APPROACHMENTS PRISTOPANJA
PHAINOMENA
Revija za fenomenologijo in hermenevtiko Journal of Phenomenology and Hermeneutics
30 | 118-119 | November 2021
APPROACHMENTS PRISTOPANJA
Inštitut Nove revije, zavod za humanistiko
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PHAINOMENA
Revija za fenomenologijo in hermenevtiko Journal of Phenomenology and Hermeneutics
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PHAINOMENA 30 | 118-119 | NOVEMBER 2021 APPROACHMENTS | PRISTOPANJA
TABLE OF CONTENTS | KAZALO
Sebastjan Vörös
Minding the Body. From Corporeal Mind to Minded Corporeality	5
Umljenje telesa. Od telesnega uma do umljene telesnosti
Aleš Oblak, Hanna Randall, and David J. Schwartzmann
"Becoming the Color." Synesthetic Gesture in a Case Study of Multiple
Forms of Synesthesia	35
»Postajati barva.« Sinestetična gesta v študiji primera z več oblikami sinestezije
Lech Witkowski
Transformations and Their Dominants. Between Dynamics and Processual Structure	69
Transformacije in njihove dominante. Med dinamiko in procesno strukturo
Martin Uranič
Bit, videz in gola navideznost. Od Parmenida k Platonu	93
Being, Seeming, and Mere Seemingness. From Parmenides Towards Plato
Matija Jan
Arnauld in Descartes. Narava idej in problem metode	113
Arnauld and Descartes. The Nature of Ideas and the Problem of Method
Wei Zhang
Max Scheler's Socratesism. An Introduction of a Phenomenological Normative Ethics	141
Sokratizem Maxa Schelerja. Vpeljava fenomenološke normativne etike
Dragan Jakovljevic
Nelsons Infragestellung der Erkenntnistheorie. Ein Beitrag zur systematischen Rekonstruktion und Diskussion, unter Berücksichtigung des Kommentars von Victor Kraft	161
Nelsonova postavitev spoznavne teorije pod vprašaj. Prispevek k sistematični rekonstrukciji in diskusiji, z upoštevanjem komentarja Victorja Krafta
Martín Prestía
Carlos Astrada and Tetsuro Watsuji on the Phenomenology of Landscape 181
Carlos Astrada in Tetsuro Watsuji o fenomenologiji pokrajine
Alfredo Rocha de la Torre
Pensiero calcolante e nichilismo. Il caso del linguaggio e la terra natale 207
Računajoče mišljenje in nihilizem. Primer govorice in domovine
Dean Komel
O materinščini	233
On Mother Tongue
Christophe Perrin
La vie est une réussite. Petite dialectique de l'échec	263
Življenje je uspeh. Mala dialektika poraza
REVIEWS | RECENZIJE	265
Damir Barbaric: Iz radionice duha (Mario Kopic)	265
Manuscript Submission Guidelines	269
Navodila za pripravo rokopisa
293
Original scientific paper Izvirni znanstveni članek
DOI: 10.32022/PHI30.2021.118-119.1 UDC: 130.2:7.041
Minding the Body
From Corporeal Mind to Minded Corporeality
Sebastjan VÖRÖs
University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, Department of Philosophy, Aškerčeva 2, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
sebastjan.voros@ff.uni-lj.si
Abstract
In recent decades, the embodied approaches to cognition have become increasingly influential in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. However, despite their invaluable contribution to the field, there is some concern that they may have succumbed to what I call the "fetishization of the irrational." This can be gleaned from a somewhat disconcerting tendency of such approaches to construe mind and reason as secondary phenomena that occlude or even distort the primary level of lived experience. There exists
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a danger that, if left unqualified, a valid attempt to dispel one group of dualisms (mind vs. body) may bring forth another and perhaps even more pernicious group (rationality vs. experientiality). In the paper, I draw on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a major source of inspiration for the embodiment movement, to show that a more nuanced understanding of the relation between body and mind is called for. More specifically, I argue that, in human beings, the idea that the mind is seamlessly interwoven with the body should be construed as a twofold relation: not only in the sense that human mind is mind embodied, but also in the sense that human body is body minded, a virtual center of behavioral patterns of qualitatively novel kind (i.e., symbolic behavior). Mind, in this view, is a unique dynamic structure that encompasses our whole mode of being.
Keywords: embodiment, Merleau-Ponty, mindedness, rationality, transformativism, vitality.
Umljenje telesa. Od telesnega uma do umljene telesnosti
Povzetek
V zadnjih desetletjih so postali utelešanjski pristopi k spoznanju bolj in bolj vplivni znotraj filozofije uma in kognitivne znanosti. Vendar obstaja skrb, da so kljub njihovemu pomembnemu prispevku k zadevnemu področju podlegli tistemu, kar imenujem »fetišizacija neracionalnega«. To je mogoče uzreti v nekoliko vznemirjujoči tendenci tovrstnih pristopov, da um in razum tolmačijo kot sekundarna fenomena, ki ovirata ali celo sprevračata primarno raven živetega izkustva. Obstaja nevarnost, da ustrezen poskus odstranitve ene skupine dualizmov (um in telo) lahko, če ostane nekvalificiran, porodi drugo, celo bolj pogubno skupino (racionalnost in izkustvenost). V članku skušam s sklicevanjem na delo Mauricea Merleau-Pontyja, ki je poglaviten vir navdiha za utelešanjsko gibanje, pokazati, da je potrebno bolj razdelano razumevanje razmerja med telesom in umom. Natančneje, predlagam, da je pri ljudeh idejo, po kateri se um brezšivno sprepleta s telesom, potrebo dojeti kot dvojni odnos: ne samo v smislu, da je človeški um utelešeni um, temveč tudi v smislu, da je človeško telo umljeno telo, virtualno središče vedenjskih vzorcev kvalitativno nove vrste (tj. simboličnega vedênja). V skladu s tem je um enkratna dinamična struktura, ki zaobsega naš celoten način biti.
Ključne besede: utelešenje, Merleau-Ponty, umskost, racionalnost, transformativizem, vitalnost.
