Get Your Smart On
A primer on embodiment and empathy through Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception.
How can I understand you, what you are feeling and thinking? Why you do the things you do? You are that part of my experience that is not me, and you have the power to affect our shared world. Even more, you have the power to affect me, how I understand, what I feel, why I do the things I do. This capacity to be affected, my primordial openness to the world, sometimes it is a hunger, but sometimes it feels like a wound that aches with vulnerability. For this walls and bridges are made, and also poetry and art. We are vulnerable in this world, but together. And this makes all the difference.
French Phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty famously said that “the world is not what I think, but what I live through. I am open to the world.” His phenomenology details our direct lived connection to the world and others. For him, other people aren't a mental puzzle you solve for (looking at you, Edmond Husserl), but part of our lived, embodied experience. Everything we experience is rooted in our lived bodies, and our embodiment serves as a bridge between us and others.
The body is not just a thing we possess and lug around, a sack of meat and bones we inhabit. Neither is it a tool or a machine. The body is unlike any other object. Merleau-Ponty calls the body our means of communication with the world, we might call it a living interface. It's not just a physical object, it is our access to that shared world. It is how I know you and can reach you. It is a medium for having a world in the first place.
The lived body is contrasted to the objective body, represented in and through science. The body of science is the one that is dissected by the surgeon, seen objectively as a functional collection of parts. The functional part often imagined in mechanistic terms, like a machine whose parts work together to some effect, an effect referred to as consciousness or mind. This mechanistic view inspires some to try and make machines that could come to exhibit consciousness. The prototypical machine is no longer a machine, but computation itself. Matter has evaporated, the machine is become pure computation.
What that perspective misses is the experience of my own visual field, having this gap where my head is as I look out onto the world. Or the weird feeling of touching your own hand, being able to experience being toucher and touched, simultaneously object and subject, intertwined. Our body isn't just side-by-side parts in space, but sensation and sensibility, the potential for being at home.
If our body is ours, which is a lot to assume these days.
The body is a unified, expressive whole. An undivided possession, undivided because any one part is not a part, but is always connected to the whole. As Aristotle said, a pile of body parts on a table does not a human make. The human is not in the parts but in the in-between interconnectedness. In this same way, our shared world is created out from the in-between us. Not you and me, but you-and-me of which I am just a part. I could try and drag you around like a slave, make you a part of me, consume you or obliterate you. I can want all of the world for myself. I can know I will fail, and still try. The obliterated other always returns, it is a law as much as gravity is a law.
Seeing the body this way means that our connection isn't just mental. It's physical, spatial, temporal, all tied together through what Merleau-Ponty calls the body image or body schema. Except it isn't an image in the way that this is typically understood, as a representation, or map laid over experience. It isn't a picture in your head. It's the body's own implicit knowledge of itself. It's what let's you reach for something without thinking about having to use specific muscles. The scientific knowledge of what muscles are used to move the body in a specific way is produced after the experience, and can come to constitute the experience as well. The doctor understands her embodiment differently than does a dancer, and indeed their embodied possibilities are not the same. Our experience of our lived body is part of our possibilities.
Merleau-Ponty is the darling of feminist phenomenology for bringing the lived body into the discussion of ways of knowing. For feminists, this means that different kinds of bodies are in. If everything we know we know through our bodies, and our bodies differ in ways that make a difference to how and what we can know, then we can account for different ways of knowing. Not only sexual difference, but all the differences that are lodged in the body and everything that we make of those bodies — socially, culturally, and politically. For example, women have been found to be more empathetic, not because of their biological makeup, but because women are taught to do the care work that requires them to develop deep empathy.
Merleau-Ponty was fascinated by the phenomena of the phantom limb, where someone feels a missing limb, not just as a memory of what is no longer there, but as an ambivalent presence. He compares it to feeling the existence of a friend who is not before you in the moment, not being perceived with your eyes, but there for you nonetheless. It is not a thought of a friend, it is a presence felt, where we feel that we have a direct hold on something. The here and now of our materiality is grounds for the otherwise elsewhere. You may not be here with me physically and still be here because you live in me as well. Likewise, the many futures that have not arrived are already here with us.
The lived body, the self, and the world is connected through what he calls the intentional arc, described as an underlying energy or tension that connects everything to everything. Perception, movement, emotion, thought, everything. It creates a unity of the sensed, of intelligence, sensibility, and motility.
