THE COMMUNICATIVE-RECIPROCAL STRUCTURE OF THE FLESH: AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE LATER MERLEAU-PONTY’S ONTOLOGY OF THE BODY

Though Cartesian dualism has been criticized for decades, it still prevails as a
strongly dominant cultural mindset rooted in people’s minds, especially in the social
environments that we experience. Along with it, there is not only a loss of attention to
our own bodies but also a loss of the recognition of the experience of inter-subjective
reciprocity. Therefore, I hope, through the methodology and virtue of phenomenology,
especially from the phenomenological-ontological account of the body/flesh from the
modern French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to help my readers to overcome
convincingly and detach themselves from the traditional Cartesian mindset. I argue that
the body is born as a communicative-reciprocal being that sustains a priori connection
with all other things in the world, and with the world. The body is a lived body and a
transcendental being that cannot be reduced to fit in the present reductionistic
mathematical-scientific idealized frameworks. After pointing out the insufficiencies in
traditional mathematical scientific and Cartesian accounts of the body in Chapter One,
my argument will be unfolded along with reflections on the common experiences in
daily life and the textual analyses respectively contributed by Merleau-Ponty’s works
The Phenomenology of Perception, especially in Chapter Two, and The Visible and the
Invisible, especially in Chapter Three.