Sebastjan Voros
0. Fetishization of the irrational?
The history of thought is punctuated by the ongoing swings of the conceptual pendulum, persistently swaying from one ideational extreme to another: realism vs. idealism, monism vs. dualism, empiricism vs. intellectualism, etc. The Sisyphean quality of these polarized movements has led many to look for their underlying reasons and for possible ways of transcending them. It could be said that, ever since the publication of Embodied Mind (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991), a project of this sort has been underway in the domain of philosophies and sciences of mind. For, in an attempt to acquire a more comprehensive view of mind and cognition, and thereby stay the unproductive conceptual swaying between realism and idealism, etc., it has been suggested—rightfully, in my view— that we need to treat the mind not as something relegated to the depths of our skulls, but as something encompassing our whole body and its dynamic engagements with the world, both natural and social. It was hoped that the so-called embodied approach may pave the way from what Francisco Varela 7 so vividly characterized as the "disenchantment of the abstract," i.e., "the rarefied atmosphere of the general and the formal, the logical and the well-defined, the represented and the foreseen" (Varela 1999, 6), towards the "re-enchantment of the concrete," grounded on the recognition that "the proper units of knowledge are primarily concrete, embodied, incorporated, lived" (ibid., 7).
However, there is, in my view, a growing concern that the proposed conceptual "recalibration" and the aim to attain the much-celebrated entredeux or "middle ground" (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, 3) may have overshot the mark, bringing about, in its wake, another swing of the pendulum, this time in the form of what I would like to call the "fetishization of the irrational." The reason for this dire foreboding is a somewhat disconcerting tendency within the embodied circles to portray "mind," "reason," "language," etc., in predominantly negative terms: as secondary and derivative, as impoverishments and abstractions, as that which occludes, obscures, or even distorts the primary level of lived experience. Now, there are, as suggested by the advocates of the embodied approach, good reasons for such critical
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pronouncements; however, there is also a danger that, if left unqualified,1 a valid attempt to dispel one group of dualisms may bring forth another, perhaps even more pernicious, array of dichotomies.
In light of these concerns, I will try to thematize the notion of the minded body. The basic claim will be that, in human beings, the idea that mind is not severed from the body denotes not only that it is embodied, but also that it permeates the body, i.e., that the human body is body minded, a (virtual) center of behavioral patterns of a qualitatively novel kind. Thus, mind is not a mere corrective "add-on," encroaching on our behavior solely when our lived engagements with the world go awry, but rather a unique dynamic structure that encompasses our whole being, our whole mode of existence. The main title of the paper is thus deliberately, and, I hope, productively, ambiguous: on the one hand, it reminds us to be mindful of the body, i.e., to recognize the role of corporeality in minded life; on the other hand, and perhaps even more importantly, it invites us to be mindful of the mind, i.e., to recognize the ineradicable mindedness of human corporeality.
8	The paper consists of four parts. In the first part, I provide a brief account of the
famous philosophical exchange between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell. The debate is of utmost importance for our topic, as it vividly illustrates what is at stake if we fail to dissolve the tension between mindedness and embodied coping. In the second part, I provide a tentative account of the "minded body" by drawing on the neglected aspects of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. I do
1 This is an important point, because one finds similar claims about "primacy" in Merleau-Ponty, the author whose work will serve as the centerpiece for my subsequent reflections. However, it should be noted—and I will expound on this presently— that, in several places, Merleau-Ponty states that such pronouncements are not to be interpreted in foundationalist terms. For instance: "In speaking of the primacy of perception, I have never, of course, meant to say [...] that science, reflection, and philosophy are only transformed sensations or that values are deferred and calculated pleasures. [...] It is not a question of reducing human knowledge to sensation, but of assisting at the birth of this knowledge, to make it as sensible as the sensible, to recover the consciousness of rationality." Similarly: "We call this level of experience 'primordial'—not to assert that everything else derives from it by transformations and evolution (we have expressly said that man perceives in a way different from any animal) but rather that it reveals to us the permanent data of the problem which culture attempts to resolve." (1964c, 25)
Sebastjan Voros
this not only because Merleau-Ponty is considered to be one of the central sources of inspiration for the "embodiment turn" but also because, as I will argue, he himself was keenly aware of, and had therefore devised conceptual tools to fend off, the deleterious dichotomies that pervade many strands of contemporary embodiment narrative. In the third part, I link my reflections on the minded body to Merleau-Ponty's conception of language, construed as an embodied praxis, which, although rooted in the gestural dynamics, discloses qualitatively new (virtual) domains of signification. Finally, in the concluding section, I point to the need for developing dynamic ways of thinking about relations between "lower" and "higher" in which the former founds the latter (embodied mind), but the latter sublimates and transforms the former (minded body).
1. Mythomachia: Dreyfus contra McDowell
The Dreyfus-McDowell debate (Dreyfus 2005; 2007; 2013; McDowell 1991; 2007a, b; 2013; see also Schear 2013) is of particular interest to our discussion, as it revolves around the (seeming?) tension between mindedness/rationality and experience/corporeality. It was instigated by Dreyfus's attack (2005) on McDowell's book Mind and World (1994), which proposes a tentative solution to the old philosophical quandary concerning the rift between mind and nature. In his book, McDowell tries to walk the conceptual tightrope between two extremes: that of "bald naturalism" (ibid., xxi), which robs nature of mindedness, and that of "rampant platonism" (ibid., 78), which severs mind from nature. To this end, he argues that human beings are not only natural but also social beings who, through the process of enculturation, fashion themselves a "second nature" (ibid., 111), a set of "habits of thought and action," which are intrinsically normative and rational. More specifically, if somewhat over-simplistically, through the process of "ethical upbringing" human beings become initiated into "conceptual capacities, which include responsiveness to other rational demands besides those of ethics" (ibid., 84), and thus morph into "animals whose natural being is permeated with rationality" (ibid., 79). The crucial point, for McDowell, is that humans, as "animal[s] endowed with reason," need not be "metaphysically split" (ibid., 108), since—on account of their second (social and rational) nature and the corresponding responsiveness
9
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to reasons—their engagement with the natural world becomes permeated with mindedness. Thus, unlike "dumb animals," slavishly obeying "immediate biological imperatives," human beings enter, through the doorway of language, into the "space of reasons" (ibid., 126), and this space extends—like turtles in the famous apocryphal story—all the way down: "[O]ur perceptual relation to the world is conceptual all the way out to the world's impacts on our receptive capacities" (2007a, 338).
