CHAPTER III

PERCEPTION AND VALUE:

The Affective Basis of an Ethics of Encounter

GHISLAINE FLORIVAL

CULTURAL TRADITION

            To reflect upon tradition means to rediscover the lived rooted-ness of an experience of the collective life of a group as a people or a community in its temporal and geographic context and in its permanent self-transcendence. Reflection upon a cultural tradition raises the question of the becoming of that "heritage from the past" as both identical and different not only within its distinct factual situation and according to its own dynamic resources, but in its relation to other cultures. Generally speaking, to reflect upon a tra-dition means to consider an historical experience, that is, to the present meaning of that "precipitate of history" which past life forms offer to individuals today. For every generation leans on the cultural experience of its predecessors, even while reevaluating afresh its creative possibilities according to the new modalities of its life.

            But modern philosophical questioning regarding cultures has its meaning only within a particular culture which, since Socrates, has articulated itself through a logic of questioning based upon the resources of a reflective and conceptual mode of thinking. Recently, contemporary philosophy has discovered the philosophical contri-butions of other worldviews, such as those of the East. Unceasingly, these have made present what remains of truths of life unthought by reason. In so doing they do not aim at building discursive representa-tions, hence, the Western philosopher who tries to be initiated into those conceptions must make use of history, customs and civili-zation. Only thus can he achieve what M. Merleau-Ponty in Les philosophes célèbres characterized as "a fascination". For it is not possible to enter only half way into, e.g., Chinese philosophy because it "revolves around the same immemorial world which it does not try to think, but to make present."1

            It would be a simplification to oppose absolutely the contri-butions of the two cultures. Coming from the Hellenic world, West-ern philosophy was not without living relations with the East. The Greek world has been living from the symbolic contribution of the beliefs of the East, which in various forms have crossed the cen-turies from Heraclitus and Pythagoras until now. However, logical reason, coming from the patriarchal and juridical contribution of Rome, not only has marked with its imprint the entire Western Christian culture and all its national and church institutions, but in modern times it has taken on a representative consciousness which distances it from every imaginary or affective, if not symbolic, dimension. Today, Western philosophy recognizes the lack of these dimensions in its own proponents as, prompted by techno-science, they evolve the process of cultural universalization. Attending to the message offered by other cultures as is required by unavoidable co-existence should enable philosophy to situate itself in the scope of an "enlarged Reason" whose project Husserl foresaw as the telos of the whole of humankind: philosophers, as he said, are the true "state servants of mankind."

            Some philosophers, to be sure, already have understood this life message from the East and others have criticized the West: Master Eckhard for example in the Middle Ages, a number of Renai-ssance thinkers and, in the modern period, Hegel (even in order to conceptualize the historical process), Schopenhauer (in his en-counter with Buddhism) and Nietzsche. But it is mainly to the con-temporary phenomenologists, attentive to what Husserl has so per-tinently called the "life-world", that we owe the birth of a con-temporary current of philosophical and anthropological ques-tioning regarding culture as such and the different cultures. Ac-cording to a new ontology, Heidegger has developed the theme of "historiality" as understanding the "world" in its becoming. This has the living force of a tradition or destiny (Geschik), for an under-standing of the history of a people depends upon an understanding of historicity or Gewesen in order to grasp the fate of the Dasein.2

            Hermeneutics aims at interpreting concrete values shared with other cultures through language and its interrelated meanings. This path is followed by Gadamer3 in speaking of the horizonal dimension of cultures with respect to each other, by the more recent thesis of P. Ricoeur4 on the ethical character of cultural values, or also by the position of Levinas5 on culture as a language which ex-presses itself not merely as thought, but as embodied in the con-vergence of being through cultural interaction.

            Finally and more fundamentally, that is, at the level of the lived body, it is found in the phenomenology of "difference" called "flesh of the world", presented by M. Merleau-Ponty in Le visible et l`in-visible.6 Similar to the way a language is expressive, this phenome-nology brings out the fundamental role of affective structures. These are lived in "chiasmus", but always are understood implicitly in the process of recognition inherent in language. It is on this last re-ference point, which Merleau-Ponty calls "flesh of the world", that I intended to base the essential elements of this presentation.

