Diotima: The Marist Undergraduate Philosophy Journal
Reality’s phenomena are approached by a study of perception and its constants, the condition of the body schema being one; through this schema, we are “geared” into the world. Merleau-Ponty understands the concept of the body schema itself to serve as a theory of perception, since perceptive subjects are always bodies. 2 Motor functions are, therefore, expressions of the body schema’s attempts to move toward the world, and the body is our means of having a world in the first place .3 In short, we are directed at the world through bodily capacities aimed at various goals. Within Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, the act of performing music then occurs through the body, and perception of music—as a musician or an audience—is made possible by the body’s schema. To investigate this topic further, I will closely examine Merleau-Ponty’s example of the pipe organist, incorporated within his discussion of habit. After discussing this example, I move into a complication of Merleau-Ponty’s theory regarding the problem of an external audience and the “passage” of music from score to sound; the performer’s body and their instrument are the “place” of this passage. Although Merleau-Ponty’s account of habit is a useful way of phenomenologically interpreting the body’s expressive, music-making gestures, his theory is complicated by the problem of external audiences in varying performance scenarios. If motor functions are an expressive attempt of the body to move towards the world, which includes audiences, innumerable performance scenarios must be accounted for in Merleau-Ponty’s description of habit. When articulating and addressing this complication, the following essay builds from Merleau-Ponty’s view of the “passage,” rather than discarding it entirely.
2 Merleau-Ponty, 217, 316. 3 Merleau-Ponty, xxiv, 103, 147.
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