Abstract
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodiment has been widely adopted by enactivists seeking to provide an account of cognition that is both embodied and embedded. Yet very little attention has been paid to Merleau-Ponty’s later works. This is troubling given that in The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty revises his conception of embodied subjectivity because he came to the realization that understanding consciousness through the concepts of subject and object imposed a dualistic framework that he was trying to escape. To overcome this dichotomy Merleau-Ponty more fully develops the radically embodied ontology implicit in his earlier work by introducing the concept of flesh. I argue that the enactive account of subjectivity would be improved by “giving flesh” to the enactive subject, given that the enactive account of subjectivity as grounded in pre-reflective bodily self-consciousness is ultimately rooted in accounts of which the later Merleau-Ponty is critical. Incorporating flesh resolves the underlying problems with the enactive account of subjectivity and makes the account more consistent with the ontological commitments to embodiment and embeddedness.
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Notes
It is also often referred to as pre-reflective bodily self-awareness and as such I’ll use them interchangeably.
I will call into question the extent to which this claim is established by the phenomenology that supports the enactive account of subjectivity.
I do not mean to imply that the enactive account of consciousness is necessarily grounded in Legrand’s account of bodily self. However, many enactivists adopt her account given that it appears to express and support an enactive approach to consciousness. This is, of course, not to say that there cannot be alternative enactive accounts, but I will identify the type of enactive approach that adopts her account of bodily self as ‘the enactive account’ for ease of reference.
As a point of disambiguation, the body schema I refer to here is not the body schema as discussed by Gallagher (1986) in contrast to the body image.
I do not mean to imply that the body schema is only a form of self-consciousness, but as a pre-reflective system that opens onto the world it is one of its dimensions.
Interestingly, here Legrand is explicitly assenting to Sartre’s phenomenology.
It might be argued that the body specified in this context is a pre-reflective body-as-object, which is not the body-as-object proper given that it is not fully thematized. This does not hurt the point I am making. For even if the sensible body in this context is not thematized, it is still part of a presentation of a unified body whereby awareness of the sensing body is constituted by the sensible body, even if pre-reflectively.
Cognitive scientists often problematically conflate bodily subjectivity with body representation. Part of my analysis of this work relies on critical work already done on this issue, but it is nonetheless how these researchers characterize their work.
Interoceptive information is arguably also instrumental in generating presence, but a discussion of that research goes beyond the scope of this paper (Cf. Seth et al. 2012).
One reviewer has pointed out that this interpretation also suggests that understanding ‘sense of agency’ and ‘sense of ownership’ as, in some sense, opposed is a problematic articulation of their relationship. Arguing the point in sufficient detail, however, would go beyond the scope of the present paper.
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Jenkinson, J. Enactive subjectivity as flesh. Phenom Cogn Sci 16, 931–951 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-016-9488-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-016-9488-5