Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology: The Problem of Ideal Objects 9781472547057, 9780826495617

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Acknowledgements

It would be difficult for me to express the depth of my gratitude and appreciation for the guidance and assistance provided by Stephen H. Watson in the drafting of this monograph. There is no part of it, large or small, that has not benefited from his philosophical insight. I, however, remain solely responsible for the oversights, errors, and shortcomings that remain. I would also like to thank Fred Crosson for introducing me to phenomenology and the thought of Merleau-Ponty, for his support and good humor, and for kindly offering comments on earlier drafts. Many thanks are also due to Jim Fieser for helping me bring this monograph to press. For their personal support, I would like to thank my family and friends. There are too many to mention by name, except for my mother – thanks Mom – and my wife, Jessica – thank you.

List of Abbreviations

Works cited frequently abbreviations:

have

been

identified

by

the

following

Work by Eugen Fink SCM

Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method (With Textual Notes by Edmund Husserl). Trans. Ronald Bruzina. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995.

Works by Edmund Husserl CES

The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970.

CM

Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Trans. Dorion Cairns. Boston: Kluwer, 1991.

FTL

Formal and Transcendental Logic. Trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Kluwer, 1969.

Ideas I

Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Trans. F. Kersten. Boston: Kluwer, 1983.

LI

Logical Investigations. Trans. J.N. Findlay. Vols. I and II. New York: Humanities Press, 1970.

SW

‘Philosophy as a Rigorous Science.’ Husserl: Shorter Works. Trans. Quentin Lauer, et al. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1981: 166–97.

x

List of Abbreviations

Works by Merleau-Ponty AD

Adventures of the Dialectic. Trans. Joseph Bien. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.

CAL

Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language. Trans. Hugh J. Silverman. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.

HAL

Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology. Eds. and Trans. Leonard Lawlor and Bettinga Bergo. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002.

IPP

In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. James Edie, John O’Neill, and John Wild. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1963.

PP

Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1970.

Primacy

The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Ed. James M. Edie. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964.

PW

The Prose of the World. Trans. John O’Neill. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.

SB

The Structure of Behavior. Trans. Alden L. Fisher. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1983.

Signs

Signs. Trans. Richard C. McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964.

SNS

Sense and Non-Sense. Trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964.

TD

Texts and Dialogues. Eds. James Barry Jr. and Hugh J. Silverman. Trans. Michael B. Smith, et al. Atlantic Heights NJ: Humanities Press, 1992.

VI

The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes. Ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968.

Introduction

What, in the final analysis, does Merleau-Ponty understand by phenomenology? It may seem strange that this question still has to be asked more than a half century after his first works. The fact remains that it has by no means been answered. Indeed, the very question is difficult to approach. One way to approach it might be by adding up his explicit statements about classical phenomenological themes, such as we find in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Perception, and comparing them to Husserl’s statements. In undertaking this approach, difficulties immediately arise, for Merleau-Ponty’s explicit statements are not arguments but rather elliptical, enigmatic or aphoristic indications of his relation to Husserl. One would hope to find the arguments elsewhere, in the body of the Phenomenology of Perception itself, perhaps, for it is a work of phenomenology, treating a classical phenomenological theme – perception. But even in the text itself, Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of phenomenology and his relation to Husserl are not fully elucidated. Rather, the Preface begins to look like an alien addition not really belonging to the body of the text. Indeed, it was added only after the latter’s completion. Of course, one can point to similarities and differences with Husserl that are found throughout the Phenomenology of Perception, but it is not a matter of simply adding up points of contact and subtracting points of divergence that would allow one to arrive at a clear idea of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of phenomenology and his relation to Husserl. In fact, one could not think of a less Merleau-Pontian approach to the thought of another, especially one as important as Husserl. Another approach would be to look at a broader context of work – the entire career of Merleau-Ponty – to see if a clear account of phenomenology emerges. There is no doubt that throughout at least most of his career Merleau-Ponty considered himself a phenomenologist and that Husserl’s thought remained influential up through the final working notes of The Visible and the Invisible. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty often identified phenomenology with philosophy. Phenomenology is not just another type of philosophy; it is, as he says in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Perception, a ‘style of thinking’ that is accessible only from within by following the movement of phenomenological thought itself (PP viii). However, the

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question that motivates this study is: Does he maintain this understanding late in his career? Did Merleau-Ponty’s itinerary from the Phenomenology of Perception to The Visible and the Invisible involve a reversal of his attitude towards phenomenology or did he continue to work from within phenomenology? Do the characterizations in The Visible and the Invisible of his early thought as a ‘philosophy of consciousness’1 signal a break from phenomenology as is sometimes argued?2 Or do his criticisms signal that he did not fully repudiate phenomenology but rather abandoned certain Husserlian theses?3 To answer these questions, I will look at the itinerary of Merleau-Ponty’s thought to establish the theoretical content of phenomenology for him in order to answer the further question of whether or not he abandons it. Consequently, in this study I will approach the question of Merleau-Ponty’s final view of phenomenology by following closely the itinerary of his overall career to see how he initially understands phenomenology, how he develops its philosophic scope, and whether, on the basis of this development, he abandons phenomenology in his final writings. My entrance into the problem of phenomenology in Merleau-Ponty’s work will be by way of the problem of ideal objects. Insofar as Husserl understood phenomenology to be giving an account of how true, universal judgments can be made based on experiential evidence but not determined by factual experience, his analyses are polarized by questions about ideal objects. Questions such as: How can transcendent ideal objects be given immanently in consciousness? What is the relation of the ideal to the factual? What is the relation between ideas and language? What is the relation of the ideal to thought? Undoubtedly, questions about ideal objects are central to Husserl’s analyses, and, in his later writings, he was concerned with the genesis and historical mode of being of ideal objects. In adopting phenomenology the way he did, Merleau-Ponty inherited many of these concerns. In brief, much of his thought is also polarized by questions of ideal objects. So, instead of beginning with an analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s relationship to Husserl on specific theoretical concepts, such as the reduction, intentionality, essences, the transcendental ego and the like, I will take as my starting point the broader question of the status and givenness of ideal objects in our experience in order to get a better understanding of what phenomenology meant for Merleau-Ponty. Then, I will use this understanding to elucidate more specific phenomenological themes such as the nature of essences, intersubjectivity, the transcendental ego, language, and the function of history in the constitution of ideal objects. It is by beginning with the problem of ideal objects and its development throughout his itinerary that Merleau-Ponty’s final understanding of the theoretical significance of phenomenology can be evaluated. Given its centrality in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, it is surprising that

Introduction

3

the problem of ideal objects is so often overlooked in the secondary literature. While it is sometimes commented on in passing, there is no extended treatment of the problem of ideal objects in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. The present volume seeks to remedy this. Since I will be looking at the overall movement of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, I will follow a tri-part division of his career.4 Rather than simply contrast his early and late work, as many accounts do, I will pay separate attention to the middle period (roughly from 1947–57) because I will claim that it is crucial to the conceptual development of his itinerary and essential to fully understand his late thought, especially his thought on ideal objects. We shall see that the account of ideal objects developed in the Phenomenology of Perception is inadequate. Towards the end of that work, Merleau-Ponty came to see the inadequacies of perceptual analyses, especially when he came to consider the historical constitution of language. The Visible and the Invisible, on the other hand, has little to say directly about ideal objects in the completed text, though we shall see the effect of the middle period on it. Indeed, it is in the middle period, specifically in his writings on expressivity, tradition, and culture that Merleau-Ponty delves into questions most germane to ideal objects. There is another virtue to placing the middle period at the center of my analysis. It is not uncommon in Merleau-Ponty scholarship to see the middle period as interesting only insofar as it develops earlier positions or anticipates, in rather broad strokes, later developments of themes considered marginal to phenomenology, such as history, politics, and expression. I will argue that it is precisely in the middle period, especially in his writings on history and expression, that we can find the crucial conceptual bridge between the Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible. Such an account of the middle period is necessary because to understand the provocative yet enigmatic fragments and sketches in the working notes of The Visible and the Invisible, one must go outside the notes themselves. Surprisingly, the writings from the middle period are rarely consulted to provide supplemental material to aid in interpreting and evaluating the significance of The Visible and the Invisible. Oftentimes, commentators such as Bernhard Waldenfels see that making sense of The Visible and the Invisible is ‘almost identical with a further development of the thoughts [themselves]’;5 or, worse, some commentators seek to make sense of The Visible and the Invisible simply by juxtaposing it to the Phenomenology of Perception to indicate certain lines of development. We find this approach exemplified in Martin Dillon’s Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology.6 In either case, these approaches downplay the significance of the middle period and overlook crucial developments in Merleau-Ponty’s thought in the years leading up to the first writings that became The Visible and the Invisible. Unlike the standard approaches, I will seek the supplemental

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material necessary to aid in understanding and evaluating The Visible and the Invisible in the writings of the middle period. Hence, my argument not only brings an ignored topic and some relatively unexplored writings of Merleau-Ponty into the secondary literature, but, by elaborating the internal development and dialogue of those writings, it also provides an orientation by which Merleau-Ponty’s ultimate claims about the theoretical status and possibilities of phenomenology can be evaluated. In the first chapter, I return to the problem of ideal objects as articulated in Husserl’s writings. From his earliest arguments against psychologism in the Logical Investigations, Husserl was motivated by the problem of ideal objects. For Husserl, psychologism is a form of ‘anthropological’ relativism, which effectively reduces the ideal to the factual. Husserl’s response to the skeptical challenge posed by psychologism involves clarifying the mode of being of the ideal, the relation of the ideal to the factual, and the givenness of transcendent, logical idealities in factual experience that does not exhaust ideal objects. The reduction of the ideal to the factual is shared by other human sciences such as history. In his 1911 Logos essay ‘Philosophy as a Strict Science,’ Husserl levels a similar argument against historicism, namely, that renewed investigations into the ideal are necessary to avoid the skeptical conclusions of the human sciences. When he returns to the problem of historicism in the Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, he announces the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) as the forgotten source of all idealizing constructions and the need for a phenomenological explication of the lifeworld. The explication of the lifeworld in the Crisis is pursued in two directions: first and foremost, the lifeworld designates the sense-world of pre-predicative perceptual experience that grounds all higher, logical ‘substructions.’ Investigations of the sense-world require a renewed ‘transcendental aesthetic,’ a need that is echoed in the Formal and Transcendental Logic. But, second, the lifeworld is also a historical-cultural world, and so seeking the ‘reason in history’ in an internal, intentional history becomes paramount for phenomenology to provide its own rational self-justification. Because Husserl’s late work plays a crucial role in Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the tasks and goals of phenomenology, the ambiguous nature of the lifeworld will be inherited and developed by Merleau-Ponty’s own investigations into the constitutive ‘origin’ of ideal objects. In the early period of his career, which I describe in Chapter 2, MerleauPonty’s entry into questions of ideal objects follows Husserl’s insofar as Merleau-Ponty seeks to clarify the relationship of rational idealizations in terms of founding them on pre-predicative, perceptual experience. In terms amenable to Husserl, Merleau-Ponty seeks to provide phenomenology with a new transcendental aesthetic. According to the account developed in the Phenomenology of Perception, ideal objects stand in a non-

Introduction

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reductive founded/founding relationship to pre-predicative, perceptual experience. This relationship is best exemplified in the phenomenological concept of Fundierung. Along with the Fundierung account of ideal objects, Merleau-Ponty develops a gestural theory of language in which all linguistic sense stands in a founded/founding relationship to a deeper ‘gestural’ or ‘emotional’ sense. While this account of language escapes the unwelcome consequences of either ‘empiricist’ or ‘idealist’ accounts of language, which Merleau-Ponty argues against in the Phenomenology of Perception, it has its own shortcomings. It cannot account either for the historical constitution of language or for its link to ordinary usage, a problem haunting phenomenology from the very beginning and articulated quite clearly in the work of Eugen Fink, as we shall see. Indeed, the gestural theory of language pre-supposes the historical constitution of language, but because it is dependent on the Fundierung understanding of linguistic sense, it does not have the resources to provide a compelling account of language. In the middle period, which I present in Chapters 3, 4, and 5, MerleauPonty sets out to address the shortcomings in his early account of language. The middle period is marked by several crucial divergences from the early period. First, the site of interrogation has shifted away from prepredicative, perceptual experience to intersubjective, cultural primordiality. The task is no longer seeking the ‘logos of the aesthetic world,’ but seeking the ‘logos of the cultural world,’ which is pursued under the guise of accounting for the constitution of the shared cultural world, what Merleau-Ponty calls the ‘intermonde.’ Second, language moves to the center of phenomenological reflection and takes up much of Merleau-Ponty’s thought during this time. As we shall see in our discussion of the work of Eugen Fink, which clearly influenced Merleau-Ponty, this move is a response to a persistent problem in Husserlian phenomenology, namely the question of rendering ordinary language transcendentally appropriate. I argue below that Merleau-Ponty’s Husserlian-inspired reading of the Saussurian distinction between language and speech is a response to this problem because it allows him to provide an account of novel expression, which, I argue, amounts to a re-writing of the transcendental moment. Given this understanding, transcendental insight is no longer the privilege of a properly reduced transcendental ego but becomes the province of a speaker ensconced in a living linguistic tradition and exploiting the possibilities inherent in the tradition to surpass what has been established in an expressive moment that allows the speaker to return to the things themselves in light of evidential motivations provided by them. The account of novel expression in the middle period also presents an alternate understanding of ideal meanings, one based on the Husserlian

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concept of institution (Stiftung). The constitutive origin of ideal objects can no longer be seen simply in founded/founding perceptual terms but rather must be understood as a diacritical development, internal to language itself, of a never-fully recoverable origin that remains, as such, operative but never fully present throughout the entire development. As a consequence of this, after the writings of the middle period, we cannot seek the grounding of ideal meanings simply in pre-predicative, perceptual experience but must locate it in the potential iterative transformation of a linguistic tradition that precedes each and every attempt to speak. In other words, it is an account of the intersubjective constitution of ideal objects in a temporal movement internal to a symbolic system that does not reify ideal objects, as in Platonism, nor does it dissolve ideal objects in momentary expressions, as in nominalism. Thus, the middle period represents a crucial departure from the early period and a transformation of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of phenomenology away from investigations into egological perceptual experience towards an active, intersubjective engagement with our philosophic tradition. Finally, I argue that the initial step away from a ‘philosophy of consciousness,’ which is Merleau-Ponty’s late criticism of his early work, is achieved in the middleperiod, institution account of ideal objects. The conceptual shift that occurs in the middle period and its implicit self-criticism, which I detail below, is usually overlooked by commentators. In the final chapter, I describe Merleau-Ponty’s late account of historical rationality, which is outlined in The Visible and the Invisible and further detailed in his (recently published) lecture notes for a course offered in 1959–60 at the Colle`ge de France; these lectures are centered around a detailed commentary on Husserl’s ‘Origin of Geometry.’ In this chapter, I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s late account of rationality is an implicit rewriting of Husserl’s account of historical rationality developed in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Moreover, MerleauPonty’s thoughts that are developed in the middle period, particularly his understanding of novel expression, institution, and the intersubjective constitution of ideal objects are, crucial to his final account of historical rationality. Indeed, many of the innovative concepts in The Visible and the Invisible, such as e´cart, flesh, and reversibility, not only stem directly from Merleau-Ponty’s middle-period analyses, but they cannot be seen as a simple extension of his early-period formulations. That is, Merleau-Ponty arrived at his account of reversibility, e´cart, and flesh by thinking through the problems of language, history, and intersubjectivity. I conclude by showing that Merleau-Ponty’s final formulations do not amount to a break with phenomenology but rather represent an internal re-working of a central phenomenological problem – bringing mute experience to its fullest expression – that motivated Husserl.

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Husserl and the Problem of Ideal Objects

I. Announcing the Problem of Ideal Objects From his arguments against psychologism in the Logical Investigations to his investigations of the relationship between science and the lifeworld in the Crisis, the status and function of ideal objects play a central role in Husserl’s thought. In the Logical Investigations, his interest in ideal objects is largely motivated by the threat of skepticism posed by psychologism. To respond to this threat, Husserl’s early works announce a renewed understanding of the proper role of the ideal in cognition and its relation to the factual. Already in the Prolegomena, we find that ‘one must clearly grasp what the ideal is, both intrinsically and in its relation to the real, how this ideal stands to the real, how it can be immanent in and so come to knowledge’ (LI 193). More fully articulated in his later works, the problem of ideal objects will come to involve clarifying the mode of being of the ideal, the relation of the ideal to the factual, and the relation of thought to the ideal and to the factual. The initial step in this enterprise, however, is to show the skeptical consequences that result from attempts to reduce the ideal to the factual, as pyschologism does. Psychologism for Husserl amounts to an ‘anthropological’ relativism because psychologism ultimately claims that logical laws are merely the result of our constitution as human beings, which is contingent. As such, even though our knowledge might accord with logical principles, we can never be certain that it accords with the objective world; that is, truth would be merely human truth and carry no rational necessity. Because it denies the possibility of certain and objective knowledge about the world, psychologism, for Husserl, is ultimately a form of skepticism. These skeptical conclusions are arrived at through psychologistic conceptions of the ideal. In short, psychologistic accounts of thought conflate universal logical laws with psychic processes; such a move reduces the ideal to the factual. Resisting such a reduction animates Husserl’s early interest in ideal objects, and the task Husserl set for himself in this early work is the opening of a series of investigations intended to make explicit the correlation between transcendent ideal objects and the subjective psychical experience in which they are given as the foundation of truth.

