Abstract

This project begins with the observation that we are bodies. Embodied experience is the horizon and site for all human being, and the site for the understanding of such being. The body does not reside in some place other than my self, my mind, or my spirit. This project builds on the effort begun by Maurice Merleau-Ponty to advance an ontology of living, bodily experience, the flesh ontology, what I also call the ontology of embodiment. The flesh ontology organizes all investigation into human being around the level of experience, speaks in the language of experience, and steadfastly refuses any form of senselessly reductive methodology. ;By heightening the tensions between subject-object talk, a cleft is made in which another layer or organization of being is intimated. This method echoes that of Merleau-Ponty, who effectively brought dualistic accounts of experience into stark critical exposure. Drawing from categories which are philosophically familiar--space, thought, intentionality, and emotions--I show how the flesh ontology re-frames, situates and appropriates these aspects of experience as orientational rather than categorial. What emerges then is an embodied understanding of primordial place, movement or motility, and emotions, and an understanding of thought which comprehends the intelligent, adaptive, perceptive and sensitive embodied orientation of the individual with the world. Disembodied thought does not exist, and therefore there is no necessary conflict or necessary inscrutability to knowledge of embodied experience. The body is not other. ;The flesh ontology, in Merleau-Ponty's usage, emerges from praxis. Because the flesh ontology shows that we are of a piece with the world and parts of the same elemental ground, I show how an ethics of embodiment is necessarily related to the ontology. To be fully embodied is to be comfortably at home, in our place. But our place is part of an environment, and therefore individual place implicates the collective and the environment. The ethics of embodiment is therefore concerned with the appropriate styles of relation and thought which bear themselves most ably in face of the meaning of flesh