Scott L Marratto: The Intercorporeal Self: Merleau-Ponty on Subjectivity, (2012)
To see this we need to direct our attention to Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of expressive movement, for it is only on the basis of this analysis that we can come to understand what he is really saying about the being of incarnate subjectivity. I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy pointedly aims to avoid any kind of reification of the subject, either as a mind or as a body, and instead seeks to understand subjectivity as a dynamic and open-ended process of emergence. Subjectivity emerges with the emergence of meaning in the world on the basis of the self-articulating character of living movement. What Merleau-Ponty calls ‘perceptual meaning’ thus arises on the basis of a dynamic that is, as it were, older than subjective consciousness. As a reflectively self-conscious subject, then, I am always haunted by a pre-history that both is and is not mine. To be a subject is to be responsive to the manifestation of being—not because the subject is passively receptive to sensations, but because the subject only ever inherits, takes up, and transforms meanings that are generated in living movement, meanings of which it is not itself the ultimate source or ground, and which are thus never absolutely transparent to it.
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Scott L Marratto: The Intercorporeal Self: Merleau-Ponty on Subjectivity, (2012)
To see this we need to direct our attention to Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of expressive movement, for it is only on the basis of this analysis that we can come to understand what he is really saying about the being of incarnate subjectivity. I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy pointedly aims to avoid any kind of reification of the subject, either as a mind or as a body, and instead seeks to understand subjectivity as a dynamic and open-ended process of emergence. Subjectivity emerges with the emergence of meaning in the world on the basis of the self-articulating character of living movement. What Merleau-Ponty calls ‘perceptual meaning’ thus arises on the basis of a dynamic that is, as it were, older than subjective consciousness. As a reflectively self-conscious subject, then, I am always haunted by a pre-history that both is and is not mine. To be a subject is to be responsive to the manifestation of being—not because the subject is passively receptive to sensations, but because the subject only ever inherits, takes up, and transforms meanings that are generated in living movement, meanings of which it is not itself the ultimate source or ground, and which are thus never absolutely transparent to it.
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