The Lived Body (Phenomenology of Perception) and the Flesh (The Visible and the Invisible)

Author(s):  
Jennifer Bullington
Philosophy ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wayne Froman ◽  
Meirav Almog

Merleau-Ponty (b. 1908–d. 1961) was a major 20th-century French philosopher and contributor to phenomenology. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure from 1926 to 1930, received the aggrégation in philosophy in 1930 and the Docteur ès lettres in 1945. After early teaching largely in psychology, culminating with a Sorbonne appointment as professor of child psychology and pedagogy, he was elected in 1952 to the Chair in Philosophy at the Collège de France, as the youngest philosopher ever in this position, which he held until his death. His inaugural lecture was published as Éloge de la philosophie (In Praise of Philosophy). In 1945, Merleau-Ponty became, along with Raymond Aron, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre, a founding editorial board member as well as political editor of Les temps modernes, a journal devoted to “la philosophie engagée.” In 1953 he resigned from the journal. After the Korean conflict, Merleau-Ponty’s political difference with Sartre was acute, and in Les aventures de la dialectique (Adventures of the Dialectic) Merleau-Ponty characterizes Sartre’s position as “ultra-bolshevism.” Eventually, Merleau-Ponty would relinquish Marxist tenets. Merleau-Ponty’s first book, La structure du comportement (The Structure of Behavior), from 1942, is largely a critique of behavioral psychology as lacking a-propos, his stated goal, understanding the relation between nature and consciousness. His second and major completed book is La phénoménologie de la perception (Phenomenology of Perception). In this work Merleau-Ponty undermines classical theories of perception, which rely on “sense data”; introduces his understanding of the “lived body”; accentuates Husserl’s remark that consciousness is initially a matter of an “I can,” not an “I think”; and introduces a gestural analysis of language. While affirming Eugen Fink’s observation that there is no total “reduction” phenomenologically, Merleau-Ponty proceeds under the “epochē,” nonetheless. When he died, Merleau-Ponty was writing what would have been a book of major proportions. The material that he completed was posthumously published as Le visible et l’invisible (The Visible and the Invisible), a title from working notes that were published with it. Critical discussions of reflective philosophy, dialectic, and intuition precede a decidedly ontological project involving: “la chair” (the “flesh”), successor to Phenomenology of Perception’s “lived body,” through which “I live the world”; “reversibility,” the perceptual dynamic operative in our habitation of the world; and “the chiasm” or “intertwining” of different contexts, such as vision and motility. L’oeil et l’esprit (Eye and Mind), intended for inclusion in The Visible and the Invisible but published separately, addresses exploration of these factors in painting.


PARADIGMI ◽  
2012 ◽  
pp. 157-171
Author(s):  
Angelica Nuzzo

This essay discusses Merleau-Ponty's assessment of Kant's philosophy looking first at his critique of Kant's transcendental idealism in the preface to the 1945 Phenomenology of Perception, and second at his account of the duality of the concepts of nature in the 1956-57 lecture notes on Nature at the Collčge de France. In both cases, Merleau-Ponty points to the encounter with the issue of the living/lived body as the stumbling block that halts the transcendental inquiry leading to his transcendental phenomenology. Along this itinerary, countering Merleau-Ponty's reading a different interpretation of Kant is offered. The claim is made that Kant did not evade the problem of the human body but made it functional to his own transcendental inquiry. Task of this essay is to measure the distance that separates the two accounts of Kant's view of sensibility, namely, the critical account that inspires Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the lived body leading him beyond the alleged impasse of Kant's transcendental idealism, and what the author claims to be Kant's own transcendental view of sensibility.


Author(s):  
Adrian Barahona Rios ◽  
Lara Estevez Fernandez ◽  
He Cui ◽  
Shuyuan Huang

This article discusses “Exposing the Invisible: A Brain-driven Audiovisual Walk”, an audiovisual installation that was part of the Digital Media Studio Project entitled Invisible Cities. Commencing with an analysis of the research, and experimental and compositional strategies we devised for the installation, we will explore the possibilities afforded from the creative combination of sounds, visuals, emotions and places, in relation to more general aesthetic considerations relevant to data sonification and visualisation. Our approach understands visualisation as a bridge interlinking the emotions with various types of visual elements and sonification as a translation of the inaudible into the sphere of the audible; most importantly, the combination of both as an instrument for comprehending the human-city bond via the embodied sensory experience of place. Our practice, inspired from the interaction between the lived body and the (urban) environment, uses the EEG data with an artistic approach in order to reflect upon and re-interpret this bond.


