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Essay
Merleau-Ponty's Indirect Ontology and Indirect Expression
University of West Florida Libraries
07/2024
Abstract
(This is an unpublished essay composed of some sections of other published and unpublished essays, some rewritten, some simply placed in a different context, and many that are new.)
We have seen in “Merleau-Ponty’s Lectures on Heidegger” that Merleau-Ponty argues that we need a new ontology, with categories that are different from what we find in classical and modernist metaphysics, different from “substance, accident, potentiality, act, object, subject, in-itself, for-itself.”1 We need a new ontology because what has been inherited in our tradition does not adequately explain the world that we encounter. We need an indirect ontology, one that does not simply use a language of nouns pointing to discrete objects (or concepts) in the world but that seeks to express a field of perceptually lived through gestalt connections and patterns, one that does not reduce everything to an essence (a fixed essence as a thing or concept), but that fuses the essence of what a thing is with its existence, which is temporal and unfolding in time. We need a language that uses verbal wesen, that is, verbal essences to express the active, on-going essence/existence of things. We need an indirect language that expresses an indirect ontology rather than a direct one. The present essay will attempt to clarify Merleau-Ponty’s use of the word “indirect” as he applies it to perception, ontology and language, and as he understands the relationship between them.
Details
- Title
- Merleau-Ponty's Indirect Ontology and Indirect Expression
- Resource Type
- Essay
- Publisher
- University of West Florida Libraries; Argo Scholar Commons
- Format
- docx
- Number of pages
- 13
- Copyright
- © July 2024
- Identifiers
- 99380570693406600
- Academic Unit
- University of West Florida Libraries; John C. Pace Library
- Language
- English