Liberty and temporality on Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

• Grant number: 13/09692-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: September 01, 2013
• End date: July 31, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - Epistemology
• Principal Investigator: Alexandre de Oliveira Torres Carrasco
• Grantee: Beatriz Viana de Araujo Zanfra
• Host Institution: Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (EFLCH). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus Guarulhos. Guarulhos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

On the work The structure of behavior (1942) Maurice Merleau-Ponty, through the notion of structure, combats naturalism and intellectualism, showing that the body is not an aggregate of muscles and nerves that operates according to mechanical and functional causalities and showing that the reflective consciousness is not the only form of consciousness and is not its first manifestation, but dependent on perceptual consciousness and indiscernible of body as a structuring principle. Accordingly, on the chapter dedicated to the question of the relation between soul and body, Merleau-Ponty shows that all problems in this regard are reduced to the problem of perception, which is understood as "the act that makes us know existences" and sees the need for transcendental philosophy be redefined in order to integrate the phenomenon of reality. This philosophy is the phenomenology, with the research of perception playing a key role in it. On Phenomenology of Perception (1945) Merleau-Ponty takes up the question of the relation between soul and body covered in the previous book, showing that the temporality solves this problem because the idea of subjectivity as temporality allows us to see that the for-itself, the revelation of self to self, is the emptiness in which time is done, and the world "in itself", which is the horizon of our present, make the problem redound to know how a being that is future and past has also a present, eliminating the problem, because the future, the past and the present are linked in the movement of temporalization. Thus, the solution of all problems of transcendence is in the thickness of the pre-objective present, where we can find, among other things, the foundation of our liberty. (AU)