Abstract
What experiences count as paradigmatic for a philosophical description of interpersonal encounters? Is it the experience of our sharing a similar view, such as when two people contemplate the same countryside? Or the experience of our ultimate difference, such as when I realize that I cannot feel the pain of the other and die his or her death? Merleau-Ponty often embraces the first possibility, while Husserl, who understood his philosophy as an "egology," goes in the second direction - when, for instance, he delimits the "sphere of my own" as something which is not shared by others. Nevertheless, as much as Merleau-Ponty draws on experiences of sharing, he does not intend to lose the irreducible perspective of the individual self as being different from the other.
To avoid the dissolution of the individual perspective into an undifferentiated commonality, he goes back to several sources, Husserl's 5th Cartesian Meditation being one of them. The first aim of this chapter is to demonstrate just this.
The chapter's second aim is also connected to the primacy of sharing in Merleau-Ponty: sharing does not preclude a possible exposure of the individual. Or, to put it differently, sharing and exposure are interconnected.
This again is related to the concept of experience that Merleau-Ponty takes from the phenomenological (Husserlian) philosophy or, more precisely, from its appropriation of the Cartesian cogito.