Habit and Phenomenology

Merleau-Ponty's assertion that Consciousness is 'I can' implies that Consciousness is the possession of an ability, i. e. habit. He proceeds to characterize habit as "our power of dilating our being-in-the world", an extension of what is originally the body's "motor space", via the adaptation, to our modes of motility, of instruments. A key factor in this expansion is intention, which, by guiding motility, accomplishes the incorporation into it of instruments. Hence, given that Consciousness is 'I can', the primary Intentional object is always the body, in general, and some motility, in particular, while external items become Intentional objects only insofar as they are appropriated as instruments. However, he stops short of likewise redefining the Phenomenological method as, say, 'the corporeal activity of articulating, to others, the observed general features of lived experience'. Instead, he leaves unmodified the traditional concept of it, i. e. the recording of what appears to a detached gaze. Possibly because of his commitment to traditional Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty, despite his derivation, from 'I can', of the primacy of motor space, and of the essential centrifugality of lived experience with respect to the subject, ultimately subordinates those results to their antitheses--that motor space is abstract, virtual, and non-existent; that experience is centripetal with respect to the subject; that Perception is fundamentally cognitive, and that the world is orientated toward external perceptual objects, with the perceiver on the periphery, i. e. at the location of the Phenomenological gaze.