re: Merleau-Ponty

Just ran across THIS POST, which I enjoyed.

“By comparison, Deleuze and Guattari don’t even talk about subjectivity; they make it irrelevant. Graham Harman also side-steps this Cartesian mutualism by going via the Object with Merleau-Ponty and his notion of flesh.”

I would just add the following caveat here. I’m not actually a supporter of Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh,” because I view it as too correlationist. It’s world on one side and mind on the other, and the two are totally intertwined, but again it’s the same two poles as usual: world and mind. Why does the intertwining always have to take place between those two terms in particular? Why not the fleshly intertwining of hydrogen and nitrogen?

There are a lot of things I enjoy about Merleau-Ponty, and he has some of the greatest sentences and metaphors of twentieth century philosophy. However, I don’t especially read him as a great innovator in ontology. He’s sexing up phenomenology quite a bit, and in interesting ways, but it’s still phenomenology. And I love phenomenology for many reason, but do not love its tendency to treat the realism problem as a pseudo-problem, which is precisely what Merleau-Ponty does even in The Visible and the Invisible.