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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Seeing and Touching: The Optic and the Haptic in Merleau-Ponty’s Thought

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description

It is well known that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy developed remarkably between the Structure of Behaviour, which appeared in 1942, and the later working notes of The Visible and the Invisible, written in 1960–1961. More precisely, through a self-criticism that started immediately after the publication of the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy progressed from a meditation on embodied consciousness – which was still anchored to the ontological dualism that it tried to overcome – to a radically different reflection on the status of flesh as the “element” of Being, and on Being itself as “true negative,” or as “Being of deflection” and as Wesen, in the verbal sense of this term inherited from Heidegger’s philosophy. Thus, Merleau-Ponty considered Being no longer as a determined Being – namely, as the essence of what is – but rather as an irradiation of interior or exterior horizons from which subjects and objects arise as “rays of the world.” This comprehensive movement manifests a clear rejection of substantial dualism for the benefit of “brute Being” or “wild Being” monism.