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MERLEAU-PONTY on the BODY Sean Dorrance Kelly Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Ratio (new series) XV 4 December 2002 0034–0006 MERLEAU-PONTY ON THE BODY Sean Dorrance Kelly Abstract The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty claims that there are two distinct ways in which we can understand the place of an object when we are visually apprehending it. The first involves an intentional relation to the object that is essentially cognitive or can serve as the input to cognitive processes; the second irreducibly involves a bodily set or preparation to deal with the object. Because of its essential bodily component, Merleau-Ponty calls this second kind of understanding ‘motor intentional’. In this paper I consider some phenomenological, conceptual, and cognitive neuro-scien- tific results that help to elucidate and defend the distinction between intentional and motor intentional activity. I go on to argue that motor intentional activity has a logical structure that is essentially distinct from that of the more canonical kinds of inten- tional states. In particular, the characteristic logical distinction between the content and the attitude of an intentional state does not carry over to the motor intentional case. 1. Introduction In the Phenomenology of Perception, first published in 1945, Merleau- Ponty describes a patient named Schneider, whose visual pathol- ogy stems from a traumatic injury to the brain incurred during trench warfare in the First World War. Schneider’s case of morbid motility, according to Merleau-Ponty, ‘clearly shows the funda- mental relations between the body and space’.1 The following somewhat lengthy passage occurs near the beginning of Merleau- Ponty’s discussion of Schneider: In the . patient . one notices a dissociation of the act of pointing from reactions of taking or grasping: the same subject who is unable to point to order to a part of his body, quickly moves his hand to the point where a mosquito is stinging him. [A]sked to point to some part of his body, his nose for example, [he] can only manage to do so if he is allowed to take 1 Phenomenology of Perception, p. 103. Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002 MERLEAU-PONTY ON THE BODY 377 hold of it. If the patient is set the task of interrupting the move- ment before its completion . the action becomes impossible. It must therefore be concluded that ‘grasping’ . is different from ‘pointing’. From the outset the grasping movement is magically at its completion; it can begin only by anticipating its end, since to disallow taking hold is sufficient to inhibit the action. And it has to be admitted that [even in the case of a normal subject] a point on my body can be present to me as one to be taken hold of without being given in this anticipated grasp as a point to be indicated. But how is this possible? If I know where my nose is when it is a question of holding it, how can I not know where it is when it is a matter of pointing to it? ‘It is probably because’, Merleau-Ponty concludes, ‘knowledge of where something is can be understood in a number of ways’.2 The general point of Merleau-Ponty’s discussion is that the understanding of space that informs my skillful, unreflective bodily activity – activity such as unreflectively grasping the door- knob in order to go through the door, or skillfully typing at the keyboard – is not the same as, nor can it be explained in terms of, the understanding of space that informs my reflective, cognitive or intellectual acts – acts such as pointing at the doorknob in order to identify it. As Merleau-Ponty says, in skillful, unreflective bodily activity my body appears to me as an attitude directed towards a certain existing or possible task. And indeed its spatiality is not . a spatiality of position, but a spatiality of situation.3 To give a name to intentional activities that essentially involve our bodily, situational understanding of space and spatial features, Merleau-Ponty coins the phrase ‘motor intentionality’. Grasping is the canonical motor-intentional activity. As recently as 1992, perceptual psychologists were loathe to distinguish between the kind of spatial information available to the visual system for visuo-motor activities such as grasping and the kind available for perceptual judgements about location implicit in acts of pointing. In a forward thinking paper of the day one psychologist writes: 2 Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 103–4. 3 Phenomenology of Perception, p. 100. Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002 378 SEAN DORRANCE KELLY We often do not differentiate between grasping and pointing when we generalize about how vision is used when generating limb movements. It is possible, that how individuals use vision may vary as a function of whether they are generating pointing or grasping movements, and that some principles of how vision is used during reaching and pointing is (sic) not generalizable to grasping.4 This was a maverick view in 1992. Since that time, however, the important work of neuroscientists A. David Milner and Melvyn Goodale has opened the way for acceptance of this basic Merleau- Pontian distinction – the distinction between essentially bodily understandings of space and spatial features, on the one hand, and essentially cognitive or reflective understandings of these on the other. Much of Milner and Goodale’s work comes from an analysis of D.F., a patient who suffered carbon monoxide poison- ing that resulted in a visual pathology strikingly similar to Schnei- der’s. Milner and Goodale describe her situation as follows: D.F.’s ability to recognize or discriminate between even simple geometric forms is grossly impaired. [Her] pattern of visual deficits [however] ... is largely restricted to deficits in form perception. D.F. recovered, within weeks, the ability to reach out and grasp everyday objects with remarkable accuracy. We have discovered recently that she is very good at catching a ball or even a short wooden stick thrown towards her. She negotiates obstacles in her path with ease . These various skills suggest that although D.F. is poor at perceptual report of object qualities such as size and orientation, she is much better at using those same qualities to guide her actions.5 In particular, Milner and Goodale report, D.F. is capable of responding differentially to spatial features of an object like its size, shape, and orientation even in cases in which she is inca- pable of visually identifying those very features. One test of this involved the identification of the orientation of a slot. Quoting again from Milner and Goodale: [We] used a vertically mounted disc in which a [rectangular] 4 Carnahan, Heather, ‘Eye, head and hand coordination during manual aiming’, in Proteau, L. and Elliott, D. (eds.), Advances in Psychology 85: Vision and Motor Control, Else- vier Science Publishers B.V., 1992, p. 188. 5 The Visual Brain in Action, pp. 126–128. Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002 MERLEAU-PONTY ON THE BODY 379 slot . was cut: on different test trials, the slot was randomly set at 0, 45, 90, or 135˚. We found that D.F.’s attempts to make a perceptual report of the orientation of the slot showed little relationship to its actual orientation, and this was true whether her reports were made verbally or by manually setting a compar- ison slot. [Further examination revealed a large variety of other reporting methods for which her performance was equally bad.] Remarkably, however, when she was asked to insert her hand or a hand-held card into the slot from a starting position an arm’s length away, she showed no particular difficulty, moving her hand (or the card) towards the slot in the correct orientation and inserting it quite accurately. Video recordings showed that her hand began to rotate in the appropriate direc- tion as soon as it left the start position. [One is reminded here, by the way, of Merleau-Ponty’s claim that ‘from the outset the grasping action is magically at its completion’.] In short, although she could not report the orientation of the slot, she could ‘post’ her hand or a card into it without difficulty.6 Milner and Goodale go on to suggest a neurophysiological basis for the dissociation between pointing and grasping. They claim that there are two different streams of visual information flow in the brain, one of which is geared to perceptual judge- ment, the other of which is geared directly to action. D.F.’s case is one of the principle pieces of evidence that there is not one common understanding of orientation on the basis of which both judgement and action occur, but rather two different ways of understanding spatial qualities like orientation. Indeed, D.F.’s understanding of the orientation of the slot, unlike the more familiar cognitive understanding, is essentially in terms of her bodily capacities and dispositions to act with respect to it. In the terminology of Merleau-Ponty, she has a motor intentional under- standing of orientation. In this paper I would like to explore some of the distinctive features of motor intentional activity, and in particular to say something about its logical form. 2. The motor intentional understanding of location Perhaps a good way to begin to explore the features of motor intentional activity is by comparing them to the features of more 6 The Visual Brain in Action, p. 128. Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002 380 SEAN DORRANCE KELLY cognitive, report oriented modes of understanding an object. The comparison is especially interesting when it comes to the understanding one has of the spatial features of the object like location, size, shape, orientation, and so on.
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