Existential Selfhood in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (original) (raw)
Related papers
2005
Introduction: The Phenomenology of Perception and the Philosophy of Consciousness If the legacy of Descartes is his idea of consciousness as a realm of interiority and transparency, the contributions of many twentieth-century philosophers consist precisely in their efforts to criticize this Cartesian notion of self. Among these efforts, Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception occupies an ambiguous position. While its analysis of being-in-the-world as bodily insertion, of expression as incarnation of sense, and of the opaqueness of our inner life challenges the idea of consciousness as a realm of transparency and self-presence, its notion of a tacit cogito seems to remain a notion of self-presence, especially when compared to the critique of the metaphysics of presence put forth by Derrida, with whom Merleau-Ponty has much in common. As to Merleau-Ponty himself, it is well known that he later concludes that the “problems posed” in the Phenomenology are “insoluble because I start ...
THE AFFECTIVITY OF THE INTERSUBJECTIVE: THE EXISTENTIAL DIMENSIONS OF MIDDLE AND LATE MERLEAU-PONTY
In this paper, I intend to argue for the fundamental, inherent intersubjectivity of the emotions (and emotionality of the intersubjective) with the site of the body as their co-existence. Using insights from Merleau-Ponty's later essay "Eye & Mind" and Chapter Four of Visible and the Invisible, in concert with earlier moments from Phenomenology of Perception and "Cézanne's Doubt," I will show that not only is our body's world always already intersubjective and emotional, but these two dimensions of our existence are inextricably bound within one another from the very outset. I will elaborate upon the concepts of existential "maps," "dimensions," and "levels" hinted at but never thematized in Merleau-Ponty, allowing us to recognize different regions of our existence as bound up within the body and one another. Ultimately, with our body as the reciprocal expression of our existence, we will never have a single perception free of intersubjectivity, an intersubjective moment free of emotionality, nor an emotion free from embodiment.
Merleau Ponty: Subjectivity as The Field of Being within Beings. Awareness As Existingness
Revista Científica Arbitrada de la Fundación MenteClara, 2019
In his later life Maurice Merleau Ponty changed his understanding of how human beings know Being and how human beings know phenomena. His mature understanding went far beyond the early phenomenology of Husserl. His understanding and intellectual position about the subjectivity of mind alone with its corresponding subject object duality dissolved into a experience of non duality within appearance. His dualistic understanding about Being changed to the vast nondual awareness of Being as the source of both subjectivity and objectivity. Resumen En su vida posterior, Maurice Merleau Ponty cambió su comprensión de En su vida posterior, Maurice Merleau Ponty cambió su comprensión de cómo los seres humanos conocen el Ser y cómo los seres humanos conocen los fenómenos. Su comprensión madura fue mucho más allá de la fenomenología temprana de Husserl. Su comprensión y posición intelectual, sobre la subjetividad de la mente solo con su correspondiente dualidad de objeto sujeto se disolvió en una experiencia de no dualidad dentro de la apariencia. Su comprensión dualista acerca del Ser cambió a la vasta conciencia no dual del Ser como fuente de subjetividad y objetividad
"You Don't Know Me!": Finding an Ethical Imperative in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology
I explore Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology with a specific focus on the indeterminacy of perception. I aim to argue that there is an underlying ethical imperative to Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological account. This underlying ethical claim takes into consideration the violent nature and indeterminacy of perception, as outlined by Merleau-Ponty. I specifically discuss the way in which our perception of objects is temporally limited. But in order to do this, I first explore Merleau-Ponty's account of consciousness as embodied. I discuss our habitual comportment towards the world as lending to experience a sense of coherence and stability. Yet, this coherence and stability is in spite of our experience being of an unstable and fluctuating world. From this I explore the manner in which other people are indeterminate beings, but are yet also experienced as coherent and stable. We are habitually oriented towards others, just as we are habitually oriented towards the objects we engage with. Finally, by bringing together the accounts of the perception of objects and of people, I argue for an ethical imperative that underlies our experiences of other people as a request for recognizing the indeterminacy of the other. Following this, I briefly explore examples of how this ethical imperative is ignored in our daily lives. I conclude that understanding the indeterminacy of perception is essential for understanding this ethical call.
Anonymity and personhood: Merleau-Ponty's account of the subject of perception
Continental Philosophy Review, 2015
Several commentators have argued that with his concept of anonymity Merleau-Ponty breaks away from classical Husserlian phenomenology that is methodologically tied to the first person perspective. The descriptions that we find in Phenomenology of Perception concerning the anonymous life of the body, as distinct from the personal life of the ego, are claimed to signal a movement which eventually leads to the "ontological turn" and to the allegedly fundamental ontological concepts of the flesh and raw being. Thus understood Merleau-Ponty would either abandon Husserl's transcendental egology and fall back on empirical reflections or else develop some other type of transcendentalismtranscendentalism of the flesh or transcendentalism of raw being -free from the "egocentricity" of classical phenomenology. An early commentator Gary Madison, for example, states that the subject of perception, as characterized by Merleau-Ponty, "is a subject without personal identity which lives outside of itself and which loses track of itself in the perceptual spectacle." 1 More recently, Renaud Barbaras has argued that in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty draws near to Scheler's philosophy and develops the view according to which the differentiation into self and other is secondary and based on an undifferentiated stream of experience without any self, thematic or non-thematic. Barbaras explains that Merleau-Ponty "approaches the question of the other, not by starting from a cogito, but from a flowing psychic 'indifference' which is realized in emotional evidence and which precedes the subjective differences." 2 Barbaras contributes to a new trend in Merleau-Ponty studies that rejects Husserlian phenomenology as a form of metaphysics of the present and contrasts it either to Heideggerian-Derridean deconstruction or to Bergsonian-Deleuzian vitalism or both. In this line, also Len Lawlor and Alia Al-Saji argue that Merleau-Ponty abandons Husserl's egoic philosophy of consciousness and moves, already in
Merleau-Ponty's modification of phenomenology: Cognition, passion and philosophy
Synthese, 1999
This paper problematizes the analogy that Hubert Dreyfus has presented between phenomenology and cognitive science. It argues that Dreyfus presents Merleau-Ponty's modification of Husserl's phenomenology in a misleading way. He ignores the idea of philosophy as a radical interrogation and self-responsibility that stems from Husserl's work and recurs in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. The paper focuses on Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the phenomenological reduction. It shows that his critical idea was not to restrict the scope of Husserl's reductions but to study the conditions of possibility for the thetic acts. Merleau-Ponty argued, following Husserl's texts, that the thetic acts rest on the basis of primordial pre-thetic experience. This layer of experience cannot, by its nature, be explicated or clarified, but it can be questioned and unveiled. This is the recurrent task of phenomenological philosophy, as Merleau-Ponty understands it.
Merleau Ponty: Subjectivity as The Field of Being within Beings
Transmission: Journal of the Awareness Field - Vol. 4 Awareness as Existingness, 2012
In his later life Maurice Merleau Ponty changed his understanding of how human beings know Being and how human beings know phenomena. His mature understanding went far beyond the early phenomenology of Husserl. His understanding and intellectual position about the subjectivity of mind alone with its corresponding subject object duality dissolved into a experience of non duality within appearance. His dualistic understanding about Being changed to the vast nondual awareness of Being as the source of both subjectivity and objectivity. Before his work on the Visible and the Invisible Merleau Ponty's thought was contained by equating subjectivity with mind alone and with object alone. His view was dualistic and the source of knowing was located in mind alone. Mind means the functions of thinking, feeling, sensation, memory and fantasy.