A PRESENT NON-PRESENCE : THE STRUCTURE OF EXPERIENCE ACCORDING TO MERLEAU-PONTY AND PATOČKA A PRESENT NON-PRESENCE : The presence non-present: The structure of experience in Merleau-Ponty and Patočka
Abstract
The present paper is based on an assumption that M. Merleau-Ponty and J.
Patočka penetrate by their proper ways into a specific domain constituted by the mutual relations between the me and all the beings which are given to him where a fundamental ontological reciprocity between the me and the world appears. In our first part, we try to ensure an access to this domain by using the phenomenological method, that is the analysis of experience.
We start from the elementary phenomenological fact that what is given in experience transcends its actual empirical donation, than we proceed to determine the content of this transcendence and we propose the concept of the transempirical nature of beings: the being transcends every single actual experience, but not every possible experience. On this ground, we try to reconstruct the general ontological basis which leads us inevitably at the limits of phenomenology.
Nevertheless, in our second part, we try to demonstrate - in the form of a hypothesis in progress - that we can probably avoid trespassing the limits of metaphysics if we accept to trespass the borders between phenomenology and structuralism, in the sense of a structural ontology of possibilities.