24 - Phantom Limbs and Plasticity: Merleau-Ponty and Current Neurobiology

Summary

At the end of chapter 3 of Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty summarises his recent research on the relationship between body and motricity. He declares: ‘What we have discovered through the study of motricity is, in short, a new sense of the word “sense”’ (2012: 148). By ‘we’, Merleau-Ponty means we phenomenologists. And by ‘the study of motricity [motricité]’, Merleau-Ponty means ‘the neurobiological study of motricity’. This new meaning of the word ‘meaning [sens]’ clearly emerges from the crossing between a phenomenological and a biological approach to the body's spatiality, to the body's specific orientation in space and movement, in other words to ‘being in the world’. When it comes to the body, to life, to the issue of being this living body in this world, it is of primary importance to give up what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘intellectualist psychology’ as well as ‘idealist philosophy’, and to stress the empirical biological dimension of our existential situation. He insists on the necessity of taking into account the most recent biological and neurobiological discoveries. This double approach constitutes as we know the singularity and uniqueness of the Phenomenology of Perception.

My first issue here is to interrogate what currently remains from this approach. It seems that with the most recent neurobiological discoveries concerning bodily motricity, we are also witnessing the emergence of a new meaning of the word ‘meaning’. To what extent is this new meaning still indebted to Merleau-Ponty? To what extent is it not? At first sight, as is practically always the case, the confrontation between the domain of continental philosophy and that of strict neurobiology seems unbalanced. In the first part of this chapter, I will show that the current neurobiological meaning of the word ‘meaning’ appears to be poorer and much less differentiated than the one Merleau-Ponty was talking about. Again, for Merleau-Ponty, the novelty of the word ‘meaning’ results from the crossing of several approaches. It seems on the contrary that the neurobiological definition of the new meaning of the word ‘meaning’ currently reduces it to a mere empirical and objective set of data, deprived of any phenomenological or existential dimension.