The specifics of McDowell's elaborate account need not concern us here; what is pertinent for our purposes, is that Dreyfus reacts strongly to McDowell's claim that human existence is suffused with mindedness and rationality. For Dreyfus, McDowell's solution bespeaks of the prevailing, and (tacitly) insidious, tendency in the Western philosophical tradition to place mind and reason on the epistemic, ethical, and existential pedestal, while cloaking all other dimensions of human existence in the shroud of ignorance or deprecation. In Dreyfus's own words:
10	Can we accept McDowell's Sellarsian claim that perception is
conceptual "all the way out", thereby denying the more basic perceptual capacities we seem to share with prelinguistic infants and higher animals? More generally, can philosophers successfully describe the conceptual upper floors of the edifice of knowledge while ignoring the embodied coping going on on the ground floor; in effect, declaring that human experience is upper stories all the way down? (Dreyfus 2005, 47)
Dreyfus responds resolutely in the negative. Drawing on the phenomenological tradition, especially on the work of Martin Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, he argues that our primordial way of engaging with the world is not conceptual, but comprises "nonconceptual embodied coping skills" (ibid.). He substantiates this claim with examples from everyday life (riding a bicycle, cooking dinner, etc.) and examples of skills exhibited by specialists-experts (chess grandmasters, jazz players, etc.), suggesting that "to become experts [in everyday or domain-specific pursuits] we must switch from detached rule-following to a more involved and situation-specific way of coping" (ibid., 52). In his view, the (hyper)intellectualist approach of McDowell focuses
Sebastjan Voros
exclusively on the disengaged, objective modes of knowing, overlooking the "engaged, holistic mode of experience" (ibid., 52) characterized by "a way of coping in which reasons play no role" (ibid., 53).
According to Dreyfus, when I am engrossed in an activity, be it of a highly skilled or everyday kind, objects in my perceptual field do not appear to me as intelligible things, but as affordances—as obstacles and supports, solicitations and constraints (ibid., 56). But although non-conceptual, affordances are not devoid of content (ibid., 55); instead, their content is action-oriented (it pertains to our motor capacities), context-specific (solicited actions are situation-specific), and normative (solicited action are bound by existential/affective conditions of satisfaction) (ibid., 56-57). Perception, then, is an embodied, contextual, and skillful attunement to our environment; reasoning, on the other hand, involves manipulation of concepts, which are universal (ergo: non-contextual), and intervenes in our lives only in anomalous circumstances, particularly when our embodied engagement with the environment breaks down and needs to be recalibrated (ibid., 57-58). Dreyfus concludes that, oblivious to the dynamics of lived experience, McDowell and his intellectual 11 forebears have fallen prey to the Myth of the Mental, the myth of the all-pervasive mindedness of human existence.
In his response, McDowell emphasizes that his views are much closer to Dreyfus's than the latter assumes them to be. For instance, he is more than willing to cede that human beings and animals share the "perceptual responsiveness to affordances" and that "there is a sense in which familiarity with affordances is a background for our openness to objects" (McDowell 2007a, 344). However, and this is crucial for McDowell, the mode of responsiveness to affordances in human beings differs radically from that found in other animals (ibid.). To substantiate this claim, he points to a distinction, taken from a phenomenological tradition of Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer (but also found in, as we will see shortly, Merleau-Ponty), according to which animals live in an environment (Umwelt) whereas human beings are open to the world (Welt) (McDowell 2007a, 343; cf. 1991, 115). In McDowells view, "[b]ecoming open to the world, not just able to cope with an environment, transforms the character of the disclosing that perception does for us, including the disclosing of affordances" (2007a, 344). In other words, since our relation to the world is
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primarily linguistic-conceptual, all our engagements with the world, perceptual responsiveness included, differ qualitatively from those found in animals.
According to McDowell, phenomenology of embodiment should not be seen as a corrective to his views but rather as a "supplementation, filling out the details of something that needs to be presupposed by any acceptable version of that thought" (ibid., 349). Therefore, it is, by his lights, not he himself but Dreyfus, along with (some of) his phenomenological friends, Merleau-Ponty in particular, that have become ensnared by a myth. Only it was not the Myth of the Mental, but the Myth of the Disembodied Intellect, that has cast a dire shadow on their philosophical project (ibid.); for, in putting so much weight on the perceptual understructure, Dreyfus severs embodied coping from the linguistic-conceptual superstructure, and thus, instead of dispelling age-old dualisms wearing on our existential fabric, he effectively reaffirms them.
The depicted mythomachia, or the battle of the myths, illustrates some of the concerns mentioned at the beginning of my article. Dreyfus seems to make a convincing case for the importance of the "lived-through" 12 (active, contextual, and corporeal) dimension(s) of our existence, which is bound to strike a sympathetic chord with contemporary embodiment enthusiasts. However, and as demonstrated by McDowell's rebuttal, this "phenomenological foundationalism" (Berendzen 2010), if left unchecked, leads to a pernicious chasm between lived (perceptual) experience (the "ground floor") and linguistic (conceptual) thought (the "upper floor"). Yet, despite having put forward a persuasive negative case against Dreyfus, it is dubious whether McDowell succeeds in developing a satisfactory positive alternative, one that would alleviate the concerns that have motivated Dreyfus's critique in the first place. It is, as I would like to argue, precisely because McDowell lacks the phenomenological supplement that would, as he puts it, allow him to fill in the lacunae in his thought, and thus expand the conceptual framework, in which the debate has been framed, that there are good reasons to see Dreyfus' reproach of (hyper)intellectualism as ultimately fitting.
In what follows, I will use Merleau-Ponty's philosophy to mitigate between the two views, filling in the chasm left open by Dreyfus and fleshing out the overtly intellectual account defended by McDowell. There are several reasons as to why Merleau-Ponty is particularly pertinent to my inquiry. To begin with,
Sebastjan voros
he is often proclaimed to be the Urvater of the embodied turn and features prominently in its "origin narratives" (e.g., Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991; Wilson and Foglia 2017). However, it is also the case that, in the embodiment circles at least, Merleau-Ponty tends to be read selectively,2 which often leads to loose and strained interpretations. The Dreyfus-McDowell debate is a case in point, for, despite all their differences, the two authors seem to agree—and in doing so, they echo a widespread sentiment in the embodiment community— that Merleau-Ponty's views tally well with those of Dreyfus, where the "lived" is pitted against the "conceptual," the "embodied" against the "rational."
While there are many factors that have contributed to this interpretative lopsidedness—Merleau-Ponty's dense and often elusive idiom not being the least among them—, I would like to focus on one that, in my view, bears particularly strongly on our topic. Namely, when one considers Merleau-Ponty's oeuvre as a whole, it becomes clear that due to his premature death the philosophical project he had undertaken, and of which phenomenology of embodiment and perception was but one, albeit integral, aspect, was never brought to full fruition. Note that this is not an exegetical subtlety; in his later 13 writings, Merleau-Ponty states explicitly that
[m]y first two works sought to restore the world of perception. My works in preparation aim to show how communication with others, and thought, take up and go beyond the realm of perception which initiated us to the truth. (1964a, 3)
Thus, in the author's own words, Phenomenology of Perception, his most well-known and most often-quoted work in the embodied community, should be read as a "preliminary study, since it hardly speaks of culture or history," one that he intends to complement by a more comprehensive account of the "organic tie [...] between perception and intellection" and the ways, in which lived experience "summons us to the task of knowledge" (1964c, 20, 25; my emphases). While many of these later works have been preserved in
2 For a complex, and sometimes tenuous, relation between Merleau-Ponty and the so-called embodied cognitive science, see Pollard 2014 and Vôrôs 2020.
