Freedom and action after Merleau-Ponty finding the ground on which freedom is enacted

Abstract: In this dissertation I address the ontological implications of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of freedom and action. In problematising and overcoming many of the objectivist approaches to perception and experience, Merleau-Ponty’s ontological approach is compelling in accounting for these phenomena. However, neither the embodied subject or flesh is wholly convincing in this regard as both take for granted the appearance of the subject. To this end, I argue that Renaud Barbaras’ living being offers a means to solve this by accounting for the possibility of intentionality as the movement of a metabolic desire. This account achieves the neutrality that Merleau-Ponty’s silence aimed at to avoid an objectivist approach. Desire achieves this by not only accounting for the presence of a subject but its appearance as a living being which desires the manifestation of its world in perception and so finds itself in continual movement. This metabolising of transcendence and the desire of a manifest world that continually drives to metabolise offer an ontological account of freedom and action a strong ontological ground. However, despite Barbaras only alluding to their role, I argue that freedom and action are not incidental to a living being but fundamental to it. This is because Barbaras describes a fundamental correlation between immanent subject and transcendent world as they are mutually affective. Thus, I conclude that freedom, that which we desire or are able to desire of the world, and action, that which we accomplish in the world, are exactly what this correlation describes.M.A. (Philosophy