Key Arguments

• He proposes to 'apply the idea of subjectivity as temporality to the questions with which we began' and recalls that previously it was 'a hopeless endeavor to join the for-itself to a certain object whose causal operations it would have to suffer.'
• He reconceives the for‑itself and the world in temporal terms: 'if the for-itself, the revelation of the self to the self, is nothing but the hollow where time takes place, and if the world “in itself” is merely the horizon of my present, then the problem comes down to knowing how a being that is still to come and has already passed by can also have a present – which means the problem is eliminated, since the future, the past, and the present are tied together in the movement of temporalization.'
• From this temporalization he derives the essentiality of embodiment: 'It is just as essential to me that I have a body as it is essential to the future to be the future of a certain present.'
• He argues that no purely 'spiritual' or purely 'bodily' function can be isolated from the other side: 'scientific thematization and objective thought will not be able to find a single bodily function that is strictly independent of existential structures,49 and, reciprocally, not a single “spiritual” act that does not rest upon a bodily infrastructure.'
• He insists not only on the necessity of having a body but of having this particular one: 'Moreover, it is not just essential that I have a body, but also that I have this particular body. It is not merely the notion of the body that, through the notion of the present, is necessarily tied to the notion of the for-itself, but the actual existence of my body is indispensable to the existence of my “consciousness.”'
• He claims that the connection between for‑itself and body can only be known in the first-person 'experience [l’épreuve] of my presence in the world': 'Ultimately, if I know that the for-itself crowns a body, this can only be through the experience of a singular body and of a singular for-itself, that is, through the experience [l’épreuve] of my presence in the world.'
• Against the objection that many bodily details (nails, ears, lungs) could vary without changing 'me', he replies that body-parts in isolation have no existence: 'my nails, ears, and lungs taken in isolation have no existence. Science accustoms us to considering the body as an assemblage of parts, and so too does the experience of its breaking apart in death. Now, the decomposed body is precisely no longer a body.'
• He reintegrates the parts into the living, phenomenal body and notes their contribution to my style and identity, even anticipating future scientific correlations: 'They are not indifferent to the idea of me that others form, they contribute to my physiognomy or to my style, and perhaps science will tomorrow pronounce – in the form of objective correlations – the necessity in which I was to have ears, nails, and lungs formed in just this way in order for me to be dexterous or clumsy, calm or nervous, intelligent or stupid, that is, in order for me to be myself.'
• He reasserts his earlier thesis that the objective body is only an impoverished abstraction from the lived body and that the mind–body problem concerns only the latter: 'the objective body is not the truth of the phenomenal body, that is, the truth of the body such as we experience it. The objective body is merely an impoverished image of the phenomenal body, and the problem of the relations between the soul and the body has nothing to do with the objective body, which has merely a conceptual existence, but rather has to do with the phenomenal body.'
• He locates this entire configuration in temporality: our 'open and personal existence rests upon an initial foundation of acquired and congealed existence' and 'if we are temporality, then it could not be any other way, since the dialectic between the acquired and the future is constitutive of time.'

Source Quotes

We conceive of being through time, because it is through the relations between subject-time and object-time that we can understand the relations between the subject and the world. Let us apply the idea of subjectivity as temporality to the questions with which we began. We asked ourselves, for example, how we might conceive of the relations between the soul and the body, and it was a hopeless endeavor to join the for-itself to a certain object whose causal operations it would have to suffer.

We asked ourselves, for example, how we might conceive of the relations between the soul and the body, and it was a hopeless endeavor to join the for-itself to a certain object whose causal operations it would have to suffer. But if the for-itself, the revelation of the self to the self, is nothing but the hollow where time takes place, and if the world “in itself” is merely the horizon of my present, then the problem comes down to knowing how a being that is still to come and has already passed by can also have a present – which means the problem is eliminated, since the future, the past, and the present are tied together in the movement of temporalization. It is just as essential to me that I have a body as it is essential to the future to be the future of a certain present.

But if the for-itself, the revelation of the self to the self, is nothing but the hollow where time takes place, and if the world “in itself” is merely the horizon of my present, then the problem comes down to knowing how a being that is still to come and has already passed by can also have a present – which means the problem is eliminated, since the future, the past, and the present are tied together in the movement of temporalization. It is just as essential to me that I have a body as it is essential to the future to be the future of a certain present. And this is true to the extent that scientific thematization and objective thought will not be able to find a single bodily function that is strictly independent of existential structures,49 and, reciprocally, not a single “spiritual” act that does not rest upon a bodily infrastructure.

It is just as essential to me that I have a body as it is essential to the future to be the future of a certain present. And this is true to the extent that scientific thematization and objective thought will not be able to find a single bodily function that is strictly independent of existential structures,49 and, reciprocally, not a single “spiritual” act that does not rest upon a bodily infrastructure. Moreover, it is not just essential that I have a body, but also that I have this particular body.

They are not indifferent to the idea of me that others form, they contribute to my physiognomy or to my style, and perhaps science will tomorrow pronounce – in the form of objective correlations – the necessity in which I was to have ears, nails, and lungs formed in just this way in order for me to be dexterous or clumsy, calm or nervous, intelligent or stupid, that is, in order for me to be myself. In other words, as we have shown elsewhere, the objective body is not the truth of the phenomenal body, that is, the truth of the body such as we experience it. The objective body is merely an impoverished image of the phenomenal body, and the problem of the relations between the soul and the body has nothing to do with the objective body, which has merely a conceptual existence, but rather has to do with the phenomenal body. All that is true is that our open and personal existence rests upon an initial foundation of acquired and congealed existence.

The objective body is merely an impoverished image of the phenomenal body, and the problem of the relations between the soul and the body has nothing to do with the objective body, which has merely a conceptual existence, but rather has to do with the phenomenal body. All that is true is that our open and personal existence rests upon an initial foundation of acquired and congealed existence. But if we are temporality, then it could not be any other way, since the dialectic between the acquired and the future is constitutive of time. We would respond in the same way to questions that might be raised about the world prior to man.

Key Concepts

• Let us apply the idea of subjectivity as temporality to the questions with which we began.
• if the for-itself, the revelation of the self to the self, is nothing but the hollow where time takes place, and if the world “in itself” is merely the horizon of my present, then the problem comes down to knowing how a being that is still to come and has already passed by can also have a present – which means the problem is eliminated, since the future, the past, and the present are tied together in the movement of temporalization.
• It is just as essential to me that I have a body as it is essential to the future to be the future of a certain present.
• And this is true to the extent that scientific thematization and objective thought will not be able to find a single bodily function that is strictly independent of existential structures,49 and, reciprocally, not a single “spiritual” act that does not rest upon a bodily infrastructure.
• the objective body is not the truth of the phenomenal body, that is, the truth of the body such as we experience it. The objective body is merely an impoverished image of the phenomenal body, and the problem of the relations between the soul and the body has nothing to do with the objective body, which has merely a conceptual existence, but rather has to do with the phenomenal body.
• our open and personal existence rests upon an initial foundation of acquired and congealed existence. But if we are temporality, then it could not be any other way, since the dialectic between the acquired and the future is constitutive of time.

Context

II - TEMPORALITY, subsection [m. Presence in the world.], where Merleau-Ponty applies his thesis that subjectivity is temporality to the mind–body relation, argues for the essential and singular character of the lived body for consciousness, and connects bodily 'acquired and congealed existence' to the temporal dialectic of past and future.