(3) Merleau-Ponty’s Solution; Habit and the Body

Development of habit

Let’s return to the phenomenological setting of the Meno paradox mentioned in section (1): the world appears to us as a mostly simple, already interpreted kind of affair. We do know that the explanations and discussions and problems of the things before us can fill volumes upon volumes, but this ‘possible knowledge’ doesn’t appear to us as a void, like a locked box in a movie surrounded by questions as to its contents, or missing or gappy sections in our ‘world projection’, or a ‘nausea’ of the concatenation of Being . The world is just there, and is mostly familiar, mundane, and seemingly ‘known enough’, despite us knowing very little about it.

Should Merleau-Ponty hear us speaking in this way his response would perhaps be to pose the question: who or what ‘knows enough’ of the world before us such that it can feel, for the most part, effortlessly familiar and mundane? His answer: the body. The room around me does not present itself as a series of geometrical, historical, scientific, philosophical, geographic and economic questions that I am unequipped to answer, but first and foremost as a thing to be moved through. It appears before me with this ready-made significance. And insofar as moving through it presents no issues to the silent intelligence of my body, that somehow coordinates itself and transports me around, it appears to me, to this very same body with eyes that see it, as perfectly ‘settled’ for its purposes. This ‘settling’ for bodily proficiency Merleau-Ponty identifies as “habit”. As Talero (2006) writes:

“Habit is our body’s power of carving its own paths through the sensuous multiplicity of being, so that we are not directly assailed by the radical novelty of each passing moment but instead able to rely upon structures of repetition that hold onto the past and recreate it for us, and in so doing, create a stable situation in which we can function.” (Talero, 2006, p.195)

But the room is not only a ‘thing to be walked through’. Here is a chair to be sat on and a desk to sit at and a computer on which to type. We’re used to thinking of the skill of typing as something physical and habitual. One practices and then one’s hands just know how they need to move in order for the desired words to appear on the screen. I am not astounded by my hand’s quick movements, because they are not astounded by them. Coiled into them is the heavy sediment of habit.

It would seem that my hands, through habit, know where the letters of the keyboard are. But can we think of this ‘knowledge’ in terms of being propositional, or rationally justifiable?

“If habit is neither a form of knowledge nor an involuntary action, what then is it? It is knowledge in the hands, which is forthcoming only when bodily effort is made, and cannot be formulated in detachment from that effort.” (Merleau-Ponty, 2005, p.166)

If it could be formulated in detachment of the actual effort of bringing it about, then a number of things should hold true that don’t: I should be able to spell “empiricism” correctly with a pen, like I can when I type. I should be able to report which finger I use for each letter of the keyboard. I should be able to list off the bottom row of letters of a keyboard. The fact that I can’t seemingly do any of these things, but none of that gets in the way of my typing, points us to a kind of knowledge that is not remotely anything like ‘justified true belief’, or the subsumption under a concept.

However, this is where our appeal to habit usually ends — in the movements of the hands across the keys forming the desired words. But is this really what it is like to type? To desire a word and then engage my hands in creating it? As someone who is typing at this very minute, I can tell you the work of ‘automatic habit’ coiled up inside my hands seems to be driving the process much more than a ‘loyal tool doing the bidding of the mind’. It is hard for me to determine at what point of the process, if I want to think of my hands as habituated-through-practice tools, this habituation cuts off. It would seem to me, observing them now as I type, that my hands are also habituated in the use of grammar insofar as they happily bounce around contributing the correct prepositions and tenses (the linguistic rules of which I can tell you very little about). And where does this end? It seems my hands are also habituated into the act of writing an essay on the Meno paradox. I may have ‘deliberated’ over an outline, but the writing itself is carried along by their inner and silent intelligence, even when that entails observations, interpretations, examples and arguments that ‘emerge’ as opposed to being pre-planned, such as this lengthy paragraph you are reading now, which my hands seem anxious to type out at length (perhaps so they can get the recognition they finally deserve).

Or think of encountering a friend on the road. You raise your hand in a wave. A habit, you admit. As if to announce the talking distance has been reached, out comes the “Hi!”, perhaps another habit. You’re asked how you are. Out comes whatever habitual response you usually give, as if by itself. Then some standard back and forths. Maybe you’re still willing to grant these remarks on the weather as the product of habit too, or maybe you think something else has now taken over. But I would ask: what has taken over? At what point in the ensuing conversation does something like ‘conscious mediation’ take over? At what point are ‘the desired words being selected’? Or rather are the words just there, discovered as you say them, responding, and nodding and replying. The familiarity of the friend, and the familiarity of this conversation, that’s different every time it is conducted, but neither of you needing to spare a thought or deliberation on it at all. The complexities driven by a silent intelligence that perfectly understands what has been said, what is to be said next, and what is happening around it. The habits of the body.