THE DATA OF THE PROBLEM:

            ETHICAL VALUES AND MORALITY

            Here the problem is to put in perspective the notion of ethical value: how can one understand that notion for the contemporary world; how can its cultural diversity be grasped? Must one still have recourse to the metaphysical concept of "human being", in order to vindicate the universal character of ethical values; do we have to underline the differences of human beings in order to grasp the meaning of the telos which runs through them from the very roots of their diversity? And what is the meaning of Husserl’s philoso-phical call for a sense of mankind on the move and opening to its self-actualization in the face of the rational desire of being for totality? This classical problematic is found in each particular culture and the relation between its different groups. Hegel contrasts it with the right of persons to a subjective morality, for it exists between per-sons. This enabled him ultimately to build a concept of the state as the synthesis of effective Reason.

            In contrast, the philosophical problem concerning value in its concrete or lived dimension must be analyzed phenomenologically from the "unspoken" bases of reason which is prior to the articu-lation of language and learned discourse. Indeed, it is already at work at the level of lived experience, for what is given beforehand in the actual existence of the Dasein as existing "being-in-the-world" con-stitutes the basis of every perceptive encounter and particularly of the affectivity and experience of desiring.

            But if an originary meaning is already present in the affective dimension of every encounter, could we not recognize in those dispositions also the premises of ethical valuation? In other words, is there an implication in principle between the element of perception in an encounter and its value dimension?

            As this is the central aim of this study of the affective bases of ethical encounter, those bases will have to be transposed to the cultural level. In so doing, will we discover the same lived intuition in the ethical behavior of different cultures, or must we not reverse our procedure and say that every encounter is situated in, or borne by, its proper culture? This would give every encounter its distinctive affective space and hence the possibility of unfolding its proper values, which will have its own truth in relation to other cultures? In other words, is not the lived cultural base the place also of a lived differentiation which manifests itself at all levels: personal, individual and collective; and is not this interrelational base in "life-world" the very "dimension" of intercultural exchange as such?

            Firstly, I shall recall some methodological data which have guided phenomenological research from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty in order to examine in what measure those two philosophers share similar intuitions, though in different ontological contexts. Secondly, I shall take up again the notions of perception and value as sources of openness and differentiation in every encounter. Thirdly, I shall articulate the ethical dimension of encounter through the existential field of desire, which opens the field of freedom.

Affectivity and Phenomenological Perception in

            Merleau-Ponty

            In the introduction to Phenoménologie de la perception, published in 1945,7 Merleau-Ponty describes phenomenology as a philosophy of essences (eidos) but in contrast to Husserl he sees this as based upon a consciousness rooted in actual existence. Hence, he proposes a rereading of Husserlian intentionality, no longer in the mode of a transcendental subjectivity as a consciousness "of" something linking the subject with the object, but as restoring the existing being in its openness to the world, that is, as "being-at-the-world". This directs his attention immediately to our embodied situa-tion. However, to consider the thing which presents itself in intuited presence as an object and to catch its meaning is to consider the phenomenon in its ontological reality as a signifying or meaningful event.

            Hence, inverting the method of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty stresses "reduction" with respect to intentionality, which is still a manifestation of consciousness. For Husserl reduction had been only an epistemological method by which he placed "in parenthesis" the world as a metaphysical object in order to see better the con-ditions belonging to the consciousness of something, namely, both the noematic side (the object for consciousness) and the noetic side (the subject as donor of meaning and aiming at the object as mean-ingful for consciousness).

            In contrast, for Merleau-Ponty the "reduction" is an onto-logical method which enables one to see existence as "being-at-the-world". In particular, it allows one to see the very act of seeing our being-at-the-world, the phenomenality of the phenomenon of existence, that is, our openness to the world. At the same time, it enables one to see the world as the permanent horizon of our pre-sence to things and to others. It seizes upon the point of view which we are, that is, as a center in terms of which things receive their meaning and orientate themselves with respect to each other. Things indeed appear to our vision under diverse profiles as they organize themselves for being seen; this constitutes them in their discrete (non-total) movement of appearing for the subject. This is a form of temporality in the process of its own constitution.

            Thus, on the side of the perceived noematic object as well as on the subjective noetic side, signifying is always open on the life-world. Perception is thereby temporal and borne by its negativity or specificity. In the same way, others enable us to discover what exceeds our situated existence: if we do not see ourselves as others see us, we at least see them as seeing us. Thus vision is in principle reversible and narcissistic. One’s body is relational and by arti-culating itself with the world constitutes effective lived existence. In this way the body is the center of differentiation, from which the world takes its sense.

