As we have seen, Merleau-Ponty's argument is that the philosophical tradition and its successors (eg., cognitivism in psychology) had overlooked the centrality of the body in human experience. For him, bodies have their worlds, and understand their worlds in terms of lived experience. Philosophy, following Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger, finds its ground on lived being.
It is the body which encounters others and the world, not an abstracted mind which somehow inhabits that body. Bodies are not merely the means or instrument of the mind.
We can add to this account of body-place nexus. There is a dialectic between what is pre-given in places (what is already present to us) and what is contributed by our lived bodies.
The pre-given can be can be understood in terms of what is densely sedimentated in terms of what is familar and its historicity.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at February 7, 2004 11:47 PM | TrackBack