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only fragmentary form, they still offer valuable glimpses into Merleau-Ponty's views on the topic. Even more importantly, however, one does not have to rely solely on Merleau-Ponty's later works to uncover a more balanced conception of experience and thought; instead, and as I will try to show in subsequent sections, if one approaches his texts without a preconceived idea of what one ought to find there, such a view presents itself both in Phenomenology of Perception (2002; originally published in 1945) and, perhaps even more prominently, in his very first monograph, The Structure of Behavior (1963; originally published in 1942).
2. Neither beast nor angel: the nascent logos
I would like to start my investigation by reiterating what I have already mentioned in passing, namely that, much like Heidegger and Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty subscribes to the distinction between "environment" and "world":
Animal behaviour aims at an animal setting (Umwelt) and centres of resistance (Widerstand). [...] Human behaviour opens upon a world (Welt) and upon an object (Gegenstand) beyond the tools which it makes for itself [.] Human life 'understands' not only a certain definite environment, but an infinite number of possible environments [.] (2002, 381)
There is, then, something unique to the human mode of being, a point which, to the chagrin of many of his contemporary admirers, Merleau-Ponty never tires of emphasizing:
'life' does not have the same meaning in animality and humanity" (1963, 174);
"[in human beings] vital energies are no longer the motor forces of behavior; they have been really integrated into a new whole and eliminated as biological forces" (ibid., 179);
"Man is not a rational animal. The appearance of reason and mind does not leave intact a sphere of self-enclosed instincts in man" (Ibid., 181)
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When confronted with such pronouncements, it is all too easy to succumb to the Siren song of retroactive interpretation and dismiss them as prima facie speciesist. For already a cursory glance at the continuation of the last quote reveals that a more nuanced picture is at play:
"But if the alleged instincts of man do not exist apart from the mental dialectic, correlatively, this dialectic is not conceivable outside of the concrete situations in which it is embodied." (Ibid.)
The preceding remarks about the animal-human distinction should not lead us to conclude that Merleau-Ponty endorsed a view reminiscent to that of René Descartes, who, at least on a certain familiar reading, argued that animals are but reflex-driven machines. In fact, Merleau-Ponty devotes the bulk of The Structure of Behavior to a systematic critique of behaviorism, a school of thought in biology and psychology that can be said to epitomize the mechanistic conception of (animal) life. The specifics of Merleau-Ponty's critical (negative) account surpass the scope of this article;3 what is of particular importance for 15 our discussion, however, is the alternative (positive) account he puts forward by drawing on the prominent non-mechanistic scientific theories of the time, most notably, but not exclusively, holistic biology of Kurt Goldstein (2000), Gestalt psychology of Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Kohler, and Kurt Wertheimer (Ash 1995), and theory of environment of Jakob von Uexkull (2010).
Merleau-Ponty's central claim is that a living being qua living is not a conglomerate of organs causally governed by discrete physio-chemical stimuli, but rather a dynamic unity whose behavior is aimed towards structured wholes (Gestalten), i.e., towards specific configurations of stimuli that are significant for the organism in light of its organization, behavioral aptitudes, and developmental history. In general, Merleau-Ponty's alternative calls for a radically different conception of both "organism" and "environment."4 Firstly, the organism is no longer conceived of as a (decomposable) thing, "a chemical structure or an agglomeration of tissues" (2002, 409), but rather as a living
3	However, see Sheredos 2018 for a more in-depth account.
4	Some of these points were explored in greater detail in Voros 2022.
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body, an (indecomposable) center of normative activity. What this means, is that, in the words of Merleau-Ponty's contemporary Georges Canguilhem, "life is not indifferent to the conditions in which it is possible" (1991, 127). The organism's engagements with its surroundings are never neutral, but involve "preference and exclusion," "propulsion and repulsion" (ibid., 136), i.e., they are the enactment of the vital need for self-maintenance, as expressed in "self-healing or self-restoring behavior" (ibid., 127). As such, organisms as living (normative) bodies, as "center of actions which radiate over a 'milieu'" (Merleau-Ponty 1963, 97), engender a certain type of rudimentary intentionality, a certain type of directedness-towards-the-environment, which, crucially, is not of the order of notion (intellection) but of (e)motion (affection and action).
The organism, then, is not akin to a keyboard reacting to, in a predetermined way, a set of physico-chemical factors, but actively participates, "by its proper manner of offering itself to actions from the outside," in the process of selecting and structuring of the stimuli to which it is sensitive (ibid., 13). Again, what is 16 significant for the organism, are not discrete physico-chemical factors themselves, but specific relations or configurations, in which they present themselves: their sequence, intensity, frequency, etc. The organism, thus, carves out of the physical domain a unique virtual domain—an "environment" or "milieu" (Umwelt)—, a domain of structures that are significant for the "a priori of the species," which it embodies (ibid., 122, 123, 129). This virtual domain is not structured as a system of geometrical and mechanical relations, but as a succession of challenges and opportunities brought forth by biological imperatives of the organism (cf. McDowell 1991, 115). Again, the signification of the environmental structures is not of intellectual-conceptual but of motor-affective order: they do not feature as things, but as affordances and solicitations, as that which affords or solicits a certain affective and behavioral poise. Crucially, these (environmental) structures are not given as isolated or isolable units in a geometrical space, but as aspects of a concrete situation, as affective vectors in a life-field.
In sum, Merleau-Ponty argues that living bodies and organismal behavior cannot be explained (away?) in terms of mechanical action, but must be understood in terms of (vital) norms and (motor-affective) signification. But, if this is true—if normativity and meaning, two characteristics usually
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associated with mind and reason, are inscribed into life itself—why would one want to insist, as Merleau-Ponty seems to do, that animality is distinct from humanity? Could it not be maintained that human beings are simply quantitative complexifications of this selfsame vital dynamics?
