What if we were to take Merleau-Ponty as a creative writer rather than a philosopher? Would we be able to analyse his texts in line of Bergson-Deleuze line of affective intuition? I think yes, of course...
Intuition is a method originally developped by Bergson. It means that we are able to connect with (if we make an effort, be attentive enough)what we normally, in the spacial time dimension, don't see. What we don't see, according to Bergson, is the world in the state of becoming, an image movement, in the form of an already passed away and not yet happened.
If we put aside all the philosophical evidence against it (including the arguments he himself made), I think Merleau-Ponty was already seeing that, or more appropriately, intuiting that. As if he was an artist trapped in a philosophers mind, he was putting forth his intuition that forced limits of sense for him, right after this going forward, he was using his own philosophical device to get back on the line of thought that blocked the way through which his intuition wants to go. This must be the reason for the difficulty of reading him, although I don't see any but academics say so. They are having difficulty to make sense of him because of this intuition / reason intertwining. And they are happy to be limited to the arguments he made in the formal way, discarding his intuitive movements. Can it get more dry than this?
And what would have happened if, from the beginning, he was identified not as a philosopher but an artist? Would he be still discarded as hard to read and ambigious? Don't think so. He would be praised I believe, as being a creative artist.
More important question: since he would not have the philosophical device that made him stumble and retreat, blocking the way which his intuition directs him to, would he be a better artist than the philosopher he was? Well, this is a hard and speculative question, but I will go with "yes"...
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