Metaphor Of The Body - The Body Of Merleau - Ponty Phenomenology

Merleau-Ponty is praised as "the greatest phenomenologist of France". Starting from Hussel's later thoughts and accepting Heidergger's basic thoughts of Being-in-the-world, he creates a distinctive phenomenology of body which surpasses or deviates from the formers. This article is a study about Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of body. The full text follows:First of all, Being-in-the-world is a corporeal being in the world. This corporeality has a peculiar structure which contains the mind, the body and the world. They constitute a circular and inseparable system. Each of them could not be separated from this system, and gets the ground and the guarantee from it. As a result, the mind is an incarnated mind which exists in the world; the body is a animated body which also exists in the world. The world is no longer the objective world in the sense of realism or the world made by the transcendental consciousness. It is a perceptive world. It is also a world united the extreme subjectivism and objectivism. However, among these three elements, body plays the most important role. It is body that runs through the rest. Because of the emphasis on the body, Merleau-Ponty's thoughts of being- in-the-world are different from those of Hussel ,Heidergger and Sartre.On the basis of the distinctive thoughts of the corporeal being in the world, Merleau-Ponty constructs his concept of "body-subject". Body-subject has several sides or dimensions. They are spaciality, temporality, sexuality, expression and so on. The body-subject manifests itself through these dimensions. Every dimension reveals subjec's characters and property: Every dimension is same important and indispensable with others. They together constitute an inseparable system. From these dimensions, we learn the relationships between the body and space, time, sexual desire and words expression. And our final end is to know how these dimension construct the body-subject. During our analysis, we will also concern the changes and developments of Merleau-Ponty's later thoughts in each respect.Being the subject of the world, body-subject is also a practical subject. In this article, we will mainly discuss the art, other and history in order to study the relationships between body-subject and nature, society and history. In the field of art, Merleau-Ponty tries to explain how the body and nature, individual and generality blending together; in the field of other, he tries to find a more original and harmonious intersubjectivity. Finally, in the field of history, through the dialectics between body and situation, individual and community, he surpasses the relativism and the determinism of history. In this part, we will find the traces of transition from the early existentialism of corporeal being in the world, to the later ontology of the Flesh of the world.In the final part, we will mainly study Merleau-Ponty's later thoughts of Flesh of the world. Changing form the existentialism to the ontology is an inevitable outcome of the development in his thought. We will analyse the concept of "Flesh",the function of the Being through the "dehiscence of the flesh" and the relationship between the flesh and body-subject. The analysis illustrates that Merleau-Ponty's change is not to deny the thoughts of existentialism, but to lay the new ground for the existentialism. So in his later thoughts, the idea of "body-subject" hasn't been deserted, but been placed in a new ontological order. On this basis, we find that Merleau-Ponty is remain at an ambiguous place between modern and Greek or modern and postmodern.