Sujeto, corporalidad y hábito en la teoría de la percepción de Simone Weil

GARCÍA, ESTEBAN ANDRÉS

Escritos de Filosofía

Academia Nacional de Ciencias de Buenos Aires

Lugar: Buenos Aires; Año: 1998 p. 121 - 146

0325-4933

Focusing on Simone Weil´s early philosophical writings (c. 1930), which develop an original and almost unattended theory of perception, this paper attempts to draw a definition of the subject of perception as a corporal support of habits. The habitual learning of movement patterns is the key to an unceasing process of auto-appropriation that takes place on the basis and against the limit of an even more originary difference of the subject respect to itself -a difference that is linked to temporality-, and which intertwins itself with the birth of a world as a significant surrounding. The structural resemblance that Weil traces between the skill of handling a tool or driving a vehicle, the perception of the object through sensations, and the grasping of meaning through a written text, points to a holistic depiction of human experience on the model of the constitution of sense, that will provide the central intuition of Weil´s later theory of "reading" ("lecture"). The paper attends to the inspiration Weil found both in W. James´ psychology and F. Ravaisson´s philosophy of habit, specially concerning the delimitation of the originary space of "ambiguité" between subject and object, spirit and matter, freedom and determination, in which experience takes place. It also underlines the many ways in which these early essays and lessons of Weil can be seen as anticipating some of the key concepts of Merleau-Ponty´s Phénomenologie de la Perception.