e tanu voriya pulak rakhite nari

Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of Perception and Indian Metaphysics of Body: An Inter-active Study

angusthasyathbngylya batadyasporsone sati jibata schetoso rupang jat tat paramam tman. 1 Yogabshistha 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 Aristotles celebrated illusion on the perceptions of two fingers, which expounds that external perception and the perception of ones own body vary in conjunction because they are the two facets of one and the same act. 2 Aristotles 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 Husserls (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 such5 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, Vorhandenseinneutrality as mode of being of thingsis 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 Dass 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 things 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 ones fingertips, an inner feel passing across the pulsating fibres of ones 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 ones 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 Dass 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] 15a 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 Chakrabortys 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 Jibananandas Dhusor Pandulipi [Gray Manuscript].

In the Moksha Dharma Parva of the Mahbharata, there comes in grandsire Bhismas fantastic discourse one robust verse which asserts that the whole world of reasoning, thinking and understanding takes place between the following limitswhatever 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 Avinavaguptas most original commentary on a famous sloka of the Bhagavad-Gita: istn bhogn hi bo deb dasyonte jajnabhbitah/ toidorttnprodyoivy 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 akar (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 Avinavaguptas 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 tanmanosonjogais 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 akar 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

karmendrini hastadini samjomyo somhrita jah ste tishthoti manas smaran

cintayan indriyrthan bisayn bimurtm bimurantokaranah mithycarah mrisacrah sa ucyate

25 [3/6] .The Bhagavad-Gita, however, repeatedly harps on the controlling of ones 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 worldwithout 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 itI 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-Pontys 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 anothers 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 fleshthe visceral substance to intersubjective embodied perception. Again, Merleau-Ponty plays upon the object-horizon structure to complicate the spatiality of ones own body. It is not that ones 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-world33, which immediately links it with the Heideggerian Vorhandensein. Merleau-Pontys 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 Dass 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-Pontys 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-Pontys 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 agencies40the id, the super-ego and the egois itself a conglomeration of different time-zones, an absent present that constantly destabilizes any construction of Ithe 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: parnchi khni bytrinat svayambhyuh tasm t par m pasyati n ntar tman41. akar 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 It were a vain endeavour,

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

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: Ones 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 Bhattacharyas ingenuous formulation, my own body is a hybrid amalgam of multiple points of views, partly mine and partly other peoples 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 intercorporeity46the 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 worldan internal animation is brilliantly captured in Binoy Majumdars 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 poets enactment of his vision and the objects 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 poets 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 techn of disciplining ones 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 ridestmanam 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 signifiersontogy 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 soundshoto 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 kheladoes 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 differencesokolei 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-Pontys 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 slokaYenedam sarvam vijnati tam kena vijnyt; Vijtram are kena vijnyt58
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 objectalthough freed from the reality of the objectthe 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 corporealami sob debotare chhere/ amar praner kachhe chole asi60 doesnt 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, its magic!]

_________________________________________

*The title is taken from Rabindranaths 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 Heideggers 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.1528. 18. Sudhir Chakroborty, Bangla Dehatattwer Gan, Nirbachito Probondho, Punascha, Kolkata, January 2010, P.78. 19. Srimadbhagabad-Gita, akar-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, akar-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-Pontys 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 chairs 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. Coleridges 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. Bhattacharyas 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-Pontys 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, akar-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.