Aesthetics as First Philosophy

Merleau-Ponty from Embodied Perception to the Ontology of Flesh

von Robert Tirvaudey

284 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

This essay examines Merleau-Ponty's aesthetic philosophy as a transformation of phenomenology into a new ontology of the sensible. Beginning with Husserl's phenomenological legacy, it analyzes the passage from transcendental subjectivity to embodied perception and shows how Merleau-Ponty's critique of intellectualism and empiricism leads to the primacy of the lived body, motor intentionality, and the pre-reflective dimension of experience. The study then explores the overcoming of traditional dualisms-subject/object, interior/exterior, mind/body-through the concepts of flesh, reversibility, and intertwining developed in The Visible and the Invisible. The essay argues that artistic experience, particularly painting in Cézanne, Klee, Matisse, and other modern artists, reveals the ontological structure of visibility itself. Art is not a representation of a pre-existing world but an event of manifestation through which new meanings emerge. From perception to expression, from language to politics of the sensible, Merleau-Ponty's philosophy demonstrates that aesthetics is not a secondary field but a first philosophy capable of revealing the conditions of Being.

• Themen: Philosophie und Religion Philosophie
• ISBN: 9786630446340
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 31.08.2026
• Größe: 220 x 150 mm
• Verlag: Scholars' Press