on the body as beautiful, athletic, and key to economic success also objectifies the body, but it is now seen as a vital possession to be honed and groomed. However, even a glorified possession is still something separate from who we are.

Perceptual Depths

Merleau-Ponty rejects these forms of objectification and instead argues that the body is vital to grounding our sense of reality by paying more attention to the richness of perception. By saying that we don’t know our bodies, he is highlighting how much we miss of our everyday perceptions. Perception comes to us with a thickness, like a many-layered cake. There is no bare sensation. We don’t just see an input of red. We see a wooly red with memories attached to it. We see connections to the red of anger, or the red of a bishop’s robes, or the red of a certain clay where we once lived. Metaphorical reds like the fires of hell or physical reds like a forest fire on the west coast. Artists explore these many layers for us, but any of us can sink deeper into our perceived world and get so much more meaning from it. These inseparable bodily dimensions that are the deeper layers of perception are our access to reality. The sensual, the emotional, the immediate taking in of gestures, the kinetic sense of ourselves and the world, the imaginative working with the senses, the intuitive, and the world’s never-ending symbolic play give us our existence in the world’s dynamic energy and expressiveness. 

Our first immediate sense of anything is these bodily perceptions, even though we are not immediately conscious of all the layers of meaning that are part of it. We feel them, and we can further explore them. We experience the world through the body before we think about it as the primary reality. Our culture sees what can be measured and quantified as what is real, as well as what can be rationally categorized. Yet, these are pale abstractions that distance us from our felt belonging in the world and with its fellow creatures. Often, we rely upon artists to remind us of our lived, felt connection to the world and others. However, we move through the world with our bodies. We hold our children and toss a football with our hands. We sit on a balcony, or on the roof of a house, and watch the sunset. We dive into a cold body of water, play an instrument, and listen to music from the speaker in our kitchen. Everything has imaginary halos and remembered intimations. We intuit connections. All these senses emerge not by thinking about them but by feeling them. There are more depths whispering to us in each thing or being we perceive. And at the center of this range of experience is the body.

Perception’s Many Voices of Silence

An object is understood by science and our culture as something inert. It must be pushed, pulled, and interacted with externally through causes and effects that have no deeper meaning than its physical properties or the resulting measurable outcomes of these interactions. Yes, the water in the stream has a certain chemical composition, a certain temperature, a measurable viscosity and speed of flow, but its felt bodily reality is as a comforting presence that has a certain liveliness and intimacy on the particular day I feel sad or exhausted and have come to sit by it. 

For Merleau-Ponty, there would be no perception of a human kind in such an objective world, just mechanically inputted sensor readings and material reactions. Merleau-Ponty borrows a phrase from André Malraux, asking us to listen to the things of the world in their “voices of silence.” Perception is not the taking in of data, but the opening of oneself to a dialogue with the world, its things and creatures. Merleau-Ponty also calls perception a communion. A communion is not a coinciding, a losing of all boundaries and becoming one. It is two beings who have taken each other into themselves and have been transformed by the encounter. This only makes sense if the reality of things, events, and creatures is not something static and unchanging outside of our taking them in through perception. If the reality of the world is within this perceptual dialogue, then the world is always changing, flowing, and transforming as its sense of meaning evolves. 

However, the current cultural standard is one that does not trust experience. Everything must be turned into a number to be taken seriously. We focus on our salaries, reaching 10,000 steps a day, tracking how many hours we use our iPhone, and calculating how many lives have been lost to war and disease. People add up this tally of experience and try to make sense of life through calculations. But the world is dynamic. It moves with us. For Merleau-Ponty, humans carry with them a “perceptual faith” in which we view our experiences as the reality of the world, but we also understand that the world is open-ended: meaning can constantly be created and changed by our perceptions.

Historically, Indigenous peoples have carried this sense of the world with them. As a college teacher, I often read Paula Gunn Allen’s Sacred Hoop with my students, in which she thanks all the beings around her in the landscape for the spirit and thoughts in the book. In Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, the protagonist, Tayo, must learn to listen to the world around him so he can return to feeling alive again after the horrors he experienced in World War Two, growing up in abject poverty and as an object of discrimination. 

