Posição e crítica da função simbólica nos primeiros trabalhos de Merleau-Ponty. / Position and criticism against the symbolic function in Merleau-Pontys first works.

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2009

RESUMO

In this study, we aim to investigate the problem of the symbolic function in Maurice Merleau-Pontys first works. More specifically, we address the position of that problem in "The Structure of Behavior", published in 1942, and its critical review in the "Phenomenology of perception", published in 1945. This theme, on which the philosopher provided few specifications, is also a source of rare debates among his commentators. In his first work, Merleau-Ponty, using the semantics of the symbol from early 20th-century neuropsychiatry, characterizes the organizational level of human corporality based on its ability to go beyond the immediate nature of the experienced situations. The categorial or symbolic attitude seemed to be a new signification of behavior, in view of the synchretic and movable forms of behavior found on the zoological scale. Human activity would imbue the environment with virtuality and, thus, redimension the concrete existence denoted in animal behavior. In those chapters of the "Phenomenology of perception" in which Merleau-Ponty discusses the spatiality, motricity and expressiveness of the own body, in the same way as the author does without the causal explanations of the pathological phenomena used as discussion material, he dispenses with the explanations traced in the symbolic function, hereafter associated with intellectualist analyses. The philosopher combats, both in the neuropsychiatry particularly represented by Gelb and Goldstein and in Cassirers philosophy, what he considers to represent a growing autonomy of the symbolic idea in the dynamics between content and form. At the same time, Merleau-Ponty makes us see that, in this neuropsychiatry and philosophy of the symbol, phenomenological analyses can be apprehended about motor, gesture and language expressions of the own body. These analyses reveal a form of knowing that is reduced neither to the order of in itself nor to the order of for itself, thus outlining the notion of intentionality which the philosopher wants to develop, based on the synergical unit of the own body. This explains the importance another theoretical-anthropological device gains in the "Phenomenology of perception": the notion of body schema.

ASSUNTO(S)

fenomenologia merleau-ponty symbolic function phenomenology função simbólica merleau-ponty body schema esquema corporal

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