“e tanu voriya pulak rakhite nari ”

Merleau-Ponty’s ‘ Phenomenology of Perception’ and Indian Metaphysics of Body: An Inter-active Study

angusthasyathbāngylya batadyasporsone sati

jibata schetoso rupang jat tat paramam ātman. 1

Yogabāshistha 3/10/42

It is my field of perceptions constantly filled with a play of colours, noises and a fleeting tactile

sensation especially on the tips of my fingers which I cannot relate precisely to the context of my

clearly perceived world, yet which I nevertheless immediately ‘place’ in the world, without ever

confusing them with my daydreams. I really feel the substance of my body, sometimes escaping

from me and over-running the boundaries of my objective body. Every external perception is then

immediately synonymous with a certain perception of my body, just as every perception of my body

is made explicit in the language of external perception. The body, however, is not a transparent

object, and not presented to us by virtue of the law of its constitution. It is an expressive unity which

we can learn to know only by actively taking it up, re-making contact with the body and the sensible

world: we can dis-cover the objective and detached knowledge of the body only on account of its

always being with us and of the fact that we are our body. The very tactile perception and its effected

stimuli on to the fingers the excerpt has vented out can re-awaken our experience of the world as it

appears to us in so far as we are in the world with/through our body. It immediately calls into mind

Aristotle’s celebrated illusion on the perceptions of two fingers, which expounds that external

perception and the perception of one’s own body vary in conjunction because they are the two facets

of one and the same act. 2 Aristotle’s illusion is primarily a disturbance of the body image that may

even be directly translated into the external world without the intervention of any stimulus. The

subject may feel the impression of being outside his/her own body. Edmund Husserl’s (1859-1938)

first directive to phenomenology spells out that ‘I am not the outcome or the meeting-point of

numerous causal agencies which determine my bodily or psychological make-up. I am the absolute

source, my existence does not stem from my antecedents, from my physical and social environment;

instead it moves out towards them and sustains them, for I alone bring into being for myself’.3

However, Descartes (1596-1650) and particularly Kant (1724-1804) detached the subject, or

consciousness, by showing that I could not possibly apprehend anything as existing unless I first of

all experienced myself as existing in the act of apprehending it. They presented consciousness, the

absolute certainty of my existence for myself, as the condition of there being anything at all; and the

act of relating as the basis of relatedness. 4 Interestingly, the most pertinent question that seeps outs

here is how the ‘body’ in its existential economy can be conceptualized through the dynamics of

perception, mediation and presence.

Grayatri Chakraborty Spivak once remarked that “the body, like all other things, cannot be thought,

as such”5 which may have immense philosophical import if we think of the conditions under which a

body can be thought of as a thing. Anirban Das has posited a thesis on this question of the ‘thingness

of the bodies’ in his recently published book, Toward a Politics of the (Im)possible: The Body in

Third World Feminisms (2012). 6 In his nuanced attempt to examine into the ‘metaphoric’

construction of the body itself, Das deals upon the intricacies of the concept ‘thing’ in some

Heideggerian parlance. Heidegger had decided to adhere to the ‘narrow’ meaning of thing-in the

sense of being present-at-hand (das Vorhandene).7 However for Kant, this thing-at-hand, as

phenomenon, is different from the thing-in-itself that is “not approachable through experience as are

the rocks, plant, and animals”. 8 Then the body ‘as such’ reminds one, as Das argues, of a Ding an

sich, which is not mediated by tools of thought and is thus unavailable to thought; ‘the body is

probably the epitome of such an immediacy, the un-thought obvious ground of all thinking’. 9

At this point one might remember that Heidegger always speaks of the two different modes of being

of the thing: one is the neutral positing of the thing, the most immediate present-at-hand thing (das

vorhandene) and the other mode, which is defined in opposition to this, is the Zuhandenheit or

ready-to-hand. 10 Interestingly, for Heidegger, as Das has observed, ‘Vorhandensein—neutrality as

mode of being of things—is reached through ready-to-handness, and not the other way round.

