My SiP examines how grounding and awareness of the physical presence through various therapeutic approaches, can help to feel present, authentic and connected in a virtual teaching and learning environment. Therefore I was quite excited when I came across Merleau-Ponty’s book “Phenomenology of Perception”. In it, he states:
“The body is our general medium for having a world.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 169)
He furthermore elaborates that the existence, so the way of being present in the world, is determined not by consciousness, but by human “corps propre”. “Consciousness is being-towards-the-thing through the intermediary of the body” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 159-160).
His thinking is validating my line of enquiry and I find it very encouraging.
He also highlights the interconnectedness and the relational, which is very relevant to my research. Those aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s theory are brilliantly summarised by Robert Macfarlane in the introduction to Nan Shepherd’s amazing book “The Living Mountain”:
“Consciousness, the human body and the phenomenal world are […] inextricably intertwined and ‘engaged’. The body ‘incarnates’ our subjectivity and we are thus, Merleau-Ponty proposed, ’embedded’ in the ‘flesh’ of the world. He described this embodied experience as ‘knowledge in the hands; our body ‘grips’ the world for us and is ‘our general medium for having a world’. And the world itself is therefore not the unchanging object presented by the natural sciences, but instead endlessly relational. It is made manifest only by presenting itself to a variety of views, and our perception of it is made possible by our bodies and their sensory-motor functions. We are co-natural with the world and it with us, but we only ever see it partially.” (p. XXX)
References:
- Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception. Translated from French by Colin Smith. London and New York: Routledge.
- Shepherd, N. (1977) The Living Mountain. Introduced by Robert Macfarlane (2011).
Canongate Books.