Sublime

Within the humanities, some of the key theorists drew inspiration from the writings published at midcentury by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who had analyzed, with stunning lucidity, the body’s influence upon even our most rarefied cogitiations.

The contemporary phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty characterized his thinking as a philosophy of the lived body or the body subject. Key to his analysis was the notion of embodiment, which draws a distinction from the objective body, which is regarded solely as a physiological entity, and the phenomenal body, which is not just any body, or simp

Merleau-Ponty instead saw quite calmly that we exist only through compromise with the world — and that this is fine. The point is not to fight that fact, or to inflate it into too great a significance, but to observe and understand exactly how that compromise works.

Les aspects de notre existence qui nous limitent, explique Merleau-Ponty, sont les mêmes qui nous attachent au monde et nous ouvrent un champ d’action et de perception. Ils font de nous ce que nous sommes.

Merleau-Ponty, que Hadot voit comme un philosophe contemporain mettant en œuvre des exercices spirituels, affirme également de son côté que, « pour retrouver la fonction entière du philosophe, il faut se rappeler que même les philosophes-auteurs que nous lisons et que nous sommes n’ont jamais cessé de reconnaître pour patron un homme qui n’écrivait

Merleau-Ponty,

I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated. I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption.