This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Rechter, S. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                   What's this?

The Originating Breaks Up: Merleau-Ponty, Ontology, and Culture

Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, s.rechter{at}patrick.acu.edu.au

In Merleau-Ponty's work there is an intimate and reciprocal involvement of socio-cultural and philosophical concerns, more profound and central than Merleau-Ponty himself acknowledged. This gives rise to productive tensions over the course of his works, between the paradigm of perception and an emerging, more culturalist paradigm: language, history, and culture penetrate to the heart of perception, and at the same time the historicity at the heart of perception offers us new ways of understanding the sense and dynamics of the social, cultural and historical fields. The outcome is an outline of an ontology which allows us to think of both nature and culture in new ways and in new relationships. Particularly fruitful is Merleau-Ponty's development of the paradigms of perception and of the life world in the concept of the World, emerging as an original ontological figure, and offering a way of thinking about meaning from our first opening upon it to the cultural world horizon and beyond.

Key Words: culture • Maurice Merleau-Ponty • ontology • post-phenomenology • social-historical • truth • world

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?