On The Primordial Spatiality Of Merleau-Ponty's Ontology Of Flesh

The spatial turn is the fundamental characteristic of the western ideological movement in the middle and late 20th century.The humanities and social sciences begin to reflect on the great obsession of the nineteenth century characterized by temporal schema and resume thinking about space.In phenomenological movement,Merleau-Ponty's philosophy shows a profound thinking mode of space.In The Visible and the Invisible,he reflects on the temporal schema and indicates that we should"take topological space as a model of being".Apparently,the study of spatiality can provide us with key clues to understand the development of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy and the construction of his ontology of flesh,and it can also reveal the logic of spatial turn within phenomenological movement.In the phenomenology of body,spatiality is considered as the spatiality of deployment of the situation projected by the lived body,and the field of presence has two dimensions of space and time,namely "here-there" and "past-present-future".However,the coexistence of space is reduced to the simultaneity of time in Phenomenology of Perception.The unity of being-in-the-world is based on the original unity of the temporal horizon.In the middle and late periods,Merleau-Ponty's breakthrough in perception first benefits from research results in psychiatry,child psychology and psychoanalysis.Relevant studies show that the body and the world are in the original relationship of pre-intentional projection,and that the field of presence has a non-Euclidean spatial structure.In this regard,the true perceptual analysis cannot begin with the distinction between the phenomenal body and the projected world,but should start from being itself to construct the ontology of flesh.In the ontology of flesh,the flesh is considered to have a reversible structure.This ontological structure shows a reciprocal relationship between perceiving and perceived in the experience of perception,the intertwining of activity and passivity in the genetic constitution of perception,and the chiasm of present and past in the temporalisation.The problem of simultaneity of past and present reactivates the problem of coexistence of space reduced by the phenomenology of body.The chiasm of past and present is based on the depth of field of presence.The depth allows plural dimensions to coexist in the present and thus opens the way from the visible to Being.The reason why we can have depth perception is that my body is both the seer and the visible.The two-dimensional of the body allows Being not only to present itself in perception through a non-original presentation(Nicht Urprasentierbar),but also to maintain its original presentation(Urprasentierbar)through this non-original presentation.The field of presence is not the ecstatic temporality,but the temporalizing-spatializing vortex.Merleau-Ponty embeds the discussion of spatiality into the foundation of Being.The spatialization will not lead to homogenization of Being,it reveals that Being is polymorphic and it has irreducible structural features.Merleau-Ponty's later philosophical work fully demonstrated the importance of spatial problems to Being.Unfortunately,Merleau-Ponty's ontological explanation of spatiality is not complete,and the dynamic problem of spatialization remains to be discussed.This unfinished thought requires for dialogue between Merleau-Ponty's philosophy and psychoanalysis and other fields,and reactivates the contemporary significance of Merleau-Ponty's philosophical discourse.