A experiência encarnada da liberdade em Merleau-Ponty

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the constitution of freedom from the perspective of embodied experience, drawing on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961). It begins with a critique of the classical prejudices of rationalism and empiricism, which separated body and consciousness and thereby limited the understanding of perception. By situating the experience of the world in the lived body, Merleau-Ponty shows that perception is a way of inhabiting the world, grounded in a direct relation with the environment. Perception constitutes a living openness, through which the body organizes space, orients gestures, and generates meaning within experience. From this perspective, the body emerges as a subject shaped by habits and motor schemas that structure its relation to the world, such that consciousness is realized in contact with what surrounds it. Freedom is thus rethought as a situated potential, actualized in the relation between the subject and the possibilities offered by the environment, manifesting itself as a style (presence) that reappropriates the past and projects the future. Finally, the relation with others is analyzed as a fundamental dimension of corporeality: intercorporeality indicates that the body opens itself to other presences within the same sensible field, where alterity is expressed through the visibility of the other. In this way, freedom assumes a shared character, rooted in the world, within a field in which body, world, and existence are continuously and inseparably intertwined.