Catherine Malabou
Plasticity is important in a number of works of Merleau-Ponty. The ontological dimension of the body wherein Ponty has organized ( in his book ) this dialogue of a series of different traditions in philosophy and phenomenology, and existentialism. Rousseau, Husserl, Sarte, sciences like psychology and neurology becomes a mix becomes a unique synthesis between science, philosophy and art that is the meaning of plasticity. What we have discovered through the study of motricity is in short, a new sense of the word sense. What we have discovered is a new meaning to the word sense. Sensation and signification. The study of movement that comes from psychology becomes the study of the profound, the study of meaning and signification and sense, as sensation.
Ponty translates the meaning sense into sensation. The ontology of the status of the body, what it means to be a body, but also to locate where plasticity where it appears, and what we have to see ourselves as in the crossing of this new meaning of sense, between sensation and signification and the in-between what Ponty calls perception. These things are profoundly intertwined, perception is not exactly sensation, but the bluntness of the sensibility. Perception is what what we have in front of us, but not around us, and is what we do not see. The context of perception is what we see literally see, and also what we perceive to be around us. It is the cognitive organization in the contextualization of our objective surroundings.
Ponty and Sarte both contradict one another through obstruction. Embodied cognition is the reflexology of the body through the way that we use the body, to engage with the world and to experience our surroundings through the neurological conscious state. Ponty will outline and build up a position or example to critique before critiquing it. He will counterpose his own theory and break it down after building it to make a point.
Merlo Ponty asks " What is Phenomenology" what is the study of essences ( as in what things are, or what they exist as). The lived time and the lived world, nothing objective or scientific which removes the subjective from the experience. The objective world is devoid of life and is inhuman, so therefore the concept of phenomenology is the description of experience.
He therefore describes science as a derivative form of knowledge ( according to Ponty) everything in science has already been built on an experiencing subject, the way we understand the world is the grounding and the foundation of the perception. Science looks to understand what relations between variables are, although it does not question why or how things are they way they are. Husserel quotes " To the things themselves" independent to themselves fundamentally, there is nothing if there is no viewing subject.
The constituting subject prior to being and time Eg. Descartes' concept of Mind, or Sartre's Preservation of Freedom. Grounded in a lived account and the foundational way in which we encounter the world through a fixed state.
The background of our reflection takes place through a very earthy perspective. The phenomenological reduction according to Ponty is an idea that Husserl conducted, and was designed to uncover how things are constituted for a conscious subject. i. eidetic reduction from the natural entity to the fixed entity through the eidetic entity itself.
Transcendental reduction is bracketing the physical object to shift the focus, instead, to the transcendental object. The idea here is that we are looking at how the object becomes an object ( instead of the object itself ) is the subject looking at the object.
Examples of the transcendental objects are The Noesis and the Noema.
The Noesis, which is essentially the structuring the experiences of the act, or what the subject brings to the act through perception ie. The perception of perceiving.
The Noema, is the structure given the act essentially is the object with the Noesis is direted towards. The subject and the object. The HYLE, which is the greek word for matter, is basically ammounts to constraining or limiting experiences which confirm or deny our expectations or anticipations that are held by the object. The Hiel is the Noma, you are the Noesis structuring the experience. The physical object serves that purpose, to reaffirm the nature of truth.
The transcendental objects are seen through the phenomenological reduction which combines the transcendental object as the essence of things in the world. Things studied do not exist without the the observer which is why we study phenomena. These things are independent of us and therefore exist independently, so they come with a meaning. Phenomenology tells us that what we include as the description as the intentional constitution of things. The objective approach does the opposite in bracketing the subject to see what is there. What is there without a subject is bringing the subject back into the perspective.
Ponty states that phenomenological reduction appears to be a return to the transcendental consciousness wherein the world is spread out in transparency and is therefore trapped in solipsism and in the essence.
Locked into transcendental consciousness we are trapped into the objective void of perception.
Fundamentally we exist in the world, we cannot separate ourselves from the world completely, because we are so thoroughly immersed in the world is by suspending the movement of consciousness. The phenomenological reduction means that we cannot see ourselves without the world influencing what we see. The most important lesson of reduction is the impossibility of complete reduction and how we see that objects are structured by us and vice vera. We can never completely achieve reduction and separate ourselves of the world. Through phenomenological reduction he also says that every reduction is inevitably concerning essences, the essences of the world. We are not separating existence in essence, it is the essence of something that exists, so Ponty looks at the idea we're not breaking from the external world, not the abstract idea. Its a not a theme of discourse, we are rather looking to see the thing as it is for us prior to the climatization of the every day definition that we can intellectually defend through the eidetic reduction, or the phenomenological reduction can never be complete.
Intentionality is more Husserl although the crucial aspect of phenomenology, similar to Sartre, all consciousness is intentionality, everything is directed towards all of our conscious states or acts are directed to something or of something so there is no kind of pure abstract consciousness, all consciousness is of something ( intentionality). This is not teleology from outside, although rather a recognition that consciousness is a project of the world, it is fundamentally engaged in the world.
There are 2 types of intentionality, act intentionality and operative intentionality. Act Intentionality - The intentional act - is concerning our judgements and deliberate decisions. Things that we are deliberately acting on. Directly.
Operative intentionality is a natural tendency to the world, the intentionality almost automatically fundamentally underlies our existence that is conducted by our desires that exist and manifest undeliberately.
Phenomenology and philosophy, is not to articulate a prior existing being, rather a founding being. This is what philosophy is about, uncovering how those things are there for us. Not the primary truth but the actualization of the truth, so the study of how the world is revealed to us opposed to how something exists independent of us and that the subject is fundamentally engaged in.
It is always inclusive of this experience perceiving subject, therefore it is important to us in understanding how the world appears. To take into account the subject. The whole project of philosophy takes place therefore within the historical context which is the history of the individual subject and interrogates itself in a way that other disciplines do not understand ( the starting point ) whereas the philosophy wants to understand how it is constructed, For Us.
This is why philosophy will never end, there will always be new ways for the world to be understood and interpreted. It is not something that can be complete.
