PHIL 210 Lecture 3: Summary #4
1 Feb 2016
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In maurice merleau-ponty chapter on the synthesis of one"s own body in his book the. Phenomenology of perception he declares bodily spatiality as the deployment of one"s bodily being. The various parts of the body are enveloped and intertwined together like an intricate machine. He used an example of a child who first attempts to grasp an object. They look at the object, not their hands, and learn the working parts of the body. This process is lost to a strictly functional understanding as the movements become second nature or habitual. We do not learn their coordination unless we have to. The translation of vision, movement, touch etc. are not done gradually but unified within the body itself. Merleau-ponty compares the body to a work of art. He explains how a poem is not only the superficial meaning, but how through the process of translation and understanding, is what constitutes it as a poem.