            As interpretative method, reduction thus enables one to see the intentional threads linking the existing being to the world as so many ties connecting the subject with its world. In perception the body appears as the central point of view in terms of the opening of the sense organs, but it is also a space-making point of view by grasping things with respect to each other and articulating them in the space-time field according to an orientation which begins from here; this sets them in the world which is the total horizon. In this sense, my body opens space and time while it depends upon something out there to orientate itself as a motor capacity. Generating space, it is able to move in a perceptive field which has sense and orientation. The differentiation of the five senses is itself an originating dif-ferentiation as one’s own body layers one sense upon the other. Intersecting with each other, the senses slip from the concrete towards the abstract in such a way that to see a problem or seize a question manifests the perceptive field in the expression of all metaphoric meanings.

Toward an Ontology of Difference or "Flesh of the World":                                    Perception and Value

            The phenomenological analysis of perception is important because it leads to the institution of a new ontology. Merleau-Ponty situates the lived body not only as an effective, but as a feeling-being which is affected both actively and passively. The experience of the hand touching while being touched, at the same time wanting to feel itself while being affected by itself, reveals a reflexive circularity which remains always incomplete. That discovery will orient all of Merleau-Ponty’s research in Le visible et l‘invisible, published posthumously. This gives incomplete witness to an ontology which concretely is ensured by its teleological self-transcendence.

            If the perceiving body is the differentiating or discerning of the senses, it is also their reflected and reflecting pole: the fact that things are appearing to it makes it embodied in the sense of being located with respect to them. A fortiori, this situation of embodiment is manifest in the openness of the body as expressive through gesture and word. The body thereby unfolds a field of meaning, in a way similar to the cycle of "feeling/being affected", which constitutes a perceptive return of things upon the perceiving body. Like a figure upon the background of the world, the lived bodiliness of the others reflects itself upon the speaking subject. At the level of affective perception, by mutual feeling or intropathy from its lived center the body lives the behavior of the other by a kind of connivance which interlaces my body with his or hers, and reciprocally, as if the bodies understood each other. However, they never succeed completely in this because the other being remains irreducible, as I am for myself, in the narcissic reflection of the signifying I. In the same way that the word of the other extends my gesture and proceeds to inhabit my self expression as in a "chiasmus", my expression escapes me in order to emerge as meaning for the other. It is visible because invisible, it goes out in the very act of being present. Just as the temporal now ceases to be in going ahead, it is always opening to new signification.

            Thus, there is formed an actual interrelation, that is, a common belonging to the same sense or the same world: my perceptible ges-ture signifies my expressed word, and conversely. The expressive sense always goes ahead of itself displacing the actuality of what is signified by what remains untold in the expression whose sense is never exhausted. What is expressed in language always turns over onto itself in order to evoke a perpetual process of a meaning whose sense can never be totally expressed. In actual fact the word is voice and expression not only for the one who is uttering it, but also for the one who is listening to it; indeed, it can be said to listen to itself as if the expressive body is self-differentiated in each of its ex-pressions. As a feeling-being which is affected in perceiving, it is both expressive voice and phenomenon heard. As a speaking sub-ject, it is an unceasing concrete recapturing of the sense present in language. Thereby the three meanings of the word "sense" as per-ceptive sense, as orientation of sense and as meaning meet each other as concrete and abstract in a reversible manner as the lived meanings of the body meet each other, coming reciprocally both from oneself and from the other, in intropathy and in expression through language.

            It is at this level of understanding through gesture and language -- which opens living expressiveness to perception by the other in a kind of chiasmas -- that the intropathic, affective interplay of en-counter can be understood. Perception is the discerning and differ-entiating dimension of one’s own body; at the same time it manifests itself as gesture and word. The gesture takes up the word, just as the other in receiving my gesture is actively engaged in the word which he speaks in his way. In this relay of discourse as being always over-come, as if the exceedence of the perceptive sense finds the pos-sibility of unfolding itself on symbolic grounds, there opens the in-visible depth of what is perceived in language. As the voice makes itself into words addressed to somebody, we find at another level the movement of discerning and differentiating. Language is assumed into the visible--into listening or into the material form of writing--and differentiates itself as the invisible of the concrete meaning.

            Thus, at the same time the perceiving body is active and pas-sive; it is both being-affected and feeling itself in the shared dif-ferentiation which links one existing being to another through in-tropathy and the mediation of language. This originary, perceptive and affective awakening and openness conditions every encounter and actual communication. The distance which always is present is like the difference of the touching-touched of the hand or two fingers pressed together which touch and feel touched at the same time; it is like the relation between the senses of perception and expression, or like perception with respect to what is expressed in language: both are reversibility from the concrete to the abstract and inversely. This distance indicates a measuring or signifying foundation which always is at work and which exceeds itself in all its perceptive mo-ments. Lived as differentiating the feeling-being affected and as a mutually felt or intropathic interrelational expression in language, perception is assumed in creating concrete and intelligible differen-tiation through its own overcoming: Merleau-Ponty calls it the "flesh of the world."

