Lived bodily knowledge is absolute and pre-discursive, not built from explicit angles

Evidence

If I stand in front of my desk and lean on it with both hands, only my hands are accentuated and my whole body trails behind them like a comet’s tail. I am not unaware of the location of my shoulders or my waist; rather, this awareness is enveloped in my awareness of my hands and my entire stance is read, so to speak, in how my hands lean upon the desk. If I am standing and if I hold my pipe in a closed hand, the position of my hand is not determined discursively by the angle that it makes with my forearm, my forearm with my arm, my arm with my torso, and, finally, my torso with the ground. I have an absolute knowledge of where my pipe is, and from this I know where my hand is and where my body is. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 734

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates Merleau-Ponty’s embodied intentionality — that bodily knowledge is direct rather than computed from explicit position data.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s noise/silence reading on how perception operates below explicit conscious calculation. — connects to: The body cannot be simultaneously an object and the subject that reveals the world — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 826; Nausea is the nonpositional apprehension of one’s own contingent facticity, not a metaphor — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 886; Sexual experience cannot be conveyed through instruction but only through lived embodiment — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 729 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Sexual experience cannot be conveyed through instruction but only through lived embodiment #corroborates (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 729
• Perceiving one’s own body as an object converts its lived possibilities into dead-possibilities #expands (0.82)
• Absolute Knowledge arises from being’s own self-systematizing, not from the I #corroborates (0.80) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1090
• Consciousness is being, not merely self-knowledge, so knowledge’s primacy must be abandoned #corroborates (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 128