Phenomenology via Kupers per Merleau Ponty

With Merleau Ponty, per Kupers in the paper listed below, phenomenology undergoes a radical return to the body and to embodiment as the basic nexus of human living, where we always already are situated in meaningful inter-relationship.

Merleau-Ponty’s overall ambition was to disclose the roots of rationality and Being, through extending Husserl’s account of the ‘lived body’ to include a body that experiences and is experienced, thus overcoming Cartesian dualism. For Merleau-Ponty, the body is already lived, meaningful, relational and intentional.  He not only rejects referentialist-representationalism, following Heidegger, he builds an anti-foundationalist, anti-essentialist, non-reductive ‘open media’ account of embodiment, rearticulating the relationship between subject and object.

Returning to the life-world and things themselves, for Merleau-Ponty, is going back to the way we experience before we begin to theorise. We are embodied as subjects into an inter-subjective and inter-objective continuum, an embedded existence. Interestingly, Kupers proposes that as unruly and unpredictable realities, per Merleau-Ponty, bodies themselves are de-centering, providing a less-than-perfect means of boundary building, for subjectivity.

We learn to move our bodies pre-reflectively, and thus there is a level of intentionality below our explicit acts, manifesting itself in bodily engagement that is our primary rapport with the world.

‘A movement is learned when the body has understood it, that is, when it has incorporated itself into its world, and to move one’s body is to aim at things through it, it is to allow oneself to respond to their call’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962)

An operative intentionality establishes and utilises secret bonds of correspondence and interdependency, which constitute our reciprocal involvements. The interaction thus inferred within an ever-present world frame opens up an orientation to a post-dualistic ontology in Merleau-Ponty’s late works. Seeing the pre-personal, the personal and the interpersonal as chiasmic, intertwined and reversible, we are allowed the possibility of understanding phenomena with greater profundity. The patterns of meaningful being and action exist neither in the mind nor in the external world, they are ‘in-between’, an inter-relationality of individual, social and trans-subjective practices.

‘Within this fleshly being the in-between is as ‘fullness of void’ understood as a creative and fulfilling emptiness.’

It is via this in-between, which is the birth place of intertwined individual identity, that we encounter social and inter-objective knowledge, realities and creative relationships. With this kind of relational ontology, a proto-integral interpretation becomes available, of phenomenology as precipitating a birth into an awareness easily identified as 'Integral'.

Kupers, W. (2009). The Status and Relevance of Phenomenology for Integral Research: Or Why Phenomenology Is More and Different than an ‘Upper Left’ or Zone #1 Affair. Integral Review, 5(1), 51 – 95.