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Merleau-Ponty's Relationship To The Other

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This essay will focus on Merleau-Ponty’s account of our relations with Others, as well as its relation to Sartre’s philosophy and how effective of a critique Merleau-Ponty offers to the Sartrean understanding of our relationship to the Other. Throughout the essay i shall refer to the relationship between the Individual and the Other, this is simply to mean the relationship found between the ‘I’ and the other humans they interact with who have questionable similarity to the ‘I’. Our relationship to Others is a significant area of discussion because it opens the problem of Other Minds, which entails the idea that I, as an individual, cannot verify that any other individual I interact with is conscious in the same way I am. Both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty …show more content…

As such the following is a brief explanation of the Sartrean standing, within Being and Nothingness. Sarte saw that the Other is necessary to one 's identifying as an Individual, and so the sense of the Other is seen as prior to one 's sense of selves. Sartre 's understanding of the Other is two fold, where firstly the Individual views the Other as an object, and secondly where the Individual understands the Other as a …show more content…

We will first outline what Merleau-Ponty understood and then move to evaluate his theories effectiveness as a critique.In opposition to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty argues that our relationship to the world is not simply a closed perspective and instead the individual and the Other exist in a shared world. The way we experience events is always in time, and can be understood by explanation of Traditional Synthesis. This is the idea that the present is always open to the past and the future, but also most importantly open to the perspectives of Others, because one’s world is not closed to the observation of Others. It is the openness of one 's world which necessitates one 's awareness of the Other, under the idea that we must inhabit the same would to affect each other. Thus, the Other and oneself “must learn to find the communication of consciousnesses in a single world [..] gathered together in a single world in which we all participate as anonymous subjects of perception” (Merleau-Ponty, 2013, pp 369). Meaning that one 's experience of the Other s intrinsically related to the Individual 's own experience and existence. Moreover, for Merleau-Ponty, there are three main characteristics which demonstrate the relation between the Individual and the

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