The Visible and the Invisible by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Too much negative dialectics, although, his goal seems to be to put us back into the flesh… not just as an embodiment of a singularity at the level of the subjective but at the level of flesh. He goes out of the way to try to die our sensory experience with our ability to create and formulate ideas; something echoed earlier in Hume. But nonetheless, a nearly impossible task. The few pages he leads to trying to tie the immense chiasm between sight and texture itself seems impossible. Given the different platforms for sense data, it does seem miraculous that we are able to synthesize a coherent experience from these two threads. Compound the difficulty of the subject with the unfinished nature of the manuscript, this makes it even harder to read. I suppose I will return to this after reading more phenomenology. This is perhaps understandable, since the back of the book states that this is a boom to read if only for the insight into the working mind of a philosopher. Not a strong recommendation for coherence.
Not having read Maurice Merleau-Ponty before, I wonder (but strongly doubt) that in his polished works, he writes with such a stream of thought, with at times, such an ill defined context. In some ways though, this text (in the 60s) is a late expression of a bygone era, since structuralism was nearing its heyday, existentialism had long past relevance, and the early post-modern era was in full swing (but not yet named, with post-structuralism on the horizon). In a way, Merleau-Ponty can be thought of as a kind of throwback then, to Husserl, the true heir to Kant, in the sense that we can be subjects embodied as we accept the transcendental field as absolute… something that was sure to get shaken up soon enough, although Merleau-Ponty didn’t get to see that happen.
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