Merleau-Ponty admits that, on the superficial level, this does seem to be the case. For just as, say, animals live in their unique organic environments, so human beings live in their admittedly more diverse, but structurally similar, culturo-social environments (ibid., 162). However, he is quick to add that
[w]hat defines man is not the capacity to create a second nature— economic, social, or cultural—beyond biological nature; it is rather the capacity of going beyond created structures in order to create others." (Ibid., 175; my emphasis)
Thus, in Merleau-Ponty's view, the animal-human distinction has less to do with greater complexity of human environments than with the human ability to transcend and transform each respective environment. But, how exactly are 17 we to understand this "power of choosing and varying points of view" (ibid.), which is said to invest human behavior with a flexibility not found in animals? To arrive at Merleau-Ponty's conclusions on these matters we need to consider his critical—ingenious, if somewhat dense—commentaries (ibid., 113-120) on Wolfgang Köhler's studies of chimpanzee behavior (1925).5
Merleau-Ponty praises Köhler for showing that, "in addition to our own perceptual universe, we have to reconstitute the animal's universe in all its originality, with its 'irrational' connections, its short-circuits, and its lacunae"; however, he believes that Köhler fell short of his goal, as his interpretations focus almost exclusively on the fact that both humans and animals "gestalt [i.e., structure] things," while ignoring the different ways in which they do so (1964b, 84-85). To remedy this, Merleau-Ponty hones in on the insufficiencies in the chimpanzees' handling of objective relations with the view of providing
5 I am referring to the ground-breaking research on chimpanzees carried out by Köhler, when he was employed as the director of an anthropoid research station on Tenerife between 1913 and 1920 (see Ash 1995, Ch. 10, for a comprehensive overview).
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an account that would take seriously both similarities and differences between animal and human behavior (1963, 113ff).
For reasons of space, I will examine only two types of "short-cuts" analyzed by Merleau-Ponty.6 The first type relates to a peculiar obstinacy, with which the chimpanzees held on to a given signification of an object. For instance, Kohler noticed that, if left alone with a dried bush, a chimpanzee, which had previously learned to utilize a rod to acquire a piece of fruit, had great difficulties in establishing that it could break off one of the branches and use it for the same purpose: "The tree branch as a stimulus is not even the equivalent of a rod, and the spatial and mechanical properties which permit it to assume this function are not immediately accessible to animal behavior." (Ibid., 113— 114) Similarly, a chimpanzee, which had previously learnt to use a box to reach a banana hanging from the ceiling, would not use it as long as another monkey was sitting on it: "It leans against it; thus it cannot be said that it has not seen it; but it remains for him a means of support or rest; it cannot become an instrument." (Ibid., 114) 18 Merleau-Ponty contends that, what these and similar examples show, is that a rod or a box is not experienced by the chimpanzee as a discrete thing that can be seen from different perspectives and manipulated in different ways; instead, it is "invested with a 'functional value' which depends on the effective composition of the field" (ibid., 116-117). More generally, the signification of a given object is co-determined by the signification of all other aspects of the concrete situation and, correspondingly, by the motor-affective aptitudes of the animal. Hence, if the situation changes, so does the signification of the entity:
This means that the signification which develops in objects is viscous. It adheres to their fortuitous distribution and is a signification only for a body engaged at a given moment in a given task. (1973, 104; my emphasis)
For the chimp, "rod-as-branch" and "rod-as-tool," or "box-as-instrument" and "box-as-stool," are not two aspects of the same object, but literally two
6 But see Moss Brender 2017 for a comprehensive and interpretatively brilliant account.
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different objects (1963, 145): "It is a branch which becomes a stick, it is a stool which becomes a ladder, the way a shake of a kaleidoscope makes a new pattern appear without my being able to recognize the old one in it." (1973, 119-120)
In human perception, this "kaleidoscopic mode of experiencing" gives way to what Merleau-Ponty calls "multiplicity of perspective" (1963, 122): "the tree branch which has become a stick will remain precisely a tree-branch-which-has-become-a-stick, the same thing in two different functions" (ibid., 175). Thus, for Merleau-Ponty, McDowell is quite right in insisting that human responsiveness to affordances is radically different from that found in animals. For there is a certain distance or remove from the motor-affective significations presented in a given situation, which allows human beings to vary our perspective, resist the pull of vital significations, and finally, to thematize them. In words of Moss Brender:
Like the chimpanzee, we experience our situation as Gestalt, an organized and oriented whole. But unlike the chimp, we are able to reorganize or reorient this whole, to "Gestalt-shift" more or less at will 19 between different possible configurations of the situation. (2017, 146).
Note, however, what Merleau-Ponty is not saying here. He is not saying that, by acquiring the novel mode of structuration, human beings become completely divested from the motor-affective dynamics. Quite the contrary, the capacity to vary one's perspective is essentially a behavioral capacity, one that assumes, while transforming, its genealogical predecessors (more on this below).
The second type of insufficiency is even more revealing. In one experiment, Köhler placed a piece of fruit behind a grill and taught the chimpanzee to use a stick to pull it within its reach. In another trial, he placed a three-sided frame around the fruit, whose open side was facing away from the animal. So, to get to the fruit, the chimp had to first push the fruit away from itself, then move it around the frame, and finally pull it towards itself. However, Köhler observed that the chimp had great difficulty in completing the task and was stubbornly trying to pull the fruit towards itself. This may strike the reader as odd for, while the chimp had enormous difficulties in moving the fruit along
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the required path, it could have easily retraced the same route with its own body if the conditions allowed it to do so (Merleau-Ponty 1963, 117).
What, for us, looks like two identical paths (from A to B and from B to A), are clearly not identical for the chimpanzee. In Merleau-Ponty's view, this is so because space, for the chimp, is not geometrical but corporeal: it has an anchorage, a zero-point, namely the chimp's own body (ibid.). The chimp's body as lived is the only stable (persistent) object in its experiential realm; all the other objects partake of the kaleidoscopic nature mentioned above. For this reason, the chimpanzee "does not experience itself as an object moving through a fixed landscape; rather, it is the landscape that shifts around the animal in response to animal's movements" (Moss Brender 2017, 148). In other words, movement for the chimp does not mean a change of position (a change in space) but rather a change of situation (a change of space).
To see how this differs from human perception, consider what it takes to successfully solve the puzzle in question. To begin with, it requires that one dissociates oneself from one's perspective and adopts the perspective of the 20 object. Further, it requires that one sees oneself—one's own body—as yet another object, which stands in multiple relations with other objects and is therefore, at least in certain regards, divested of its privileged status: I have to "there" myself so that I may "here" the thing. Finally, it requires the ability to "transcribe a kinetic melody into a visual [sequence] [...] establishing relations of reciprocal correspondence and mutual expression between them" (Merleau-Ponty 1963, 118), i.e., to translate a motor sequence carried from the object's point of view into a visual sequence seen from my current point of view.
