Repository | Book | Chapter

In the previous chapters of this part of the Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty has presented a detailed phenomenological description of the genesis of objectivity. We have seen that far from being given, objectivity comes into being through a body-world dialogue whose foundation is the body-subject's primordial power of anchoring itself in a pre-objective world through the exercise of its sensory organs. We have seen that things become "real" when the body-subject, as a comprehensive intersensory power, has a grip on them as intersensory objects. We have seen that this "hold" involves a gearing of the body to the world and moreover, that it implies motion, temporality, incompleteness and ambiguity. We have seen that although things are inseparable from the perceiver, being constituted in the latter's hold on the world, they are nonetheless objective. Things thus have an independence — but not an absolute independence; they are inthemselves for us. Things have a constancy, an identity; yet we have seen that it is not a matter of their possessing stable inert properties. Rather, the thing's identity is a dynamic 'style of existence" which emerges in the way in which that thing invites, and responds to, perceptual exploration.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-19761-3_14

Full citation: