The Preface to Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: A Re-Introduction 3031513282, 9783031513282

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The Preface to Merleau-Ponty‘s Phenomenology of Perception: A Re-Introduction

Rajiv Kaushik

The Preface to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception: A Re-Introduction

Rajiv Kaushik

The Preface to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception: A Re-Introduction

Rajiv Kaushik Department of Philosophy Brock University St Catharines, ON, Canada

ISBN 978-3-031-51328-2    ISBN 978-3-031-51329-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51329-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

To Frank.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Outline of the Chapters   9 2 “Facts and Essences” 17 Facts and Essences in the Natural and Phenomenological Attitudes  19 A Vision of Facts and Essences According to the “First Rule”  24 The Phenomenological Epochē  27 3 Intentionality 31 Beyond Representationalism and into the Lived-Body  33 Motivation and the Unmotivated Upsurge of the World  40 Operative Intentionality  45 4 The Incomplete Reduction 49 The Impossibility of a Complete Reduction  53 Problem of Time and Space  55 Incomplete Ontology  57

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Contents

5 Phenomenology and Non-phenomenology 61 Is Phenomenology the Rigorous Science?  63 Ontology and Nature Reconsidered  68 Phenomenology and the Psyche Reconsidered  72 Does Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology Result in a Novel?  78 6 Concluding Remarks 87 7 Epilogue: On the Continued Relevance of the Preface Today 93 Index103

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract  This chapter introduces the book. It gives an outline of the chapters. Before this, it gives some historical context to the writing of the Preface of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. The chapter also discusses Merleau-Ponty’s own criticism of Phenomenology of Perception in his later work, The Visible and the Invisible. There, Merleau-Ponty finds his term “tacit ego” problematic. I argue that this does not mean we need to abandon the earlier phenomenology in favor of the later ontology, that the Preface is already on the way to an ontological articulation of phenomenology which is unique to Merleau-Ponty. Keywords  Phenomenology • Husserl • Heidegger • “Tacit cogito,” language and experience • Ontology • Psychoanalysis • Arts

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 R. Kaushik, The Preface to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception: A Re-Introduction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51329-9_1

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Merleau-Ponty completed his main thesis, Phénomenologie de la perception (Phenomenology of Perception),1 toward the end of 1943–1944 school year at the École Normale Supérieure. It was written under the supervision of Émile Bréhier and defended in 1945. Before then, as a student, Merleau-Ponty had already attended Edmund Husserl’s 1929 Sorbonne lectures and Georges Gurvitch’s 1928–1930 courses on German philosophy. In April 1939, at the suggestion of one of Husserl’s former students, Jean Hering, he was the first visitor to the newly inaugurated Husserl archives in Leuven, Belgium. There he read the manuscripts later published as Ideas II, Experience and Judgment, and sections 28 to 72 of the Crisis of the European Sciences, as well as the transcription of a note titled “Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature: The Originary Ark, the Earth, Does Not Move.” These would sustain much of his thought throughout his career until his death in 1961. It is no understatement to say the Phenomenology of Perception is itself monumental. It emphasizes the elements of phenomenology signaling the death of Cartesianism. It offers detailed and systematic analyses of perception and embodiment, revealing them as sites from which the traditional problems of mind and body may be addressed and reconsidered. It does this by describing perception and embodiment in terms beyond the inside and outside, or subject and object. In doing so, it gives perception and embodiment a philosophical dignity that even allows us to think history, politics, or nature in view of them and in new ways. Yet, the Phenomenology of Perception also continually draws from empirical research in psychology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and aesthetics. Even further still, it is an 1  Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phénoménologie de la perception (France: Gallimard, 1945), translated by Donald A.  Landes as Phenomenology of Perception (United Kingdom: Routledge, 2014). Henceforth, cited as PP with French pagination first, then English.

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existentialist work and gives an account of the concrete nature of human freedom. Its Preface was written after both the thesis’ completion and its defense, as a response to its examiners. The Preface does not so much introduce the Phenomenology of Perception but phenomenology in general, the phenomenological method, and its daring consequences. In fact, on its own, the Preface is a significant work in the history of phenomenology partially because of its limpid writerly quality. It discusses four central themes: the requirement in phenomenology to describe rather than theoretically reconstruct things; the phenomenological reduction; the reduction to the essences of experience or the “eidetic reduction”; and intentionality. To read the Preface is to discover a text systematic and detailed as well as enigmatic and open—something more idiosyncratic than one might expect. The present book is anchored in the major themes of the Preface and is in part an introduction addressing its enigmatic and open nature. I hope to draw out the elements of the text complicating it as a simple introduction to phenomenology writ large. The present book is thus also a “reintroduction,” because it does not erase the enigmas and sites of openness of the Preface and even hopes to show that it leads to many of the same ideas crystalized in Merleau-Ponty’s later work. I am attempting to read it and the later work into one another. By “later work,” I mean not only The Visible and the Invisible2 but also the more recently published course notes like Recherches sur l’usage Littéraire du Langage,3 La problème de la

 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Le Visible et l’invisible, suivi de notes de travail (France: Gallimard, 1964), translated by Alphonso Lingis as The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). Henceforth, cited as VI with French pagination first, then English. 3  Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Recherches sur l’usage littéraire du langage: Cours au collège de france, notes, 1953. Genève: MetisPresses, 2013. 2

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parole,4 Institution et passivité,5 etc. With all these posthumously published courses and working notes, it is often difficult to catch the trajectory of Merleau-Ponty’s thought. The book is also a “reintroduction,” then, because it aims to help Merleau-Ponty scholars trying to piece together the oeuvre of a thinker whose writings do not lend themselves to, even resist, systematization. I am thus presupposing at least some familiarity with MerleauPonty’s work and an understanding of some of the classical questions surrounding it: Is there a decisive break between his phenomenology and his ontology, his early and later period? Can he think about language and the language system when he is so oriented toward perception? Do his phenomenology, the sciences, and the arts go together? What is their internal relationship? Perhaps Merleau-Ponty would himself disagree with the very idea of this project. For instance, in a February 1959 Working Note to The Visible and the Invisible, he derides the Phenomenology of Perception as “psychology” because of its implicit Cartesianism.6 This is especially noticeable, Merleau-Ponty thinks, in its early

4  Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Le problem̀e de la parole: Cours au Colleg̀e de France, notes 1953–1954. Genev̀e: Met́isPresses, 2020. 5  Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. L’Institution, Passivité: Notes de Cours au Collège de France (1954–1955) (France: Éditions Belin, 2003), translated by Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey as Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954–1955) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010). Henceforth, cited as IP with French pagination first, then English. 6  VI, pp. 222–223/176.

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account of a “tacit” or “silent” cogito.7 The tacit or silent cogito is an “I think” behind the “I think” on which we consciously or actively reflect. Here is what Merleau-Ponty says about it in The Visible and the Invisible: Is this correct? What I call the tacit cogito is impossible. To have the idea of ‘thinking’ (in the sense of the ‘thought of seeing and of feeling’), to make the ‘reduction,’ to return to immanence and to the consciousness of … it is necessary to have words. It is by the combination of words (with their charge of sedimented significations, which are in principle capable of entering into other relations than the relations that have served to form them) that I form the transcendental attitude, that I constitute the constitutive consciousness.8 The specific problem regarding the tacit cogito is that it remains beyond, rather than within, language; yet, to recuperate it and make it explicit, language is needed. This makes the cogito other to language and linguistic expression. The early work remains a psychology, in other words, because it clings to the idea of a subject that stands as an object for objective investigation. The  This is one relevant passage from Phenomenology of Perception: “Insofar as we believe that, through thought, we are in direct communication with a universe of truth in which we are at one with others…, it is because we take the process of expression for granted, because it figures among our acquisitions. The cogito at which we arrive by reading Descartes … is, then, a spoken cogito, put into words, and for this very reason not attaining its objective, since that part of our existence which is engaged in fixing our life in conceptual forms, and thinking of it as indubitable, is escaping focus and thought. Shall we therefore conclude that language envelops us, and that we are led by it…? This would be to forget half the truth. … I should be unable even to read Descartes’ book, were I not, before any speech can begin, in contact with my own life and thought, and if the spoken cogito did not encounter within me a tacit cogito. This silent cogito was the one Descartes sought when writing his Meditations.” PP, pp. 460–461/423–424. 8  VI, pp. 222–223/171. 7

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apparent paradox of something like a “subject object” can only resolve itself if we assume a moment of consciousness beyond the distinction. Not only that, it requires an immediacy before consciousness and world and even “where the distinction between the true and the false has not yet appeared.”9 For all the work Phenomenology of Perception does to bridge the opposition between perception and thought, the tacit cogito reasserts their mutual exclusion. In fact, as Claude Lefort suggests, to the extent that this tacit cogito marks the pre-­theoretical and prelinguistic way consciousness and the world coincide as if in an instant, we are tempted to say that Merleau-Ponty, “—even better than Husserl—gives metaphysics its completed expression.”10 The later work is certainly an attempt to break from both the philosophy of consciousness and metaphysics, and it does not put the cogito before its operation in language, thought, and perception. It even suggests that phenomenology cannot happen except in language and the play of words. It is certainly evident that Merleau-Ponty increasingly thinks of language and perception within each other so that language is never a purely virtual system but rather embodied. The Preface and its surrounding discussion, I will point out, is also on the way to this internal connection. It has already broken from the “psychology” of Phenomenology of Perception. Why should our own reading of the Preface be so strictly informed by Merleau-Ponty’s harsh superego? Actually, it is not “tacit” but “new” cogito he mentions in the Preface. The former suggests a retracing of experience, the latter an unexpected experience now bursting through and rupturing consciousness. For example, when in the Preface Merleau-Ponty writes about the “unmotivated springing forth of the world,” this defies some of the basic tenets of Husserl’s phenomenology such as 9  Lefort, Claude. “Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” translated by Don Landes in Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. xxvii. 10  Ibid.

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“constituting consciousness.” A reader will notice my stress on the unmotivated springing forth of the world. It conveys a double sense of “inside”: I am always inside the world; and this world is always inside me. The unmotivated springing forth of the world happens both in front and inside consciousness. The new cogito suggests that consciousness and the world do not coincide and maintain a unitary instant but the opposite: each is internally fragile and there is no first event of either to which we can return. The very next sentence—the famous remark about the impossibility of a complete reduction—describes Husserl’s continuous project to inaugurate the phenomenological method but not in terms he would necessarily abide. Phenomenology, for Husserl, does demand a return to the constituting subjective acts of consciousness, not just, as Merleau-Ponty repeatedly remarks in the Preface, to wonder before the world and its irreducibility. Merleau-Ponty’s often gives proto-deconstructionist treatments of other philosophers—exposing their unauthorized thoughts. Even in the Preface he ascribes thoughts to Edmund Husserl that do not in the conventional sense belong to him. The result is an expansion of phenomenology that is surreptitious at the same time. Such unauthorized thoughts, when they appear in Merleau-Ponty’s writings, should be noticed too and their consequences for phenomenology heeded. I am suggesting a reading of Merleau-Ponty, like the ones he often gives of philosophers, which deemphasizes authorial intent. This is what is demanded by the enigmatic and open text itself. Moreover, I will point out, the degree to which Merleau-Ponty’s evolution from phenomenology to ontology constitutes anything like a “turn” depends on the ontology one has in mind. His ontology is surely enigmatic and open too. The Preface suggests an ontology that anticipates some of the insights emphasized in more recent Merleau-Ponty scholarship. It is radical and different from Martin Heidegger’s ontology to the extent it suggests that being

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is external neither to consciousness nor to the beings. It is rather constellated into the relation between consciousness and existence and is in this sense “dehiscent” or “promiscuous”—to borrow terms associated with his last work. It is Merleau-Ponty’s consistent wish to break from the philosophy of consciousness and its metaphysics, even if this wish becomes better and better expressed using the language of his later more ontologically inflected writings.11 Although I anchor this book in the main themes of the Preface, I do not dedicate each chapter to each theme. The reader will notice that the chapters are instead organized around key phrases from the Preface and their explication. The second chapter after this one deals with the problem of “facts and essences” outside and within phenomenology. The third chapter deals with “intentional consciousness,” perhaps the most central theme in phenomenology. The fourth chapter, through the “incompleteness” of phenomenology, discusses the intimacy between intentional consciousness and ontology. The route from the former to the latter implies a criticism of both Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and frees us to think Merleau-Ponty’s original phenomenological-ontology. The fifth chapter discusses the internal relationship between phenomenology and other fields or “nonphenomenology.” There, I give a further consideration of the results of an inter-constellation between phenomenology and ontology as well as the broadened idea of the phenomenological method, unique to Merleau-Ponty, which is already articulated in the Preface.

 “[later essays] shaped by the same desire to break out of the framework of a philosophy of consciousness and that this desire does not only have the effect of engendering an extended critique of the claims from which he had still not freed himself, but that it also animates his language, which is demonstrated through his very practice of a new relation to knowledge.” Ibid., pp. xxviii. 11

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Outline of the Chapters Chapter 2: “Facts and Essences” Merleau-Ponty begins the Preface by pointing out phenomenology’s most glaring tension: it is a philosophy of both facts and essences, he says, whereas the philosophy that focusses on one normally excludes the other. This exclusion, Merleau-Ponty explains, is what Husserl would call a “natural thesis” and is part of the “natural attitude.” This is an attitude that, though it informs our theorizing, is in fact uncritical, unreflective, and merely habituated. Within it, we simply theorize, to find the essential structures that explain contingent facts, we must travel beyond those facts. The second chapter is dedicated to Merleau-Ponty’s account in the Preface of the way one should enter phenomenology so that its claims are no longer apparently untenable. He introduces what he calls phenomenology’s “first rule,” or what Husserl calls “the principle of all principles.”12 This is to describe the phenomenon in its primordiality, i.e., as it is given and without the importation of uncritically adopted theses. The central aim here is to return; as Husserl says, to go “back to the things themselves.” When we describe the phenomenon in its primordiality, we explain away the tensions within phenomenology. The point of description is in this sense also exegetical. We only assume from within the natural attitude that essences are not in the facts and thereby depart from, rather than return to, things. The natural sciences are in this way involved in what Husserl calls a “countersense.” They assume a thesis not derived from experience even while they try to explain that experience. There is however a kind of vision—Husserl calls this “eidetic vision”— capable of seeing the essential structures of contingent facts without involving itself in this countersense. As Merleau-Ponty 12  Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983), pp. 44.

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explains in the Preface, it is only through what Husserl calls the “phenomenological reduction” or the “phenomenological epochē” that we abide by the “first rule” and reacquire this vision. It is through the epochē that we abstain from the theoretical suppositions of the natural attitude and reduce to the free ability of eidetic vision. Within this epochē, then, what initially seemed like an internal tension turns out not to be one at all. The phenomenological attitude is precisely the attitude within which we can grasp the proper essences of the facts. The rigorous description of primordial experience, or how things are given to consciousness, is nothing less than the accomplishment of philosophy itself. But precisely for this reason Husserl liked to say that he was not a philosopher but a phenomenologist. Chapter 3: “Intentionality.” It seems, then, we can only abide the “first rule” within the epochē. There, we consider facts and essences inseparable and within primordial experience or given within consciousness itself. In other words, within the epochē, abiding by the first rule, we do not resort to any kind of transcendence that purports to explain consciousness. In fact, consciousness is no longer explained in terms of representationalism at all. It does not represent the object to itself but is “correlated” to whatever is given to it. This correlation is called “intentionality.” To say that consciousness is intentional is to say that it is always “consciousness of something.” The things that show to it genuinely manifest their being. In effect, intentionality is the region of being between consciousness and thing. Much of the Preface is dedicated to explaining the profound importance of the re-discovery of intentional consciousness. There is less discussion in the text of Merleau-Ponty’s explorations of the livedbody or bodily intentionality, but this is surely one of the important outcomes of phenomenology’s return to intentional consciousness: the body, and its living encounter with things and

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the world, is restored. It is of course a core theme in Phenomenology of Perception itself. Where Husserl describes intentional consciousness in terms of “constitution,” Merleau-Ponty describes bodily intentionality in terms of “motivation.” The body is not primordially caused but motivated to move in the world one way or the other. This suggests the world as a field of affect and investment rather than a pre-existing object for action. The world only seems to pre-exist motivation, requiring re-presentation, after this primordial encounter. I discuss one of the important phrases of the Preface in this connection: “the unmotivated upsurge of the world.” Here, and in reference to some of Merleau-Ponty’s earlier remarks concerning the problem of the other and existence, the unmotivated upsurge of the world constitutes a discrete critique of Husserlian intentionality. For Merleau-Ponty, the world is not only given to or does not happen only in front of consciousness, but is surging up through or within consciousness. The ensuing discussion in the Preface of “operative intentionality” elaborates this crucial claim. The term “operative intentionality” is still borrowed from Husserl, and hence Merleau-Ponty seems to be giving a simple exposition. Yet operative intentionality also defies the usual sense of “intentions” as something cognitive or “act consciousness.” Here intentionality is operative rather than active because it concerns a meaningful existence in which I always already am—noticeable, Merleau-Ponty says, only through its results. What is radical about phenomenology is ultimately that, in looking for the region of being between consciousness and existence, it in fact finds that reflection and meaning are contingent in the sense of unmotivated and not prior to its effects. The unmotivated upsurge of the world is an operative intentionality because it is both needed and unnoticed in experience and reflection. If phenomenology is the accomplishment of philosophy, as suggested in the first chapter, it is so in a paradoxical way because

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it comes back to its basic fragility. This is in one sense an elaboration of Husserl’s phenomenology and in another sense quite a departure: we are learning to interrogate the moment our thought destroys experience by turning both experience and its things into objects13; so we are also learning to think in a way unfamiliar to our usual objectivism. Thus, through his limpid descriptions of embodied-intentionality, Merleau-Ponty offers a criticism of time and space themselves. If time and space are connected to the body’s motivations and the unmotivated upsurge of the world, they can be linked neither to a spontaneous cogito nor to an inert matter. Instead, they are located from within the situation of an embodiment in the here and now, and its field of relations: up and down, right and left, behind and in front. In some sense, this is the case for all intentionalities: if all consciousness is consciousness of something, then neither are things inert and separate from consciousness nor is consciousness free of those things. Chapter 4: “The Incomplete Reduction.” Between “the unmotivated upsurge of the world” and “operative intentionality” is perhaps the most famous remark in the Preface: “The most important lesson of the reduction,” Merleau-Ponty declares, “is the impossibility of a complete reduction.” Notably, this sentence directly follows the mention of an “unmotivated upsurge of the world” and underlines the notion that existence upsurges in front, and inside, consciousness. Moreover, this world cannot itself be complete or else it would never surge up for us. It is a non-measurable space injected into the time of consciousness. Merleau-Ponty’s early work is often compared to his later work by stressing an increasing reliance on Heidegger’s ontology. But, according to this reading of the reduction and the 13  “We have learned to re-interrogate the moment that the thought about seeing destroys seeing, turns it into its object” Lefort, Claude. “Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” pp. xxi–xxii.

