Abstract
Merleau-Ponty holds that Husserl's descriptions of the body go beyond the conceptual framework of subject-object ontology to which his philosophy is usually thought to conform. Merleau-Ponty says of his own philosophy that it is founded on the circularity in the body; that is, on the fact that the perceptibility and perception of the body are, from the ontological point of view, one and the same.
The inseparability of these two aspects of the body he calls flesh (chair). According to Husserl, I perceive my body such that in a certain perceived object I also understand sensations roused by the perception of that object - I observe the "consequential parallel" between two series of objective and subjective phenomena.
Husserl argues that the unity of the body should be expressed as a double unity, and the body as subject-object. In this article I analyse Husserl's example of two hands of the same body touching each other and, in agreement with Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, I attempt to show that the body can appear to itself as an object only on the basis of a differentiation of the body as of a certain field of perceiving.
The body as a double unity of subject and object is therefore grounded in the body as a pre-objective and pre-subjective field; that is, in flesh as Merleau-Ponty understands it. This is also the point of departure for an original conception of ontology as we find it in his later philosophy.