Glen A Mazis
Glen A. Mazis is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Penn State Harrisburg, Emeritus. He has also taught at University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, Louisiana State University, Northern Kentucky University, St. Lawrence University, Wesleyan University, Soka University, and SUNY Stony Brook. He is the author of EMOTION AND EMBODIMENT: FRAGILE ONTOLOGY (Peter Lang, 1993), THE TRICKSTER, MAGICIAN AND GRIEVING MAN: RETURNING MEN TO EARTH (Inner Traditions, 1994) and EARTHBODIES: REDISCOVERING OUR PLANETARY SENSES (SUNY, 2002), HUMANS, ANIMALS, MACHINES: BLURRING BOUNDARIES (SUNY, 2008) and MERLEAU-PONTY AND THE FACE OF THE WORLD; SILENCE, ETHICS, IMAGINATION AND POETIC ONTOLOGY (SUNY, 2016) . He has published more than 50 essays on aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy in journals and collections, as well as numerous essays on time, emotion, imagination, memory, art, film, dreams, embodiment, animality, archetypal psychology, gender issues, ethics, ecology, technology, ecospirituality, etc. He is also a poet who gives readings, performances, and has published more than 90 poems in leading literary reviews and also a collection, THE RIVER BENDS IN TIME (Anaphora Literary Press, 2012), THE BODY IS A DANCING STAR (Orchard Street Press, 2020), and BODIES OF SPACE AND TIME (Kelsay Books, 2022). Glen is a runner, meditator, now a sailor, and needs to have opportunities to embrace of the natural world.
Phone: cell: 717-201-4272
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The book begins with Merleau-Ponty’s warning right before he died in 1961 that he foresees postmodern culture falling into an “endless nightmare” in which the algorithmic manipulation of data would usurp a true understanding of the nature of humanity and reality. Merleau-Ponty’s articulation of how understanding the nature of human embodiment transforms our perspective on ourselves and the world is contrasted with the current fetishization of the body in popular culture. This is a leitmotif throughout the book that underscores the importance of the insights of silence, felt solidarity, another sort of imagination than mere fancy and poetic language.
The book has three parts, which begins with a reconsideration of the role of silence in Merleau-Ponty’s thought as well as original phenomenological insights into the deeper nature of silence. Rather than being considered as a lack, silence is seen to be a powerful presence that applies not only to humans, but to the natural world. Gestural meaning is seen to underlie not only human language, but the indirect voices of the beings of the world. All the beings of the world are seen to have expressive faces. The recognition of the nonverbal power of the face to involve others in the depths of the historical contingent worlds of others is key to an ethic of felt solidarity with others. Merleau-Ponty’s ending the Phenomenology of Perception with a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is seen in its significance to the author’s shared sense of the importance of felt solidarity, in contrast to transcendent face of Levinas’s ethics. The importance of Merleau-Ponty’s ethics to postmodern global culture as well as be presupposed but not acknowledged traditional ethics (and Levinas) is articulated.
The last part of the book begin with an exploration of what I call “physiognomic imagination” that is traced out in its gradual development in Merleau-Ponty’s work in contrast to the imagination of fancy or make-believe. This imagining brings out the depths of perceptual meaning and is akin to Gaston Bachelard’s work on “material imagination.” This sort of sense is seen to lead to the appreciation of poetic language as key to the revitalization of meaning that seems to have become an object of despair in postmodern philosophies and culture. The work brings out ties to Bachelard and Saint-Eupéry not previously appreciated, a telling contrast to Levinas, brings forth both a new sense of ethics and the first developed appreciation of an ethics in Merleau-Ponty’s work, as well as seeing how Merleau-Ponty’s poetic use of language is necessary for any philosophy that claims to truly fathom human embodiment.