Culture
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
This episode of In Our Time explores the life and philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a key figure in phenomenology who challenged the Cartesian dualism of mind and body. The discussion delves into h...
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Culture •
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Hello, the French philosopher Maurice Mellow-Ponté, 1908 to 1961,
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was part of the movement known as phenomenology.
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While his less well-known is contemporary Jean-Paul Satholens
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in Montdebeau-vois, his popularity has increased among philosophers
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in recent years.
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Mellow-Ponté rejected when it had cast division between body and mind,
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arguing the way you perceive the world around us
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cannot be separated from our experience of inhabiting a physical body.
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Mellow-Ponté was interested in the down-to-earth questions
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of what it actually is like to live in the world,
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while performing actions as simple as brushing your teeth
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or patting the dog, we shape the world and in turn the world shapes us.
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We'd like to discuss Maurice Mellow-Ponté,
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the Archermalian-Romden-Rom look,
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senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sheffield,
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Thomas Baldwin, emeritus professor at philosophy at the University of York,
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and Timothy Mooney, associate professor at philosophy at the University College,
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Dublin. Timothy Mooney, who was Maurice Mellow-Ponté?
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He was a French philosopher of the body.
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He was born at Rochefort-Soumere in 1908
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to Jean Bernard and Louise Mooney,
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his father died when he was very little,
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and his mother brought Maurice and his brother and sister to Paris to bring them up there.
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And he was a prococious child.
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He showed brilliance at a very young age.
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He studied at the Liseis Johnson de Saye and Louis Le Grand.
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After that, he got into the École Normale Superior
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and graduated with flying colors.
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He studied at the Liseis Des Chars, in various other places.
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He was conscripted in 1939 into the French army.
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He was injured in the Battle of France.
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He made a recovery, got married in 1940 to Suzanne Jolibot.
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And they had one daughter, Marianne Mellow-Ponté.
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When he was at the École Normale,
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he became very friendly with Simone de Beauvoir,
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and she introduced him to Jean Paul Sartre,
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and the three became fast friends.
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Both Sartre and de Beauvoir were very taken by his cheerful and modest disposition,
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as well as his intellectual brilliance.
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His first major book was published in 1942, The Structure of Behavior.
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And then, by general acclaim, his greatest work, the phenomenology of perception.
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Can we tell the listener what philosophical questions he was trying to answer
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for them all in one that's fine?
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What was he trying to answer?
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He was trying to get away from what he saw as a very bad picture of the body.
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That comes from what he calls objective thought.
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And this is the idea that...
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You thought...
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...objective thought.
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It's the idea that all bodies can be understood through physics and chemistry
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and ultimately reduced to physical processes.
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And one strain of objective thought called empiricism
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claimed that all thoughts, all volitions,
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could be reduced to physical processes.
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And another movement accepted the mechanical picture,
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and this was Descartes' move, but said,
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well, if there's such a thing as freedom and responsibility,
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and it cannot be explained in terms of a physical body,
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then there must be a separate realm, a realm of a spiritual self.
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And this picture for Merleponte is a catastrophically bad one.
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On the one hand, it gives you a physical body,
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which is an exterior without an interior.
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All you find when you go through the physical body is moving parts,
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and on the other hand, it gives you a strange spiritual self,
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something that you never directly experience.
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So bodily expressions don't give you consciousness.
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They only give you indications of consciousness.
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So what Descartes did was he turned consciousness into an interior
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without an exterior.
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There was this dreadful cleft where bodies are extended and unthinking,
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whereas minds are thinking but unextended.
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And Merleponte said quite correctly,
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if you start with that picture, if you divorce mind and body so catastrophically,
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you're never going to be able to bring them back together.
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So the entire picture has to be abandoned.
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Why did that original idea that Merleponte over through?
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Why did it hold its place, steadily, for so long?
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Because of the enormous success, first of Galilean mechanics,
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and then of Newtonian mechanics.
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So the sheer success of the physical or natural sciences
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had philosophers as we are running to try and catch up.
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And Merleponte pointed out that the notion of just a physical body
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will only get you so far.
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He calls this the objective body.
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It's the body in so far as physics or chemistry deals with it
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from an exterior third person approach.
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And it's also the body that's present to me when I pay attention to it.
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So if I get a pain in my ankle or if I'm brushing my hair,
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then my body is an object that's present to me.
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And he calls this the objective body.
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But he realized that there are other senses of the body.
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And amongst them, there's what he calls the phenomenal body.
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And that's the body that's present with me.
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So I feel myself breathing, I feel myself moving,
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and I'm in constant tactile contact with the world.
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So my body's present with me,
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even when I'm not paying any attention to my body.
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And then he also talked about the body being a body
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as a repertoire of skills.
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He called this the habitual body.
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And beneath that again, you find a posture organisation
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which he calls the body scheme.
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So Merleponte realized that there are multiple senses of the body,
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which the approach of objective thought and of Cartesian dualism
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quite simply misses.
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We'll come back to some of those thoughts as we go along.
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Thomas Baldwin,
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how did his ideas relate to those of other philosophers of the time,
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including Hussarol?
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Well, there were two groups of philosophers
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that Merleponte was particularly drew on.
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The first was that of Edmund Hussarol and his followers
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who initiated a kind of reflective inquiry
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into philosophical foundations,
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seeking out what they called self-evident a priori truce,
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which would be the foundations of sciences and other intellectual inquiries.
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Now, what's distinctive actually about Merleponte
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is that he in a way takes over Hussarol's method of inquiry,
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but he no longer seeks to find foundations for self-evident truths,
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for a priori truths.
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So there is quite a big difference between what Merleponte takes from this method
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and what Hussarol was offering.
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The other group of thinkers, philosophers,
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but actually white-seist scientists,
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who greatly influenced Merleponte's work,
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where the Gestalt theorists,
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these are German, basically, theorists writing about perception,
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particularly visual perception.