Zuhandenheit is prior to Vorhandensein’. 11 We meet things as things for use and then conceptualize

them in their neutrality. The ‘then’ actually denotes a logical sequence and not a temporal leap. The

thing, in a Heideggerian sense, is not a proper description of the immediate presence of the body. In

Anirban Das’s formulation, ‘the impossibility of positing an unmediated thingness itself is a

symptom of the impossibility of positing of an unmediated ‘body’’.12 The thing comes into being

through the act of gathering what Heidegger calls the fourfold, the conditionalities of its being; and

it reaches the state of neutrality, as Das has observed, only through mediation of the thing’s relation

with others. In this sense, the thing occurs as beyond mediation by going through mediatedness. To

think of the body as a thing then is to ‘think of the specificity of the body through the relatedness of

the body to others, to other bodies, to those that are conceived to be other than the body’.13

Again if we refer back to the fleeting tactile perception one feels at one’s fingertips, an inner feel

passing across the pulsating fibres of one’s body, a deeper mystery starts; phenomenology of our

bodily perceptions takes a new turn. The Yogabashishtha (3/10/42) gives the hint that the very tactile

sensation on the tips of one’s fingers tingles with the same subjectivity which unifies everything in

the universe; the text here unfolds that ‘in an alive person, there is a form of sentience which gets

accentuated by the contact of the thumb and the tip of a finger even when there is no external touch

of any wind. This inner feel of the living mind indeed is the form of that supreme all pervasive

Self’.14 A close reading of Jibanananda Das’s marmoreal poem, “Bodh” can reveal that the persona

is deeply perturbed by this inner feel –“swopno noy, shanti noy, kono ek bodh” [nor dream, nor

happiness, but an inner feel] 15—a perception which is not a science of the world, not even an act, a

deliberate taking up of a position but it is the background from which all acts stand out, and is

presupposed by them. Krishna Chandra Bhattacharya has brilliantly commented upon this

inalienability of cognizance and the object of cognition: “The bodily feeling is but the felt body”.16

Arindam Chakraborty’s fascinating piece, Jibanananda O Antarmukh Dehabodh 17[Jibanananda

and an Interior Body-perception] offers a phenomenological lay out of this inner feel spreading

across the spatial coordinates of the living body in his re-reading of the limnic verses of

Jibanananda’s “Dhusor Pandulipi” [Gray Manuscript].

In the Moksha Dharma Parva of the Mahābharata, there comes in grandsire Bhisma’s fantastic

discourse one robust verse which asserts that the whole world of reasoning, thinking and

understanding takes place between the following limits—whatever you see above the bottom of the

heels and below the crown of the head. Metaphysical thinking must start by paying back its debt to

the organic body; realization comes only through un-raveling the knitted fabric of any corporeal

mechanism: mon tui roili khanchar ashe/khancha je tor toiri kancha banshee/kondin khancha porbe

khose [O Mind, you have lived with high hopes/ but your Cage is made of raw bamboo/One day this

Cage (too) will fall and break] 18 Indeed the moral import of these logical ploys in some ‘Lokayatik’

parlance has been beautifully captured in Avinavagupta’s most original commentary on a famous

sloka of the Bhagavad-Gita:

istān bhogān hi bo debā dasyonte jajnabhābitaāh/

toidorttānprodāyoivyā jo bhungte stena eba sah [3/12]19

It literally says: ‘fostered by sacrifice the gods will give you the enjoyments you desire. He who

enjoys these gifts without giving to them in return is verily a thief’. 20 In the exegetical design of the

sloka Śaṅkar (9th CE) and Ramanuj (11th CE) take a similar position brushing up on its literal

meaning but Avinavagupta interprets in a novel way. 21 For him, gods here imply nothing else but

our perceptive sense-organs. Arindam Chakraborty in an article, Indian Philosophy of the Body and

the Senses published in the Bulletin of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, justifies

Avinavagupta’s position tracking it along the Nabya Nyaya thinking in Indian orthodoxy. In the new

Nyaya system, Arindam explicates, the contact between the inner sense and the organs of touch—

tanmanosonjoga—is a necessary condition for any cognition. Not just perception, even the most

abstract thinking will not take place unless your manas (mind) is in touch with your skin.22

