EKEV Akademi Dergisi

Öz

Ponty’s philosophy of the body offers an alternative to empiricism and idealism’s thinking about the body, consciousness, the world and the relationship betweenthem. By deconstructing the düalist and mechanical body understandings of traditional metaphysics, Ponty develops his own phenomenological life-body idea and tries to overcome this düalist structure, which is opposite to each other but also necessarily includes each other, with the body-subject understanding in perceptual experience. Consciousness cannot be separated from its environment, as the body’s interaction with the world constitutes mental states and actions. In Ponty, the body is not a mere object but a Subject , a form of conciousness. In this sense, bodily consciousness become the basis of all mental states and actions. Ponty tries to reveal his understanding of subjectivity based on bodily consciousness through his in-depth research on perception and action. The body is neither an object in the world like other objects, nor does it have an existence independent of consciousness. In Ponty, the individual is his own body. The body makes possible the intentional opening of the body-subject to the World. In this respect, the body philosophy that Ponty describes in his Phenomenology of Percepton is actually a questioning of individual existence. On a perceptual, bodily level, in a state of existence prior to reflection, the reciprocal primal interaction of consciousness and the world makes it possible for phenomena to be visible on indefinite existence and to open up unlimited horizons of meaning possibilities. This primordial contact of the body and the world, which is prior to reflection, judgement and understanding, is a creative activism that opens the phenomenal field. The aim of this article is to explain how Ponty, in his body analysis, explains human worldliness and the intentionality of the individual who perceives himself as a body through the concepts of movement, motor skill, habit, sexuality and body-schema, and thus how he bases the possibility of human existence on pre-reflective interaction with the world. This bodily mode ofexistence opens up the boundless web of interconnected relations on the indefinite horizon of perception and the world and invalidates all kinds of objective truth claims.