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We saw in the last chapter that space has traditionally been considered to be a form generated by the subject as the condition of there being any objects at all; or, on the realist side, that it has been regarded as a giant container in which things are located. Merleau-Ponty rejected both these traditional conceptions of space and described the genesis of space in a dynamic pre-objective, pre-logical interaction of body-subject and world. The foundation or ground of spatiality therefore shifted from the constituting activity of a transcendental ego posited by intellectualism, to the reciprocal hold of the phenomenal body and world as described by phenomenology. It emerged that objects are neither purely constructed by the subject nor simply encountered as absolutely independent existents. Rather, there is a genesis of objectivity in an anonymous body-world dialectic, such that objectivity comes to be only as orientated being for a bodily gaze or "grip". In short, we saw that lived spatiality is inseparable from objectivity, since such spatiality is the means whereby we recognize and are aware of objects as objects. We saw that objects are always objects for us — but that this "us' refers first and foremost to the body as natural self and subject of perception, through whose activity objects come into being.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-19761-3_13

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