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Posted: 20 Jul 2020

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THE DANCING PHILOSOPHER

THE DANCING PHILOSOPHER
In which Merleau-Ponty has a chapter himself.


plato.stanford.edu/entries/merleau-ponty
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
. . . .Merleau-Ponty has spent the war working himself into uncompromising attitudes that went against his grain. He adopted a dogmatic pro-Soviet position, which he maintained for several years after the war before dramatically abandoning it. He often changed his views in this way when his thinking took him in a new direction. But he always remained a phenomenologist at heart, dedicated to the task of describing experience as closely and precisely as he could. … Page 228

. . . . No photographer of American fans chased Merleau-Ponty around the Left Bank. Journalists did not quiz him about sex life -- which is a shame, as they would have dug up some interesting stories if they had. Meanwhile, he quietly turned himself into the most revolutionary thinker of them all, as became clear on publication of his masterwork in 1945 ‘The Phenomenology of Perception’. He remains an influential figure in modern philosophy, as well as in related fields such as cognitive psychology. His vision of human life is best summed up by these brief remarks near the end of the ‘The Phenomenology of Perception’:

.I am a psychological and historical structure. Along with existence, I received a way of existing, or a style. All of my actions and thoughts are related to this structure, and even a philosopher’s thought are related to this structure, and even a philosopher’s thought is merely a way of making explicit his hold upon the world, which is all he is. And yet, I am free, not in spite of beneath these motivations, but rather by their means. For that meaningful life, that particular signification of nature and history that I am, does not restrict my access to the world; it is rather my means of communication with it. - page 229

. . . He was influenced especially by gestalt theory, a school of psychology which explores how experience comes to us as a whole rather than as separate bits of input. ~ Page 230

Of course we have to learn this skill of interpreting and anticipating the world, and this happens in early childhood, which is why Merleau-Ponty thought child psychology was essential to philosophy. This is an extraordinary insight. Apart from Rousseau, very few philosophers before him had taken childhood seriously, most wrote as though all human experience were that of a fully conscious, rational verbal adult who has been dropped into this world from the sky -- perhaps by a stork. Childhood looms large in Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’ and in Sartre’s biographies; Sartre wrote in his Flaubert book that ‘all of us are constantly discussing the child we were, and are’. But his strictly philosophical treatises do not prioritise childhood as Merleau-Ponty do. ~Page 231

In ‘The Phenomenology of Perception’ Merleau-Ponty starts with Husserl’s notion that we must philosophise from our own experience of phenomena, but he adds the obvious point that this experience comes to us through our sensitive, moving, perceptive bodies. Even when we think of a thing that is not there, our minds construct that imaginary thing with colours, shapes, tastes, smells, noises and tactile qualities. In abstract thought, we similarly draw on physical metaphors or images -- as when we talk of ideas as weighty, or discussions as heated. We are sensual even when we are being most philosophical. 231
4 years ago. Edited 4 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
With Merleau-Ponty, the further he wades out into the mysterious, the closer he also comes to the basics of life: to the act of picking up a glass and drinking, or to the bounce of branch as a bird flies away. This is what astonishes him, and for him there can be no question of banishment that puzzle by ‘solving’ it. The philosopher’s task is neither to reduce the mysterious to a neat set of concepts nor a gaze at it in awed silence. It is to follow the first5 phenomenological imperative: to go to the things themselves in order to describe them, attempting ‘rigorously to put into words what is not ordinarily put into words, what is sometimes considered inexpressibloe.’ Such philosophy can be seen as an art form -- a way of doing what Merleau-Ponty thought Cezanne did in his paintings of everyday objects and scenes: taking the world, making it new, and giving it back almost unchanged except the world, making it new, and giving back almost unchanged excep0t in that it has been observed. As he wrote to Cezanne in a beautiful essay, ‘Only one emotion is possible for this painter -- the feeling of strangeness -- and only one lyricism -- that of the continual rebirth of existence.’ In another essay, he wrote of how the Renaissance writer Michale de montaigne put ‘not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.’ One could say the same of Merleau-Ponty himself. - 237

In his inaugural lecture at the College de France on 15 January 1953, published as ‘In praise of Philosophy’, he said that philosophers should concern themselves about all with whatever is ambigious in our experience. At the same time, they should think clearly about these ambiguities, using reason and science. Thus, he said, “The philosopher is marked by the distinguishing trait that he possesses inseparably the taste of evidence and the feeling for ambiguity’ A constant movement is required between the two -- a kind of rocking motion ‘which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge. ~ Page 241
4 years ago. Edited 4 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
. . . Merleu-Ponty’s ‘Phenomenology of perception’ (1945) voidnetwork.gr/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Phenomenology-of-Perception-by-Maurice-Merleau-Ponty.pdf appears to articulate a sympathetic relationship between perceiver and perceived wherein each activity apprehends the other. Merleau-Ponty imputes a kind of animate quality to the sensory word : “Hardness, softness, roughness and smoothness …. Presents themselves in our recollection. . .as certain kinds of symbioses, certain ways of outside has of invading us.” Elsewhere in the book he describes this process as one of an active world taking possession of the body. But such reference are rare, and are subject to various interpretations. Generally speaking elements of panpsychism in phenomenology are faint at best. In Herman’s opinion, “it’s safe to say that there is no panpsychist strain anywhere in the pehnomenological movement. ~ Page 225 Excerpt: “Panpsychism in the West - Author: David Skrbina
3 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
The least widely known but perhaps the best of the Paris-based philosophers of that time was Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-61) plato.stanford.edu/entries/merleau-ponty His most important book are ‘The Structure of Behaviour’ (1942) and ‘The Phenomenology of Perception’ (1945) especially the latter. His special contribution was to bring to philosophy a much needed acknowledgement of the importance of the human body. Both phenomenologists and existentialists had tended to write as if what each human being is, above all else, is a center of conscious awareness, and therefore something that can be thought of as abstract or immaterial , though of course none of them actually said that. Merleau-Ponty insisted that it is fundamental to our identity as human beings that we are physical objects, each one of which has a different and unique location in space or time. Not only must everything by anyone be experienced through the unique physical apparatus of one such object: the whole of the rest of reality can be apprehended only from the perspective of its unique point of view. All this is still true even if we are more than just our bodies, we are perpetually aware of our bodies, and without them we cannot perceive or act. These things being so, in the human body to be regarded as subject or object. It is both -- and yet, in a queer way, neither. It is not a disembodied subject of experience, because it is a physical object in the world, and yet it is not an object in the world just like all the other material objects, for it is a self-aware subject having experiences. ~ Page 218

THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
2 years ago. Edited 2 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
What does phenomenological mean?

of or relating to someone's awareness or experience of something rather than the thing itself:Case study scholars examine a particular phenomenon, while phenomenological scholars examine its essence and meaning as experienced by people in their everyday lives.
11 months ago.

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