When the book opens, he is in a haze and feels like cotton wool has encased him, like he is not really there. It is only by listening to the silent voices of dragonflies, cattle, waving wild flowers, the looming mountains, the deep pools of water, and myriad other natural beings that he returns to his sense of vitality and presence. Silko suggests that, like Tayo’s condition, there is a wider sickness of our culture. We have all suffered a more subtle but continual violation—the violation to our sensitive bodies caused by our view of the natural world as a distant object.

For Merleau-Ponty, perception is a response to the beckoning of everything around us. In his Saturday afternoon lectures, he talks of how the lemon communicates to us through its colour, its smell, and its taste in such a way that we are lemoned in the immediate moment of experiencing it before thought. Another example he offers is water and how it calls to us with its flowing, resisting, and shape-shifting essence. 

We all know this on some level but ignore its importance. When we are upset or tired from work, we go to sit on the banks of the river or go to the ocean and watch the waves endlessly roll into shore. A Zen Garden uses rocks, sand, and burbling water to instill in us a sense of peace, whereas days of overcast and gloomy clouds promote on us an oppressive sadness or lethargy. 

We can resist these voices that all sensual beings impart to us, or we can finely tune ourselves to take in the world with all our senses. Yet, both the Indigenous and Zen Buddhist traditions would agree that besides the world silently speaking to us, gesturing to our senses, it does so in a continuous and dynamic way. Just as we hear a melody and not individual notes in our immediate and primary experience of music, so do all moments of time become part of a flow and a duration. 

The Buddhist thinker Dogen would simply say, “All time is now.” Where else could it be? The past is with us always. It is the source of our understanding of ourselves and the world, and it has already sketched out futures that are inseparable from what it means to be in this moment. This is how the body takes in time and is at odds with the “clock time” of our culture.

This web of relations that make up perception’s openness to the world can be understood through the German word Gestalt, which means “to express”: we perceive at first wholes in what we hear such as sentences, not isolated words, or melodies, not notes, and see forests first, not individual trees, or a person’s facial expression and not their eyes, lips, and cheeks separately. The body’s taking in of the world puts us within its interrelations.

Merleau-Ponty’s Warning about Disembodiment

Our postmodern, consumerist, and hyper-capitalist world tends to grind its way through these webs of relations in which we are situated. One can take things apart and see this as their reality as a way to manipulate these parts, yielding a certain power over things and events, but it is not dwelling with them and allowing them to come forth in their deeper and fuller meaning. Instead of openly taking in another being, one can slap a label upon them, having identified them by some characteristic, and then move on with a projection, a manipulation, of them. 

D. H. Lawrence expresses this eloquently in his poem, “Two Ways of Living and Dying.” He contrasts those who “live the life…open to the restless skies and the streams flowing in and out from the darkly fecund cosmos” with those who “are only self-conscious and self-willed…while nothing comes to them from the open heaven, from earth, from the sun and the moon to them, nothing, nothing.” Lawrence continues to describe those who don’t take in the fullness of open bodily perception, writing, “only the mechanical power of self-directed energy drives them on and on like machines…full of dangers to the gentle passengers of growing life.” The poem is a statement of how gliding over the fullness of perception’s beckonings from the cosmos and other beings is the essence of a power mania that does violence to the environment and other sensitive beings. 

Lawrence, as a poet, has expressed an important theme in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology: that being open to the sensual richness of perception has an ethical and ecological edge, and is key to personal fulfillment.

In Merleau-Ponty’s introduction to his last published essay, “Eye and Mind,” before his sudden and untimely death, he warns the world that the scientific objectification of the world “manipulates things and gives up living in them.” However, it was not science itself that Merleau-Ponty felt was the problem. Rather, the problem was modern culture’s use of technology and “information processing” to interpret the world through algorithms and “operational thinking.” 

He foresaw a time when, distanced from our deeper bodily experience, humanity would only manipulate things from an abstract distance. He predicted this would boomerang upon humanity, and with this obsession to manipulate the world, humanity itself would be reduced to a manipulated thing. Then, we would “enter into a cultural regimen where there is neither truth nor falsity concerning man and history, into a sleep, or a nightmare, from which there is no awakening.” 