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upsurge of the world, the Preface already introduces an ontology distinct from Heidegger’s. The reduction cannot be completed because of an existence that likewise cannot be complete and is irreducible. There is at least some sense in which this ontological principle resists becoming something like Heidegger’s “Being of beings.” Instead, this ontology moves in the direction of Merleau-Ponty’s later terminology, for example, “écart,” “fragmentation,” “dehiscence,” “explosion,” or “promiscuity.” This incomplete ontology is what Merleau-­Ponty later calls the “indirect ontology.” It is not an ontology that demands to be completed but the ontology of a being that can never be directly acquired. There is no ontological principle that can be directly inspected because, for Merleau-Ponty, this is simply not what being is. Chapter 5: “Phenomenology and Non-Phenomenology.” If the greatest lesson of phenomenology is that it remains incomplete and open, then its place in relation to our natural theorizing needs reconsideration. An incomplete reduction means that our natural thesis is always being reduced. For Merleau-Ponty, this means situating phenomenology and other “non-­ phenomenological” fields side by side. In this chapter, I consider the discussion that followed the presentation of a paper, given to the Societé française philosophique on November 23, 1946, titled “The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences” in which Merleau-Ponty gives the central arguments of Phenomenology of Perception. There, Merleau-Ponty says that phenomenology and the sciences are related concentrically rather than hierarchically. This is no doubt evident in Merleau-­Ponty’s own oeuvre, where evolutionary psychology, biology, physics, etc., are always considered in the light of the phenomenological attitude and vice versa. In view of his concentrical attitude, I reconsider the relation between Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and nature. His nature lectures, and especially some of his ideas concerning the

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instincts in both animals and consciousness, seem to expand on the idea of an unmotivated upsurge of the world—a profound irrationalism configured into the rationalism of reflection itself. Here we see the implicit link between the indirect ontology and nature. This amounts to another concentric movement, it seems: the registers of human culture and nature are not primordially separate. I also reconsider some of the remarks Merleau-Ponty makes in the Preface about the difference between phenomenology and psychology. Surely, if phenomenology cannot fully accomplish the reduction of the natural attitude, then it cannot fully reduce the psychological sciences. In fact, Merleau-Ponty suggests that phenomenology and psychoanalysis could be combined. This becomes explicit as his work progresses. The combination suggests that phenomenological analysis finally comes to a limit phenomenon, or psyche, which is at once internal to consciousness and existent things. Such a combination in fact allows us to reject the view that, in his earlier work, Merleau-Ponty “gives metaphysics its completed expression.” It in fact prevents the idea of a tacit ego independent of language. There is of course a chapter in Phenomenology of Perception on speech, but it does not contain much in the way of a language system per se. However, if the incomplete or indirect ontology is already sketched out in the Preface, then already here consciousness cannot be radically self-affective and independent of its language. It is both caught up within and internally constellated by being. This being is thus always already differentiating. It separates me from myself, me from another, and even worldly things from one another. It is precisely this being that would be capable of intersecting within language. In this chapter, I finally consider a remark, made by Bréhier during the discussion period, that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is better served by art and literature and even “results in a novel.” This comment seems to follow some of Merleau-Ponty’s

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statements in the Preface suggesting that, because its reduction is incomplete, phenomenology amounts to wonder before the world. Here, art and literature would achieve that wonderment in perhaps even better terms than phenomenology. This same view is reflected in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger. The former, for example, thinks literature is revolutionary because it exposes the truth that language is figurative rather than literal. The latter thinks that poetry is closest to, and even unconceals, the Being of beings. If we pay attention to the incompleteness of the reduction, however, art and literature cannot achieve any reduction and their reduction is also incomplete. This leads me to consider the internal relation between phenomenology and literature, or description and expression. Such considerations are evident in more recent, posthumously published lecture courses and, in a certain way, in Merleau-Ponty’s self-critique from The Visible and the Invisible. Yet, already in his response to Bréhier, and however obliquely, he nonetheless indicates that phenomenology’s first rule, description, cannot exclude expression. Although it may seem so, the Preface is not a straightforward introduction to Husserlian phenomenology but a surprisingly radical text pointing to a phenomenology that does not only “reduce” or limit itself to the acts of cognition. The seeming ambiguities inherent to phenomenology and clarified within the epochē (discussed in Chap. 2) are both elaborated and undermined with the discovery of intentional consciousness (discussed in Chap. 3), and this leads to further and more fundamental ambiguities (discussed in Chap. 4). These are not themselves destined to be clarified but are rather “good ambiguities” that even serve as the method of philosophy itself (discussed in Chap. 5).

CHAPTER 2

“Facts and Essences”

Abstract  This chapter discusses the first theme in phenomenology, facts and essences, which Merleau-Ponty presents in terms of an initial tension in phenomenology itself: phenomenology is at once a philosophy of both facts and essences and therefore seems to be an absurdity. It only appears so, he explains, within what Husserl calls the “natural attitude.” This is an attitude that, though it informs our theorizing, is in fact uncritical, unreflective, and merely habituated. Within it, we uncritically assume that, to find the essential structures explaining contingent facts, we must travel beyond those facts. This chapter introduces the natural and phenomenological attitude, the differing notion of facts and essences within them, and the phenomenological epochē—namely the disruption of the natural attitude to open up a phenomenological attitude and the phenomenological field. Keywords Epochē • Bracketing natural attitude • Phenomenological attitude • Eidetic vision • Eidetic phenomenology

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 R. Kaushik, The Preface to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception: A Re-Introduction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51329-9_2

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“Phenomenology,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “allows itself to be practiced as a manner or as a style, or that it exists as a movement, prior to having reached a full philosophical consciousness. It has been en route for a long time.”1 Phenomenology is a method “en route” in part because it has been anticipated by Hegel, Marx, etc.2 But, even more importantly, it is “en route” in the sense that it is a method according to which consciousness comes back to itself, before it has turned itself into a philosophical object. Phenomenology is “en route,” in other words, because it enters back into a naïve consciousness which is always mid-stream. Here we get a hint of the discussion that will follow: phenomenology is always a “phenomenology for us,” but this also means it is already on the way to something we do not presently grasp about ourselves.3 This indicates that, in phenomenology, the “I think” will be quite different than a self-causing or spontaneous cause independent of the phenomenal world, as it is in Descartes and the transcendental idealist tradition. If naïve consciousness is not spontaneous, neither is access to it. As Husserl famously points out, there is a “natural attitude,” a familiar and habitual adoption of uncritical theses, which prevents access to naïve consciousness. We need to first become aware of this attitude so naïve consciousness can be made familiar. We do this by putting into effect a rigorous method. In fact, Merleau-Ponty says, 1 2

 PP, p. ii/lxxi.  Merleau-Ponty is, in other words, against the view that Husserl’s phenomenol-

ogy has nothing to do with Hegel’s, and marks a break from it. This is perhaps only true if one emphasizes only the Hegelian “system.” For his own part, MerleauPonty at times departs from Hegel in his works and at other times is a Hegelian of a sort. 3  Ibid.

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“phenomenology is only accessible to a phenomenological method.”4 The most important uncritically adopted thesis of the natural attitude is mentioned in the first lines of the Preface and concerns the separation between “facts” and “essences.” This separation involves what Husserl calls a “countersense”—an internal incoherence. Although, from the position of the natural attitude, the countersense concerning facts and essences is in phenomenology. This is the first difficulty Merleau-Ponty addresses in the Preface. Facts and Essences in the Natural and Phenomenological Attitudes The Preface opens with the following lines: What is phenomenology? It may seem strange that we must continue to ask this question half a century after Husserl’s first works. Nonetheless, it is far from being resolved. Phenomenology is the study of essences, and it holds that all problems amount to defining essences, such as the essence of perception or the essence of consciousness. And yet phenomenology is also a philosophy that places essences back within existence and thinks that the only way to understand man and the world is by beginning from their “facticity.”5 There is an apparent difficulty in phenomenology which makes it seem confused: it at once purports to be both the study of essences and facts. The facts are contingent. They have no intrinsic reason to be. On their own, they defy understanding. Hence, we think, philosophy cannot stay only within contingent facts 4 5

 Ibid.  Ibid., i/lxx.

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because it would be unable to explain them. The moment it tries to explain facts, or even to explain how there are only facts, it is no longer at the register of facts. It either looks for essences underlying the facts, accounting for them and necessitating them, or tries to dispel the idea of essences altogether and stay at the register of facts. The essences do on the other hand purport to explain facts, and even the differences between them. There are three things posited here: that facts are intrinsically contingent and without meaning, that essences are invariant and supply meaning to the facts, and that there is a real initial separation, and hence a real relation, between facts and essences. The last of these is assumed and never itself under direct investigation, but it is what makes the natural attitude so familiar. It is precisely this assumption, however, which makes us think phenomenology is caught between two irreconcilable paths: a philosophy of facts and a philosophy of essences. But this will turn out to be an inherent contradiction only from within the natural attitude. On the one hand, phenomenology’s point of departure is always the factical and contingent world. On the other hand, it is not an empirical account of different phenomena but seeks to disclose the invariant structures of that factical and contingent world, for example, of the stream of consciousness, embodiment, perception, etc. To see this, we need to consider the third assumption above. It involves what Husserl calls a “Platonic Realism.”6 Here, the ideas are real unto themselves and so is the relation between them and the facts. Whereas phenomenology is an “eidetic science” in which essence and facts are “inseparable.” The essences are “eidos” insofar as they have a unifying function across difference. They proceed to the level of the same from the level of the multiple, to the level of the understanding from the level of extension. For example, eidos has a geometric sense that refers to  Husserl, Edmund. “The Reproach of Platonic Realism. Essence and Concept,” in Ideas I. pp. 40–42. 6

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the shape of a figure in the sense of both its external contour and its internal structure. It demands a series of successive sublimations, from what is externally visible to what is internally intelligible of the visible. There is, in other words, a semi-logical sense of eidos: it is the place of a species within a classification. In an important way, insofar as there is a real relation between essences and facts, Platonic Realism always misses something significant about the movement between these levels because their relation assumes separation. Of course, phenomenology is not geometry. In geometry, we also proceed deductively and draw our content from axioms. These axioms are abstract, and we know them as what determine spatial shapes. In phenomenology, there is instead the consistent demand to move between the visible and the intelligible. What Merleau-Ponty refers to as its “first rule” is thus not at all axiomatic but rather it posits a goal: “to be a ‘descriptive psychology’” in order to return “‘to the things themselves.”7 This is of course a reference to the famous §24 of Husserl’s Ideas I in which he speaks of the “principle of all principles” to remain faithful to the phenomenon by describing it as it presents itself in its primordiality. This rule, Husserl thinks, should in fact apply to all science, especially empirical science. Once followed, though, empirical science cannot be a study of putative “objective” realities or our “subjective” impression of those realities. The objective and subjective correlates are not themselves given in experience but are only intelligible from within the perspective of experience itself. However, the empirical sciences do adopt the natural thesis and are the study either of objective or subjective realities. This is the basis on which they assume a real initial separation between facts and essences and are unable to be genuinely empirical. The “eidetic science” is, on the other hand, an attempt to conform to the “first rule.” Phenomenology is an eidetic science 7

 PP, pp. ii/lxxi.

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in that, by remaining faithful to experience and describing experience itself, it will be in the context of experience that we discern what is being experienced and what is necessary for it. The phenomenological attitude is meant to exhibit the immanental, rather than transcendent, essences of facts. To study phenomena phenomenologically means to study them as immanentally intelligible. Husserl does not in fact certify the phenomenological attitude, and our allegiance to the “principle of all principles,” until §71 of his Ideas I, in a section titled “Phenomenology as a Descriptive Eidetic Doctrine of Pure Mental Processes.”8 The title suggests a lot: the essences are not ascertained by ignoring the phenomenon and posing a hidden infrastructure behind it or causal superstructure meant to explain it. They are gathered through a faithful description of the phenomenon. This description exposes the essences “of pure mental processes.” This is no doubt tricky and will require further exposition: phenomenology goes back to the things themselves, to how they in fact manifest themselves, because, according to its method, there is no reality of ideal objects doubling the world of physical things. The manifestation of these things are just the essences of pure mental processes. What we experience is what is there and vice versa. At the level of primordial experience, in other words, there is nothing like Cartesian doubt or, as Immanuel Kant posited, a noumenon behind the phenomenon. Although one of the most important philological roots of phenomenology is Kantian philosophy, Merleau-Ponty points out that Husserl’s transcendental is not Kant’s transcendental.9 Both Husserl and Kant look for the transcendental condition of possibility for experience. But, unlike Kant, Merleau-Ponty says, Husserl is not caught in a “psychologism of the faculties of the soul.”10 In Kant’s transcendental  Ideas I, p. 167–170.  PP, p. viii/lxxvii. 10  Ibid., p. iv/lxxiii. 8 9

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system, there are still transcendent aspects—the noumena specifically—that guarantee the subject never itself appears and limits its reason. Whereas Husserl liked to say that phenomenology is a transcendental analytic without the transcendental dialectic. He wants phenomenology to be a transcendental philosophy without noumena. In fact, he thinks, such philosophy would not so much oppose Kant’s as it would accomplish Kant’s ambition to be properly critical, carrying critical philosophy forward into a final ground that he himself failed to glimpse. Because phenomenology operates in terms of immanent essences, it does not surreptitiously suppose that the transcendental conditions of possibility resist appearing. Instead, the essence is a ground that is both what it is and what it is about—at once both the ground of experience and the ground of the notion of ground itself. It is what supplies the appearing of the world, the appearing of selfreflection, and even the very idea of ground. Merleau-Ponty thus denies Jean Wahl’s declaration that “Husserl separates essences from existence.” He points out that this separation is just the realm of language, whereas in phenomenology essences are “[w]hat appears in the silence of originary consciousness.” They are “not only what these words mean, but also what these things mean, that is, the core of primary signification around which acts of naming and of expression are organized.”11 This is grounds to criticize Merleau-Ponty’s exclusion of language and emphasis of perception. Later, we will see he comes to think that the exclusion of language is itself reliant on a subjectivism and a too subjectivistic notion of language. He will try to broaden the very idea of language so that originary consciousness and primary signification might be included within it. This is where his analyses of the speech act and gestures are important. They “constitute a languagely ensemble [un ensemble langagier],” he remarks, “of the same sort as the pre-logical  Ibid., p. x/lxxix.

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unity of our life.”12 The problem of language and its primary signification eventually becomes an ontological problem, perhaps the ontological problem. Namely, the being in language and thought, the being according to which there is both language and thought. A Vision of Facts and Essences According to the “First Rule” There is nothing intrinsic to contingent facts that make them this thing, with just these properties and not others. They can be in some other spatiotemporal location, with another shape, size, color, and so on. Yet every fact is also essentially what it is. It is not merely a this but also a so-and-so. There are of course predicates that hold good for it. In other words, facts have accidental properties, and these accidental properties also presuppose essential ones. While there are varieties of chairs, for example, the varieties presuppose essences. The same is true in experience. When I experience joy, at the same time I can be aware of joy as an experience in principle. With some factual alterations determined empirically, I can be aware of joy as applicable to the experience of any possible subject. Because subjectivity therefore has a structure as such, my joy formally presupposes an eidetic structure. Because this eidetic structure is immanent rather than transcendent, we can say that it is neither really universal nor completely solipsistic. The absolute limit essence, such as the one we find in the phenomenological rather than Kantian sense of the transcendental, maintains no real difference between the a priori of joy and the a posteriori of joy. It is merely that the former has special ontological status. In fact, without it, I could not be aware of the experience as having particular meaning for me.  This is from Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Proust in the 1953–1954 course Le problème de la parole 115r/3. The phrase “languagely” also appears in Signs. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Signes (France: Gallimard, 1960), translated by Richard C.  Mcleary as Signs (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 111/88. Henceforth, cited as S with French pagination given first, then English. 12

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We must still consider the a priori of joy as something that appears and the experience of something. Husserl calls this “eidetic vision.”13 Now the issue of facts and essences is transposed into an issue concerning sense-­vision and eidetic vision. The latter is always immanent to the former. The way to grasp the ontological region of experience is through eidetic determinations. I delimit my experience of joy from other kinds of experiences, then analyze these different kinds. Every specific kind should be able to disclose some immanental essence or else it would not be a kind. The particular experience of joy might be a clue to its corresponding essential structures; but, conversely, these essential structures also tell us something significant about the subordinate facts of my own experience. I am at least implicitly aware of the a priori in my specific experience of joy. On the other hand, eidetic vision must differ from sensevision. Husserl is also sometimes tempted to seize on this difference even to the point of emphasizing an unbridgeable chasm between them. The purpose is to preserve the necessity and certainty of eidetic vision against the fallibility of sense-vision. It may be a mistake to posit this chasm, but the distinction also has the effect of clarifying what is special to eidetic vision. It is a positional abstention—without having to posit this or that, without position—and even relies on free phantasy. Husserl’s point is ultimately that we have both the free possibility of directing our attention to a fact, but we cannot grasp this fact as what it is without also the free possibility of carrying out an “eidetic act” (e.g., the a priori of joy), and even grasping this eidetic act itself. This is certainly an inversion of our usual assumption that experience begins with an object which brings experience about. In fact and principle, it is the experience and self-reflection that is the primordial given. I first see, and then I conclude the thing is there. 13  “The essence (eidos) is an object of a new type. Just as the datum (das Gegebene) of individual experiencing (erharrenden) intuition is an individual object, so the datum of essential intuition is a pure essence.” Ideas I, p. 9.

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The phenomenologist is equally adamant that this is not solipsism because there are not two distinct categories of existence— one “in” the mind and the other “out” in the world—and these are both abstractions. As Merleau-Ponty points out, for example, in Husserl the “noematic reflection”—the description of the thing as it primordially appears—does not oppose the “noetic analysis”—the description of the consciousness to which the thing appears.14 I will discuss this terminology more in the next chapter on intentionality. Just note: by virtue of a radical acceptance of the “first rule,” or “the principle of all principles,” phenomenology goes back into a primordial region of being in which these two aspects include, rather than exclude, one another. This is how we arrive at the transcendental in Husserl’s sense. A physics, psychology, geometry, etc. has no place here, but this primordial region of being makes them possible and gives them their sense. Their senses are contingent on this region, but for Husserl this region is “absolute” in that no other sense escapes from it. We are led far beyond Cartesian dualism. For example, we do not have to suppose that we are interior subjects who are not in that world; so, we do not have the problem of how we know the world in front of us. We no longer suppose outright that what appears is distinct from its reality. We can say instead that the phenomenon manifests the original region of being between consciousness and existence. A series of tensions make themselves felt here: The first tension is already mentioned in Merleau-Ponty’s statement that “phenomenology is only accessible to a phenomenological method.” He means that the “first rule” is impossible to sustain outside of a phenomenological method. Its firstness is, in other words, not technically a principle but only guaranteed from inside of the primordial region between consciousness and existence. We cannot do phenomenology except within this  PP, pp. iv/lxxiii.

