Ocean Journey -Between Horizons

Journal article, 2013

Could it be that there is pure thinking and that sensuous experience comes, as it were, afterwards? Or is it like the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty says: that we can only think about the world that we are a part of, the only world we know? That what is given a priori and what is given as an experience exist at the same time? “I abandon myself to it and plunge into its mystery, it ‘thinks itself within me’, I am the sky itself as it is drawn together and unified, and as it begins to exist for itself; my consciousness is saturated with this limitless blue,” writes Merleau-Ponty. This essay discusses the act of in-the-world-being experienced in dense moments during a voyage that lets us return to the ‘things themselves.’ In the following it will be examined how the moment in a given situation captures a way to knowledge, how the relation of knower to known, subject to object, always take place in a specific situation. How is sensuous experience related to questions of: what is knowledge, what is experience, perception? What part does the perceived moment play in transferring knowledge by experiencing? Can we talk of a knowledge of discovery, an articulating rather than a confirming knowledge?