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(1986) Phenomenological explanations, Dordrecht, Springer.
The different chapters of the fragmentary text of The Visible and the Invisible we have are structured into a polemic against empiricist operational thought, reflexive analysis, negativist, dialectical and intuitionist modes of thought; the work sets out to define an essentially, intrinsically, interrogative mode of cognition - a "question-knowing."1 And throughout this work, Merleau-Ponty keeps up a polemic against every kind of positivism - the positivism of empiricism; but also that of reflective philosophy (with "all the positivist bric-a-brac of "concepts,' "judgments,' "relations'..."2), the positivism of being in itself which is, in Sartre, the counterpart of the negativist conception of mind proper to dialectical thought; the positive essences presupposed by phenomenological intuitionism; and the positive intuition of immediate existence in Bergsonism. The ontology it was preparing proposes that being itself is not to be positively conceived, that "the existing world exists in the interrogative mode,"3 "in a sort of gliding, beneath the yes and the no."4 What could it mean to conceive being itself in the interrogative mode? What could be the purpose of such a project?
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-94-010-9610-2_3
Full citation:
Lingis, A. (1986). Being in the interrogative mood, in Phenomenological explanations, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 41-57.
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