Thought-Factory.net Philosophical Conversations Public Opinion philosophy.com Junk for code
PortElliot2.jpg
'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
RECENT ENTRIES
SEARCH
ARCHIVES
Weblog Links
Library
Fields
Philosophers
Writers
Connections
Magazines
E-Resources
Academics
Other
www.thought-factory.net
'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Merleau-Ponty: bodies +flesh « Previous | |Next »
July 16, 2006

Steven Rosen says:

Perhaps more than any other phenomenologist, it was Merleau-Ponty who made it clear that, in the lifeworld, there can be no categorial division of object and subject. The lifeworld subject---far from being the disengaged, high-flying deus ex machina of Descartes---finds itself down among the objects, is "one of the visibles" ....is itself always an object to some other subject, so that the simple distinction between subject and object is confounded and "we no longer know which sees and which is seen" ...Merleau-Ponty's placement of the subject among the objects was of course no materialistic reduction of the subject to the status of mere object (an inert lump of matter). Rather, his grounding of the subject is indicative of the ambiguous dialectical interplay of subject and object that is found in the lifeworld.

This leads to the body subject-and to an embodied subjectivity, with its sense of bodily contact with objects in the world and with others. The 'ambiguous dialectical interplay of subject and object that is found in the lifeworld' leads to bodily attachment to a geographical location and encountering it in the fullest sense. Bodies have their worlds, and understand their worlds. Bodies are "lived experience" in that bodies have tacit understandings of the world which are independent of any sort of cognitive map.hence the idea of body-subjects.

In Merleau-Ponty's last and incomplete work The Visible and the Invisible, the notion of "flesh" is introduced.

I haven't read the book as it is out of print.Marjorie O’Loughlin in Intelligent Bodies and Ecological Subjectivitiessays:

"Flesh" refers to the capacity of being to fold in upon itself, its simultaneous orientation to inner and outer. Using the term "double sensation," Merleau -Ponty describes the transfer of what is touching to that which is being touched, explaining that the touching subject passes over into the rank of the touched, descending into things, such that it is the one touch which occurs in the midst of the world and in things...t is his articulation of the tangible which is particularly significant, signaling a radical departure from the Western philosophical tradition in which, while the toucher is always touched, the one who sees merely does so from a distance and is, therefore, not implicated in what is seen. His discussion of the tangible underscores a determination to depict both "subject" and "object" in a generalizeable visibility, which is, for each, the same visibility -- that is, the same "flesh."

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:54 PM | | Comments (0)
Comments