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And Merleponte's first book, or his first philosophy book,
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The Structure of Behaviour,
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is a critical account of their work,
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and then a critical, in a sense, critique of it just at the end.
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But what he took from their work was the mistakenness of a kind of atomistic view
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of our understanding of perception,
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that by and large, our perception of the world is, as we would say, holistic,
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we take in things as a whole,
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we don't build them up in a sort of atomistic,
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or might say, a plenty-east way,
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thinking of some French impressionist paintings,
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and then see shapes, shapes of people, of buildings, or whatever,
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emerging from our visual perception.
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Instead, we take in shapes, which we recognize straight away.
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We know that he became a close friend of Jean-Paul Satholus in the Bevoir
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and connecting him to existential thinkers.
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What did that do for his work?
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Well, what that did was that made him focus on what he called existence.
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And that's a term, we know it in the term, existentialism, of course.
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It's a term that comes from Kierkegaard,
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and it has a special meaning in which it means roughly the same as human life.
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And to be an existentialist is to be someone who makes the structure of human life,
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the central concern.
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And so what Meloponte and Sarge and De Beauvoir did
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was they wanted to use this phenomenological reflective approach to philosophy,
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but to address it to questions about the nature of human life.
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And that's what marks them out as existentialist.
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Thank you, Cameron.
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His most important work is perhaps his phenomenology of perception.
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What does that book argue?
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So in the phenomenology of perception, one of the things that he's trying to do
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is reconceive not just the body, but consciousness and our relation to the world,
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which he also thinks involves a reconceptualisation of what the world is
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and also our relation to other people.
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So he's got this very grand project in that book.
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And he starts off, I think Thomas already mentioned,
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beginning with studies of perception,
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so what is our perceptual experience like?
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He first of all goes through various scientific viewpoints of his day and critiques them,
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and that sort of clears the way for a new sort of approach to perception.
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And then he thinks from focusing on what perceptual experience is like,
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he can then build out from that to a new understanding of the body,
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our relation to the world, our relation to other people, what human freedom is.
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So he's got quite a grand project in that book, lots to talk about.
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Can you relate what he did to the work of the towering figure before him,
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on a day card?
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Yes, so as maybe Tim's already mentioned, from day cards philosophy, one of,
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well, there's lots in day cards philosophy, but one of the central ideas,
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which has been really influential, is there being a hard distinction between the mind and the body.
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And then that dichotomy carries on to the mind versus the world,
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because the body ends up on the side of the world.
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It's a physical object.
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It's amongst the other objects of the world.
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And then you have the mind, which is a separate soul substance.
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And one of the things that Melopunt is interested in is that even after people have,
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on the face of it, rejected day cards ways of seeing things,
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that dichotomy and effects are thinking all the way down.
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So just the language I'm using where I talk about me and my body makes it sound like we're two separate things and we're not.
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So one of the things he's trying to do is excavate those cartesian dichotomies from the bottom of our thinking
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and then try to give us new ways of understanding these phenomena,
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which don't rely on those cartesian dichotomies.
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Can you do that with an example?
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One of the examples from his work is thinking about the body itself.
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So in the Cartesian world view, you've got the body on the side of the world.
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Consciousness is something separate from the body.
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And what Melopunt is trying to do is through thinking about very basic skills and habits
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and ways of interacting with the world, like brushing your teeth or playing with your dog.
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The body itself has a kind of consciousness.
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So he's thinking about something like...
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Just pin that down a bit more.
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What do you mean by the body having a kind of consciousness?
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So if you think about a simple habit such as brushing your teeth,
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here's what happens when you brush your teeth.
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You do that thing every day.
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And through the activity of repeating, you come to see the world in terms of that activity.
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So you might think when you look at the toothbrush,
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what you're looking at is a particular object with a size and shape in space,
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but you categorise in a certain way.
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But for him, through the action of using it in a certain way every day,
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you come to literally see the toothbrush as inviting you to perform certain actions with it.
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So the habit becomes kind of embedded in your perception of the world.
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And you can then respond to that perception of the toothbrush kind of saying,
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brush your teeth without needing to think about what you're doing.
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So generally speaking, if I'm brushing my teeth in the morning,
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I'm not thinking about brushing my teeth.
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I'm thinking about what I'm going to eat for dinner later,
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what I'm going to teach my students the news, all sorts of things.
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And the reason that I can do this activity was thinking about these other things for mella punty.
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Because my body has a grasp of the world and how to act with it, how to interact with it.
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I'm not like a sort of puppet controlled by the mind.
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There's this bodily understanding.
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So that's one aspect of what he means when he talks about the body being a kind of subjectivity.
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Thomas, do you think his water I'm experiencing?
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I don't know if it's actually a question.
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I can only say no really.
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I mean, for such the story is completely different.
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Sartre was in a prisoner of war camp and so on.
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Mella punty was not in a prisoner of war camp.
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He and Sartre worked together with the Beauvoir trying to establish a kind of resistance movement.
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But this came to very little.
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It's true.
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His work came to very little.
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He did editor resistance magazine under the boot for a little while.
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But not much came of it.
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What did impress him?
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I think from his wartime experience was solidarity.
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So at the end of phenomenology perception is some nice passages about agricultural workers here about a strike in town.
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They lay down their tools and protest because they have this idea that by making common cause with the urban counterparts,
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they could gain better conditions.
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And he also has very moving passages on the resistance fighter who's been captured and is going to be subject to torture.
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And that person is actually buttressed by others.
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He feels the imprisable or he or she feels the invisible presence of those others that are depending on that person, not to betray them.
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So freedom is never without supports in existence.
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And he starts to move in a direction that's later developed by Beauvoir.
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And that's a nethex of ambiguity has to be attentive to other people.
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And that Sartre with his emphasis on personal freedom, personal choice
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and Sartre's radical division and freedom of intention on the one hand from freedom of action,
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missed really the fact that ethical action is something in which we're entwined with others all the way down.
