Key Arguments

• He opens by likening the body’s role in the world to the heart in the organism: 'One’s own body is in the world just as the heart is in the organism: it continuously breathes life into the visible spectacle, animates it and nourishes it from within, and forms a system with it,' indicating that the body is the living center that animates and organizes the perceived world.
• When he walks around his apartment, 'the different aspects under which it presents itself to me could not appear as profiles of a single thing if I did not already know that each of them represented the apartment as seen from here or as seen from over there, nor if I were unaware of my own movement and of my body as identical throughout the phases of this movement,' showing that recognition of one object across changing views presupposes awareness of bodily movement and bodily identity.
• Even apparently 'objective' views like plans or maps ('I might conceive of my apartment as if from above, I might imagine it or draw a floor plan of it') still depend on bodily experience, since 'what I call a floor plan is nothing but a more extensive perspective. This is the apartment as “seen from above,” and if I can summarize in it all of the customary perspectives, this is only on condition of knowing that a single embodied subject could successively see from different positions.'
• He explicitly contrasts his view with the objection that putting the object 'back into bodily experience as one of the poles of that experience' would strip it of objectivity, but his argument is that without this bodily pole, the 'profiles' of the object could not be unified in experience at all.
• The example of the cube is introduced precisely to show that the 'unity of the object would be conceived of – but not experienced as – the correlate of the unity of our body' if we detach it from its conditions of givenness; against this, Merleau-Ponty insists that our very capacity to conceive a cube with six equal faces presupposes an embodied, perspectival way of inhabiting space.

Source Quotes

INTRODUCTION TO PART TWO [The theory of the body is already a theory of perception.] One’s own body is in the world just as the heart is in the organism: it continuously breathes life into the visible spectacle, animates it and nourishes it from within, and forms a system with it. When I walk around my apartment, the different aspects under which it presents itself to me could not appear as profiles of a single thing if I did not already know that each of them represented the apartment as seen from here or as seen from over there, nor if I were unaware of my own movement and of my body as identical throughout the phases of this movement.

INTRODUCTION TO PART TWO [The theory of the body is already a theory of perception.] One’s own body is in the world just as the heart is in the organism: it continuously breathes life into the visible spectacle, animates it and nourishes it from within, and forms a system with it. When I walk around my apartment, the different aspects under which it presents itself to me could not appear as profiles of a single thing if I did not already know that each of them represented the apartment as seen from here or as seen from over there, nor if I were unaware of my own movement and of my body as identical throughout the phases of this movement. Of course, I might conceive of my apartment as if from above, I might imagine it or draw a floor plan of it on a piece of paper; but even then I would not be able to grasp the unity of the object without the mediation of bodily experience, for what I call a floor plan is nothing but a more extensive perspective.

When I walk around my apartment, the different aspects under which it presents itself to me could not appear as profiles of a single thing if I did not already know that each of them represented the apartment as seen from here or as seen from over there, nor if I were unaware of my own movement and of my body as identical throughout the phases of this movement. Of course, I might conceive of my apartment as if from above, I might imagine it or draw a floor plan of it on a piece of paper; but even then I would not be able to grasp the unity of the object without the mediation of bodily experience, for what I call a floor plan is nothing but a more extensive perspective. This is the apartment as “seen from above,” and if I can summarize in it all of the customary perspectives, this is only on condition of knowing that a single embodied subject could successively see from different positions. One might respond that, by putting the object back into bodily experience as one of the poles of that experience, we strip it of precisely what gives it its objectivity.

The object and my body would thus certainly form a system, but it would be a cluster of objective correlations and not, as we said just above, a collection of lived correspondences. The unity of the object would be conceived of – but not experienced as – the correlate of the unity of our body. But can the object be thus detached from the actual conditions under which it is given to us?

Key Concepts

• INTRODUCTION TO PART TWO [The theory of the body is already a theory of perception.]
• One’s own body is in the world just as the heart is in the organism: it continuously breathes life into the visible spectacle, animates it and nourishes it from within, and forms a system with it.
• the different aspects under which it presents itself to me could not appear as profiles of a single thing if I did not already know that each of them represented the apartment as seen from here or as seen from over there, nor if I were unaware of my own movement and of my body as identical throughout the phases of this movement.
• what I call a floor plan is nothing but a more extensive perspective. This is the apartment as “seen from above,” and if I can summarize in it all of the customary perspectives, this is only on condition of knowing that a single embodied subject could successively see from different positions.
• The unity of the object would be conceived of – but not experienced as – the correlate of the unity of our body.

Context

Opening of INTRODUCTION TO PART TWO, where Merleau-Ponty explicitly links the theory of the body to a theory of perception via examples of moving around an apartment and conceiving its floor plan.