This quest for the heart of things has been phenomenology’s major objective, ever since Husserl first set out his method of achieving a definition of “ideal” essences. This highlights the persistent problem of conceiving the relationship between the mind and the world, just as Kant had discovered in the eighteenth century, in trying to resolve the argument between rationalism and empiricism. As Kant concluded, our human faculties impose a set of limits on our potential knowledge and in attempting to define these limits the search has since shifted to the experience of the individual “embodied” subject. The problem for phenomenology has been the extension of these individual insights, to apply to other individual subjects as part of an “inter-subjective” realm. Like Kant’s definition of beauty as something experienced subjectively, there is still a huge leap of faith required to accept that judgements are agreed upon universally. This rift between the individual and the diverse experience of the larger society is a persistent problem in phenomenology which many critics have been quick to point out.

         In architecture there lies the possibility that this problem might be alleviated through the study of phenomenology’s insights as part of the wider cultural world. This hope that phenomenology offers possibilities for resisting the reductive ideology of modern science has been expressed by various writers as part of a general disillusionment with the state of architecture in the twentieth century. As the architectural historian Alberto Perez-Gomez pointed out, in the introduction to his important work on the “crisis” in modern architecture:

         The problem that determines most explicitly our crisis, therefore, is that the conceptual framework of the sciences is not compatible with reality. The atomic theory of the universe may be true but it hardly explained real issues of human behavior. The fundamental axiom of the sciences since 1800 has been ‘invariance’, which rejects, or at least is unable to cope with, the richness and ambiguity of symbolic thought.15

hand”, particularly the way the tool in use becomes “transparent” to the person using it. This idea of reaching out into the environment – in the sense of the tool as an extension of the body – becomes a major theme in Merleau-Ponty’s work, particularly in his unfinished writings published just after his death. Earlier, in his book The Phenomenology of Perception, he had described a common scenario, where a person driving a new car takes a period of time to become accustomed to its size. With experience the person can feel whether the car will fit through a particular opening, as the volume of the vehicle becomes gradually incorporated into the overall “body image”. Likewise in the case of a blind person who has to navigate with the aid of a stick, the tip becomes the point of sensitivity and a means of communication with the surrounding environment. The stick becomes a part of the body as the person eventually learns to feel things “through” it and, like Heidegger’s hammer, it “withdraws” from our perception as the world is experienced at the tip of the cane.13

         In his essay “The Intertwining – the Chiasm” which appeared in 1964, he developed the concept of the “flesh of the world” as a means of further exploring this idea. The intertwining referred to in the title is again that of the individual with the outside world, which he saw as a kind of transitional zone where the flesh of the body interacts with the “flesh” of things. Instead of a barrier between the mind and the world, he saw the body as our means of contact – the only means we have available for the task of reaching out to understand the world:

surprisingly, away from the history of philosophy as such, to consider instead the role that action plays in our perception of the outside world. Although in this early work he had looked at spoken language in terms of its origins in the “language” of gesture – to claim that gesture was still an important factor in communication – he went on in his later essays to look at other means of expression, such as how an artist might use his body to communicate ideas in physical form. In the essay “Eye and Mind”, published in 1961, Merleau-Ponty described the body as an interface between the perceiving mind and the physical world. His interest in the work of art came from its expression of this interaction, such as where the brush strokes in a painting reveal the movements of the artist’s hand. This “encounter” between the artist’s body and the natural resistance of the medium being used provides a powerful image of the everyday process of interaction between the body and the world. As another French philosopher, Henri Bergson, wrote in 1896: “The objects which surround my body reflect its possible action upon them.”11 Merleau-Ponty say this reflection or revelation of the body’s actions in the tectonic qualities of the work of art – this suggested the idea of continuity between the body and the outside world.

         The American philosopher John Dewey, in the book Art as Experience, also used a similar formulation to explain his understanding of the work of art:

         The epidermis is only in the most superficial way an indication of where an organism ends and its environment begins. There are things inside the body that are foreign to it, and there are things outside of if that belong to it … 12

         He suggested that as the biology of human life requires the taking in of air and foodstuffs, then one could also interpret the use of tools as a kind of “incorporation” of objects into the body. This discussion brings him close to the early Heidegger, in his analysis of the “ready-to-

escape what Michel Foucault would later call the “prison-house of language” – and provide a clearer understanding of the nature of “embodied” knowledge.

A Philosophy of the Body – From Bergson to Merleau-Ponty 

Perhaps the most intriguing of those later writers who took up this theme of embodiment is the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who collaborated closely with Jean-Paul Sartre. The two men founded the philosophical journal Les Temps Modernes in 1945 and continued to work together on it until a disagreement forced them to part company. The same year that the journal was founded saw the publication of Merleau-Ponty’s major work, the results of his doctoral research entitled The Phenomenology of Perception. In this work he first set out the effect that the body has on our perception, through a series of detailed analyses based on case studies from clinical research. By considering the way the senses work together in the process of synaesthesia, and how perception provides the raw data that the mind arranges into clear concepts, Merleau-Ponty hoped to show that language itself is merely derived from our lived experience and thereby to reverse the priority given to it in Heidegger’s earlier analysis. As he describes it in the preface to his book:

         To return to the things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign-language, as is geography in relation to the countryside in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river is.10

         What Merleau-Ponty is trying to describe is a kind of pre-linguistic understanding, the notion that the world is already meaningful for us before it is “parceled up” into language. His research led him, not

While all four components are meant to be “presented”, in the properly poetic activity of authentic dwelling, the discussion remains tantalizingly vague about the practical application of these ideas in architecture. Where Heidegger does become more specific is in his discussion of the definition of place, which he sees as the initial task involved in the acts of building and dwelling. On the other hand place is seen to be dependent on the articulation of boundaries and edge-conditions-the boundary is not where something stops, but where something actually “begins its presenting”8 – and at the same time, places can be created through the intervention of a newly built object. He illustrates this with the example of the bridge, which brings the river banks into a new relationship, as it “causes” the banks to lie opposite to one another and “gathers the earth as landscape around the stream”.9

         These ideas begin to suggest a role for architecture, in heightening our awareness of the character of our surroundings, as did Heidegger’s earlier analyses in the book Being and Time, where he considered the interpretation of items of equipment. In the end, however, language retains its status as the privileged medium or “house of being” and this view has caused much controversy ever since Heidegger first presented the essay “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” as a lecture. At the same conference, the Darmstadt Colloquium, which took place in August 1951, Ortega y Gasset presented his paper (mentioned above) on pragmatic fields. Their argument concerned the priority between action and contemplation, or between existence and essence in the understanding of the nature of dwelling. Ortega’s “project of life” had become a “project of though” in Heidegger’s work, whereas the dialectical relationship between the two realms was still undeveloped in either version. It was left to other philosophers to return to this theme and to consider the specific role of bodily experience – to