Ocean Journey -Between Horizons

Artikel i vetenskaplig tidskrift, 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?