DE Weekly: Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, & Being-in-the-World
One could raise a valid critique that the most glaring weakness of existentialism is that it is too abstract; it could be said that it deals too much in theory, is too complicated, and not grounded enough to be useful in everyday life. However, not every existentialist thought the same way. Some even challenged that same abstractness, including one Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Merleau-Ponty was a twentieth-century French philosopher who is often grouped with his contemporaries––especially Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, whom he studied alongside at the École Normale Supérieure––as an existentialist. Being strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger helps bolster this notion.
DE Weekly: Barron, Modern Thought, & the Influence of Ideas
Last week, I wrote about Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, a book explaining how perception of the modern world is dominated by “simulacra,” or “copies without originals.” Baudrillard argues we endure a “hyperreality,” wherein signs replace reality and our perception is defined by said signs.
If you haven’t read last week’s newsletter yet, I highly recommend doing so to get caught up on what I’ll be discussing this week.
DE Weekly: Perception, Baudrillard, & Simulacra
In existentialism, the role perception plays in our lives is as important to understanding the philosophy as anything else. This is because in existentialism, perception is much more than “seeing” the world with your senses; perception is about our being-in-the-world.
How do we experience the world? How do we experience our own existence? How do we know the things we perceive are true reality, that we can believe our perception?