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region. On the other hand, since all other methods take place within the natural attitude, we cannot gain entrance into this region without the phenomenological method. Both region and method are in this way bound together by a reciprocal relation, and there can be no thought of one without the other. This means any discussion of the phenomenological method sheds light on the primordial region between consciousness and existence; and any discussion of the primordial region between consciousness and existence sheds light on the phenomenological method. The second tension in fact keeps the first one from being a vicious circle. In the mutual imbrication between method and region, we do not find self-enclosure and exclusion but openness and a lack of completion. Merleau-Ponty writes: Reflection carries itself along and places itself back within an invulnerable subjectivity, prior to [en deçà de] being and time. Yet this is a naïveté, or, if one prefers, an incomplete reflection that loses an awareness of its own beginning. I begin to reflect, my reflection is a reflection upon an unreflected; it cannot be unaware of itself as an event; henceforth it appears as a genuine creation, as change in the structure of consciousness, and yet this involves recognizing, prior to its own operations, the world that is given to the subject because the subject is given to himself.15 The Phenomenological Epoche ̄ To be properly empirical, the sciences need to abide by the first rule. But, by virtue of the foregoing, they take place in the natural attitude and cannot. It is only the phenomenological method that abides by the first rule and accesses the region of being according to which we think and reflect. Hence, for the  Ibid.

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phenomenological method, we need a decisive interruption that closes off the natural attitude and allows us to instead live in the phenomenological method. There are a few terms that describe this interruption: bracketing, suspension, epochē. Their basic move is the same: Ausschaltung. This is a “switching off” of the most basic natural thesis that the world explains experience. In the same way the contents of a room are still there after a light is turned off, the world remains after the natural thesis is turned off. It is there as a datum to be explained. Then, instead of its inherent intelligibility explaining experience, it is the intelligibility of experience that makes the world intelligible. Moreover, it needs to be re-­emphasized that, in this radical experiential turn of the epochē, we self-­consciously suspend the assumption that “reality” is the objective, “out there” existent, while experience is on the other hand “merely subjective.” In the phenomenological attitude, experience is understood as experience. We refrain from attributing to experience—at least as the starting point for our investigations—the significance of images or indices to some hidden, trans-experiential reality. In this respect, the epochē allows for a phenomenological reduction. This is not a reduction at the expense of comprehensiveness—a reductio—but rather the epochē allows us to reduce to an absolute sphere of experience by clearing away the theoretical barriers that have so far obstructed our access to it. The epochē is, in other words, precisely what allows us to maintain reciprocity between region and method. I need to perform the epochē to gain access to the absolute sphere of experience; the absolute sphere of experience keeps me from lapsing out of the epochē. What is lost? Famously, as Merleau-Ponty has already mentioned, Husserl declares that phenomenology goes “back to the things themselves.” Nothing is lost in the epochē but rather we have gained back the whole region of being between consciousness and existence.

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We can now consider the tension Merleau-Ponty noted above at the end of last section. What remains after the epochē are the necessary structures inherent to experience, what Husserl famously calls the “pure” or “absolute” I. This is the primordial experiential given that all my experiences are of a subject’s. The “pure I” is an immanent principle without which experience would be unintelligible. These are not naturalistic claims, as we will see more clearly next chapter. Rather, “absolute” should be taken in the sense of ab-solo, that is, in the absence or away from the singular. It suggests that, when I try to look at the I that is doing the observing, it also retreats, takes a step back, or slips out from underneath. The I which is the immanent condition of experience is also not present to itself. As Merleau-Ponty therefore says: “When I return to myself from the dogmatism of common sense or of science, I do not find a source of intrinsic truth, but rather a subject destined to the world.” Let us note: the world is given to the subject, Merleau-Ponty says, because this subject is given to itself. But this subject is also destined to the world. This is precisely the tension MerleauPonty takes up when discussing “intentionality.”

CHAPTER 3

Intentionality

Abstract  This chapter explores what we find in the phenomenological field—intentional consciousness. It discusses the structures of intentional consciousness (the correlation between a noesis and a noema), and the themes that result: the lived-body and motivation, the “unmotivated upsurge of the world,” and an “operative intentionality” that further thematizes the correlation between consciousness and world in terms of a more primordial, and not just static, intentionality. Keywords  Intentionality • Motivation • Unmotivated world • Paul Cézanne • Lived-body • Operative intentionality • Typification • Institution When we carefully study the phenomenon itself, we are not led to a “two-­world thesis” between us and a realm in-itself. This is an uncritically adopted thesis, familiar to us, but not found in the phenomenon. If we are going to follow the “first rule” and rigorously describe the phenomenon, our theorizing can no longer © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 R. Kaushik, The Preface to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception: A Re-Introduction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51329-9_3

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make use of this especially familiar claim. We thus need to effect a change in our theoretical stance, perform an epochē, and stay consistently within the phenomenological mode of investigation. Here, we have a study of the being of consciousness and existence. There is no realm in-itself, in other words, because the subject has access to everything of the world. There is no initself, then, but only a for-us. Hence, Merleau-Ponty’s statement that phenomenology is the study of “a subject destined to the world.” The idea that consciousness is inserted into the world, and that that this world manifests itself to consciousness, is called “intentionality.” To say that consciousness intends is to say that something is always given or meant for consciousness. Thus, Husserl’s famous dictum to describe intentionality: all consciousness is consciousness of something. He means that, by definition, consciousness always has content and nothing about it stands outside or apart from its content. Even when consciousness is consciousness of itself, when it is self-reflective, its content is itself; self-­ reflection, except in the natural attitude, does not imply that consciousness is “un-conscious” or that it cannot in principle appear. In fact, it implies the opposite. When we are self-reflective, we really do apprehend ourselves. Merleau-Ponty has already noted the tension that this self-­apprehension is the basis for consciousness to recognize itself as destined to the world. This existential aspect of intentionality is a major part of the Preface and of this chapter. It concerns intentionality as the nonmetaphysical structure of subjectivity, destined to the world, and of existence too. While we must pay attention to the former, Merleau-Ponty also gives a thesis about the latter and what he calls its “unmotivated upsurge.” This reversal is his insight: the reduction finds intentionality, not subjectivity as such; moreover, the subject and the world are secondary to an intentionality through which the world surges up in an unmotivated way.

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Beyond Representationalism and into the Lived-Body A critique of knowledge—that is, a knowledge of the possibility of knowledge—must be based on a kind of knowledge free from the transcendence of an in-itself. At some point, this critique would once again face the same problems it seeks to resolve, namely, the unbridgeable chasm between interior and exterior. Husserl is very aware that framing world and consciousness according to the terms of representation is already to fall victim to the problems Kant faced in his critique. It is not a matter of solving the problem of how subjective representations reach outside themselves and acquire knowledge of an object. Husserl famously takes the term “intentional consciousness” from Franz Brentano. It is Brentano for whom “all consciousness is consciousness of something.” Yet, for Husserl, so long as he remains a psychologist, his understanding of intentionality will always be an act of bad faith. First, because it assumes that at least one subspecies of nature exhibits the quality of intentional experience. In which case, it is forced to say how this could be according to the laws of physics or physiology, which are not themselves intentional (a current problem even today). Second, because it already presupposes the possibility of talking about, identifying, referring to entities, and to nature as a system of entities, which is properly found in intentionality itself. A critique of knowledge must go beyond representation and into the interior structures of the latter ability of consciousness. In the epochē and the interruption of the natural attitude, intentional experience is more than a simple reference to an object. The re-discovery of this experience shows that, primordially, consciousness and existence are “correlated.” The noetic-noema correlation is exactly this. The noema—the thing given or meant for consciousness—is not a re-presentation but a presentation. It prohibits the pre-set categorial distinction between phenomenon and being.

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Husserl says that intentional consciousness does not re-present but “constitutes” the world. Constitution is a way to describe intentionality as a process through which the world appears to consciousness as what it is. It also highlights anew the apparent confusion about phenomenology Merleau-Ponty mentioned in the opening lines of the Preface and discussed toward the end of last chapter. It is only because I am aware of myself that the world appears in the way it does. The retrieval of this previously implicit self-reflective subjectivity makes constitution possible and is a “pure” or “absolute” subject. This leads commentators to immediately charge Husserl with solipsism, and later Jacques Derrida to charge him with a “metaphysics of presence.”1 Indeed, while true to Husserl, in the following passage from the Preface Merleau-Ponty seems to contradict the idea that subjectivity is destined toward the world: I am the absolute source. My existence does not come from my antecedents, nor from my physical and social surroundings; it moves out toward them and sustains them. For I am the one who brings into being for myself—and thus into being in the only sense that the word could have for me— this tradition that I choose to take up or this horizon whose distance from me would collapse were I not there to sustain it with my gaze (since this distance does not belong to the horizon as one of its properties).2 The reader must continually keep in mind that a methodological interruption of the natural attitude has taken 1  This is the criticism of Husserl, akin to the one Merleau-Ponty makes of his own “tacit cogito,” that phenomenology makes of consciousness immediately available to itself and forecloses on the possibility of allowing difference into it. I hope it is by now clear to the reader that Merleau-Ponty is not guilty of this; and that in fact his phenomenology wide open. The repercussions of this openness are discussed in the later parts of this book. 2  PP, pp. iii/lxxii.

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place. The primary respect in which phenomenology is paradoxical is its unnaturalness: the discovery of an absolute subject is not a new discovery in the sense that it supplements other fields of investigation. It is new in the sense that it is completely beyond everything familiar to us. The phrase “absolute source” will no doubt generate resistance from those in the natural attitude. But, within the phenomenological attitude, where the unfamiliar and unnatural has been made familiar, “the absolute source” of sense and meaning in the world is precisely the consciousness available and open, rather than closed, to the world. Again, this is absolute in the sense of ab-solo. In the depths of its own sphere, it finds itself spread out into the very horizon that would collapse without it. It “moves out” toward this horizon and “sustains” it. This sustenance is by no means an idealism that returns us back to the “psychologism of the soul.” It is merely that, through constituting consciousness, I know the world, there is a world. In a representational model of experience, the relation between experience and world is one of causation: we wonder how existent, spatial things cause images in me. We think of consciousness in terms of sense-data, for example. But this is a problem because it turns consciousness itself into an objective—what Husserl calls “mundanizing” consciousness, making it into a mundane thing that we know about through our objective studies (such as in psychology). Whereas, as the absolute source, consciousness is an intentionality from which all the other sciences gain their sense and meaning. It is an “absolute sensebestowing” consciousness, as Husserl says, which means it is the lowermost limit from which no sense and meaning escapes—not even the sense and meaning of the world-horizon. It is furthermore a problem to think of experience merely in terms of causation and sense-data because existent, spatial things are just some of what I can be conscious. There are absent things, fictive things, dreamed things, futural things, and so on. The

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intentional correlation is not just a simple reference to an object but a noetic-noematic correlation. Consider sight or touch of a table. In every perception, as I move around and orient myself or take a different perspective, I have both a different perceptual conscious act (or noesis) and a different perceptual thing (or noema). Yet, of course, in all these cases I am still seeing or touching the same table and the intended table remains the same. There are successive perceptual acts on the side of experience and their respective and equally successive noemata on the side of the thing. The different parts of the table are each seen or touched differently, so there is a noematic multiplicity that corresponds to a noetic multiplicity. But these two multiplicities are neither at the same level nor parallel to one another. The fact that I see or touch the table differently, and that there is a noetic multiplicity, does not mean that there is a different referent, a different table, being sensed. The different noemata, the different phases or perspectives, refer to one and the same table. It is true, however, that different noetic acts can refer to different noemata; and also that different noetic acts can refer to one and the same noema. The intentional correlations are, in other words, not real correlations or a simple one-to-one relationship. In fact, they show the error in thinking of them as such. I see or touch through the noemata into one and the same table. The table is whatever the perceiving of my noemata provokes: an experience that there is a table. The difficult point here is that a material background of the table’s different aspects or perspectives—the “hyletic manifold”—is not something that blocks my vision or touch but that it is always already there for consciousness. Rather than matter and experience excluding one another, it seems that matter needs to conform in some way to intentional experience. This is the route Husserl chooses in his famous lectures on time-­ consciousness. It is through the temporal structures of consciousness (retention, protention, and the primordial-impression

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and inner-time consciousness) that a manifold becomes intentional. It is also apparently what Merleau-Ponty stresses when he says in the passage above that the world-­horizon collapses unless there is an absolute subject. On the other hand, Husserl also speaks of many other kinds of intentionalities that are more spatially oriented, passive-intentionality, anonymous-intentionality, bodily-intentionality, and so on. In “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” Merleau-Ponty writes about, “the absolute here to the there … the source of distances to distance.”3 I am an absolute here in the sense that I, and I alone, constitute the world that appears to me. However, I am only an absolute here if I differentiate myself from the things that appear to me. In that way, my absolute here depends on my being there, in and amongst those very things that appear to me. This is the “source of distances to distance.” There is an extra-ordinary space of intentional existence that is the basis of experience itself. These fundamental notions are of course explored with great rigor in Phenomenology of Perception. In particular, MerleauPonty takes up some of the remarkable insights from Husserl in his Ideas II concerning the “lived-body.” The noemata, Husserl notes, presupposes that the experiencing subject is itself given in space. Since the subject has a spatial location only because of its embodiment, we can say that a spatial object can only appear and be constituted by embodied subjects. The body is what Husserl calls the null-point (null-punkt) of experience. It is a condition of possibility for perception and interaction with spatial objects. This previously unthematized body is found at a level prior to the objectivity of the object—the object experienced as a separate unified thing—and even prior to the subjectivity of the subject. It is the “source of distances to distance” in the sense that it persists in and alongside the noemata and their horizon. For this body, there is a “kinaesthetic horizon” which holds the capacity 3

 S, pp. 210/166.

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of its possible movement. For example, the table’s non-given sides have an intentional if-then connection: if I move this way, one profile of the table will become visually or tactually accessible; if I move that way, another profile will become visually or tactually accessible. The absent backside of the table is its backside because it can become present through a specific bodily movement. The crucial point is that experience presupposes movement, and this movement happens in a non-objective space. Merleau-­Ponty discusses “motor-intentionality” in Phenomenology of Perception. The idea is that the unthematized body is in fact in a field of activity and affectivity, a volitional structure, and a potentiality for mobility. It is helpful to draw this out further: when my hand slides over the table, I perceive its hardness, smoothness, and extension. It is also possible, though, to change my attention so that, instead of being preoccupied with the table and its properties, I bring to explicit awareness my own hand. Then I am aware of feelings of pressure and movement, which are not apprehended as objective properties of my hand but localized in it. Now my hand manifests its function as an experiencing organ. One and the same sensation can, consequently, be interpreted in two radically different ways: as an appearance of the sensed thing and as a localized sensing (Empfindung) in the correlated experiencing bodily part (Empfindnis). Moreover, as Husserl would say, the touched object and the touching hand do not appear in the same way. For one thing, the table is encountered in aspects and phases, whereas this is not so for localized sensations. The experiencing body part is not at all a material property of the hand but embodied subjectivity itself. Instead of saying that sensation can be interpreted in two different ways, then, it is better to say that one and the same sensation contains two radically different dimensions— it is both sensed and sensing. It is both available to be sensed and it senses. It is passive as well as active.

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Following Husserl, Merleau-Ponty is likewise anxious to emphasize this peculiar two-sidedness of the body. My body is given as an interiority and a visually and tactually appearing exteriority. He famously demonstrates this with the example of the right hand touching the left hand: the touching hand feels the surface of the touched hand; but, when the left hand is touched, it is not simply given as a mere object because it also feels the touch itself. What is crucial in the relation between the touching and the touched is that it is “reversible,” since the touching is touched and the touched is touching. This reversibility demonstrates that bodily interiority and exteriority are manifestations of the same. Yet Merleau-Ponty also notes that this reversibility does not mean these two aspects of sensation continue into one another: “either my right hand really passes over to the rank of the touched,” he writes, “but then its hold on the world is interrupted, or it retains its hold on the world, but then I do not really touch it.”4 Also: When I find again the actual world such as it is, under my hands, under my eyes, up against my body, I find much more than an object: a Being of which my vision is a part, a visibility older than my operations or my acts. But this does not mean that there was a fusion of coinciding of me with it: on the contrary, this occurs because a sort of dehiscence opens my body in two.5 The reader should note again that, since in the absolute sphere of consciousness we are no longer talking about objective relations between experience and existence, it allows Merleau-Ponty to address a constellation of ideas: quite remarkably, there is some basic aspect of the body that is not itself given and that does not coincide with itself. In this non-­ objective space, 4 5

 VI, pp. 191/148.  VI, pp. 162/123.

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moreover, dreams or fictive noema are not necessarily severed from spatial noema. Motivation and the Unmotivated Upsurge of the World “Motivation” is one key notion in Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-­Ponty takes from Gestalt psychology to analyze the correlation between the being of consciousness and existence. He writes: The phenomenological notion of motivation is one of those “fluid” concepts that must be formulated if we want to return to phenomena. One phenomenon triggers another, not through some objective causality, such as the one linking together the nature of events, but rather through the sense it offers—there is a sort of operative reason, or a raison d’être that orients the flow of phenomena without being explicitly posited in any of them. This is how the intention of looking to the left and the adherence of the landscape to the gaze motivates the illusion of a movement in the object. To the extent that the motivated phenomenon is brought about, this internal relation with the motivating phenomenon appears, and rather than merely succeeding it, the motivated phenomenon makes the motivating one explicit and clarifies it, such that the motivated seems to have preexisted its own motive.6 If the noematic reflection leads to a noetic one so that the subject is implicated in and destined toward existence, it also turns back to an analysis of that world as what motivates the subject toward it. Moreover, as Merleau-Ponty sees, in the phenomenological account, this world cannot pre-exist its own 6

 PP, pp. 61/51.

