Collating lectures
given at the Ratio conference in 2001, this book presents seven very different
perspectives on the body, which has historically been something of a blindspot
to the Western philosophical tradition, perhaps even up until Nietzsche. For
anyone interested in the work of the French phenomenologist Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, this is a valuable collection. The majority of the essays deal
with Merleau-Ponty either directly or indirectly, and this reflects the
increased attention that has been accorded to his work in recent times,
including a forthcoming Cambridge Companion. But this book is expansive in the
themes considered and not reducible to any one school or thinker: Artificial
Intelligence, psychoanalysis, and feminist thinking about sex and gender, are
but some of the many themes dealt with. There is also an ongoing rapprochement
of analytic and continental philosophy with Sidney Shoemaker, John McDowell, and
Donald Davidson juxtaposed against the likes of Merleau-Ponty and Samuel Todes,
who Hubert Dreyfus characterises as renewing the Merleau-Pontian project.

Contributing to
this rapprochement, Quassim Cassam defends the idea that we can think of our
body as objects, against what he takes to be the Sartrean/Merleau-Pontyian
position that this is impossible. ‘Representing Bodies’ is an illuminative
essay, but it is not always clear who he is writing against, particularly given
that Merleau-Ponty explicitly argues for a difference between grasping and
pointing, between the body as an "I can", and the body as an "I
think"; the latter which renders the body capable of being treated as an
object. Of course, it is precisely this treating of the body as an object that
Schneider’s brain injury, as is documented thoroughly in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, will not
allow him to accomplish (he can grab his nose when sneezing, but cannot
consciously point to it). There are also various arguments in this book
designed to affirm the primacy of the "I can", or the primacy of
being with our bodies, rather than objectifying them. In this respect, it is a
pity that Cassam does not engage the Phenomenology
of Perception in any depth. Instead, he suggests that it is a mistake to
assume that the body cannot be both subject and object at the same time, and,
of course, this is explicitly what Merleau-Ponty argues for at length, against
Sartre, and it is what ensures that the perceptual faith is typified by
ambiguity.

Still, this aspect
of Merleau-Ponty’s work is accorded much more attention in Sean Kelly’s essay
‘Merleau-Ponty and the Body’. He highlights the importance of
‘motor-intentionality’ to Merleau-Ponty’s account, and distinguishes the
unreflective grasping body from the reflective pointing one. Demonstrative
pointing depends on knowledge of the object that differentiates it from all of
other objects, or in Gareth Evans’ terms (which Kelly cites) pointing involves
"knowledge of the object’s objective location, not just knowledge of its
egocentric location".

The phenomenology
of grasping doors, sitting on one’s chair, etc., are major aspects of Kelly’s
essay, as well as Dreyfus’ essay — entitled ‘Samuel Todes’s Account of
Non-conceptual Perceptual Knowledge and its Relation to Thought’. In both
cases, their analyses are illuminative in pointing to the ways in which the
understanding I might have of such processes is not capable of being understood
in abstraction, divorced from the activity itself. Rather, it is a practical,
embodied knowledge that discloses the world to us, but cannot itself be
captured in the process of doing so. What becomes apparent, is that it also
discloses a world that is always-already socialised and this, of course, is why
Iris Young’s famous 70s essay ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ was such a revelation,
highlighting as it did, that the body is also a means of transmission of
cultural knowledge.

The other ‘pair’
of essays included in this volume are pieces by Young herself, and Alison Adam.
Strangely, the essays in this book group into thematic pairs, and the mutual
references and citations also ensure that it is something of a buddies session:
Cassim and Max de Gaynesford, Kelly and Dreyfus, and Young and Adam. Of course,
Mike Brearley, former England cricket captain, is the odd man out with his
essay ‘Psychoanalysis and the Mind/body Problem’, and how could this not be the
case?! But his essay is a lucid contribution from a practising psychoanalyst,
even if he arguably makes the cardinal mistake of attempting serious
self-analysis via a detailed rumination on a dream about Geoff Boycott.

But to return to
Young and Adam, both are wary of ‘postmodern’ turns away from the body, but
neither actually specify many examples of who these postmodern thinkers are,
and how their work entails a reduction to mere textuality — such accounts of
Derrida’s work have long since been rejected. Adam even refers to an
"unfettered postmodernism" and an "unbridled
postmodernism". But that aside, she does point to an interesting tension
in feminist theorising, between sociology, which has moved away from the body,
and feminist philosophy, which has taken something of a ‘corporeal turn’, and
she rightly points to the example of Australian philosophers Rosalyn Diprose, Moira
Gatens, and Genevieve Lloyd. Her essay also contains interesting reflections on
the way in which women deal with biologically produced dirt, but not with
engineering dirt/oil, which is about machines. She suggests that a
nature/culture dualism is hence intact, and still split along gendered lines —
women being vastly under represented in the engineering profession. In her
essay ‘Lived Body vs. Gender’, Young argues that there are socio-political
grounds for retaining the sex/gender distinction, at least if it isn’t assumed
to be an ahistorical fact.

It must be noted
that there are arguably a few easy targets being attacked at the outset of this
book. Does anyone still think Sidney Shoemaker is right that perceptual
awareness is insufficient to provide for self-awareness of any sort? Does
anyone think that touching and being touched are separate and irreconcilable
orders of being in the world as Sartre argued? Perhaps they do, but even if
not, these essays are admirably clear and form a helpful volume for anyone
interested in the philosophy of the body.

© 2003 Jack Reynolds

Dr Jack Reynolds, University of Tasmania

Categories: Philosophical