Thoughts from Mearlu-Ponty’s “Experience and Objective Thought”, pp. 67-9 in Phenomenology of Perception

What we actually see is only one face of an object, determined by the axis of our embodied orientation as it is directed towards the object. When we label the object found at the end of our gaze, we do so with an assumption of what would be given from all other views and angles that could be taken toward and around the object. Therefore, what we fill in about an object in our furious attempt to grasp the world and fit it into what we can conceptually circumscribe is essentially ungrounded in the sense that it is completely disconnected from our actual view of the world, the world as it is given to our “limited” first-person perspective. I must inquire here as to what view of the world we are trying to manifest and maintain. We are working to validate an absolute world where objects have permanence in their characteristics and where we are able to grasp the world from beyond our outside of our embodied view. Once the world is discovered to be a social realm, the knowledge of the Others’ presence and sentience alters our perspective such that we put ourselves in his place, hypothesize the world from his view, and adopt his view when conceiving of the a priori world given within our embodied position. This last theory may be a bit of a stretch, but I truly do not think that we can talk about how we came to experience the world as we do in this dissociative way without accounting for our drive for assimilation and communion with the Other.

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