ABSTRACT
What makes my own body so different from the things around me? When Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his Phenomenology of Perception, turns to the question of how to describe the specific spatiality of one’s own body, he starts with an everyday example of someone sitting at a table. “If my arm is resting on the table, I should never think of saying that it is beside the ashtray in the way in which the ash-tray is beside the telephone” (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 112). This seemingly simple observation already suffices to effectively demonstrate how seriously Merleau-Ponty takes the bodily perspective on the world in his phenomenological account of human existence. Clearly, I do not perceive my own body, or a part of it, merely as a thing that is located somewhere in space, as I do with other things. On the contrary, without my body there is no space at all for me through which it would make sense to speak of things that are lying next to each other on the table. My pre-reflexive familiarity with the world depends on my so-called body schema, i.e. my body’s ability to project its motor intentions into the world it inhabits. But this body schema is not an image or a representation in which my body’s empirically determinable motor habits and capabilities are simply summed up. My body is polarized by its tasks, “it exists towards its tasks,” and consequently the term ‘body schema’ expresses “that my body is in the world (est au monde)” (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 115).