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Part of the reason why Sartre has this radical view of freedom,
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and at least some understandings of his work, is because he was thinking after the Second World War
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and all the horrors that had happened there, of people trying to share responsibility for what had happened
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and saying I was just caught up in these historical events.
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And his emphasis on, no, you always have a choice, is to get people to see that they have responsibility, no matter what's going on,
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no matter how restrictive your situation seems to be.
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There's always a choice on how to deal with it is what Sartre was trying to get at.
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And then Merloponte's critique of that was thinking, maybe he wasn't so influenced by his experiences in the war
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in the same sort of ways that you've already talked about, but he was still engaging with that crucial question,
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what are people's responsibilities?
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How do you stop something like that happening again?
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How are social movements of people motivated?
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How do people act as collectives?
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These are all questions that are tied up with his account of freedom,
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and they are clearly resonating with memories of what has just happened in Europe and around the world.
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Tim, what was Merloponte so interested in talking about the human body?
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Because us, Tom and Comorina, myself have mentioned there are several different senses of the body,
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and you recognize that the body, if I'm to be towards the world and geared into the world,
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the body has to appear in a certain way.
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And he showed this with reference to a famous case of an amputee.
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A man had lost his leg, 17 years before, but very often during the day,
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he would try to walk off from a standing position without a second limb.
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He would swing his stump and fall over.
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Now, when he was aware that he'd lost the limb, that he'd lost his leg, he wouldn't try this,
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but then he would seem to forget and try and walk off and he would fall over.
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Now, one explanation was that it's a causal explanation,
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that his remaining nerves are producing this use phantom limb.
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And from Merloponte, that's a good account, but it's incomplete.
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Another explanation was psychological.
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The psychological explanation was, forget about the nerves or forget about physiology,
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the patient is in denial.
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Because he's in denial about his loss, he's producing a representation of the missing limb.
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On Merloponte, he realized that both of these accounts went wrong.
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The impure such account was incomplete, whereas the psychological account was wrong from the ground up.
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And when the patient, the amputee described his phantom limb, he said in its form, in its situation,
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it's just like the leg that I had before I moved it.
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So Merloponte realized, when the amputee tries to move towards the world to make a pot of coffee,
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whatever it might be, to go downstairs to greet a friend, he doesn't think about his phantom limb,
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because it's appearing just as the real limb used to appear.
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And Merloponte's great insight was, the amputee's objective body was incomplete.
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But his phenomenal body, the way his body was present with him, was complete.
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As Merloponte puts it beautifully, the patient does not deny in his deficiency.
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His deficiency is being hidden from him.
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Thank you.
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I think, in a way, the most striking example of the way in which the mind body,
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the traditional mind body distinction is, in a way, criticised by Merloponte,
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comes with his discussion of language, because his thesis is that speech, he says,
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is the accomplishment of thought.
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So in other words, as he says, we shouldn't think of language as just a way of closing thoughts,
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which occur anyway in some abstract, purely Cartesian mind.
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Instead, learning to speak is learning the thoughts that are the content of the things that we say.
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So that we might think that speech is just, as Merloponte says, the clothing of our thoughts,
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but instead, it brings us the ability to have thoughts.
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And he then goes into a discussion of the origins of language,
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which he recognises is completely speculative,
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but in which the utterances of sounds is the production of what he calls vocal gestures.
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So in this speculative anthropology, he thinks of human, early humans, gesturing first, physically,
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and then vocally, and thereby developing a means of expressing thoughts to each other,
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which we then recognise as thoughts, so that it's not that the capacity of thought
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is some kind of abstract ability separate from the body.
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Instead, it's something which is deeply rooted in some physical ability, the ability to speak.
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Thomas, why do you think his book on phenomenology at perception proved to be so important?
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It comes that that's a chapter or a couple of chapters in the phenomenology of perception.
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And it comes in that book because, for the reasons that both Conor and Tim have been explaining,
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his central thesis in that book has been the priority of our phenomenal body,
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and there is now an important feature of his discussion of the body,
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which we perhaps just briefly mention, which is what he calls sometimes the ambiguity of the body.
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And he talks quite a bit about touch, and his thought is that you can, with one hand, touch your other hand.
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And in that moment, the hand that is touching is, in a sense,
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using its phenomenal abilities, the ability to touch things and identify what is being touched.
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But equally, the hand that is being touched experiences itself as just something that's there to be touched.
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And so his claim is that, in a way, the body is something that is, as he puts it, sometimes ambiguous,
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that we have these abilities, and the most important facet of the body,
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is this view of the body as something that is fundamentally a being of powers and abilities,
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which include, as I said, the power of speech.
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But equally, we recognise that the body is something physical.
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It is located within objective space.
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Thank you. Come on, can you, you wanted to come in?
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Yes, I was going to say it might be helpful.
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Another phrase that sometimes used to mean the phenomenal body is the body is lived,
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to get at this idea that what he's talking about when he's talking about the phenomenal body,
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is the body as we live it every day.
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So as we experience it, as we go around our daily life,
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whereas the objective body sometimes understood as the body as studied by science.
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And it's maybe worth emphasising.
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I don't know whether it's come across in what we've been saying already,
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but Meloponty and the other phenomenologists are not anti-science.
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They think science is obviously a very important way that we know about the world.
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It's more a question of what the limits of science are.
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And coming against the view that sometimes called scientism,
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which is the thought that the ultimate authority over everything
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in every aspect of human life is science.
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And the thought that that's not true, science has a proper place,
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but there are areas of human existence which it can't explain.
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What are they?
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Well, things such as morality, for example.
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So thinking back to Hussail in his later work,
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the kind of science that he's engaging with is Galilean science.
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And one of the main ideas of that was that anything that cannot be measured
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is not real.
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The only real things are those that can be quantified.
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And the only rational inquiries are into the things that exist.
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That kind of seems obvious.
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But if you've said the only things that exist are the things that can be measured,
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that then means that inquiry into ethics and justice and those areas of life,
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they're no longer rational,
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because you can't literally measure something such as moral goodness.
