Childhood in the Philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The barbarian thinking of children as an expression of the world of life

Abstract

In this paper an analysis will be conducted on some of the works of Maurice MerleauPonty, in which the phenomenologist provides a description of childhood or where the child image will report any relevant aspect within his theory. The description of the child as a place inhabited by many places, as a primary silence or asthat unspeakable, shows us the childhood as the opening of a new field of experience, as the institution of a new sense. Childhood will not only be a methodological interest object in his psychology studies, but also that primal going-forward of experience, the mere potentiality yet not thrown (or rather, not yet been thrown) in the world where everything will, necessarily, have sense.