A review by ralowe
Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

5.0

the ends is the means, "your abode is your act itself. your act is you," on the last page in an excerpt from the wwii memoir of antoine de saint-exupery. i mean i guess i feel better with that notion. kinda. wahhh. so doing is one with undoing: how can such a coexistent notion resist complacency? not trying to hate on hippies. especially after here having them afford me such fertile ground for tranquility. such blissful writing here. up the hippie talk, definitely, even with the potentially psychogenic prospect of a beautified and beatified struggle. hamster wheel of joy. an activist friend of a different generation told me that she remembered people being really into this book. she might have said hippies. i don't know if the train of thought along a track informed by these recent reading selections has been subliminally placing a regimen in my head contributing to my current physical appearance (i.e. long hair), although her sharing this rumination would certainly confirm it. something to think about is whether the premises of the cogito that render it vulnerable to solipsism (e.g. anesthecized complacent bliss) may be extended to merleau-ponty's idea of the relation between the subject and the world, and if constitution is similarly insubstantial fantasy. merleau-ponty would counter that certainty resides in the act of doing: the certitude of the seen is insured through sight itself. there is no opportunity of abstraction as either sense or sensation, there is purely you and the phenomenon, the medium or rather site of that contact is the body itself. it seems like phenomenology is about the moment when the subject encounters the object. that's what appeared to be the basic premise of the hegel i read. the body is the site of the encounter between expression and meaning. i suppose that for now this will do for agency.