This is the only sentence of such a dire and bombastic nature in the writings penned by this careful and “tranquil” man, to use Simone de Beauvoir’s words. He pleads for humanity to return to “the soil of the sensible and opened world such as it is and for our body.” The essay that follows this plea is an intensely poetic exploration of the power of the arts to awaken us to the raw and wild voices of the natural world and the sensual world as immediately felt by our bodies. He says he is looking to encounter “savage” or “wild” or “brute” being and not the rational, objectified being which has had its vitality and depth squeezed out of it in the cultural traditions of philosophy, science, and religion. 

This is the haunting theme of Silko’s Ceremony, the tale of how the Europeans came to be under the spell of “witchery,” which meant they no longer felt the vitality and meaning of the world around them but saw it as inert objects to be manipulated. The witchery gives rise to a whirligig of intoxicated and bewildered actions that culminated in unremitting violence toward the fragile web of life. This was the origin of the genocide perpetrated by the European settlers toward the Native Americans and native wildlife of America.

Waking Up through the Body

Although Merleau-Ponty saw how global culture was sliding toward a reliance on technology and an algorithmic approach to existence, he never lost his faith in embodiment to break through cultural conditioning and bring us back to a more primary and felt experience of the world. This experience could open us to the power of imagination and a different relationship to language. It would also open us to the power of the natural world.  

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche had pointedly portrayed the modern threat of nihilism in Thus Spoke Zarathustra as being the specter of the “last men” who “have their little pleasure for the day and their little pleasure for the night” and drift through life tranquilized and doing what everyone else does. They lack the courage to despise themselves, that is, to be critical of their way of life, only wanting comfort and constant distraction and “no longer able to shoot the arrow of their longing beyond themselves.” They will not take such risks to experience the chaos of having to recreate oneself. Yet, Zarathustra warns, “One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.” 

Always running here and there, being entertained, avoiding self-criticism, Nietzsche saw humanity as slipping into boredom, an underlying sadness, and having lost the love of life itself in its creative struggles. During the mid-twentieth century, Heidegger saw the same malaise and lack of self-challenge in much of modern culture. Technology was reducing humanity to a “calculative thinking” that could no longer meditate and, in silence, find depths of meaning. 

For Merleau-Ponty, however, to experience the world in a bodily way, taking in the “thickness” of perception, which is enlaced with emotion, imagination, intuition, felt bodily sense, kinetic propulsion, implicit memories, and a wider background that surrounds that which we are initially focused on, allows us to break out of the taken-for-granted world and to experience things anew. 

He says, “With the first vision, the first contact, the first pleasure, there is initiation, that is, not the positing of a content, but the opening of a dimension.” New ideas are not in a separate mental realm but are the invisible lining of all the visible things around us, their deeper sense. If we use our imagination to follow what the senses beckoning from the world are whispering to us, the invisible deeper senses will become experienceable. This is the source of meaning, the gift of our body’s perceptual dance with the world, its back and forth. It is not only the child but all of us who can perceive with freshness. 

As Merleau-Ponty also says toward the end of the Phenomenology of Perception, “I still am that first perception.” This is also the possibility for humanity that Nikos Kazantzakis envisioned in his character Zorba in his novel, Zorba the Greek. An old man, Zorba rises every morning and engages with his senses as if he were still a child, as if for the first time, and to his jaded employer says, “What is that miracle over there, Boss, that moving blue, what do they call it? Sea? Sea? And what’s that wearing a flowered green apron? Earth? Who was the artist who did it? It’s the first time I’ve seen that, Boss, I swear.” 

Merleau-Ponty agrees with Zorba when he declares that “Nature is at the first day; it is there today.” Yet, to experience this, we have to open ourselves to the full sensitivity and depth of bodily apprehension. As Zorba puts it, “I should fill my soul with flesh. I should fill my flesh with soul.” They are inseparable for Zorba, for Kazantzakis, and for Merleau-Ponty. It could be inseparable for all of us if we escaped our culture’s alienations and its opposition of body and mind, and mind to spirit. To become more still and take in the body’s perceptions requires us to slow down and to savor each experience. Even those experiences we might think are painful or boring might not be so if we really attended to them. When we become fully present in our bodies, these many layers of meaning sensed by us give us differing pathways to enter into experience. Some are straightforwardly delightful, like the hues of flowers or the rhythm of the passing clouds, but even others, like being stuck waiting for an appointment, might yield new senses when we pay attention and notice the moment around us. At that moment, I am not just waiting for an appointment. The whole world is moving with me, and all I have to do is look out the window to see what else is right there around me: the joy of the children playing down the street, the self-assuredness of the gentleman standing outside his shop, the admiration of a parent watching their children walk ahead of them.

