ABSTRACT
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s central original idea about perception is that it is not just contingently but essentially a bodily phenomenon. Perception is not a private mental state, nor is the body just one more physical event among others. The body is not just a causal but a transcendental condition of perception, which is in turn not just an inner subjective state but also a mode of being in the world. The body schema is not a representation of the body, then, but our ability to anticipate and incorporate the world prior to applying concepts to objects. The point is no longer simply that the body, in being aware of the world, is also always reflexively aware of itself, or that its conscious sensory and motor capacities are dependent moments of a unified whole. Motor intentionality is not a neurological datum, nor is it simply Merleau-Ponty’s name for concrete movement, grasping, or dorsal stream processing.
