Intentionality and Myths of the Given by Sachs Carl B

Author:Sachs, Carl B.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317317586
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

5 SOMATIC INTENTIONALITY AND HABITUAL

NORMATIVITY IN MERLEAU-PONTY’S

ACCOUNT OF LIVED EMBODIMENT

Both Sellars and Merleau-Ponty insist that rejecting the sensory-cognitive continuum – that there is a difference in kind and not just of degree between perceiving and thinking – requires that perception involves a concept of non-conceptual content, but that insisting on the role of such a concept in no way licenses the empiricist version of the Myth of the Given. In that regard Merleau-Ponty would seem to agree with Sellars in a way that neither Brandom nor McDowell do, but this agreement is unfortunately superficial. The salient difference is that Sellars argues that we cannot completely explain what it is to perceive until we introduce into our account something that is posited for theoretical reasons, in the interests of explanatory adequacy – i.e. sense-impressions. By contrast, Merleau-Ponty holds that the nonconceptual aspect of perception is brought into view through phenomenological descriptions alone, i.e. phenomenological description is both necessary and sufficient for securing our cognitive grip on the notion of nonconceptual content. We do not need to posit anything in order to secure a fully adequate understanding of perception. The difficult point to appreciate is that Merleau-Ponty is able to do so without committing himself to the Myth of the semantic Given. (On the question whether phenomenology commits the Myth of the Given, see Appendix).

The aim of this chapter is to show, in other words, how Merleau-Ponty succeeded where C.I. Lewis railed. In doing so, Merleau-Ponty is also able to satisfy the demand for transcendental friction. To anticipate: what gives friction to our judgements, embedded as they are in our discursive practices, is that as essentially embodied beings, we are creatures not just of rules (norms) but also of habits. The upshot of this discussion will be to show that the distinction between norms (à la Brandom) and habits (à la Merleau-Ponty) gives us a different and better understanding of what Kant was trying to capture in his distinction between concepts and intuitions. (One crucial difference is that the concept/intuition distinction is primarily introduced for the criticism of theoretical reason, whereas the norms/habits distinction is distinctively pragmatic. In that regard my project contributes to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century trend of giving Kantian themes a more pronounced and explicit orientation towards pragmatism).

To establish these (perhaps, seemingly) audacious claims, I will proceed as follows. First, I will examine how Merleau-Ponty describes the perceptuo-practical structure of lived embodiment. Phenomenology of Perception (henceforth PP) traces the route from perception to movement and from movement to perception.1 In explaining how this functions, I will make explicit and defend Merleau-Ponty’s implicit views about the role of habits and skills in both ordinary and pathological perceptuo-practical context-specific, object-oriented comportments, in order to show this kind of activity counts as both a specific kind of intentionality – motor intentionality – and a specific kind of normativity – namely, habitual normativity. By ‘habitual normativity’ I mean that our habitual ways of engaging with objects are subject to implicit norms of correctness,

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