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Husserl did not limit his early critique of relativism to psychologism, however, because historicism is an equally serious threat to scientific knowledge insofar as it also conflates the ideal with the factual. Historicism, like psychologism, thus demands a response, which we find in Husserl’s 1911 Logos essay, ‘Philosophy as Rigorous Science,’ where he turns his attention to the ideal principles that govern thought in the ‘human sciences.’ Husserl’s critique is concerned primarily with Dilthey’s Weltanschauung philosophy, which, fairly or not, Husserl considers a form of historicism. Husserl’s response to historicism is similar to his critique of psychologism because historicism is, for Husserl, another form of reductive skepticism. Husserl’s critique of historicism is simple. The historicist i) assumes that we can enter into a historically reconstructed world-view of a past epoch by uncovering its central motivating intention, thus discovering its intrinsic sense; having done that, the historicist ii) judges its relative worth. But – and this is Husserl’s criticism – the ability to judge any past spiritual formation presupposes principles that transcend relative evaluations. These principles are not available to historicism as a theory simply because the theory denies any such transcendent principles. Moreover, and this step is crucial for phenomenology to make a case for itself, history as a factual science is not in a position to provide such principles. Husserl claims that the principles of relative evaluations made by the historicist ‘lie in the ideal sphere’ (SW 188), but the historian is in no position to justify these principles because hers is a factual science. Hence a science that adequately deals with the ideal and its role in cognition is needed, and phenomenology as a strict science, with a clearly delineated method of investigation, is just such a science. Husserl’s early interest in ideal objects, thus, is motivated by the threat of skepticism arising out of psychologism and historicism, and his solution is to clarify the role of the ideal in cognition. Husserl begins with the belief that ideas are already operative in cognition. He goes on to develop a method, the goal of which is to describe the givenness of ideal objects to consciousness; as such, it was a piece of his larger project at the time, which often goes by the name of ‘static phenomenology.’ Static phenomenology includes descriptive analyses that inquire into how something is given to (or constituted in) a subject. It does not inquire into what that something is. It reveals fundamental structures that hold between subject and object; these structures include intentionality, noesis–noema, and modes of intentional fulfillment and disappointment, among others. While static phenomenology acknowledges the undeniable temporal nature of the subject, for the purposes of analyses, it assumes a fully developed subject and does not inquire into its temporal becoming, a theme that for Husserl goes under the title of ‘genesis.’ In the late teens and twenties, as Husserl turns his attention towards problems of subjective

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genesis and then in the thirties to intersubjective genesis, the problem of ideal objects persists. Full treatment of the problem, however, will involve more than descriptive analysis of their modes of givenness. It will entail inquiries into the genesis and historicity of ideal being along with analysis of the intersubjective fields in which ideal being emerges and is maintained. In short, it will involve analyses of culture, history, and tradition. These later writings of Husserl are crucial for Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of ideal objects.

II. Husserl’s Late Account of Ideal Objects in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology It is well known that Merleau-Ponty distinguishes two phases in Husserl’s career, the ‘early’ and the ‘late’ Husserl, and it is also well known that Merleau-Ponty champions the ‘late’ Husserl – meaning the writings of the thirties – and downplays Husserl’s early thought as too much given over to idealism. Without going into the debate over the accuracy of this view, it remains true that Merleau-Ponty sees a decisive shift in Husserl’s late thought and that Husserl’s later thought profoundly influenced MerleauPonty, specifically on the problem of ideal objects. Because of this influence, we need to glimpse the outlines of Husserl’s late thought to understand the problem of ideal objects as Merleau-Ponty understands and inherits it. To do this, we shall turn to some of the themes in Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology1 for a very brief consideration. Motivated largely by problems arising from genetic analysis and intersubjectivity, the question of the origin of scientific idealizations becomes pressing in the Crisis. Ideal objects are traced back to the lifeworld, a concept that plays a crucial role in the Crisis. However, its presentation there is ambiguous. Without going into all these ambiguities, I wish to point out two aspects of the lifeworld that become crucial to MerleauPonty’s thought. In the Crisis, Husserl pursues his investigation in two directions. In the first direction, he seeks the genesis of ideal objects in the proto-objectifying activity of the lifeworld, primarily understood as the initial layer of unmediated perceptual experience. All scientific idealizations are founded on the mute world of perceptual experience, which serves as the ground of all scientific idealizations. In the second direction, Husserl seeks the origin of ideal objects in the lifeworld, which is primarily understood as a concrete historical world in which the praxis of science is one among many praxes, all of which are founded on a more basic attitude, which itself is largely the result of cultural sedimentations. In this

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direction, seeking reason in history becomes necessary for phenomenology to justify itself as the discipline that can ground its own practice, as well as all rational activity. Part of what makes the Crisis so difficult and so compelling is that Husserl pursues both these directions of the origin of ideal objects at different places in the text without clarifying how and whether they are distinct tasks. More importantly, it is not clear how pursuing the origin of ideal objects in the anonymous, pre-predicative perceptual world and also in the surrounding cultural world with its historical sedimentations can coincide.2 Indeed, it seems that the two might even conflict. The one gives a foundational account of the genesis, while the other seeks to embed it in a trans-generational praxis. It may be more precise to say that the Crisis is an attempt to problematize the anonymous or pre-personal sources of idealizing activity by locating its origin in the lifeworld, which is conditioned by sense experience and historical sedimentations. This seems reasonable. Once the lifeworld has been problematized, then, its explication can be pursued in at least these two directions. In any case, Husserl’s ambiguity on this topic may not be accidental. Rather it may betray a deeply seated difficulty in the manner in which Husserl has heretofore posed the question of ideal objects. It is, however, crucial to note that the problem of the lifeworld is not a problem of regional sciences such as anthropology or sociology but is a global problem applying to all rational activity, and phenomenology, as Husserl understands it, seeks to clarify this activity. As such, phenomenology must investigate the lifeworld. Hence, Husserl’s researches into the genesis of ideal objects and the idealizing activity that brings them about sets the task for subsequent phenomenological investigations into ideal objects and phenomenological rationality. And, as we shall see, Merleau-Ponty’s thought on ideal objects, which follows Husserl’s late investigations into the origin of ideal objects, also pursues their genesis in these two directions. In his early work, Merleau-Ponty will pursue the genesis of ideal objects in subjective, pre-predicative, mute perceptual experience, and then in his middle period he will pursue it in an intersubjective, historical, and cultural world. Harmonizing these two accounts is not without difficulties, but first we need to examine in more detail Husserl’s characterization of the genesis of ideal objects in the Crisis. II. A. Perception and the Lifeworld Husserl returns to the question of the subjective processes that yield access to logico-mathematical idealizations in his later works, such as the Formal and Transcendental Logic and Experience and Judgment. Analysis of the ‘logical,’ which in these texts is roughly equated to ‘language’ or what can be called the conceptual, is divided into two domains. The ‘lower’ domain is

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that of pre-predicative or pre-conceptual experience, which is pre-given or presupposed in all conceptual, linguistic, and judgmental operations. The ‘higher’ domain is that of the linguistic or conceptual operations themselves. One can begin with perceptual processes and then go on to analyze the various sorts of judgments that arise from them, as Husserl does in Experience and Judgment; or, one can begin with the pure logical ideas and trace them back to perceptual processes, as he does in the Formal and Transcendental Logic. That is, analysis can move from the higher domain to the lower: from logical ideas to pre-predicative, perceptual experience; or, it can move from the lower to the higher. The distinction between these domains and the movement between them is crucial for understanding Husserl’s turn to the lifeworld and history in the Crisis. As Husserl diagnoses it, the crisis of modern philosophy stems from its failure to provide a proper ground for its philosophic activity. This failure is due to the fact that that which is ‘obvious’ or that which is always and everywhere valid and taken for granted in all objectifying attitudes has been ignored. The ‘everyday surrounding world of life is presupposed as existing’ (CES 104) in every aspect of the modern manner of posing philosophic questions. This means, first and foremost, that the ‘sense world,’ which is a world in which we live in accord with our bodily, personal way of being, is taken for granted in all activity, including scientific practice and theorizing. As a result, our bodily involvement with the perceptual world has never been thematized adequately as a philosophic problem. In other words, the being of the sense-world has never been made a philosophic problem, and, as a result, it has remained ‘anonymous,’ covered over, and ‘forgotten.’ In order to overcome this habitual forgetfulness, Husserl announces the need for a re-orientation of philosophic inquiry towards ‘the immediately intuited world’ (CES 49) of sense experience. He aims to uncover the heretofore unrecognized contributions of perceptual consciousness to scientific idealizations. Here he identifies the lifeworld as the ground of all science, including scientific praxis and all scientific theories. The announcement of the need for this re-orientation of philosophic inquiry is of a piece with Husserl’s critique of the objectivist attitude of modern philosophy, which not only misconstrues the object but also objectively interprets the subject, thus leading to all the enigmas and antinomies exemplified in modern empiricism and rationalism. An entirely new mode of inquiry is needed, which Husserl here tries to motivate by problematizing the mode of being of the everyday surrounding world that has been forgotten in theoretical activity. Modern philosophy has ignored the subjective achievement of the lifeworld, but to its peril. For in its disdain of everything subjective, in its search for objectivity, it has neglected the source of meaning of all its achievements. The objective world of science and mathematics is what

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Husserl calls a ‘theoretical-logical substruction’ (CES 127) upon immediate experience. Scientific idealizations are not, even in principle, perceivable, whereas in the sense-world, we are presented with the ‘thing itself’ in immediate presence. Mathematico-logical thought prescinds from the sense-world in its activity of idealization, an activity that produces new objects – ideal objects – much in the same way that memory or, more importantly, anticipation prescinds from the immediate presence of the things themselves in perception to produce memories or anticipations. Taking this analogy further, it becomes clearer how all logical idealizations derive their meaning from the intuitive givenness of the object itself – just in the same way perception of the thing itself ‘grounds’ all meaning in memory or anticipation – and like those modes of conscious activity, idealization is a spiritual (geistig) activity that goes beyond the givenness of the thing itself to further and further extrapolations. According to Husserl’s analysis of perception, the object is given as a mobile unity of appearances within a horizon of future possible experience. Every perceptual experience is open to further amplification and verification ad infinitum. To this horizontal idealization of perception, Husserl adds the vertical idealization of scientific objectification. These are the ‘higher’ mathematico-logical idealizations of Husserl’s ‘logic.’ Just as the horizontal idealization of the object is grounded by actual, finite experience, so the vertical idealizations of science are also grounded in actual experience of the object itself in pre-predicative, perceptual experience. The logical ‘substructions’ are not, in principle, perceivable, while ‘the lifeworld is a realm of original self-evidences’ (CES 127), Husserl tells us. The lifeworld is the realm of primordial evidence and the basis for all further extrapolations. The thing-itself is given in an intuition of that which is directly experienceable, and all subsequent idealizations are ‘substructions,’ which are the result of subjective processes and are further verified or nullified in subsequent direct experience. This is why the idealizations of theoretical activity are grounded upon and, in an attempt at rational justification, ultimately must return to the level of primary experience of the lifeworld. Perceptual experience is the initial ‘rational objectification’ (CES 348) upon which all higher objectifications are theoretical ‘substructions.’ The activities of horizontal perceptual objectification and vertical logical idealization are not different in kind but only different in their products. One produces perceptual objectivities. The other produces logical idealities. Both are moments of ‘rational objectification’ which exceed, in the direction of anticipation, what is ‘present in person’ in direct experience, thereby leaving further determination open. Finally, both activities result in an objective unity of appearances; that is, both are constitutional activities. Although we are presented with the thing itself in perceptual

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experience, what we gain as knowledge of the thing is ‘in all its identifiable determinations something that remains unwaveringly approximate, suspended in vague differentiations of greater or less perfection’ (CES 343) and no matter how clear it is, another gradation is still thinkable. Belonging to the gradations of perfection is ‘the idea of an identical self, the in-itself’ (CES 309). The absolutely perfect thing in itself is the ‘limitpoint’ (CES 309) of possible gradation. Moving from the vague to the exact in-itself is what idealizing, scientific thought achieves by relating the relative determinations back to the complete object. Exact science is thus seen by Husserl as a ‘perfecting’ (CES 111) of pre-scientific thought in its idealizations, much in the same way that philosophy has traditionally seen science as the move from doxa to episteme. The movement from vague perceptual experience to exact idealizations in scientific thought can be considered to be a blind activity of subjectivity, the productions of which must be constantly reconfirmed, renewed, and amplified in further experience, and which also necessitates the downward analytic movement to pre-predicative experience. The blind activity of idealizing, which is achieved by scientific objectification, must be accompanied by a reflective activity, particularly reflection on the constitutional activity of consciousness that illuminates the origin of the idealizations; this reflective activity is the task of phenomenological explorations of the lifeworld. Without the downward reflective move, a separation occurs between the higher and lower realms, between actual experience and logical idealities, which leads to what Husserl calls mere ‘technization’ on the lower side and a ‘loss of meaning’ on the higher. On a large scale, technization and emptied idealizations lead to the crisis in rationality, which Husserl seeks to overcome. Every idealization has its origin in the lower realm of perceptual experience, and so Husserl writes that tracing the idealizations of science back to actual experience of the lifeworld is similar to the call for a new ‘transcendental aesthetic . . . [which] functions as a ground level in a world logic’ (FTL 292) in the Conclusion of the Formal and Transcendental Logic. If we keep in mind that the investigation of the pre-predicative origin of all higher idealities of objective-scientific thought is not ‘a partial problem but rather a universal problem for philosophy’ (CES 132), then to solve this crisis a new ‘transcendental aesthetic’ becomes a pressing task for phenomenology: showing how the ‘lower’ pre-predicative, perceptual experience gives rise to objective idealizations. Perception becomes important to completing this new transcendental aesthetic because it functions as a privileged form of conscious activity to examine both consciousness’ role in objectifying idealizations as well as the experiential origin of all objective idealizations. In short, Husserl’s call for a new transcendental aesthetic outlines the need for a phenomenology of

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perception understood in terms of a transcendental aesthetic. MerleauPonty’s Phenomenology of Perception is, among other things, a response to this need. The return to pre-predicative experience here refers to the constant reconfirmation and expansion of conceptual idealizations in perceptual experience as well as the question of the origin of ideal conceptualization itself. Husserl pursues this second question in yet another manner in the Crisis. Idealizing thought cannot forget its birth in pre-predicative experience, because if this happens, then a loss of meaning occurs, which ultimately leads to a crisis in rationality. Cognition loses its moorings in subjectivity and becomes a faulty rationalism, such as modern rationalism. Rationality, however, is also thrown into a crisis when ideas are severed from experience in scientific theorizing about method. To find a way out of the crisis requires a meta-reflection on idealizing scientific activity itself. The question here is not that of tracing a certain sphere of idealizations back to grounding evidence in experience but rather of tracing the very praxis of idealizing activity itself back to its origin in the history of reason. This is the question of the origin of rational activity per se, not as it might be pursued factually, but pursued in light of its own sense. It is the search for the origins of theoretical activity itself and for the hidden ‘reason in history,’ a search that must be carried on from within the movement of reason; as such, it is an historical reflection of a very particular sort. II. B. History and the Lifeworld As we have seen above, the lifeworld is understood as the pre-predicative perceptual world of immediate experience that precedes and grounds all scientific idealizations, and which is in need of a phenomenological clarification in the manner of a new transcendental aesthetic. But the lifeworld is more than this. In his description of the lifeworld, Husserl includes past cultural accomplishments, such as the products of science, art, and literature that have become abiding acquisitions through historical sedimentation: ‘here are also the sciences, as cultural facts in this world’ (CES 104). Scientific theories as well as works of art are spiritual (geistig) products, and, once sedimented, they become as familiar, as ‘obvious,’ as the surrounding perceptual world. The lifeworld, then, is equally a cultural world, a horizon of cultural ideas, the origin of which is historically conditioned and in need of clarification. And it is what Husserl has to say about the historical character of the lifeworld that makes the Crisis such a provocative text, for he raises a host of problems about the relationship between history, culture, phenomenology, and the lifeworld. Many of these problems the text itself does not adequately clarify; consequently, they remain pressing problems for subsequent

