Abstract

Traditionally, philosophy has cut a deep cleavage between reason and emotion, and between the self and the world; I hope to show how these chasms can be closed, how indeed these types of impasses are neither givens in our experience nor do they indicate a fundamental ontological division in Being, but are distinctions imposed upon a more primordial unity. ;Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty's analysis of the body, I will examine this primordial unity, viz. the corps-sujet which can be understood as the world thinking itself through us. The ways in which the world thinks or feels itself through us is given to us most intensely in our affective life; however, it is not in the affective life alone but in our bodily existence as perceivers that we uncover the world. The analysis of the body, according to Merleau-Ponty, is already an analysis of perception. ;Appropriating Merleau-Ponty's notion of the chiasm, I wish to marry up fundamental ontological concerns with an analysis of erotic being. For Heidegger, dread is the key-mood; it is the ontological feeling. I hope to show how erotic desire and/or erotic feeling likewise reveals Being. Merleau-Ponty claims the following: ;If then we want to bring to light the birth of being for us, we must finally look at that area of our experience which clearly has significance and reality only for us, and that is our affective life. Let us try to see how a thing or a being begins to exist for us through desire or love and we shall thereby come to understand better how things and beings can exist in general. ;This dissertation is an examination of this claim and an exploration of the parallels in structure between what can be termed "perceptual reversibility" and "intercorporeal love."