Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908 to 1961) was a French philosopher of the phenomenological school, best known for Phenomenology of Perception (1945). His central claim is that we know the world first through the living body, not as minds looking out at objects: “The body is our general medium for having a world.” Therapeutic Shamanism also treats the body as a conscious knower in its own right, though it goes further than he did, to a world of other beings who can be met as kin.
Who was Maurice Merleau-Ponty? #
He was born in Rochefort-sur-Mer, France, in 1908, and died suddenly in Paris in 1961, aged fifty-three. He taught at the University of Lyon and lectured on child psychology at the Sorbonne, and in 1952 he was elected to the Chair of Philosophy at the Collège de France, the youngest person ever to hold a chair there. With Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir he co-founded the journal Les Temps modernes in 1945.1
His books include The Structure of Behaviour (1942), Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and the essay Eye and Mind (1961). The Visible and the Invisible, unfinished at his death, was published in 1964.1
What is phenomenology? #
A way of doing philosophy by describing experience as it is actually lived, before any theory has been laid over it. Merleau-Ponty thought that most philosophy and psychology had made the same mistake. They started from a world of finished objects and then asked how a mind could come to know them. Some built perception up out of separate sensations that nobody has ever actually had; others handed the work to a judging intellect that nobody has ever caught in the act. Going back to perception itself, he found that the one who perceives is not a mind at all, but a body.2
What has the body to do with knowing? #
Everything, in his account. The body he means is not the body as an object among objects, but the body we live as, already moving, skilled and at home in a world it does not need to think about. “The body is our general medium for having a world.” Consciousness, he wrote, is in the first place not a matter of ‘I think that’ but of ‘I can’.3
Habits show it most clearly. A typist knows where the letters are in the way we know where our limbs are. “It is knowledge in the hands, which is forthcoming only when bodily effort is made”. An organist settles into a strange organ “as one settles into a house”, and for a blind person the tip of the stick becomes “an area of sensitivity”, part of the body’s own touch.3
Perception, too, is something the body does with the world, not something done to a mind. He called it “a communication or a communion”. And he thought that our senses naturally run into one another, so that we see the brittleness of glass and hear it in the breaking, and that we lose this only because “we have unlearned how to see, hear, and generally speaking, feel”.4 See What is embodied (bodily) intelligence?
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
In Therapeutic Shamanism the physical body is not a vehicle for the soul or a thing we live in. It is one of the parts of the selfParts of the self. There are four parts of the self, the realm-corresponding members of the Inner Tribe: the Body and the middle-world self (both of the middle-world), the Soul (of the Lower-World) and the Spirit (of the Upper-World). The Aware Self, also called the Witness, is not a fifth part but a capacity: the awareness that can watch all four, with compassion and equanimity. Read the full answer, with its own consciousness, intelligence, wisdom, needs and drives, and it needs to be listened to and respected as much as any other part.5 It is also honest in a way the head is not. The head tells stories, rationalises and justifies, whilst the body is always trying to tell us the truth. See What are Soul, Spirit, the middle-world self and the body?
Shamanic practice works with this kind of bodily knowing on purpose. In shapeshiftingShapeshifting. Becoming another being within a journey, fully enough to know it from the inside: one of the two routes to grokking, a transformation practice, and a direct experience of interconnection. Read the full answer, becoming an Animal, a Plant or a Mountain brings not an intellectual understanding of that being but a deep felt senseFelt sense. Eugene Gendlin’s term for the whole bodily ‘feel’ of an issue: deeper than emotion, deeper than words, reached through Focusing. Read the full answer, a knowing from the inside out.6 Merleau-Ponty reached his view of bodily knowing by describing ordinary perception; Therapeutic Shamanism reaches its own through journeying and shapeshifting. The two descriptions sound alike, but they come from different places, and neither was drawn from the other.
His “unlearned” senses can also be set next to the Therapeutic Shamanism account of how modern people came to attend to the world, the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer as a shift of attention towards the left hemisphere’s way of seeing, which breaks the world into separate pieces.7 Both suggest that a fuller way of perceiving was not lost for good, only trained out of us.
Was Merleau-Ponty an animist? #
No. He wrote about animism with some sympathy. Animist perception, in his account, is not a mistaken guess about hidden minds inside things, but things being met as the very presence of what they mean, so that “everywhere there are warnings with no one who issues them”. But he wrote of it as “infantile and primitive animism”, and grouped children, ‘primitive’ peoples and the ill against “adult, normal and civilized experience”, the developmental framing of his time.8
He also stopped short of kinship. The things of nature, for him, remain “a resolutely silent Other”, rooted in “a background of nature which is alien to man”.9 In Therapeutic Shamanism everything is alive and conscious, and so everything can, in principle, be communicated with.10 See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
Who has built on his work? #
Many people, across philosophy and science. In The Embodied Mind (1991), Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch linked his ideas to the new embodied and enactive approaches in cognitive science, and the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus drew on him to argue against computer models of the mind.11 The philosopher Iris Marion Young, in her essay “Throwing Like a Girl” (1980), applied his account of bodily movement to the situation of women, arguing that their bodily intentionality is often inhibited, experienced as an ‘I cannot’; her essay extends his account instead of rejecting it.12
In his late, unfinished work he spoke of ‘the flesh of the world’, a shared fabric from which both perceiver and perceived arise. The philosopher and ecologist David Abram reads the flesh as the interdependent web of earthly life, and his own work draws heavily on Merleau-Ponty.11 See Who is David Abram, and where does the phrase “more-than-human world” come from?
