Merleau-Ponty holds that Husserl's descriptions of the body go beyond the conceptual framework of subject-object ontology to which his philosophy is usually thought to conform. Merleau-Ponty says of is own philosophy that it is founded on the circularity in the body; that is, on the fact that the perceptivity and perception of the body are, from the ontological point of view, one and the same. The inseparability of these two aspects of the body he calls flesh (chair). According to Husserl, I perceive my body such that in a certain perceived object I also understand sensations roused by the perception of that object - I observe the "consequential parallel" between two series of objective and subjective phenomena. Husserl argues that the unity of the body should be expressed as a double unity, and the body as a subject-object. In this article I analyse Husserl's example of two hands of the same body touching each other and, in agreement with Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, I attempt to show that the body can appear to itself as an object only on the basis of a differentiation of the body as of a certain field of perceiving. The body as a double unity of subject and object is therefore grounded in the body as a pre-objective and pre-subjective field; that is, in flesh as Merleau-Ponty understands it. This is also the point of departure for and original conception of ontology as we find it in his later philosophy., Jan Halák., and Obsahuje poznámky a bibliografii
Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of the pathology of perception show “objctive” and “subjective” events have sense for the living body only in relation to its whole equilibrium, that is, to how it organises itself overall and how it thus “meets” those events. If we apply this conception to Husserl’s example of two mutually-touching hands of one body we must then state not that we perceive here a coincidence of certain subjective sensations with certain objective qualities, but rather that my body, in the sense of an object, results from a restructuralisation of the whole field of the body accomplished by the body as the performer of perceptual intentions. The body-object, and for the same reasons also the body-subject, is therefore the product of the analysis of the body in the sense of a field of structuralisation or polarisation, not its original phenomenological “stratum”, as in Husserl. If the body grasps itself as perceptible only by a change of its own structure, inasmuch as it is a certain field of structuralisation, then an “external” thing, which is likewise a pole of such grasping, must belong to the same ontological “field” as the body. Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh”, that is the circularity between questioning of perception and answering of the perceived, is thus a phenomenon taking place beyond the boundary of the body as a singular being. This fact allows the concept of flesh to be extended and to be understood as an “element”, that is, as a dimension in which individual beings only appear