Making Sense of Suffering: Merleau-Ponty and Keats's "Vale of Soul-Making"

Unlike the traditional view of suffering in philosophy and theology as a deviation from the ideal, John Keats's vale of soul-making attends to the potentiality of the suffering body in the world for fashioning the identities of the modern subject. Keats thereby exhibits a notion of the body that shows more affinity with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on the primary role of perception in knowledge than with John Locke's empiricist account of sensation. Turning to the prereflective experience, Merleau-Ponty concedes the limits of reasoning in the face of an opaque world and hints at a quality similar to Keats's negative capability.