Maurice Merleau-Ponty Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Lawrence Hass

Critical Essay by Lawrence Hass

SOURCE: Hass, Lawrence. “Sense and Alterity: Rereading Merleau-Ponty's Reversibility Thesis.” In Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World, edited by Dorothea Olkowski and James Morley, pp. 91-105. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Hass argues that a thorough understanding of Merleau-Ponty's reversibility thesis is fundamental to grasping his overall theories of phenomenology.

When I find again the actual world such as it is, under my hands, under my eyes, up against my body, I find much more than an object: [I find] a Being of which my vision is a part, a visibility older than my operations or my acts. … [B]etween my body looked at and my body looking … there is overlapping or encroachment.

—Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

This passage from The Visible and the Invisible succinctly recapitulates Merleau-Ponty's ontology. Neither a subjectivism, which favors the constitutive function...
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