Introduction
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his seminal work The Structure of Behavior, delves into the intricate relationship between mind and body, exploring the concept of “structure” and “form” as fundamental to understanding human behaviour. This essay explains Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of these terms, focusing on their implications for avoiding mechanistic naturalism. By analyzing relevant passages from the text, especially Reading 4, I aim to elucidate Merleau-Ponty’s perspective and critically evaluate its significance.
Understanding “Structure” and “Form”
Merleau-Ponty’s theory in The Structure of Behavior mainly stems from his existential phenomenology approach. This perspective emphasizes the fundamental link between the mind and the body. He offers several variations, in which he rejects the machine-like mental functioning and assumes responsibility for the deeper critical human views (Merleau-Ponty). For Merleau-Ponty, the body is not an automatic vessel used to transport or harbour external forces; instead, it is an active influence that can both affect and be influenced by surrounding circumstances.
The concept of intentionality, one of the principal notions of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy extracted from phenomenological ideas, assumes that every human action has an inherent meaning and purpose. In such an instance, he stipulates that the behaviour cannot be stripped into simplistic external stimuli and response patterns because what matters is that the subject is intentionally involved with the world (Merleau-Ponty). Reading four shows that the carnal existence is the foundation of perceptual structure. This structure is inherently built and cannot be separated from mental activity. Here, sympathy with Cartesian dualism is denied; human existence is unified in the idea that mind and body are interdependent within a physical setting (Merleau-Ponty). The meaning of this for you is that you will explore Merleau-Ponty’s meaning of intentional structure as a tool that allows the subject to be articulated with its surroundings. As for sense, he rejects the view, saying that perception is not the passive grab of input nor the active process of interpretation and meaning-making. In passage four, he differentiates how mending is directed at a perceived entity. It is the reciprocal relations between the intention and cognitive processes of the world comprising perception and action or action (Merleau-Ponty). However, this research favours a holistic view, opposite to mechanical reductionism, which assumes perception as a stimulus-response mechanism by a mathematical model.
Merleau-Ponty, in his thoughts, theorizes the key of Form as a tool, which is devised to explain the nature of the inherent pattern and unity of human behaviour. On the contrary, he regards forms as the very outcome of a continuous interaction process between the individual and the environment in which this is taking place, the function of which is to design the purposeful routine. In contrast to behaviourists, who consider human behaviour as nothing but the stimulus and response, Make Future Form emphasizes the richness of the human experience (Merleau-Ponty). Form is about a seamless, comprehensive intersection, which involves perception, action and discourse creating a foundation for describing the complicated behavioural systems. For Merleau-Ponty, the notion of structure and Form works as an alternative to a mechanistic outlook, which puts it in front as an analytical tool to cut into pieces and assemble your needs. He calls the unnecessary complexity and implies the intentionality and roundedness of the human mind of the behaviour as a mechanical process (Merleau-Ponty). In contrast, he commends the concepts of holistic comprehension, which suggests that the elements of human nature are not isolated. Still, they are interconnected; therefore, the understanding should be complex.
Avoiding Mechanistic Naturalism
Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of mechanistic naturalism and Cartesian dualism is based on his refusal to accept the over-simplistic versions of behavioural patterns. He disputes this tendency of the deterministic frameworks by claiming that these theories merely explain the behaviour through external stimulations or internal mental states that consider behaviour as a result of individual togetherness with the environment (Merleau-Ponty). By rejecting the passive body’s assumption of an active mind that Descartes would subject in his ring-fence dualism, Merleau-Ponty questions the domination of body and mind in the Cartesian worldview (Merleau-Ponty). On the other hand, instead of going with a phenomenological approach, he prefers giving more importance to the fact that human beings are entangled in their bodily existence and are always experiencing stuff from their own situated position. For Merleau-Pony, cognition cannot be reduced to separate the mind from the body, but the body from the mind interactions are the key determinants of man’s behaviours. On the other hand, his critical view pondered on the all-embracing character that the individual and their environment have in evaluating human behaviour.
In his resistance to reductionist methodologies, Merleau-Ponty demonstrates that human experience contains some ends and is not merely a materialist conception of reality (Merleau-Ponty). He says that behaviour is not fully mapped by external forces on their own or microstates of mind either because the first one needs to consider the dynamic interactions and the second one fails to capture the complexity of it. Instead of simply opposing mechanistic naturalism or Cartesian dualism, Merleau-Ponty promotes a more sophisticated perspective of human behaviour that relies on the context and environment and other than a strict mechanical framework (Merleau-Ponty). The phenomenological approach brought forth the need to actively consider human experiences, including the ongoing interactions of an individual’s body with the world. As a result, a holistic approach gives birth to a more complete model that concurrently includes external stimuli and goes beyond these simple explanations to mental states.