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motivation or else we would be once again caught within the problem of representation. The world only appears to pre-exist its own motivation of the subject after the fact. The retrospective appearance implies that, primordially, the world is in fact indeterminate. If so, it is not on the other side of the subject but also within the subject. “Thus,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “the acknowledgement of phenomena implies, in short, an entire theory of reflection and a new cogito.”7 There is evidence to suggest that Merleau-Ponty is pressing beyond the Husserlian notion of the phenomenon and the cogito. Where Husserl thinks of the phenomenon in terms of the thing that appears and the consciousness to which it appears, a reclamation of the phenomenon in terms of motivation—as something that does not precede the subject but also includes itself in the subject—implies something more. Inside both the phenomenon and the subject is a motivating element that for its part resists both, disappears and retreats. Merleau-Ponty takes this up in the Preface first in his discussion of the “problem of the other.” In Husserl, he writes, “there is indeed a problem of others, and the alter ego [the other myself] is a paradox.”8 The paradox of the other is that it shows precisely as what is alien to me and ungraspable. This leads to the idea of an asymmetry: the other is recognized precisely as what cannot be possessed or taken in by me. This is notably different than Merleau-Ponty’s articulation, however: “I discover in myself,” he says, “a sort of  Ibid., pp. 62/51. In Desire and Distance, for example, Renaud Barbaras points out that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “phenomenon” extends beyond Husserl’s. In Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenon is “its own disappearing to the benefit of the appearing.” He points out, “[O]ne must not confuse [the phenomenon] with the appearing (with a simple thing) nor separate it from the appearing, because this would again amount to making [the phenomenon] into a kind of thing.” Whereas, for Husserl, phenomenon and appearing are the same. Barbaras, Renaud. Desire and Distance: Introduction to Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Paul Milan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 32. 8  PP, pp. vi/lxxvi. 7

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inner weakness that prevents me from being absolutely individual and exposes me to the gazes of others as one man among men or, at the very least, as one consciousness among consciousnesses.”9 It is not simply a matter of exclusion between self and other, for Merleau-Ponty. It is in fact on the inside that the subject finds itself destined to existence and for others. We are in a way closer to the world and the other than to ourselves. Merleau-Ponty has performed a slight of hand here that will lead to a discussion of his ontology next chapter. The intentional structures of consciousness are caught up in existence and vice versa. Only in retrospect does that existence pre-exist consciousness. It is in fact indeterminate and included inside consciousness. There is thus an indeterminacy within the phenomenon that produces the problems of self and other or the unbridgeable chasm between self and world. These problems and their ways of thinking lead to “the unmotivated springing forth of the world.”10 What is the unmotivated springing forth of the world? It does not mean there is some more primordial conflict within existence from out of which the world rises. If it did, it would imply some principle of self-seclusion which for its part does not come forth in the phenomenon. This is Heidegger’s notion of the Earth, for example, when he writes about the Greek temple in “Origins of the Work of Art.”11 “The unmotivated springing forth of the world” also does not mean an uncaused cause—a necessary being. If it did, it would mean the world is itself unmotivated but there would also be no possibility of it itself rising to appear. In the first case, we would have an ontological severance within the phenomenon and in the second case we would be once again trapped within a representationalism, something other to the phenomenon.  Ibid., pp. vii/lxxvi.  Ibid., pp. viii/lxxvii. 11  Heidegger, Martin, and Albert Hofstadter. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” 9

10

Essay. In Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper Collins, 2013.

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The unmotivated springing forth of the world means something quite specific and admittedly paradoxical. It means, first, there is no in-itself that, from outside the world, motivates the world’s existence. It also means that the world is not itself a thing or a collection of things but, as an upsurge, a process that presents itself in or as the things. The world is unmotivated and uncaused, and its upsurge implies that it is contingent and insufficient on its own. In other words, it invests itself in us and is always already in the register of consciousness and things. A reference to Merleau-Ponty’s essay “Cézanne’s Doubt” might help explain this. There, Merleau-Ponty famously writes about Cézanne’s repeated paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire. The mountain is painted over and over again. If we were to put all these canvases together, we would have the impression of an appearing each time anew: darker, lighter, jagged, forested, near and looming large, far away and small, etc. “Only one emotion is possible for this painter,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “the feeling of strangeness—and only one lyricism—that of the continual rebirth of existence.”12 The strangeness of the mountain: It is as if the painter “commits suicide,” Merleau-Ponty says, quoting Emile Bernard. The mountain is captured as apart from us, in its brute and alien state. It ruptures forth “each time” new and there is nothing we can do about it, nothing to be predicted or anticipated. It has its own solidity and monumentalism that seems to spring forth toward us and from someplace else. To paint all this, Cézanne self-abdicates. Yet the mountain has a lyricism, Merleau-Ponty also says. Even though it comes up to us each time anew, it demands to be turned into a succession  Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Le doute de Cézanne” in Sens et non-sens (France: Gallimard, 1996), translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus as “Cézanne’s Doubt” in Sense and Nonsense (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 18/23. Henceforth, cited as SNS with French pagination given first, then English. 12

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between the times and something more than specific ruptures having nothing to do with another. That Cézanne “commits suicide” is only a partial story. It requires that one closes “one’s mind to half of what he said and one’s eyes to what he painted.”13 The mountain can be both strange and lyrical, both an unmotivated upsurge and a phenomenon, because it rises in front and within consciousness. It is exterior and interior to consciousness. The landscape, Cézanne says, and as Merleau-Ponty quotes, “thinks itself through consciousness.”14 Notice that the landscape goes “through consciousness” here. This is not an idealistic claim but an invitation to think the mountain and the various ways it surges up as a latent but also anonymous part of consciousness. It is an idea to which I will return in my discussion of nature and ontology in the final chapter. Indeed, when one visits Aix en Provence one discovers the mountain as a landmark, almost like a setting and rising sun, configuring one’s orientation and position and finding its way into interior life. Readers of “Cézanne’s Doubt” are often perplexed by the sudden turn at the end to a discussion of Valéry, Freud, and Leonardo. But, keeping in mind Merleau-Ponty’s reply to Bernard, the turn is not difficult to fathom. It amounts to a discussion about the nature both of existence and of consciousness. Because the continual rebirth and the unmotivated springing forth of the world includes and even happens inside consciousness, the world and its upsurge is a “forest of symbols” in which we are caught, with a lack of fixed meaning.15 Ultimately, there is the sense that intentionality leads to a primordial moment where explicit and latent meaning—the meanings of which I am aware and the ones of which I am not—are not categorially distinct from one another.

 Ibid., pp. 18/13.  Ibid., pp. 23/17. 15  Ibid., pp. 29/22. 13 14

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Operative Intentionality There is a most primordial form of intentionality, according to Merleau-­Ponty, that accommodates this unmotivated springing forth and its resistance to reflection. This is an intentionality beyond Husserl’s “act intentionality.” Merleau-Ponty nevertheless finds it in another of Husserl’s terms, “operative intentionality”: operative intentionality (fungierende Intentionalität), the intentionality that establishes the natural and pre-predicative unity of the world and of our life, the intentionality that appears in our desires, our evaluations, and our landscape more clearly than it does in objective knowledge. Operative intentionality is the one that provides the text that our various forms of knowledge attempt to translate into precise language. The relation to the world, such as it tirelessly announces itself within us, is not something that analysis might clarify: philosophy can simply place it before our eyes and invite us to take notice.16 There are certain moments, for example, in accidents or in an expectation from the world that is not satisfied, when I become aware of a practical relationship to an existence that “tirelessly announces itself within us.” This most interior intentionality, Merleau-Ponty says, is not something philosophy clarifies but only notices. He writes in Phenomenology of Perception that operative intentionality “only knows itself in its results.”17 It is only meaningful—it only becomes noticeable and given to me— through its after-effects. I apprehend operative intentionality when, for example, I make a mistake, or my expectations are defied. I misjudge the distance between here and there. I try to  PP, pp. xiii/lxxxii.  Ibid., p. 491/453.

16 17

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shake someone’s hand who is trying to give me a hug. The world shows up in these after-effects as having already been meaningful, and I notice that I was already deposited in its meaning. Then, Merleau-Ponty says, I become aware of an intentionality that is “pre-predicative” and “natural,” affective and with a set of “desires,” bearing a relation to the world that “announces itself in us” (rather than to us). That operative intentionality shows up in this way suggests it is neither an origin to which we can return nor a destination to which we are directed. It even undermines what we commonly associate with intentions, neither cognitive nor willful. Indeed, there is something crucial in perception that is not present and cannot be made present with a simple turn of attention toward it. When I say, “I see the table,” for example, I am referring to the fact that I have perceived. In fact, something of perception may be nothing in-itself but only ever content-full in the same way that there is no red in-itself but only red things. Then, in retrospect, I say there is perception in the same way I say there is the color red. If we remember that the entire discussion of operative intentionality in the Preface follows the one about inter-subjectivity and the unmotivated upsurge of the world, then we can pay attention to the constellation of relations at work in it. First, that operative intentionality is not the superficial intentionality that concerns a directedness of cognitive acts but the meaning in which I already am. Second, that, in this pre-predicative meaning, there is a sense of expectation or openness that concerns consciousness, existence, and others. Third, still further underneath all this, there is a whole field of investment. It is perhaps helpful to connect operative intentionality to another theme of capital importance in phenomenology, namely, “typification.” Husserl emphasizes this term, especially in his attempt to go beyond the intentional correlation and into the genesis of this correlation in the lifeworld. This characterizes his move from eidetic to genetic phenomenology. In the latter, the

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lifeworld is the world with which we are practically engaged and in which we unreflectively live. It has meaning not of our own making and is inter-subjective or even historico-­cultural. It is the result of a process of internalization and externalization. That is, I act in various typical ways which in fact establish those types even as I apprehend them as external to me, fixed and unbreakable. One can think of the many idiosyncratic ways we act in specific social contexts that frame those acts; and yet, at the same time, how our acts establish that social context and frame. Hence, typification is one way to talk about the human as a social being always engaged in this social act of interpretation. Moreover, there are norms in experience too. I expect there to be another side to the present side; this informs how or whether I move; and, in turn, experience of the other side satisfies my expectation so that it becomes not just an “expectation” but objective confirmation. This makes the objectivization of the world, the illusion that there are objects in-themselves and that the world is one such in-itself, so tempting. The tension between the norms of inter-subjectivity and the norms of the perceptual world, the cultural and the perceptual, is intensified in Merleau-Ponty’s 1950’s course on institution (Stiftung) and primal-institution (Ur-Stiftung). Like operative intentionality, institution comes to Merleau-Ponty through Husserl. It works like typification too, and names an entire structure of reciprocity: an instituting act produces and re-establishes an instituted norm even as the instituted norm is felt to be exterior from the act. Husserl does think objectivity is a European instituted norm and is therefore established. Its cultural crisis results from having fallen prey to the tempting perceptual norm that the world conforms to objectivity, rather than the other way around. When I walk around the table and see the alternate sides, for example, I may already feel it to be an independent object properly knowable on objective terms—forgetting that it is experience which tells me so and forgetting I am in that same

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existence. Husserl insists that the epochē grants access to the instituting norm-forming acts of this instituted norm, which he thinks is their a priori and transcendental structure. He famously says that “all transcendental subjectivity is inter-subjectivity” and even that there is a “historical a priori.” These would concern the lifeworld of subjectivity and its own structures. It is a technical discussion, but it is worth mentioning here that Merleau-Ponty’s radicalization of the phenomenon to include an unmotivated upsurge of the world is also found in his institution lectures. There, institutions are not just “historical” but also bio-­chemical, evolutionary, etc. They include menstruation, puberty, animality, and animal morphology. In other words, Merleau-Ponty includes within the inter-subjective notion of institution a totally non-personal element that belongs to and arises from existence. The relation between instituting and instituted is not at all a closed circuit for him: on the instituted side, that is, on the passive side, I feel a certain pressure or force to conform to the norms of behavior; on the instituting side, that is, on the active side, there is also an activity that lets the outside internalize itself. In other words, the relation is entirely chiasmatic; each side both includes and rejects the other.18 Merleau-Ponty is at once a thinker of continuity and inclusion as well as a thinker of discontinuity and delimitation. We should be equally mindful of the latter too. One could say that he is a thinker of ambiguity and ambivalence. This is addressed in the next chapter.

18  This is why Merleau-Ponty calls institutions “symbolic matrices.” For a more developed account and the phenomenological consequences of the matrix between phenomenology and psychoanalysis, see also Kaushik, Rajiv. Merleau-Ponty between Philosophy and Symbolism: The Matrixed Ontology (New York: SUNY Press, 2019).

CHAPTER 4

The Incomplete Reduction

Abstract  Merleau-Ponty famously states in the Preface that phenomenology’s greatest insight is that the phenomenological reduction cannot be completed. This is due to the upsurge of the world and its constant and ongoing interception of consciousness. Merleau-Ponty’s early work is often compared to his later work by stressing an increasing reliance on Heidegger’s ontology. But, according to Merleau-Ponty’s articulations of the reduction and the upsurge of the world, the Preface in fact indicates an ontology distinct from Heidegger’s, what MerleauPonty will later call the “indirect ontology.” If the reduction cannot be completed, it is because of an existence that likewise cannot be complete and is irreducible. Rather than suggesting the possibility of a “Being of beings” (as in Heidegger), the incompletion, both of the reduction and of the existence, already moves in the direction of Merleau-­Ponty’s later terminology, for example, “écart,” “fragmentation,” “dehiscence,” “explosion,” or “promiscuity.” This is not an ontology that demands to be

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 R. Kaushik, The Preface to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception: A Re-Introduction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51329-9_4

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completed but the ontology of a being that can never be directly acquired. Keywords  Incomplete reduction • Ontology • Hyperdialectic • Space and time • Indirect ontology • Heidegger • Being and Time

The incomplete reduction invites the prospect of some relation between phenomenology and ontology, even a new kind of ontology, which emphasizes incompleteness and hence openness. Later, in The Visible and Invisible, Merleau-Ponty writes that operative intentionality “is the intentionality within being.”1 The impossibility of a complete reduction, the fact that the reduction always remains open, suggests an ontology that is likewise incomplete and hence always open. Where the phenomenological method was previously thought to interrupt the natural attitude, Merleau-Ponty also wants to stress the various openings that result from this interruption. One opening is “wonder before the world”: reflection, he writes, “steps back in order to see transcendences spring forth and it loosens the intentional threads that connect us to the world in order to make them appear; it alone is conscious of the world because it reveals the world as strange and paradoxical.”2 Another, not unrelated opening concerns perhaps the most famous sentences of the Preface that immediately follow “the unmotivated springing forth of the world.” These are: The most important lesson of the reduction is the impossibility of a complete reduction. This is why Husserl always 1 2

 VI, pp. 293/244.  PP, p. viii/lxxvii.

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wonders anew about the possibility of the reduction. If we were absolute spirit, the reduction would not be problematic. But since, on the contrary, we are in and toward the world, and since even our reflections take place in the temporal flow that they are attempting to capture (since they sich einströmen [flow along therein], as Husserl says), there is no thought that encompasses all of our thought. Or again, as the unpublished materials say, the philosopher is a perpetual beginner.3 The phenomenological reduction is impossible to complete. This is not its failure but its deepest insight. It reveals consciousness not as immediately present to itself but open to, within, and by existence. It reveals consciousness, as Merleau-Ponty says, happening in the very temporal flow it is attempting to capture. This is what constitutes the reduction’s incompleteness. It attempts to take a distance from the very flow of existence in which it is and from which it cannot fully depart without a loss. This loss is in the transformation of that flow into something that it is not—fixed, objective, something on which we can fully reflect. But it also finds that it cannot entirely take this stance and make this transformation. It finds itself, instead, marveling at existence and this is its most important lesson. One way to understand this is that, while in the reduction, consciousness attempts to maintain its activity and reflect on itself as what constitutes the meaning of existence; in doing so it inevitably rediscovers its passivity and its being in that existence. This passivity is not simply what Husserl describes as a kind of synthesis of the manifold that happens before the cognitive acts of consciousness.4 It rather belongs to a still more primordial activity already described as an unmotivated upsurge of the world 3 4

 Ibid. p. ix/lxxviii.  Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Active and Passive Synthesis: Lectures on

Transcendental Logic, trans. Anthony J. Steinbock (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001).

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into consciousness. Merleau-Ponty’s later lectures on institution and passivity speak to this primal passivity. His comments here in the Preface also anticipate a profoundly important 1959 working note to The Visible and the Invisible titled “Einströmen— Reflection.”5 If the reduction is incomplete, a complete reduction that returns to naïve and original c­ onsciousness ignores and cannot conceive of the upsurge of existence or the consciousness in which it is constellated. However, the phenomenology that is aware of its incompletion also paradoxically acknowledges this springing forth and places itself there. To do this, and in accord with its own condition of possibility, it remains an unfinished

 In a very important Working Note to The Visible and the Invisible from 1959 titled “Einströmen—Reflection” Merleau-Ponty writes the following: 5

The Einströmen: a particular case of sedimentation, that is, a secondary passivity, that is, of latent intentionality—it is Péguy’s historical inscription—It is the fundamental structure of Zeitigung: Urstiftung of a point of time— [Through?] this latent intentionality, intentionality ceases to be what it is in Kant: pure actuals, ceases to be a property of consciousness, of its “attitudes” and of its acts, to become intentional life—It becomes the thread that binds, for example, my present to my past in its temporal place, such as it was (and not such as I reconquer it by an act of evocation) the possibility of this act rests on the primordial structure of retention as an interlocking of the pasts in one another plus a consciousness of this interlocking as a law (cf. the reflective iteration: the reflection reiterated ever anew would give only “always the same thing” immer wieder)—Husserl’s error is to have described the interlocking starting point from a Präsensfeld considered as without thickness, as immanent consciousness: it is transcendent consciousness, it is being at a distance, it is the double ground of my life of consciousness, and it is what makes there be able to be Stiftung not only of an instant but of a whole system of temporal indexes—time (already as time of the body, taximeter time of the corporeal schema) is the model of these symbolic matrices, which are openness upon being. … reflection is not adequation, coincidence … it would not pass into the Strom if it placed us back at the source of the Strom. VI pp. 224–225/173

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project. Thus, Merleau-Ponty’s perhaps shocking statement and his redefinition of the truth of philosophy in the Preface: [P]hilosophy must not take itself as established in the truths it has managed to utter, that philosophy is an ever-renewed experiment of its own beginning, that it consists entirely in describing this beginning, and finally, that radical reflection is conscious of its own dependence on an unreflected life that is its initial, constant, and final situation.6 What is meant here by “describing this beginning” if the “impossibility of a complete reduction” is its “most important lesson”? It means that, if thought wants to return to the event of its own origin and see once and for all what made it possible, it cannot. But it also means that this origin is not an archē so much as itself an “ever-renewing experiment.” The ever-­ renewing experiment is in effect the reduction. The Impossibility of a Complete Reduction If naïve consciousness were already immediately available to itself, or, in the language of Hegel, “absolute spirit,” the reduction would not be impossible to complete and in fact would have already taken place. The most important lesson of the reduction is, however, its impossibility and thus that consciousness is not absolute spirit. It is rather, as Merleau-Ponty also says, a temporal and original flow that attempts but cannot capture itself. It cannot ever have a single thought that encompasses all thought. Even though, as we mentioned at the end of the first chapter, “phenomenology is only accessible to a phenomenological method,” and in this method we gain access to the primordial region between consciousness and existence, the fact that this consciousness is temporal means that it both slips out from 6

 PP, p. ix/lxxviii.