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Thank you.
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Jim, the ad is indeed a big consciousness.
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Consciousness from Murlopunty begins as perceptual consciousness.
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And he thinks a great mistake of modern philosophy
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and indeed of some contemporary philosophy of mind
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is that it puts concepts and judgments all the way down.
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And the thought here is that there's a preconceptual significance
spk_0
or a sense of things before intellectual interpretations come on the scene.
spk_0
And furthermore, he makes the point that the very structure of the human body,
spk_0
its form, as it were, is necessary for the emergence of rationality.
spk_0
So to say simply that we're rational animals,
spk_0
our animals with the capacity for reason as Aristotle does,
spk_0
is not quite enough.
spk_0
And the thought more specifically is this,
spk_0
we are the beings that learn to stand upright.
spk_0
And that means that our hands are freed up for manipulating,
spk_0
for caressing, for healing.
spk_0
And it's no accidently says that the rational being
spk_0
is the being who stands up and has opposed fingers and thumbs.
spk_0
And as one scholar has pointed out,
spk_0
we can see the internal complexity of things at a distance
spk_0
because with our fingers and thumbs,
spk_0
we have seen ourselves taking things apart
spk_0
and pushing them back together.
spk_0
That means that the first analysis we ever carried out
spk_0
from the Greek Analu sign, which means I'm tying,
spk_0
are taking apart, was bodily analysis.
spk_0
We took things apart as the child does,
spk_0
with bakers and spoons and forks and pots and pans.
spk_0
Children take things apart, they disassembled them.
spk_0
Then we learned to put things back together and that synthesis.
spk_0
So the body, as it were, has performed
spk_0
proto-rational activities before rational articulation
spk_0
could ever come in the scene.
spk_0
And a great insight of Merle Ponte was that,
spk_0
unless we had built up our habitual body as a repertoire of skills,
spk_0
we could never engage in rational activity
spk_0
because we would have to concentrate on everything.
spk_0
Our habitual activity is something I don't have to think about.
spk_0
And because as Karmarin has pointed out,
spk_0
we have these repertoire of familiar activities,
spk_0
brushing one's teeth, making the coffee cycling a bicycle.
spk_0
I can think about other things
spk_0
when I'm engaged in these habitual activities
spk_0
because my body, otherwise, is doing everything for me.
spk_0
Before we move on, I'd like to take a side step
spk_0
to something which I think we must mention,
spk_0
is the influence of childhood.
spk_0
Yeah, so before he held the chair of philosophy,
spk_0
he held a chair in child psychology
spk_0
and some of his lectures, which I find really interesting,
spk_0
around child psychology.
spk_0
And one of the things that he says about the condition of childhood
spk_0
is that you see in children, there's a kind of synesthesia to experience.
spk_0
So synesthesia is where the senses cross over into each other.
spk_0
And people, as adults, who have synesthesia,
spk_0
have experiences such as seeing the color of numbers, for example,
spk_0
which is obviously quite unusual.
spk_0
But he says in children, the norm is synesthetic experience.
spk_0
And he thinks that that can tell us something about the way that we develop as adults.
spk_0
So another claim that he makes about childhood is that for the very young child and the infant,
spk_0
they can't distinguish between themselves and other people.
spk_0
To them, at an early stage of experience, there's just kind of a collective.
spk_0
And we then have to learn, as we mature into adults,
spk_0
to distinguish ourselves from other people.
spk_0
So that's a kind of turning on its head, going back to Descartes,
spk_0
a kind of Cartesian picture, where you start off sort of inside your own self.
spk_0
And you've then got to work out from this very individual perspective,
spk_0
that there are other people in the world.
spk_0
And then Meloponty thinks from Descartes' point of view,
spk_0
that's kind of impossible, because all you see are other bodies.
spk_0
And you don't know whether there's a conscious mind inside the other body,
spk_0
when all you're looking at is a physical object from Descartes' perspective.
spk_0
Where as Meloponty says, that's not how it goes.
spk_0
You don't start off from this individual perspective
spk_0
and have to work out to the existence of others.
spk_0
You start off from this collective awareness of yourself as just one amongst many,
spk_0
where you haven't actually made any distinctions between yourself and others.
spk_0
And you then grow into adulthood, learning to distinguish yourself from others.
spk_0
So it's one of the reasons that I think he's interested in childhood.
spk_0
Thanks looking at how he sees the child developing,
spk_0
can tell us something about adult consciousness and existence.
spk_0
Thomas, what was Meloponty's political views? Can we switch now?
spk_0
And did they change over time?
spk_0
Yes, they did change.
spk_0
He starts off in the 1930s as a pretty devoted Marxist
spk_0
in that his first book, in fact, is called Humanism and Terror.
spk_0
And it's a book in which it's being written at the time of the Spanish Civil War,
spk_0
at the time when it seemed as though liberal democracies were not able to stand up to fascism,
spk_0
another extreme points of view.
spk_0
And basically, Meloponty says, look, it's tough.
spk_0
Marxists do don't do all do wonderful things,
spk_0
but look at the alternatives.
spk_0
However, he changed his mind after the end of the Second World War in the mid-1940s.
spk_0
And he came to see the Soviet Union and its activities in Eastern Europe,
spk_0
as so awful that actually Marxism was not a political doctrine
spk_0
that should command our approval, that instead we should work within the framework
spk_0
of attempts at socialist democracy.
spk_0
And he wasn't, I think, very active in French politics in the post-war period
spk_0
in the way that Sartre was.
spk_0
Did this a radical effect on his expressed thought?
spk_0
It affected his relationship with Sartre,
spk_0
because Sartre went in the opposite direction,
spk_0
particularly after the Second World War.
spk_0
Sartre felt that capitalism was so exploitative and so closely connected to imperialism,
spk_0
that although Marxism was not in many ways attractive,
spk_0
it was a price to pay in order to clear away the injustices of capitalism and imperialism.
