David Morris

This review of John Russon's Human Experience: Philosophy, Neurosis, and the Elements of Everyday Life focuses on Russon's position that experience is open (having a developmental, situated and dynamic, rather than fixed, structure) and figured (having a structure inseparable from forms of bodily function), and that mind is something learned in the process of working out experience as figured and open. These themes are drawn together in relation to recent scientific discussions (e.g., of bodily dynamics, mirror neurons, robotic systems and thermodynamics), to show how Russon's view challenges deep philosophical assumptions in prevailing accounts of mind, body and experience.

A study of habit and other unconscious backgrounds of action shows how shapes of spiritual life in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit each imply correlative senses of lived time. The very form of time thus gives spirit a sensuous encounter with its own concept. The point that conceptual content is manifest in the sensuous form of time is key to an interpretation of Hegel's infamous and puzzling remarks about time and the concept in ``absolute knowing.'' The article also shows how Hegel's Phenomenology connects with current discussions of lived time, habit, and, via discussion of Wallace's Infinite Jest, addiction.

Studies that compare human and animal behaviour suspend prejudices about mind, body and their relation, by approaching thinking in terms of behaviour. Yet comparative approaches typically engage another prejudice, motivated by human social and bodily experience: taking the lone animal as the unit of comparison. This prejudice informs Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s comparative studies, and conceals something important: that animals moving as a group in an environment can develop new sorts of “sense.” The study of animal group-life suggests a new way of thinking about the creation of sense, about the body, the brain, and the relation between thinking and nature

I survey some unusual phenomena in which the body seems to be projected into other things. I argue that these phenomena should not be understood as illusions, as erroneous distortions of an objective body, but as indicating that the body is first of all a being absorbed in outside things. The usual questions about perception are thus reversed: the question is not how the outside world is represented in an inside, but how a moving body ecstatically absorbed in things ever breaks out of that absorption. My suggested answer involves movement and has implications for rethinking nature.

Merleau-Ponty’s radical reflection conceptualizes the transcendental and the empirical as intertwined, emerging only via an écart. I advance this concept of transcendental empirical écart by studying the problem of measurement in science, in both general and quantum mechanical contexts. Section one analyses scientific problems of measurement, focusing on issues of temporality, to show how measurement entails a transcendental that diverges with the empirical. Section two briefly interprets this result via Merleau-Ponty’s concept of depth, to indicate how measurement reveals a temporality that is not an already given ground that would guarantee the transcendental in advance: temporality is instead ‘deep,’ itself engendering a divergence of transcendental and empirical operations that first allows for measurement and sense.

A phenomenological account of spatial perception in relation to the lived body. The Sense of Space brings together space and body to show that space is a plastic environment, charged with meaning, that reflects the distinctive character of human embodiment in the full range of its moving, perceptual, emotional, expressive, developmental, and social capacities. Drawing on the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Bergson, as well as contemporary psychology to develop a renewed account of the moving, perceiving body, the book suggests that our sense of space ultimately reflects our ethical relations to other people and to the places we inhabit.

This chapter studies the theme of the body in Merleau-Ponty by first showing how it is anticipated in The Structure of Behaviour and is central to the Phenomenology of Perception. In addition to illuminating Merleau-Ponty's concept of the body, the aim is to show how the body is, for Merleau-Ponty, a key methodological term, since it marks philosophy's inherent openness to something prephilosophical, to which philosophy must be responsible. The chapter shows how this openness and the body's expressive role in the earlier philosophy anticipates key issues in the later The Visible and the Invisible.

A study of shifts in scientific strategies for measuring the living body, especially in dynamic systems theory: sheds light on Hegel's concept of measure in The Science of Logic, and the dialectical transition from categories of being to categories of essence; shows how Hegel's speculative logic anticipates and analyzes key tensions in scientific attempts to measure and conceive the dynamic agency of the body. The study's analysis of the body as having an essentially dynamic identity irreducible to measurement aims to contribute to reconceiving the body, in a way that may be helpful to overcoming dualism

This article studies the phenomenology of chronic illness in light of phenomenology’s insights into ecstatic temporality and freedom. It shows how a chronic illness can, in lived experience, manifest itself as a disturbance of our usual relation to ecstatic temporality and thence as a disturbance of freedom. This suggests that ecstatic temporality is related to another sort of time—“provisional time”—that is in turn rooted in the body. The article draws on Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and Heidegger’s Being and Time , shedding light on the latter’s concept of ecstatic temporality. It also discusses implications for self-management of chronic illness, especially in children.

