The Logic of the Body in Bergson's Motor Schemes and Merleau-Ponty's Body Schema

Abstract

Contemporary philosophy, above all Merleau-Ponty's, sets us the task of conceiving our being, doing, and thinking as bodily. Kant's critical philosophy specifies the conditions through which alone we cognise a world by reflecting thought onto itself; in contrast, Merleau-Ponty's radical reflection goes back to the phenomena of bodily existence, tracing the body from within as the strictured opening through which alone we exist toward a world. The body is an "a priori," but a living, contingent "a priori" that unfolds through its history and its pre-personal past.1 This body is also the root of our thinking.2 The body would thus impose its logic on our thinking. But what is this logic? It is one thing to overcome dualism by showing that thinking is bodily, it is another to say how the body informs the logic of thinking-and reducing this to a problem of how the brain works as a thinking engine will not do, since it is we who think, not the brain.3 Showing how the body informs the logic of thinking is necessary if we are to adequately respond to traditional problems of the philosophy of mind without falling to the criticisms of phenomenology.4 What we need is a logic of bodily thinking. In this essay I make some steps toward such a logic by analysing motor schemes in Bergson and the body schema in Merleau-Ponty. In Matter and Memory, Bergson, like Merleau-Ponty, argues that it is incoherent to conceive of perception and thinking as taking place apart from circular relations between the body and the world, even if perception also requires a memory that is different in kind from body. Motor schemes are crucial to describing how the circular relation between body and world structures itself so as to allow in the first place for the recollection of memories, and thence perception and thinking.5 The body schema has a cognate role for Merleau-Ponty. Both sorts of schemes indicate something about how the body structures itself, about a logic of the body that might inform thinking. But Bergson ends up with quite a different claim about the logic of the body than Merleau-Ponty, especially when it comes to temporality, and this difference helps elucidate a program for exploring a logic of embodied thinking through Merleau-Ponty. In the first section I give a detailed analysis of motor schemes in Bergson, and thereby introduce the logic of the body. In the second section I develop a programmatic contrast between Bergson and Merleau-Ponty. The crucial difference is that in Merleau-Ponty's account the body, and thence its logic, is expressive. Bergson's discussion of motor schemes (inappropriately translated as "motor diagrams") arises in his argument that memory is not an image stored in the brain. Rather, the role of the brain is in structuring the body-world circuit such that memory can insert itself into the perception that attracts it, thus becoming actual-pure memory is merely virtual." But the insertion of memory-images is also crucial to perception itself-Bergson argues that the afterimages that we sometimes see after we turn away from something exist "already while we were looking," they are always overlaid on things. Perception is not an immediate circuit between body and world, but "truly involves a reflection, in the etymological sense of the word"discerning things within perception is a matter of adding images to what is given to the body.' To account for actual memory and perception it is therefore necessary to show how we recognize the present as recollecting the past, since this is what lets us add the right images, and Bergson, like Merleau-Ponty, finds the traditional accounts of recollection incoherent-on the hypothesis of the tradition, the present stimulus is first given as having nothing to do with the past, and then provokes recollection, but Bergson argues that the present would already need to be recognised in light of the past if it is ever to trigger the appropriate recollection. (Moreover, the traditional hypothesis could not, on Bergson's argument, explain the data of psychic blindness and aphasia. …