“The Union of the Soul and the Body”: Merleau-Ponty on Being in the World

Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the body is often depicted as emphasizing the distinction between the physical and the conscious dimension of the body. This distinction, however, runs the risk of recreating the tension between the physical and the conscious that is at the center of the mind-body problem. In view of this, I argue for a different interpretation of Merleau-Ponty, according to which his theory of the body is an attempt to establish “the union of the soul and the body” (Merleau-Ponty, 2012: 91, 99) by way of an analysis of the phenomenon of being in the world. This phenomenon does not just go beyond reflective but also beyond pre-reflective consciousness. It is an essential feature of living beings that has a teleological structure and that stands in the way of a reduction of living beings to physical objects. In the end, Merleau-Ponty argues for an antireductionist and metaphysically quite charged concept of life that is supposed to bridge the gap between the conscious and the organic dimension of human existence and that holds important insights for the contemporary debates on minimal consciousness, the life-mind continuity, autopoietic enactivism, and causation.