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phenomenologists, especially for Merleau-Ponty. In any case, Husserl’s historical reflection, as it functions internally to the text of the Crisis itself, is somewhat clear: in order to overcome the crisis that has befallen philosophy since the Renaissance, historical reflections are necessary to establish transcendental phenomenology as the proper philosophic task of our epoch. Historical reflections are, in short, a ‘new way into’ phenomenology, now seen as necessary because the ‘Cartesian way,’ outlined in the Cartesian Meditations, leaves the transcendental ego ‘empty of content’ (CES 155). Husserl’s turn to history in the Crisis is motivated by the very idea of philosophy, which, due to the prevailing positivistic orientation of the natural and human sciences, no longer guides rational inquiry and is in need of a reflective retrieval in order for the crisis in the sciences to be overcome. Ultimately, positivism leads to skepticism, irrationalism, and mysticism and, most importantly, an abandonment of the guiding ideal of philosophy. In its original institution, in sixth-century-BC Greece, philosophy set for itself the task of an all-encompassing science of everything, a science that particularizes itself according to various regions of being; it is also a science securely founded and proceeding by self-evident principles. Distinguishing itself from the mythical-practical attitude and sparked by philosophic wonder, the idea of philosophy was born with the theoretical attitude, which marked a new sort of humanity, the ‘European spirit’ (CES 71), as Husserl refers to it. However, due to objectivist preoccupations that have prevailed since the Renaissance, the development of the idea of philosophy has been ‘one-sided’ insofar as it seeks to eradicate all subjective elements from scientific activity. Hence the proper ideal of science and the telos of Western humanity have been lost. The crisis is, thus, at once an epistemological crisis of reason – for skepticism and irrationalism have become the hallmark of European sciences – and an existential crisis of Western man because European humanity has lost its founding ideal. In order to overcome this twofold crisis, Husserl undertakes historical investigations ‘by way of a teleological-historical reflection upon the origins of our critical scientific and philosophical situation to establish the unavoidable necessity of a transcendental-phenomenological reorientation of philosophy’ (CES 3). Transcendental phenomenology is needed to overcome the crisis. Historical investigations are necessary to re-orient philosophy and to reinstitute the proper idea of philosophy in transcendental phenomenology. In short, only when philosophy becomes transcendental phenomenology shall the guiding ideal of philosophy be re-instituted and the crisis be overcome. It is a reflective retrieval and clarification of the original meaning of the theoretical praxis itself. But we must pause a minute and ask: What is the sense of history Husserl has in mind here? It is clear that it

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is unorthodox. He is not setting out to investigate various philosophical systems of the past to distinguish points of contact, points of divergence, and influences. It is not a history of ideas; nor is it a disinterested contemplation of past philosophies in their own right. It is not an understanding of various philosophies in order to borrow bits from here and pieces from there to cobble together one’s own philosophy. Rather, its goal is to uncover ‘the hidden unity of intentional inwardness which alone constitutes the unity of history’ (CES 73). It seeks the underlying, if often unacknowledged, unity of the many philosophic systems of the past. One might go on to add that it is the unity of our history as beings who engage in idealizing theoretical activity; thus, it is an historical self-reflection, the kind of reflection that phenomenology is uniquely in a position to execute. For Husserl, the various philosophies, when taken together, are a spiritual unity, which is our history, our historical becoming as Western humanity. The various historical moments of philosophy must be seen in light of the overall intentional unity, and each philosopher must understand her vocation in light of the telos of philosophy as an ‘infinite task’ (CES 289). To uncover this unity and to locate his own proper place in the development, Husserl’s historical investigations proceed not from the outside, from facts, but from ‘the inside’ (CES 71) of the intentional unity of the idea of philosophy as it is developed by the intentions of various philosophers, and particularly, its one-sided development since the rise of the objective attitude, which Husserl associates with Galileo. Husserl’s interest in history, as it functions in the Crisis, is the historical becoming of the intentional unity of the telos of philosophy, with the goal of placing transcendental phenomenology squarely within this intentional development as the necessary re-institution of philosophy to overcome the crisis provoked by its one-sided development since the time of Galileo. The purpose of his intentional history is clear. It is an internal inquiry back into the original institution – what Husserl calls the Urstiftung – of philosophy in order to demonstrate that transcendental phenomenology is the final institution (Endstiftung) of philosophy. Husserl’s turn to history appears to be a fundamental re-orientation of his phenomenology because what appears at first to be an entirely new dimension of inquiry for phenomenology – the historicity of the lifeworld – turns out to be yet another way into transcendental phenomenology. In other words, problematizing history and the lifeworld calls for an investigation of this all-encompassing region, an investigation that has all the typical elements of phenomenological method: an epoche´ of objective science; the search for an a priori of the lifeworld and its ‘general structure’; the need for a ‘logic’ of scientific objectivities; the importance of intentionality in investigating the lifeworld; plotting ways to carry out a transcendental reduction; the task of an ‘ontology’ of the lifeworld, etc. This

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entry into phenomenology, Husserl notes, is contrasted to the ‘ ‘‘Cartesian way’’ . . . [which] while it leads to the transcendental ego in one leap, as it were, it brings this ego into view as apparently empty of content’ (CES 155). This rather ambiguous statement, indicating the shortcomings of the Cartesian approach to transcendental phenomenology, comes to be taken by Merleau-Ponty and others to indicate that the way into transcendental phenomenology via the lifeworld arrives at a transcendental sphere that derives its content from the concrete cultural world rather than from a world-less ego. With this sketch of Husserl’s account of history and phenomenology in view, we can conclude that one does not need to accept Husserl’s ultimate claims about phenomenology to find value in his phenomenological approach to the development of reason in history. Particularly for our purposes here, Merleau-Ponty finds many of the concepts Husserl used in the Crisis and other later writings fruitful when he comes to think through the problems of rationality and the historical development of ideas. Merleau-Ponty accepts that phenomenological history proceeds by an internal analysis of the historical development of idealizations, which have their origin in evidential motivations of the concrete historical world. The history of idealizations comprises a developmental unity, and insofar as these idealizations comprise our lifeworld, we have access to their historical becoming – in other words, to their historicity. Furthermore, our proper philosophic task is to bring these idealizations to fulfillment. Given this understanding, the phenomenologist can no longer be content with descriptions of the subjective modes of givenness of ideal objects, which characterized Husserl’s ‘static’ analyses. Rather phenomenology’s task is now to actively participate in the inter-subjective and inter-generational development of sense through a reflective recovery of the original instituting intention in a move that ultimately seeks to fix its final meaning by bringing it to full expression. However, it is on the question of such recovery and development that Merleau-Ponty differs most profoundly from Husserl, as we shall see. Moreover, whether Husserl is explicitly aware of it or not, already operating in his internal, intentional history in the Crisis is what Merleau-Ponty will later call ‘operative intentionality’; here, such operative intentionality is formulated in intersubjective and historic terms. These are a few of the more glaring Husserlian adoptions by Merleau-Ponty, and there will be more detailed below. But although Merleau-Ponty adopts Husserl’s intentional approach towards history and several of its implicit concepts, few of these concepts remain unchanged in Merleau-Ponty’s own writings. Moreover, for Merleau-Ponty and others, there are other transformations of the very enterprise of transcendental phenomenology embedded in Husserl’s approach and analysis in the Crisis. As already described

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above, Husserl’s internal, intentional history of the idea of philosophy in the Crisis is a historical ‘argument’ against objectivism and faulty forms of transcendentalism. The crisis of the European sciences is the result of positivism, which is the latest and greatest extension of objectivism. The historical account seeks to trace historical origins of objectivism as an initial step to clear the way for the claim that the transcendental turn must be made in the right way, namely in transcendental phenomenology. Transcendental phenomenology is the ‘task’ that has been assigned to our historical epoch to overcome the crisis and to re-institute the idea of philosophy. It is in this way that the Crisis is an introduction to transcendental philosophy. While the role of historical investigations might clearly establish the need for transcendental phenomenology in the text of the Crisis itself, it is less clear what effect they have for transcendental philosophy as it is described in Husserl’s earlier texts. That is, with the historical turn of the Crisis, can we be assured that the transcendental phenomenology introduced there is the same as the transcendental phenomenology introduced in, say, the Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, which also purports to be an introduction to phenomenological philosophy? Are we to take the subtitle of the Crisis – ‘An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy’ – to be indicative of the fact that with the introduction of historical concerns phenomenological philosophy can no longer be pure phenomenology? Does phenomenology continue to be reflection on the intentional analysis of egological consciousness? Or does such a ‘Cartesian’ approach, indeed, leave the transcendental ego devoid of content? In other words, is the intentional history merely a prolegomena to transcendental phenomenology, a groundclearing enterprise that establishes a genuine need for phenomenology, which can then proceed as it always had as descriptive analysis of subjective, intentional consciousness? Or has transcendental phenomenology been radically altered? That is, are the historical investigations merely a necessary component of the ground-clearing critique of objectivism but inessential to the actual method of phenomenology? Or does intentional history become an essential component of phenomenological method itself? In short, does history become necessary for phenomenology?3 The secondary literature on these and related questions is vast and not immediately relevant to my argument. Rather than attempt a resolution to these questions, I would like to indicate Merleau-Ponty’s opinion in this matter. From the numerous descriptions of Husserl found in the oeuvre of Merleau-Ponty, it is clear that he thinks something decisive occurred in Husserl’s thought of the thirties, which had to do with, among other things, the question of history and transcendental analysis. Merleau-Ponty continually champions Husserl, denying that there is a radical break between the ‘early’ and ‘late’ Husserl. Instead, he suggests a coherent

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development of thought, which includes correction of earlier formulations. I would like to suggest that it is precisely the treatment of history in his ‘late’ work that makes Husserl a lasting influence on Merleau-Ponty. The treatment of history in the Crisis and related texts of the period raises several questions about the historical development of ideas, the relationship between history and phenomenology, and it raises once again the threat of historicism for phenomenology. These are all issues to which Merleau-Ponty will turn when he takes up the question of history and phenomenology in the middle period of his career. His final view of phenomenology will be heavily indebted to Husserl’s late writings, but his account will bear within it some explicit and other implicit objections to Husserl’s presuppositions, such as Husserl’s account of language, the access the philosopher has to sedimented meanings, the nature of transcendental subjectivity such a history suggests (can it be anything other than a transcendental inter-subjectivity?), and, most importantly, the limitations of historical reflection. We will return to these issues in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 below, when we take up Merleau-Ponty’s middle period.

III. Conclusion In the Logical Investigations Husserl announces the necessity of renewed investigations into the ideal, the relation of the ideal to the factual, and how the ideal is given in acts of cognition; these investigations are necessary to overcome the errors of psychologism, which leads to relativism. Moreover, these errors, which stem from a reduction of the ideal to the factual, are shared by the human sciences as well. In his early work, Husserl poses a central problem of phenomenology – the problem of ideas and their relation to the factual – which he pursues in different guises throughout his career. In his earliest work, he is interested in mathematical and logical universals. In ‘Philosophy as Strict Science,’ he turns his attention to the role ideas play in historical thought. As in psychologistic logic, the result in history is the reduction of the ideal to the factual. Husserl’s response to historicism is to establish the need for phenomenology to investigate the ideas that history and the other human sciences presuppose but cannot themselves justify. When Husserl returns to the problem of historicism and the rational justification of phenomenology in the Crisis, he is much better prepared to bring a more sophisticated account to the question of the developmental unity of science due to genetic analysis and researches into intersubjectivity. In the Crisis, Husserl seeks the origin of scientific ideas in the proto-objectifying activity of the ‘anonymous’ life of subjectivity. Prior to scientific activity, the scientist is engaged in the lifeworld, as a world of

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valid objects already determined to a certain degree. The lifeworld is the always-already-given world that grounds all scientific activity, which is an attempt to further specify that world in order to perfect the vague understanding of the everyday world. Modern science and philosophy, however, have ‘forgotten’ the lifeworld as the source of idealizations. In the Crisis, Husserl problematizes the lifeworld and calls for its phenomenological explication, which takes two directions. As the everyday world of straightforward experience, the lifeworld is understood as a ‘sense-world,’ the world of pre-predicative perceptual experience. Here the thing itself is given to sense experience, a fund from which the logical substructions of scientific idealizations are drawn. Phenomenological explication of the sense-world as the source of ideal objects becomes a new transcendental aesthetic. It is in this direction that Merleau-Ponty sees the task of phenomenology in his early work, specifically in the Phenomenology of Perception. The lifeworld as source of scientific idealizations is not exhausted in an analysis of pre-predicative sense experience, however, because it is also conditioned by history. Phenomenological analysis of history understood as seeking the unifying sense in history also becomes part of the task of phenomenology. Here Husserl traces the historical becoming of the idea of philosophy. The original institution of the theoretical attitude arose in sixth-century-BC Greece. Since the Renaissance, philosophy and science have developed the idea of philosophy one-sidedly. Due to preoccupations with objectivity, the subjective contributions to the idealized productions of scientific activity have been ignored, leading to the present crisis in the sciences. Husserl’s internal, intentional history reveals that phenomenology is the proper philosophic task of our time to overcome the crisis and re-institute the proper guiding idea of science. While Husserl sees historical investigations in the Crisis as another way into transcendental phenomenology, his turn to history raises questions about his earlier articulations of transcendental phenomenology, particularly, the questions of whether and how historical investigations are necessary for transcendental phenomenology and how such historical investigations might alter his earlier understanding of the task, goals, and methods of phenomenology. When Merleau-Ponty turns to the question of history in the middle and latter periods of his career, the issues raised and concepts developed in the Crisis become definitive for his understanding of phenomenology, its task, goals, and methods.

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The Problem of Ideal Objects in the Phenomenology of Perception

I. Ideal Objects and the Structure of Behavior We have already seen in the work of Husserl that the problem of ideal objects involves several issues, but two in particular. Properly speaking, ideal objects are understood as objects of higher-order consciousness, but objects of higher-order consciousness ultimately relate to lower prepredicative objects of perception. Reflection can pursue this connection in two ways: One can pursue the constitutive processes of consciousness from the ‘lower’ to the ‘higher’ or from the ‘higher’ to the ‘lower.’ The problem of ideal objects thus takes up the classical problem of the relationship between sensibility and intelligence. Understood in this way, a full account of ideal objects involves, among other things, a transcendental aesthetic. In one sense, the relationship between these terms is the question of the relationship between the particularity of the hic-et-nunc and another order not totally bound by immediacy, the universal. Seen in this light, the problem of ideal objects also includes the ancient problem of participation, or the relationship between idea and the particular. As far as Merleau-Ponty is concerned, phenomenology is heir to the critical tradition, so, following Husserl, his entry into the problem of ideal objects is to investigate the relation between sensibility and intelligence. Philosophic reflection begins with a fully constituted world of objects: perceptual objects, cultural objects, historical objects, as well as ideal objects. Philosophic reflection also begins with the constituted body and the presence of others. The difficulty in any attempt to account for the objects of the world, my body, and others, is to determine the contributions of sensibility and the contributions of intelligence. This difficulty is most acutely noticed in perception. It is in this light that Merleau-Ponty’s early interest in perception must be seen. In his first work, the Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty does not address the problem of ideal objects directly, but in light of his later writings, the problem of ideal objects is clearly at stake in the motivating problem of the text. Moreover, much of what is relevant in that work for

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the present study is developed more fully in the Phenomenology of Perception. Nonetheless, the Structure of Behavior is crucial for laying the essential groundwork of Merleau-Ponty’s early view of ideal objects. The concept of the Gestalt is especially crucial for Merleau-Ponty’s early approach to the problem of ideal objects. Merleau-Ponty finds in the Gestalt a better understanding of the relationship between ‘consciousness and nature’ (SB 3). This has been a central problem of modern philosophy since Descartes. Traditionally the problem has been posed in terms of epistemology – how consciousness and nature are united and how they are distinct in the relationship of perceiver to perceived, of knower to known – that is, how perception allows us to have knowledge of and to make true judgments about the perceptual world. Merleau-Ponty finds in the Gestalt the unity of these two orders: ‘the synthesis of matter and idea’ (SB 137), or, alternatively put, ‘the unity of interior and exterior, of nature and idea’ (SB 210). While Merleau-Ponty’s interest is primarily epistemological, the Gestalt also contributes to a new ontology. For the ‘theory of form . . . seeks to expand into a philosophy of form which would be substituted for the philosophy of substances’ (SB 132). How does Merleau-Ponty draw such startling conclusions from this psychological concept? Left to the psychologist, this conclusion would not have been reached, for psychologists have resisted the inner logic of the Gestalt and remained committed to naturalist principles and realist ontology. In its narrow application in the Structure of Behavior, the Gestalt is useful to overcoming problems inherent in the atomism of contemporaneous analyses of nerve functioning and perception. But the significance of the Gestalt is much broader; Merleau-Ponty sees the Gestalt as a ‘new category’ (SB 47). The philosophic significance of this new category is a new way of conceiving the relationship of part to wholes that, when contextualized, contributes to overcoming the traditional dichotomy between interior and exterior and particular and idea. Contrary to atomistic conceptions of parts and wholes as compositions of quasi-independent and invariant elements that are grouped by a cumulative or additive process into a whole, what is significant in the Gestalt account is a more interdependent relationship between the parts and the whole. In a Gestalt-type unity, parts are determined and qualified by their relation to every other part and to the whole into which they are integrated, while the whole itself is considered as the ‘total equilibrium’ (SB 91) of parts in their interdependence. In short, parts and wholes cannot be fully distinguished from one another in any sense, since they mutually imply one another; furthermore, neither parts nor wholes have priority. The philosophic significance of the Gestalt-type unity is more profound, for it reveals a certain kind of structure:

