From Experience Of Consciousness To Body's Experience

This paper is concerning Merleau Ponty's Phenomenology of Body, mainly about his early philosophy.The author try to carry out the research from the essential subject of challenging the tradition of epistemology and around the basic clue of replacing the experience of consciousness by body's experience.Merleau Ponty called the method of dealing with the world entangled with us originally of traditional epistemology as "objective thought".All his efforts aimed to transcending the "objective thought",reverting to the pre-thematic life experience involving others and the whole world which is omitted by the philosophy returning to consciousness based on the dividing of subject-object, psycho-physical.The necessity of from experience of consciousness back to body's experience is the thematic differentiation of initiativity and passivity to the given experience of traditional epistemology driven by objective thought,thus the initiative consciousness is separated from the integral structure of behavior as an "interior",the"excessive initiativity"of consciousness make it often withdraw from the world and only concentrate the representation with the evidence offered itself,and then the surroundings and the whole world become an absolute "exterior" because of the interruption of introspection which presented pre-introspectively when the experience of consciousness "present itself.And then epistemology come into being:omitting the perceptual field presented originally,explaining the existing world regarded as perceptual material with category of causality objectifiedly,and then the rich perceptual sense originally implied in the world which is reducted to perceptual material is omitted.Consequently,only examining our introspection,revealing the non-introspection situation of consciousness which can not be reducted can we return to the way of contacting with the world anew which is more fundamental and has more possibility.To achieve this,it is necessary to put the initiative consciousness into the passive flesh,cancel the opposition between "interior"and"exterior",replace the mental representation based on the separation of subject and object by plain body's perception which is the intertwining of body-mind.Body is the mediation for us to contact the original world regularly,as "a kind of substance which can think",body is the intertwining of initiativity and passivity,it lies in a world full of substance,as well as it can develop intentional activity.As for body,never as a private action,the activity of perceiving an object is an anonymous happening between perceiving subject and perceived object.Perception takes root in perceptual field consisted of various elements.Intentional body is an ability of transcending perceiving subject and getting involved in various objects,and form a integrative living system between objects and us containing each other.As a "place" where any mental activity come up,body cannot act as consciousness that can cover the world thoroughly in the perspective of ideas,and the sense can come forth only by "transformational synthesis" in the situation.Tacit body as the intertwining of initiativity and passivity knows more motive and approach about the synthesis of the world than the experience of consciousness.Around these issues,this paper researches into several key areas of Merleau Ponty's Phenomenology of Body,expanding the discussion from aspects of body-subject,intentionality and perception,body's expression and the world body get involved in.In the process of demonstration,the author will not aim to grasp all aspects of these areas,but try to sort out a more essential part of Merleau Ponty's important contribution to theories in the whole theoretical background of contemporary philosophy.Merleau Ponty reconstructed many keywords of traditional philosophy by means of body,thus some held that his philosophy was limited to the frame of traditional subjective philosophy.The author holds that although actually there is no new area hewed out in Merleau Ponty's philosophy,it's discussion is confined to the old frame of philosophy returning to consciousness as "ego-world",but starting from the analogue category rooted in the philosophy returning to consciousness,in the base of making out the inner logic of it sufficiently,it is to the benefit of deconstructing it more effectively.Thus,as we deconstructing the traditional philosophy effectively,the same time a sort of construction is accomplished.Through researching into Merleau Ponty's Phenomenology of Body, we can sort out the path taken by western philosophy from modern to contemporary,recognize the essential difficulty in reflection and new prospect of western philosophy especially of epistemology characterized by the opposition of subject-object and psycho-physical.