The idea of a body ‘understanding’ through habit, each habit being such an understanding, requires us to revise what we mean by the term ‘understanding’:

“This way of putting it will appear absurd, if understanding is subsuming a sense-datum under an idea, and if the body is an object. But the phenomenon of habit is just what prompts us to revise our notion of ‘understand’ and our notion of the body. To understand is to experience the harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance — and the body is our anchorage in a world” (Merleau-Ponty, 2005, p.167)

Or as O’Loughlin (1995) puts it:

“Consciousness — the “symbolic” or “objectifying” function — does not direct the body’s movements; these are directed instead by the intelligent body’s connections with the world at hand. It is the body, not an occupying consciousness, which understands its world.”

Already, this drawing of our attention to the knowledge of the body, contained in habit, is making progress in the problem concerning the relation between the mind and the world such that knowledge, and its acquisition, could be possible. The relationship of interest is now the seemingly more manageable one of the relationship of the body to the world. For Merleau-Ponty, for the most part, Heidegger’s Being-in-the-World is largely thought in terms of our bodies and their habits. If the world is to present itself as something like a ‘field of equipment’ as Heidegger understood it, then it appears that way to and for a body that is habituated into its use. But, furthermore, and this is key, our body’s habituated capabilities directly emboss, or ‘fold’ our experience. The room around me appears mostly ‘resolved’ and mundane, not exploding in mysteries and perplexities, because it is addressed to a body that is perfectly capable of moving through it without the least difficulty or consideration. Those habituated movements that would have me walk to the kitchen and back ‘carve out’ or ‘fold’ my fundamental and primordial understanding of my phenomenal situation. My body sits in and moves through its ruts quite comfortably.

This brings us to the important temporal aspect of habit, its acquisition and development. It’s not the case that I instruct my body with some architectural schema when I first move in to a house. The smoothness with which my body moves about it is the condensation and sedimentation of thousands of walks I have taken through it. Our body’s relationship to the past is deeply intimate; we sit and complain about the vagaries of memory, all the while utilizing effortlessly and exquisitely thousands upon thousands of unique vocal articulations called ‘words’ — our larynx, lips, and tongue dancing around ‘remembering’ volumes of the past while we struggle to bring to mind some vague image from a few days ago.

Insofar as the world appears before us as it does, curved and ‘unthought’ because of the knowledge contained in our body’s habituated capabilities, our body brings our full past to bear upon the present moment. This is not in the sense of a ‘projection of memories’, where, for example, a visual experience is supplemented, collage like, by fragments of previous visual experiences, but, rather, the very significance of things, the particular way the world folds itself in my attention, is arranged by what my body, through habit, can do. For most of us the street appears as a space to be walked through, but for the skateboarder, parkour runner, graffiti artist, or homeless person sadly accustomed to sleeping on the streets, entire new cartographies open up. This, then, brings habit’s condensation of the past into a projection upon the future — those possibilities that become present, in the present, speak to the ruts and furrows carved out through the body’s habituated understanding.

Now, finally, we can return to the process of learning. It is certainly possible to learn how to skateboard, and thus to ‘open up’ the space of the street to different possibilities and significances (Richards, 2017). By teaching the body new ways of movement, the very world is rearranged, or ‘re-prioritized’ in regards to its significance and how it is to be encountered. However, we seem a far cry from the children learning mathematical operations. If that seems to be the case, however, then it means we are holding on to the old categories. If we think of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘habit’ as a mere ‘programming of the body’ the way we might program a stop watch, granting that the body as a semi-autonomous object might be ‘primed’ in this or that way, we have missed how radical his solution is.

“Number is never a pure concept, … it is a structure of consciousness involving degrees of more or less. The true act of counting requires of the subject that his operations as they develop and cease to occupy the centre of his consciousness, shall not cease to be there for him and shall constitute, for subsequent operations, a ground on which they may be established. … What is called pure number or authentic number is only a development or extension, through repetition, of the process which constitutes any perception.” (Merleau-Ponty, 2005, pp.154–155)

If Merleau-Ponty is right about this, the arithmetic learning that the children undergo flies under a cognition that would associate or analyse the mathematical relationships involved, straight into a silent intelligence of the body that has sedimented all of the past instances of beginning the addition algorithm by counting out the first term. The body now perceives the first term as already counted, the enumeration compressed into a result that the child just sees directly there in front of them, carving out the initial rivulet of an entire field of mathematical perception. This perception is not there waiting in a priori concepts in the mind, nor is it the association between sense data amassed in fragments in some storehouse of memory, but is habituated into the body at the same time the significance of cardinality emerges in the world, as a new past-present-future path of what the body can do.