Body and World

Samuel Todes
Cambridge, Mass, MIT Press, 2001
292 pp. Paper, ISBN 0-262-20135-6
1. Body, Human (Philosophy)

Reviewed by Robert Pepperell
School of Art, Media and Design
University of Wales College, Newport
Caerleon, Newport NP18 3YH, UK

pepperell@ntlworld.com

"Body and World" is an edited republication of a doctoral thesis written by Samuel Todes in 1963, presented here with various appended material. According to the foreword by Hubert L. Dreyfus, "one can think of Body and World as fleshing out Merleau-Ponty’s project while presciently relating it to the current scene." (p. xii). The significance of this statement in the current philosophical climate is itself worth stressing. With only a few exceptions (Merleau-Ponty being one of them), philosophers in the western tradition have relegated our flesh to the status of an irrelevant appendage. Only recently has there been specific and wider recognition of the role of the body, and indeed our global environment, in the generation of our mental experience.

Todes explains that in the classical realm, for Plato and Aristotle at any rate, the earthly world, including the body, stands in unfavourable opposition to the ideal world. These opposing realms are linked by the mind (soul), which aspires towards the heavenly and away from the corporeal. Thus the qualitative distinction between mind and body, subject and object, was inaugurated and hardly ever revised throughout the course of western philosophy. From this point on many thinkers became fixated by the subjectivity of experience, to the extent that the very existence of the body, and the world it inhabits, was thrown into doubt.

Descartes, of course, is usually credited with formalising the complete divorce of mind and body though, in fact, the real story is more complex, and Descartes’ view more subtle than is often reported. As far as Descartes’ cogito is concerned, any attempt to deny the human subject already presupposes it. So the indubitable existence of the human subject becomes a first principle from which equally secure principles can be derived with certainty. Although certainty in knowledge was the optimistic aim of Descartes’ philosophical program, as Todes points out, he remained in some confusion about the status of the human body in relation to the world, and to God. Descartes famously saw his own senses as a fallible source of truth about the world, but equally recognised that his knowledge of the extended world (including his own body) formed part of the same subjective experience he could not deny.

Moving to a consideration a consideration of Hume and Leibniz, who both in different ways developed Descartes’ ideas, Todes mounts a critique of their equal but opposing responses to the doubtful status of the human body. In following Descartes, neither Hume nor Leibniz could see any means by which externally generated events could give rise to internally experienced perceptions. This left the realm of mental experience largely insulated from its extended environment. Moreover, the mind cannot contain any extended matter (according to Descartes) but only representations of the world that the mind ‘has’. Todes make much of this notion of ‘having’, in the sense that the subject ‘has’ experiences — including the experience of the body. But, to my mind, this itself raises the spectre of an unproductive infinite regress as the verb to ‘have’ implies a further subject who is doing the having.

Leibniz is criticised here for idealising human existence in an optimal body, as opposed to our actual, messy circumstances, which are often far from optimal. (p. 38). Indeed, for Todes it is the awkwardnesses and imbalances, frictions and constraints characterising our real existence (what Todes calls ‘circumstances’) that are a precondition of our subjective experience, just as for Descartes the subject presupposes itself: "And out being embodied in the midst of circumstances is . . . so fundamental a characteristic of the world of our experience that it is not even possible to imagine or conceive of what it would be like to have a "body", "desires", "will", "conscience", or "understanding", or to engage in "activities" of any kind, except in the midst of circumstances." (p. 39). Thus Todes asserts the active body as the determining agent of experience. And this, in effect, is "How Todes Rescues Phenomenology from Idealism", to take the title of the introductory essay to this volume by Piotr Hoffman.

Having considered Hume and Leibniz, Todes pushes the accelerator on his own thesis. Attempting to adduce evidence for his argument he mounts the claim that we can distinguish between imaginary figments and veridical knowledge by the feedback gained from physical intervention. So, for example, to distinguish between a real oasis and a mirage, I would take certain active steps in an attempt to reconcile my mental and physical experience. One is put in mind of Samuel Johnson’s toe-stubbing refutation of Berkeleian idealism. But if the threat of idealism, and illusion, could be dispensed with so readily it would not have plagued western philosophy for the last couple of thousand years. How can we separate the real from the imagined in, for example, an inactive state, or a state where physical verification is not an option? Equally, might not a hallucination persist despite, or even because of, our physical activity? Todes counters these objections with a dubious appeal to logic. The distinction, he says, "between illusory and veridical appearances is not an apparent distinction but a logical one, to be made with the help of judgement about the consistency, coherence, simplicity, etc., of the family group of appearances that can be formed by including or excluding the given appearance from among them." (p. 56). To me this is far from satisfactory.

There is another respect in which I find Todes appeal to the agency of the body problematic. He writes: "To appear, or to be anything at all, is to be a function of the human body. For the world itself is such a function and so is made as to allow only such things in it. What is not a function of the human body is outside the world, and hence can neither be nor appear to be anything at all." (p. 42). In this view the human body stands at the "portals of the world and allows entrance only to that which can be domesticated for its uses, so as to make the world of experience livable." Of course, this implies we know what a body is, what are its bounds and limits, and that, indeed, it is something distinct from the world.

On one level Todes’ thesis is quite straightforward, even perhaps slightly obvious: that our bodies have a considerable influence on the way we consciously perceive the world. He summarises his position as "the fundamental contention . . . that the human body is not merely a material thing found in the midst of other material things in the world, but that it is also, and moreover thereby, that material thing whose capacity to move itself generates and defines the whole world of human experience in which any material thing, including itself, can be found." (p. 88). Hence the "human body as material subject of the world" - the original title of the 1963 dissertation. But, of course, things in academic philosophy are never straightforward, and on another level this thesis implicates all sorts of complex ontological issues, which this review cannot address. Much of the remainder of the book is occupied with a critique of Kant’s philosophy and further developments of the main argument.

Whilst I welcome "Body and World" as a contribution to the re-orientation of philosophy away from idealism towards a view of the subject as active in a body and a world, it must also be said that this is a work of scholarly philosophy and, as such, not easily recommended to the general reader. However, Todes’ style is clear and consistent, while the book has obviously been expertly edited. So with determination and patience there is much to be drawn from it.