Chapter 5 - The Body Schema and Our Skills

Summary

Here I commence my explication of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the body schema. Our skills are deployed through this sub-reflective schema, which lies behind our pre-reflective or proprioceptive awareness of posture. I focus on his interpretation of the phenomenon of the use-phantom limb as silhouetting our ordinary performances because it is continuous with the rest of the body. Ordinarily our skilled readiness-of-hand and readiness-of-leg are not represented or objectified, not being thematic or focal powers of action. Rather they are ‘regions of silence’ that we take for granted. I show what the schema can exclude (inoperative areas of the body), what it can incorporate (implements it uses proficiently), and why it is an a priori condition of cognitive distanciation and of reckoning with the possible. We reckon with imagined actions that are immediate possibilities for us, and in the process we also draw on a reservoir of sedimented concepts and convictions.