I've been reading more philosophy than poetry, but since most of it has been written by Merleau-Ponty, it's still pretty beautiful writing. He says: we are each " a being which is in pursuit of itself outside" (PP 451). We are chasing after our own motivations that lead us away from our bodies toward other bodies, toward other things, toward actions, events. For M-P this is a sort of "realistic" statment: you simply are always already outside of yourself; you're made up of the stuff of the world, a hollow or fold in the world not fundamentally different (as for Sartre, Descartes).
I've begun to think of his work as a sort of virtue ethics, a praxis you must take up, not theorize. He concludes the Phenomenology of Perception with a quote from St. Exupery: "Your act is you." And yet as a practice his philosophy seems to differ quite strongly from other philosophies to which I am committed, namely yogic philosophy. In yoga, one wants to stop seeking ourselves "out there"; stop looking at another person's mat to see what you should be doing. But yogic philosophy seems to have little postivie to say about desire or motivation; we are to distinguish ourselves from them.
But for M-P, to be motivated does not mean that we are not free. I wonder if M-P is only describing a situtation rather than prescribing it?
1 comment:
your act IS you. St Exupery is right. His plane crashed into the mediterannean just ten miles from coast of Provence on flight back from North Africa in WW2 - his descriptions of flying at night under the black blazing sky are amongst most beautiful things written about deterritorialized existence.
Difference between MP and yoga philosophy is intriguing. And I think you are right to observe that MP is describing rather than prescribing, at least in PP (maybe different in Adventures of Dialectic).
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