The human being, then, cannot be understood as a combination of two substances, mind and body. It is a unitary phenomenon. Any conceptual relationship we have with things is itself grounded in and made possible by the seamless dialectical synergy between incarnate consciousness and the world. Merleau-Ponty will refer to this synergy in terms of a “bodily schema” (schéma corporel) (1964a, 5), a reference to the pre-reflective sensory motor grip that we have on the world. This is why Merleau-Ponty refers to his project as a ‘phenomenology of origins.’ It is one that returns us to the pre-conceptual experiences that underlie objective thought and brings to light the complex web of relations that endows things with the meanings that they have. The world, on this view, is not something separate from me. It is the ambiguous, pre-objective field that I am already woven into in my everyday perceptual acts; it is “where the paths of my various experiences intersect, and also where my own and other people's intersect and engage each other like gears” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, xx).
This conception of being-in-the-world has helped to undercut one of the more dominant paradigms in contemporary Anglophone philosophy, the paradigm of ‘naturalism.’ Due to tremendous advances in the empirical sciences in the nineteenth-century in areas such as zoology, physiology, and evolutionary theory, and, more recently, in the emerging field of neuroscience, naturalism has become more or less a default setting in contemporary philosophy. This view generally entails two assumptions, one epistemological and one metaphysical. The epistemological assumption contends that the detached theoretical standpoint and the procedures of empirical science constitute the best way to gain knowledge of intra-worldly things, including ourselves. The metaphysical assumption contends that the world — including our own thoughts, beliefs, and desires — is constituted by physical objects in causal interaction (Ratcliffe 2009, 330). On this account, as the German scientist Karl Vogt proclaimed at the end of the end of the nineteenth century, “Thoughts stand in roughly the same relation to the brain as gall to the liver or urine to the kidneys” (cited in Guignon 1983, 41). But this naturalistic interpretation uncritically assumes the standpoint of theoretical detachment. As a result, it overlooks the experiential world that we are engaged in every day. In this world of practical involvements, we do not encounter objects in a neutral or impartial way. Indeed, we do not encounter ‘objects’ at all because the term itself entails a view of entities as being separate and distinct from us (as ‘subjects’). As a being-in-the-world we are already involved with things that make sense, that are already rich with meaning, and this meaning is disclosed not through theoretical or conceptual analysis but in how we pre-reflectively handle, use, and manipulate things in our everyday practices.
In this way, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty show that the primary relationship we have with things is not one of detachment and objectivity but of situated and skillful involvement in a referential context of meanings, and it is a contextual involvement that can never be made theoretically explicit. This is why Heidegger will refer to the standpoint of naturalism as one that is “unworlded” (1992, 217) because it abstracts out the situated and purposive meanings of being-in-the-world. But this does not mean that Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are anti-science. In fact, Merleau-Ponty draws extensively on empirical science and neurological case studies in developing his own account of perception and embodied agency. What they are critiquing, rather, is the uncritical privileging of methodological detachment and objectivity, a view that has been largely uncontested in modern philosophy since Descartes. As Heidegger says, “What is messing up the real problematic is not just naturalism as some people think, but the overall dominance and primacy of the theoretical” (cited in Sheehan 2006, 78). Such a standpoint invariably overlooks and takes for granted our embodied familiarity with things and the situated meanings of the experiential world that underlie all scientific thought. Merleau-Ponty makes this point explicit when he claims scientific thinking “must return to the ‘there is’ which underlies it; to the site, the soil of the sensible and opened world such as it is in our life and for our body … that actual body I call mine” (1964a, 160–161; cited in Langer 1989, xi).
Aspects of alterity
One of the more significant contributions of the existentialist account of being-in-the-world is that it makes it possible to engage perspectives that have been historically marginalized in the Western tradition. If, as the existentialist argue, we can make sense of things only from within a situated and embodied orientation, then this orientation must also be shaped by aspects of alterity or ‘otherness’ such as madness, racial and sexual difference, and physical disability. These aspects not only inform our embodied ways of being but they can also disrupt the seamless weave between self and world. Psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), for instance, drew on his own experiences of racism as a black man born and raised in the French colony of Martinique to expand on and critique Merleau-Ponty's conception of being-in-the-world. He argued that the ‘bodily schema,’ the pre-conscious sensory-motor grip on the world that we normally take for granted, is not present in the same way for colonized people (see Weate 2001). Fanon introduces what he calls the “historical-racial schema” that captures the black experience of confusion and alienation, a result of being forcibly “woven out” (1967, 111) of the shared meanings and practices that constitute the white European world. Because he does not belong to the European world, the colonized black man does not share the same pre-objective understanding that the European has. For Fanon, then, Merleau-Ponty's account of the bodily schema does not map onto the particularities of “the being of the black man” (110).
Fanon goes on to suggest that there is a deeper layer of alienation that he calls the “racial epidermal schema” (112). Drawing on Sartre's conception of ‘the look’ (le regard), Fanon describes how the black man's connection with the world can be disrupted when he is transformed into a brute object or thing by the judgmental gaze of the white European. In these situations, the black man feels immobilized and incapacitated, finding it difficult to stretch into the world, to handle equipment, and participate in public activities. The smooth, pre-conscious synergy that characterizes the European's existence is out of reach. He becomes imprisoned in a sphere of immanence, where his physical motility and sense of self are constrained by his skin color. He feels completely “dislocated [and] unable to be abroad with the other” (112). The result is a very different way of moving through the world and inhabiting lived space. The black man is inhibited; he embodies shame in the way he walks and carries his shoulders, in his lowered head and reluctance to make eye contact, and in his deferential way of speaking. Fanon refers to a feeling of “nausea” (116) to convey the sense of being trapped in the racial-epidermal schema that emerges from internalizing the objectifying and dehumanizing judgments of the European. He offers a personal example of how the racial-epidermal schema emerges in the simple statement of a white child pointing at him on a train and saying to his mother, “Look a Negro” (114). For Fanon, this statement already contains a host of sociocultural assumptions that transform him into an object, into a hostile, even bestial, thing. Fanon is suggesting that the bodily schema of those who are colonized is penetrated by a sense of alienation and objectification that culminates in the paralyzing experience of being “walled in” (117) by the color of their own skin.