I finished the book on Husserl and decided to make one more stretch into Maurice Merleau-Ponty, yet another phenomenologist, an associate of Sartre and Camus, and greatly influenced by Husserl and Heidegger.
It did not take long to feel the impact. Merleau-Ponty saw art, music, and phenomenological philosophy as the solution to our modern entrapment by scientism and technocracy. We have lost touch with the world around us. We are told to ignore meaning for the sake of technology. What is meaningful is not important. That’s just a subjective product of your own mind. Science, on the other hand, is real! MP says, no. Actually the world of perception and meaning is real. Science is merely a shadow of that reality. But the biggest light that turned on for me was this…
It is not so much what I developed in my phenomenological model I have worked on for over a decade. It’s that I did develop it! I stepped beyond the world of corporations, technocracy, and “the natural attitude.” In doing so I stepped into a world of perceptual meaning that transcends the technocratic order. That was Merleau-Ponty’s point.
And to prove this point, I am finding true commonality, true empathy (though not necessarily ideological agreement) with the likes of Leftist Marxists such as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Camus, with national socialists such as Heidegger, and with Carmelite saints such as Edith Stein. There is a commonality of meaning that transcends the awful state in which we find ourselves, whereby I can reach the humanity of a wide array of fellow travelers, most with whom I disagree at the lower, more vulgar domain of politics.
*That* is why we need art, and music, and… phenomenology. Folks, we do not have much time. We need a new way of thinking, a new way of communicating, and pathway to transcendent empathy.