spk_0
Sartre and Meloponty had together with Sumod de Beauvoir founded a journal
spk_0
after the end of the Second World War called, in French,
spk_0
let our modern modern times.
spk_0
And they worked together in editing this until 1950,
spk_0
when they moved away from each other.
spk_0
And Meloponty then wrote an essay called Sartre and Ultra Bolshevism,
spk_0
which was a very vitu-pruditive attack on Sartre.
spk_0
And I think probably unfair and an essay which put a barrier between the two of them.
spk_0
There had been close friends, but they separated for many years.
spk_0
Timothy, an important later work was called, The Visible and The Invisible.
spk_0
What was that concern with?
spk_0
That's right.
spk_0
Meloponty thought that his work in the structure of behaviour
spk_0
and phenomenology perception had not sufficiently oncited our god-widdif,
spk_0
what he called the subject object distinction.
spk_0
And in The Visible and The Invisible, he laid stress and bodily expressivity
spk_0
coming before language.
spk_0
It's appointed already made in phenomenology perception,
spk_0
but the range of expressions that we have prior to language
spk_0
has given much more attention.
spk_0
And he also began to talk about what he called the flesh of the world.
spk_0
Each thing in the world is exposed in the world, it's open to damage.
spk_0
And when we get to organisms, we find, and Tom has already pointed to this,
spk_0
every organism that's in the world that touches is also touchable.
spk_0
In fact, it feels itself being touched when it touches something else.
spk_0
Every organism in the world that can see is seeable,
spk_0
so with hearing and all the other modalities of sense.
spk_0
And in fact, he pointed out that sometimes painters get the sense of being looked at
spk_0
by inanimate objects when they're painting, and they actually are on to something.
spk_0
Because every point in the world is a perspective from which something else might be looking at you.
spk_0
Every position in the world is a possible perspective, occupied by a perceiver,
spk_0
who might be taking me as something within its perceptual field.
spk_0
And this flesh of the world, it's between what we call bear matter
spk_0
and it's between so-called disembodied thought.
spk_0
It's like one of the ancient elements between matter, between kinking.
spk_0
And as of where it mediates, the flesh of the world mediates and comes,
spk_0
comes between these extreme things, so-called bear matter and so-called disembodied intellect.
spk_0
You want to come in?
spk_0
Yes, so there's a place when he's talking about flesh.
spk_0
Melopunti died before he finished the visible and the invisible,
spk_0
so it's an unfinished text, including all this new terminology that he dies before he properly explains.
spk_0
But at one point he calls, he says that flesh is visibility.
spk_0
And as Tim's already said, he's trying to conceive of it somehow as an element,
spk_0
like the ancient elements, like earth, air, fire and so on.
spk_0
So it's this very peculiar notion.
spk_0
That's right, it's inherently ambiguous.
spk_0
Yeah.
spk_0
Geological, I mean, that almost.
spk_0
Yes, I just want to go back to speech and language for a second.
spk_0
Yes.
spk_0
That Tim emphasized that Melopunti has a distinct view about consciousness.
spk_0
Now, what he takes to be central to a certain kind of consciousness,
spk_0
self-consciousness, which is what's captured in French by being for oneself,
spk_0
which is what Jean-Posatre and others had taken to be characteristic of us.
spk_0
Melopunti wants to say, this being for oneself, this self-consciousness,
spk_0
is precisely a kind of consciousness, which we have because we have the capacity for speech.
spk_0
Because we have speech, we can accomplish thoughts, we have thoughts.
spk_0
And we are self-conscious when we have these thoughts about ourselves,
spk_0
so that this capacity for rationality, which is built into the capacity for having thoughts,
spk_0
is itself dependent on the bodily skill that we have of speaking.
spk_0
Now, when he comes in this late work, the visible and the invisible,
spk_0
to talk about the reversibility, as he says, of the sense and the sensible,
spk_0
he applies that also to language.
spk_0
So, he wants to say that there is a kind of sensible speaking
spk_0
in which we are heard, and then there's a way in which the language,
spk_0
or what is said, the sounds that we make, can be, in a sense, conceived as flesh themselves.
spk_0
Now, that's the part of the invisible and the invisible that's really hard to follow.
spk_0
Is he the big distance from what you've said to the effect he has had on the thinking about cognitive science and anthropology?
spk_0
So, I guess the idea is that we've talked about a lot from melopunties ideas,
spk_0
of embodiment and embodied consciousness.
spk_0
These are some ideas that have had an influence on certain strands of cognitive science.
spk_0
So, in cognitive science, you have a strand of thinking called inactivism,
spk_0
which takes direct and explicit inspiration from melopuntie,
spk_0
and rather than trying to model the mind as a kind of thing that makes calculations,
spk_0
and then controls a body.
spk_0
They've taken on board some of melopunties ideas about this immediate engagement with the world,
spk_0
and tried to model the mind in those kinds of ways.
spk_0
And then, in anthropology, the idea that we live in a world that reflects us as human beings
spk_0
and reflects our existence.
spk_0
That's been influential in trying to understand features of different communities.
spk_0
You also find it in fields as diverse as nursing, for example,
spk_0
melopunties ideas talked about there.
spk_0
It's not how do you come out in nursing.
spk_0
Nursing is precisely about caring for the vulnerable,
spk_0
and understanding what that means, I guess, beyond just the sort of physical giving of medicine to somebody,
spk_0
and the physical aspects of healing.
spk_0
There's also this experiential engagement with another person,
spk_0
and then nurses like other professionals have a set of skills,
spk_0
which are embodied skills, which, as well as being embodied skills,
spk_0
embody a kind of practical knowledge,
spk_0
which isn't the sort of thing that can be explicitly written down,
spk_0
so that someone can learn it just from reading about it.
spk_0
They have to do it, they have to engage in the practices,
spk_0
which to acquire that knowledge.
spk_0
Can you come back to your own thing with me?