Therefore in the name of meditating or withdrawing into a super-sensory world, as Avinavagupta

exegetes, if someone does not give the senses their due, such a person is a thief. To try to be spiritual

while ignoring the body and the sense organs is a kind of ungrateful action of deception. He connects

this with a previous sloka of the Bhagavad-Gita which puts that ‘one who restrains his organs of

action but continues in his mind to brood over the objects of sense, whose nature is deluded is said to

be a hypocrite’. 23 Śaṅkar has brilliantly played upon this concept of ‘hypocrisy’ in its differential

economy that invariably calls forth the most perplexing question: is the self-restrainer a hypocrite,

by default? 24 …karmendriāni hastadini samjomyo somhrita jah āste tishthoti manasā smaran

cintayan indriyārthan bisayān bimurātmā bimurantokaranah mithyācarah mrisacārah sa ucyate

[3/6]25.The Bhagavad-Gita, however, repeatedly harps on the controlling of one’s unruly sense-

organs and egotistical desires; one has to fight them and curb them, not let them play out until they

retreat or calm down on their own because they never do (3/41). Thirst or desire does not grow old,

we do!

Now the issue of the ‘thingness of the body’ in the sense of being present-at-hand can be

problematized if we posit a subtle logical analysis of the statement ‘this is my body’ and asks

questions like ‘Is this an analytic statement?’ ‘Is this an a priori statement?’ ‘Is it a contingent

statement?’ ‘Or, is it a posteriori statement?’ Can someone, with his/her surprise empirically find

out ‘this is my body’? Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) in his Phenomenology of Perception

(1945) ingenuously plays upon this cogito problem along the lines of Husserlian metaphysics. With

him the study of embodiment in its inalienable plug with cognition and perception takes a ‘corporeal

turn’. He analyses, ‘as a mediating ego, I can clearly distinguish from myself the world and things,

since I certainly do not exist in the way in which things exist. I must even set aside from myself my

body understood as a thing among things, as a collection of physico-chemical processes’. 26 As

phenomenological reduction apparently belongs to existential philosophy, Ponty observes, one may

fall prey to unreflective understating of the notion of ‘essences’ in Husserl. Every reduction, says

Husserl, as well as being transcendental is necessarily eidetic. That means that we cannot subject our

perception of the world to philosophical scrutiny without ceasing to be identified with that act of

positing the world—without passing from the fact of our existence to its nature, from the Dasein to

the Wesen.27 Seeking the essence of consciousness will, therefore, not consist in developing the

Wortbedeutung of consciousness and escaping from existence into the universe of things said. It

consists in re-discovering my actual presence to myself, the fact of my consciousness which is in the

last resort what the word and the concept of consciousness mean.

In his discussion of the problematic of experience and objective thought, Merleau-Ponty observes

that our perception ends in objects, and the object once constituted, appears as the reason for all the

experiences of it which we have had or could have. He puts forward a very interesting but intricate

example: “I see the next-door house from a certain angle, but it would be seen differently from the

right bank of the Seine, or from the inside, or again from an aeroplane: the house itself is none of

these appearances: it is, as Leibnitz said, the geometrized projection of these perspectives and of all

possible perspectives, that is, the perspectiveless position from which all can be derived, the house

seen from nowhere”. 28 Now Ponty re-formulates the object-horizon structure when he states that to

look at an object is to inhabit it, and from this habitation to grasp all things in terms of the aspect

which they present to it—‘I can perceive from various angles the central object of my present

vision’. Every object then is the mirror of all others. Any seeing of an object by me is

instantaneously reiterated among all those objects in the world which are apprehended as co-existent,

because each of them is all that the others ‘see’ of it. 29 The modified formula therefore becomes, the

house itself is not the house seen from nowhere, but the house seen from everywhere. The completed

object is translucent, being shot through from all sides by an infinite number of present scrutinies

which intersect in its depths leaving nothing hidden.

A second radical way that Merleau-Ponty conceptualizes perception is as a two-way, dynamic and

interactive process. In Merleau-Ponty’s rendering, it is impossible for humans to assume the “God

perspective” in which they objectively observe the world in such a way that they are not affected by

the world observing them back. Human beings cannot perceive without simultaneously being

perceived. 30 Just as I observe another human being, I am aware that he or she can perceive me. The

awareness of another’s perception will subsequently alter my awareness of myself. This constant

interplay of perception and its implicate sense of being perceived creates the qualitative experience

of being in relation to another. He coins the term “percipient perceptibles” to describe this essential

way of being in the world and presses on this interactional dynamic in his 1968 book, The Visible

and the Invisible: “As soon as we see other seers, we no longer have before us only the look without

a pupil, the plate glass of things with that feeble reflection, that phantom of ourselves they evoke by

designating a place among themselves whence we see them: henceforth, through others’ eyes we are

for ourselves fully visible”. 31 This notion of reversibility, however, gets problematized as it hooks in

the idea of ‘flesh’—the visceral substance to intersubjective embodied perception.

