intentional arc

Compiled with AI assistance and selectively reviewed. Please consult the cited passages; the books remain the authoritative source. About this companion

Editorial synthesis · provisional

Definition

The intentional arc is Merleau-Ponty’s account of the bodily integration through which past experience, future orientation, practical powers and social situations form a meaningful field of action. It links perception and movement with acquired habits and projects before detached reflection. The corpus treats this as embodied situated openness, not a private will that invents its world.

Explanation

RB2 introduces the arc as projecting a person’s past, future, human milieu and physical, ideological and moral situations around their present activity. The phrase names an integrated orientation rather than a line connecting an already complete inner subject to an independently neutral scene.

The later phenomenological discussion joins body schema and intentional arc in explaining how experience, skill, affect and culture sediment into a bodily style. Practical capacities are already at work when a pianist meets the keyboard or a person grasps a cup without calculating each movement.

This openness is neither arbitrary projection nor causal sovereignty. RB2 makes capacities answerable to scale, gravity and resistance, while AB retains the term in its named phenomenological lineage. The proposed subentry therefore distinguishes an arc of situated engagement from an isolated act of deliberate intention.

Scope and attribution

Retain the Merleau-Ponty-attributed subentry.

AB — The Actual Book

Merleau-Ponty’s arc belongs to the lived-body account alongside body schema.

Occurrence locators: Notes: 242.

RB2 — The Real Book, Volume II: Becoming Is Being

History, projects and situation are integrated through practical bodily orientation.

Occurrence locators: 150, 153, 154.

Background used in the editorial explanation

Named theories and mechanisms are distinguished from neighboring background, homonyms and the author’s own synthesis. Reproduced AI passages retain their separate voice.