Merleau-Ponty’s Criticism of Heidegger

Abstract

It now clear that took seriously the criticism that Being and Time did not adequately address the human body.1 He addresses this criticism in the Zollikon Seminars2 and provides a brief outline of an existential theory of the body, one that bears a striking similarity to Merleau-Ponty's, as both Richard Askay and Kevin Aho have recently claimed.3 Another thing that clear that MerleauPonty was among the most Heideggerian of the French philosophers of his generation, since he adopts Heidegger's etoasis characterization of human existence, i.e., the subject's active transcendence toward the world, and speaks of perception as occurring through the anonymous of the body and not as a personal choice.4 It also true, as some have claimed, that The Visible and Invisible5 Merleau-Ponty 's most Heideggerian text,6 since, in his own words, he attempts to move even further from the of Phenomenology of Perception - by developing an ontology of the Flesh, by developing a theory of perception that nature perceiving itself through one of its own, through the human body. In a Heideggerian spirit, Merleau-Ponty claims that the individual's experience rests upon the body that opens to a world that includes it and other human bodies. The individual's Flesh blends with the greater Flesh of the world. Yet, even though recent commentators have claimed that a similarity between Heidegger's and Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of the body, they have also claimed that Heidegger's Being-in-the-world supersedes the body and remains more primary. Heidegger's position remains more worldly and less attached to the subjectivism that necessarily remains a part of an individual's orientation toward the world, and, apparently, the subjectivism that remains a part of Merleau-Ponty 's theory of the body (Askay 32). Kevin Aho presents Heidegger's analysis of the body in the Zollikon Seminars as similar to Merleau-Ponty's in that each seeks to overcome the body understood merely as an object or merely as a vehicle for a Cartesian subject. For both the body must be understood as Uvedthrough (Aho 15). However, Aho also claims that the Zollikon Seminars remain at the level of the ontic-existetiell, describing the concrete activities and perceptions of a 'factical' individual. This of course means that the comparable analysis provided by MerleauPonty, especially in Phenomenology of Perception, also remains at the level of the ontic, at the level of the individual's body (Aho 16; see Askay 32-33). Aho also points out that Being and Time, on the other hand, more primarily concerned with the ontological structures that determine the of beings ___ These constitute the Da, the disclosure site in which any entity whatsoever can show up as such and such. That why claims that it a mistake to interpret as . . . in a determinate place, 'here and not there' (Aho 16).7 One thing, then, that distinguished from Merleau-Ponty that the latter adheres to the here-there structure of a particular embodied opening upon the world, while Heidegger, at least in Being and Time, focuses on the there in a way that supposedly transcends the here of the situated, embodied subject. As Richard Askay expresses it, referring to and quoting Heidegger, bodily possible because our beingin-the-world always already consists 'of a relatedness in which we perceive-apprehend that which addresses us out of the openness of our world' (Askay 32: see ZS-G 293, ZS-E 232).8 Bodily-being, he continues, is 'founded upon' Dasein's responsiveness to the clearing (Askay 32: see ZS-G 232, ZS-E 186). Moreover, he states that Dasein 's existence the precondition for the possibiUty of being (Askay 32; see ZS-G 113, ZS-E 86-87). Askay thus concludes that Heidegger . . . would no doubt have accepted MerleauPonty's premise that the Uved body and existence 'presuppose each other,' and yet deny his conclusion that neither 'can be regarded as the original of the human being' (Askay 33). …