            The body is the privileged form of this as it feels itself feeling in the actual reversibility of language. This structure of distance and differentiation lived as such by the body opens meaning at all the lived levels. It is the structure of a speaking subject, whose ex-pre-ssion is taken up by the others in the differentiated field that is the world of culture. It is from this core of sense that the possibility of speaking in common arises, that the texture of the effective dialogue is constituted and that the differentiated poles of discourse become articulated as the power of the shared feeling-speaking by each person.

Desire and the Ethical Dimension of Encounter

            The life-world -- which is transposed by Merleau-Ponty as the signifying and concrete reversibility he calls "flesh of the world"--is the dimension in which cultural interrelations and the sense of other can be understood as mutually felt and in the expression of language. Hence, we must take up the problem of ethical encounter, which alone is able to situate "persons".

            Here, the approach of Merleau-Ponty is contrary both to transcendental idealism which promotes the universality of pure subjectivity, and to scientistic positivism which reduces the body to its material causality in the chain of the concrete elements for the unprejudiced onlooker. He has deconstructed the a priori subjec-tivity as well as the objectivity of a subject in itself, in order to re-produce them through contact with others in cultural interrelations. It is in the proper field of their responsibility to each other from inside the institutional environment that each person must learn to act and to know oneself: one rises to one’s personal stature through re-ceiving oneself from the culture. This is not from things in them-selves, but from the works which symbolize lived actions and reflect them to others in a common world.

            It is thanks to the ontological differentiation, to the "flesh of the world," that this encounter is varied according to sense differences, which always are reversible and are continually revived in their in-completeness. The ever more differentiated manifestations which constitute the cultural ground allow for discerning others in their particularity. They give the "I" the capacity to receive itself both is alter for others and as ego in its identity. One learns to recognize oneself in one’s own field, to take the initiative in one’s actions, to confront oneself with the surrounding world and to assume one’s proper responsibilities. That recognition of oneself as an other ori-ginates in the movement which is identified by the other as an "other-self"; it is a function of intropathy or mutual feeling and its affective derivatives. The recognition of the other occurs in en-counter through initiating an essentially reversible process.

            Thanks to desire the other appears to me in his or her other-ness. This opens in the subject that temporal distance of objective differentiation which is always already supported by the lived affec-tive interrelation. Desire is intrinsically "flesh" in the sense of dif-ferentiating distance in which concrete expressive bodiliness lives as a sign of its own overcoming. Desire embodies the reflexive move-ment of narcissistic bodiliness in search of itself in the alter-ego, that is, in the ever disappearing promise of a fully realized reflexion.

            But whence does the intensity of desire arise? Does it belong to the language of the other, opening a presence which the living and desiring person tries to grasp in a bodily manner as an actually lived totality? Or does it belong more radically to "concern" in as much as the existence is "passage" (Gewesen) between birth and death? De-sire gives rise at the same time to both directions. On the other hand, the values which are to emerge in life call to action the au-thentic liberty of the existing person in understanding him or herself in the temporal whole of his or her finite being. On the other hand, desire gives rise to the values of the past, which recall what was originally lived in terms of affectivity. Whatever be said regarding its affective modalities, desire aims to realize itself in the hope of a pro-mise of which the other and the others implicitly hold the secret inas-much as bear they that difference which enables things to have sense. However, if the other appears as borne by that whole which ensures its presence as other, he or she is not then a simple phe-nomenon.

            Here we find the emergence of the ethical dimension of en-counter. It is not only a cultural work or something founded inter-relationally on presence in the world. Rather it is a matter of desire itself and not its effects. This is due to the fact that ethical encounter concerns another who is facing me; he or she no longer is only a phenomenon included in the expressive whole of cultural meaning or a simple datum, but is primordially "sense".8 According to Levinas, the other does not come from the horizonal meaning of the world of perception, but is a "visitation" out of context; "His manifestation is a surplus". He is a first word, an opening in the very openness of "face", an absolutely differentiating "trace" which announces the reception of an "absolutely" other.

