Merleau-Ponty
the depth of memory as the depth of the world
pp. 227-250
in: Hugh J. Silverman, Algis Mickunas, Alphonso Lingis, Theodore Kisiel (eds), The horizons of continental philosophy, Berlin, Springer, 1988Abstract
Merleau-Ponty came to see depth as the key not only to an adequate phenomenology of perception, but also the key to articulating a new ontology that could allow for the coming to be of truth, of the sens of the world, the meaning of history, the power of art, and ultimately of that strange intertwining of human being within time, ambiguity, materiality and language. For Merleau-Ponty, depth became the primary dimension of experience to be interrogated, "the dimension of dimensions" (EM, p. 185).1 The importance of depth to understanding Merleau-Ponty's use of the term "flesh" and as central to the import of both The Visible and the Invisible and "Eye and Mind" has yet to be fathomed. Without radicalizing the notion of depth as thoroughly as Merleau-Ponty, it is not possible to subvert the subjectivistic approach to human being, the mentalistic approach to subjectivity qua consciousness, or the dualistic, reifying, conceptions of the natural, historical, cultural world.
