Merleau Ponty: Subjectivity as The Field of Being within Beings

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

Philosophy of Mind: The Key Thinkers, ed. Andrew Bailey, 2013

International Studies in Philosophy, 2002

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 ...

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 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.

Essays on Values and Practical Rationality : Ethical and Aesthetical Perspectives, 2018

15 essays of original phenomenological research, exploring the continuing significance of Merleau-Ponty's *Phenomenology of Perception*.