Again, Merleau-Ponty plays upon the object-horizon structure to complicate the spatiality of one’s

own body. It is not that one’s whole body is an assemblage of organs juxtaposed in space. He

foregrounds that one is in undivided possession of it and knows where each of his/her limb is

through a ‘body image’ in which all are included. But the notion of the body image is ambiguous; it

can be first understood as a ‘compendium of our bodily experience, capable of giving a commentary

and meaning to the internal impressions and the impression of possessing a body at any moment’.32

Bodily space is however distinguished from external space and does not refer to a determinate

position in relation to other positions or to external coordinates, but the laying down of the first co-

ordinates, the anchoring of the active body in an object, the situation of the body in face of its tasks.

The bodily image is actually ‘a way of stating that my body is in-the-world’33, which immediately

links it with the Heideggerian Vorhandensein. Merleau-Ponty’s analysis becomes even more

complicate when he plugs in the temporal in conceptualizing ‘my body’. Our previous analysis on

the metaphoricity of the corporeal in terms of Anirban Das’s arguments would take a new leap as the

notion of immediacy and the sense of being present-at-hand linked with bodily perceptions get

ruptured in Merleau-Ponty’s brilliant formulation. Body is being conceptualized in terms of temporal

duration which is invariably constructed upon the horizon of imminence. Merleau-Ponty interrogates

this business of thinking of the body in terms of presence, of the immediacy of being present, of the

existence of/in the body. He posits, “The present holds on to the immediate past without positing it

as an object, and since the immediate past similarly holds its immediate predecessor, past time is

wholly collected up and grasped in the present. The same is true of the imminent future which will

also have its horizon of imminence. But with my immediate past I have also the horizon of futurity

which surrounded it, and thus I have my actual present seen as the future of that past. With the

imminent future, I have the horizon of past which will surround it, and therefore my actual present as

the past of that future. Thus, through the double horizon of retention and protention, my present may

cease to be a factual present quickly carried away and abolished by the flow of duration, and become

a fixed and identifiable point in objective time”. 34

What is interesting is that the theory of the body schema in its collateral association with Pontyan

theory of perception absolutely hinges upon the dynamic discourse of the temporal which, in

Kantian language, is the form taken by our inner sense, and because it is the most general

characteristic of ‘psychic facts’. 35 We say that time passes or flows by. We speak of the course of

time. The ‘events’ are shapes cut out by a finite observer from the spatiotemporal totality of the

objective world. But on the other hand, if I consider the world itself, as Merleau-Ponty has observed,

there is simply one indivisible and changeless being in it. Change presupposes a certain position

which I take up and from which I see things in procession before me: there are no events without

someone to whom they happen and whose finite perspective is the basis of their individuality. Time

presupposes a view of time. What is past or future for me is present in the world. That is why

Leibnitz was able to define the objective world as mens momentanea, and why Saint Augustine, in

order to constitute time, ‘required, besides the presence of the present, a presence of the past and of

the future’. 36 It destroys the very notion of ‘now’ and its succession.37

Merleau-Ponty undermines psychologists’ familiar enterprise to ‘explain’ consciousness of the past

in terms of memories, and consciousness of the future in terms of the projection of these memories

ahead of us. He foregrounds that nothing can be found in the body to account for the order of

disappearance of memories in cases of progressive aphasia. The body is no longer a receptacle of

engrams, but an organ of mimicry with the function of ensuring the intuitive realization of the

‘intentions’ of consciousness.38 But these intentions cling on to memories preserved in the

unconscious which is beyond any temporal dynamic. It immediately pokes out an interesting

problematic as we re-consider Merleau-Ponty’s incorporation of some aspects of Freudian

psychoanalysis in conceptualizing the shimmering ‘subject’ of any bodily perception. In his 1915

metapsychological paper called ‘The Unconscious’ Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)was unflinching in

declaring that psychoanalysis upheld the ‘dynamic view of mental processes’ and took ‘account of

psychical topography as well’.39 Most importantly, in the Freudian conundrum the ‘psyche’

constituted of ‘three psychical provinces or agencies’40—the id, the super-ego and the ego—is itself

a conglomeration of different time-zones, an absent present that constantly destabilizes any

construction of ‘I’—the subject(?) of fleeting sensations in/of the body, being present in its dynamic

of immediacy, das vorhandene.