In short, the solution of the problem requires what Moss Brender calls the "mobility of perspective" (Moss Brender 2017, 149). This capacity allows one to not only alternate perspectives from the same point of view, as was the case with the multiplicity of perspective, but also to alternate the point of view itself and grasp the meaning of the action-to-be-taken "from a perspective outside of the movement itself' (ibid., 151; emphasis in the original). Note, again, what Merleau-Ponty is not saying here: he is not saying that human beings no longer have a center, but that, in our case, the center is mobile, which allows us "to take up a virtual point of view without actually moving our body to that location" (ibid., 149). This, in turn, means that these new virtual anchorages become
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invested with the stability (permanence) which, in animals, is restricted to their bodies.
At this juncture, I would like to underline two points. Firstly, while analytically separable, the multiplicity and mobility of perspective are actually two aspects of what Merleau-Ponty calls the "function" or "power of projection" (2002, 130, 138, 139, 146, 181, 210-211). The said function enables me to "take a bird's eye view of movement and project it outside of [myself]" (ibid., 146), and thus recognize, beyond my present environment, "a world of things visible for each 'I' under a plurality of aspects" (1963, 175). Correlatively, it enables me to orient myself not only "in relation to a limited [actual] milieu" but also "in relation to the possible" (ibid., 176), i.e., it opens up an area of hypervirtuality, "an area of free space," in which various possible environments "take on a semblance of existence" (2002, 128).
Secondly, the power of projection is not a separate faculty added to the vital powers we share with animals, but entails a transformation of our whole mode of being and therefore manifests itself as a new structure of behavior. In this so-called symbolic behavior, it is, as mentioned, the behavior itself which becomes 21 "the proper theme of activity" (1963, 103). If we go back to the problem of performing a detour, we notice that, to solve it successfully, we have to "trace by our very gesture the symbol of the movement which we would have to make if we were in [the object's] place" (ibid., 118). Put differently, it requires that we establish correspondences—"relations of relations"—between behavioral patterns executed from different centers: the actual gesture I perform with my hand when I move the fruit from my present position expresses the same signification as that of the possible movement of my body traversing the selfsame path from the position of the object. Symbolic behavior thus stands for the ability to take up a common signification of these different—actual and/ or possible—behavioral patterns, and express it in (other) gestures, pictures, or words. These then stand for symbols, i.e., "structure(s) of structures" or structures of the second order, expressing reciprocal correspondences between actual and possible sensorimotor patterns (ibid., 122).
In short, the power of projection as a novel way of being-in-the-world is my entry-way into the "thing structure" and "an indefinite time and space" (ibid., 119). As such, it allows me to perceive not only "a narrow circle of human
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'milieus" (Umwelten) but also, especially through language, art, and science, the "universe" or "world" (Welt), and to transcend "the experience of an immediate reality" to pursue a "knowledge of truth" (ibid., 176). Further, if we consider that, etymologically, both ratio (Lat.) and logos (Gr.), the two classical terms for "reason(ing)," also denote "proportion(ality)," i.e., the establishment of relations between different variables, we see that, from a Merleau-Pontyean perspective, the power of projection—the power of establishing symbols as "relations of relations"—is a cradle of rationality, a "nascent logos" (1964c, 25) or a "Logos of the aesthetic ['perceived'] world" (1964a, 10; 1973, 38, 42, 69; 2002, 498). Unlike non-human animals that strive to insinuate their "stubborn [vital] norms," human beings have the ability to "de-realize" themselves (1963, 126) and adopt a metanormative attitude, which allows them to thematize, i.e., reflect upon, compare, and alternate, the norms they enact and environments they inhabit. It is because of the "circumscribed remove" from the actual and the ability of its thematization in light of the possible, that human beings are not only incarnate but also epistemological subjects. As beautifully expressed 22 by Moss Brender:
The animal enacts a meaningful world through its behaviour, but it does so without knowing the meanings it enacts, without making them thematic. It sings a melody it cannot hear. Human logos is an awakening to the song that is all around us. It is the power to perceive meanings as such, rather than simply living in them. This does not mean that we cease enacting meanings in favour of knowing them. Rather, we enact meanings of a second order: the meaningful world that our bodies respond to includes the meanings that we and others are enacting. (2017, 152)
This provisional sketch should suffice to show why the power of projection can be said to constitute the core of human mind(edness) and reason(ableness). What is crucial, however, is that mind and reason so construed are not severed from corporeality—in fact, Merleau-Ponty sees such (sometimes inadvertent) decoupling as the main vice of intellectualist approaches (2002, 143 ff.)—, but are, as we have seen, a new way of being
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a body, a body minded. By Merleau-Ponty's lights, we can understand both similarities and distinctions between animals and humans only if we are willing to admit that "there are several ways for the body to be a body" (2002, 143; emphasis in the original). The body in non-human beings is a center of normative activity embedded into a virtual domain of signification (environment), which is (more or less) fixed by each organism's organization and given from a single perspective. The body in human beings is a center of metanormative activity operating in a hypervirtual domain of signification (world/universe), which spreads out, around the socio-culturally acquired significations, the "halo" of possible de- and re-structurations:
[T]he human dialectic is ambiguous: it is first manifested by the social or cultural structures, the appearance of which it brings about and in which it imprisons itself. But its use-objects and its cultural objects would not be what they are if the activity which brings about their appearance did not also have as its meaning to reject them and to surpass them. (1963, 176; emphasis in the original)	23
A famous fragment from Blaise Pascal's Pensées reads: "Man is neither angel nor beast, and unhappily whoever wants to act the angel, acts the beast." (1995, § 557) In my view, the fragment captures nicely the middle-ground approach to human mindedness that Merleau-Ponty is striving for. On the one hand, human beings are not angelic intellects fortuitously tied to their bodies and the world, but corporeal minds ineradicably enmeshed with worldliness and otherness; on the other hand, their minded corporeality differs from that of other animals in that it is a vehicle of a new structure of behavior, a radically new way of being-in-the-world. Thus, human beings are embodied minds in the sense that the new structure (mind) is grounded in the older structure (body); but they are also minded bodies in the sense that the new structure (mind) transforms the meaning and functioning of the older structure (body). In the next section, I will try to shed more light on this point by focusing on Merleau-Ponty's conception of language.
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3. Singing the world: the speaking speech
The reason why language is particularly pertinent to our topic is its amphibious nature: on the one hand, it is involved in human cognition; on the other hand, it is a specific form of bodily activity. As such, it often falls prey to two explanatory extremes: one may either reduce it to sheer intellectual activity and ignore its behavioral component (language as "mentalese" or language of thought); or one may reduce it to its gestural dimension and ignore its cognitive component (language as an elaborate reflex). In his account, Merleau-Ponty opts for a middle path, arguing that, while undoubtedly a form of behavior, language opens up qualitatively new ways of "structuring things," and thus qualitatively new ways of being-in-the-world. But to understand this properly, we need to catch language "in the act," i.e., as (speaking) speech or languaging.
