The origin of alienation: Some Kierkegaardian reflections on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body

Abstract

There is no doubt that you and I, as modern Westerners, are in the midst of an existential crisis. We are literally at the "breaking point" over the issue of our relation to the natural and cultural conditions into which we have been thrown. Our very identity as persons is threatened by our growing and deepening sense that somehow we are fundamentally alienated from the world.The world, both in the sense of nature and culture, is chronically and profoundly despised in the experience of alienation. Our embodiment in nature and culture is seen as a negative condition which inhibits, restricts, tyrannizes, objectifies and imprisons the self. In the experience of alienation, the self is imaged as trapped freedom, as pure freedom seeking to disentangle itself from the imperfect conditions of worldly existence.This crisis has provoked an urgent cry for a radical alternative to the deep-seated set of assumptions that are currently dominant in our thinking about ourselves and our relations to the world. Is there a starting point that will not lead to self-world alienation? Is there a way of positively integrating ourselves into our world?Merleau-Ponty has responded to these questions in precisely the radical terms that are needed. His argument has two "intertwined strands." In the critical strand of his argument he tries to show how the modern experience of alienation is rooted in a set of epistemological assumptions which center around a sharp (Cartesian) dichotomy of subject and object. Such a dichotomy, he claims, underlies the seemingly exhaustive philosophical alternatives of the day. That is, the subject-object dichotomy is the basis for both empiricism (which treats "perception as a simple result of the action of external things on our body"l) and intellectualism (which insists "on the autonomy of consciousness"2). The constructive strand of Merleau-Ponty's response to the crisis of alienation is found in his attempt to radically reorient our critical thinking by showing how it is perceptually grounded. This grounding of critical thought in perception provides the basis for recovering "the roots of the mind in its body and in its world. ''3 The livedInt J Phil Rel 12: 111-122 (1981) 0020-7047/81/0122-0111 $01.80. 9 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague. Printed in the Netherlands.

“That is Giving a Banquet”: Neighbor‐Love as Spiritualization of Romantic Loves in Works of Love

“…Therefore, that which spirit excludes it also requires, such that sensuality retains a definitive role in the constitution and revelation of spirit. As Ronald L. Hall has observed, that which spirit excludes “is thus indirectly affirmed as that which spirit excludes ” (1981, 114). The form this affirmation takes is the endowment of the excluded with the power to refer beyond itself to the realm of spirit that excluded it in the first place.…”

“…The very exclusion, however, grants privilege to the sensual nature as the requisite means of revealing spirit in its reality. It is this dialectic that defines humanity's being in the world, according to Kierkegaard (Hall 1981, 118).…”