Here emerges the notion of ‘bodily subjectivity’ which K. C. Bhattacharya unfolds in his densely

argued book, Subject as Freedom to reach a new dimension of our ambivalent epistemic relation to

the body. Body is not an ordinary object of perception here; it is the source that perceives. It is

interesting to note that my eyes see the whole world in its enigmatic opulence and variety but they

can never see themselves. Katha Upanishad beautifully unravels: “parānchi khāni bytrinat

svayambhyuh tasmā t parā m pasyati nā ntarā tman”41. Śaṅkar exegetes that the Self-caused pierced

the openings of the senses outward, therefore men look outward into the appearances of things but

the soul ripe for spiritual wisdom withdraws attention from phenomenal variety and turns his eyes

inward to the noumenal reality. 42 In his superb Dejection: An Ode Coleridge utters that spiritual

search has an inward movement leading to revelation of the Divine in the inmost soul:

It were a vain endeavour,

Though I should gaze forever

On that green light that lingers in the west:

I may not hope from outward forms to win

The passion and the life, whose fountains are within. 43

But the fact that we do not perceive our whole body externally makes Krishna Chandra Bhattacharya

reach a luminous moment of realization: ‘One’s own body is only half-perceived. The rest being

eked out by perception’.44 Arindam Chakraborty deals upon this logical move in his Indian

Philosophy of the Body and the Senses stating that any solid object is half-perceived at any given

point of time and in imagining the unseen parts the perceiver imagines that the whole body being

placed in a different position relative to that solid object. ‘My going behind my own body or my

taking and turning around my own body for me to see all sides is inconceivable’. 45 The most

pertinent question arises: ‘Is this a logical or physical impossibility?’ In Bhattacharya’s ingenuous

formulation, my own body is a hybrid amalgam of multiple points of views, partly mine and partly

other people’s and the bodily ego is seen to be more inter-subjective than the world of impersonal

inert objects. I cannot place my own body as a physical object of perception until I actively imagine

other bodies as perceivers just like me! The notion of ‘intercorporeity’46—the over-running of the

tangible into the touched, a coupling with the flesh of the world is indeed a unique treasury of bodily

perception. This fission and passing of the palpable subject into the ‘objective’ world—an internal

animation is brilliantly captured in Binoy Majumdar’s euphonic Aghraner Onubhutimala (My

Feelings in Aghran): nichu hoye eibar fuler bhitortike dhire dhire dekhi…/hotobak phool tar mukh

diye tene neoya niswaser sathe/nijer vetore tane amake (I bend down, palpate and my eyes slowly

tips into the inside of the flower…/ the flower dazed, inhales through her mouth/ draws me into her

core).47 The invisible is made manifest through the poet’s enactment of his vision and the object’s

revelation of itself to the observer.  There is no actual distinction between the perceiving body and

its immediate environment, but rather an extension and expression of being which permeates the

poet’s vision.  The materiality of experience is not however gained from the non-discursive

‘material’ outside. Now by going back to my preliminary concern that speaks about the body as a

metaphor of ‘bodies’, one important question sparks up here that through the phenomenological

reading of the body in its existential immediacy focusing upon ‘lived experience’48, can one really

‘approach’ the body itself? Re-evoking the Spivakian edge-play on the thinking of the thingness of

the body, we can posit an open-faced answer always to be re-thought: “There are thinkings of the

systematicity of the body; there are value codings of the body. The body, as such, cannot be thought,

and I certainly cannot approach it”. 49

The Vairagya-prakaranam of the Yogavashishtha puts forward an intimate account of the irreducible

materiality of the body, simultaneously celebrating its metaphoric construction in the grandiose

image of the ‘dehanagari’. One has to know the techné of disciplining one’s own body that puts us

always in trouble. The text with an ingenuous rhetorical ploy talks about an old horribly tottering

tree on which we are living but it eventually becomes a city magnificent in appearance, in which we

are supposed to wander just like a traveler, marveling at what beauty and pleasures it might bring,