To begin with, Merleau-Ponty agrees that it is important to recognize the gestural dimension of language: "The spoken word is a genuine gesture, and it 24 contains its meaning in the same way as the gesture contains its." (Ibid., 213) So, how does a gesture contain its meaning? Clearly, the latter is not simply "given," i.e., it is not an initial cause in a mechanical process, for I can be, and often am, wrong about what the other person is signaling. Instead, it seems to require an act of understanding on my part (ibid., 214). This understanding, however, is not a "cognitive operation" undertaken by a disembodied-angelic intellect (ibid., 214), but relates to something fleshlier. For Merleau-Ponty, to understand a gesture involves an invitation to enter into a virtual domain of signification, to take up the behavioral style of the other and incorporate it into my own corporeal schema:
It is as if the other person's intention inhabited my body and mine his. The gesture which I witness outlines an intentional object. This object is genuinely present and fully comprehended when the powers of my body adjust themselves to it and overlap it. The gesture presents itself to me as a question, bringing certain perceptible bits of the world to my notice, and inviting my concurrence with them. Communication is achieved when my conduct identifies this path
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with its own. There is mutual confirmation between myself and others. (Ibid., 215)
What is involved in understanding and/or communicating a gesture, then, is an establishment of dynamic synchrony between my own intentions and the gestures of others (ibid.). This, again, is not a mechanical or intellectual process, but involves "a synchronizing change of my own existence," "a transformation of my [whole] being" (ibid., 213-214).
According to Merleau-Ponty, the same is true of speech construed as a linguistic gesture. For instance, Merleau-Ponty remarks that to learn the meaning of a word is to become acquainted with its "place in a context of action," which is achieved by "taking part in a communal life" (ibid., 208): "I learn it as I learn to use a tool, by seeing it used in the context of a certain situation." (Ibid., 469) Language in its active dimension, language as languaging, is thus an embodied praxis that is essential for the intersubjective establishment and maintenance of the jointly inhabited virtual domains. This is why, for Merleau-Ponty, "words, vowels and phonemes are so many ways of 'singing' the world" 25 (ibid., 217), and why different languages are "but several ways for the human body to sing the world's praises" (ibid.).
However, although continuous with gesture, language also goes beyond it; for it not only sings the world, but also allows the worldly songs to be heard. Language transcends gesture in two important ways. Firstly, unlike gesture, it is "able to settle into a sediment and constitute an acquisition for use in human relationships" (ibid., 220): technologies of writing transform intersubjectively enacted virtual domains into manuscripts, books, etc., thereby instituting an (artistic, intellectual, etc.) "tradition," which lends itself to subsequent generations. Secondly, and unlike some other cultural practices (e.g., painting and music), language can be "indefinitely reiterated," which is why "it is possible to speak about speech whereas it is impossible to paint about painting" (ibid., 221). There is an inherent recursivity of language, expressed in the fact that linguistic meaning, once constituted, can serve not only to disclose new meanings, but also to use the latter to thematize (i.e., adopt, modify, and/or abandon) the former—and so on, indefinitely. Language, then, is not a mere complexification of gesture,
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but a qualitatively novel structuration centered around sedimentation and infinite recursivity.7
Most importantly, language allows for the sublimation of the nascent logos, already present in perception, into explicit logos, constitutive of full-blown thought:
This mute or operational language of perception begins a process of knowledge which it cannot itself accomplish. However firm my perceptive grasp of the world may be, it is entirely dependent upon a centrifugal movement which throws me toward the world. I can recapture my grasp only if I myself spontaneously posit new dimensions of its signification. Here is the beginning of speech, the style of knowledge, truth in the logician's sense. (1973, 124-125)
We have seen that what prevents me from becoming coagulated with a given domain of vital signification and allows me to open myself to the possibility of the universe/world, is the power of projection with its two 26 aspects of multiplicity and mobility of perspective. I have to be able to fashion myself, by changing my perspective, a new (temporary) abode, a new domain of signification, which allows me to thematize the previous one from a certain remove, and then either take it up, alter it, or let it go. Language is particularly well-suited for this: as a speaking subject (1973, 38), I am able to not only skillfully reside among the established meanings, but also withdraw from them and establish new meanings offering themselves as possibilities on the horizon of my socio-cultural setting.
Note, however, that this maintenance and establishment of meaning is not something that first takes place in the autonomous realm of thought and then gets mediated through the vehicle of language; instead, it is something that occurs in-and-through language. To get a better grasp of what I mean by this, let us consider Merleau-Ponty's distinction between "speaking speech" (2002, 102; also: "authentic" (ibid., 202), "originary" (ibid., 409), "originating" (ibid., 453),
7 The "gesture-speech" comparison is a bit misleading since, in the human world, all gestures are embedded into a socio-linguistic context, so there are, strictly speaking, no natural gestures strictu sensu.
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or "transcendental" (ibid., 454)) and "spoken speech" (ibid., 102; also: "second-order" (ibid., 207), "constituted" (ibid., 214, 453), or "empirical" (ibid., 454)). In a nutshell, speaking speech presents (establishes) a domain of signification, it "brings the meaning into being or makes it effective" (ibid., 212), whereas spoken speech re-presents (maintains) a domain of signification, it operates with "the ready-made meanings" (ibid., 214). Put differently, language as languaging constitutes a new (domain of) signification, whereas language as languaged draws on the already constituted (domains of) signification.
Since we live in a culture where language is an institution, we take the already acquired meanings for granted, although they originally arose out of an embodied, inter subjective process of coming to terms with the world and still require ongoing acts of intersubjective synchronization to maintain their significatory value. Things we live with—books, computers, etc.—are not simply "there," but are meaning-nodes in a vast socio-cultural framework of sedimented symbolic behaviors, which need to be reaffirmed by continual use and custom. The presentational ("speaking") aspect of language comes to the fore in atypical situations—in cases of breakdowns or in cases where the 27 language is just being acquired. One such example is a well-known passage from Helen Keller's autobiography. Keller was a remarkable woman who, despite becoming deaf and blind at a very early age, not only learned to read and write, but went on to become an acclaimed author and lecturer. In the passage that follows, she learns that words signify for the first time:
Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word "water," first slowly then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful something that flowed over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, joy, set it free! [...] As we returned to the house each object that I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange new light that had come to me. (Keller 1959, 23)
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The "living word," of which Keller speaks, is not a mere label attached to an already established domain of signification, but the act of disclosing a domain of signification that, previously, was merely an implicit possibility on the horizon of her life, a vector in her life-field. Language manifests this possibility as an actuality, thereby "opening a new field or a new dimension of our experience" (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 212).8
Language, then, is a vehicle of reason(ing), not in the sense of being a mere "envelope" of preformed thought, but in the sense of embodying thought-in-action. It is a retrospective illusion to believe that thoughts emerge, fully developed like Athena from Zeus's head, in the silent depths of our mind. For, if this were the case, why are my ponderings so vague, before I say them out loud or write them down? As Merleau-Ponty puts it, speech "does not translate ready-made thought, but accomplishes it" (ibid. 207). It is what, in my concrete (cultural, social, temporal) situation, enables me to endorse an established signification or open up a new one, what allows me to reconfirm myself and the world I live in, or—often after a prolonged period of confusion 28 and suffering—re-fashion myself in light of tacit possibilities permeating the nooks and crannies of what, previously, I have called "my reality." As such, speech is not a mere addendum to my lived corporeality, but an integral part of a novel structure called minded body.
