The Body and the Book: Reading Being and Nothingness

Abstract

In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty reminds us of the words of Edmund Husserl’s assistant, Eugen Fink, that phenomenology is wonder in the face of the world and a corresponding return to things (PP xiii). Still, Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty wrote about phenomenology, and certainly we come across their thoughts only in books. On one level I do not want to make very much of this; that is, I do not claim that the philosophical enterprise can be reduced to the act of writing. There is no need for me to take such a heavy burden upon myself since my point is a simple hermeneuical one, namely, that certain books have a unity that is more than the sum of their chapters.