PhaenEx ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorothea Olkowski

In chapter four of The Visible and the Invisible, titled “The Intertwining -- The Chiasm,” Merleau-Ponty considers the relation between the body as sensible, which is to say “objective,” and the body as sentient, that is, as “phenomenal” body. He makes this inquiry in the context of interrogating the access of such a sensible-sentient or objective-phenomenal body to Being. “Objectivity” and the objective body, as Merleau-Ponty defines it in the Phenomenology of Perception, are to be determined in relation to experience. Objectivity requires knowing how it is possible for determinate shapes to be available for experience at all. But the possibility of determinate shapes is also called into question by Merleau-Ponty insofar as the body is experienced as a point of view on things; thus every body would experience a different point of view, even though things are given as abstract elements of one total world. Since the two elements form a system, an intertwining, in which each moment (that of a body with a particular point of view and that of things in the totality of their world) is immediately expressive of each other, objectivity would seem to be hard to achieve. The relationship between body and things, point of view and world, if the relata continually express one another, would appear to be anything but determinate and the question of how objectivity is possible remains unanswered. This essay will explore this question in the light of Merleau-Ponty’s (mis-) reading of Henri Bergson and from the point of view of Sartre’s original expression of the relation of intertwining.


Author(s):  
Emmanuel de Saint Aubert

Access to a large number of unpublished manuscripts allows us to follow the continuity of Merleau-Ponty’s thought from his first to his last writings, to uncover its double critical constitution, anti-Cartesian and anti-Sartrean, and to understand the status of this philosophy of the flesh as it establishes itself as ontology. This philosophy is geared toward a never-abandoned methodological challenge to grasp humanity first as another manner of being a body, the challenge of thinking a corporeity which is always already, in the very principle of its animation, intercorporeity. Through his continual pursuit of a phenomenology of perception, its insistence on the motifs of depth, the inexhaustible, the invisible, and incompletion, Merleau-Ponty’s carnal ontology proceeds in the discovery of the common negativity of human beings and the world, of myself and others, which affects its conception of being.


Phainomenon ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 18-19 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-124
Author(s):  
Ma Carmen López Sáenz

Abstract It is my contention that there is a significant relationship between “Phenomenology of Perception” (Merleau-Ponty) and “The Second Sex” (de Beauvoir). The two authors give great importancc to the lived body (Leib), either from a neutral perspective, either from a perspective feminine. This key concept of the phenomenology allows us to understand the lived experience of women and their possible relationship with feminism. From this corporeal sense we analyze the Merleau-Pontinian redefinition of subjectivity and reason. We emphasize his criticism of reductionism, both epistemological as ontological. We refute certain feminists accusations against Merleau-Ponty. To do this, we study all his work in search of traces of women, we place them in context, while we study his own hermeneutics of psychoanalysis in order to highlight the contribution of it to the deconstruction of stereotypes about femininity. We conclude by showing the main keys of this phenomenology for· the current feminist Philosophy.


Author(s):  
James Phillips

This chapter traces the trajectory of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s views on psychoanalysis and the Freudian unconscious. It begins with a discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s first reading of Sigmund Freud by way of The Structure of Behavior, his development of a full description of perceptual consciousness in the Phenomenology of Perception, and his interpretation of the Freudian unconscious as the ambiguity of operative intentionality or perceptual consciousness. The chapter goes on to consider Merleau-Ponty’s lectures as Professor of Psychology at the Sorbonne from 1949 to 1952, the criticisms hurled against his early work, and his relationship with Jacques Lacan. It also examines themes from Merleau-Ponty’s lectures at the Collège de France between 1951 until his death, along with two of his posthumous writings: The Visible and the Invisible, and a Preface to L’Oeuvre de Freud et son Importance pour la Monde, a book on Freud by psychoanalyst Angelo Hesnard.


2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-183
Author(s):  
Le Dong ◽  

In this article, I argue that Merleau-Ponty underpins an idea of differentiation without ultimate unification through intertwining. I trace this idea of intertwining to Phenomenology of Perception. I argue that what perception marks is already differentiation prior to any identification. For this purpose, firstly, I will introduce Merleau-Ponty’s depiction of intertwining; secondly, I will elaborate perception in Phenomenology of Perception; finally, I will discuss flesh as intertwining in The Visible and The Invisible.


PhaenEx ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith L. Whitmoyer

In light of more contemporary interest in the concept of an immemorial past, this essay takes up the manner in which this idea figures in Merleau-Ponty’s works by turning to the famous reference to “a past that has never been present” in Phenomenology of Perception. In order to contextualize and think through what Merleau-Ponty means, I turn to a reference in the same text to “primary silence.” Merleau-Ponty’s concern is to disclose the differential between the concatenation of sensibility and expression and what remains beyond the bounds of the sensible. The task of phenomenology, accordingly, is the disclosure of this primary silence, this primary non-sense. Finally, articulating that this differential never ceased to be a concern for Merleau-Ponty, and, turning to texts from the 1950s as well as to The Visible and the Invisible, we see the development of Merleau-Ponty’s thought as the consistent effort to think through this question.  


2006 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 14
Author(s):  
ALAN ROCKOFF
Keyword(s):  

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