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What is profound in the notion of ‘Gestalt’ from which we started is not the idea of signification but that of structure, the joining of an idea and an existence which are indiscernible, the contingent arrangement by which materials begin to have meaning in our presence, intelligibility in the nascent state. (SB 206–7) To understand how the Gestalt can have the profound significance of joining ‘an idea and an existence,’ it is necessary to look at lived perception. Returning to a description of lived perception, it is undeniable that perception is perspectival; the perceptual object is given in so many ‘profiles.’1 In immediate perception, the fact that the object is given to me in profiles is not a subjective deformation of things; on the contrary, the perspectival nature of perception gives me access to the real. It is the very nature of profiles to indicate something beyond them to which they properly belong. No single profile can stand alone; it requires other profiles for its status as a profile. Alone any profile is incomplete; it indicates something more, a surplus that is held in reserve. Even a series of profiles taken together remains incomplete, for it is the very nature of a profile to announce that it is a profile of something beyond itself. For perception this indicates that there is something beyond perceptual consciousness: ‘I grasp in a perspectival appearance, which I know is only one of its possible aspects, the thing itself which transcends it’ (SB 187). It is this very transcendence of perceptual consciousness that is given in perceptual consciousness that ‘founds a consciousness of reality’ (SB 187). The transcendent reality revealed in perceptual consciousness is a concrete, individual existence. Although perceptual objects are given to us in a series of profiles, we are given access to individual existences because profiles are organized into meaningful wholes. Thus, insofar as each momentary profile points beyond itself to other profiles and to the whole, the perspectival nature of perception does not cut us off from the perceptual object but instead gives us our very access to transcendent, individual realities. While profiles give us access to transcendent reality, the profiles themselves are in need of an organizing principle. What allows for the organization of profiles into meaningful wholes? The organizing principle is not found outside the profiles themselves; rather, in the Gestalt, the profiles organize themselves. The autochthonous organization of profiles into meaningful wholes is a break from the traditional accounts of the organizing principle of perception. For traditionally there have been two divergent answers to this question.2 On the one hand, realism interprets the profiles as a series of ‘sensations,’ the organization of which is ensured by the external object. This account fails, however, when it tries to explain

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higher acts of consciousness. Critical thought or transcendental thought, on the other hand, seeks the organizing principle in some act of consciousness, but this ends up in an ‘intellectualist theory of perception’ (SB 201), making it a variety of judgment. Between these two alternatives Merleau-Ponty sees the spontaneous organization of the profiles to be a Gestalt-type unity, which is beyond the spontaneous activity of consciousness, yet is a unity only for consciousness. In effect, the Gestalt offers a via media between realism and critical philosophy. In the unity of profiles in the Gestalt, one cannot distinguish intellectual form from sensible content as critical philosophy seeks to do; nor can one distinguish impulse from sensation as realism suggests. The Gestalt is an irreducible whole bearing the organizing principle in itself, which, in effect, surpasses the traditional categories as a means of explaining lived perception. By returning to lived perception and the primacy of the Gestalt for philosophic analyses of perception, Merleau-Ponty finds a middle way between the traditional dichotomy of realism and critical thought in an account that preserves the truth of both realism and critical thought while avoiding that which is false in each of them. Rather than analyzing perception as a function of the body resulting from causal processes that constitute perception as effects of nature, critical thought begins the analysis of perception from within, as it were, from significations: The experience of a real thing cannot be explained by the action of that thing on my mind: the only way for a thing to act on my mind is to offer it a meaning, to manifest itself to it, to constitute itself vis-a`-vis the mind in its intelligible articulations. (SB 199) Merleau-Ponty seeks to pursue this aspect of critical thought, namely that philosophic analysis begins with meaning and significance and must go from there to return to the evidence of ‘naive consciousness’ (SB 199). Thus the truth that Merleau-Ponty finds in the critical tradition, which he finds preserved in phenomenology, is that: In order to indicate both the intimacy of objects to the subject and the presence in them of solid structures which distinguish them from appearances, they will be called ‘phenomena’; and philosophy, to the extent that it adheres to this theme, becomes a phenomenology. . . . Transcendental idealism, by making the subject and the object inseparable correlates, guarantees the validity of perceptual experience in which the world appears in person and nonetheless as distinct from the subject. (SB 199) As far as Merleau-Ponty is concerned here, phenomenology is heir to the critical tradition. Thus to solve the problem of the relationship between

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sensibility and intelligence, what is needed is a new ‘transcendental aesthetic’ (SB 200). While the truth of the critical tradition might be preserved in phenomenology, a major problem in it needs to be overcome. The problem with the critical approach is that it neglects the constitutional history of perceptual significations by giving an ‘intellectualist theory of perception’ (SB 201), thus making perception a form of judgment. In other words, while critical thought might admit that moments of knowledge are derivative modes of consciousness ‘founded’ (SB 1989) on more original modes, any attempt to understand this primitive consciousness with categories of the intellect, in effect, ‘intellectualizes’ them, thus depriving them of their original status as lived rather than thought significance: While critical thought pushed the problem of the relations of the soul and body back step by step by showing that we never deal with a body-initself (en soi) but with a body for-a-consciousness and that thus we never have to put consciousness in contact with an opaque and foreign reality, for us consciousness experiences its inherence in an organism at each moment; for it is not a question of an inherence in material apparatuses, which as a matter of fact can be only objects for consciousness, but of a presence to consciousness of its proper history and of the dialectic stages it has traversed. (SB 208) Bringing to reflective awareness what Merleau-Ponty here calls ‘proper history’ and ‘dialectic stages’ of consciousness is, in phenomenological terms, the problem of ‘passivity’ (SB 216) or the problem of passively constituted objects of primary consciousness. Phenomenology has inherited the truth of the critical tradition and is now charged to overcome its main problem, to save the contributions of perception in acts of intelligence by accounting for passivity. In short, when it comes to the problem of perception, passivity becomes the problem for phenomenology to solve. The shortcoming of critical thought is its inability to account for the passive constitution of perceptual significance. While realism may well be an error insofar as it seeks the relation between perspectival aspects and the thing which they present as reducible to ‘the relations which exist within nature’ (SB 193), realism is a motivated error because it accounts for the passivity of original consciousness by acknowledging that the organization of profiles into significant wholes is beyond the total control of consciousness. And it is this very relationship between profiles and the significant wholes that Merleau-Ponty finds articulated in the philosophic interpretation of the Gestalt, which, on this account, appears to be a privileged locus to analyze passivity. What Merleau-Ponty finds in the autochthonous unity of the Gestalt is that consciousness is not solely

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responsible for the organization of the profiles but that the Gestalt offers a signification for a mind insofar as the unity of profiles does not exist in itself without reference to the for-itself. In other words, the Gestalt is a unity beyond consciousness, but it is a unity only for a consciousness. Thus, Merleau-Ponty aligns himself with the starting point of critical philosophy. But it is a tenuous association because the critical tradition passes over the problem of passive constitution, which, when fully problematized, returns to the traditional problem of the relationship between the soul and the body, a problem that Merleau-Ponty seeks to pursue in terms of ‘the problem of the relations of consciousness as flux of individual events . . . and that of consciousness as a tissue of ideal significations’ (SB 215). In Husserlian terms this problem becomes the relationship between pre-predicative experience and judgment. We see MerleauPonty’s early thought following Husserl’s later articulation of this problem, namely that higher orders of consciousness are ‘founded on the concrete articulations of the perceived field’ (SB 218). Merleau-Ponty seeks to place the emphasis on the function of pre-predicative contributions to higher conscious activity. Moments of knowledge, thus, ‘should be considered as derived modes of consciousness, founded in the final analysis on a more original mode of consciousness’ (SB 199). Consciousness naturally moves from pre-predicative experience to judgment; thus, to return to perception as original experience is to undertake ‘an inversion of the natural movement of consciousness’ (SB 220). Philosophic inquiry must begin from the results of the natural movement of consciousness – the idealizations of higher-order acts of consciousness – as a consequence, philosophy proceeds by an inverse movement of consciousness. In other words, the task of philosophic reflection is to provide an account of the relation between sensibility and intelligence that does justice to the contributions of perception for intelligence. Already in the Structure of Behavior MerleauPonty understands this relationship in foundational terms. This will become much clearer in the Phenomenology of Perception, where he interprets this relationship in terms of the phenomenological concept of Fundierung, which is usually translated as ‘foundation.’ To summarize, the philosophic consequences of the Gestalt operate in two registers in the Structure of Behavior, a work that seeks to contribute to overcoming the shortcomings of traditional understandings of the relations between ‘consciousness and nature’ (SB 3). First, the Gestalt is a spontaneous and autochthonous unity of profiles that situates itself between the traditional dichotomies of inner and outer – perceiving subject and perceived object – thereby saving the truth of realism. Second, the Gestalt offers a way to save the truth in the critical tradition by giving an account of passivity, which will come to include origin, generation, and context, as a means to unite intelligence and perception without

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trivializing the latter. The Gestalt can serve this dual function because the profiles are not mere appearances but are manifestations of the thing itself; furthermore, the perceptual sense found in the Gestalt serves as the foundation for higher acts of consciousness. In the Structure of Behavior it is less clear how the Gestalt can fulfill this second function because it is not clear at this point how the Gestalt functions to unite sensibility and intelligence in order to overcome the classic dichotomy of the critical tradition, which historically provided its own solution to the problem. The attempt to apply the Gestalt in this domain will need to avoid perceptualizing intelligence or reducing thought to perception. This is a problem Merleau-Ponty faces as he continues to develop the philosophic consequences of the Gestalt in the Phenomenology of Perception. The first step of this development will be to loosen the Gestalt from its moorings in the perceptual domain. The proper space for the Gestalt is ‘between’ perceiver and perceived. It is an autochthonous unity of profiles pregnant with a meaning, which is an achievement neither of the perceiver nor of the perceived considered as distinct entities causally related to each other. The Gestalt suggests that perceiver and perceived are instead two terms involved in a dialectic relationship. Once loosened from its original moorings in perception, the Gestalt will come to provide a more general means to question and articulate various types of significant unities (of profiles) that are located between two orders: subject and object, intelligence and sensibility, present and past, and universal and particular. While much of what is said in Structure of Behavior is promising, too little has been said of the classic philosophic problem facing any account of perception, namely, the relationship between sensibility and intelligence. More will be said of this in the Phenomenology of Perception, which MerleauPonty will pursue under the guise of a transcendental aesthetic.

II. Phenomenology and Fundierung In the ‘Introduction’ to the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty begins with the Gestalt. The real achievement of Gestalt psychology was to provide concrete analyses that once and for all called into question the constancy hypothesis. Without the validity of the constancy hypothesis as a shared assumption, both ‘intellectualist’ and ‘empiricist’ accounts of perception are problematized at their foundation. The most basic assumptions of perception are once again put into question. Once perception is problematized and new investigations of it are undertaken, the body is also problematized since it is implied in all instances of perception. To investigate the body’s function in perception, Merleau-Ponty’s strategy involves describing cases of injury and illness that affect perceptual

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function. Instances of improper function, which result from bodily injury and illness, indicate the problems inherent in empiricist and intellectualist accounts of the contributions of corporeality in the ‘categorical functions.’ Schneider’s case, in particular, demonstrates that the traditional distinctions between sensibility and ‘categorical’ operations are flawed since the explanations that they provide for Schneider’s malfunctions do not adequately account for the phenomena. Returning to the body as philosophically significant calls for a re-conceptualization of the body and its place in cognitive activity, which is an enduring theme in Merleau-Ponty’s thought and is the major achievement of this early work. While it is true that Merleau-Ponty’s early thought inaugurated and contributed much to phenomenological investigations of the body, it must be clear that this return to the body is not merely an attempt to supply a descriptive phenomenology of the body without any further ramifications, but is rather a re-conceptualization of the relation between sensibility and intelligence, emphasizing the contributions of sensibility. In Kantian terms, MerleauPonty attempts to provide a transcendental aesthetic. In Husserlian terms, he attempts to give an account of the relationship between pre-predicative experience and judgment, beginning from the pre-predicative, from the ground up, as it were. In Merleau-Ponty’s words, it is an attempt to discover a ‘logos of the aesthetic world’ (PP 429), which, as noted above, Husserl called for in the conclusion to the Formal and Transcendental Logic. In the end, we must see the philosophic significance of Merleau-Ponty’s reconceptualization of the body as a response to an epistemological problem inherent in Husserl’s work, for which Husserl’s attempted solutions were inadequate. Articulating the intelligible value of pre-predicative experience for higher cognitive activity, such as is represented by the term ‘categorical function,’ is the philosophic problem that motivates MerleauPonty’s return to the body. Solving this problem will ultimately require additional analyses that take Merleau-Ponty beyond embodiment to other phenomenological themes such as history, language, and intersubjectivity. Again, Schneider’s case is significant because it shows that empiricist and intellectualist accounts of the relation between motor functions and symbolic function are inadequate and will remain so until ‘some definition is found for a concrete essence, a structure of illness which shall express both its generality and its particularity’ (PP 126). Already we see the problem of ideal objects emerging in the text under the guise of a need for analyses to link the general essence to the particular individual case of malfunction, which Schneider’s case represents. Linking the concrete essence to the instance here describes the movement of thought, and, in order to do this, a general concept of the illness under consideration is needed. The general concept here is understood as a concrete essence

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because it applies to the material world, the body. More, however, is suggested here, for in order to arrive at the concrete essence that Schneider’s injury presents, we will need to seek in perception the origins of his deficiencies in his categorical activity and symbolic functions, thus seeking the origins of higher consciousness in the lower. In order to arrive at the concrete essence of the illness that Schneider’s case presents, which would amount to explaining the relationship of sensibility and intelligence, phenomenology must become ‘genetic phenomenology’ (PP 126). These Husserlian terms, indicating that ideal investigations are implied in the attempt to give an account of the function of the body in perception and higher cognitive activities (such as symbolic activity), are now being given specific content in the example of Schneider. Specifically, an analysis is needed to ‘link the origin and the essence or meaning [sens]’ (PP 126). The problem becomes clear: The task for us is to conceive, between the linguistic, perceptual and motor contents and the form given to them or the symbolic function which breathes life into them, a relationship which shall be neither the reduction of form to content, nor the subsuming of content under an autonomous form. . . . Visual contents are taken up, utilized and sublimated to the level of thought by a symbolic power which transcends them, but it is on the basis of sight that this power can be constituted. The relationship between matter and form is called in phenomenological terminology a relationship of Fundierung : the symbolic function rests on the visual as on a ground, not that vision is its cause. . . . Form integrates within itself the content until the latter finally appears as a mere mode of form itself, and the historical stages leading to thought as a ruse of Reason disguised as Nature. But conversely, even in its intellectual sublimation, content remains in the nature of radical contingency, the initial establishment or foundation of knowledge and action, the first laying hold of being or value, whose concrete richness will never be finally exhausted by knowledge or action, and whose spontaneous method they will ceaselessly reapply. This dialectic of form and content is what we have to restore. (PP 126–7) This dense passage turns on the concept of Fundierung, a phenomenological concept that Husserl introduced and elaborated in the Third Logical Investigation. While it was initially articulated in this early work, Fundierung remained operative in Husserl’s late thought. Throughout Husserl’s career, it is a concept meant to describe a non-reductive relationship between terms, specifically between a generality understood as a form and a specific material instance of that generality. In the passage quoted above, the problem of ideal objects is announced as the attempt to

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restore this ‘dialectic of form and content,’ and its solution is sought in the phenomenological concept of Fundierung. The problem at issue here is the relationship between sensibility and intelligence, a problem that is a natural outcome of returning to the body and perception. The reference to form and content echoes Husserl’s early but ultimately abortive attempt to solve this problem in terms of ‘hyle’ and ‘morphe.’ This problem was continued in analyses of the relationship between pre-predicative experience and judgment in Husserl’s late thought. It is, in any case, a problem that persisted in the thought of Husserl, one which did not receive a satisfactory solution. Moreover, it is this problem to which Merleau-Ponty sought to provide a solution. Overcoming the problem of the relationship of sensibility and intelligence, or more precisely, articulating the value of sensibility and its contribution to eidetic analyses, is what phenomenology needed. It is the dialectic between intelligible ‘form’ and sensible ‘content’ that Merleau-Ponty seeks to restore as a means to solving this outstanding problem in phenomenology. The crucial first step to providing a solution is found in the concept of Fundierung, by which Merleau-Ponty seeks to articulate the movement of consciousness and the relationship of sensibility and intelligence in nonreductionist terms; that is, the natural movement of consciousness is to transcend the material conditions of perception towards intellectual operations, to go beyond the content of perception to its intellectual form. The movement of reflective consciousness, on the other hand, begins with the intellectual form and seeks to uncover the material content underlying the form. Ideal objects thus transcend their origin in perceptual consciousness, but reflection cannot ignore this origin when seeking to provide an adequate constitutive history of ideal objects. There are two general tendencies when philosophers are faced with the relationship of intelligible form and sensible content, both of which Merleau-Ponty sought to avoid, as the above quotation reveals. The first attitude is exemplified in any attempt to reduce intellectual form to some function of the material content, to try to see form as founded on the ‘material.’ For Merleau-Ponty, there is something fundamentally correct in this reductionist impulse, for the form cannot stand alone, fully detached from the underlying content. The flaw in this reductionist tendency is that the reduction is usually carried out in causal terms. The attempt to reduce, or in less polemic terms, to found intellectual operations in the causal, material conditions of these operations, Merleau-Ponty calls ‘empiricism.’ The other attitude taken towards the form/content relationship is not a reduction but what Merleau-Ponty characterizes above as a ‘subsumption’ or ‘sublimation’ of the content by the form. The goal here is to downplay the contingency and spontaneity of the content for the meaning of form; it is a version of essentialism or Platonism. On this view,

