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3 Singing the Living Body Electric I sing the body electric, The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, They will not let me off till I go with them . . . . . . and charge them full with the charge of the soul. —Walt Whitman1 I want to speak to the despisers of the body. . . . “I,” you say, and are proud of the word. But greater is that in which you do not wish to have faith—your body and its great reason: that does not say “I,” but does “I.” —Friedrich Nietzsche2 1. Toward a Philosophy of Living Embodiment It is well known that the mind-body problem is defined by a blatant contradiction in Descartes’s Meditations. On one hand, Descartes argues time and again that the mind is immaterial: he establishes mind as res cogitans by its not being material; he insists that mind and body are “completely different” substances. Yet at the end of the Sixth Meditation, Descartes also argues that mind and body are “very closely joined” and “intermingled,” that they form a “single unit.” How is this union possible? How is it possible for the immaterial mind to be “connected” with the material body? After this problem in the Meditations became evident, many philosophical attempts have been made to explain the mind-body relation, starting already with Descartes’s own thesis of the pineal gland. But what is never far from the discussion (and often assumed by it), is Descartes’s way of casting one’s body as an object “out there,” physically and metaphysically closer to a rock than to me. This radical, objectivist view of the body was true for Descartes on principle. Since matter is defined as extension in force relations (“the subject matter of pure mathematics”), the organic, material body becomes partes extra partes. That is, each part of it is externally related to the other parts with all action occurring through mechanical force. I hasten to add that this is how, say, a toaster works; and Descartes embraces this kind of analogy, comparing our bodies to “a clock constructed with wheels and weights.”3 Thus is born in western intellectual history what Michel Foucault has called “the age of man-the-machine.”4 It is not particularly difficult to trace out the continuing legacy of the Carte- Singing the Living Body Electric 75 sian body-machine. It is legitimized by Newton’s “natural philosophy” which ignores the “subjective-mind” half of Descartes’s ontology and casts the universe as “a great object” (once again like a clock). It is subtly carried through Locke’s empiricism, in which the “passive” body is “forced” to receive “impressions ” from the objects around it.5 Foucault has argued that this mechanical image of the body both supported and gained support from the rise of industrialism with its need for a productive and efficient work force.6 In intellectual culture, the body-machine pervades nineteenth and twentieth-century behaviorism, in which all actions are cashed out by theories of the “reflex” and “stimulated response.” And it persists well after behaviorism in our contemporary talk of the body and cognition in terms of “computational systems ,” “hardware,” “software,” “mechanisms,” and “networks.” Be all this as it may, one thing is sure: so long as we continue to understand, discuss, and model the body as a machine—as an inanimate object constructed of independent systems—we will never understand its life. That is to say, we will never understand the phenomena of living embodiment. As long as this happens we will be forever “out of step” with our bodily experiences, dislocated from our myriad ways of comportment, and unaware of phenomena that our scientific models and explanations need to respect. Indeed, the virtue of sensibility I discussed in chapter 2 requires that we thoroughly study and articulate, rather than ignore, our embodiment as it is lived. It requires that we celebrate embodied experience and not despise it: that we learn, with Whitman, how to “sing the body electric.” In the philosophical effort to rigorously study embodied experience there is probably no better place to start than with Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty is widely known among philosophers and theorists as “The Philosopher of the Body.” Some people have claimed that his phenomenology of embodied experience and agency is his genius and legacy.7 I must say at the outset of this chapter that I don’t share this view. Of course I agree that embodiment is a...

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