Merleau-Ponty - The Visible and The Invisible (7)

This video continues MP’s critique of Sartre, this time focusing on each of those three aspects of Being from perspective of vision, which is, given that we are treating the subject as a nothingness, ‘pure’.
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00:00 Introduction
02:16 THE WORLD FOR ME: PURE VISION
06:22 Nihilation
18:58 THE OTHER: PURE VISION
21:22 Criticism: A movement from the general to the specific
27:35 The other as a relationship of being
36:34 BEING AS WORLD: PURE VISION
38:01 The carnal relation / Flesh
40:41 Two mistakes
52:21 Metaphysics vs. Phenomenology/Ontology
56:42 Summary

[@absurdbeing2219]

*Contents* 02:16 THE WORLD FOR ME: PURE VISION 06:22 Nihilation 18:58 THE OTHER: PURE VISION 21:22 Criticism: A movement from the general to the specific 27:35 The other as a relationship of being 36:34 BEING AS WORLD: PURE VISION 38:01 The carnal relation / Flesh 40:41 Two mistakes 52:21 Metaphysics vs. Phenomenology/Ontology 56:42 Summary

[@shawncostello770]

Awesome! Great job!

[@shawncostello770]

The difference between MP and Sartre may be well summarized as MP is attempting to see through his eyes, while Sartre is seeing with them.

[@absurdbeing2219]

That's quite a good way to put it.

[@Haveuseenmyjetpack]

I always thought the flesh of the world had to do with the way the world lures or repels my body. Sartre says the essence of flesh is desire to press against flesh. This is connected to the touched-touching (and the untouchable). Also, it has to do with the unconscious-the phenomenal world is part of the unconscious itself, for matter is but a “momentary mind” w/ no memory. This is how subjects can relate to each other, since they share an unconscious. And, in this way, the word can have meanings embedded within it, and I myself can be or am an emblem of being, a node in the flesh. This is basically the chaism

[@absurdbeing2219]

Flesh: Yes, I think that’s right. This will be covered in more detail later when we get to MP’s philosophy itself. I don’t think this excludes the notion of flesh introduced in the section covered by this video.

[@Haveuseenmyjetpack]

Could you give some examples of what Merleau-Ponty is writing about through *concrete descriptions of (hypothetical) phenomenal experiences* -different from those given by Sartre? For example, approaching a mailbox? Or speaking to a video recording device? He speaks of reversal, negation, flesh/field, pure vision, carnal relation, horizon, transversal, non-being and so on. What do these *really* mean? It seems like he’s correcting other thinker’s conceptions, but his concepts are equally abstract and wanting of a relatable phenomal description.

[@Haveuseenmyjetpack]

In my opinion, this why Gurwitsch was the greatest of all phenomologists. He never gives a description which can’t be related back to every day experience. And yet his phenomology has the greatest breadth of all.

[@absurdbeing2219]

That’s probably a fair point, but in MP’s defence, is this the right question to be asking of him here? Remember that _VI_ is MP moving away from phenomenology (experience) to ontology (being). The way I see this is as a shift from asking ‘what is the world (in itself, for me, and for others)?’ to asking ‘how is the world able to appear in the first place (in itself, for me, and for others)?’ From a phenomenological perspective (concrete descriptions of experience), everything in this book will thus appear ‘abstract’, but this is only because it is what I would call ‘structural’ rather than experiential.

[@Haveuseenmyjetpack]

If it’s not rooted in experience somehow, it’s obscure nonsense. Am I wrong? Not trying to trash what you're doing, I like Merleau-Ponty -- I just cant believe that Merleau-Ponty would stray so far from his roots. He laid out a kind of ontology/metaphysics in Structure of Behavior, but everything was basically rooted in experience or a study of gestalt psychology etc. 🤷‍♂ There must be some experiential grounding to these concepts.

[@absurdbeing2219]

@@Haveuseenmyjetpack I wouldn’t say that _VI_ isn’t “rooted in experience” - in fact, MP’s ontological project starts with experience (I recall saying this early in this video series somewhere). I just don’t think that he is doing phenomenology anymore; i.e. investigating or describing concrete experiences, as such. Rather, he is attempting to articulate the structure (“world”, or “being”) within which _all_ experience can occur. Thus, while there is, in a sense, an experiential grounding to his ontology, the inference actually goes the other way: MP is looking for the ontological grounding of experience. (I believe he tried to do this towards the end of _PhP_ with the so-called transcendental field, which attempted (and failed, in my opinion) to ground his phenomenology in time.) Further, MP hasn’t really come out with his own position yet. He’s still critiquing other philosophers, in this case, Sartre. So, many of those terms you mentioned in your first comment, rather than amounting to a formulation of MP’s position, relate to Sartre and his philosophy of nothingness. For example, the field (“flesh” because it is the part of the world that we actually engage with) MP mentions here is the immediate ‘zone’ of concern in between me and a background that serves as a limit (“pure being”) for this field. Original? No (nor would I call it phenomenological), but that’s not the point. The point is that it undermines Sartre’s ontological claim that being-in-itself is a pure plenitude. I guess, and maybe this is your point, we can cash this out in concrete terms like approaching a mailbox in which we “carnally” relate to the things in our immediate surroundings (perhaps the footpath we are walking on, the mailbox itself, other people in between me and the mailbox, etc.) as “open and inexhaustible” (i.e. not a fixed and pure plenitude of “being”), whereas less immediate objects at the limit of our concern (MP mentions the stars here) _do_ appear as fixed and complete in themselves, more properly aligning with Sartre’s conception of being-in-itself. My resistance to this kind of description is that I think it is less relevant/meaningful here than it is in someone like Gurwitsch, for example, who is properly phenomenological in that he is exploring a concrete description of experience (as occurring within three “zones”, for example). MP adopts a similar structure here with his "carnal" field, but his interest isn’t with what our experience is like; rather, it is with the “being” within which that experience takes place. There is a superficial similarity but a fairly significant difference between the two, I think, that is occluded if we try to cash MP out in phenomenological terms.