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the particularity of the material content is irrelevant to the form; matter does not matter because it is changeable, while the form is stable. The form itself does not depend on this specific instance to be what it is, for any other instance will do. The tendency to subsume content into pure form Merleau-Ponty considers indicative of ‘intellectualism.’ Merleau-Ponty does not concern himself much with empiricism on this issue. Granting Husserl’s arguments against empiricist accounts of (logical) ideal objects, from the phenomenological standpoint, the empiricist reduction is bound to fail. Rather, it is clear in the analyses that MerleauPonty is in constant dialogue with the intellectualists, who, according to him, falsify the relationship between sensibility and intelligence by ignoring the natural movement of consciousness, which begins in the material but transcends this towards the ideal. This transcendence – and this is what Merleau-Ponty emphasizes – is never complete. Phenomenology, as Merleau-Ponty understands it here, seeks to restore this movement of consciousness by bringing to reflective awareness the ‘history’ (PP 31) of consciousness. That history will reveal that despite successive ‘sublimation’ (PP 126) of the lower orders into the higher, the contingency of the material origin cannot be superseded fully. The contingent origin remains a non-reducible moment in the constitution of intelligible form. Fundierung, thus, is a founding in which the founded transcends but never fully escapes its founding, without being dominated by the founding. The goal is to link the origin to the essence without reducing the latter to the former, as empiricism does, or fully absorbing the origin into the essence and thereby eradicating all contingency. For the present, the dialectical relationship represented in the concept of Fundierung is the locus at which the problem of ideal objects first comes to full light. Clearing up this problem is associated with the central task of phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty does more than merely borrow phenomenological terms from Husserl – his whole approach is phenomenological. By bracketing accounts that fail to capture the non-reductive dialectic between sensibility and intelligence, Merleau-Ponty is able to seek concretely the origin of the teleological movement of consciousness through perception. Seeking the origin of consciousness through concrete, embodied perception now becomes the task of philosophy, which has become identified with the project of phenomenology:3 The miracle of consciousness consists in its bringing to light, through attention, phenomena which re-establish the unity of the object in a new dimension at the very moment when they destroy it . . . [attention is] the active constitution of a new object which makes explicit and articulate what was until then presented as no more than an indeterminate horizon. . . . This passage from the indeterminate to the determinate, this

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recasting at every moment of its own history in the unity of new meaning is thought itself. . . . The result of the act of attention is not to be found in its beginning. . . . Consciousness must be faced with its own unreflective life in things and awakened to its own history which it was forgetting: such is the true part the philosophical reflection has to play. (PP 30–1) What Merleau-Ponty says about attention in this early passage from the Phenomenology of Perception can be generalized to thought itself. Thought is the movement from the indeterminate to the determinate, which is accomplished only through the successive destruction and creation of the object of consciousness at various levels of determination. The task of philosophy is to reflect on this movement, bringing to light the constitutive history of consciousness as well as the constitutive history of the object of consciousness. The error of intellectualism is that beginning with fully constituted objects, it ignores this history and, consequently, downplays the significance of perception for thought. Since philosophy can no longer simply take the object of thought as it initially presents itself – that is, as a result and thereby ignoring its generation – it must strive, instead, to bring this generative history to reflective awareness. With this new orientation, a new problem emerges: Given this destructive-creative movement of thought, how are we to understand the identity of the object of consciousness throughout its transformation? The ‘knowledge-bringing event’ is a transformation of the ‘still ambiguous meaning’ (PP 30), which functions not as a cause in the empiricist sense or a foundation in the idealist sense but rather as ‘motifs.’4 It is this transformation that is at issue. What is the motif that originates in perception but is transcended in thought? Provisionally, Merleau-Ponty sees this movement as united in a ‘transition synthesis’ (PP 30), which is a temporal concept. This indicates that formulating the problem of ideal objects in terms of Fundierung will necessitate, at some point, the inclusion of temporal considerations in the founding/founded relationship. Considerations of temporality, as we shall see, will ultimately call into question the attempt to pursue the problem of ideal objects exclusively in a perceptual Fundierung, but before getting to this, the Fundierung account needs to be developed further.

III. Ideal Meanings and the Gestural Theory of Language In the everyday, natural attitude, prior to reflection, we are concerned with objects. Perception, like all intentional activity, ends in objects. Reflection, however, reveals that the object emerges as the result of a constitutive history. The constituting activity, by virtue of which the object

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appears, is always already achieved when reflection begins. According to Merleau-Ponty, if we are to truly understand the movement of consciousness, we must return to the origin of objectification of objects which objective thought presupposes in all its activity. We must return to the ‘constitution of our body as object, since this is a crucial moment in the genesis of the objective world’ (PP 72). We find in the body the privileged locus to see constituting activity at work. In the normal course of things, however, this activity is hidden. For the objects present themselves as unproblematic. So how is one to bring this constitutive activity to light? Merleau-Ponty seeks to reveal the constituting activity by examining instances in which the normal functioning of objective thought has been disrupted due to bodily illness or injury. In order to account for the disruption of perceptual and cognitive functions, we will need to abandon the traditional views of the body as one object among the many objects in the world and instead see the body as an ‘expressive space’ (PP 146). The origin of meaning can no longer be seen as the exclusive provenance of theoretical consciousness and its object in the manner of a ‘bestowal’ of sense, as Husserl would have it. Meaning emerges already at the level of the ‘expressive’ relationship of body and the world. While it is the origin, bodily expression cannot be seen as a conferral of meaning outward, as a centrifugal force, for this would be a repetition of the idealist position, except now merely shifting the power of meaning ‘bestowal’ from theoretical consciousness to the body. Equally so, the emergence of meaning cannot simply be the effect of a movement towards the body, the result of a centripetal force, for this would repeat the empiricist position. Rather, describing the body as primarily an expressive space reveals the ambiguous nature of being-in-the-world: Anterior to conventional means of expression . . . we must, as we shall see, recognize a primary process of signification in which the thing expressed does not exist apart from the expression, and in which the signs themselves induce their significance externally. In this way the body expresses total existence, not because it is an external accompaniment to that existence, but because existence realizes itself in the body. This incarnate significance is the central phenomenon of which body and mind, sign and significance are abstract moments. (PP 166) In this primary process of signification that is bodily expression, we see another description of Fundierung in terms of expression. Merleau-Ponty seeks to describe in bodily expression a new type of intentionality that is anterior to the cognitive order, what he calls elsewhere ‘operative intentionality’ (PP 418). Meaning emerges in the dialectical relationship of my body and the world. By describing the body’s ambiguous commerce with

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the world in terms ‘expression’ and ‘meaning,’ terms that are normally reserved to describe thought and language, Merleau-Ponty seeks to reorient the traditional understanding of expression away from its accepted application to exclusively higher cognitive activity, towards the expressivity of incarnate existence. The body, in its daily transactions with the surrounding world, is as expressive as thought, we might say. Locating intentional activity at the level of the body is one of the major achievements of the Phenomenology of Perception and a hallmark of Merleau-Ponty’s early thought. It remains to be seen, however, how bodily intentionality and bodily expression can describe the general function of the body as being-in-the-world, which Merleau-Ponty seeks to give it, while at the same time maintaining something like the traditional understanding of expression as the privilege of thetic consciousness. That is, if ‘categorial activity’ is being re-conceived to include bodily expression, it is not clear whether this account will carry enough explanatory power to account fully for all the cognitive activities usually understood by ‘categorial activity.’ The threat lurking here is conceiving this move as some sort of a reduction of all conscious activity to the body. Integral to Merleau-Ponty’s development of bodily expressivity in the Phenomenology of Perception is his gestural theory of language. This theory of language is explicitly intended to overcome the difficulties inherent in ‘empiricist’ and ‘intellectualist’ accounts of language. When it is fully drawn out, however, it squarely encounters the problem of intersubjective, historically constituted ideal meanings, and one, decisively, not without difficulties for Merleau-Ponty. These difficulties must be overcome for the ultimate development of his account of ideal objects. Before turning to these difficulties, however, more needs to be said about Merleau-Ponty’s gestural theory of language. The gestural theory of language is a way of responding to empiricist and intellectualist interpretations of language, both of which, in their account of the relationship of meaning to word, do not account for the speaking subject. For the empiricist, the word is some sort of ‘psychic, physiological or even physical phenomenon . . . thrown up by the workings of an objective causality’ (PP 176) that serves as nothing more than a trigger or indicator of meaning. Consequently, ‘there is no speaker, there is a flow of words set in motion independently of any intention to speak’ (PP 175). For the intellectualist, on the other hand, thought, which is in full possession of itself prior to language, employs language as a tool or medium only to make itself known to others; language is nothing but ‘an external accompaniment to thought’ (PP 177). Here as well, speech is a superfluous, involuntary action. Contrary to these approaches, Merleau-Ponty begins with the concrete speaking subject. Unlike Husserl, however, Merleau-Ponty’s approach to language is not based on the judgment but on the gesture. That is, he does not take the judgment as the paradigmatic example of

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language use by which all other uses of language are to be understood. For the first thing we must acknowledge is that the speaking subject is embodied. Another way of putting this is to say that language is conditioned by the body and, therefore, the privileged locus to witness such conditioning is in the emergence of meaning in a gesture – a type of language that most clearly implicates the body – rather than in the judgment. The gesture shows us three things about language and expression. First, it re-integrates meaning and expression, typically separated in both of the traditional accounts. For it is clear that meaning is not separate from the gesture. In Merleau-Ponty’s account, the meaning of a hand raised in anger ready to strike is not separate from the movement; it is embodied in the movement. Also, I do not infer anger from the red face and raised voice as if it were a hidden psychic event; I see anger in the gesture. Much as the musical meaning of the sonata is not separate from its notes, the meaning of the gesture is internal to the gesture itself: I see and hear the anger in the gesture just as I hear the musical meaning in the playing of the sonata. Second, the gesture integrates me into a surrounding world. The gesture that I witness outlines an intentional object, which I take up and share in. If we did not share the same world of objects, then the gesture would not be understood, for the object that the gesture would intend would not be present. For gestural meaning to emerge, the gesture presupposes a shared world that is bodily understood before it is conceptualized. Bodily understanding – the pre-reflective ability to manipulate, influence, and interact with objects in the world, which is more akin to practical knowhow than to intellectual understanding – is much like perceptual understanding, which is pre-reflective cognizance. Much like perception, the gesture occurs and is part of the surrounding world. In short, the shared perceptual world, in which my body holds sway with others, is the background from which gestural significance stands out. The gesture is significant because it is a series of movements that, through mutual implication, bind themselves into a unity placing itself in the world between me and the other. The unity of various moments of the gesture lend the gesture its significance as the various perspectives of the perceptual object lend it its significance prior to reflection. As the full meaning of the sonata must be played out note by note, emerging only from the relationship between each note and all the others, the meaning of a gesture includes all its moments. And like the musical meaning of the sonata, the gesture cannot be separated from its articulation without a loss of meaning occurring. The meaning of the gesture cannot be divorced from its playing out in the phenomenal world. Any alteration of the moments of the gesture would alter its overall meaning just as a new ending added to the sonata would alter its musical meaning. The fact that the gesture does not point beyond itself to some inner psychological state

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but is instead a part of the shared world indicates the third, and most important, aspect of the gestural theory of meaning. Finally, the gesture also gives me the other. Gestural meanings are not hidden in another consciousness inaccessible to me but are projected into the world which I can understand by intending the same object. Doing so pre-supposes a common world and access to the other. The gesture is like a question, it is an invitation to respond, to take up and join in the surrounding world the way the other is intending it. The other and the meanings articulated in her gestures are present to me because we share the same perceptual world. With these aspects of the gestural theory of meaning in view, its fruitfulness begins to emerge. First, it points the way to an account of the ‘origin of language’ (PP 186), a persistent problem that has been neglected by linguists and philosophers alike. Language is not a Promethean gift; it is an achievement of man. For speech to emerge in the course of human existence ‘an earlier means of communication’ (PP 187) must be presupposed. Gestural meanings provide the requisite cultural background from which speech emerges. The issue of the origin here is not, however, a one-time occurrence deep in the pre-history of man but rather is a persistent origin of all linguistic activity presupposed in the simplest utterance. That is, this sense of the origin of language indicates a more profound sense of the origin of language, an origin that is forever present in all speech; it is present in all expressive acts that break the silence of the mute world. Thus, beneath spoken language is a ‘primordial experience anterior to all traditions’ (PP 179) which speech seeks to express. One cannot, however, infer from this reference to primordial experience that all linguistic signs are conventional. Language is not purely a determined system given only to itself; it seeks to say something about the world and our experience of it. Such articulation is possible because underlying the conceptual meaning of words is a deeper ‘emotional essence’ (PP 187), which is not completely arbitrary but is essential to the very expressivity of the given language. If we could get beneath the alterations in each language due to external influences from other languages, from phonetics, from the rationalizations of grammarians and lexicographers, we would find in the various languages, Merleau-Ponty famously says, ‘several ways for the human body to sing the world’s praises’ (PP 187). This is not meant to indicate that beneath conceptual language is some sort of immutable human nature that seeks expression in one form or another, for the biological, material world leaves open many possibilities: ‘It is impossible to superimpose on man a lower layer of behavior which one chooses to call ‘‘natural,’’ followed by a manufactured cultural or spiritual world’ (PP 189). That is, if it were possible to reduce any given language to its

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‘original form,’ we would find that this form is ‘not entirely arbitrary’ (PP 187). But this does not imply that there is some level at which one language could be fully translated into another; incommensurability of languages cannot be overcome by appealing to some deeper structure such as human nature or a common material basis for all human behavior. Concordances might be found; deep similarities might even be uncovered. But incommensurability will persist in the end. Behavior is bodily conditioned but not fully determined by embodiment. Rather than indicate a deeper structure common to all humans, the accretions of language indicate that language is an ‘institution’ (PP 184 and 189) not fully reducible to embodiment and the carnal context. This deeper gestural sense is described by Merleau-Ponty by taking as an example the word ‘sleet,’ which is neither the marks written on a page nor the sounds made when it is pronounced. The word cannot be reduced to one of its empirical manifestations, but it is rather a generality, something like a ‘unified idea’ (PP 402) of these empirical manifestations. This is not to imply that the word is a representation or a pure object for consciousness as traditionally understood. Rather, the generality of the word ‘is not that of an idea [in the intellectualist sense], but that of a behavioral style ‘‘understood’’ by my body’ (PP 403). As such a style, the meaning of the word is not constituted by consciousness but was learned as one learns to use a ‘tool’ (PP 403) by seeing it used in the context of a certain situation. Learning the word is akin to mimicking a gesture, but only insofar as it is expressive of human experience of the world involved in the use of the word. The meaning of the word ‘sleet’ is ‘first and foremost the aspect taken on by the object in human experience, for example my wonder in the face of these hard, then friable, then melting pellets falling ready-made from the sky’ (PP 403). The gestural sense is, thus, the initial meeting of the human and non-human, one might say the Fundierung of the linguistic meaning of the word ‘sleet.’ In the terms of the Structure of Behavior, it is the meeting of ‘consciousness and nature’ (SB 3). It is this origin of language that Merleau-Ponty seeks in the gestural theory of linguistic meaning, and seeking this origin is inspired by Husserlian analyses, particularly his later work. But the fruitfulness of the gestural theory of meaning goes beyond accounting for forgotten aspects of language – its origin – for when generalized to include speech and thought, the gestural theory of meaning provides a rival theory of language to those proposed by intellectualist accounts of language, and this is its function in the text of the Phenomenology of Perception. The full-blown theory of language that Merleau-Ponty develops in the Phenomenology of Perception overcomes a major difficulty in such accounts, succeeding where they fail, namely by providing a philosophic account of novel expression and communication.