It is, therefore, naive to think that any type of inquiry—phenomenological or otherwise—can uncover, underneath the layers of linguistic and rational sediments, an Adamic sphere of lived experience, in which our primordial (direct, unobstructed) engagement with the world is said to unfold. Instead, the goal is to understand how, in a cognitive and linguistic being that is human, corporeal existence feeds into, and is ultimately transformed by, speech and thought.
Take, for instance, contemporary first-person approaches to the study of experience (Petitmengin 2006, Petitmengin et al. 2019, Varela and Shear 1999). These are not, and cannot be, relegated to "primordial silence," but
8 It should be noted that, while this capacity of(self)transcending is inherent in language, the specific restructurations cannot be carried out on a whim, but are predicated on the possibilities surrounding the biologically and socio-culturally acquired structures. There is, then, an (admittedly fluid) historical horizon of comprehensibility, which, if surpassed, results in our attempted restructurations being devoid of signification.
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take place in a dialogical setting, in the realm of dia-logos, two-mindedness. When the interviewer probes, suggests, hints, etc., and the interviewee seeks, responds, recasts, etc., are we to believe that the dialogical exchange—the linguistic encroachment of the speaker and the listener—has no bearing on the dynamics of lived experience, that the latter was, so to speak, simply there, in the silence of our being, waiting to be picked and enjoyed, like a ripe fruit? In other words, are we to believe that language here is merely a proverbial lamp shedding rays of thought onto fully-formed objects of experience, which, like fish in the depths of the ocean, lurk in the dark recesses of our mind? But, then, why does "the most familiar thing appear indeterminate as long as we have not recalled its name" (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 206)? Moreover, what exactly are we to make of these elusive unnoticed phenomena—unnoticed body sensations, memories, etc.—if a "phenomenon," by definition, is that which appears, that which gives itself, precisely and inasmuch as it gives itself?
4. Conclusion: on discontinuity-in-continuity
29
Let us now, by way of summary, return to the original question about the relation between lived experience (perception) and mind (thought). We have seen that, by Merleau-Ponty's lights, the originality of mind a propos life is not one of addition but of transformation, of "a [wholesale] retaking and a 'new' structuration" of the preceding structural dynamics (1963, 184). Mind, then, is neither a spiritual add-on to, nor a quantitative complexification of, life; instead, it is a qualitatively novel structuration of one's whole being: it takes up the preceding (lived, vital) structuration while simultaneously transforming it, i.e., integrating it into a new whole and investing it with a completely new meaning and function:
Man taken as a concrete being is not a psyche joined to an organism, but the movement to and fro of existence which at one time allows itself to take corporeal form and at others moves towards personal acts. Psychological motives and bodily occasions may overlap because there is not a single impulse in a living body which is entirely fortuitous in relation to psychic intentions, not a single mental act which has not
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found at least its germ or its general outline in physiological tendencies. (2002, 101)
In a normal ("well-integrated") human being, all existential dimensions— perception included—are permeated with mindedness in the sense of being open to rational scrutiny. And yet, this mindedness is not relegated to the plane of angelic existence, but constitutes a novel mode of corporeal being, which is never completely freed from the ambiguities of concrete situations in which it finds itself: I may vary my perspectives, but I am still a perspectival being.
In Merleau-Ponty's view, to do justice to this dynamic of existence, we must develop ways of thinking that would allow us to (re)capture the circulatory relation between "higher" superstructures and "lower" substructures. He himself uses different terms to express the said relation: for instance, he says that the "higher" "assumes and transcends" the "lower" (ibid., 61), it "continues while going beyond" (ibid., 68), "goes beyond [...] while still preserving" (ibid., 75), "fulfill[s ...] by destroying" and "destroy[s...] by 30 fulfilling" (ibid., 99), "reconfirm[s ...] at the same time it supersedes" (ibid., 100), "sav[es ...] by destroying" (ibid.), "sublimates [... without] cut[ting] the roots" (ibid., 107), "prolongs and transforms" (ibid., 139), "surpasses [... while] prolonging its movement" (ibid., 141).9 The common denominator of these, and similar,10 phrases is that they all try to capture a movement that allows for both continuity and discontinuity, or more precisely, for a discontinuity-in-continuity.
Clearly, as a phenomenologist of sorts, Merleau-Ponty does not think that phenomenology, as an attempt to grasp and articulate the elusive dynamics of
9	Similar descriptions can be found in his other works, but for reasons of space I am unable to pursue this further. I would just like to add that they can be traced all the way back to his first monograph, where he notes that the "double aspect" of the said relation "both liberate[s] the higher from the lower and found[s] the former on the latter": the superstructure "eliminates the preceding one as an isolated moment," yet it also "uses and sublimates it," "conserves and integrates it" (1963, 207, 208).
10	The closest Merleau-Ponty gets to a definition of this two-way dynamic is when he expounds it in terms of Edmund Husserl's notion of Fundierung (2002, 458). However, limited space requires me to forgo a more thorough explication of that multifaceted notion (see Matherne 2017, 783, for a helpful overview).
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lived experience, is condemned to silence. In fact, he claims that it is precisely the linguistic and reflective practices that, originarily, disclose the realm of the prereflective as a unique domain of inquiry and, ultimately, serve as, perhaps not exclusive, but undoubtedly exemplary, modes of its expression. Thus, the phenomenologist—or any philosopher, for that matter—should not try to separate the (distortive) contributions of logos from the (authentic) activities of aisthesis, but to gain a better (more comprehensive) understanding of logos in light of a better (more comprehensive) understanding of aisthesis. The experience, then, is (contra Dreyfus, pro McDowell) permeated by mindedness; but this mindedness is permeated with the dynamic logics of the living, and thus of a different kind than envisioned by McDowell.
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