Merleau-Ponty, Correlationism, and Alterity

Booth, Robert ORCID: 0000-0001-7089-8301 (2018) Merleau-Ponty, Correlationism, and Alterity. PhaenEx, 12 (2). pp. 37-58.

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Abstract

<jats:p>A common commitment amongst speculative realists holds that phenomenology is irredeemably hostile to nonhuman alterity because phenomenology is correlationist. Since phenomenologists deny unmediated access to the modality of the in-itself, their correlationism purportedly consists in subsuming the more-than-human world into one’s own (narrowly anthropocentric) intentional horizon, a move that promises correspondingly disastrous environmental implications. Merleau-Pontian phenomenology appears to be especially guilty in this regard since Merleau-Ponty argues that taking our situated embodiment sufficiently seriously entails that any other entity encountered must always take the form of an “in-itself-for-us.” In this paper, I argue that the charge of correlationism against Merleau-Pontian phenomenology can be disarmed because it is either false or insubstantial. In either case, I argue, if we are to remain sufficiently open to more-than-human alterity to evade the dangerous sort of anthropocentrism that anticorrelationists rightly speak against, we would do well to retain the very subject-object ambiguity that motivates the correlationist charge against Merleau-Pontian phenomenology in the first place.</jats:p>

Item Type:	Article
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	30 Jan 2018 16:57
Last Modified:	19 Jan 2023 06:42
DOI:	10.22329/p.v12i2.5032
Related URLs:	Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3017166