La fine del mondo.

Orizzonte e fondamento nell’ontologia indiretta di Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Authors

  • Paola Pazienti

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13136/thau.v10i2.217

Keywords:

World, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ernesto De Martino, Institution, apocalypse

Abstract

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the world could be intended, on the one hand, as a structure of horizon drawn around an individual or a social group, which can be declined into a plurality of “phenomena-of-the-world”, both real or virtual; on the other, as a primordial ground or “flesh of the world”, which re-proposes the metaphysical-theological question of the foundation. This essay attempts to provide an analysis of the dynamic of institution and sedimentation at the base of every cultural world and its exposure to the risk of “the end of the world”, as formulated by the Italian anthropologist Ernesto De Martino in his last and unfinished project about the possibility of psychopathological and cultural apocalypses. Our thesis is
that Merleau-Ponty’s final phenomenological ontology, deployed in The Visible and the Invisible, receives new light from this interpretation, especially for what concerns the use of a mythical language in an indirect approach to Being.

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Published

2022-11-28