Tony O'Connor

Categorizing the Body

AbstractI shall attempt to do four things in this paper:(1) sketch the influence of two models—one essentialist, the other non-essentialist—on some contemporary ways of categorizing the body;(2) indicate certain tensions that remain because of the dominant influence of the essentialist model;(3) discuss what to my mind is the most sustained attempt by phenomenology to come to terms with the problem of the body by concentrating on Merleau-Pontys theory of operative intentionality;(4) argue that intentionality and ontological analysis must always be distortive of this issue, and indicate an alternative way of approaching the matter.

Intentionality, indirect ontology and historical ontology: Reading Merleau-Ponty and Foucault together

In this paper we examine the thoughts of Merleau-Ponty and Foucault to help highlight important issues at stake in the questions of the conditions of human knowledge and action, and of the historical character of their occurrence. We argue that each philosopher makes a valuable contribution to the revision of central philosophical assumptions about what is involved in such questions. In this regard, it might appear that we offer a kind of synthesis of the phenomenological and poststructural approaches to philosophy, yet this is not the case. We want to recognise that each position, and any proposed synthesis of them, is open and incomplete, with many unresolved issues. We consider that all this offers an invitation and a challenge to rethink the conditions of human thought and action while making use of a mixture of phenomenological and archaeological-genealogical thinking. Here human embodied experience and changing historical circumstances play a central role. Of crucial importance here, as Carman and Hansen indicate, is MerleauPonty’s commitment to the phenomenological approach to philosophy, while not sticking to the letter of Husserl’s philosophical doctrines. This bifurcation of phenomenological vision has meant that Merleau-Ponty’s open philosophical attitude occasionally has been too sharply pinned down, and it has been subject to regular misinterpretation. One consequence of this has been that the resonance of Merleau-Ponty’s later work with poststructuralist French philosophy has been largely unrecognised. Further, his position has fallen victim to ‘a certain 1970’s interpretation’ when his philosophy was regarded as being somewhat old-fashioned. Merleau-Ponty helps us to gain a critical perspective on the notion of the ‘historical apriori’ introduced by Husserl in the ‘Origin of Geometry’. In the Phenomenology of Perception he develops his account of the nature of man as historical idea rather than as a natural species: