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125 6 Culture, Development, and Gender If we take seriously the call to see our existential condition and the human sciences that study it—history, psychology, biology, sociology, anthropology —as relevant for a general philosophical understanding of ourselves, we cannot avoid turning to the question of cultural relativism . The conflict between cultural analyses and scientific ones is particularly trenchant when considering any theory of child development. Does child development reveal that human maturation will proceed upon a determined path? Or does child development differ radically between cultures? Merleau-Ponty has good reason to be concerned with this conflict between “nature” and “nurture.” Strongly influenced by existentialist , Marxist, and Freudian theory, Merleau-Ponty agrees not only that we are culturally determined to privilege certain values over others, but also that our very methods of accessing the “truth” are influenced by our situation. The Phenomenology of Perception is famous for its critique of the self-assurance of the sciences, and he strongly argues against the concept that phenomenology should see itself as a science. Nonetheless, Merleau-Ponty by no means rejects the findings of those who rest more firmly on the “nature” side of the debate. His focus on perception and on cases of brain damage, such as the patient Schneider, clearly demonstrate that Merleau-Ponty saw empirical research as informative for any study of perception.* * Merleau-Ponty paid particular attention to the case of the brain-damaged patient Schneider in the Phenomenology of Perception. His account of Schneider’s pathology was secondhand . Schneider was a patient examined by Adhémar Gelb and Kurt Goldstein who had a remarkable number of impairments: agnosia (the loss of ability to recognize objects, persons, or sense-perceptions usually due to a brain injury in the temporal lobe), loss of movement vision, alexia (word blindness), loss of a coherent body schema, loss of body position, and loss of abstract reasoning. The case was not only striking to Merleau-Ponty, but its analysis greatly shaped the nature and focus of Gestalt theory—in particular the discussion of the relationship between perception and bodily motility. See Merleau-Ponty’s chapter “The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motility” in the Phenomenology of Perception for his classic interpretation of Schneider (PP 98–147). For the original case of Schneider, see Goldstein and Gelb’s (1918) “Psychologische Analysen hirnpathologischer Fälle auf Grund von Untersuchungen Hirnverletzer.” 126 T H E C H I L D A S N A T U R A L P H E N O M E N O L O G I S T In the Sorbonne lectures, the nature-nurture conflict is impossible to ignore given that it dominates any understanding of child development . The great contribution of the two overshadowing figures in child psychology at the time of the Sorbonne lectures—Piaget and Freud— present us with comprehensive theories of child development. Although Merleau-Ponty is deeply indebted to both, he finds that they reduce the individual’s freedom and ignore the cultural and historical factors that obviously shape our styles of child rearing. A theory that conceived of child development as a series of “stages,” be they cognitive schemas in the case of Piaget or stages of sexual development in Freud’s work, tends to overvalue a type of universal innate motor to human maturation and thus minimizes the relevance of significant individual and cultural differences . Merleau-Ponty’s challenge is to express a general theory of development that incorporates freedom as well as contingency. Merleau-Ponty returns to Hegel’s nuanced theory of how the present can hold within it the past, while remaining distinct from it to explain his concept of development: Development is as little a destiny as it is an unconditioned freedom, for the individual always accomplishes a decisive act of development in a particular corporeal field. We find here once again Hegel’s idea of “surpassing while preserving.” The individual only moves beyond his first states if he agrees to retain them. Thus, we rejoin our general conceptions of the personal and interpersonal dynamic. (CPP 407) The freedom I possess in the face of development is not the freedom to be anything I wish. After all, if I suffer from an incurable illness, it isn’t possible to reject this part of my condition as if one could remove oneself from the mortal coil with only the power of the mind. Instead of thinking of freedom in development as the ability to be something different in...

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