Embodiment Can Open the Poetic Power of Language

Lastly, for Merleau-Ponty, there is the trap in which we are enclosed in the way we use language. He called our everyday speech and writing “empirical language.” He saw this way of wording the world as passing around well-worn tokens that no longer awakened us to truly experience that which was being described. This everyday language presents the things, events, creatures, and people around us as if they are already sufficiently apprehended in a general way and no more attention needs to be paid to them. We slap a label on what we experience and pay no real attention to our perceptions. Worse still, we might slap a label on the starving person and pass by with apathy, instead of engaging them and finding our feelings of care and concern that might lead to fellowship and kindness. Entering the body’s perception takes effort and time, but it is infinitely rewarding. A culture that tells us we have no extra time mitigates against this dwelling in our bodies.

For Merleau-Ponty, our senses, open to the world, introduce us to a depth of meaning that has no end, or what he says is “inexhaustible.” Our rational, categorial, and everyday use of language doesn’t push us outside of its neat boundaries, back into the mystery of appearance. There is only one use of language that breaks up this sleepy order and awakens us again to wonder, and that is poetry. 

Merleau-Ponty claims that “poetry melts ordinary language,” and in creating this opening, this disorder, new possibilities of meaning and experience come forth. Speaking of its power, he says that “poetry is like a song or a dance of language, nor is it for want of signification, but it is because it always has more than one signification.” These many meanings that flower forth from a poetic use of language are also born in the fiction writer’s craft or in any creative writing that becomes poetic. 

Our bodily senses take in many-layered meanings from the world, and the poetic releases their possible dynamic play of coming to us. Merleau-Ponty agrees with Bachelard’s statement in Air and Dreams that poetry is “truly the first manifestation of silence.” Merleau-Ponty finds silence running throughout language as its expressive root and to which we must return to in order to witness the world’s mystery and meaning. Poetry contains this silence within its pace, rhythm, and metaphoric twisting of language. 

Yet, our current culture is wont to noisily cover over any silences. In one of his French Radio Hour lectures, Merleau-Ponty claims that poetry could rehabilitate our everyday language. It is at the heart of a deeper sense of language’s origin that is not lost to us. We do know this on some level since our culture is more ambivalent about poetry. Even though poetry is seen as inessential by much of contemporary culture, in moments of spiritual importance, such as weddings, funerals, commemorations, and rituals, people often turn to poetry. They stand before their loved ones or their community and read a poem to make the event special and deeply felt. In letting the richness of the body’s apprehension of the world come to the fore again, the poetic can awaken us and restore to us the wonder of the world. 

As Merleau-Ponty got older, his philosophical writings became more and more poetic and moved away from traditional philosophical terminology. This poetic rediscovery of the sensible depths of the body’s apprehension of the world is a way to return humanity to its interconnectedness with other persons, but also with all creatures and the natural world, and to emerge from the cultural nightmare of endless algorithmic manipulation that tears at this fabric of interdependence. Merleau-Ponty saw the philosopher as having a responsibility and a potential sensitivity to embodiment in its poetic expression “because he has experienced within himself the need to speak, the birth of speech as bubbling up at the bottom of his mute experience.” 

The silence and the sensual are the roots and leaves of a poetic expression of bodily wisdom. He says, “the philosopher knows better than anyone that what is lived is lived-spoken, that, born at this depth, language is not a mask over Being, but—if one knows how to grasp it with all its roots and all its foliation—the most valuable witness to Being.” Poetic language speaks from within the body’s felt connection with the world and pushes us back into the richness of that experience. It is a richness of being for which our culture is starved and yet it is all around us. Merleau-Ponty invites us to return to the world of the body. It is a fine place to dwell.