Part 11:  Existentialism and the Salsa Connection
by Sam Gill

Some of you know that I am not only a salsa teacher/dancer, but also an academic.  I have taught at the University of Colorado as Full Professor since 1983 (hmm, how can that be as young as I am?).  For over a decade I have been doing research and teaching topics related to dance traditions around the world and to understanding what it is that distinguishes dancing as a human activity.   This research has taken me to many fields of study and to read and think about lots of things. 

One of the most provocative areas I have been interested in is the philosophical writings of a Frenchman named Maurice Merleau-Ponty.  His research was on human perception.  Most theories of perception see the human body as kind of a box with the senses being something like instruments that detect what is outside the box and bring it in the box. Merleau-Ponty’s revolutionary work found that bodies aren’t boxes that passively receive information from outside through the senses, but rather that we interact with the world beyond our skin in creative ways.  Our senses are actively creating the world as they sense the world and this is based on the nature of the human body including the mind/brain.  He showed that we interactively create and discover the world all the time. 

Merleau-Ponty’s principal inspiration for this view was the simple situation in which we touch one hand with the other.  One is touching the other, but this can easily be reversed so that the hand doing the touching is actually touched by the other hand.  This flip-flopping, or reversibility, as the two hands are of one body, shows the two are inseparable, that is, in some sense also one.  He referred to this reversibility using the term chiasm which is a crossing place.  We can also think of it as modeled by a mobius strip which has both two and one sides simultaneously.  Another kind of illustration is to think of M C Escher prints where a tiny shift in focus flips back and forth the images we see ( http://www.mcescher.com/  ).  Extending this analogy of one hand touching the other, Merleau-Ponty believed that all perception is of this nature.  As we see the world, we are also seen (in some sense) by the world and so on.  The point is really that perception is interactive; it is the active presentation of things outside us for us to perceive while it is, at the same time, our actively seeking the world beyond us, creating it and our experience of it in the terms of the history of our experience and expectations, in terms that are dictated by the biology and physiology of the human body.  The body and mind are inseparable as are the perceiving human being and the world the human being perceived.  Well, that is a pretty quick and dirty presentation of Merleau-Ponty and ideas I have been contemplating for years.