Merleau-Ponty

Merleau-Ponty makes interesting arguments about the body and the senses in his work, "The Visible and the Invisble". He mentions that the senses of touch and sight are interchangeable; we can use our sense of touch to "see" objects and our sense of sight, our gaze, can allow us to consciously know of the objects’ existence, to almost tangibly “handle” them. What is especially interesting is his theory on the body as a chiasm. It is the way we are able to “[cross]-over” and it bridges the gap between “subject experience” and “objective existence”. To me, I felt this referred to our own, however flawed or wonderful, experiences in life regarding an object and how this influences (or is influenced by) the object’s simple, unbiased state of being.

Embodiment, I believe, is an example of this duality, as proposed by Descartes and summarised for us in the first week of class. As Wikipedia defines it, embodiment is “the way in which human (or any other animal’s) psychology arises from the brain’s and body’s physiology”. So, the person’s experiences and mindset about something are based off the brain and body’s (objective) “mechanical, physical, and biochemical functions”. In our project, we can try to further make this link clear. We can try to find an isolated experience and try to make it, somehow, independent of its physiology.