A infinitude do corpo como abertura para o filosofar em Merleau-Ponty

Abstract

The aim of this article is to reflect the relationship of the body and its finitude to philosophize in Merleau-Ponty. It is a matter of reflecting on death as a dimension of the constitutive finitude of the body itself, which cannot be denied or avoided, but as a gift to the body in its finitude. Thus, Merleau-Ponty is not about death in his philosophy but about finitude. There is a correlation between Heidegger's and Merleau-Ponty's philosophy in the discussion of finitude, which is not surprising, because for the readers of these philosophers, the influence of Heideggerian thought in some conceptions of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is perceived, either as approach or distance. In Heidegger, the reflection on death serves as a foundation for an authentic existence, since he is concerned with the question of the meaning of being, he carries out an existential analysis of man, the only entity in which being unfolds. It is in this sense that he proposes to think about the problem of the human and, consequently, his relations with the world, with others and with his own finitude. For Merleau-Ponty, finitude is taken as an experience of the finitude of one's own body and as an opening to authentic philosophizing that opens up in perception. When finitude is not considered as a presence of the body, one lives on the periphery of incarnate existence, as it cannot understand either birth or death as the unfolding of the same event in life. This understanding goes through the perceptual experience of the finitude of apprehending that both birth and death reveal how we are immersed by the body in sensitivity. It is the experience of the body that now enters the scene through the experience of finitude. This metamorphosis or constitutive paradox triggered in the experience of the body only attests that the reflection on death does not take place in a pure intellectual act that seeks to think about this dimension that, like birth, is beyond our control, but it is necessary to understand the finitude of the body. Facticity is the certainty that we are present in the world and that time is not outside of us, but happens through us. Thus, when weaving the web of perceptual experience, it - time - becomes, in its own sense, what allows us to understand exactly the belonging of the world to the subject and the subject to himself as an experience of finitude. For this reason, Merleau-Ponty insists that philosophy cannot ignore the problem of finitude because it would be to deny itself as a presence that wonders about the origin. Before asking what death is, it is necessary to experience the experience of finitude that makes the act of questioning philosophical.