Discuss the significance of the phenomenon of the phantom limb for Merleau-Ponty.What does the phantom limb indicate regarding the “in itself” of things in the world?

Maurice Merleau-Ponty begins his book “The phenomenology of perception” with the demonstration that a merely mechanistic physiology of the nervous system simply cannot account for the experience of our own body. Merleau-Ponty tries to show that the experience of our own body has its basis in our “existence” i.e. in our mode of “existing our body”. Utilizing materials from recent psychopathology, his existential analysis deals first with the spatial and motor patterns of the body.

For Merleau-Ponty, my own body, before being an object that I can conceptualize or treat conceptually as a physiological thing, is a dimension of my own existence. The body is a lived body. Consciousness is not just something that goes on in our heads. Rather, our intentional consciousness is experienced in and through our bodies. With his concept of the lived body, Merleau-Ponty overcomes Descartes’ mind-body dualism without resorting to physiological reductionism. For Descartes, the body is ...