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underneath reflection and demands to be witnessed each time anew. There is an issue here that reflects what we saw in operative intentionality. The primordial region between consciousness and existence is itself operative. It cannot itself be witnessed but only through its after-effects and retroactively once its slippage has already transpired. The resistance within the phenomenological reduction of the region of being between consciousness and existence leads the former even further away from an analysis of the cognitive acts of consciousness. Instead of a vision that grasps the essential invariants supplying the appearing of both existence and self-reflection, vision betrays a still more primal dimension in which both the apparent world and self-reflection are already caught up but for which they cannot account. This means that consciousness also never shows up to itself in its purported role as an absolute source. It only does so retrospectively, and then as an intentional object, once something has already transpired. It turns out, in other words, that consciousness is intersected with some element of being that refuses to submit itself to the reduction. Merleau-Ponty’s radical claim about the reduction is thus not that it is impossible to accomplish, but it is impossible to accomplish because something within consciousness makes it so. This texture of being is not itself reducible or capturable because it defies the structure of something that would be. Even Husserl’s reduction to the original stream (sich einströmen) of consciousness contains this internal resistance. It is also interesting to consider: if the reduction is always incomplete, this means that, when it is put into effect, it also transmutes something. In the 1959 Working Note to The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty writes that the original stream is itself “a particular case of sedimentation.” He means that even a reduction to the original stream of consciousness does not find something original but rather makes itself from something even more original than consciousness. Previously, we noted that the

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epochē was interruptive, namely of the natural attitude. Here, we can wonder if it is also interruptive of an unmotivated upsurge of the world that for its part cannot genuinely be interrupted. Hence the greatest insight, that phenomenology is incomplete, leads, seemly apart from the reduction, to notice an existence impossible to reduce. That is why, as Merleau-Ponty says, the ultimate moment of phenomenology is to wonder before the spectacle of existence. Problem of Time and Space The reader might be suspicious of the rather quick moves between Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of the temporal flow of reflective consciousness and the unmotivated upsurge of the world, that is, between the interior flow of consciousness conceived in temporal terms and the intervention of the spatial world into consciousness. Previously, we noted that Merleau-­ Ponty does go beyond the Husserlian notion of phenomenon to include an “interior weakness” of subjectivity. It is worth paying some greater attention to Merleau-Ponty’s more implicit argument. When Husserl emphasizes the temporal flow of consciousness, it is also to emphasize that existence appears to consciousness only because of this flow. In the noematic reflection, for example, it is not automatically the case that I see the table as a spatial object. I see the table as a spatial object because I am presented with the different noemata; I am presented with one side together with its non-presented sides and am situated in relation to both sides at once. I must move around the table, and its back side must go from hidden to perceived. This implies a dual movement: on the side of the table, the table is distended into the hyletic manifold that must constantly move into view; on the side of consciousness, there is exposure to this manifold for it to also become actively object-oriented. We remarked last chapter

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how Husserl initially noticed the lived-body and commented on Merleau-Ponty’s extension of it. The former also notices this double movement but insists that the interior temporal form of consciousness is the basis on which the spatial thing acquires its sense and meaning. This exclusion of space from the inner life of consciousness risks a set of distinctions that might make phenomenology revert to a natural thesis: the spatial object itself, the mode in which it appears, and a purely temporal consciousness distinct from the spatial object. Merleau-Ponty is guarding against precisely these distinctions. If consciousness bears the form of temporality and therefore cannot be present to itself, there is no basis to say that this lack of self-presence—and thus the impossibility of the reduction itself—is unrelated to the unmotivated upsurge of the world. It is only that that this unmotivated upsurge, as we emphasized in the discussion of motivation last chapter, is not a real causal order but both non-objective and concrete. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty adopts the term “hyper-­dialectic” as a form of dialectic posed especially against a Sartrean one. Already in the Preface, in Merleau-Ponty’s account of the original flow of consciousness, we see a different sense of “absolute” not only than Hegel’s “absolute spirit” but also than Sartre’s “absolute negation.” According to Merleau-Ponty, the more phenomenological account of “absolute” is a negation of absolute negation. It is in this sense a negation that is instead “determined” and inside rather than transcending existence. This means, reciprocally, existence is not untouched by consciousness but rather allows consciousness to be constellated inside it. While it may have initially appeared to readers that Merleau-Ponty’s later, ontologically oriented writings are juxtaposed to his earlier phenomenology, I do not think this is the case. Any mistake here is at least in part due to an over-emphasis on phrases from The

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Visible and the Invisible like “one sole Being,”7 “unique Being,”8 or “belonging to the same Being.”9 These give the impression of an ontological ground juxtaposed to the phenomenon. More recently, however, the publication of later lectures has allowed for a significant reappraisal. This reappraisal allows us to highlight the uniqueness of Merleau-­Ponty’s ontology and its emphasis on écart (deviation or separation) and other themes like “fragmentation,”10 “dehiscence,”11 “explosion,”12 or “promiscuity.”13 The hyper-dialectic only serves to emphasize these themes. If consciousness and existence are constellated into one another, it is because of a being that is dehiscent in the sense that it is spread throughout the intentional correlation and is on the side of both consciousness and existence at once. That is, a being incomplete on its own. It is this incomplete being that also makes the phenomenological reduction incomplete because it invades the inside of consciousness and remains irreducible. Incomplete Ontology Although somewhat matter-of-factly, in the Preface MerleauPonty makes a controversial claim about Heidegger’s Being and Time: “Heidegger’s ‘In-der-Welt-Sein’ [being-in-the-world],” he says, “only appears against the background of the phenomenological reduction.”14 This is controversial because it in fact reverses Heidegger’s own claim in Being and Time that the “regional ontology” of phenomenology is impossible without a “fundamental ontology,” which would be the true accomplishment of  VI, p. 146/110.  ibid., p. 117. 9  ibid. p. 82. 10  Ibid., p. 217. 11  Ibid., p. 128. 12  Ibid., p. 265. 13  Ibid., p. 270. 14  PP, pp. ix/lxxviii. 7 8

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Husserl’s method. In the early sections of his text, Heidegger argues that, in phenomenology, the formal meaning of phenomenon, as expressed in the dictum “back to the things themselves,” implies “to let that which shows itself be seen from itself” and “from the way it shows itself.”15 There is, furthermore, something that does not show itself but is connected in an intimate way with what does. This is the ground and the condition of possibility of what does show itself and the phenomenological conception of the phenomenon. It is the Being of the beings: “what one has in mind as that which shows itself,” Heidegger declares, “is the Being of beings.” The mode of investigation most appropriate to this Being is “interpretation.” That is, Heidegger thinks, hermeneutics allows for the more basic investigation of what does not show in the phenomenological analysis of the phenomenon. In this sense, it precedes phenomenology. A turn to hermeneutics, then, is a turn to the still more fundamental ground which phenomenology never provides. What can we make of Merleau-Ponty’s reversal of Heidegger? A lot. He is continuing to argue, I believe, that the basic attitude of phenomenology is incompleteness, and that this attitude should extend to the ontology that inevitably enters phenomenology. If we keep in mind that the phenomenological reduction is incomplete, we can certainly recognize a being that frustrates it. But this frustration is continual and ongoing. This ontology is in other words itself incomplete. It does not supplant phenomenology with a self-identical being underneath the beings. Later, Merleau-Ponty calls this an “indirect ontology.” Already in the Preface he is arguing for a being to which we cannot travel except through the phenomenological reduction. This is precisely the ontological texture that keeps the reduction from being complete and the reflection from closing in on itself.  Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). 15

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The final evocative lines of the completed portion of The Visible and the Invisible are from a subsection titled “Presence. The Thing and the Something.” They read as follows: “Are not the identity, the positivity, the plenitude of the thing—reduced to what they signify in the context in which experience reaches them—quite insufficient to define our openness upon ‘something’?” Even at this last stage Merleau-Ponty is wondering about an implicit lack of presence that makes a thing what it is, and even allows experience to be open to the thing. This lack of presence, that is, a non-coincidence that is being, makes both things and experience.16 This is ultimately what it means for Merleau-Ponty to say that a thing is there: a thing is there, as it is and at a specific location, because it is separated from another thing or other things. This separation is what makes each thing what it is because it is where they literally “confront,” or come face to face with, one another. One could say, in other words, that at their limits, surfaces, exposures, or contours, each thing becomes the thing that it is. In this sense, being is spatialized and in the intervalences between things. This is one way to understand what Merleau-Ponty later calls flesh and écart. The flesh of being concerns the concrete way bodies of all kinds relate to one another by bearing a separation within themselves and  I have argued in Merleau-Ponty Between Philosophy and Symbolism that MerleauPonty’s ontology comes close to Heraclitus, who in the first fragment argues for a “division according to the nature of the thing.” Instead of an identity that makes difference, it is difference or separation that makes identities. The first fragment reads: “Though this Word is true evermore, yet men are as unable to understand it when they hear it for the first time as before they have heard it at all. For, though all things come to pass in accordance with this Word, men seem as if they had no experience of them, when they make trial of words and deeds such as I set forth, dividing each thing according to its kind and showing how it is what it is. But other men know not what they are doing when awake, even as they forget what they do in sleep.” Jean Bollack and Heinz Wismann point out in Héraclite ou la séparation, that Heraclitus certainly makes, “a contribution to a reflection that pursues unity, not separation.” But, they say, he makes “radical separation as such the condition of identity.” See my Merleau-Ponty between Philosophy and Symbolism, p. 23. 16

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from one another. Right away, we can see how this space is not a measurable container but that according to which there is an inside and an outside and makes measurement or geometrical space possible. At the same time, it makes literal a metaphor we use to describe consciousness: the space to think. When we understand Merleau-Ponty’s ontology in this way, we can see that phenomenology and ontology are not exclusive. Rather, with the lack of a self-identical principle, ontology offers a critique of the inner-time of consciousness and the space of the world. It is commonly thought that Merleau-Ponty’s later work adopts the Heideggerian thesis of being, but this overlooks the already radical ontology implicit in the Preface. It is interesting in this context to consider anew the relationship between phenomenology and hermeneutics. Certainly, for Merleau-Ponty, hermeneutics would not supplant phenomenology because it could not be a final reduction on the phenomenological sense of the phenomenon. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty has already problematized such a reduction. Instead, I think, Merleau-Ponty might say there is always hermeneutics in phenomenology and phenomenology in hermeneutics. When he writes, for example, that “philosophy must not take itself as established in the truths it has managed to utter” and that “philosophy is an ever-renewed experience of its own beginning,” it is because of an incomplete or indirect ontology he at least implicitly has in mind. The incomplete being, the being that is recognized in the incompleteness of the reduction, is also not a being that we can simply denote and point to in our writing but a being that shows up in the ever-renewed experience or in the perpetual beginning that is phenomenology. These themes are taken up next chapter.

CHAPTER 5

Phenomenology and Non-phenomenology

Abstract  If the greatest lesson of phenomenology is that it remains incomplete and open, then its place in relation to our natural theorizing needs reconsideration. This means situating phenomenology and other “non-phenomenological” fields side by side. Merleau-Ponty says, for example, that phenomenology and the sciences are related concentrically rather than hierarchically. In view of his concentrical attitude, I reconsider the relation between Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and nature.  I also reconsider some of the remarks Merleau-Ponty makes in the Preface about the difference between phenomenology and psychology. I finally consider and problematize a remark, made by Bréhier during the discussion period, that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is better served by art and literature and even “results in a novel.” Keywords  Psychology • Instincts • Psyche • Chiasm • Chiasmus • Psychoanalysis • Unconscious • Language • Literature • Art • Painting • Proust

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 R. Kaushik, The Preface to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception: A Re-Introduction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51329-9_5

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The epochē disrupts the natural attitude. This disruption allows us to view a naïve consciousness on which the sciences rely but cannot give account. In this way, Husserl thinks, the epochē recovers both primordial experience and the ground of the natural attitude and the sciences. This is why he famously calls phenomenology “the rigorous science.” It rigorously examines experience itself to find within it a transcendental ground for the sciences. Moreover, through the epochē, or even because of it, this pursuit is not itself groundless. It is the basis for phenomenology as the only method that recovers the essential structures that make it possible. This is why Merleau-Ponty remarks that “phenomenology is only accessible to a phenomenological method.” However, Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the incompleteness of the phenomenological reduction does complicate the relationship between phenomenology and the sciences. After all, if phenomenology is incomplete, so would be the justification of itself as a singular method to which all the sciences are reduced. That is, if phenomenology is incomplete so would be the project of grounding the sciences. One only needs to read Merleau-­ Ponty’s oeuvre to see that he works with, rather than reduces, the sciences. This is true already in The Structure of Behaviour—a study deeply reliant on Gestalt psychology but also unhappy with how it interprets its own findings. In Phenomenology of Perception, too, Gestalt and evolutionary psychology are continually deployed even though it is certainly a work of phenomenology, which is the point of view from which these sciences are understood. In fact, Merleau-Ponty opposes neither the principles and foundations of philosophy nor the new and contemporary sciences and their own enigmas. He marginalizes neither what is central to phenomenology nor what is central to other practices of knowledge. The result is something profound about the nature of philosophy and what counts as philosophy. This,

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too, as we have already mentioned, is a recurring question in the Preface. This chapter is an exploration of the encounter between phenomenology and what Merleau-Ponty calls “non-phenomenology.” It explores this encounter in general terms, then as an attempt to go beyond a dualism between ontology and nature. The third section reconsiders the relationship already discussed between phenomenology and “psychologism.” Last, the chapter discusses the more obvious relation in the Preface between phenomenology and the arts. The medial encounter between these otherwise disparate disciplines suggests both the concrete ontology discussed last chapter and new or meta-methodological concerns appropriate to it. Is Phenomenology the Rigorous Science? We should stress the evolution in phenomenological thought: while phenomenology initially reduces a natural attitude, it eventually does this, in Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences, for example, only to return to a natural or familiar world, namely, the “lifeworld.” This is the world with which we are practically engaged where we enact and reproduce typical norms—where there is the instituting of norms even while they are felt as instituted. One important norm, recall, is objectivity itself. MerleauPonty adopts this view. It is beautifully outlined in “The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences.” The discussant, Mme Prenant, wonders whether Merleau-Ponty places “a higher value on the sun of the astronomer or on the sun of the peasant?”1 He responds with the two following important remarks: Recall the famous phrase from Hegel: “The earth is not the physical center of the world, but it is the metaphysical cen1

 Ibid, pp. 92/36.

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ter.” The originality of man in the world is manifested by the fact that he has acquired the more exact knowledge of the world of science. It is strictly necessary that we teach everybody about the world and the sun of the astronomer. There is no question of discrediting science. It is only when one has conceived the world of the natural sciences in all their rigorous that one can see appear, by contrast man in his freedom. What is more, having passed a certain point in its development, science itself ceases to hypostatize itself; it leads us back to the structures of the perceived world and somehow receivers them. For example, the convergence between the phenomenological notion of space and the notion of space in the theory of relativity has been pointed out. Philosophy has nothing to fear from a mature science, nor has science anything to fear from philosophy.2 Then: This does not mean, however, that what is at the bottom is to be suppressed. It seems to me, for instance, that if we make it our goal to reach the concrete, then in certain respects we must put art above science because it achieves an expression of the concrete man which science does not attempt. But the hierarchies of which you are speaking suppose a point of view; from one point of view you get one hierarchy and from another point of view you get another hierarchy. Our research must be concentric rather than hierarchized.3 Merleau-Ponty is noting that Prenant’s question already poses the astronomer and the peasant, the theoretical and the practical, against one another. This juxtaposition, he says, supposes a 2 3

 Ibid.  Ibid.

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point of view, that the theoretical cannot come back to the practical and that the practical cannot become theoretical. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty points out, there are consequences to this separation: each circumscribed field of examination assumes in advance a truth; this truth justifies the method, and the field remains circumscribed. This is precisely what “crisis” is: no separate field of examination can grasp the grounds that make it possible since it is a separate field of examination precisely by ignoring its ground. On the other hand, Merleau-Ponty is also saying that this ground cannot become its own separate field of study hierarchized above the others. We must move in a concentric rather than hierarchized path, he says. If we pay attention to the way science develops, this concentric movement becomes obvious. The notion of space in the theory of relativity, for example, leads back to the phenomenological notion of space, the notion of a non-­objective and lived-in space as it relates to the concrete movements of a body. It is possible to say that phenomenology grounds the sciences, but it is also true that, on their own, the sciences come back to the phenomenological articulation of things.Merleau-Ponty is also anticipating his lectures on Husserl’s notion of an earth-ground and the so-called anti-Copernican revolution.4 It is no longer just theoretically the case that experience of a sunset involves experience of the earth revolving around the sun; this theory is certainly by now practical. The sunset is an uncritical experience of the earth revolving around the sun. Yet this is precisely what it means to say that the earth, not the sun, is our metaphysical center. It is not a matter 4  As Merleau-Ponty points out, the earth for Husserl is an “Ur-Arché” that “brings to light the carnal Urhistorie.” VI, pp. 307/259. It is the possibility of a reality, a pre-object, something initial, and as such provides the cradle or base of all previous and futural human experience. It is a possible, non-localizable space into which all bodies over the span of human history repose. It sustains every historical style of being, all historical comportments, historical ways of being in time, historical gaits, postures, mannerisms, etc. The earth is, in other words, the ground of world-formation itself.

