Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology offers one way of approaching this question. For Merleau-Ponty, the body is not simply an object situated within a pre-existing world. It is through the body that a world becomes available to perception and action. As he writes: “The body is our general medium for having a world.”

Perception, from this perspective, is not the passive reception of an external reality by an isolated subject. The body perceives because it is already situated within and involved with the world it perceives. Merleau-Ponty’s later concept of flesh of the world pushes this relation further. Flesh does not refer simply to the biological material of the human body. Rather, it describes the intertwining of perceiver and perceived, body and world. When I touch something, I am also capable of being touched; when I look, I am not positioned outside the visible world but remain visible within it. The body does not observe the world from a distance. It participates in the same perceptual field that it encounters.

This is important for the research because it challenges the idea that embodiment begins with a self-contained body that subsequently enters into relationships with equally separate objects. Body and world are already implicated in one another. What the body can perceive and do depends upon the conditions through which it encounters the world, while those encounters continually reorganise its possibilities for action. Tools make this relationship particularly tangible.

This is one way into what Maurice Merleau-Ponty means by embodiment. For him, the body is not simply an object located in a world that already exists independently around it. It is through the body that a world becomes available to perception and action. As he writes in Phenomenology of Perception, “The body is our general medium for having a world.””

This changes what it means to use a tool. Through repeated use, a tool can cease to be something I constantly perceive as a separate object. Its possibilities and limitations become incorporated into bodily practice. I do not need to first think about the lettering guide, calculate its edge, and then instruct my hand to respond. The relationship can become habitual and bodily. I begin to perceive and act through the constraint rather than merely against it.

Merleau-Ponty’s later concept of flesh of the world pushes this further. Flesh does not simply describe what happens inside my body, nor does it mean biological flesh. It names an intertwining between the body that perceives and the world that is perceived. When I touch something, I am also a body capable of being touched. When I look, I remain visible. Perceiving does not place me outside the world looking in; my body participates in the same world that it encounters.

Merleau-Ponty eventually describes this relation through a strange but useful phrase: the world as a pregnacy of possible The phrase matters to me because it shifts attention away from things understood as already complete and separate. What a body, object or situation can become depends partly on the relations through which it takes form.