but always being ready for an exit at any moment.50 In the Katha Upanishad, the embodied self is

compared to the chariot with its sensitive steeds representing psycho-physical vehicle in which the

self rides—ātmanam rathinam biddhi shariram rathameba tu [1.3.3]51 Again, clothing which gets

tattered and taking on new ones is another metaphor conveying mutability and impermanence of the

corporeal body.52 Thinking of the body in terms of presence/immediacy thus gets articulation in its

semiotic play of sign and, more importantly, the body itself becomes an articulation of sign;

signification resides as the spirit in the body, the spectral-body forever haunted by the ideological,

by an organon of unreadable signifiers—ontogy gets replaced by hauntology.53 When Foucault asks

with a skeptic doubt, “My body, and the immediate perception I have of it?”,54 he confronts

Descartes in a defiant spirit putting emphasis on the instant of mediation and the actuality of the

subject. The principle that grounds the actuality of this presence is Reason; it is not the immediacy of

mind but the actuality of the situation flowing from reason that stalls the march of all-encompassing

doubt in Descartes. But the Derridian formulae can complicate this valorizing of present by making

present of the absent that has its tolls of erasure.55 Yet the question remains, who but the throbbing

pulsating body is the closest to the self-evident presence of reality? When Jibananada Das wrote

poems, did he not himself perceive an innumerable flux of sound—shoto jolojhornar dhwani—

passing across the pulsating fibres of his body? When Arindam Chakraborty is brooding over their

springy buoyancy – hijaler janalay alo ar bulbuli koriyache khela—does he not have a fleeting inner

feel across the spatial coordinates of his corporeal body issuing out of that unmatchable magical

lilts? Binoy Majumdar and Utpal Kumar Basu would love to say that the body is like a wind-pipe, a

flute through which sinusoidal waves of sounds are continually passing by and those who can hear

and capture them make the difference—sokolei kobi non, keu keu kobi. Indeed grasping the

perceiver in its essential irreducibility remains as yet on the fringe of an impossible possibility that

empties the very order of signification. As Jean Luc Nancy utters, there is no such thing as body;

there is no body.56 Yet the phenomenological intervention on the theories of bodily perception

remains foundational, Merleau-Ponty’s project is hailed as a classic not in the sense he provides a set

of axiomatic truths about living bodies, ‘but an explanation and analysis of the meanings in our

experience of such realities’.57 Brhdaranyaka Upanishad beautifully summarizes our cognitive

situation in the sloka—Yenedam sarvam vijānati tam kena vijānīyāt; Vijñātāram are kena vijānīyāt—58

which radically foregrounds the problem of epistemology as an attempt at establishing the ground of

the possibility of all knowledge without polarizing it into a subject-object relationship; to envisage a

pure consciousness which is beyond self-consciousness. J. N. Mohanty in his brilliant piece, ‘Is a

Vedantic Phenomenology Possible?’ argues that the Vedantist exegesis does not quite reach the idea

of ‘Pure Consciousness’; instead it reaches a consciousness which they call pure and transcendental

but still directed toward an object—although freed from the reality of the object—the object as

something which is constituted by consciousness within consciousness, not yet projected outside.59

Yet again when one hears the call of the (im)perceptible, escaping from and overrunning the corpus

of the corporeal—ami sob debotare chhere/ amar praner kachhe chole asi60— doesn’t there emerge

a pulsating proliferating polity of the body? One even attaining the Bodhisattva condition may be

drawn toward the irresistible enigma of it:

O Hafij, ei jibonta dhandha—/karo jana nei er uttor; /ostitwer bastobikota/oleek kahini, fusmontor61

[O Hafij, this life is an enigma/no one knows what it is; /reality of existence/or a fiction, it’s magic!]

