Key Arguments

• He argues that if 'I am conscious of my body through the world and if my body is the unperceived term at the center of the world toward which every object turns its face, then it is true for the same reason that my body is the pivot of the world.'
• With a lost limb, 'At the same moment that my usual world gives rise to habitual intentions in me, I can no longer actually unite with it if I have lost a limb. Manipulable objects, precisely insofar as they appear as manipulable, appeal to a hand that I no longer have. Regions of silence are thus marked out in the totality of my body.'
• This yields a lived contradiction: 'The patient knows his disability precisely insofar as he is ignorant of it, and he ignores it precisely insofar as he knows it. This is the paradox of all being in the world.'
• He proposes to understand this by positing two layers: 'it is as though our body comprises two distinct layers, that of the habitual body and that of the actual body. Gestures of manipulation that appear in the first have disappeared in the second.'
• The question 'how I can feel endowed with a limb that I no longer have in fact' thus 'comes down to knowing how the habitual body can act as a guarantee for the actual body. How can I perceive objects as manipulable when I can no longer manipulate them?'
• He answers that 'The manipulable must have ceased being something that I currently manipulate in order to become something one can manipulate; it must have ceased being something manipulable for me and have become something manipulable in itself.', implying an objectivity of manipulability beyond current power.
• Correlatively, 'my body must be grasped not merely in an instantaneous, singular, and full experience, but moreover under an aspect of generality and as an impersonal being.', showing that bodily self-experience includes a generalized, anonymous layer that sustains the phantom limb.

Source Quotes

But at the very moment that the world hides his deficiency from him, the world cannot help but to reveal it to him. For if it is true that I am conscious of my body through the world and if my body is the unperceived term at the center of the world toward which every object turns its face, then it is true for the same reason that my body is the pivot of the world. I know that the objects have several faces because I can move around them, and in this sense I am conscious of the world by means of my body.

I know that the objects have several faces because I can move around them, and in this sense I am conscious of the world by means of my body. At the same moment that my usual world gives rise to habitual intentions in me, I can no longer actually unite with it if I have lost a limb. Manipulable objects, precisely insofar as they appear as manipulable, appeal to a hand that I no longer have. Regions of silence are thus marked out in the totality of my body. The patient knows his disability precisely insofar as he is ignorant of it, and he ignores it precisely insofar as he knows it.

Regions of silence are thus marked out in the totality of my body. The patient knows his disability precisely insofar as he is ignorant of it, and he ignores it precisely insofar as he knows it. This is the paradox of all being in the world. By carrying myself toward a world, I throw my perceptual intentions and my practical intentions against objects that appear to me, in the end, as anterior and exterior to these intentions, and which nevertheless exist for me only insofar as they arouse thoughts or desires in me.

By carrying myself toward a world, I throw my perceptual intentions and my practical intentions against objects that appear to me, in the end, as anterior and exterior to these intentions, and which nevertheless exist for me only insofar as they arouse thoughts or desires in me. In the case we are considering, the ambiguity of knowledge amounts to this: it is as though our body comprises two distinct layers, that of the habitual body and that of the actual body. Gestures of manipulation that appear in the first have disappeared in the second, and the problem of how I can feel endowed with a limb that I no longer have in fact comes down to knowing how the habitual body can act as a guarantee for the actual body. How can I perceive objects as manipulable when I can no longer manipulate them?

Gestures of manipulation that appear in the first have disappeared in the second, and the problem of how I can feel endowed with a limb that I no longer have in fact comes down to knowing how the habitual body can act as a guarantee for the actual body. How can I perceive objects as manipulable when I can no longer manipulate them? The manipulable must have ceased being something that I currently manipulate in order to become something one can manipulate; it must have ceased being something manipulable for me and have become something manipulable in itself. Correlatively, my body must be grasped not merely in an instantaneous, singular, and full experience, but moreover under an aspect of generality and as an impersonal being. [e.

The manipulable must have ceased being something that I currently manipulate in order to become something one can manipulate; it must have ceased being something manipulable for me and have become something manipulable in itself. Correlatively, my body must be grasped not merely in an instantaneous, singular, and full experience, but moreover under an aspect of generality and as an impersonal being. [e. “Organic repression” and the body as an innate complex.] The phenomenon of the phantom limb connects in this way to the phenomenon of repression, which in turn will shed some light on it.

Key Concepts

• my body is the unperceived term at the center of the world toward which every object turns its face, then it is true for the same reason that my body is the pivot of the world.
• At the same moment that my usual world gives rise to habitual intentions in me, I can no longer actually unite with it if I have lost a limb. Manipulable objects, precisely insofar as they appear as manipulable, appeal to a hand that I no longer have. Regions of silence are thus marked out in the totality of my body.
• The patient knows his disability precisely insofar as he is ignorant of it, and he ignores it precisely insofar as he knows it. This is the paradox of all being in the world.
• it is as though our body comprises two distinct layers, that of the habitual body and that of the actual body. Gestures of manipulation that appear in the first have disappeared in the second, and the problem of how I can feel endowed with a limb that I no longer have in fact comes down to knowing how the habitual body can act as a guarantee for the actual body.
• How can I perceive objects as manipulable when I can no longer manipulate them? The manipulable must have ceased being something that I currently manipulate in order to become something one can manipulate; it must have ceased being something manipulable for me and have become something manipulable in itself.
• Correlatively, my body must be grasped not merely in an instantaneous, singular, and full experience, but moreover under an aspect of generality and as an impersonal being.

Context

Later in subsection [d. Ambiguity of the phantom limb.], where Merleau-Ponty uses the paradoxical co-existence of knowledge and ignorance of disability to introduce his distinction between the habitual and actual body, and to argue for a generalized, impersonal grasp of body and world that underpins phantom limb experience.