ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how Merleau-Ponty describes the perceptuo-practical structure of lived embodiment. It shows how the perceptual-practical field can count as a kind of givenness, what Robert Hanna calls 'the Grip of the Given', without falling into the Myth of the semantic Given. This part of the argument will be developed through close criticisms of both Jay Rosenberg and Robert Hanna. The central claim to establish here is that, because the habitual normativity of somatic intentionality lacks the requisite sort of rational authority that the Given would have to have in order to be genuinely Mythic, the 'practical Given' is not vulnerable to the criticism of the Myth of the Given. The chapter presents a rough sketch of Merleau-Ponty's account of perceptuo-practical intentionality and habitual normativity. Merleau-Ponty undertakes a detailed description of motor intentionality as logically distinct from discursive or intellectual intentionality and shows why intellectualism cannot account for the Grip of the Given.