Touch requires that one move in concert with one's tactile object. This provokes the question how joint movement of this sort yields perception of tactile qualities of the object vs. tactile qualities of an object-augmented body. Phenomenological analysis together with results of dynamic systems theory (in psychology) suggest that the difference stems from 'resonant' vs. 'reverberant' modalities of body-object movement. The further suggestion is that tactile movement is itself a form of discriminative intelligence, and that the peculiar intimacy of touch and movement can shed light on a general role of movement in perception, subject-object relations, and intelligence.

This paper studies the role of faces in animal life to gain insight into Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, especially his later ontology. The relation between animal faces and moving, animal bodies involves a peculiar, expressive logic. This logic echoes the physiognomic structure of perception that Merleau-Ponty detects in his earlier philosophy, and exemplifies and clarifies a logic elemental to his later ontology, especially to his concept of an invisible that is of (endogenous to) the visible. The question why the logic of the face can manifest this analogy or homology with the logic of perception and ontology is treated through a study of embryology, which suggests that the logic of the face ramifies a deeper logic of being. Methodologically, the face is taken as something like a lens into the onto-logic of being. This lens suggests that what underlies Merleau-Ponty's later ontology is a logic of animality.

Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy attempts to locate meaning-sense-within being. Space and time are thus ingredient in sense. This is apparent in his earlier studies of structure, fields, expression and the body schema, and the linkage of space, time and sense becomes thematic in Merleau-Ponty’s later thinking about institution, chiasm and reversibility. But the space-time-sense linkage is also apparent in his studies of embryogenesis. The paper shows this by reconstructing Merleau-Ponty’s critical analysis of Driesch’s embryology (in the nature lectures) to demonstrate how, for Merleau-Ponty, embryogenesis entails a principle of sense-generation that is irreducible to the plenitude of space or spatial distributions of material, yet is inseparable from being and spatial facts. This principle indicates a ‘depth’ or ‘hollow’ internal to “flat being,” in virtue of which being can create more sense than is yet given. The paper illuminates this ‘depth’ and the role of space in sense by turning to some recent scientific accounts-of bees deciding on new nesting places, of termites building mounds, and of embryogenesis-to suggest how space is inherently ingredient in the genesis of sense. This depends on turning from a concept of space as extensive to place as intensive, for it is the intensity of places, rather than the extensity of already delineated spaces, that affords sense generation.

This paper aims to clarify Merleau-Ponty’s difficult concept of “reversibility” by interpreting it as resuming the dialectical critique of the rationalist and empiricist tradition that informs Merleau-Ponty’s earlier work. The focus is on reversibility in “Eye and Mind,” as dismantling the traditional dualism of activity and passivity. This clarification also puts reversibility in continuity with the Phenomenology’s appropriation of Kant, letting us note an affiliation between Merleau-Ponty’s reversibility and Heidegger’s Ereignis: in each case being itself already performs the operation that Kant had located in the imagination. Reversibility discovers this Kantian imagination moving in place, Ereignis discovers it in temporality.

In ancient philosophy life has priority: non-living matter is made intelligible by living activity. The modern evolutionary synthesis reverses this priority: life is a passive result of blind, non-living material processes. But recent work in science and philosophy puts that reversal in question, by emphasizing how living beings are self-organizing and active. “Naturalizing” this new emphasis on living activity requires not simply a return to ancient philosophy but a new ontology, a new concept of nature. To explore that ontology, I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, studying the link between the organism and its environment, the body and the world, as reflecting a nature in which things are already linked in a moving whole. I focus on the topics of expression and movement, putting Merleau-Ponty into conversation with recent discussions in philosophy of science, especially in immunology and in evolutionary theory, and attending to Bergsonian and Hegelian threads in the background of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking.

Husserlian variation, Bergsonian intuition and Peircean abduction are contrasted as methodological responses to the traditional philosophical problem of deriving knowledge of universals from singulars. Each method implies a correspondingly different view of the generation of the variations from which knowledge is derived. To make sense of the latter differences, and to distinguish the different sorts of variation sought by philosophers and scientists, a distinction between extensive, intensive, and abductive-intensive variation is introduced. The link between philosophical method and the generation of variation is used to illuminate different philosophical conceptions of nature and nature's relation to meaning and sense.