Merleau-Ponty avoids mechanistic naturalism through the concept of the Form, which articulates nature holistically as human behaviour of life. Contrary to mechanistic strategies that try to segment behaviour into parts, Merleau-Ponty brings all of these aspects of attitude, action, and meaning into a single frame (Merleau-Ponty). But, Form, for him, is not a mere picture of a person interacting with his environment but describes all the vibrant, complicated patterns of activity that result from such a dynamic interaction (Merleau-Ponty). Through a Form, Merleau-Ponty focuses on the idea of presentation as he triggers the reductionist manner of thinking and, in return, advocates for a more sophisticated sort of human experience. In its fourth reading, Merleau-Ponty discusses the perceptual Gestalt, rejecting the detailed behaviourist perception model and the concept of stimuli as a passive reception (Merleau-Ponty). For St. Thomas Aquinas, no knowledge would be possible without the perceptual dimension, and perception is not a passive process of registering sensory data but an active engagement with the world. The structure reflects the active nature of organizing and making intelligent thoughts about the stimuli the perceiver carries. The Gestalt theory focuses on the interactive process between the object and the subject. Through his view against the deterministic principle of behaviourism, Merleau-Ponty implies that the responsibility and subjectivity to one’s perceptions result from human agency and intention.
Merleau-Ponty focuses on plans and ways towards which perception is being stretched beyond mere matter. In this respect, he differs from mechanistic naturalism. For him, ownership is not simply the justification of cause and effect but the subject’s knowledge of something he is involved in (Merleau-Ponty). Emphasizing the centrality of meaning ascription in forming our perceptions, Merleau-Ponty rejects the monist view that subjective experience is an inevitable outcome of hard-coded existence approaches. Rather than speaking of the observer, Locke characterizes the actual role of the perceiver in the reality of visual perception.
Critical Evaluation
While Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical focus opposes the mechanical concept of nature, it teaches us a different meaning of oneself as a human being. This meaning is much deeper and richer than the contemporary scientific viewpoint. His spotlight on the corporal and deliberately composed characteristic of all human existence highlights the supremacy of contexts and intentionality in determining behaviour (Merleau-Ponty). For Merleau-Ponty, Cartesian dualism, which postulates that mind and body are separate, is destructive to conventional views and instead urges for a totality approach that upholds the unity of mind and body (Merleau-Ponty). By framing the connection between the individual and their environment in a certain way, Merleau-Ponty’s perspective will give a deep understanding of the changing role of a person throughout their life.
Critics have questioned Merleau-Ponty’s approach on the grounds of relevance and practicality. Some researchers say that for Husserl, phenomenological description is the only procedure of abstraction and that it is extremely hard to apply from an empirical standpoint. This opposition reminds us that the approaches proposed by Merleau-Ponty are original and conducive to thinking, but they can hardly apply to scientific research (Merleau-Ponty). In his way, he refused a traditional character of science method establishing existential phenomenology, which was highly adverse against empiricism and positivism proponents. On the other hand, critics believe that rejecting this crucial factor would weaken the basis of scientific inquiry, which is objectivity and replicability.
The challenge of bouncing the Merleau-Ponty framework against modern neuroscience and cognitive science topics seems quite hard. Galen has acknowledged human experience as a crucial domain for scientific research. Yet, Galen’s scepticism of explaining life phenomena solely using a physiological process remains. This demonstrates a fundamental contradiction between scientists, who look at the phenomenon of experience, and phenomenologists, who apply the scientific model of objective explanations. This is done through a refined broadening of the phenomenological insights using empirical findings developed in the discourse (Merleau-Ponty). Even though Merleau-Ponty’s critique of mechanistic naturalism leads to disagreements about it, it still supplies unique standpoints showing the flaws of reductionist methods used to determine human behaviour (Merleau-Ponty). The concept of the embodied nature of human experience he introduced contributes to a realization that context or environment should be another key factor. The interconnection of perception, action, and meaning is the key element in Merleau-Ponty’s practical approach; therefore, his interpretation allows us to grasp human behaviour and consciousness.
Conclusion
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in The Structure of Behavior, presents a deep analysis of the intertwining of the mind and body. This framework goes beyond the traditional approach of either/or. At the core of his reflection process are two ideas, “structure” and “form,” which he uses to describe the embodiment phenomenon in detail. In the scope of this paper, I will explore Merleau-Ponty’s idea of those two cases since their meaning for a holistic and non-reductionative approach underpinning human behaviour is considered crucial. After choosing the most vital sentences from the test, particularly Reading 4, I want to show how Merleau-Ponty’s view disappointed mechanistic naturalism and opened up an extraordinary dimension of the human being experience.
Work Cited
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Structure of Behavior. Beacon Press (MA), 1963.
write