If my being is embodied and engaged with intentionality, then so is another’s embodied being animated with intentionality. Understanding the other isn't primarily figuring out what's going on in someone else's hidden private mind. It is, rather, reciprocity. The communication and comprehension of gestures is made possible through reciprocity. It is as if the other person's intention inhabited my body, and mine theirs.
When I see someone make a gesture — say, holding up a fist and pumping it in the air. I may say it is an angry gesture. Not that it makes me think of anger, but that it is anger itself, manifest. The bodily expression of anger is legible to us directly. Moreover, it is different from the similar gesture that means “Yeah! Power to the people” or some such. We know the difference without having to parse out differences and engage in an intellectual process of analysis. Your own body understands the gesture, the expression, and grasps its meaning directly. It resonates in a pre-reflective way. Our direct bodily understanding bypasses conscious thought initially. It is a “blind recognition” of another's bodily gesture that is full of meaning for us.
I don't have to share with you that something is bothering me, you can read it off my face and body. Sometimes I may not even realize that I am bothered myself, until you point it out and ask me about it: “Why are you so bothered of late?” Leading to reflection, conversation, questioning, curiosity, and in the best case scenario, wonder. Intersubjectivity isn't something we achieve or have to strive for, it is already a fact of our existence. It's where we start. And it is the deficiency of which requires an explanation. We're tangled up together from the beginning. The fact that so many US-Americans and others live such isolated and siloed lives needs to be explained. It is not empathy and intersubjectivity that needs explanation.
Our behaviour patterns settle into our environment where it leaves traces, and a cultural world emerges therein. Now we can think about tools, objects, a spoon, the famous pipe laying on the table, the philosopher's hammer. These aren't just inert matter, but are molded to and by human action. They carry with them an atmosphere, and humanity. Even if what you find is a pile of broken bits of instruments belonging to a completely unknown civilization you can still sense the close presence of others beneath the veil of anonymity. This is why relics from ancient societies can be so meaningful to us. You don't need to decode it intellectually, the etchings on a wall lost and found are immediately legible in their humanity. All these objects around us, they speak to us of our shared human way of being.
The whole of our embodied way of being and understanding connects us to our emotional lives too -- to our feelings, desires, and loves. Embodiment is at the heart and center of our affective lives. Emotions and desires aren't meant to be just private internal states, choke points of existence. They are ways of relating, or as Heidegger calls them moods. Shame or modesty come from experiencing yourself as you might be seen by another. Our feelings are inherently relational and intersubjective.
We have this deep, embodied connection to others, and we grasp others in their being through a kind of bodily resonance. While I can never know exactly what it means to you to be you, or you me, we don't need to, not necessarily. We can reflect on what it must be like to be someone else, but that reflection is secondary or comes after the fact of already relating to you, and it's never complete -- just like our own understanding of ourselves is never complete.
In other words, there is an ambiguity there. This ambiguity, maybe even mystery of the Other, is not a bad thing, or a problem to be solved. It's a fundamental condition of our existence and our own sense of self, of being present here and now, and present elsewhere and always, and also absent from here and from now.
It is consciousness. Existence in the existential sense. Understanding ourselves, as with understanding others, is always ongoing, the ever receding horizon of our being, of passing though time, in a particular concrete situation, always partially rooted in a shared world, but nonetheless filled with ambiguity and mystery.
Empathy isn't a mental calculation or manipulation, it's a fundamental resonance and orientation in a shared world. Our bodies tune into each other on a pre-reflective level. It is very apparent at, say, a music performance or political rally, where you can feel the electricity in the air and shared affect of being moved by a larger collective force.
Some recent critiques of the anti-empathy movement rightly point to creating a permission structure for dehumanizing immigrants, LGBT folks, African Americans, and anyone deemed lesser than and relegated to second class citizenship. All this is true and politically astute. And also, the rather unsuccessful wearing away at empathy over the last 20 years is a fear of our human collectivity, and what we could do if we were to synch up and act together in a show of collective interests. It is as a life-force that empathy is a threat to authoritarian regimes and death cults, and not only to do with the relationship between one individual and another. The word “communion” is right on here, as it captures how empathy is a communal unfolding of the world.
The world is what is given to us, to me and to you. We choose to pull it apart and sell it. We do that collectively. We undo that too, collectively.