THE COMMUNICATIVE-RECIPROCAL STRUCTURE OF THE FLESH: AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE LATER MERLEAU-PONTY’S ONTOLOGY OF THE BODY

Though Cartesian dualism has been criticized for decades, it still prevails as a strongly dominant cultural mindset rooted in people’s minds, especially in the social environments that we experience. Along with it, there is not only a loss of attention to our own bodies but also a loss of the recognition of the experience of inter-subjective reciprocity. Therefore, I hope, through the methodology and virtue of phenomenology, especially from the phenomenological-ontological account of the body/flesh from the modern French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to help my readers to overcome convincingly and detach themselves from the traditional Cartesian mindset. I argue that the body is born as a communicative-reciprocal being that sustains a priori connection with all other things in the world, and with the world. The body is a lived body and a transcendental being that cannot be reduced to fit in the present reductionistic mathematical-scientific idealized frameworks. After pointing out the insufficiencies in traditional mathematical scientific and Cartesian accounts of the body in Chapter One, my argument will be unfolded along with reflections on the common experiences in daily life and the textual analyses respectively contributed by Merleau-Ponty’s works The Phenomenology of Perception, especially in Chapter Two, and The Visible and the Invisible, especially in Chapter Three.