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The first step in providing an account of novel expression and communication is to distinguish between what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘authentic speech’ or ‘transcendental speech’ (PP 390) – first-order speech – which establishes or constitutes new meanings for the first time, and secondorder speech, which is not constituting but constituted speech. Authentic speech is an originating activity of creating linguistic meanings from already available meanings. As the surrounding perceptual world is the common background from which the meanings of gestures stand out, the surrounding cultural world is the background from which authentic speech derives its meaning. Language is an institution with a store of available meanings that are put to the service of every authentic expressive intention, which succeeds ‘by bending the resources of constituted language to some fresh usage’ (PP 389). Language, then, is a dialectic between the acquired meanings and the movement of authentic speech that exploits the possibilities they provide for expressing a novel intention: [Authentic] speech is, therefore, that paradoxical operation through which, by using words of a given sense, and already available meanings, we try to follow up an intention which necessarily outstrips, modifies, and itself, in the last analysis, stabilizes the meanings of the words that translate it. (PP 389) Constituting language takes up and utilizes the possibilities of expressivity that remain in constituted language by ‘bending’ or ‘deflecting’ established meanings, and it is in such use and re-use of constituted language that constituting language contributes to the stabilization of those very linguistic meanings. Words with univocal meanings seem to be free from this dialectic, but this is so only because we neglect to notice the constitutional process by which they came to take on a univocal significance. Words which one might consider univocal were at one time ‘like a landscape new to us, while we were engaged in ‘‘acquiring’’ them, and while they still fulfilled the primordial function of expression’ (PP 389). In the initial stages, such words were filled with a richness of possible expressivity, a plethora of possible meanings, which through subsequent dialectical determination came to be stabilized by limiting expressive possibility. Thus stabilized, the words become abiding acquisitions. This account of authentic speech is similar to Merleau-Ponty’s more developed account in the middle period of his career, which I detail below in the following three chapters. But here we can indicate a crucial difference in the two accounts. Because of Merleau-Ponty’s gestural account of language, authentic speech depends on a pre-linguistic gestural strata; that is, the meaning that is developed in all speech, including authentic speech, is primarily a bodily meaning. In the middle period, the meaning that is developed in

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authentic speech is primarily historical and cultural. In the Phenomenology of Perception, cultural conditioning of language operates in the analyses, but it is not entirely clear whether the gestural account of meaning gives Merleau-Ponty the requisite resources to justify the use of cultural conditioning on language at this early stage. More needs to be said; indeed, more will be said in his writings on history and language in the 1950s. In any case, the speaking intention that puts the store of acquired meanings to use in authentic speech is thought seeking expression. Thus, not only is there a dialectic in language itself between constituted and constituting language, there is also a dialectic between language and the thought that is seeking to express itself. It is a dialectic that directly involves speech in thought, and which carries with it an implicit critique of intellectualist accounts of the relation of thought to speech. When it comes to authentic expression, the intellectualist would have it that language is little more than an external accompaniment to thought, which is already complete and accomplished in and of itself. Thought, on this account, reaches out to language only to make itself known to others, to communicate to others. But there is no explaining why thought – its communicating function notwithstanding – naturally seeks to express itself in language, why it tends towards language as its completion. Whether the thought expressed is presented to another in an act of communication or whether it is thought silently expressing itself in order to be at all, thought is not prior to expression. ‘Thought and expression,’ Merleau-Ponty says, ‘are simultaneously constituted’ (PP 183). Thought and language are inextricably interwoven, each implied in the activity of the other. The mutual involvement of thought and language in Merleau-Ponty’s account of authentic expression includes an implicit critique of intellectualist accounts of language, which are incomplete because they preclude novel expression and communication.5 The difficulties inherent in the intellectualist account of thought and language also emerge in the phenomenon of communication. First, there is no explaining why thought seeks to communicate at all. Even more problematic, however, is the possibility of communicating new thoughts to another, in the activity of teaching. How can one communicate novel thoughts to another? If the thoughts expressed were already constituted, then my expression would only serve as some sort of indicator for thoughts that already exist fully constituted apart from the expression. The other would be forced to infer from the language that I employ the thoughts I wish to communicate. But if the thoughts I wish to express are new, they are not part of the cultural store expressed by language. In fact, by communicating them to another, the first steps are being taken to inaugurate them into language. If the thoughts were fully constituted independently of language as the intellectualist has it, then the words used to

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communicate thoughts would not really communicate my thoughts but would be merely the occasion of the other ‘reading my mind,’ as if that were at all possible. Language, on this account, really has no communicative function. In sum, the result of the intellectualist account is that there is no genuine communication taking place, and the other could not learn anything from me. But this view of language is repudiated by the simple fact that we do learn from others and listen to them as though they have something new to tell us, which in fact they do. The fact of actual communication and, more specifically, learning indicates that language is not separate from thought but that language accomplishes thought. The gestural theory of meaning seeks to account for these shortcomings in the intellectualist account of language by refusing to separate meaning from expression and by making the other accessible in a common world of gestural significance. In fact, it is the dialectic internal to language itself that the intellectualist accounts of language take for granted when they seek to separate thought from its expression. This should not be surprising, for as an institution, the linguistic world is unsurprising and ordinary: ‘The linguistic and intersubjective world no longer surprises us, we no longer distinguish it from the world itself’ (PP 184). As a result of the ordinary nature of constituted language, the constituting activity is passed over in intellectualist accounts. While it is understandable that the functions of authentic language go unnoticed, an important aspect of language is missed if this activity is left out of account. Accomplished or established language covers over or forgets ‘the contingent element in expression and communication’ (PP 184) that is present in authentic expression. As a result of this forgetfulness of the contingent, the meaning of a sentence for the intellectualist appears ‘intelligible throughout, detachable from the sentence and finitely self-subsistent in an intelligible world, because we presuppose as given all those exchanges, owed to the history of the language, which contribute to determining its sense’ (PP 188). The error of the intellectualist account is that it takes language as it is already constituted, ignoring its constitutional history. By failing to inquire into authentic language, it distorts the phenomenon of expression, thereby making novel expression and communication impossible. But worst of all, it misunderstands the ideal meanings of language because linguistic meanings appear to be ‘detachable,’ as in the above quotation, from all those aspects of communication that threaten to disrupt the purity of ideal meanings. That is, language appears as a system of stable signs that translates a thought already pure and clear in itself. This view of language reaches its ultimate formulation in the attempt to establish an ideal language. But the intellectualist approach is wrongheaded, for:

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There are no conventional signs standing as the simple notation of a thought pure and clear in itself, there are only words into which the history of a whole language is compressed, and which effect communication with no absolute guarantee, dogged as they are by incredible linguistic hazards. (PP 188) Merleau-Ponty’s critique of intellectualist accounts of language amounts to the assertion that language is conditioned not only by embodiment but also by the vagaries of historical, cultural, and social circumstances from which linguistic meaning can never be fully ‘detached.’ The intellectualist dream of a pure language replete with univocal, ideal meanings ignores embodiment, history, culture, and society in which the speaking subject is forever embedded. The intellectualist account covers over the contingent aspects of ideal meanings, and it is only by doing so that ideal meanings take on the necessity they seem to possess. Ultimately, Merleau-Ponty’s quarrel with the intellectualist account of language and its relation to thought is over ideal meanings in language. While linguistic meanings might be beholden to and, hence, not fully detachable from the contingent conditions of their origin, the meanings, nonetheless, ‘can be indefinitely reiterated’ (PP 190). Merleau-Ponty agrees with the intellectualist on this point but objects to the further inference made from this, namely, that because linguistic meanings can be indefinitely reiterated, they are detachable from the material conditions of their articulation. What Merleau-Ponty tries to show by returning to the origin of language and the dialectic of thought and language is that linguistic meanings cannot be fully detached from the material conditions of their articulation. That is, linguistic meanings certainly are ideal, and, thus, transcend the empirical world, but the crux of the problem for Merleau-Ponty is to understand the nature of this transcendence: ‘What remains true is that in speech . . . thought seems able to detach itself from its material instruments and acquire an eternal value’ (PP 391). We need to explain this seeming detachability, which is necessary for any linguistic meaning to function, for even the meanings of gestures are repeatable. The intellectualist seeks to establish a total transcendence of the empirical with ideal meanings. This is evident in the intellectualist attempt – when carried to its logical extreme – to ensconce them in a Platonic heaven of univocal and universal meanings. Merleau-Ponty’s first salvo against this view, as we have already seen, involves arguing that the origin of linguistic meaning in embodiment and history is a persistent acquisition of that meaning. The task at hand is to understand precisely the transcendence of ideal meanings without committing the intellectualist error of making ideal meanings impervious to the vagaries of the empirical world. The issues involved here, however, go beyond linguistic theories and involve

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more far-reaching philosophic problems, namely, truth. For the teleology of speech ‘implants the idea of truth in us as the presumptive limit of its effort; [in doing so] it loses itself as contingent fact, and takes to resting upon itself’ (PP 190). There is no denying that speech seems to free itself from the contingent circumstances of its expression, for this is a requirement for truth. In order for there to be true speech, it must not be dominated by its material means of expression. The precise nature of ideal meanings is the crux of Merleau-Ponty’s quarrel with intellectualism, but his objection goes beyond ideal meanings in language to include the problem of ideal objects more generally. In his account of ideal objects in general, the same difficulties emerge. The idea is a cultural object, and there are many of them such as ‘the church, the street, the pencil or the Ninth Symphony’ (PP 390). Ideas are not fully separable from the empirical world, for if all the copies of the Ninth Symphony and all the musical instruments were reduced to ashes, the Symphony would disappear after the passing of those who had last memorized it. It would no longer exist empirically or ideally. One might object to this by trying to establish a distinction between cultural ideas and other ‘pure’ ideas, which resist the influence of the empirical world because of their status, ideas such as the triangle or the quadratic equation, in short, mathematicals. But here again, Merleau-Ponty maintains that if ‘the cultural instruments [of such ‘‘pure’’ ideal objects] which bear them on, were to be destroyed, fresh acts of creative expression would be needed to revive them in the world’ (PP 390). There is no guarantee of the eternal persistence of even our most cherished ideas. All are susceptible to history and happenstance. This does not imply that ideas are fully beholden to the empirical world, for, as ideas, they transcend the empirical. The ‘time of ideas is not to be confused with that in which books appear and disappear’ (PP 390). Ideas take on an existence that transcends the empirical world, but they are never fully free from its influence and action, which can affect the means as well as the possibilities of expression: ‘The existence of the idea must not be confused with the empirical existence of the means of expression, for ideas endure or fall into oblivion, and the intelligible sky subtly changes color’ (PP 390). The task for an account of ideal objects more generally considered, as it has already been articulated for ideal meanings in language, is to understand the act of transcendence whereby speech becomes truth or the Ninth Symphony becomes an abiding validity, a ‘truth’ which, in order to express its truthfulness, only needs to be played. That is, the task is to understand the nature of ideal objects such that they can transcend the empirical but not detach themselves from it completely; it is to understand the transcendence found in this paradoxical formulation: ‘That which is called an idea is necessarily linked to an act of expression, and it owes to it its appearance of autonomy’ (PP 390).

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In summary, we have seen that the gestural theory of language, when generalized, is meant to counter intellectualist accounts of language that fail to account for novel expression and communication. Moreover, they misunderstand the nature of ideal objects. Merleau-Ponty’s gestural account of meaning succeeds in overcoming problems inherent in intellectualist accounts of language, but it is not without its own shortcomings.

IV. Problems in the Early Account of Ideal Objects Whatever expressed and unexpressed intentions are operative in the ‘Cogito’ chapter of the Phenomenology of Perception, it is in some sense a meditation on the problem of ideal objects. Take, for example, its central topic, Descartes’ cogito. It is not entirely clear whether the cogito is the ‘thought which took shape three centuries ago in the mind of Descartes, or the meaning of the books he has left for us, or else an eternal truth which emerges from them’ (PP 369). While it is not entirely clear towards what our thought and speech strive when thinking or speaking of the cogito, one thing is certain: It is a ‘cultural being’ (PP 369). Merleau-Ponty begins by asking how we can relate ourselves to this cultural being and discover the validity it has for us. Of course, one begins by reading the Second Meditation; any truth or validity that I find in the phrase, ‘I think, therefore I am’ will require language. But it cannot be due to the action of language alone that I find the proposition true. Merleau-Ponty insists that beneath the spoken cogito is the tacit cogito: ‘Behind the spoken cogito, the one which is converted into discourse and into essential truth, there lies a tacit cogito, myself experienced by myself’ (PP 403). Just as the gestural meanings inherent in my commerce with the world gives to the spoken word its meaning, the meaning of the spoken cogito depends on a prior, mute contact with my own thought and life. The same goes for Descartes or anyone else who reads the Meditations and finds the cogito argument meaningful; without the tacit cogito, the spoken cogito has no basis in truth. The tacit cogito is the immediate experience of self by self that Descartes sought to express with the formulation ‘Cogito, ergo sum,’ and which underwrites the truth of that statement. Anterior to language, then, is this inarticulate consciousness ‘which conditions language’ (PP 404) and which lends to it the meaning and validity that it takes up and linguistically develops. The Fundierung account of language and ideal objects is implicit in the analysis here. As we have seen already in the gestural theory of language, Merleau-Ponty seeks the truth in the cogito argument in the primordial experience anterior to all traditions. Again, this emphasis on pre-predicative experience results from the anti-intellectualist orientation of the analyses. The meaning and truth of

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the cogito does not reside in the cogito as eternal idea; whatever validity it may possess must be phenomenologically recoverable in my own experience. It is not its status as an idea that validates my experience of the cogito; rather, the only evidence, the only witness to the truth of the cogito must come from my experience of the tacit cogito. It is true that while reading the Meditations, the operation of language disappears and pure thought seems to shine through, as if language were a diaphanous medium through which the light of pure reason shines. The intellectualist might go so far as to say that thought is contained in language only insofar as the latter is the clothing of thought, with the implied assumption that the same pure thought could wear many costumes. In effect, Merleau-Ponty is arguing that while it is possible that without the exact words of Descartes, I might have discovered, on my own, the tacit cogito, it could not have been done without some language or other. More importantly, if this discovery is to make it into the firmament of ideas, some language will be necessary for its establishment as an abiding ‘cultural being.’ Thus, language as a means of communication is an ever-present and necessary aspect of ideal objects insofar as it is necessary in order to establish and maintain their transtemporal existence. Furthermore, what is implied in this analysis is that ideal objects are constantly menaced by the necessarily contingent aspect of their communication and transmission. Ideas can be lost, and such losses can be due to the disappearance of the empirical means of transmission. But ideas can also be lost if they no longer exercise their power of elucidating our experience, if they cease to be verified in our experience. Truth needs a constant witness: ‘ ‘‘being-in-truth’’ is indistinguishable from being-in-the-world’ (PP 395), Merleau-Ponty says. The analysis of the cogito suggests that the truth of ‘Cogito, ergo sum’ is ‘eternal’ as long as men find it expressive of the truth, which, ultimately, implies that ideas are not eternal as the intellectualist would have it: forever abiding and binding with a univocal meaning. This, in turn, raises the problem of the temporal transcendence of ideal objects, for in order to be ideal objects, they must be valid for more than one time and one place. In phenomenological terms, the temporal transcendence of ideas is pursued under the guise of the historical constitution of ideal objects. MerleauPonty is far from offering a full account of such constitution. Indeed, the historical constitution of ideal objects is here – in this late chapter of the Phenomenology of Perception – emerging as a problem. Suggesting that ideas are constituted and maintained in language implies that ideas are never fully constituted at any given time or all at once; in any case, they are not given without reference to a factual history or a natural language. The full or complete ideal object must be seen as a presumptive limit of constituting activity. Nonetheless, the Phenomenology of Perception lacks an account of this temporal transcendence, presumptive limit, and

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constituting activity. More central to Merleau-Ponty’s early thought on the constitution of ideal objects – and the onus of his account in the Phenomenology of Perception – is the fact that the constituted ideal object is never fully free from the constituting activity. The relationship of constituted/ constituting is similar to the founded/founding relationship of Fundierung insofar as it is intended as a non-reductive relationship. Ultimately, it is hinted here that the problem of the historical constitution of ideal objects connects with the problem of seeking the origin of ideal objects in the Fundierung of bodily expressivity, but that is merely suggested in the analyses of the cogito. For the problem of the historical constitution of ideal objects has yet to become a full-fledged problem for Merleau-Ponty. Returning to what is explicit in the analysis of the cogito, we see in the pre-predicative experience of the tacit cogito that linguistic meaning is related to a lower order beneath it and that language and knowledge are ‘founded on this primary view’ (PP 404), but again it is a founding/ founded dialectic in which neither term can be fully reduced to the other. The analysis of the cogito is significant, however, for what begins to emerge here is that the attempt to relate linguistic meaning to some deeper bodily significance is not adequate to provide a full account of ideal objects. While the experience of the pre-reflective cogito is necessary to give meaning to the expression, ‘Cogito, ergo sum,’ it is not sufficient because, as MerleauPonty notes, the words ‘cogito’ and ‘sum’ have ‘an empirical and statistical meaning . . . [which indicates] that they are not directed specifically to my own experience’ (PP 402). This means that the generality of language is operative in my thought, but it cannot be accounted for solely on the basis of my experience of the tacit cogito.6 The experiences of others, Descartes primary among them, are also necessary to give and maintain the meaning of words: ‘Descartes, and a fortiori his reader, begin their meditation in what is already a universe of discourse’ (PP 401). If this is true, then some account of the establishment and maintenance of this universe of discourse is necessary. In other words, for me to find ‘Cogito, ergo sum’ expressive of my experience, the language that sustains the general significance of those words already must be operative in that very experience. To say that the expressivity of language is the result of language as an ‘institution,’ or to say that it is due to the ‘sedimented’ meanings that language is expressive, does not provide a solution. Just the opposite is the case – it announces the problem. In brief, the problem is that the institutionality of language needs to be worked into the account of the origin of ideal objects. But in order to do so, the simple founding/founded relationship will prove to be inadequate. For while it is true that without the pre-predicative experience of my tacit cogito, the spoken cogito would remain meaningless, it is equally true that without cultural accretions of language, the experience itself would not be

