Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world

A thing can be familiar without being fully visible. A movement can be learned without becoming a rule we recite. Another person can make sense to us and still surprise us. This study begins with such ordinary experiences and asks a demanding question: what can attending carefully to experience establish about a world we share?

Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty both make experience a philosophical starting point. Phenomenology, the approach they develop, investigates how things are encountered and what makes that encounter possible. Husserl seeks a rigorous foundation for philosophical knowledge: an account of the structures through which anything can have meaning and count as known. Merleau-Ponty takes up this inquiry through bodily life, expression and our involvement with others. Their relationship is not a simple division between a philosopher of the mind and a philosopher of the body, and we will examine both what their arguments share and where they part company.

The nine lessons proceed in three stages:

• How things are given. “One thing, more than one appearance”; “What changes when we bracket the world?”; “How can a passing moment belong to a whole?”; “How can another person be given to me?”
• Bodily access and expression. “The body through which a world appears”; “Learning a way of moving”; “When expression helps a thought take shape”.
• Others and the reach of description. “Sharing a world without sharing one perspective”; “What can a description establish?”

Throughout, a second question accompanies the first: what warrants moving from a description of one experience to a claim about experience more generally? Examples give the arguments something definite to explain, but an example cannot establish its own universal reach. We will keep asking what survives another case, another description or an objection. Source notes identify the texts behind the arguments, and explanatory answers show how an application can be reasoned through; you may read those answers without first writing a response.

The aim is understanding, with no assent required. A well-supported objection can show that you have understood a philosopher as clearly as a defense can. This is an inquiry into philosophical claims, not a program of therapeutic attention or a survey of every kind of experience, and it asks for no personal disclosure or bodily exercise. Begin with the first lesson; the study explains its essential concepts as they become useful.