_________________________________________*The title is taken from Rabindranath’s song, ‘amar mon mane na, dinorojoni’ composed in the year 1892-93[Gitabitan, Prem, 58, Viswa-bharati Granthanbibhag, Karttik, 1412, Kolkata, P. 295]

Notes & References:

1. Arindam Chakraborty, Deha Geha Bondhutwa: Chhoti Sharirok Torko, Anustup, Kolkata, 2008, p.23.2. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945), translated by Colin Smith, Routledge: London & New York, 1962, p.237.3. Ibid.p.ix.4. Anirban Das quoting Grayatri Chakraborty Spivak, Toward a Politics of the (Im)possible: The Body in Third World Feminisms, Anthem Press, New York, 2010, p.39. G. C. Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, New York &London: Routledge, 1993, p.20.5. Anirban Das, Toward a Politics of the (Im)possible, Ibid.6. Ibid.7. See: Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Blackwell Publishing House, Oxford, First English Edition, 1965.8. See: Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing?, Tr. by W. B. Barton, Jr. & Vera Deutsch Lanham, London, New York: University Press of America, 1985.9. Anirban Das, Toward a Politics of the (Im)possible: The Body in Third World Feminisms, Anthem Press, New York, 2010, p.40.10. A detailed discussion of the two modes of being of the thing can be found in Heidegger’s Being and Time (First English Edition, 1965).11. Anirban Das, Toward a Politics of the (Im)possible: The Body in Third World Feminisms, Anthem Press, New York, 2010, p.40.12. Ibid.13. Ibid. p.42.14. Arindam Chakraborty, Deha Geha Bondhutwa: Chhoti Sharirok Torko, Anustup, Kolkata, 2008, p.23.15. Jibanananda Das, Prokashito-Oprokashito Kobita Somogro, Collected & Edited by Abdul Mannan Saiyad, Abasar, Dhaka, Bangladesh, March, 2005, P.78.16. See: Sanat Kumar Sen, Thinking and speaking in the philosophy of K. C. Bhattacharya, Journal of Indian Philosophy, Volume 8, Number 4, 337-347, DOI: 10.1007/BF01793837.17. Arindam Chakraborty, Deha Geha Bondhutwa: Chhoti Sharirok Torko, Anustup, Kolkata, 2008, pp.15-28.18. Sudhir Chakroborty, Bangla Dehatattwer Gan, Nirbachito Probondho, Punascha, Kolkata, January 2010, P.78. 19. Srimadbhagabad-Gita, Śaṅkar-Bhasyo, Translated & Edited by Pramathnath Tarkabhusan, Deb Sahityo Kutir, Kolkata, 2001, P.199. 20. S. Radhakrishnan, The Bhagabad Gita, 3/12, Blackie & Son, India, 1970, p.136.21. See: L.D. Barnett, The Paramarthasara of Avinavagupta, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, London, 1910.22. Arindam Chakraborty, Indian Philosophy of the Body and the Senses, Bulletin of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, February, 2010, p. 70.23. S. Radhakrishnan, The Bhagabad Gita, 3/6, Blackie & Son, India, 1970, p.134.24. See: Arindam Chakraborty, Desire, Self-control and Concealment: Bhagavad-Gita, Kant and Nagel on Hypocrisy, Broadview Press, Toronto, 2004.25. Srimadbhagabad-Gita, Śaṅkar-Bhasyo, Translated & Edited by Pramathnath Tarkabhusan, Deb Sahityo Kutir, Kolkata, 2001, P.195.26. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Translated by Colin Smith, Routledge: London & New York, 1962, p. xiv.27. Ibid, p. xvi.28. Ibid. p.77.29. Ibid. p. 79.

30. It encodes Merleau-Ponty’s notion of reversibility considered even more radical because he conceptualized human bodies as phenomenal “things” within a world of other phenomenal “things”. What this means is that for him, we are not just “observed” by other human beings, we are “observed” by all of the

