Abstract
It is important that French philosophy insists on the body, on bodily existence of the human being. Phenomenology and phenomenological existential philosophy in France have made an outstanding contribution marking the body as an important philosophical theme. The philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in particular make consideration of the body indispensable. Generally speaking, German philosophy is, in comparison with French philosophy, poor at thematic consideration of the body. Edmund Husserl should be regarded as the exception: he describes subjectivity as bodily subjectivity, and this conception greatly influences Sartre’s, and even more so, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. The underlying tone of Husserl’s philosophy, however, consists in the constitution of objects by transcendental subjectivity as pure consciousness. He was, so to speak, forced by the necessity of matter in his phenomenological description to consider the body as an essential element of subjectivity. However that may be, the description of bodily subjectivity in Husserl’s phenomenology is extremely important in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Martin Heidegger made Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity more concrete as Dasein which consists in our mode of Being-in-the-world. But one could claim that Dasein in Heidegger’s philosophy remains a subjectivity as consciousness and is not a bodily subjectivity. In Heidegger’s philosophy the body is not inquired about, and Dasein is a neutral being without sexuality. The Dasein of the philosophy of Karl Jaspers is considered more in accord with bodily reality; it can be said that Jaspers’s theory of Dasein possibly contains a theory of the body. But he does not thematize the body as such.
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Notes
Husserliana I (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), p. 118.
Husserl, Ideas I, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Macmillan, 1931), pp. 151, 154f.
Ibid., p. 165.
See Husserliana IV, 1952, p. 158.
See pp. I44ff. and “The Intertwining — The Chiasm” in The Visible and the Invisible (pp. 130ff.), trans. by Alfonso Lingis ( Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968 ).
See M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962 ), p. 93.
Husserliana IV, p. 146.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, op. cit., p. 351.
M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (New York: Harper 1962 ), p. 161.
See Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., pp. 91ff.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, op. cit., pp. 52f.
Ibid., p. 57.
Ibid., p. 213.
See G. Marcel, Du Refus à l’invocation (Paris: Gallimard, 1940) pp. 32f. (“L’Être incarné repère central de la réflexion métaphysique”). In this place, he puts être incarné and être au monde in the same category.
See E. Levinas, “La Ruine de la représentation,” “Intentionalité et métaphysique,” and “Intentionalité et sensation” in: En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger ( Paris: Vrin, 1967 ).
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, op. cit., p. 137.
Ibid., pp. 138f.
For example, Levinas says, pointing to Heidegger’s philosophy in the latter period, especially his work Bauen Wohnen Denken (1952), “Ontology of Heidegger] becomes ontology of nature.” See E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis ( The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979 ), p. 46.
Husserl, Ideas I, op. cit., p. 236.
See Husserliana X, 1966, p. 75. Klaus Held says that “what is ultimately and truly absolute” is the “living present” (lebendige Gegenwart). See K. Held, Lebendige Gegenwart (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), pp. 69f.
See M. Merleau-Ponty, Husserl aux limites de la phénoménologie: Résumés de cours, Collège de France 1952–1960 ( Paris: Gallimard, 1968 ), p. 170.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, op. cit., p. 147.
Ibid., p. 133.
Ibid., p. 139.
Ibid., p. 135.
Ibid., p. 137.
Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, September 1965, no. 3, pp. 266f.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, op. cit., p. 170.
See E. Levinas, De l’existence à l’existant ( Paris: Vrin, 1947 ), p. 98.
See E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969 ), Part II.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, op. cit., p. 139.
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, op. cit., p. 142.
Ibid.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, op. cit., p. 143.
Ibid., p. 142.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, op. cit., p. 353.
Ibid., p. 355.
See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 429: “The essence of the relation between consciousnesses is not the Mitsein; it is conflict.”
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Sato, M. (1998). The Incarnation of Consciousness and the Carnalization of the World in Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy. In: Tymieniecka, AT., Matsuba, S. (eds) Immersing in the Concrete. Analecta Husserliana, vol 58. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1830-1_1
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