6 - The Silent, Limping Body of Philosophy

Summary

In the field of Western philosophy, Maurice Merleau-Ponty is something like the patron saint of the body. Although La Mettrie, Diderot, Nietzsche, and Foucault have also passionately championed the bodily dimension of human life, none can match the bulk of rigorous, systematic, and persistent argument that Merleau-Ponty provides to prove the body's primacy in human experience and meaning. With tireless eloquence that almost seems to conquer by its massive unrelenting flow, he insists that the body is not only the crucial source of all perception and action, but also the core of our expressive capability and thus the ground of all language and meaning.

Paradoxically, while celebrating the body's role in expression, Merleau-Ponty typically characterizes it in terms of silence. The body, he writes in Phenomenology of Perception, constitutes “the tacit cogito,” “the silent cogito,” the “unspoken cogito.” As our “primary subjectivity,” it is “the consciousness which conditions language,” but itself remains a “silent consciousness” with an “inarticulate grasp of the world” (PP 461-3/402-4/468-70). Forming “the background of silence” (S 58/46) that is necessary for language to emerge, the body, as gesture, is also already “a tacit language” (S 59/47) and the ground of all expression: “every human use of the body is already primordial expression” (S 84/67).