spk_0
This is a long way from what British philosophy is up to at the time.
spk_0
In some ways, but not in others,
spk_0
he's certainly close to British philosophy of the classical perical period,
spk_0
because John Locke, the Great British Empiruses, took childhood very seriously.
spk_0
And so does Melopuntie, and he said, if you want to find out how we build up the world,
spk_0
how we enacted, as Kormorina said,
spk_0
you have to look at the behavior of children.
spk_0
Now, at the time, the predominant philosophy was ordinary language philosophy
spk_0
in both Oxford and Cambridge.
spk_0
But Melopuntie's work had immediate impact on a philosopher called Gilbert Ryle,
spk_0
wrote a famous book called The Concept of Mind,
spk_0
only a few years after Melopuntie.
spk_0
And Melopuntie said, for example, that we have to get rid of the specter of consciousness
spk_0
as an inside, without an outside, and the body as an outside, without an inside.
spk_0
And Gilbert Ryle famously called this the dogma, the Cartesian dogma, of the ghost in the machine.
spk_0
So I was just going to add there's an example, which I think is quite nice.
spk_0
If you think about what it's like watching somebody play sport,
spk_0
and typically people watching football will be shouting instructions to the player.
spk_0
And in Melopuntie's terms, you're seeing the world as it invites that other person to act,
spk_0
which is kind of an example to illustrate what Tim's talking about,
spk_0
that we see each other as centres of behaviour.
spk_0
How are Melopuntie's ideas regarded by philosophers today?
spk_0
They're pretty well regarded.
spk_0
He's a bit of a touchstone for anybody who's interested in the body these days.
spk_0
But we've talked a bit already about fields in which he's being influential,
spk_0
but it's maybe worth mentioning as well his influence on figures such as Franz Fanon,
spk_0
who you may know is one of the most important, perhaps the most important,
spk_0
anti-colonial thinkers of the 20th century.
spk_0
He was a psychiatrist from Martinique, and he studied medicine in France.
spk_0
And whilst he was studying medicine in France,
spk_0
he attended some of Melopuntie's lectures in philosophy,
spk_0
and then some of his work is inspired by some of Melopuntie's ideas,
spk_0
because one of the things he was trying to do was understand how an ideology,
spk_0
such as colonialism, affected our bodily existence.
spk_0
So he was drawing on Melopuntie to understand that.
spk_0
So he's also been influential in people trying to understand action,
spk_0
because for a very long time, people have understood action in terms of a mind
spk_0
that forms thoughts, makes decisions, forms intentions,
spk_0
which then trigger the body to perform movement.
spk_0
And one of the things that Melopuntie's work showed us is that is kind of hopeless,
spk_0
as a way to understand action.
spk_0
He also has things to tell us about emotions.
spk_0
People have thought of emotions in terms of a kind of feeling
spk_0
that's inside something like a Cartesian theatre,
spk_0
sort of in interior space of the mind.
spk_0
And one of the things that Melopuntie's tried to do in his reconceptualisation of the mind
spk_0
is think of emotions as a kind of affective way, affect in the sense of feeling,
spk_0
of engaging with the world.
spk_0
So if you think about something like love,
spk_0
he wants to argue that rather than being a feeling contained inside the mind,
spk_0
it's a way of seeing the loved one.
spk_0
So when I see the person that I love, I see them as inviting me to engage in all sorts of loving forms
spk_0
of behaviour towards them.
spk_0
And that's partly what love is for Melopuntie.
spk_0
We're coming to the end now.
spk_0
Is anything that you would like to add to this?
spk_0
I'm one thing I would like to add, and I think Melopuntie was particularly strong in this,
spk_0
that the lived world, the world of existence is a world of possibilities.
spk_0
And Melopuntie recognised that as the child gains more and more skills,
spk_0
that means the child's perceptual field increasingly points beyond the so-called beargivens,
spk_0
the things that might be done with them.
spk_0
For the very young child, things are like meteorites from another planet, as Melopuntie puts it.
spk_0
But once a child learns how to deal with something through imitation, through watching others,
spk_0
then the child has taken up for herself a herself that particular mode of existence.
spk_0
So we don't just see actuality, we see possibility.
spk_0
And in very moving ways, and comorines touched on this already,
spk_0
the more present your body becomes to you, through injury or illness,
spk_0
the more that the world recedes.
spk_0
In other words, when my body is working very well, it's present with me,
spk_0
I have it as an undivided power of action.
spk_0
But when the body is in pain, when there are other injuries,
spk_0
it gets between me and the world.
spk_0
And he goes far as to say for a person whose beargiven, let's say, are close to death,
spk_0
bodily events have become the events of the day.
spk_0
The world actually has shrunk into the body.
spk_0
There are no longer the same possibilities,
spk_0
the phenomenal of perceptual field and world of possibilities that there were before.
spk_0
Well, thank you very much. Thank you very much, Timothy Mooney, Thomas Baldwin,
spk_0
Kermoreen Romden Romlook.
spk_0
Next week, how reforms to the Roman Republic,
spk_0
advanced by the gracky brothers, may have hastened the republic's collapse?
spk_0
Thank you for listening.
spk_0
And the in-artime podcast gets some extra time now,
spk_0
with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
spk_0
The question I always ask you is a question I always ask you.
spk_0
It seems to me that there was a limited time you've covered it so well,
spk_0
but even so, slightly with you, Thomas, was there anything you would like to have said
spk_0
that you didn't get a chance to say?
spk_0
Well, where Melpont's work seems to me to be, in a sense, undervalued and underused,
spk_0
is in what is called philosophy of mind.
spk_0
It's the understanding, so to speak, of our mental capacities.
spk_0
The dominant approach to that in much English-speaking philosophy,
spk_0
both in this country and in the United States,
spk_0
is what is often called physicalism, which is the view that ultimately we are just
spk_0
neurological structures, and that we just have to wait for the neurologists
spk_0
to tie up the neurons for us, and then we'll understand how the mind works.