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linguistically meaningful, for ‘the tacit cogito is a cogito only when it has found expression for itself’ (PP 404). Unexpressed experiences, whether they never rise to the level of expression, or whether they pass into oblivion, remain meaningless in a linguistic sense. In other words, the problem is this: The fact that language ‘promotes its own oblivion’ (PP 401) cannot be an excuse to leave it out of account. Merleau-Ponty acknowledges that language and experience are dialectically related, but in order to articulate fully what this entails, a more robust account of language is needed. The primary goal of Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of language is to ‘go back to that origin . . . beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence . . . [to] describe the action which breaks this silence’ (PP 184). If this is so, then for the creation and continuance of ideal meanings, we must look beyond the founding/founded relationship, understood exclusively in terms of bodily conditioning. The shortcomings of Merleau-Ponty’s early account of ideal objects, as we see them in the analysis of the cogito, point to other related problems in Merleau-Ponty’s early account of language. The first place that we find other problems in Merleau-Ponty’s early account of ideal objects is in his gestural account of language. The gesture is a fruitful locus to begin an analysis of language that seeks to unite the word with its meaning as a means of overthrowing the intellectualist accounts of language and providing a theory of communication. But when the gestural theory of language is generalized to include speech and thought, problems begin to emerge. That is, the gestural theory of language is a fruitful way to highlight the shortcomings of intellectualist theories of language, but it is less successful as a complete theory of language on its own. The first difficulty in Merleau-Ponty’s account is securing the privileged status that speech requires. Speech, on this account, must be distinguished from the gesture as well as other forms of authentic expression, but this goes against Merleau-Ponty’s express intentions. For he says that ‘there is no fundamental difference between the various modes of expression, and no privileged position can be accorded to any of them on the alleged ground that it expresses truth in itself’ (PP 391). Speech is an example of authentic expression, an activity that creates objectivities, but speech cannot be the primary objectifying activity. In other words, it cannot be the primordial creator of meanings. For prior to speech is the body as ‘expressive space,’ the body as the initial site of objectivity. Merleau-Ponty insists that speech is just one form of behavior of that relatively anonymous signifying function that ‘shall be the same at all levels’ (PP 196), a function that includes perception, emotion, painting, and speech, in short, all activities that yield ‘gestural’ or ‘existential’ significance. Thus, if we follow Merleau-Ponty’s express intentions, speech should be offered no special

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position, but the requirements of spoken language seem to demand that it be different, at least insofar as ideal meanings in language are different in kind from gestural significance and artistic expression. Merleau-Ponty is aware of this difference. First, speech is different even from gesture. The gesture is an instance of that ‘irrational power which creates meanings and conveys them’ (PP 189) and which signifies the body as expressive space. As we have seen, beneath the conceptual meaning of words is a gestural meaning, which is immanent in speech. But there is a tension between speech as just another instance of the ‘open and indefinite power of giving significance’ (PP 194) and speech as that which ‘implants the idea of truth in us as the presumptive limit of its effort’ (PP 190). The sticking point is that speech takes up and surpasses the significance inherent in gesture. The teleology of linguistic meaning, while it might originate in the gesture, is to be true speech. Thus, speech differs from gesture and other forms of expression insofar as Merleau-Ponty concedes to it a truth function as its goal. Second, speech, as opposed to other forms of authentic expression, is associated with the eternal as well as the true: ‘What remains true is that in speech, to a greater extent than in music or painting, thought seems able to detach itself from its material instruments and acquire an eternal value’ (PP 391). It is true that every form of authentic expression is creative and that ‘what is expressed is always inseparable from it’ (PP 391). So we must insist that speech is, in this respect, no different from other forms of expression, yet Merleau-Ponty admits that expression, in the case of speech, ‘can be indefinitely reiterated, that it is possible to speak about speech whereas it is impossible to paint about painting’ (PP 190). Thus there is a privileged position accorded to speech. The best way to understand this tension is that it is a product of the argument against intellectualism that runs throughout the Phenomenology of Perception. We must begin by not conceding to speech any privileged position insofar as ideal meanings never fully escape the contingency of their expression, but once we have gotten beyond the beginning – and no longer suffer from the intellectualist illusion that any ideal meaning is fully separable from its expression – then some sort of distinguishing factor must emerge for linguistic meaning to take on its truth function and to be associated with the eternal and indefinitely reiteratible. Ultimately, speech must be distinguished from other forms of bodily expression – whether understood as gesture or aesthetic forms of authentic expression – but given what Merleau-Ponty says in the Phenomenology of Perception, this distinction cannot be clearly made. The second and more decisive difficulty in Merleau-Ponty’s gestural account of language begins to emerge when we look at the creative power of expression. It should be noted that his analysis of the logic of invention

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and the dialectic of thought and language points to the same problem of ideal objects from two different directions, namely the dependence of ideal objects on material conditions. The dialectic of thought and language points to the problem of communication of novel meaning given the material conditions of linguistic expression. Likewise, novel thought in geometry is held to depend on contributions made by perceptual activity. Both of these analyses, as we have seen, point to the need for a reflective account of the history of conscious activity, akin to discovery of the logos of the aesthetic world. We might call this an ‘intrasubjective history,’ but another type of history is implicit in but not accounted for by the analyses. The history of the constitution of ideal objects, independent of any particular experience of them, has emerged as a problem. That is, the relationship between the history of an ideal object and what we might call ‘intersubjective history’ must be taken into account; this is the history of the constitution of ideal objects. In the Phenomenology of Perception, these two histories are often identified with the task of providing an account of the origin of ideal objects. The ambiguity of Husserl’s lifeworld as a perceptual world and as a cultural world, detailed above in Chapter 1, returns here. This ambiguity runs throughout Merleau-Ponty’s writings on the problem of ideal objects; it is, however, just beginning to emerge in this late chapter of the Phenomenology of Perception. Furthermore, it is unclear whether pursuing the logos of the aesthetic world exclusively in terms of embodiment can succeed in accounting for the intersubjective as well as the intrasubjective history of ideal objects. That is, pursuing the origin of ideal objects in terms of embodied consciousness opens out on to intersubjective history – the historicity of thought: To give expression is not to substitute, for new thought, a system of stable signs to which unchangeable thoughts are linked, it is to ensure, by the use of words already used, that the new intention carries on the heritage of the past, it is at a stroke to incorporate the past into the present, and weld that present to a future, to open a whole temporal cycle in which the ‘acquired’ thought will remain present as a dimension, without our needing henceforth to summon up or reproduce it. What is known as the non-temporal in thought is what, having thus carried forward the past and committed the future, is presumptively of all time and is therefore anything but transcendent in relation to time. The non-temporal is the acquired. (PP 392) The whole issue of language as an institution, talk of cultural ‘acquisitions’ and sedimented history, point beyond the origin of ideal objects in terms of Fundierung interpreted exclusively in terms of bodily conditioning and point to intersubjective, historical conditioning of ideal objects as well.

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Consciousness is ‘involved through its body in a space, through its language in a history and through its prejudices in a concrete form of thought’ (PP 399). Consciousness is constantly surrounded by acquisitions; it is always already multiply involved. Due to these multiple involvements, philosophic activity must not only reveal the vertical history of egological consciousness and embodiment, but it must also be broadened by analyses that reveal the intersubjective horizontal history of ideal objects. Fundierung interpreted in terms of bodily conditioning is inadequate to account for the institutionality of language, the sedimented history of linguistic meanings and, in general, ideal objects understood as cultural beings. The vertical movement of consciousness is traversed, as it were, by the horizontal movement of the historicity of thought. Finally, there emerges from the analyses in Phenomenology of Perception a hierarchy of ideal objects that are unaccounted for in these analyses. That is, the realm of the ideal includes: (i) mathematical and geometric objects, (ii) cultural objects such as the pencil, the Ninth Symphony, and the Cogito, as well as (iii) the ideal meanings of language. Now, all these have a common structure: they are unities of significance that can be re-iterated. But it seems that they are different insofar as they are not all similarly related to a deeper, embodied meaning. That is, taking gesture as a paradigmatic does not seem to account fully for the differences among the various types of ideal objects. Merleau-Ponty’s examples of this are tendentious. Concrete words such as ‘sleet’ might ultimately be expressive of corporeal experience, but what about abstract words? Can their origin be traced to an ‘emotional essence’? Is ‘sing[ing] the world’s praises’ (PP 187) reducible to a corporeal song? Again, while the geometricizing subject must be embodied in order to see the logical connections in the triangle, what about Non-Euclidian geometries? More to the point, though, is prepredicative experience of the tacit cogito really bodily? The point is this: Ideal objects are not homogeneous, although Merleau-Ponty’s analyses treat them that way. There is a hierarchy of ideal objects suggested, some of which are more clearly conditioned by embodiment, while others are more clearly conditioned by historicity, and yet others, such as mathematical objects, that are traditionally seen as ‘pure,’ that is, escaping, to some degree, bodily and historical conditions of thought. This suggests that ideal objects are multiply conditioned, not just by embodiment. In summary, the decisive difficulty in Merleau-Ponty’s account of ideal objects in the Phenomenology of Perception stems from the necessity of following the constitution of ideal objects back to their historical, cultural, and contextual origins. But this does not mean that a set of gestures or emotional sense somehow underlies ideal objects in general. Rather, it appears that the gestural theory of meaning is best understood as a model to understand ideal objects. This model, based on the concept of Fundierung,

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does not succumb to the shortcomings of intellectualist accounts, especially when it comes to language, but it is a model that ultimately will need to be abandoned as a result of Merleau-Ponty’s deepening interest in language, history, and intersubjectivity in the middle period.

V. Conclusion Merleau-Ponty’s initial interest, as he articulates it in the Structure of Behavior, is oriented towards overcoming traditional problems involved in the relationship of ‘consciousness and nature’ (SB 3). While the problem of ideal objects is not an explicit theme of that work, it is implied in the motivating problematic. The problem of ideal objects emerges early in the Phenomenology of Perception as part of the task of providing a logos of the aesthetic world, specifically in his articulation of the relationship of sensibility and intelligence in terms of a non-reductive founded/founding relationship exemplified in the phenomenological concept of Fundierung. His account of ideal objects is further developed in the gestural account of language, which, while it avoids the shortcomings of intellectualist and empiricist views of language, has shown itself to be hobbled with its own difficulties, namely accounting for the intersubjective, historical constitution of ideal objects. Merleau-Ponty is not unaware of these shortcomings, for he comments shortly after its publication in ‘The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophic Consequences’ that the Phenomenology of Perception is ‘only a preliminary study, since it hardly speaks of culture or history’ (Primacy 25). What was achieved in the Phenomenology of Perception was an opening of a more general problem, which Merleau-Ponty will take up in the middle-period researches into language, history, and intersubjectivity. Beginning with perception as a privileged realm, the Phenomenology of Perception ‘attempts to define a method for getting closer to present and living reality, and which must then be applied to the relation of man to man in language, in knowledge, in society and religion’ (Primacy 25). Perception is primary because ‘it reveals to us the permanent data of the problem which culture attempts to resolve’ (Primacy 25). The analyses begun in the Phenomenology of Perception need to be extended, but as we shall see, when Merleau-Ponty seeks to complete the account begun in this seminal work by turning his attention towards history, the gestural account of meaning will appear deeply flawed. As a result, the constitution of ideal objects will need to be re-conceived. We will see that expression remains central to this re-conception, but expression will be displaced from embodiment and come to include the diacritical development of language. The problem of ideal objects will be taken up in the middle period of Merleau-Ponty’s career under the themes of history, expression, and truth.

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From Perception to Language: Relocating the Primordial I. Introduction From a purely phenomenological standpoint, the theoretical value of a theory of perception as articulated in the Phenomenology of Perception is, to a large degree, to provide a transcendental aesthetic. Such a transcendental aesthetic is necessary for a critique of reason that includes a foundational analysis of ideal objects. Merleau-Ponty’s thought in the middle period continues to be motivated largely by questions of rationality and ideal objects. A phenomenological account of rationality that is limited to analyses of perception, however, has thus far shown itself to be inadequate to successfully treat the mutual implication of expression, meaning, and thought, which require intricate and comprehensive treatment, escaping the confines of the straightforward Fundierung account found in the Phenomenology of Perception. The gestural account of language, in particular, has shown that pursuing the constitution of ideal objects exclusively in terms of perception and embodiment fails to adequately describe all aspects of language. The institutionality of language, its nature as a cultural acquisition, and linguistic sedimentation all require analyses that go beyond egologically oriented reflection in order to include the intersubjective and historical contributions to the constitution of ideal objects. As a result, expression can no longer be accounted for exclusively in terms of intra-corporeality; the analysis must be extended to include the undeniable inter-corporeal aspects of expressive acts. It is by considering the phenomenological problem of expression in the middle period that the phenomenological concept of institution – Husserl’s Stiftung – along with the related issues of the historicity of thought and the historical constitution of language will come to be seen as crucial to a proper understanding of ideal objects. In brief, the concept of Stiftung re-orients the analysis of ideal objects. In the middle period, ideal analyses can no longer be framed in egological, Kantian terms – as seeking the logos of the aesthetic world – but they are framed in intersubjective terms: as Merleau-Ponty describes it, seeking the ‘ ‘‘Logos’’ of the cultural world’ (Signs 97).

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The bulk of Merleau-Ponty’s writings in the middle period can be divided into three main categories: writings on politics, on creative expression, which includes painting and language, and writings on the relationship between philosophy and the social sciences. Issues relating to ideal objects are manifest in all three categories of writing. The problem of ideal objects, however, is treated most directly in the second and third groups. It is also found in lesser degrees in his political writings. Moreover, these themes are not so neatly divided in Merleau-Ponty’s own thought, and so any single piece from this period will contain strands of more than one theme. The problem of ideal objects cannot be so cleanly isolated because it is one of the poles around which Merleau-Ponty’s rich thought constantly revolved, but for expository reasons, my approach will attempt to do just that. However, so that primary textual material does not become too unwieldy to manage in this study, I will limit the focus of my analysis to his works from the last two groups of writings and will only consider his writings on politics in passing as they might shed light on the analysis of ideal objects in the middle period.

II. The Broadening of ‘Perception’ and the Shift to Cultural Primordiality Soon after the publication of the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty characterized that work as ‘only a preliminary study, since it hardly speaks of culture or of history’ (Primacy 25). Specifically, it contributes to a new theory of perception, a necessary first step to overcoming the dualisms of modern philosophy. Its main achievement is that it ‘attempts to define a method for getting closer to present and living reality’ (Primacy 25). His work immediately after the Phenomenology of Perception articulates a broader understanding of ‘perception’ by applying the method developed in that work beyond the study of man’s relation to perceptible reality and man’s relation to others at the level of perceptual experience alone to other areas such as ‘the relation of man to man in language, in knowledge, in society and religion’ (Primacy 25). Perception remains primary, however, as the privileged locus to study ‘present and living reality’ (Primacy 25). This level of experience Merleau-Ponty calls here and elsewhere, the ‘primordial’ – ‘not to assert that everything else derives from it by transformations and evolution . . . but rather that it reveals to us the permanent data of the problem which culture attempts to resolve’ (Primacy 25). This brief resume´ of Merleau-Ponty’s early thought, which he himself presents at a crucial point in his philosophic development, indicates a fundamental alteration in his abiding philosophic interest. It indicates a continued

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interest in the ‘primordial,’ understood as that which is initial, selfevident, and taken for granted in all human knowing. Moreover, the task of philosophy is still seen as an interrogation of the primordial to bring its contributions to rational practices to reflective awareness in order to deliver a justificatory account of these practices. The primordial is that region where sens originates, where the world begins to take on a meaning for us. But, it is crucial to note that the characterization of the ‘primordial’ has been altered. The ‘primordial’ is no longer understood simply as mute, pre-conceptual, silent ‘nature’ operating at the level of perception, but rather now the ‘primordial’ designates our living participation in a concrete historical world by means of which we reach others and others reach us. This shift has not been unheralded, for there are moments in the Phenomenology of Perception in which the problem of cultural primordiality arises naturally in the analyses. These are little more than hints and indicators of a primordiality that cannot be understood purely in egological perceptual terms, and, indeed, full treatment of this sort of primordiality is put off until the middle period. For example, at the end of Part Two, in the chapter titled ‘Other Selves and the Human World,’ Merleau-Ponty mentions the problem of cultural primordiality, and takes up the problem of intersubjectivity. Like much of the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of intersubjectivity contributes to his attempt to overcome the strict ontological and epistemological division between subject and object instituted by Descartes and continued in ‘intellectualist’ and ‘empiricist’ modes of thought in modern philosophy. The categories of objective thought – being in-itself and being for-itself – are inadequate to account fully for intersubjectivity. According to MerleauPonty, the body, mine as well as that of others, is a ‘third genus of being’ (PP 350), neither pure subject nor a pure object. Since reflection on the body and perception reveals that I am not fully given to myself, the impossibility of the absolute givenness of the other should not be seen as an impediment to intersubjectivity. Rather, in the ‘neutral’ (PP 353) world of perception, both the other’s body and mine are ‘manifestations of behavior’ (PP 352); each revealing a certain hold on the world. To say that I have a perception on the world implies that the world is beyond my view of it, that there are other views on the world. My perspective and the other’s are not absolutely independent of each other, however, because I recognize the gaze of the other as an intentional act, and I can join in this act by looking at the same object. My gaze and the other’s spontaneously ‘slip into each other and are brought together finally in the thing’ (PP 353). Self and other are brought together in one single world ‘in which we all participate as anonymous subjects of perception’ (PP 353). The shared perceptual world is an achievement neither exclusively of the other nor

