How should one read Merleau-Ponty if one is a physicalist? That is, how can one make his vigorously anti-empirical (and yet anti-idealist) theories of the embodied mind in the Phenomenology of Perception (and elsewhere) amenable to physicalism--perhaps even against the ramifications of these theories? To put it perhaps in the best way, how can Merleau-Ponty be introduced to a physicalist, without the physicalist having to totally transform her or his conceptions? I don't have time now to consider this, but I'll name what I see as the big hurdle: What in the physicalist would be most challenged by Merleau-Ponty would be a simple notion of causality, the mainstay of both type and token physicalism, as well as the supervenience theory. Causality for Merleau-Ponty is interpreted through the concept of intentionality (interpreted as external to will or decision, suffusing the "objective" space of nature), which makes any physical state (of the brain, for example) a readiness to be-influenced by a cause: one would have to think the effect as a response that so closely resembles an anticipation of the cause that one could not distinguish between effect and merely an actualization of what was latent in the influenced object. Can one still use the vocabulary of physicalism to address even just the non-mental (the physical) that operated according to these terms? Physicalism to an extent already encounters these problems in the reflex. But could it address the physical if this reflex-like action were all that constituted the physical? I'll elaborate on this perhaps later.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Merleau-Ponty and physicalism?
How should one read Merleau-Ponty if one is a physicalist? That is, how can one make his vigorously anti-empirical (and yet anti-idealist) theories of the embodied mind in the Phenomenology of Perception (and elsewhere) amenable to physicalism--perhaps even against the ramifications of these theories? To put it perhaps in the best way, how can Merleau-Ponty be introduced to a physicalist, without the physicalist having to totally transform her or his conceptions? I don't have time now to consider this, but I'll name what I see as the big hurdle: What in the physicalist would be most challenged by Merleau-Ponty would be a simple notion of causality, the mainstay of both type and token physicalism, as well as the supervenience theory. Causality for Merleau-Ponty is interpreted through the concept of intentionality (interpreted as external to will or decision, suffusing the "objective" space of nature), which makes any physical state (of the brain, for example) a readiness to be-influenced by a cause: one would have to think the effect as a response that so closely resembles an anticipation of the cause that one could not distinguish between effect and merely an actualization of what was latent in the influenced object. Can one still use the vocabulary of physicalism to address even just the non-mental (the physical) that operated according to these terms? Physicalism to an extent already encounters these problems in the reflex. But could it address the physical if this reflex-like action were all that constituted the physical? I'll elaborate on this perhaps later.
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2 comments:
It seems reading Hubert Dreyfus is helpful in this regard. He's a pretty dedicated fan of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, yet avoids idealism. You should look up the old debate between him and Daniel Dennett over Artificial Intelligence. http://www.slate.com/id/3650/entry/23905/
Dreyfus talks about the way our brains are wired, through neural nets, allows for a materialist understanding of referential totality and a Merleau-Pontian notion of spatiality and the body.
I think it is important to note that Merleau-Ponty was doing phenomenology, not quantum physics. Our experience of space cannot be rendered intelligible solely on atoms and whatnot, but this is not because there is some-thing that isn't reducible to the physical. Rather, we acquire spatial and bodily familiarity through a massive series of nets in our brains.
I like that debate--thank you for showing it to me: I always liked Dennett too so its neat to see them talking to each other.
Rather than jump right into neural nets idea, it is interesting I think to take an step back and see how Dreyfus reacts to Dennett's suggestion that, basically, neurons are little robots, and the robots make up the brain. If there is a homology between this idea and the neural nets idea (I really need to read his book on Computers! I'll get to it soon!)... well then we're in good shape for seeing how the philosophy of mind folk (which I here call physicalists, though that might not be the right way to talk about them in this day and age, I don't know--but I want to connect this all to the genealogy of the ideas of today, as I'm elaborating in this sentence) can make that leap into Merleau-Ponty without getting into the phenomenology of skill acquisition that Dreyfus is (rightly) keen about. Even though I find it super-interesting, I'm just trying to figure out how someone like Dennett could, on his own AI principles, read Merleau-Ponty... and I guess this debate is good evidence of how that could work--so thanks!
What I mean by "can read MP" though means precisely how one can construe (from a point of view like Dennett's) the ideas of MP into something that quantum physics can begin to address. This is why I say this might require a little of reading MP "perhaps against the ramifications of his theories." All that was to lead up to a kind of pseudo-thesis using the old vocabulary of physicalism: that ironically the movement in philosophy of mind would, if people began integrating the ideas of MP (which of course they are) be back from token physicalism and supervenience to type physicalism, if they could still actually call it this (because, as you show with the neural net idea, the material brain itself would be already formed somewhat like what the physicalist would call the "mental:" the mental would be in space). I don't know if that's an interesting point or whatever but I thought the irony might be worth it.
But back to what you say, and back to the real thrust of what I'm getting at here: do you think it's that important to dissociate Merleau-Ponty from the language of science? I mean, that does respect what he has to say about the dual ability of things to be studied as objective/empirical and as lived (not to mention also as idealist), and that both can provide us information though the second one is the only one that can really render our experience. Doesn't what he say also allow for an expansion of science (by rending some of its own favorite positivist concepts apart, like in string theory--this is only an example of the rending, though, not of the accommodation I'm going to speak of) to accommodate experiential reality, perhaps? I fear Dreyfus might be emphasizing the difference between nature and the human too much, thus perhaps saying "experiential" reality is only human reality--though of course this happens in AI research as well--when the later work of Merleau-Ponty is more concerned with brute wild being and perhaps less with this being remaining commensurate with our (human) experiential reality? And doesn't that open up a space for science that is more than just a place where science can give us just different information about the same things? I totally agree with all you said--these questions just remain interesting to me with respect to Merleau-Ponty...
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