Abstracts Philosophy, Religion, and Theology

L'absente de tous bouquets: linguistic negativity in Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty

by Berndt Michael Sellheim

What is our opening upon the world? What is the relationship between this opening - its tactility, depth and reach - and the language with which we seek to express it? Poetry and philosophy are frequently considered in opposition, but here, pushing up against the limits and possibilities of expression, in the face of 'raw' perception, they speak of a common opening upon experience. Both disciplines begin in a sense of wonder that we find ourselves in a meaningful world, and each takes the exploration of that 'meaning' to be the first question of existence. Their divergence, and the manifold paths that proliferate within each individual discipline, arrives in how this question is unfolded and engaged. – Although the opposition between the disciplines is an ancient one, one that continues to this day, some theorists do attempt to merge these genres, and in fact see the possibilities of exploring this phenomenological opening as existing only within the coupling of the two. This thesis will look at how such a coupling is theorised in Jena Romanticism, and examine the way in which it is formulated and executed in two of the 20th Century's most original and important thinkers, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The central question is why, in the responses offered by both these philosophers, modes of 'indirect' expression are frequently privileged over more 'direct' logico-discursive language. The inquiry will be engaged thematically and in the linguistic form of the work itself.