THE ONTOLOGY OF THE FLESH THE CRITIQUE OF DUALISM IN MERLEAU-PONTY’S CONCEPT OF THE PHENOMENAL BODY

This article analyzes the critique of Cartesian dualism from the ontology of the flesh in the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. From his early works, Merleau-Ponty criticized the philosophical tradition and argued that the relationship between perception and subjectivity with the lived world was inadequately addressed by theories of knowledge, both in philosophy and in the exact or cognitive sciences. In his final work, "The Visible and the Invisible," influenced by the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger and building upon what they supposedly did not advance, Merleau-Ponty aimed to return to what he referred to as the ontology of raw being to explore the relationship between the embodied subjectivity of the body and intersubjectivity with the lived world, including a new phenomenological interpretation of the relationship of being with time, space, and language. Thus, the ontology of the flesh transcribes the events of the order of raw being, in which the body, the visible aspect of being, is pierced by an invisible sense. Therefore, the phenomenal body is, in the ontology of the flesh, a correlative interweaving of "thing" and "world," a chiasm of the structures of the visible and the invisible in the world of being, underlying a resounding critique of modernity's dualism.