            The "epiphany" of the "face" is not a phenomenon, but an enunciation of an authentic existing being, bespeaking both the sense of being and its invisibility. Thus the respect for the other invites me to be more than myself; it urges me to recognize in him or her the infinite gift of being and invites me to affirm the excellence of his or her appeal.

            In his interpretation of the encounter of the other, Levinas em-phasizes an absolute difference in otherness as such; he does so by recourse to the presence of the Infinite as the absolute Other. But though difference is so radical as to leave no possibility of exchange or mediation Levinas can speak of the existing being as hostage. This is because, though the perspective of difference is an originary differentiation polarizing the same and the other as different, it does so in a common expression of lived bodiliness. This sets the "event" of presence as unique, which no conceptual synthesis is able to represent and which in such events as birth and death is of the absolute order of person.

THE ETHICS OF CULTURAL VALUES

            What then is the status of cultures and of cultural values? To be sure, they reflect the surrounding milieu from which proceed personal exchanges; certainly also, they always are interpreted in the collective experience which they inspire afresh. But it is always inside a group or more exactly in the exchange between persons that the mutual respect of the customs and of aspirations is located concretely as an ethical demand for recognition. This recognition inscribes itself along three ethical dimensions: (1) the subject as responsible for others in one’s relation to oneself; (2) the other as recognized by me in his or her otherness, which is to say in his or her responsible liberty with respect to others; and (3) the cultural inter-relation constituting the institution or "neutral third party" with respect to which the truth and efficacy of our concrete actions, as well as of social justice, can be constructed, justified and objectively measured.9

            There are then no universal values which exist a priori, but only values stemming from concrete and differentiated experience in cultures. To be sure every tradition reveals, while repeating, the possibility of the Desein in its "to be as having been"; every existing being has "to be" as his or her destiny, by virtue of his or her power to be, and according to his or her choice, each time and in each situation.10 To live the tradition can take on different forms, all of which are supported by the experience of being-at-the-world. But in the last instance it is always the concrete existing being who performs acts, who lives them and is affected by them, even if those acts themselves can also become what Sartre called the "pratico-inert", that is to say, can have effects which go beyond the intentions of those who performed them.11 In this way every existing being, as well as every culture, lives in the context of its own values. These delineate a plurality of human projects which intersect precisely in order, through diverse actions, to construct an ethical world. It is then through confluence in action that there emerges hope of recognizing the values of each culture. This is not to amalgamate their approaches into one, but to detect in each culture the surge toward values as the promise of a better world. As every culture bears its proper tradition, it is up to each to give life again to the intrinsic truth of its tradition and to bring out deliberately the most humanizing aspirations of that tradition. There is no common ground of a uniform mankind; there are only pluralities of ethical forms all working for the recognition of a humanizing fulfillment.

            In the same way that historicity enables us to live in the present the temporal destiny of a whole existence, it permeates the history of the world in its emergence under different figures.12 However, the genesis of the perception of values is parallel to the genesis of culture and of cultures. It has three successive moments, which re-formulate the philosophical history of ethics and reverse what philosophy proposes to itself in its present state of second reflection.

            1) Archaic societies operate in function of their universe of values located in a weakly differentiated collective interrelation, which Durkheim and Bergson called closed societies. Institutionally they are static in the distribution of the respective roles of their members. It is the function which determines the individual.

            2) But the dignity of the subject sets down the objective reality of the individuals with respect to each other according to a criterion of recognition which provides a foundation for the notions of respect and autonomy for the person. Liberty then is no longer linked merely to the political role and shared by "peers" who have access to the public world of the agora in the Greek sense of that term. Hence-forth, it must be understood according to its ethical dimension: men recognizing each other as equal before the greatness of the law which they bear in themselves as practical reason. That is, the ca-pacity for the subject to rise in his actions to a universal point of view,13 that is, to be responsible for his acts as human. The Kantian notion of respect, which probably was the first philosophical argu-mentation radically to denounce slavery, made it possible also to understand the equality of cultural forms, of races, and of sexes which the 20th century has tried to discover through critical reflec-tion upon its philosophical and religious self understanding.

            Resituating this in the perspective of metaphysics and of non-critical religious behavior, together with the scientific revolution and the discoveries of technology, can contribute to rethinking the gene-alogy of values. Abandoning its closed society, the West which had come to consider itself to be the mankind of universal reason, now discovers and recognizes the contributions of other cultures. And though the West claims for itself the prerogative of spiritual univers-ality with regard to "human rights", it should be noted that those rights appear only in the course of a progressive awareness of the other in his or her otherness and hence in his or her proper culture. Interrelational differentiation is at work in the recognition by which everyone becomes a citizen of the world, but it is always against the background of a new otherness operative at the level of racial or sexual differences.