spk_0
Now, it seems to me that Melpont's discussions in phenomenology of perception
spk_0
indicate that although there's lots of value in work of that kind,
spk_0
and no one would ever deny that, nonetheless,
spk_0
there need to be ways of understanding or approaching our abilities and our capacities,
spk_0
which get beyond that appeal simply to understanding the basic biology
spk_0
and neurology of a human body, really.
spk_0
And my own view, going back to things that I've said earlier,
spk_0
is that his discussion of speech and thought is a really key insight,
spk_0
that speech speaking is, of course, a physical ability,
spk_0
but it's that which facilitates the capacity for thought,
spk_0
and it's only when you've got thoughts that you can be a rational animal,
spk_0
so that one of the features of human life,
spk_0
which in a way seems to be very hard to comprehend from a straightforward physicalist approach,
spk_0
is our capacity for rational action for doing things for reasons rather than just causes.
spk_0
But if you come through these issues from Melpont's starting point,
spk_0
that we are animals with sophisticated bodily skills, including speech,
spk_0
then we get thoughts, and then we can use the contents of those thoughts
spk_0
to engage in actions.
spk_0
Gemini.
spk_0
I always thought in reading Melpont that he's never trying to score points.
spk_0
He's trying to find what's true in empiricism, what's true in intellectualism,
spk_0
what you can extract out of these extreme polls and synthesize them.
spk_0
And in that sense, he's something of a latter-day haggle.
spk_0
He wants to get a synthesis that will take what's true in earlier accounts
spk_0
and get a better account of how the world is, of how we build up the world through our bodies.
spk_0
And the other thing that's always struck me about Melpont is a very cheerful philosopher.
spk_0
I kind of read Melpont without feeling happier,
spk_0
and Tom's already referred to Melpont's childhood.
spk_0
He said he had an incomparable childhood, something he said to Sarthi,
spk_0
writes about it in phenomenology perception.
spk_0
And he thinks that one of the tragedies of Adirhood and this runs with having a skilled body
spk_0
is we pass over the novelty of the world.
spk_0
It's an extraordinarily varied world, a beautiful world,
spk_0
and in fact different species with their peculiar organs of sense
spk_0
articulate the world in ways that we don't and vice versa.
spk_0
And it's this attentiveness in as early as work to other species, even to insects.
spk_0
And others that I think really draws the reader in.
spk_0
And the perceptual world is one that's inexhaustible.
spk_0
The simplest of things can never be exhausted by no matter how many perceptions I might have.
spk_0
So there's a singularity or a style to which thing.
spk_0
And in the same way, there's a style to another.
spk_0
Just as you never have just one performance of a piano sonata,
spk_0
similarly everybody is stylized.
spk_0
Each person brings a certain way of expressing comedy or sadness or whatever it might be.
spk_0
Something to give some light heart, for example,
spk_0
it is expressed in one way by Steve Cougan, in another way by Laurel and Hardy,
spk_0
and so on and so forth.
spk_0
We are stylized singular once off existence.
spk_0
He was very, very attentive to this.
spk_0
And also we anticipated a later philosopher called Levenas
spk_0
in stress in the expressivity of the face.
spk_0
The face is the very center of human expression.
spk_0
It's what the baby first responds to, to joy, to melancholy, and so on and so forth.
spk_0
And then the baby gradually becomes aware of itself as a center of action here,
spk_0
as opposed to other centers of action over there.
spk_0
We emerge from the collective that Comerians already referred to.
spk_0
Interesting as you say about the bass Bergman said that the most interesting shot he ever took was of somebody's face.
spk_0
And despite all the films he made, all the things he did,
spk_0
that was the key, not more than the key, that was supremely important to someone's face.
spk_0
I think it's so important.
spk_0
And of course, filmers brings out the expressivity of the face and of the body as a whole.
spk_0
Certainly in the 50s some people thought they were studying faces,
spk_0
but they weren't. They were studying photographs of faces.
spk_0
And as Merleponte puts it, joy and sadness,
spk_0
they're not signified in the face.
spk_0
They are present in the face. They are expressed through the face.
spk_0
So mind as it were is out in the world.
spk_0
Certainly from not that person's perspective, from their first hand perspective,
spk_0
but nonetheless I'm directly experiencing somebody's joy or sadness or happiness and so forth.
spk_0
What would you like to say?
spk_0
So actually thinking about what you just said,
spk_0
doesn't Merleponte say somewhere that philosophy is wonder in the face of the world?
spk_0
Yeah, which really captures some of the things you were talking about.
spk_0
But I suppose one of the things we didn't really cover in any detail was Merleponte's account of freedom.
spk_0
And that seems pretty important.
spk_0
It was one of the disagreements philosophical disagreements that he had with Sart.
spk_0
Because the way that he understood Sart was as claiming that we are radically free.
spk_0
Of course we're confined by bodies.
spk_0
I can't literally fly out of this room.
spk_0
But the thought is that our situation, the physicality of our bodies,
spk_0
our current environment and so on, gives us a range of options to choose from.
spk_0
But then I'm radically free to choose any of those options.
spk_0
And Merleponte totally disagreed with that.
spk_0
He thinks that that is not how we live our freedom.
spk_0
And thinking about what he said about habit and the way that the more we do something,
spk_0
the more that that habit becomes embedded in the structure of the world.
spk_0
So that I see the world as inviting me to act in certain ways.
spk_0
And I can respond without needing to think about what I'm doing.
spk_0
He thinks in understanding freedom we've got to understand that.
spk_0
So the person who is in the habit of gambling every day,
spk_0
when they get up, they will just see the world in terms of that habit.
spk_0
They'll see the way to the casino as inviting them to walk along it.
spk_0
And then they can respond without really needing to think about what they're doing.
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So it's a very different picture of freedom that you get from Merleponte.
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He's not saying that our habits determine what we do.
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But they weigh on us in a way that he thinks Sart didn't recognise.
