Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Sympathy
Martin J. Matuštík
Auslegung a Journal of Philosophy 1991 DOI: 10.17161/ajp.1808.9334 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Philosophy of mind |
| Citations | 1 |
| Key points | Argues that Merleau-Ponty's account of sympathy parallels his account of perception, with pre-personal sympathy grounding affective intersubjective relations. Proposes that operative intentionality gives a primordial affect of sympathy primacy over thematic, deliberate sympathy and antipathy in both early ontogenesis and adulthood. |
Abstract
Merleau-Ponty never wrote a phenomenology of sympathy.But his use of sympathy in accounting for human relationships parallels in intent and manner his treatment of perception in the Phenomenology.}In addressing the paradox of alterity, he draws an analogy between perception and sympathy: just as perceptual consciousness founds intersubjective thematic experience, in the same way pre-personal sympathy accounts for the possibility of affective intersubjective relations.Just as my body, as the system of all my holds on the world, founds the unity of the objects I perceive, in the same way the body of the other-as the bearer of symbolic behaviors and of the behavior of true realitytears itself away from being one of my phenomena, offers me the task of a true communication, and confers on my objects the new dimension of intersubjective being or, in other words, of objectivity (PrP in PoP 18).Along with operative intentionality-awareness of the existential, lived • horizon against which we thematize the world-the primordial affect of sympathy in early ontogenesis and in adulthood exercises primacy over thematic and deliberate relations of sympathy and antipathy.Just as the perception of a thing opens me up to being, by realizing the paradoxical synthesis of an infinity or perceptual aspects, in the same way the perception of 1
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