            3) In fact, the discovery of subjectivity is recent; it is a con-tribution from beyond modernity which interprets critically the lived appropriation of subjectivity. The I is no longer a priori the rational subject, but is self in the light of customs and cultural interchange. The I who discovers itself as "oneself like any other" is relevant only to the universal rights of humankind in general. But we must ask if there is not a still more specific distinctiveness or identity relevant not to the simple universality shared by all men, but to a part of humankind whose recognition as properly personal is made possible only by their sexed affectivity. Thus the attainment of the human is not yet "personal" as long as it has not learned to recognize its own differentiation as constitutive of humanity.

            The sexual difference is understood immediately as a rela-tional truth, which is spoken in the reciprocal and constitutive open-ness of the two sexes, male and female, the one calling the other as the other of the self. This new interchange of "sense" makes it possible to rethink values from the interior of the differentiating dimensionality of the sexes for they can be understood constitutively only as relative to each other. This path of understanding oneself as personal interiority passes through the constitutive otherness of every person in his/her embodied being as incomplete, precisely as this is manifested at the edge of desire. As we have seen in the analysis of affectivity, this induces the proper character of differ-entiated recognition in one’s lived bodiliness, and therefore in the context of a desiring sexuality.

            Here the dimension of person is linked to the radical polarity which already is the sexed difference at the dawn of life, and which serves as the foundation of every human relation. As radical, it provides the foundation for the situation of the person as person, for the person is always relational with respect to the other sex and, thereby, to the truth of his/her whole behavior. But beyond itself, beyond the very experience of sexuality which is only a sign of the person, the person is also the ultimate goal at which desire aims.

            The modernization of values has taken account thus far of the cultural and racial differences of humanity in general, but it is on the way to becoming aware of the sexed difference which is the life of the senses. This is not only the meaning of actual sexual desire, but colors the whole of life with a correlative and reciprocal truth. Every project of a society of persons, be it a socio-political or a religious society, must be rethought in the light of the new awareness of the sexed difference. The hermeneutics of person has radicalized itself: the truth and action of the senses present themselves to us in their primordial reversibility, which is the sexed difference in its cultural multi-dimensionality.

CONCLUSION

            Our project was to grasp in the affective interrelation of feeling and being affected, as well as in its expression in language, the ontological foundation of our living together, our life-world. It is on that basis that every encounter with others is constituted and that the different facets of life exist as concrete and meaningful parti-cipations. However, while mobilizing the actors in affective space, the ethical character of encounter belongs to a dimension which not only appeals to desire at the phenomenal level of lived perception, but realizes one’s presence as unique. This is because the encounter is for the subject an infinite invitation based on the excellence of one’s gift of existence. Desire surmounts itself by the requirements of its orientation towards others and thereby opens itself to the excellence of the gift of existence in the other which enables it to receive from the gift of being. Hence, to love signifies the search which is simul-taneously both immanent and transcendent. This is supported by the creative gesture of an appeal or vocation addressed to the whole human community. In this light it can be seen that ethical value be-longs not to the horizonal order of a single milieu as a life-world, but to the "flesh of the world" in as much as "creating difference" expresses an infinite transcendence of the senses.

NOTES

            1. M. Merleau-Ponty, "L`Orient et la Philosophie", in Les philosophes célèbres (Paris: L. Mazenod), p. 15.

            2. M. Heidegger, Etre et Temps trad. francaisç F. Vezin (Paris: Galliniard, 1986), [par. 72], p. 439; [par. 79], p. 447.

            3. H.-G. Gadamer, Verite et Méthode (Paris: Seuil, 1976), p. 147.

            4. P. Ricoeur, Toi méme comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990), pp. 388s.

            5. E. Levinas, Humanisme de l’autre homme (Montpellier: Fata morgane, 1972), p. 37.

            6. M. Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Golimord, 1964), p. 324.

            7. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenologie de la perception (Paris: Gollimord, 1945), pp. i-xv.

            8. E. Levinas, Humanisme de l‘autre homme (Montpellier: Fata morgane, 1972), p. 47.

            9. P. Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990), p. 264.

            10. M. Heidegger, L‘Etre et le temps, trad. francaisç (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), [ch. 76], pp. 457s.

            11. J.P. Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1960)., pp. 323, 344, 369.

            12. M. Heidegger, idem, p. 453.