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of posing practical and theoretical space against one another, but rather of grasping a space—an earth-ground—that provides movement between the two, lets the theoretical to emerge from and sink back into it so it becomes practical as well. While this ground is transcendental, it is also morphological and in movement. Implicit in this alteration of the relationship between phenomenology and the sciences is a certain conception of phenomenon and phenomenality. Where Husserl initially thought of the phenomenon once and for all grasped by the eidetic vision that grounds the sciences, Merleau-Ponty is giving an altered ontology of light and vision. This comes up in Phenomenology of Perception when Merleau-Ponty describes how a bust is lit up when a lamp moves around it: “If we move a lamp round a bust at a constant distance from it,” he says, “even when the lamp itself is invisible we see the rotation of the source of light in the complex of changing light and colour.”5 This rotation and complex of changing light he calls the “logic of lighting” or the “synthesis of lighting.”6 The phrase is used later too: my gaze “knows” the logic of lighting, Merleau-Ponty says, when it, “following the indications offered by the spectacle, and drawing together the light and shade spread over it, ultimately settles on the lighted surface as upon that which the light reveals.”7 The surface of an object is never lit up entirely. It has its movement, undulations, and folds; parts of it are lit up while other parts are darkened, where light is diffuse or where the surface falls into itself and there are shadows. Even when the lamp moves around the bust and I do not see the light source, my gaze “knows” that the same bust that is illuminated here is also darkened there. It knows the logic of lighting. The logic of the lighting is this: to see, I do not need to see a source of illumination itself. Part of  PP, pp. 360–361/326.  Ibid., pp. 361/326. 7  Ibid. 5 6

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what Merleau-Ponty contests about Descartes’s analyses of light, for example, is that Descartes leaves aside this logic and context to clarify it; and, for this reason, he cannot give account of the very light by which we see. Instead, what my gaze “knows” is that no surface is entirely light and it must contain dark spots, it also “knows” that these same sites of darkness can themselves also shift and come into light while what was previously lit up falls into darkness. There is no total view of anything here. An account of the very light according to which we see demands an account of how what is seen bears an invisible that is not its other side. To put it provocatively, we are blind to the things we see. In the “Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel” lecture, Merleau-­ Ponty mentions a “new idea of light” that is “polysemic.”8 He is speaking against the “sunny day” of philosophy just as he does against the “absolute spirit” in the Preface— impossible. Think of the phenomenon instead as refractory or diffuse. In a certain sense, Merleau-Ponty’s remarks in response to Mme Prenant, particularly the idea of a concentric rather than hierarchical movement, destroy the idea that philosophy moves to an uppermost limit of vision and somehow sees the source of illumination that makes possible both our vision and the things it sees. Later, in The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty instead speaks of a “cosmology of the visible.” It would replace the philosophy of “finalism,” he says, with a philosophy that is “no longer a question of origins, nor limits, nor of a series of events going to a first cause, but one sole explosion of being which is forever.”9 Here is an ontology that makes complete eidetic vision, and the reduction of the sciences to phenomenology, impossible.

8  Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Notes de cours: 1958–1959 et 1960–1961 (France: Gallimard, 1996), pp. 305. 9  VI, pp. 313/265.

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Ontology and Nature Reconsidered In the important nature course notes from the 1950s, MerleauPonty declares that nature is a “privileged expression” of ontology. It is perhaps difficult to resist calling Merleau-Ponty a vitalist or an animist if we forget that his ontology frustrates self-identities of all kinds. He does not mean that there is some aspect of nature resistant to appearance and expression because that would suggest, paradoxically, it betrays something super-­natural and beyond us. This is a reminder of what Merleau-Ponty has already declared in the Preface about an unmotivated upsurge: a primordial and non-theoretical sense of nature includes itself in the plane of the phenomenon and the human. It implies, in turn, that we are also natural beings in some primordial sense. In this case, Merleau-Ponty also says, nature is a productive power of “ontological mutations.” It is an upsurge of sense and meaning that arises for and in us. It is therefore not aberrant to the worlds of language, art, history, etc. It is crucial to note how this is also not a biological essentialism and how the notion of nature has also been reorganized considering the phenomenon. The biological formulation of nature is concerned with the functioning of organisms with respect to their physical-chemical constitution. This view assumes in advance what does and does not count as a natural event to be studied. Here, biology circumscribes a subspecies of natural events. Whereas, when Merleau-Ponty says that nature is the power of ontological mutation and the privileged expression of ontology, he means that it is not self-enclosed at all and cannot be circumscribed by one field of investigation. He means, furthermore, that it is not defined in terms of some measurability immanent to it and will not be reduced to whatever of it is grasped objectively. If it were any of these, then either ontology would be outside nature or understood merely as a subset of the conditions of biology.

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One of the projects of the nature lectures is thus to give a new account of nature without a notion of telos. To a large degree, this is what Charles Darwin does in his account of the origin of species. Although Darwin does import themes such as “fittest,” “survival,” or “utility” which Merleau-­Ponty thinks goes against the project. He takes up works such as Edward S.  Russel’s Directiveness of Organic Activities and considers at length organisms like the marine fish, the microstoma, and the counterintuitive way it relies on nematocysts pattered over its body that it does not itself produce but takes from the hydra. He very importantly gives an account of mimicry in nature that is not simply restricted to animal life but also includes plants. His fundamental point is that, against the idea of some unifiable truth, nature is a multivalent, creative, and deceptive play of appearances that guards against singular governing principles like utility, fitness, or survival.10 A natural event happens inside nature, but nature is not only these natural events. It is mutation itself. Darwin thought that the instincts were those actions done without experience, always in the same way though without knowledge of its purpose.11 He thought that instinctive behaviors could be explained using the resources of his own theory of evolution and that they were no different than adaptation,  As Véronique Fôtì points out, Merleau-Ponty warns, “against making efficacity the criterion for the reality of mimicry; and the fundamental point is that—in marked contrast to the long-standing philosophical idealization of univocal truth— a multivalent, creative, and often deceptive play of appearances prevails throughout nature, repudiating any attempt to impose a single governing principle, such as utility or survival.” Fôtì, Véronique. Tracing Expression in Merleau-Ponty: Aesthetics, Philosophy of Biology, and Ontology (Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2013), p. 84. 11  “An action, which we ourselves should require experience to enable us to perform, when performed by an animal, more especially by a very young one, without any experience, and when performed by many individuals in the same way, without their knowing for what purpose it is performed, is usually said to be instinctive.” Darwin, Charles (1859). On the origin of species (London: Murray, 1859), p. 207. 10

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survival, or fittest.12 The problem for Merleau-Ponty is how to understand the instincts outside of these inherently teleological ideas. His extremely early interest in Husserl manuscripts, which began in April 1939, resurfaces much later in The Visible and the Invisible in a brief comment on Husserl’s notion of the instincts: in the manuscript notes, Merleau-Ponty says, Husserl considers the instincts only “from the transcendental point of view” and thus assumes “the omnipotence of the eidetic method.” This is because, for Husserl, on Merleau-Ponty’s view, the instincts are irrational and therefore opposite to the rational and transcendental point of view. When they emerge, they overthrow the rational and transcendental. To get out of this opposition, Merleau-Ponty says, “the decisive step is to recognize that in fact a consciousness is intentionality without acts” and “that the ‘objects’ of consciousness themselves are not something positive in front of us, but nuclei of signification about which the transcendental life pivots, specified voids.”13 On one side, as we saw in the discussion of operative intentionality, there is an intentionality without acts, that is, an intentionality not actively constituting what appears to it. This is because, on the other side, what appears to consciousness is not initially an object or something positive in front of us but things which are not in-themselves and therefore lack complete presence. We stressed these two sides in our discussion of ontology and its non-coincidence last chapter. This ontology allows Merleau-Ponty to navigate the problem of the instincts by showing a certain topology between consciousness and existence in which the instincts and their irrationalism do not overthrow consciousness and its rationalism but are rather configured in them. This makes consciousness not totally intentional or teleological and it makes the instincts not totally apart from intentionality. This is the site of the body itself. 12  Also, due to the collaborative efforts of Gaston Berger, Paul Ricœur, Jean Wahl, Jean Hyppolite, and Merleau-Ponty, the Centre d’Archives Husserl at the Sorbonne in Paris was officially inaugurated in May 1957. 13  VI p. 287/238–239.

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Think of current discussions involving the role of the gut and bacteria in cognition. For Merleau-Ponty, such discussions involve a recalibration of notions of both interior and exterior to highlight their “oneirism.” His own example of the chiasmus illustrates this cross between the interior and the exterior and its own unreal state. The chiasmus is certainly real: it is the optic nerve that intercrosses on the body of the sphenoid bone so that, in binocular vision, the left and right eye function in equal measure. I cover one eye, and I have one point of view. I cover the other, and I have another point of view. This means that the body is not itself a single point of view but the possibility of two points of view that are only seemingly one and the same. That is, phenomenologically, the body itself defies specific location and this defiance is what in fact gives me the single perspective. Merleau-Ponty says, for example, that the body is “the advent of difference.” It is the “possibility for separation (two eyes, two ears: the possibility for discrimination, for the use of the diacritical).”14 If single vision gives the impression that we see things from away, from a rational point of view, the chiasmus shows that this is not initially the case, that there is in fact an irrationalism of vision. This defiance of the singular is precisely the reverie-like state of the body itself: that element which is both inside consciousness and resistant to it. Merleau-Ponty is posing the instincts as some concrete aspect of the body that surges up and through consciousness, so that it is both inside and resistant to reflection. Because this aspect is both outside and inside—an element of my body that is as exterior as the world of things and yet at the same time interior to and needed by me—it is not technically placeable or teleological. This aspect of our embodiment, its association with a primordial nature and instincts, is thus without “utility or “fittest.” It is a non-philosophical conception of foundation.  Ibid., p. 266/217.

14

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Phenomenology and the Psyche Reconsidered The instincts and the transcendental, the irrational and the rational, imply a reconsideration of Merleau-Ponty’s comments in the Preface about phenomenology and psychologism. Furthermore, he says in response to Mme. Prenant during the discussion of the Phenomenology of Perception, the sciences reintegrate themselves into the phenomenological, and thus the latter is not decisively closed to or from the sciences. Would the same not be true for psychology? Would there not be a psychology that comes back to phenomenology, and would not phenomenology accommodate it? Indeed, in his introduction to Hesnard’s L’Oeuvre de Freud, Merleau-­Ponty recognizes a need for these two major trends of the twentieth century and calls for their “converging.” This convergence, he also notes, prevents “an idealist deviation of Freudian research.”15 This, I think, amounts to saying the following: phenomenology and psychoanalysis converge so long as we cease to believe in a true subject behind a false one, but it is also precisely this convergence that allows us to cease from believing in this inherent parallelism within the subject. The convergence of phenomenology and psychoanalysis, in other words, is meant to undermine the double life of a conscious and unconscious self. This is not the same as denying the unconscious. Consider this problem in psychoanalysis: the analysand has to test reality and tell the difference between a latent meaning in her mind against one that is manifest; beyond this, however, she also must come to terms with true and false latent meanings—she can make use of some latent meanings and not others. This latter is a truly special ability. It has to do with a primary process in the psyche where latent meanings may be 15  Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Préface,” in A. Hesnard, L’Œuvre de Freud, 5–10 (France: Payot, 1960), pp. 8. Translated by Alden L. Fisher as “Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis: Preface to Hesnard’s L’Oeuvre de Freud,” Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 18 (1982): 70–71.

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rejected either because they are intolerable or because they are inapt. When we think of this ability phenomenologically, the most we can say is that complete reflection is limited, and this limit is a symbolic structure that is itself unthinkable or intolerable. We can leave aside the “idealist deviation” and say instead that this limit is not simply in my mind but a limit of me that is also not mine. It is, after all, not because of something I will to do that I can tell the difference between true and false latent meanings. Here instead is a limit of thinking and deliberation that is at the same time ontological. One radical outcome of this convergence is that it more vividly allows us to think about an ontological sedimentation, like the sedimentation Merleau-Ponty says the phenomenological reduction makes, in different than realist terms. The convergence between phenomenology and psychoanalysis discovers an ontological limit of thought, but this limit cannot be apprehended according to the thought it produces. While one common but abstracted way to think of such a limit might be as an excess or transcendence, the convergence between phenomenology and psychoanalysis prevents us from doing so. Instead, Merleau-Ponty says, we are as if in a “timber yard.” Analysis works because it sediments its latent content rather than retrieves or reduces to it. The point is to deny that analysis has a completely active power opposed to the latent content it analyzes. It is also to deny that there is a latent content so passive that it waits to be analyzed. There are not two kinds of content here: the complete active power of expression to express a latent that can then become totally unconcealed and no longer latent. The convergence between phenomenology and psychoanalysis makes us instead think that the conscious and unconscious are lateral to one another: each produces the other. We do not leave the superficial and go into the depths, but rather the depths are always at the surface so that there is a surface. How then should we instead think of our analysis and what we analyze? What we do and who we are? In one of his remarkable

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final lectures titled “La philosophie aujourd’hui” Merleau-Ponty says the following: “There is only one complete psychology: it is philosophy, that is to say Psyche confined to the auto-revelation of Being (hence, reference to the Psyche of Heraclitus).”16 The reference to Heraclitus here is Fragment B45, which concerns the psyche as a limit of thought: “The logos of the psyche has such depth that we may never reach its limit, no matter what path we take or how far we travel.” The further out into existence I travel, the more I am confronted by the depths of my own interior life and the impossibility of knowing it. The depths of the psyche are in this way unknown: so bottomless is it that it cannot exclude the outside world. Because it penetrates my interior life, this world is likewise bottomless or has no outer limits. We should think of the psyche or limit of philosophy as impossible to grasp not because it transcends reflection but because it is constellated within the very structures (me-world, self-other, etc.) of all reflection. This is the reason Merleau-Ponty suggests a convergence between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. Taken together, they concern a limit would not be speculative but concrete and configured into both the inside and the outside. A limit to both me and philosophy. Another way to make sense of psychoanalysis and MerleauPonty’s phenomenology might be through his encounter with Jacques Lacan. The two had a close relation. Lacan repeatedly refers to and challenges Merleau-Ponty, while Merleau-Ponty does eventually take up some of these challenges. Marc Richir, for example, notes the psychoanalytic “turn” in Merleau-Ponty’s later work and tries to situate Lacan’s notion of the signifier therein.17 In one rare direct reference to Lacan, and especially to his famous thesis that the “unconscious is like a language,” Merleau-Ponty says this is just a “regional problem.” The deeper 16  Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Notes de cours: 1958–1959 et 1960–1961 (France: Gallimard, 1996), pp. 83. 17  Richir, Marc. 2018. Phénomènes, temps et êtres, Grenoble: Jérôme Millon. 68–76.

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problem, he notes, is that being is itself structured like a language.18 Here, “language” refers specifically to Saussure’s notion of the arbitrariness of the sign—the idea that the word has no positive value like a specific referent but means what it means only in oppositive relation to another word or words in general. The arbitrariness of the sign implicates, then, a system of signs unto itself. Merleau-­Ponty is saying that, in ontology, there is no positive value but only oppositive differences. This thesis is not well defined, but I think it must be something like this: ontology is like a language because it is differential or is itself écart. This forces us to go even further and say: ontology is not just like a language in the sense that it is similar to language; rather, because being is differential, there is an ontology so open that it intervenes into both the system of signs and perceptual things. There is, in other words, a still more profound ontology according to which we have the distinction between of language and world. I noted in the introduction that Merleau-Ponty was critical of the idea of a tacit ego because it preceded language and thought, and therefore fell prey to Cartesianism. When discussing essences, I noted that for Merleau-Ponty they are not separate from existence but language implicitly conceives of them so. There is thus a “primary signification around which acts of naming and of expression are organized.” This is what leads readers to think that Merleau-­Ponty conceives of perception as pre-linguistic and totally without language. But, in the same way that he is dedicated to configuring phenomenology and psychoanalysis into one another, and giving an ontological account of the psyche, he is likewise broadening the account of language, what counts as language, and including it within ontology and ontological differentiation. My thesis is that this ontology is a pre-­existence, a primary signification. Not coincidentally, Saussure excludes the speech act from linguistics and says it is impossible to give an  VI, p. 165/126.

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“ontogenesis” of language.19 Whereas Merleau-Ponty does want to provide an ontogenesis of language and thinks this occurs in the speech act itself. For him, the speech act is not only the actions involved in mouthing words but a site of symbolization. It has to do with an aspect of the body that is not itself denoted but lets us denote: “in here are words” and “out there are things.” This moment according to which language produces an inside and an outside is technically not anything language could be about. It does not itself obey the laws of signification even as it makes signification possible. Here, then, we come to the very concrete limit that configures the inside and outside and defies conceptualization. Merleau-Ponty suggests in the passivity course that, as a site of symbolization, this limit does not straightforwardly follow Freud’s drive theory but is rather an “impressional,” or what we called presentational, notion of consciousness.20 This was also indicated above in the discussion of the instincts. Merleau-Ponty reads Freud’s theory of sexual instincts to indicate that the situation itself demands interpretation.21 There is not a systematic point of view on psychoanalysis in Merleau-Ponty—its convergence with phenomenology prevents that—and he does not pledge allegiance to one school of thought within it. There are also plenty of references to “projection and introjection”—one of which appears on the first page of the institution lectures and  de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics, translated by Roy Harris (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2009), p. 9. 20  IP, pp. 196–97/148–49. 21  At the end of “Cézanne’s Doubt,” for example, he says that Freud’s understanding of sexuality is a “hermeneutical musing” rather than being “overdetermined.” That is, because of an indeterminate existence that both demands to be interpreted and forces a failed interpretation. Hence the talk of being in a “forest of symbols.” In the passivity lectures he writes the following: “[W]hat prevents the latent meaning from being stated openly is that ‘the very idea of openly or of exactitude makes no sense here, not simply because we are in the imaginary (formal reason), but because the unity is undivided. This sex is not sex because it is everything—ignored as sex because it is everything.’” IP, pp. 204/154. 19

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describes institution itself.22 The idea of projection and introjection is crucial to Freud’s melancholy dynamic. It is then taken up especially by Melanie Klein and Kleinian analysts (e.g., Julia Kristeva). Here, whatever of the caregiver is intolerable (hate) is internalized by the child and symbolized as part of them. The child then contains within them something intolerable, but leaves within the caregiver what tolerable (love). There is, in other words, a split within each term that at the same time allows each to split from the other. Instead of a polymorphic perversity between infant and mother that gets cut off and lost because the father arrives on the scene, projection and introjection may be a pre-oedipal dynamic, not idealized and already shot through with the ambivalence between hate and love. Merleau-Ponty in the passivity notes maintains that this pre-Oedipal dynamic is an operation of embodiment, and that embodiment is itself split. If so, it would mean that we would have to again maintain the embodiment in terms of écart and differentiation; and we would have to understand this differentiation, like in the speech act, as a place of symbolization. One of the last working notes to The Visible and the Invisible from November 1960 is vexing in this regard: “Do a psychoanalysis of Nature: it is the flesh, the mother.”23 In contradiction with the claim just above, this note seems to emphasize a polymorphic perversity. The note is however vague. It is also reasonable to wonder if the psychoanalysis of nature and flesh is ambivalent. It would mean re-emphasizing the open ontology discussed last chapter. It would mean the following: (1) being is always already incomplete and other to itself in things and consciousness; (2) because of this, there is an internal delimitation both within things and subjectivity; (3) this internal delimitation does not mean unity but in fact undermines the thesis of a tacit cogito that precedes language and reflection; and this will mean  IP, pp. 20/6.  VI, p. 315/267.

