The Incarnation of Consciousness and the Carnalization of the World in Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy

Abstract

It is important that French philosophy insists on the body, on bodily existence of the human being. Phenomenology and phenomenological existential philosophy in France have made an outstanding contribution marking the body as an important philosophical theme. The philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in particular make consideration of the body indispensable. Generally speaking, German philosophy is, in comparison with French philosophy, poor at thematic consideration of the body. Edmund Husserl should be regarded as the exception: he describes subjectivity as bodily subjectivity, and this conception greatly influences Sartre’s, and even more so, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. The underlying tone of Husserl’s philosophy, however, consists in the constitution of objects by transcendental subjectivity as pure consciousness. He was, so to speak, forced by the necessity of matter in his phenomenological description to consider the body as an essential element of subjectivity. However that may be, the description of bodily subjectivity in Husserl’s phenomenology is extremely important in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Martin Heidegger made Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity more concrete as Dasein which consists in our mode of Being-in-the-world. But one could claim that Dasein in Heidegger’s philosophy remains a subjectivity as consciousness and is not a bodily subjectivity. In Heidegger’s philosophy the body is not inquired about, and Dasein is a neutral being without sexuality. The Dasein of the philosophy of Karl Jaspers is considered more in accord with bodily reality; it can be said that Jaspers’s theory of Dasein possibly contains a theory of the body. But he does not thematize the body as such.