Merleau-Ponty at the dentist

The best argument that the body is not something merely biological--in the sense that Merleau-Ponty argues in his Structure of Comportment and Phenomenology of Perception--comes from everyone's experience at the dentist. I feel guilt, sitting in that chair there, the dentist frowning as he picks and pokes. Or else I feel immense pride at the surprisingly quick exam, the dentist moving on to other things and other patients briskly, telling you simply to come back in a half a year, you're teeth are great. The teeth he just examined were not merely physical agglomerations of atoms and chemical reactions. They were a lifestyle, a choice: if I have too much to do than worry about my teeth, these teeth simply become less invested with significance, and decay. As an extention of my subjectivity, which is merely a sphere of significance and a power to bring things into that sphere, they fall away, fade into the background. This is what causes them to decay, not any biology or physics that articulates a significance and keeps its significance articulated in an area beyond my concerns, beyond my subjective experience. Similarly, if they are pristine, it is because they occupy almost the center of my subjectivity--I obsess over them, transforming them not into flawless chemical structures but into something on which my fortunes as I see them in the world hang, desperately.