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The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics

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After teaching and writing about the phenomenology of the body and Merleau-Ponty for three decades, I am often asked what of his works to start with and I usually say this one for the more serious reader. The essays are engaging and complex and go to the heart of Merleau-Ponty's perspective on how embodiemnt is our way of knowing the world and expressing it. "The Child's Relations with Others" is a brilliant extrapolation from psychological studies of how infants dwell in a shared embodiment and world with other infants and persons, a prereflective realm of affect and perception. This experience will remain as an acquisition throughout life that will surface in love and friendship--the echo of the infant's shared body with others. It may also be repressed by abuse, and Merleau-Ponty looks at this, long before others. "Eye and Mind" is the most concise articulation of both Merleau-Ponty's later poetic "re-languaging" of philosophy and his notion of the artist as expressing our "reversible" relationship with the world around us through a heightening of aspects of perception--where part of what we perceive is how we appear AS IF WE WERE being perceived by that object. It articulates how we only "come to ourselves" through the world, and how the artists expresses this journey of perception and imagination. The other essays are equally powerful.