Review of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Le Monde Sensible et le Monde de l'Expression (original) (raw)

Merleau-Ponty’s Concept of Nature and the Ontology of Flesh

Biosemiotics, 2010

The essay attempts to delineate how Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception can be applied to theories of sign processes, and how it reworks the framework of the phenomenalist conception of communication. His later philosophy involved a reformulation of subjectivity and a resolution of the subject/ object dualism. My claim is that this non-reductionist theory of perception reveals a different view of nature as we experience it in an expressive and meaningful interaction. The perspective that another living being has and communicates entails a form of depth, the invisible dimension of the visible or audible. These two aspects of perception and dialogue are intertwined in a dialectic of presence and absence, so that sense arises in the perceptual field rather than in subjectivity. This, I argue, is the most fundamental result of his theory. The origination of meaning in the workings of the chiasm of visible and invisible in perception opens up an objective sense of intersubjective nature. The essay also deals with the role of the phenomenological reduction; a suspension of beliefs and existence claims in experience. The reduction enables us to take a step back and look more closely at our understanding of nature in light of the historical and cultural influence on our thinking.

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's Concept of Nature and the Ontology of the Flesh.pdf

Springer Link: "Biosemiotics", 2010

The essay attempts to delineate how Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception can be applied to theories of sign processes, and how it reworks the framework of the phenomenalist conception of communication. His later philosophy involved a reformulation of subjectivity and a resolution of the subject/object dualism. My claim is that this non-reductionist theory of perception reveals a different view of nature as we experience it in an expressive and meaningful interaction. The perspective that another living being has and communicates entails a form of depth, the invisible dimension of the visible or audible. These two aspects of perception and dialogue are intertwined in a dialectic of presence and absence, so that sense arises in the perceptual field rather than in subjectivity. This, I argue, is the most fundamental result of his theory. The origination of meaning in the workings of the chiasm of visible and invisible in perception opens up an objective sense of intersubjective nature. The essay also deals with the role of the phenomenological reduction; a suspension of beliefs and existence claims in experience. The reduction enables us to take a step back and look more closely at our understanding of nature in light of the historical and cultural influence on our thinking.

Singing the World in a New Key: Merleau-Ponty and the Ontology of Sense

2004

To what extent can meaning be attributed to nature, and what is the relationship between such “natural sense” and the meaning of linguistic and artistic expressions? To shed light on such questions, this essay lays the groundwork for an “ontology of sense” drawing on the insights of phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty’s theory of expression. We argue that the ontological continuity of organic life with the perceived world of nature requires situating sense at a level that is more fundamental than has traditionally been recognized. Accounting for the genesis of this primordial sense and the teleology of expressive forms requires the development of an ontology of being as interrogation, as suggested by Merleau-Ponty’s later investigations.

On the Phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Merleau-Ponty offers a significant renewal and deepening of the phenomenological project by introducing the body itself as the locus of the “upsurge of the world.” His career represents an unfolding revelation of this fundamental insight, beginning with a realization of the inadequacy of objective/mechanistic psychology and eventually moving toward a never completed project of re-imagining ontology in terms of the self revelation of the world as living existence. In this paper, I concentrate on the first phase of Merleau-Ponty’s career, which includes his challenge to the objectivist tendencies in biology and psychology and his alternative phenomenological vision of life and significance. In Phenomenology of Perception, in particular, Merleau-Ponty argues that scientific knowledge passes over the true nature of perception and, therefore, misses its origin in the silent immersion of the body in a world with which it is always already intimate. Indeed, for Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology reveals, in perceptual experience, the birth of meaning as it is lived by bodies in the subtle dance that is existence.