In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

100 M E R L E A U - P O N T Y ’ S P H I L O S O P H Y O F N A T U R E and hence the possibility for worldly space, depth, orientation. When Merleau-Ponty refers to bodily space as the “zone of not being” in front of which beings appear, he seems to be endorsing such a view. But the chapter on space in Phenomenology suggests something much richer than this traditional view; it stages a reversal in how being’s own orientation is to be understood. We can glimpse here the beginnings of a wholly different manner of understanding the relation between humans and nature, which holds implications for how we are to understand fundamental intentionality and therefore the relationship between the lived body and spatiality. To work through this richer conception, we must first understand what Merleau-Ponty means by describing space as always preceding itself, always already constituted. This leads to the primordial “level of all levels” that exceeds any possible thematization. We will then find that this “level of all levels” is associated with a never-present past and a never-present space, which are correlated with the anonymous body understood as a “natural” subject. This subject is “natural” by having its roots in the absolute past and prehuman space of nature. The new conception of intentionality that Merleau-Ponty promises is therefore discovered when being’s own orientation is revealed as a fundamental intersection of body and nature. This suggests that Merleau-Ponty’s later introduction of the language of écart, “divergence,” is the working through of this fundamental continuity of the human and the natural. This notion of écart, as we will see, does not avoid a kind of “spatializing” of intentionality; but it does reject the alternation of plenitude and void, interpreting the formation of sense not as a negative within being but rather as nature’s own play of difference. In the end, then, the space of intentionality points toward a fundamental orientation of being. To see why this is so, let us look first at Merleau-Ponty’s introduction of the “level of all levels.” Whenever the body acts as an agent in the world, taking the perceptual field as a situation of possible action, it establishes a functional norm or “level” by which space is to be reckoned . The agent of this orientation is not the “real” body, given as a thing in the objective world, but the “virtual body,” a system of possible actions organized toward a goal (PP 289/290). The virtual body “inhabits ” or “gears into” the world in such a way that the world is polarized according to the body’s tasks; lived space is thereby oriented into left and right, up and down, near and far, moving and at rest. Consider, for instance, what is involved in locating oneself on a map, or negotiating a three-dimensional maze projected on the screen of a computer. In each case, the body comes to inhabit the virtual space that it projects, shifting between different systems of possible orientation in the same way that 101 T H E S P A C E O F I N T E N T I O N A L I T Y A N D T H E O R I E N T A T I O N O F B E I N G a singer shifts between keys while continuing to sing the same melody.7 This phenomenon of changing spatial levels reveals that the true subject of lived space is the body, “gearing into” the world in what Merleau-Ponty describes as an “organic relation” (PP 291/293). But every such orientation, by instituting a certain level as a norm, presupposes a more fundamental level that serves as its ground. When I stand in a gallery looking at a painting, exploring the virtual space that it opens for me, this already presumes as its foundation the level adopted by my body in the gallery hall, as it stands upright at the appropriate focal distance before the painting. Our lived experience reveals to us that space is always already constituted, that it always precedes itself, since every experience of a spatial level presupposes an already given level that serves as its ground (PP 291/293). But if every perception presupposes a more fundamental spatializing, this spatializing can be nothing other than the essentially oriented character of being itself...

Share