Body and World (review)

Body and World is an edited republication of Samuel Todes's 1963 doctoral thesis, presented here with appended material. According to the foreword by Hubert L. Dreyfus, "one can think of Body and World as fleshing out Merleau-Ponty's project while presciently relating it to the current scene" (p. xii). The significance of this statement in the current philosophical climate is itself worth stressing. With only a few exceptions (Merleau-Ponty being one of them), philosophers in the Western tradition have relegated our flesh to the status of an irrelevant appendage. Only recently has there been specific and wider recognition of the role of the body, and indeed our global environment, in the generation of our mental experience.

Todes explains that in the classical realm, for Plato and Aristotle at any rate, the earthly world, including the body, stands in unfavorable opposition to the ideal world. These opposing realms are linked by the mind (soul), which aspires towards the heavenly and away from the corporeal. Thus the qualitative distinction between mind and body, subject and object, was inaugurated and hardly ever revised throughout the course of Western philosophy. From this point on, many thinkers became fixated by the subjectivity of experience, to the extent that the very existence of the body, and the world it inhabits, was thrown into doubt.

Descartes, of course, is usually credited with formalizing the complete divorce of mind and body, though, in fact, the real story is more complex, and Descartes's view more subtle than is often reported. As far as Descartes's cogito is concerned, any attempt to deny the human subject already presupposes it. So the indubitable existence of the human subject becomes a first principle from which equally secure principles can be derived with certainty. Although certainty in knowledge was the optimistic aim of Descartes's philosophical program, as Todes points out, he remained in some confusion about the status of the human body in relation to the world, and to God. Descartes famously saw his own senses as a fallible source of truth about the world, but equally recognized that his knowledge of the extended world (including his own body) formed part of the same subjective experience he could not deny.

Moving to a consideration of Hume and Leibniz, who both developed Descartes's ideas in different ways, Todes mounts a critique of their equal but opposing responses to the doubtful status of the human body. In following Descartes, neither Hume nor Leibniz could see any means by which externally generated events could give rise to internally experienced perceptions. This left the realm of mental experience largely insulated from its extended environment. Moreover, the mind cannot contain any extended matter (according to Descartes) but only representations of the world that the mind "has." Todes makes much of this notion of "having," in the sense that the subject "has" experiences—including the experience of the body. But, to my mind, this itself raises the specter of an unproductive infinite regress, as the verb to "have" implies a further subject who is doing the having.

Having considered Hume and Leibniz, Todes presses the accelerator on his own thesis. Attempting to adduce evidence for his argument, he mounts the claim that we can distinguish between imaginary figments and veridical knowledge by the feedback gained from physical intervention. So, for example, to distinguish between a real oasis and a mirage, one would take certain active steps in an attempt to reconcile mental and physical experience. One is put in mind of Samuel Johnson's toe-stubbing refutation of Berkeleian idealism. But if the threat of idealism, and illusion, could be dispensed with so readily, would it have plagued Western philosophy for the last couple of thousand years? How can we separate the real from the imagined in, for example, an inactive state, or a state where physical verification is not an option? Equally, might not a hallucination persist despite, or even because of, our physical activity? Todes counters these objections with a dubious appeal...