Intersubjectivity: Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenological Reduction (original) (raw)

Intersubjectivity: Merleau-Ponty"s Phenomenological Reduction It seems that first, in order to beg the question "What is phenomenology?" one must ask "Why phenomenology?" Particularly, why does M. Merleau-Ponty continue the project of E. Husserl in a substantive phenomenological mannerwith, his very own, unique interpretations of phenomenology? Certainly Merleau-Ponty diagnosis his time in a similar "crisis" as Husserl; science -specifically, classical psychology -has continued to constitute objectivity within objects themselves and attempts to dichotomize relations of subjects and objects without accentuating being in the world. The assumption of classical psychology is that knowledge, consciousness, perception are complete ends in themselves, given and self-evident. In opposition, Merleau-Ponty demands a movement from this crisis to a phenomenological understanding of intersubjectivity. The phenomenological reduction suspends all presuppositions of lived experience and radically critiques positivist natural sciences. This paper will maintain the notion that this movement explains, to a major extent, the foundations of phenomenology; one that is grounded in the "things themselves" instead of abstracted and objectified notions of understanding. Then, it will explore how the other problematizes strict dichotomization of being/nothingness and solidifies a phenomenological shift from past philosophies in understanding intersubjectivity. declare an evaluation, or explanation, it does so in order to circumvent the actual lived world for access to their abstracted object. When Merleau-Ponty claims "the psychologist"s being knew more about the psychologist than the psychologist himself… the psychologist already possessed, through himself, the results of the story he was developing from within the objective attitude 2 ," he is reiterating that the classical psychologist finds his object not within the world, physical embodiment, or within a horizon, but something contained within an extra-spatial and extra-temporal setting. Phenomenology effectively re-interprets this crisis, and grounds objects within the world.