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(4) that language is instead implicated in ontology and its internal delimitation between consciousness and world, implicated in its primary signification. In a way, the methodological implications of this language and ontology, and of a convergence between phenomenology and psychoanalysis, are discussed in the following section. Does Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology Result in a Novel? There is a notable ambivalence in Merleau-Ponty’s response to Mme. Prenant: “in certain respects we must put art above science.” Also in the discussion is Emile Bréhier’s famous comment that he sees Merleau-­Ponty’s “ideas as being better expressed in literature and in painting than in philosophy” and that his “philosophy results in a novel.” If so, it would put Merleau-Ponty in line with Heidegger and Sartre. For example, along with the thesis of absolute negation already discussed, Sartre thinks literature is revolutionary. It overthrows ordinary or direct language and shows instead the fictive and free play of imagination. In this sense, literature performs a reduction. Heidegger similarly thinks that poetry unconceals Being. Both Sartre and Heidegger write poetry, plays, or literature. They show what, all along, phenomenology attempts to show but cannot. On this view, philosophy both begins with and tries to resolve the distinction between phenomenon and being. It is thus faced with an impossibility because, to resolve this distinction, it must destroy its founding premise. Whereas the history of art does not have this struggle. It is, in a sense, more philosophical than philosophy. Indeed, near the end of the Preface Merleau-Ponty apparently comes close to this view: “Phenomenology is as painstaking as the works of Balzac, Proust, Valéry, or Cézanne, through the same kind of attention and wonder, the same demand for awareness, the same will to grasp the sense of the world or of history in its nascent state.” In “Cézanne’s Doubt” he famously says Cézanne’s paintings are like phenomenology in that they remain

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faithful to the phenomena.24 Notice, however, that he puts art and philosophy in concentric rather than hierarchical terms. Notice, too, that Merleau-Ponty’s immediate response to Bréhier is not to the above comment but to an earlier critique: I would like to answer briefly one of Bréhier’s earlier remarks— namely, that it is “serious” to posit the other in his relationships with us and to posit him in the world. I think that you meant to say “ethically serious.” It was never my intention to posit the other except as an ethical subject, and I am sure I have not excluded the other as an ethical subject.25 The critique has to do with Merleau-Ponty’s claim that I find the other in the same world in which I am. Although he denies it here, Bréhier thinks there is a bad “consequence” of Merleau-Ponty’s claim. The latter refuses this since it in large part assumes the Kantian claim that ethics concerns the spontaneity of an “I think” independent of existence. Although Merleau-Ponty seems to evade the question about art and literature, his response nonetheless refers to the new cogito and its inner-weakness—that is, the impossibility to reduce to it, the unmotivated upsurge of existence into it, and thus also its transcendence into existence. This does relate to Bréhier’s comment about art: because there remains something irreducible in consciousness, and because this irreducibility just is what consciousness is, Merleau-Ponty cannot ultimately agree that literature and painting better express thought or that philosophy results in a novel. If phenomenology is incomplete, it does not make sense to then say that artwork performs a reduction on phenomenology and shows what phenomenology otherwise wants to show. It is in this sense a philosophical, not just biographical, point that Merleau-Ponty did not, at least not under his own name, write  SNS, p. 19/14.  Le Primat de la perception et ses conséquences philosophiques (France:

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poetry, plays, or literature. It may also be significant that MerleauPonty does not provide a direct response to Bréhier. We still must explore the place “painstaking” artworks have in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, and how to conceive their concentric relation to phenomenology. There is of course an equation in the Preface between a wonder before the world while in the phenomenological reduction and in the process of making works of art or in the demand they place on their audience. In “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty even calls for a “figured philosophy.” Merleau-­ Ponty’s thought is famously critiqued, especially by Paul Ricoeur and Jean-François Lyotard, for being unable to think language in the terms most proper to it. That is, as symbolic and figurative system. We noticed above in our discussion of Lacan that this is not Merleau-Ponty’s sense of language and that, for him, language and being are matrixed into one another. This already means that being is not something “real” and distinct from the figurative. Merleau-Ponty’s comments in the Preface at least allow us to problematize the idea that pure description retrieves the things in themselves and even whether there are things in themselves. The reduction is incomplete, after all, because the things to which we reduce are themselves incomplete. That is why we are left to marvel at their unmotivated upsurge. Here, MerleauPonty certainly intimates that description must bear some internal relation to art, expression, and literary language. This might well be the inchoate notion to which Bréhier was reacting. But, again, just as phenomenology cannot provide a total ground for the sciences, neither can artwork for phenomenology. Just as phenomenology and the sciences internally constellate one another, so too might phenomenology and art. Merleau-Ponty is eventually quite clear that this internal relation does not amount to a so-called linguistic turn in philosophy but is in fact ontology. In his 1954 course on the problem of speech, for example, he calls attention to a paper titled “La notion de verb,” written by Jean Fourquet just a few years earlier in 1950, and especially to its historical analysis of the verb

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“being.”26 The point for Merleau-Ponty is that ontology is a linguistic tradition, and it is impossible for ontology to ignore its language (Merleau-Ponty gives the specific examples of logical positivism and German Idealism). This however means that we cannot possibly conceive ontological claims to universality as genuine achievements in universality. Instead, a sensitivity to the history of the language of being is, for Merleau-Ponty, already a sensitivity to the contingency of being itself. This is a methodological issue: to be sensitive to the language of being and its contingency, we expel the idea that being is something descriptively available—something already there to which we can return. We thus come to an internal constellation between description and expression. The 1953 lecture course, Recherches sur l’usage Littéraire du Langage27 course, indicates the matter. It is posed as an ontological concern in one of his last lectures titled L’ontologie cartésienne et l’ontologie d’aujourd’hui.” It again comes up in The Visible and the Invisible: Hence it is a question whether philosophy as the re-conquest of brute or wild being can be accomplished by the resources of the eloquent language, or whether it would not be necessary for philosophy to use language in a way that takes from it its power of immediate or direct signification in order to equal it with what it wishes all the same to say.28  Fourquet, Jean. “La notion de verbe,” Fourquet, “La notion de verbe,” in Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique, ed. Paul Guillaume and Ignace Meyerson, 1950, 43 (1), p. 73. In the lecture, following a consideration of the verb, Merleau-Ponty criticizes both “German idealism” and logical positivism (in particular the Vienna circle and the Lwów-­Warsaw school). Merleau-Ponty treats them as the same philosophical endeavor, naming them “the schools of Vienne and Warsaw” and using them as examples of logical positivism (empirisme logique). See Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sur le problème de la parole, (Switzerland: MetisPresses, 2020) p. 50 ([13]v(14)). 27  Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Recherches sur l’usage Littéraire du Langage: Cours au Collège de France Notes (Switzerland: MētisPresses, 2013). 28  VI. 137/102–103. 26

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Merleau-Ponty asks in another passage: “But then I will have to disclose a non-explicated horizon: that of the language I am using to describe all that—And what co-determines its final meaning”29 He is asking about a language adequate to the indirect and incomplete ontology. What language could concern itself with the being which is so radically open that it is even in the midst of that language? This question poses being not something about which I think or to which I refer but something according to which I think and is therefore non-referential and non-denotable. Hence, contra Bréhier, Merleau-Ponty’s answer to the question must be that there is no specific language since that would turn the indirect ontology into something reducible and to something that could be directly said. This suggests a phenomenology which, instead of employing a pure description that goes back to the things themselves and retrieves them, operates a matrix between description and expression. It is worth considering the oft-quoted working note to The Visible and the Invisible titled “Philosophy and Literature” where MerleauPonty says that “being demands creation.” He wants to “make an analysis of literature,” he says, that would be an “inscription of Being,” and he openly wonders whether incorporating this into phenomenology would make it a “supreme art.”30 This is not to say that ambiguities between genre do not abound. They certainly do, and instructively so. In fact, in  Ibid. p. 230/178.  “[E]xpression of the mute experience by itself, is creation. A creation that is at

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the same time a reintegration of Being: for it is not a creation in the sense of the commonplace Gebilde that history fabricates: it knows itself to be Gebilde and wishes to surpass itself as pure Gebilde, to find again its origin. it is hence a creation in a radical sense: a creation that is at the same time an adequation, the only way to obtain an adequation. This considerably deepens Souriau’s views on philosophy as supreme art: for art and philosophy together are precisely not arbitrary fabrications in the universe of the “spiritual” (of “culture”), but contact with Being precisely as creations. Being is what requires creation of us for us to experience it. Make an analysis of literature in this sense: as inscription of Being.” ibid., pp. 247–248/197

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“Metaphysics and the Novel,” Merleau-Ponty says that, as soon as there is a “metaphysics” no longer concerning abstract entities but of our worldly experience and “in the heart’s slightest movement,” then “the tasks of literature and philosophy can no longer be separated.” They will always be left with the same ambiguities of expression.31 Merleau-Ponty also writes in The Visible and the Invisible, that “[n]o one has gone further than Proust ‘in fixing the relations between the visible and the invisible, in describing and idea that is not the contrary of the sensible, that is its lining and its depth.’”32 He even declares in the recently published La problème de la parole lecture course that Proust “is a philosopher.”33 The relationship between MerleauPonty and Proust has been much hailed as well. A discussion of Proust occupies some of the final pages of the completed part of The Visible and the Invisible. One thing that might not be so obvious, however, is that the form of Proust’s writing—an “autobiographical fiction”—adds another dimension to the ambiguity between philosophy and literature. What interests Merleau-Ponty about Stendhal in Recherches sur l’usage littéraire du langage is his use of the form to problematize who the narrator is—the author himself or a fictional character?—and suggest a language preceding subjectivity. Marcel is the character who at  SNS. pp.  36–37/28. A collection of essays on precisely this ambiguity is supremely helpful, especially the introductory remarks: See Davis, Duane H., and Hamrick, William (eds). Merleau-Ponty and the Art of Perception (New York: State University of New York Press, 2016). 32  VI. p. 193/149. 33  In an excerpt from the lecture course of 1953–1954, La problème de la parole, published in Chiasmi International, Volume 21 (2019), and translated into English by Rajiv Kaushik, Merleau-Ponty says this: 31

1) Proust as philosopher?Theory, for he is a philosopher: he says that he himself often ‘sought a philosophic theme for some great literary work’ … This is not a diversion from philosophy; it is his philosophy. … Let us describe, then, this fundamental experience, which, when broadened, will become ‘his philosophy,’ and which is precisely the correlative experience of the silence of things and of the appearance of speech [la parole]. p. 45

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the end of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time sits down to write the book we have just read. This does not mean, however, that everything we have read has issued from the mind of Proust. We can also say that, as we read Marcel sitting to write Proust’s major work, we are also reading Proust becoming Proust. What Proust and Stendhal effectively operate in the autobiographical fiction is a resolution to Diderot’s paradox of the actor and the character: instead of a realism in language that allows identities to be identified with or separated from one another, to be properly true or not, language is a space in which identities are formed even before there is intention. One could say that the autobiographical fiction directly addresses the psychology of the tacit ego about which Merleau-Ponty was initially concerned. There is a basic association in both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty between intentionality and signification. The relation between the noesis and the noema is like the one between the signifier and the signified. The former is “of” or “refers to” the latter. But, if it is true that for Merleau-Ponty there is something non-intentional in language, it is also true that the association between intentionality and signification is not straightforward. Just as in intentions there is an operative relation that is neither an origin nor a destination, in signification there is an operative meaning. For example, as Merleau-Ponty has written, there is no one thought encompassing all thought; and there is no language that circumnavigates itself and speaks its own beginnings or says everything language wants to say. This internal impossibility of language is what Merleau-Ponty has called its “silent” or “mute” meaning. A silent or mute meaning is not at all disassociated from operative intentionality and the unmotivated upsurge of existence. The speech act and mouthing words, for example, contains silence right within it. There is what Merleau-Ponty describes at the end of the completed section of The Visible and the Invisible the “awesome birth of vociferation.”34 Between two people, words are also sounds that in some practical and unreflective way  VI, p. 188/144.

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come from the motor-movements of one’s mouth and ring in the eardrum of another. What the latter hears is not just the voice of the former but the resonance that takes place in their own body. This slippage between two speakers is illustrative of what MerleauPonty means by the silence of the world, or of being, in language. His phenomenology not only pays attention to silence but allows it to happen. That is, it does not resolve itself or reduce to origins but keeps itself open. The final conundrum in Merleau-Ponty, it seems to me, concerns this limit of phenomenology—a limit to reflection and language that is at the same time concrete and bodily—which we will miss as soon as we turn it into a direct referent. That is why Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology neither ends in a novel nor expels literary language.

CHAPTER 6

Concluding Remarks

Abstract  I reflect on the openness of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, the contingency of consciousness and existence, as well as the philosophy that is meant to inspect and be internal to them. What can this openness of philosophy mean for us? Keywords  Indirect ontology • Archeology • Openness • The phenomenon of life • The contingency of philosophy The Preface is in large part about the phenomenological method, both its consequences and internal possibilities for extension. In this sense, the deepest phenomenological question is “What is phenomenology?”—the very question that opens the Preface. Its starting point is its depth. That is why we ultimately did not get too far beyond this initial question. The reader should keep this in mind: Merleau-Ponty is at once giving a description or exegesis of Husserlian phenomenology and posing this description as the problem of phenomenology itself. One way to do this is to situate Husserl’s “first rule”— which is itself to “describe and reach back” or “look back into” © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 R. Kaushik, The Preface to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception: A Re-Introduction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51329-9_6

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experience itself—in an uncomplicated way. Here, phenomenology is radical to the extent that it allows us to witness naïve consciousness itself, to see not the separate acts of consciousness but the intended objects of consciousness and the principles that govern them.1 However, and again posing description as the very problem of phenomenology, one of the major claims of the Preface is also to point out the incompleteness of this reduction, to stress that the return to naïve consciousness implicates an existence that is both irreducible and defies reflection from inside it. Not only does phenomenology reach back into experience, not only is it archeological, but in doing so it reveals its impossibility. In other words, it reveals its conditions not as archeological but as present. Husserl’s declaration, “back to the things themselves,” is thus reformed by Merleau-Ponty to say, “here are the things.” Yet, also according to Merleau-Ponty, we must be careful about presence. We place ourselves in the world to wonder at it. We place ourselves within this spectacle, and we even place this spectacle within us. In this way, presence becomes 1  In the Crisis, for example, Husserl writes the following about retroactive regard of phenomenology:

[S]eeks to attain the genuine and pure form of its task and its systematic development. It is the motif of inquiring back into the ultimate source of all formations of knowledge, the motif of the knower’s reflecting upon himself and his knowing life in which all the scientific structures that are valid for him occur purposefully, are stored up as acquisitions, and have become and continue to become freely available. Working itself out radically, it is the motif of a universal philosophy which is grounded purely in this source and thus ultimately grounded. This source bears the title I-myself, with all my actual and possible knowing life and, ultimately, my concrete life in general. The whole transcendental set of problems circles around the relation of this, my ‘I’—the ‘ego’ … around the relation of this ego and my conscious life to the world of which I am conscious and whose true being I know through my own cognitive structures. Husserl, Edmund, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, translated by David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 97–98.

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what resists reflection. One paradoxical thesis of the Preface is thus: because there is a world that is present to us, and because we are also present to this world, we can neither make the world nor ourselves entirely present through the reduction. To say that there is an unmotivated upsurge of the world is to say that something of existence is operative and defiant of both originalist and teleological thinking. Something of existence is neither “what was” nor what “will be,” neither something to which we return nor something into which we are going. It rather erupts and its eruption is both in front of and inside us. This is why in the Preface Merleau-Ponty also redefines philosophy as an experiment concerned with its own beginning which is at the same time ever-renewing. The statement that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy ends in painting and the novel emphasizes one side of his thesis, that we can only stand and wonder in front of the world. It forgets that this same spectacle, and its unmotivated upsurge, constellates itself in consciousness and betrays its inner-weakness. In other words, even though phenomenology finds that its beginnings renew themselves and are present, it is nonetheless critical philosophy insofar as it is concerned with the limits of reflection without which it would not be. It is only that these limits are concrete and configured within both the things and the reflection it frustrates. Furthermore, to the extent Merleau-Ponty remains a phenomenologist, he resists all transcendencies. There is a concrete ontology here. The ontological limit of reflection is not a Being that is self-identical and distinct from the beings but incomplete on its own and always within the very things it makes possible. True to this ontology, Merleau-Ponty thinks the different fields of investigation do not so much forget and pass over their foundations but are at a transversal slice within being, which can never be submitted to direct study. In his own work, for example, philosophy does not reduce non-philosophy but each is ever-renewing in view of the other. This is the concentric rather

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than hierarchical movement discussed last chapter. One can wonder if Merleau-Ponty does not suggest an ontology of inter-disciplinarity. If, in Husserl, the dictums “back to the things themselves” and the “principle of all principles” are paired together, MerleauPonty’s complication of the former should also result in a complication of phenomenology’s “first rule.” That is, along with the incompleteness of the reduction is the inadequacy of pure description, and description on its own. The philosophy that actively experiments again and again with its own beginning is also a philosophy that not only describes but also expresses. In fact, it expresses the very incomplete or indirect ontology that is itself always expressive and within the things it makes possible. Certainly, Bréhier must have noticed the repeated mentions of painters and writers in Merleau-­Ponty’s work. Throughout his oeuvre there are even more, and in some way these references become more and more centralized. Against Bréhier remark, however, we have noticed that the incompleteness of reflection informs the relation between phenomenology and art. “The parallel [of painting] with philosophies,” Merleau-Ponty says in his institution course, “is acceptable only if philosophies themselves are not taken as statements of ideas, but as inventions of symbolic forms.”2 Although he has been criticized for not taking seriously the insights of structural linguistics, it is also possible Merleau-Ponty thinks the philosophies which result from it go too much in the direction of a virtual language system and to the idea that there is a specific and purer language than others. Literature or poetry, for example. Whereas Merleau-Ponty does not and cannot think this. Yet he is an unusually fluid writer. Not only does he pay attention to artists and writers and make them central to phenomenology, his own writing constellates description and 2

 IP, pp. 82/44.

