An Analysis And Discussion Of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Time Concept

The time question is an important topic of phenomenology, no matter in Husserl or Heidegger, the time analysis plays a foundational role or is considered as the premise. As a phenomenological classical writer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty appears to pay more attention to the body, space, but not the time question. Actually that wasn't true, Merleau-Ponty started from the position of transcending the opposition of the nature and consciousness, and then demonstrated the neutral character of behavior. By the analysis of behavior, the initial position of perception was discovered. Because of the actual existence of perception field, the body theory then turned out to be a kind of perception theory. The subject exists certainly not in the time, the subject experience time and with life together. We should understand the subject as time, the time as subject. The time concept of Merleau-Ponty starts with the bodily subject, time existence cannot leave the existence of the bodily subject, cannot leave the glance of the subject, because the body exists in in-the-world, getting along well with the world, so the emergence of time becomes possible. Time and bodily subject contact so close together that in the Merleau-Ponty's opinion time comes to be a subject. So we think the time concept of Merleau-Ponty has a kind of body, such kind of time provides a new way for comprehending the other problems. From the angle of time, we can re-examine the other and the freedom problems. Maurice Merleau-Ponty embarked his time concept from the body, his time concept is much closer to the mortal body, thus only then had his surmounted phenomenology possibly.The time concept of Merleau-Ponty took the body as a chance, trying to break out the pure consciousness time of Husserl and the existence time of Heidegger, pulling time back to the more original side----the practice, rather than stayed in the consciousness or existence. But in fact he didn't consider the society of which the body exists in enough, because the body is never abstract and isolated, it always contacts with the society, the society is more original than the body. To be more basically, time comes up not the body appear in the world lonely and helpless, time should be in the activity that the people is making contact with the world, it just appearing in the people of the society, time is a kind of essential relationship between the body and the world. The work that put time contact closely with the social practice, finally completed in Karl Marx.