Abstract

The concept of embodiment found in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception requires us to revise our self-understanding in two primary ways. First, it requires that we understand the body, rather than the 'mind,' 'soul,' or 'self,' as the true subject of experience. Second, it requires that we understand the body not as a physical 'thing' but as an open temporal process of creative expression. This dissertation focuses on the implications these ideas have for the question of freedom, clarifying in what way a bodily phenomenology of perception is also a phenomenology of personal existence. Merleau-Ponty's analysis of the temporality of personal existence demonstrates the relevance of the Freudian notions of repression and "working though" to an understanding of personal identity as a creative work-in-progress. The dissertation concludes with a study of freedom as the authentic expression of the potentialities of one's life-experiences as an individual, embodied historical subject. Merleau-Ponty's concepts of artistic expression and first-order speech are examined in order to show how the possibility of freedom lies in the creative responsiveness of a life to its own ecstatically temporal structure. The dissertation shows that the body subject is a person for whom freedom is at stake, and that, although nothing compels us to seek freedom, the creative potentialities of our embodied situation, like those of the work of art before it is brought into being, call out for its expression