Merleau-Ponty, Space, Teleology

Like Heidegger and Sartre, Merleau-Ponty seeks to reveal the spatiality of living experience that precedes the scientific concept of space. As it is for them, space for him is, in contrast with the Newtonian concept, oriented, not absolute, and, in particular, centripetal with respect to the subject of experience. Unlike them, for whom the orientation is constituted by the instrumentality of objects, for Merleau-Ponty, the Gestalt structure of space suffices to orient it, i. e. towards a perceived object that occupies its center, between two horizons--not merely the standard far one, but, a near one, as well, namely, the body of the perceiver. Despite that variation, Merleau-Ponty's concept of space, and therefore, his concept of behavior, is as teleological as are those of his predecessors. For, each implies that motility is always oriented towards some experiential object, which means that only some external element can be the occasion any behavior. They also conversely imply that if one suddenly found oneself in the some amorphous wilderness, one would be unable to move, because without any ready-to-hand item in one's purview, the space in which one could move does not exist, according to the teleological concept. Now, as has been noted, Merleau-Ponty does also recognize a spatiality that he acknowledges as centrifugal with respect to the subject, namely purposeless motion, but he dismisses it as virtual and, even, non-existent. He might have, instead, realized that such a concept of space alone explains how motility in wilderness conditions is possible. If so, then, he might have arrived at the conclusion that such space is even more primitive than teleological lived space.