Merleau-Ponty On Our Primordial Encounter With Otherness

“In the cultural object, I feel the close presence of others beneath a veil of
anonymity. Someone uses the pipe for smoking, the spoon for eating, the bell for
summon-ing, and it is through the perception of a human act and another person
that the perception of a cultural world could be verified.” (405)

For Merleau-Ponty, any encounter with an Other is preceded by a pre-cognitive,

pre-linguistic encounter with otherness in the form of anonymous others whom
we encounter as a part of an objectively shared word. No longer there simply for
me, the world and the things found therein immediately point us to others. When
these others appear, our objectively apprehended world gets sucked into their
sphere of influence, and we loose our position at the center of the world. As
Merleau-Ponty describes:

“Round about the [Other’s] perceived body a vortex forms, towards which my
world is drawn and, so to speak, sucked in: to this extent, it is no longer merely
mine, and no longer merely present, it is present to x, to that other manifestation
of behaviour which begins to take shape in it. Already the other body has ceased
to be a mere fragment of the world, and become the theatre of a certain process
of elaboration, and, as it were, a certain ‘view’ of the world. There is taking place
over there a certain manipulation of things hitherto my property. Someone is
making use of my familiar objects. But who can it be? (411–12)

The mere existence of an Other takes us outside of our bodies and ourselves. The
Other is a theater for the elaboration of a drama not of our own making. As we are
drawn into their world of concern, we forget ourselves and our concerns. We
come to be out there in the world, and as Merleau-Ponty suggests, the world
comes to inhabit us. The other doesn’t just present us with the data of other
consciousnesses, but the other affects us and acts upon us, as if love stricken.
The Lived Body and the Other

The Other is first of all perceived as a body, but this body is no mere object. The
lived body of subjects is characterized by the reversibility of being both object and
subject simultaneously. (For example, think of how you can simultaneously grasp
your own hand, and be both grasping and grasped.) A special kind of object, the
lived body of the other exhibits behaviors much like our own. More specifically, it
can leave marks and traces as vestiges, and produces the space in which it moves
by shaping its environment. In a somewhat cryptic but very suggestive passage,
Merleau-Ponty writes:

“The very first of all cultural objects, and the one by which all the rest exist, is the
body of the other person as the vehicle of a form of behaviour. Whether it be a
question of vestiges or the body of another person, we need to know how an
object in space can become the eloquent relic of an existence; how, conversely, an
intention, a thought or a project can detach themselves from the personal subject
and become visible out- side him in the shape of his body, and in the environment
which he builds for himself.” (406)

As a cultural artifact, the body of the Other can be interpreted or read for its
significance. The simplest way to understand this is to take the example of the
athlete or the dancer, off of whose bodies we can read the athleticism and poise
produced through the way they use their bodies. Their bodies are an expression of
their life’s work. Or we may read the calloused worker’s hands to mean that they
world work with their hands. Even the lack of marks and traces says something
about the other….

Furthermore, bodily attitudes communicate something about our psychological

state — for example, if we are feeling defeated, we slump in our frames; when we
are excited, our bodies exude with energy. If we are pricked, our facial expression
and bodily wincing can communicate that sharp, sudden experience of pain. So
bodies, like inert objects, can be “read” for the significance that they communicate
against a cultural backdrop. In fact, our bodies may communicate and know what
we have not (or cannot) consciously register, even against our wishes.

Finally, Merleau-Ponty here suggests that the environment in which we find

ourselves and others is produced, in part, through the Other’s activities in and
through that space. We are not just sucked into a psychological vortex when we
encounter others, but the vortex may well be physical, around a whirl of activity
not our own. It is as if our bodies are pencils that leave marks and traces, and that
shape the space we inhabit.

How Our Encounter With Primordial Otherness Structures Our Subjectivities

Prior to conscious thought, prior to an exchange with a particular Other, the

human world is there for us. There is no human world that does not always
already include others, and it would be very difficult to imagine a meaningful
world devoid of others. This is where Merleau-ponty makes his biggest
move: primordial otherness structures my subjectivity  because the Other comes
across as completing a system. Merleau-Ponty re-narrates the encounter with
otherness as follows:

“I say that it is another, a second self, and this I know in the first place because this
living body has the same structure as mine. I experience my own body as the
power of adopting certain forms of behaviour and a certain world, and I am given
to myself merely as a certain hold upon the world; now, it is precisely my body
which perceives the body of another, and discovers in that other body a
miraculous prolongation of my own intentions, a familiar way of deal- ing with the
world. Henceforth, as the parts of my body together compromise a system, so my
body and the other’s are one whole, two sides of one and the same phenomenon,
and the anonymous existence of which my body is the ever-renewed trace
henceforth inhabits both bodies simultaneously.” (411–12)

Much like I recognize that all the parts of my body arranged in working order make
up the unity I call my body, the hereto anonymous Other forms a part of the unity
of the world in which I find myself, and is in fact a necessary condition for my
coming to consciousness as a subject.

In this way, Merleau-Ponty gets back behind Husserl’s lifeworld to suggest a prior

encounter with otherness as a condition for the possibility for subjectivity. We are
not first of all distinct from this world and others, but form a unity with them from
which we later come to separate out our own individual subjective sense of
self. Any encounter with a specific Other has as its backdrop a primordial
encounter with, or connection to otherness.

Merleau-Ponty puts it most clearly in the following quote:

“Between my consciousness and my body as I experience it, between this

phenomenal body of mine and that of another as I see it from the outside, there
exists an internal relation which causes the other to appear as the completion of
the system. The other can be evident to me because I am not transparent for
myself, and because my subjectivity draws its body in its wake.” (410)

And later he will add this:

“In reality, the other is not shut up inside my perspective of the world, because
this perspective itself has no definite limits, because it slips spontaneously into the
other’s, and because both are brought together in the one single world in which
we all participate as anonymous subjects of perception.” (411)
The word “imbricated” is often used to describe this situation, and this
phenomenological description is meant to give a new starting point from which to
overcome the problem of solipsism — of a subject that is shut up in itself. The
reality of the solipsistic subject’s world is in question precisely because it cannot
be verified. (Husserl preserves the subject/object inside/outside division intact in
his account, a strategic solipsim he adopts in over to overcome it, but arguably his
transcendental subject is never able to fully overcome the split.) Merleau-Ponty
overcomes the mind/body subject/object split by denying it outright, arguing that
the body/self is simultaneously subject and object, and that “the world is wholly
inside and I am wholly outside of myself.” (474)

Quotes Source: Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception (New

York: Routledge) 2005.