From Husserl to Merleau-Ponty: On the Metamorphosis of a Philosophical Example

Abstract

This essay outlines the transformation of the ostensibly mundane example of two hands touching each other in Husserl’s Ideas II into the pivotal concept in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of flesh and notion of embodied subjectivity. By focusing on the contexts in which the example appears in the works of Husserl and of Merleau-Ponty, it seeks to explicate Merleau-Ponty’s fascination with Husserl’s example, its role in the development of his own thought and in the conceptual shift in his late works on the body. I explore the various stages in the metamorphosis of Husserl’s example of touching hands, originally used merely to differentiate the sense of touch from that of sight, into Merleau-Ponty’s radical concept of flesh that overturns “our idea of the thing and the world, and... results in an ontological rehabilitation of the sensible.”