15.4.20, Merleau - Ponty, knitting and existentialism
‘My body is not an object like others, it is me. If I sit down with my knitting... I might have to hunt for my knitting needles but I don't hunt for my hands and fingers.'
And again: '...the idea of consciousness as a 'chiasm'. The word 'chiasm'... comes from the Greek letter chi (which looks like a cross) and it denotes exactly that crossed intertwining shape... The interwoven figure calls to mind two hands grasping each other, or the way a woollen thread loops back to grip itself in a knitting stitch... 'the hold is held'. For Merleau-Ponty it was the perfect way of making sense of the connection between consciousness and the world. Each clasps the other, as if by criss-crossed, knitted links.'
I really like this analogy between knitting and the links between consciousness and the world.
Bakewell, S. (2016) At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others London, Vintage
‘My body is not an object like others, it is me. If I sit down with my knitting... I might have to hunt for my knitting needles but I don't hunt for my hands and fingers.'
And again: '...the idea of consciousness as a 'chiasm'. The word 'chiasm'... comes from the Greek letter chi (which looks like a cross) and it denotes exactly that crossed intertwining shape... The interwoven figure calls to mind two hands grasping each other, or the way a woollen thread loops back to grip itself in a knitting stitch... 'the hold is held'. For Merleau-Ponty it was the perfect way of making sense of the connection between consciousness and the world. Each clasps the other, as if by criss-crossed, knitted links.'
I really like this analogy between knitting and the links between consciousness and the world.
Bakewell, S. (2016) At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others London, Vintage