Space in Merleau-Ponty’s Existentialist Phenomenology

The notion of space is one of the most interesting and attractive topics in Merleau-Ponty̕ s phenomenology of perception. Unlike Husserl who looks for certain facts in the field of pure consciousness, i.e., in the field devoid of natural assumptions such as time and place, but more like Heidegger’s idea of Being- in- the- world as the essential state of human beings; Merleau-Ponty believes that cognition of space is an a priori condition for our knowledge of objects and events. In addition, through more reflection on the psycho-physiological findings in contemporary psychology, Merleau-Ponty argues that our body is the ground or horizon by which objects take spatial features, and therefore it is the source of a dual relation between the subject and the world. He reiterates the point that all of our experiences followed by creation of new spatial levels that formed successively, and that our experiences are the result of the formation of new spatial levels of embodiment subject. A significant result of this view is that the individual subject is a historical one whose moments are formed by successive experiences in which the body’s spatial levels are aggregated to form a more complete special level compared with the previous ones.