Merleau-Ponty's Intertwining as a Theory of Communion

교감 이론으로서 메를로퐁티의 '상호 엮임'

The recent revival of phenomenology and aesthetics is deeply connected to the development of neuroscience which studies the nervous system and the brain with particular regard to cognition and memory. How are those fields gathered into building up the basis for the communication not only between human beings but also between humanity and its environment? This paper examines the human mind considered unseparable from the body, with reference to Merleau-Ponty's two major works: Phenomenology of Perception (1962) and The Visible and the Invisible (1968). While reading these texts, I investigate the way he overturns the Cartesian cogito and establishes the body as the ground of perception. According to him, human perception is chiefly obtained through the body rather than consciousness. Influenced by William James, who produced the unique concept of cognition and memory through his experiments with the brain, Merleau-Ponty extends Heideggerian Desein to the field of the embodied mind. James also anticipates Bergson, who regards memory as the product of interaction between consciousness and matter (or the body). The intervention of the body which stores the past experiences makes it impossible for us to capture the present moment in itself. This failure, however, is viewed as positive by Merleau-Ponty because the human body is not only a medium of social interaction, but also that of ecological communion.