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expression. This is not extraneous to his thought, I would argue, but methodological. The point is to produce a phenomenology of the very ontological texture to which we cannot travel directly, or about which there is never only one thing that can be said. This would be the very phenomenology he proposes in the Preface as the one that repeatedly experiments with its own beginning. In the already mentioned working note to The Visible and the Invisible on philosophy and literature, Merleau-Ponty speaks about “creation in a radical sense: a creation that is at the same time an adequation, the only way to obtain an adequation” and refers to Étienne Souriau’s L’instauration philosophique3— “instauration” being another term for instituting. This suggests that, for Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology exposes what was impossible to recognize in the already instituted way of philosophizing, and it is creative because it thereby lets its concepts take on meanings that were impossible to predict.4 There is, then, another comparison between philosopher and artist: in the same way Merleau-Ponty suggests that Matisse opens up possible paintings and worlds which were not stored in his mind before he began painting, or that Klee’s drawn lines are “diacritical,” and therefore each with a ­meaning only in oppositive relation to other lines, thought for the phenomenologist is likewise tentative and open. This is one of the great lessons we may take from him, already stated in the Preface: our thoughts do not result 3 4

 Souriau, Étienne. L’instauration philosophique (Paris: Alcan, 1939).  In “A Note on the Relation between Étienne Souriau’s L’instauration philos-

ophique and Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy?” Leonard Lawlor writes: “In instauration and creation, the repetition is necessary. Yet, in instauration, the necessity arises not only because nothing can be produced without using previous traits, functions, and features. The necessity also arises because the instauration was not possible the first time. It is this ‘not possible’ or this ‘what had not been able to be’ that distinguishes instauration from creation in Deleuze and Guattari. In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari think that concepts have been and can be created; creation is possible; it can be achieved. To lay out a plane of immanence without any transcendence whatsoever, that is impossible.” Deleuze Studies 5.3 (2011), pp. 400–406.

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from a spontaneous cogito and are not that precious. We offer them and hope they take on their own life. Where in the introduction I spoke about ontology and its contingency, here I would like to mention the aliveness of an existence capable of being both external and internal to us. There is an aliveness in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, too, because it concerns an existence which is not at all circumscribed but in me, the other, and things. If I am going to grasp the aliveness of this existence, I must grasp it as what comes from neither me nor the outside completely. This existence does affect me but only because its own interiority or “unmotivated upsurge” at once calls for its own exteriorization and into the specific things and consciousnesses. Here is an ontology that marks me internally because its own internality demands that it exteriorize itself. It is true that reflection cannot capture being because it is in being, but it is also true that being is in reflection. There is at least some sense, then, that for this philosophy to be alive it needs to be one according to being, and this means it is no longer just a denotational or referential philosophy. Merleau-Ponty asks us, in other words, to think of philosophy in a more creative way because creation is precisely what ontology calls for.

CHAPTER 7

Epilogue: On the Continued Relevance of the Preface Today

Abstract  This chapter concerns the themes arising from the Preface and the discussions of it that continue to have relevance in contemporary philosophy. It considers a phenomenology of life, a phenomenology of the language structure and speech acts, “coherent deformation,” and interdisciplinarity. The chapter does this while also responding in a preliminary way to some of the criticisms of Merleau-Ponty historically made by philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, and Jean-François Lyotard. Keywords  Phenomenology of life • Phenomenology of language • Speech • History of being • Interdisciplinarity

The implicit criticism of Heidegger’s Being and Time, outlined in Chap. 4, ultimately brought me to the theme of aliveness. It strikes a different chord than does death in Heidegger. However, Merleau-Ponty’s ontology is not necessarily optimistic so much as it is incomplete and dissatisfying. At the conclusion of “Eye and Mind,” he calls it disappointing. This is a criticism of both © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 R. Kaushik, The Preface to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception: A Re-Introduction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51329-9_7

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origins and ends. It approaches Husserl’s idea in the manuscripts that birth and death are transcendental conditions of subjectivity and internally configured into it. To my mind, though, the most helpful comparison here is to the phenomenology of life outlined by renowned Merleau-Ponty scholar, Renaud Barbaras.1 Where biological life does not have life as its object and is concerned with only an aspect of it—namely, the physical-chemical constitution of beings already understood to be alive—a phenomenology of life does. Phenomenologically speaking, I recognize life within these other beings as well as within me. Its primordial givenness concerns neither only the functioning of other beings living beings nor only me. It simultaneously belongs within other beings as well within me. It is a tissue of existence, Barbaras argues, which is neutral with respect to the inside and the outside, the active and the passive. If I participate in life, it is only because this life never fully arrives at itself and refuses to become self-enclosed. This is how Barbaras links the principle of life to incompletion and thus to desire and lack: it is because of primordial life that the individual is marked by an insatiability and a sense of being dispossessed. This is a principle that must apply equally to the bacterial and human; it must account for the most basic forms of life and the highest orders of human thought. Let us recall Merleau-Ponty’s response to Jean Wahl in the Preface that there is a “silence of originary consciousness” in which both words and things have meaning, a “primary signification around which acts of naming and expression are organized.” This response can now be better understood thanks to the very recent publication of Merleau-Ponty’s 1954 course, La problème de la parole. There is a generation of thinkers after Merleau-Ponty for whom structuralism, post-structuralism or deconstructionism replaces phenomenology. These posthumously published ideas 1  Barbaras, Renaud. “Life, Movement, and Desire” in Research in Phenomenology 38. pp. 3–17. See also his Introduction to a Phenomenology of Life, translated by Leonard Lawlor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020).

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help us understand with greater clarity the ontological import of language Merleau-Ponty was considering up until the end. They help us understand that he did not fail to understand, or consider with depth, the various motivations behind these apparent replacements of phenomenology. It seems to me that language needs to be understood in view of the primordial sense of life that bursts through it. Although Merleau-Ponty’s idea that being is always within a linguistic tradition might at first seem like a “linguistic turn” and that philosophy is merely a language game, it is also an ontological claim. The claim is that, if being is within the history of language, there surely must be an ontology which reflects this. This ontology is the one I have been stressing in this text: what Merleau-Ponty eventually calls an “indirect ontology” that does not treat being as denoted or referenced but rather, incomplete on its own, transversally sliced within the denotation or within the reference, threaded throughout the intentional correlation between consciousness and existence. To be sensitive to the linguistic tradition of “being” is to be sensitive to the contingency of being. It is not something already there waiting to be uncovered or something that holds the possibility of a return. The “primary signification” and the “silence of originary consciousness” Merleau-Ponty mentions in the Preface is precisely this. It anticipates, I suggest, Derrida’s idea that metaphysical language (like absolute, infinite, non-being) are negative concepts raised to the level of reality while metaphorical language is lowered to the level of pure fiction and unreality.2 Merleau-Ponty, as I have 2  Derrida asks in White Mythologies: “Is there metaphor in the text of philosophy, and if so, how?” In the text of philosophy, it is assumed that language is the proper elucidation of real events. But this is an untenable assumption. If words truly pointed to such events, they would not themselves be elucidatory. The text is instead, according to Derrida, surreptitiously metaphorical and non-conceptual and holds within it what he calls a “surplus value” Derrida, Jacques. Derrida. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, translated by Robert J.C.  Young (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 121.

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pointed out, likewise asks the question of their relation and answers that they are not per se ‘related,’ as two separate terms would always require, but instead constellated into one another. The “primary signification” is in effect a call to introduce “nonphenomenology” and the non-descriptive into phenomenology and its description. Carbone, Saint Aubert and Johnson’s co-­ authored text, Merleau-Ponty’s Poetic of the World: Philosophy and Literature, is a magnificent elaboration of the many ways poetry and philosophy are mixed into phenomenology for Merleau-Ponty.3 Underneath the idea that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology needs to be replaced by the various post-phenomenological philosophies is a criticism of his reading of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. For example, I have emphasized the importance of the speech act for Merleau-Ponty, but the speech act is precisely what Saussure excludes from the linguistic system. He famously distinguishes la parole, the actual and concrete experience of speaking, from la langue, the linguistic system of phonological rules on the basis of which there is a construction of words in language through distinctive, oppositive, or relative characteristics of their component sounds. For Saussure, the former is an accessory or accidental while the latter is essential. The linguistic system can be further dissected: it bears a diachrony and a synchrony. While diachronic linguistics studies the history of changes within a language (e.g., from Latin to French, Italian and Spanish, or the relationships between German and Sanskrit), a synchronic linguistics is the science of the given state of a linguistic system. Saussure points out that, since la langue relies on the distinctive, oppositive or relative characteristics of compound sounds, every linguistic valuation is positive with respect to its content and negative with respect to 3  Carbone, Mauro; Saint Aubert, Emmanuel de; Johnson, Galen. MerleauPonty’s Poetic of the World: Philosophy and Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020).

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what it is not. This is the model of meaning within the linguistic system known as “diacritical.” It emphasizes what Saussure calls the first principle of linguistics, the arbitrariness of the sign: the sign does not mean anything in itself, it does not have a positive value in itself, but it only has value in oppositive or differential meaning to another sign. A system of signs is, then, the behaviour of identities through their differences. Saussure’s revolution is his insistence in focusing on this system. To use a word, a speaker does not need to know its historical variations or meanings. Usage of a word indicates not only the difference between speech and the linguistic system but the central importance of synchrony within the system. It is only this, for Saussure, which carries meaning within language. Critics of Merleau-Ponty naturally wonder whether he can take seriously the idea of a linguistic system in which signs behave only in relation to one another—that is, independently of the sensible and perceptual world. Paul Ricoeur famously argues that language breaks radically from ontology. He argues this by pointing once again to metaphor. In Aristotle’s classic definition of metaphor, disparate terms are brought together so that they suddenly appear close; metaphor forms a kinship between heterogeneous ideas to make a totally new sense. This means that metaphor implies a transfer of sense from an everyday and direct use of a word or words (flame referring to fire) to a novel or indirect purely linguistic use of words (flame referring to love). Ricoeur even extends this observation: a language system involves not only the behaviour between individual signs but a behaviour onto sentences and metaphorical statements. Here, language involves a totally new and innovative use of the imagination—non-­ logical, virtual—and destroys the consistent or lexical meanings of the coherent use of the imagination in direct language. Actually, as Ricoeur also points out, the term “figure” (linguistic figure, figure of speech, figure of language, and so on) is already a metaphor we use when we talk about metaphors. It

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suggests that the new use of imagination in metaphor has its own purely virtual terrain and shape, distinct from the actual and sensible terrain and shape in which we exist. Moreover, the “figure” is a spatial metaphor that indicates we do not have a real idea what we mean by metaphor in language; so, when we use the metaphor of “figure,” this is already the destruction of a logical space, the expression of a notion impossible to express, and therefore the formation of the circumference of a purely linguistic space opposite to a sensible space. Jean-François Lyotard’s Discours, figure—a book famously influenced by Ricoeur—especially emphasizes this purely virtual, and not spatial, sense of the figural and puts it directly at odds with MerleauPonty’s understanding of perception. There is an opposition between the visible and a structural linguistics, and the strongest account for this, Lyotard says, is the text. I pointed out in Art, Language, Figure in Merleau-Ponty4 that this criticism of Merleau-Ponty overstates things. Merleau-Ponty notices that Saussure’s distinction between synchrony and diachrony is parasitic on the dialectical difference he initially poses between la langue and la parole. The concrete usages of language, the “sublinguistic schema,” are thus reintroduced into linguistics. This does not betray the rule of the sign’s arbitrariness—that it has diacritical meaning—but rather speech acts and gestures are understood by Merleau-Ponty in diacritical terms. It is helpful to remember the “operative intentionality” and institution here. I speak, and what I say appears to me and other as mine. It has the look of transparency and clarity but only because the bodily aspects of speech have been displaced. This is, I think, one sense in which Merleau-Ponty borrows André Malraux’s phrase, “coherent deformation”: the coherency and referencability of existence is in fact a deformation of what was previously deformed. All the musculature of my tongue and larynx, say, now appears divergent and unrelated to the very language I now 4  Kaushik, Rajiv. Art, Language, Figure in Merleau-Ponty: Excursions in HyperDialectic (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2013).

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declare as mine. Merleau-Ponty’s is a phenomenology that invites deformation and tries to do something other than make it go away. It is a phenomenology that tries to think in terms of a being in constant deformation. It is an ontology that resists and limits conceptualization precisely by finding this resistance and limitation at the site of embodiment. In his “Revision of the Theory of Dreams,” Freud stresses that we, have long been aware that this censorship is not an institution peculiar to dream-life. You know that the conflict between the two psychical agencies, which we—inaccurately—describe as the ‘unconscious repressed’ and the ‘conscious,’ dominates our whole mental life and that the resistance … is nothing other than the resistance due to [a] repression by which the two agencies are separated.5 He means that we mistakenly think resistance as belonging only to the latent meaning of our internal unconscious life opposite to the explicit meaning of our external conscious life. The “resistance due to a repression,” or the censor, is instead that according to which the unconscious and the conscious become separated. I am saying that, for Merleau-Ponty, the body is in some way a “resistance due to a repression.” It at once delimits my ability for self-reflection and the things on which I reflect. It delimits me from myself as well as from the world and is even part of the internal delimitation between separate things in the world. I am also saying that the body is precisely at the site of an “originary consciousness” and “primary signification.” This is the import of his analyses of speech and voice in sharp contrast to Saussure’s prohibition. It is in la parole where we witness both the non-subjectivistic aspect of language and the non-­objectivistic  Freud, Sigmund. “Revision of the Theory of Dreams” in Essential Papers on Dreams, edited by Melvin R.  Lansky (New York: New  York University Press, 1992), p. 39. 5

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aspect of the world about which we otherwise speak. With the speaking body, we have the very aspect of embodiment that obeys the structure of deformation rather than denotation. Merleau-Ponty invites us to think about the need for phenomenology to exceed description and, in doing so, remaining most proper to embodiment. Claude Lefort writes in his Introduction to The Visible and the Invisible that Merleau-Ponty’s last philosophy was ultimately devoted to discovering the being of language, to repeatedly going from word to being and being to word. An alive phenomenology, I think, is an attempt to interrogate ontology in the very words used to describe and express it; and in this sense it returns language to the very life Barbaras outlines. At the start of “Eye and Mind,” speaking about “cybernetics,” Merleau-­Ponty warns against a “nightmare to which there is no awakening.” Today the nightmare—even more entrenched now—is a problem of the imagination. The nightmare MerleauPonty has in mind is a particular form of imagination that makes it difficult to fathom imagination’s other possible variations, and therefore an imagination that takes itself to be real. The nightmare is, in other words, an imagination that kills itself. Usually, this is disturbing enough that we wake up. But Merleau-Ponty wonders if waking up is still possible today when we understand ourselves in light of the technologies we have produced. In an important way, I think, Merleau-Ponty’s implicit demand for a more expressive phenomenology, which takes the historicity of being seriously, is a proposition out of this nightmare and even out of the philosophy that has fallen into this nightmare. He writes in the Preface that philosophy is less the truths it has managed to utter than an ever-renewed experiment of its own beginning. To awaken from our nightmare, we need a philosophy that reminds us of this experiment. The most basic issue in philosophy, we could say, is not to discover a final answer to the question “What is philosophy?” The question is anyway already a reflection on reflection. It implies that we can wonder what it means to wonder. It is immediately transformed into a practical question—a

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praxis within the theoria. Finally, Merleau-Ponty says, radical reflection becomes conscious of its dependence on the unreflected life. Notice: philosophy is what introduces reflection in an otherwise unreflective world. It is also what introduces an unreflected life into the overly reflective one. If there is a nightmare, it collapses distance and stays at the level of immediacy. If there is a way out of the nightmare, it is to introduced distance and mediacy. I suspect that, for Merleau-Ponty, the import of phenomenology is precisely to introduce distance into consciousness, to make distance proximate. In “Merleau-Ponty: An Attempt at a Response,” a short piece found in Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy,6 Jean-Luc Nancy notes his surprise in rediscovering Merleau-Ponty’s passivity notes, since passivity is one of the ways to say “displacement” and overcoming the “metaphysics of presence.” This displacement also overcomes the hierarchy of metaphysics that presence presumes. It moves, as Merleau-Ponty says, concentrically rather than hierarchically. Merleau-Ponty’s import today is not only in philosophy but in many other fields of study. He refuses to marginalize philosophy from the other disciplines, and he refuses to keep these other disciplines out of philosophy. He does not keep philosophy the “absolute science,” does not merely apply it to other disciplines, but everywhere engages in their mutual encounters. The notion that phenomenology and non-phenomenology are matrixed into one another leads to the idea that phenomenology, in addition to archeological and descriptive, needs to be creative or expressionistic. The notion that being is incomplete and never present to itself also means there is no one discipline that alone is capable of travelling into being. It is this fundamental reconceptualization of ontology, understanding each field of study as its own adventure in being, that seems to be most alive today.  Alloa, Emmanuel, Chouraqui, Frank, Kaushik, Rajiv (eds.), Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy (New York: State University of New York Press, 2020). 6

Index

A Archeology, 88 B Body, 70 Bréhier, Émile, 2

E Earth, 66 Ecart, 13, 57 Eidetic, 9, 20, 25 Embodiment, 71 Epochē, 10, 27–29

C Cézanne, Paul, 78 Constitution, 11 The contingency of philosophy, 92

F First rule, 9 Flesh, 59 Freud, Sigmund, 72, 76

D Darwin, Charles, 69 Dehiscence, 13, 57 Derrida, Jacques, 34 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 75 Descartes, René, 18

H Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 18, 56, 63 Heidegger, Martin, 8 Husserl, Edmund, 2, 7, 8

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 R. Kaushik, The Preface to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception: A Re-Introduction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51329-9

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INDEX

I Indirect ontology, 13, 90 Instincts, 69, 70 Institution, 47 K Kant, Immanuel, 22 Kinaesthetic horizon, 37 Klein, Melanie, 77 Kristeva, Julia, 77 L Lacan, Jacques, 74 Lived-body, 37 Lyotard, Jean-François, 80 M Motivation, 11, 40 Motor-intentionality, 38 N Natural attitude, 18 Noema, 84 Noesis, 84 O Openness, 87, 91

P Phenomenological epochē, 10 The phenomenon of life, 92 Primal-institution, 47 Principle of all principles, 9, 21 Proust, Marcel, 78 Psychoanalysis, 14 Psychoanalysis of Nature, 77 Psychologism, 63 R Reversibility, 39 Ricoeur, Paul, 80 S Sartre, Jean-Paul, 15 T Tacit cogito, 5 Typification, 46 U Unmotivated upsurge, 11 V Valéry, Paul, 78