Ontology, Otherness, and Self-Alterity

Ware, Owen

doi:10.5840/symposium200610231

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Thus Merleau-Ponty wishes to maintain a cogito but without re-establishing a Cartesian ego that is a 'hermetically sealed entity, locked away as it were in its own mind, fully present, unified, and self-certain' [77] (p. 503). It seems then that thought is required for distinguishing self and others, but this should not be a timeless res cogitans that is completely transparent to itself, with indubitable powers of self-knowledge regardless of the existence or non-existence of the world.…”

Section: The Primordial Social Interworld and The Concrete Experience Of Othersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Body, Self and Others: Harding, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on Intersubjectivity

Ramm

2021

Philosophies

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Douglas Harding developed a unique first-person experimental approach for investigating consciousness that is still relatively unknown in academia. In this paper, I present a critical dialogue between Harding, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on the phenomenology of the body and intersubjectivity. Like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Harding observes that from the first-person perspective, I cannot see my own head. He points out that visually speaking nothing gets in the way of others. I am radically open to others and the world. Neither does my somatic experience establish a boundary between me and the world. Rather to experience these sensations as part of a bounded, shaped thing (a body), already involves bringing in the perspectives of others. The reader is guided through a series of Harding’s first-person experiments to test these phenomenological claims for themselves. For Sartre, the other’s subjectivity is known through The Look, which makes me into a mere object for them. Merleau-Ponty criticised Sartre for making intersubjective relations primarily ones of conflict. Rather he held that the intentionality of my body is primordially interconnected with that of others’ bodies. We are already situated in a shared social world. For Harding, like Sartre, my consciousness is a form of nothingness; however, in contrast to Sartre, it does not negate the world, but is absolutely united with it. Confrontation is a delusion that comes from imagining that I am behind a face. Rather in lived personal relationships, I become the other. I conclude by arguing that for Harding all self-awareness is a form of other-awareness, and vice versa.

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Section: The Primordial Social Interworld and The Concrete Experience Of Othersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Body, Self and Others: Harding, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on Intersubjectivity

Ramm

2021

Philosophies

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Black bodies in phenomenological bioethics: cultural othering, ‘Corporeal Uncanny’ and ethical quandaries of black nurses inTake My HandandSmall Great Things

Balasubramanian,

Balasubramanian

2024

Med Humanities

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The aims of the present article are twofold. First, it attempts to theorise the thematic and ontological intersection between phenomenological and black bioethics and proposes ‘Ontic-Black Bioethics’, a neologism to evince how the corporeal misconceptions (such as race construct, bodily othering and colourism) become the cultural impediment for black women healthcare professionals. The article draws specific insights from the philosophical anthropology of race, ranging from Richard Polt to Sarah Ahmed, to understand the epistemic structures of scientific racism. Second, it investigates how the racial attitudes of white healthcare professionals and supremacist patients towards black nurses can be potential triggers of cultural othering, corporeal burden and ethical quandaries by closely readingTake My Handby Dolen Perkins-Valdez (2022) andSmall Great Thingsby Jodi Picoult (2016). For this, the article relies on the theoretical frameworks of cultural phenomenology and somatic attention postulated by Thomas Csordas, Philipa Rothfield and other theoreticians of varying importance. While the corporeality of black nurses is replete with the images of biological misconception and racial-cultural constructs, the epistemic perspectives and literary representations underscoring their bodily and experiential agony have been scarcely examined through the lenses of bioethics. Thus, the article construes the corporeality of black nurses as the confluence of biological and cultural discourses under phenomenological bioethics.

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Ontology, Otherness, and Self-Alterity

Cited by 2 publications

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Body, Self and Others: Harding, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on Intersubjectivity

Body, Self and Others: Harding, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on Intersubjectivity

Black bodies in phenomenological bioethics: cultural othering, ‘Corporeal Uncanny’ and ethical quandaries of black nurses inTake My HandandSmall Great Things

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