I am scouring Merleau-Ponty's "Phenomenology of Perception" in an attempt to understand Maxine Greene's development of the "lived life." Though I haven't come across the "l-l" paradigm, I have used the occasion to try to find the origins of le corps vecu or, "the lived body," as mentioned in Baldacchino. After running around in circles, I have come across discussions in papers posted on the Internet about Merleau-Ponty and Husserl and their views on "le corps vecu" or in the case of Husserl, "Leib." I will now take a look at Husserl to try to come to terms with "Leib." (Thank goodness for holiday gift cards redeemable at book retailers.)
In my quest for "le corps vecu" in Merleau-Ponty, I came across instances of the "lived-through." In closing the mind/body split, Merleau-Ponty proposes that it is a synthesized and unified body that grasps meaning and that the body is a "grouping of lived-through meanings."
Later in the book, the "lived-through" takes on qualifiers such as "purely" and "merely." Merleau-Ponty makes it clear that the lived-through in and of itself is not an experience without the possibility of expression: "Moreover, there is no experience without speech as the purely lived-through has no part in the discursive life of man."
So now I ask, is the "lived life" in Maxine Greene a more fully realized concept of experience than the merely "lived-through"? Is the "lived life" a fuller embodiment that takes into account expression? Time will tell...
I don't know why....but I've always read "Toward Wide-Awakeness" as a kind of Greene manifesto. In it she cites Schutz whom I believe is a "blended" source of the cultural-sociological-phenomenological-existential, interdisciplinary angle:
ReplyDeleteHere she is citing Schutz:
By the term "wide-awakeness" we want to denote a plane of consciousness of highest tension originating in an attitude of full attention to life and its requirements. Only the performing and especially the working self is fully interested in life and, hence, wide. awake. It lives within its acts and its attention is exclusively directed to carrying its project into effect, to executing its plan. This attention is an active, not a passive one. Passive attention is the opposite to full awareness."
And then this is followed by citing Merleau-Ponty:
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, speaking of what this kind of awareness can mean, writes, "My life must have a significance which I do not constitute; there must be strictly speaking an intersubjectivity...." Engaging with the kind of history I have been describing, individual human beings can locate themselves in an intersubjective reality reaching backwards and forwards in time.