the lived body/the lifeworld.
"when we speak of
the flesh of the world
we mean that carnal being, a being of depths, a being in latency, a presentation
of a certain absence
is a prototype of Being, of which our body,
the sensible sentient is a very
remarkable variant,
whose constitutive paradox already lies in every visible,
a quality pregnant with a texture, the surface of a depth,
a cross section upon
a massive being,
a grain or corpuscle borne
by a wave of being."
Merleau Ponty
"the flesh is not matter, not mind, not substance.
To designate it, we need the old term "element", in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing,
midway between the spatiotemporal individual and the idea,
a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being.
The flesh is in this sense, an
"element" of being
not a fact, or a sum of facts, and yet adherent to location and to the now."
"we see the things themselves, in their places, where they are,
according to their being which is indeed more than their being perceived,
at the same time we are separated from them by all the thickness of the look and of the body;
this distance is not the contrary of this proximity, it is deeply consonant with it,
the thickness of flesh between the seer and the thing is constitutive for the thing of it visibility,
it is not an obstacle between them,
it is their means of communication."
the most difficult point:
the bond between the flesh
and the idea,
between the visible and the invisible
an idea is not
the contrary of
the sensible
it is its lining
and its depth.
these ideas [of music, literature, the passions]
have their logic, their coherence,
their concordances, but
cannot be detached from the sensible appearances
and erected into a second positivity, unlike
those of science.
body and distances participate in the same corporeity which reigns between them."