“things” of the world, even if they are not conscious. For instance, as I sit on the chair that I am sitting on as I type these words, I may bring my attention to it and notice its hardness and sturdiness (or not) and simultaneously, I am touched by the chair. Of course the chair does not have a consciousness that registers the quality of my body on it; however, by noticing how my body feels as I am in touch with it, I actually learn something about my own body. In this way, the chair’s “observation” of me informs me about myself. 31. M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, edited by Claude Lefort, translated by Alphonso Lingis, Northwestern University Press, 1968, p. 143.32. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Translated by Colin Smith, Routledge: London & New York, 1962, p.113.33. Ibid. p.115. Merleau-Ponty has discussed through the image of the phantom limb, considered as a modality of the body image and understood in terms of the general movement of being-in-the-world.34. Ibid. p.80.35. Ibid.p.476.36. Ibid. p.478.37. The definition of time which is implicit in the common sense as ‘a succession of instances of now’ is a Heideggerian concept. For a detailed discussion see: Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Blackwell Publishing House, Oxford, First English Edition, 1965.38. Ibid. p.479.39. Sigmund Freud, The Unconscious, Tr. by C. M. Baines, in Penguin Freud Library, vol.11, London: Penguin Books, 199, p.175.40. Ibid.41. Upanishad, Translated & Edited by Atul Chandra Sen, Sitanath Tattwabhusan, Mahesh Chandra Ghose, Katha Upanishad 2.1.1, Haraf Prakashani, Kolkata 1980, P.117. 42. The Principal Upanishads, Ed by S. Radhakrishnan, Harper Collins publishers, India, 1998, p.630-631.43. Coleridge’s Poetry & Prose, Ed. By Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson, Raimonda Modiano, Norton Publications, London: New York, 2004, pp.155-158.44. Arindam Chakraborty explicating K.C. Bhattacharya’s position in Indian Philosophy of the Body and the Senses, Bulletin of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, February, 2010, p. 71.45. Ibid.46. A detailed study of the concept can be found in M. Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible, edited by Claude Lefort, translated by Alphonso Lingis, Northwestern University Press, 1968, p. 141-155.47. Binoy Majumdar, Aghraner Onubhutimala, Binoy Majumdar er Kabyosomogro (Vol.I), Protibhas, Kolkata, January, 2000, P. 83-110.48. See: Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, Tr. by H. M. Parshley, Vintage Classics, London, 1997.49. Anirban Das quoting Spivak, Toward a Politics of the (Im)possible: The Body in Third World Feminisms, Anthem Press, New York, 2010, p. 61.50. Arindam Chakraborty introduces a talk on this metaphor of living bodies in Indian Philosophy of the Body and the Senses, Bulletin of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, February, 2010, p. 72.51. Upanishad, Translated & Edited by Atul Chandra Sen, Sitanath Tattwabhusan, Mahesh Chandra Ghose, Katha Upanishad 1.3.3, Haraf Prakashani, Kolkata 1980, P.106. 52. Srimadbhagabad-Gita 2.22, Śaṅkar-Bhasyo, Translated & Edited by Pramathnath Tarkabhusan, Deb Sahityo Kutir, Kolkata, 2001, P.102-3. It goes: ‘Just as a person casts off worn-out garments and puts on others that are new, even so does the embodied soul cast off worn-out bodies and take on others that are new’. [S. Radhakrishnan, The Bhagabad Gita, 3/12, Blackie & Son, India, 1970, p. 108].53. Anirban Das, Toward a Politics of the (Im)possible: The Body in Third World Feminisms, Anthem Press, New York, 2010, p.70.54. Michel Foucault, History of madness, “My body, this paper, this fire”, Routledge, London, pp. 550-575.55. Anirban Das, Toward a Politics of the (Im)possible: The Body in Third World Feminisms, Anthem Press, New York, 2010, p.54.56. See: Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 1993.

57. Sara Heinamaa, The Soul-body Union and Sexual Difference: From Descartes to Merleau Ponty and Beauvoir, Feminist Reflections on the History of philosophy, Eds. by L. Alanen & C. Witt, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Netherlands, 2004, p.142.58. A. C. Chakraborty, The Nature of Self, (Allahabad: The Indian Press, 1938), 1943, Br. Up. I. 4-14; III. 8. 11. The translation goes: Who can know that, by which everything is known; my dear, how should the Knower be known?59. J. N. Mohanty, ‘Is a Vedantic Phenomenology Possible?’ Bulletin of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, February, 2010, p.65.60. Jibanananda Das, Prokashito-Oprokashito Kobita Somogro, Collected & Edited by Abdul Mannan Saiyad, Abasar, Dhaka, Bangladesh, March, 2005, P.78. The translation goes like: ‘Renouncing all the deities, I just come back to my sole self’.61. Hafijer Kobitar Pongti, Translated by Subhas Mukhopadhyay, Chirantan Sarkar, Oi Shunye Amake Nao, Radix, Dept. of English, Kalyani University, 2009, p.16.

______________________________________________________________________________Acknowledgement: Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, Anirban Das, Sukanya Sarbadhikary, Chirantan Sarkar

ANIRBAN BHATTACHARJEE.Junior Research Fellow in Cultural Studies, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta & Jadavpur University.