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And from that picture, he then wants to understand things like social movements.
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So that is again a really interesting aspect of Merleponte's philosophy,
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understanding how collectives of people are moved to action
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because it's not just about conscious decisions.
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I just like first to add to what we've heard about his discussion of freedom.
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The view that he's opposing of Sartre was a view that runs through a lot of Sartre's work, actually,
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which is that we make a radical choice of ourselves.
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For each of us being an agent is living a life that in some strange way we've chosen to live.
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And Sartre writes lots of biographies and always he's looking for the choice that that person
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that flow bare or bow to the air or himself.
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I think people who walk down a mine have a choice.
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Sorry?
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Do you think people who walk down the coal mine have a choice?
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Sartre would say yes.
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I mean, look, I'm not defending that.
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No, no, no, not at all.
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No, no, no, no, no, I introduced you.
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Yes.
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No.
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As Colmarine said, what's really important about Merleponte's criticisms of this is that Sartre
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claimed that when we try to rationalize our decisions, actually, we're just talking.
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We've already made those decisions in choosing to be the kind of person that we are.
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Now, where the discussion that both Colmarine and Tim have made very clear for us comes into play
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is that they have emphasized by and large that it's our perceptual and physical abilities
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that are work in structuring our life.
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And what Merleponte brings to the surface at the end of phenomenology of perception
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where he's talking about this is that our motivations also are work, so to speak,
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in a not a subconscious necessarily way, but just within the structure of our ordinary existence.
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And so those motivations are not things that we have typically chosen.
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They just come from our needs, from our pleasures, and rational choice of a kind which is the exercise of freedom.
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It has to presuppose that we have ordinary motivations which haven't been chosen.
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And that's what's the whole Sartre and picture of human life missed out.
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Can we bring in Sonia Orwell here?
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Don't mention it.
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OK, well, Sonia Orwell and the surname shows us one connection here.
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She was the second wife of George Orwell, whom she married shortly before George Orwell's death.
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But before that, she had had a very close and very overwhelming affair with Merleponte.
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So Sonia Brownell, as she was before she was married, was a very attractive, active young woman in London in the 1940s.
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And she helped Cyril Connolly edit horizon.
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And when the war ended, Cyril Connolly took her to Paris and this very attractive English woman who spoke perfect French.
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In a sense fell in with this group of friends of Cyril's, namely Jean-Posars, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleponte.
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And fairly soon Maurice Merleponte and Sonia began a very passionate love affair, which lasted from, I think, 1947
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till the end of 1949.
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And basically, Sonia wanted to marry Maurice, but he was already married and he didn't want to leave his wife for Sonia.
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But it was a very passionate affair.
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Sometimes they were in Paris together. Sometimes they were in London.
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And there was a thought, Maurice Merleponte might come back to London with Sonia and start a new life with a position at University College London,
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which is where Freddie Air was professor and Freddie Air was another member of this group in Paris.
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He was apparently an excellent dancer and that helped to, in a sense, engage him with all these young Frenchmen and French women.
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That's all fascinating. What's this got to do with the philosophy we were talking about?
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Nothing close except that there's a sort of tantalizing thought that
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Merleponte, this characteristically French philosopher, might have moved to University College London in 1946, 1947
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and become a very powerful new figure within British philosophy.
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At precisely the time that people like John Austin and all the Oxford School of ordinary language philosophers were coming into their dominance.
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Look at the Vittgenstein in Cambridge in some ways was close to Merleponte.
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So Vittgenstein says for example, the best picture of the human soul is the human body.
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And that's a very Merlepontean thesis.
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Vittgenstein also says to see another is to see a soul.
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I'm not of the mere opinion that the result and this again shows approximately between Merleponte and the Vittgensteinian School.
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As Merleponte pointed out when I see another, when I'm a child, when I've established the difference,
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when I've gone out of the anonymous intercoporiality that Colmarine's referred to,
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what I see is an expressive center of activity.
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The child who distinguishes itself from another doesn't see a body governed by a mind.
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The child sees an expressive center of activity.
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And the whole point here is the distinction between mind and body is the theoretical distinction.
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That you can only make when you're an older child and when you've entered the realm of language, concepts and judgments.
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Don't miss it.
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There is one British philosopher of the post-war period whose work is in a way very close to Merleponte's,
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Brian O'Shaunasi, he was based in London, and he wrote a wonderful book called The Will,
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which is what he calls a dual aspect theory.
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And the thought is that human life has two aspects, the mental and the physical.
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And these have to be understood as two aspects of a single life.
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And Brian has a wonderful capacity for fantastic examples.
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And he developed this book so far as I can see without much familiarity with Merleponte.
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There are one or two references.
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But basically it's a Merleponte-esque book written in London in the 1950s and 60s.
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And it deserves, I think, much more attention than it receives.
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But the other thing I'm just going to say is that it's actually a very disappointing feature of Merleponte's corpus of ours,
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I can see is that there is only one explicit reference to Vic and Stein.
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And it embodies a completeness understanding of Vic and Stein's work.
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He simply says, Vic and Stein treats languages as if it was cut off from the world.
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Well, I don't know what he had in mind.
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Vic and Stein's later writings are full of views which are comparable to Merleponte's.
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But for some reason, which I don't understand, Merleponte never gave them much attention.
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He knows before we leave this subject we could be here for the rest of the day,
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but you're shaking your hands.
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Thank you very much indeed. That was terrific.
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Merleponte, would you like to eat your coffee?
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I think I would have to. I'll have a bit of a small coffee please.
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A small coffee, come on.
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Can I have some tea please?
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Yep.
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Ten?
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I'd love a cup of tea as well please.
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Yeah, same for me please.
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Three teas and one small coffee.
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No, I'll have a cup of tea.
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I'll have a cup of tea.
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Well, thank you.
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Very much.
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In our time with Melvin Bragg was produced by Ellie Anklaser
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Hi, I'm Izzy Judd.
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