Karl: Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Temporality
From Whooshup.org
Crucial Conversation
I think Dreyfus thinks Heidegger went "mildly" astray, got lost, and that we might save him, but only by throwing the issue to Merleau-Ponty. Dreyfus wants to gently "correct" Heidegger by using the perception angle to help Temporality make sense - that's where familiarity comes in.
This has to do with exactly what Dreyfus tries to bring in when teaching Division II - but could not without leaving Heidegger - namely the issue of perception and embodiment - the two things Merleau-Ponty concentratse on. Merleau-Ponty improves on Heidegger's temporality by making better sense of familairty through embodiment.
Merleau-Ponty's key book is The Phenomenology of Perception, in it he is doing the same thing as Heidegger does with hammering, only he does not "take for granted" the way the hammering Dasein perceives everything in its coping and its background world. Merleau-Ponty recapituilates much of what Heidegger asserts, only in terms of perception, using concepts like maximum grip and intentional arc, instead of Heidegger's system of ontology, using concepts we know as coping in the world based on Dasein's on-the-basis-of-which's.
Merleau-Ponty is all about perception. He makes the case that it is our perceptual system that unifies the past, present and future. When you perceive something, you keep it - it just gets "buried" under later perceptions. And the things you will perceive in a few moments or a few weeks - they are all lined up and ready to hit you (from the future) because of your "intentional arc"
The "arc" is formed by all the lines that connect your body to the "equipment" that you "intend" to use in the future. Imagine a bunch of lines that connect my fingers to the keys I am about to type: My body is taking my past perceptions, re-experienced in the now, to press into the future, through a complex of lines which describe my intentional arc. I have learned to type, I am very very familiar with the keyboard, and I now use that embodied skill to perform the task of typing this line, a future which I am just now pressing into, and has just now become "deposited" in my past.
