Meleau-Ponty's Aesthetic Interworld: From Primordial Percipience to Wild Logos

The overall aim of this paper is to defend the value of the arts as uniquely instructive regarding philosophical questions. Specifically, I aim to achieve two things: firstly, to show that through the phenomenological challenge to dualist and monist ontologies the key debate in aesthetics regarding subjective response and objective judgment is reconfigured and resolved. I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s analyses complement and complete Kant’s project. Secondly, I propose that through his phenomenological interrogations of the creative process the issue of the viability of his relational non-dualist ontology is defended against accusations that it has not gone beyond dualism or that it has collapsed into a monism.