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exclusively of myself but is rather an ‘anonymous’ world in which all perceiving agents participate in mutual co-constitution. The analysis thus far, centered on perceptual activity, suffices to account for another living being ‘but not yet another man’ (PP 354). To account for another human, we must take account of the cultural world. The privileged site to begin such an analysis is by examining the ubiquitous cultural object – language – more specifically active language, that is, language in its function of constituting meaning for others in communication. It is in dialogue and communication that the other is finally presented as another rational agent rather than the other merely as participant in the inter-corporeal perceptual world. Not surprisingly, the analysis of rational intersubjectivity in dialogue parallels that of perceptual intersubjectivity: There is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground; my thought and his are interwoven into a single fabric, my words and those of my interlocutor are called forth by the state of discussion, and they are inserted into a shared operation of which neither of us is the creator . . . Our perspectives merge into each other, and we co-exist through a common world. (PP 354) Merleau-Ponty continues his description of the concrete experience of the other in dialogue in order to illuminate further an account of intersubjective experience which integrates persons into a shared cultural world that he calls the ‘intermonde.’1 The analysis in the Phenomenology of Perception is broken off, for it calls for descriptions which go beyond perception proper. Merleau-Ponty, however, pauses long enough to pose a fundamental problem for phenomenology, a problem he will take up again in the middle period with much more rigor. He asks: Co-existence [in a neutral world] must in all cases be experienced on both sides. If neither of us is a constituting consciousness at the moment when we are about to communicate and discover a common world, the question then is: Who communicates, and for whom does this world exist? (PP 357) If we are to take the analysis of perceptual co-existence as our clue to respond to the crucial questions of the above quotation – Who constitutes the intermonde? – then the who in question is not an ‘I’ but a ‘we.’ It is not an egological subjectivity but an intersubjectivity because it seems that the who in question cannot be identified, given a name, a date or a place but is rather an anonymous constitutive activity belonging properly to no one in particular, just as the shared perceptual world is an anonymous world

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belonging to nobody in particular but is co-constituted by all perceptual agents. It is an analogous anonymous we-subjectivity which answers the second half of the final question in the above quote: For whom does this world exist? The intermonde is co-constituted by and for the anonymous wesubjectivity. To anticipate the philosophical ramifications of the question by who and for whom is the intermonde constituted, it must be noted that in terms of constitutive phenomenological analysis, Merleau-Ponty’s interest in the intermonde is to expose and describe the structures of the anonymous constitutive activity of the intermonde, which includes the relation of individual intentions to the always already existing shared cultural world. In terms of rationality, the question at issue is: Given the mutual coconstitution of the intermonde, how does individual intentionality relate to the ‘intentionality’ of the anonymous we-subjectivity? Or, in other words, what is the relation of private thought to public structures and vice versa? To return to the point at issue, we can see in these instances in the Phenomenology of Perception that the analysis of egological perception points beyond itself to an intersubjective primordiality which is in need of phenomenological explication. The problem of the individual’s participation in the intermonde reveals cultural primordiality and its role in rationality as the central philosophic problem in need of phenomenological explication. It is just this sort of cultural primordiality that is at issue when Merleau-Ponty takes up the problem of communication in the middle period. In other words, the phenomenological genesis of sense henceforth is to be sought in culture and history. It must be noted that such a move to a more primary primordiality is not an abandonment of results obtained through a phenomenological analysis of perception but a radicalizing of the phenomenological problematic which alters yet preserves the early project of perception. Moreover, given Merleau-Ponty’s early interest in perception, if one were to search the middle-period writings for further texts on perception, one might be surprised to find neither an article nor a book dedicated to perception. In fact, perception is rarely mentioned in the middle-period writings except to note the limitations inherent in an exclusively perceptual account of rationality. For instance, in the 1952 letter to Gueroult supporting his nomination to the College de France, Merleau-Ponty notes: The study of perception could only teach us a ‘bad ambiguity,’ a mixture of finitude and universality, of interiority and exteriority. But there is a ‘good ambiguity’ in the phenomena of expression, a spontaneity which accomplishes what appeared to be impossible when we observed only the separate elements, a spontaneity which gathers together the plurality of monads, the past and the present, nature and culture into a single whole. (Primacy 11)

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In the middle period, Merleau-Ponty seeks to develop and complete his analyses of perception with an account of linguistic expression and a description of the anonymous constituting activity of the intermonde. His interest during this time remains the same as in the Phenomenology of Perception – interrogation of the primordial – but the site of interrogation has changed. As a result of perceptual analyses, the structures of intersubjective constitution of the intermonde have shown themselves to be the guiding problem for a phenomenological account of rationality and ideal objects.

III. The Problem of Rationality in the Middle Period In phenomenological terms, shifting the site of interrogation to the constitution of the intermonde and to intersubjective primordiality has important ramifications for thought and rationality. Merleau-Ponty’s account of thought in the middle period maintains his earlier thesis that thought and language are in a dialectical relationship with each other; the two activities cannot be fully separated. Thought and language are mutually implicated. In the Phenomenology of Perception, this dialectical relationship is supported by a deeper constituting activity of bodily intentionality, which, ultimately, signifies that the meaning of language is constituted in the activity of Fundierung. This means that rationality is founded in a genesis of sense that is essentially an achievement of the body. Such a move is not meant to be reductive, however, for the bodily meaning is expanded and elaborated by higher levels of conscious activity. At the end of the previous chapter, I indicated ways in which MerleauPonty’s early thought is inadequate to account for the historical constitution of language and its intersubjective character. Merleau-Ponty’s thought on language in the middle period seeks, in part, to redress these inadequacies. The dialectic of thought and language in the middle period is no longer founded on individual perceptual experience, but rather it is communalized and historicized in a particular way. Thought is no longer the thought of an isolated cogito, which is ultimately supported by a tacit cogito; rather, thought is achieved outside of singular egological consciousness. Such a move outside of the cogito might be understood in Hegelian terms of Geist or some other metaphysical category. Merleau-Ponty resists this move. For he insists that we must not understand non-egological thought to indicate that the achievements of thought are susceptible to a reduction of history to consciousness or the surpassing of history in a Hegelian-like movement of Geist. Such an account, on Merleau-Ponty’s terms, denotes an external constraint on thought because the rationality of any moment of thought

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can be justified only in light of the telos of the entire movement, which itself is outside the movement. In The Visible and the Invisible, MerleauPonty characterizes this type of thinking as ‘high-altitude thought.’ As a result, any singular moment of thought or cycles of development of thought cannot be justified on their own terms but can only find justification in an external telos. In other words, the individual moments cannot be justified internally and on their own merit and self-conception. If Merleau-Ponty resists a Hegelian account of rationality or its Marxistinspired brethren current at the time, he also resists the account of rationality presented by the human sciences, which see thought as causally determined by external factors, extending, in effect, naturalism to the human sciences. Husserl’s arguments against psychologism and historicism remain valid for Merleau-Ponty; however, the achievements of thought are not pure accident and chance. Thought must be constrained within certain limits. For without some sort of constraints, rationality would crumble. The problem of rationality emerges in the middle period of Merleau-Ponty’s career in his attempt to articulate the constraints of rational activity while avoiding both the externality of Hegelian-like teleological necessity on the development of thought and the externality of causal constraints characteristic of the naturalistic human sciences. He is seeking a via media between Hegel and historicism. In this endeavor, his thought re-joins the thought of Husserl. His response to the problem of the constitution of the intermonde reveals an important shift in his thought. For if it is no longer possible to found all rational practices in egological perceptual experience, then the sciences, most notably the human sciences, require another basis to assert rational legitimacy. And much of Merleau-Ponty’s thought on rationality and ideal objects in the middle period applies most directly to the human sciences, and only by extension to the natural sciences, but his thoughts on the matter suggest that this very division of the sciences might need to be reconceived as a result of his analyses. In seeking to clarify the relationship between phenomenology and the sciences of man, Merleau-Ponty returns to a problem which motivated much of Husserl’s thought: the crisis of rationality, which is, as Merleau-Ponty agrees with Husserl, ‘the problem of our time’ (Primacy 43). The crisis of rationality of which Husserl speaks late in his career was already implied by his earliest writings against psychologism. Western rationality is in crisis insofar as the sciences of man – psychology, sociology, and history – claim that thought, including philosophical thought, is nothing more than the result of external psychological, social, and historical conditions. Correlatively, all claims, specifically truth claims, do not result from the mind’s contact with a reality in itself but are nothing more than the internal effects of external conditioning factors. Irrationalism is the result because, as Merleau-Ponty echoes

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Husserl’s thought, ‘reason itself appears to be the contingent product of certain external conditions’ (Primacy 44). For Merleau-Ponty, the crisis of rationality is deeper than the Protagorean self-refuting nature of the claims made by psychologism, sociologism, and historicism – that the truth claims made by these sciences are simultaneously undercut by the relativism of these very same claims – but the real bite is that the crisis leads to a continual conflict between philosophy and the sciences of man, the end result of which is a failure of rationality because both speak of and seek the truth of the same world. It is this conflict between philosophy and the sciences of man and the resulting crisis in rationality that motivate Husserl’s arguments against psychologism already in the Logical Investigations and against historicism in the essay from 1911, ‘Philosophy as Strict Science.’ Furthermore, it is this crisis to which he returns in the Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy by seeking a deeper source for all rational activity – all the sciences as well as philosophy – in the lifeworld. For Husserl, as for Merleau-Ponty, the crisis involved, from the very beginning, questions of ideal objects: What is the status of the ideal? What is the relation of the ideal to the factual? How are ideal objects generated? Insofar as the human sciences make claims based on empirical facts that go beyond the facts themselves, they already involve idealizations. In any empirical study, thought moves naturally from merely recording facts to creating intellectual models of reality based on the recorded facts. Phenomenology’s consistent criticism against the human sciences is to remind their practitioners of these intellectual productions or, in the language of phenomenology, their ‘idealizations,’ without which ‘there would no more be any sociology today than there would formerly have been Galilean physics’ (Signs 99). The movement from particular facts to idealizations is the hallmark of any rational activity that claims to be a science, i.e., that aspires to arrive at the truth. These idealizations involve philosophy in science. For Merleau-Ponty, every human science engages in philosophy when it determines its object and the conception of man that will guide its research. The results flow from those very ideas and conceptions, which, then, direct the questions addressed to the facts. The thrust of MerleauPonty’s analysis of the human sciences is that methodological thought always implies, to some degree, philosophic activity. And to the extent that the philosophic conceptions that inform a science are ignored, poorly formed, or just plain false, research in the science will be hobbled with a handicap that can be overcome only by philosophic reflection and reconception of the most basic concepts of the given science. Merleau-Ponty certainly saw the guiding concepts of the human sciences as well as the results of their researches as legitimate philosophic concerns. His initial interest in Gestalt psychology sought to exploit the philosophical

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implications inherent in their empirical research. This interest continued in several essays from the middle period in which Merleau-Ponty explicitly returns to the question of the relationship between phenomenology and the human sciences.2 In keeping with his research interest at the time, his interest in the human sciences tends towards those disciplines which have intersubjective implications, namely, anthropology, sociology, history, and, most importantly, linguistics. On the question of ideal objects and the human sciences, MerleauPonty sees himself following Husserl’s lead, not the early thought of Husserl, in which Husserl’s idealist tendencies are most pronounced, but his more mature formulations. Husserl’s early thought on the question of the relationship between philosophy and the human sciences is that eidetic analysis should establish at the very beginning of a science the meaning of guiding concepts and categories of the region of being that the science in question studies, while the empirical study of the region in question should come only afterwards and be limited to directly investigating and clarifying relevant facts in light of the essences already determined through eidetic analysis. Thus, facts are absorbed into a universe of thought that determines all factual possibility of a given field without reference to any serious and in-depth empirical analysis of the field. According to Merleau-Ponty, Husserl’s view ultimately detaches thought from factual experience, while at the same time enveloping and possessing the facts, which furthers the antagonism and conflict between philosophy and the human sciences because the empirical sciences turn out to be just so many handmaidens to philosophy. This emphasis on the priority of thought and the ideal at the expense of the factual, which Merleau-Ponty finds in the early works of Husserl, is, for Merleau-Ponty, belied by Husserl’s continual insistence and intention to bring philosophy back to direct experience of the things themselves. For Merleau-Ponty, clarifying guiding concepts and categories is not exclusively the province of philosophers; nor is it merely a preliminary activity but an ongoing one. For those engaged in actual research, as well as the philosopher, perform legitimate idealizations in the course of their research. Hence eidetic analyses cannot be performed prior to in-depth empirical study, but rather they emerge in the process of empirical investigations. Philosophy and the human sciences work hand in hand. It is Husserl’s later formulations that Merleau-Ponty follows when he comes to consider the relationship of philosophy to the human sciences. On Merleau-Ponty’s reading, the philosophical task which Husserl’s late thought set for phenomenology was the establishment of an ‘integral philosophy’ (Primacy 51) that avoids historicism, psychologism, and sociologism but not by going to the other extreme of reaffirming the dogmatism of logicism: ‘It is always between the Scylla of psychologism

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and the Charybdis of logicism that Husserl steers his course’ (Primacy 55– 6). It is the constant threat of the former that continually led Husserl to flirt with the latter. Phenomenology as ‘integral philosophy’ is the attempt to articulate an account of rationality that takes into account the external conditioning factors, which psychology and sociology thematize, without allowing these factors to externally determine thought: It is a question of finding a method which will enable us to think at the same time of the externality which is the principle of the sciences of man and of the internality which is the condition of philosophy, of the contingencies without which there is no situation as well as of the rational certainty without which there is no knowledge. (Primacy 51–2) The crisis of rationality to which Husserl and then Merleau-Ponty applied themselves was, in rather broad terms, articulating a method of rational activity that avoids various contemporary forms of relativism – in the present case these come from certain conclusions in the sciences of man – not by giving in to the temptations of Platonism but rather by developing a historical account of rationality that does not safeguard the validity of thought in a Hegelian absolute. Clearly articulating such a method and its application to both philosophy and the human sciences occupies much of Merleau-Ponty’s thought in the middle period. We can see in this question Merleau-Ponty’s continual attempt to integrate two positions by maintaining what is true in each of them while avoiding what is false in each. In other words, it is an attempt to integrate the truth of the human sciences – that thought is historically, sociologically, and psychologically conditioned – into philosophy without admitting precisely what is false in these sciences, namely, that these conditioning factors dominate rationality. On the other hand, the truth in philosophy is that truth is more than merely truth for us, but philosophy is false insofar as it seeks to guarantee truth in an external absolute. Truth emerges from the internal conditions that give rise to it, but it slips free of these conditions insofar as it opens out beyond the bounds of them. In any case, Merleau-Ponty seeks an integration that provides a rapprochement between philosophy and the sciences of man. Such a rapprochement is de facto already underway, for Merleau-Ponty sees deep points of contact in the late thought of Husserl and contemporary practices in the sciences of man. For Merleau-Ponty, phenomenological method coincides with the contemporaneous practices of the sciences of man.

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IV. Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man By overcoming the conflict between philosophy and the human sciences in a rapprochement that finds harmony in the deeper intentions of late Husserlian phenomenology and the philosophical implications of the human sciences (freed from their own dogmatic assertions), MerleauPonty seeks to articulate an account of rationality that takes into account insights revealed by the human sciences – that all thought is externally conditioned, or to put it in terms more amenable to phenomenology, that all thought is an achievement from within a factical situation – with the imperative of philosophy – that thought not be fragmented and dissolved into an infinite number of abortive attempts to reach the true and the real. Phenomenological rationality demands that the truths we reach are not reducible to the situations in which they arose. Effecting this rapprochement means presenting an account of central phenomenological concepts that differ from Husserl’s express formulations, especially as they are found in his early work. Indeed, on many of these topics, Merleau-Ponty assures us that he is ‘pushing Husserl further than he wished to go himself’ (Primacy 72). For example, the epoche´ looks different on Merleau-Ponty’s account. Performing the epoche´ is, in effect, to place in suspension the straightforward affirmations that are implied by the given factual situation – the psychological, sociological, historical situation in which all thought is involved – not in order to deny this situation but rather to see it. It is to bring the various conditioning factors to reflective awareness so as not to pass beyond them, not to arrive at a thought outside of all situations, but, on the contrary, to bring these factors to reflective awareness in order to witness their contribution in the mind’s coming to truth. The central truth of the human sciences is that all thought is situated – psychologically, historically, and sociologically; the epoche´ is a methodological step necessary to bring the aspects of this situation to reflective awareness, which is the first step needed for thought to arrive at objectivity. For the various social sciences to properly thematize their respective region of inquiry – the social, the historical, the psychological, etc. – some sort of epoche´ is necessary. But there are other parallels between the de facto method of social sciences and central phenomenological concepts properly modified. The Wesenschau is another example of Merleau-Ponty’s modification of central phenomenological concepts. Most succinctly put, the Wesenschau is the grasping of universal meanings in and through individual and contingent experience. It is not a mystical operation of some sort of supersensible faculty; it is merely to claim that the factual events of one’s life reveal a meaning that is irreducible to the factual particularities of the

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situation. While any given lived experience is factually conditioned, it also has an ‘inner sense’ that cannot be reduced to the factual situation of its emergence. This ‘inner sense,’ which escapes external, factual determination, is the order of essences: Insofar as the essence is to be grasped through a lived experience, it is concrete knowledge. But insofar as I grasp something through this experience which is more than a contingent fact, an intelligible structure that imposes itself on me whenever I think of the intentional object in question, I gain another kind of knowledge. I am enclosed in the particularity of my individual life, and I attain an insight which holds for all men. (Primacy 54–5) I move beyond my singularity insofar as the factual events of my life have an intelligible sense not reducible to – and in this sense independent of – my actual experience of them. For example, in the Gestalt we witness this ‘inner sense’ in operation: Husserl was really seeking [in his definition of eidetic intuition], largely unknown to himself, a notion like that of the Gestaltist – the notion of an order of meaning which does not result from the application of spiritual activity to an external matter. It is rather, a spontaneous organization beyond the distinction between activity and passivity, of which the visible patterns of experience are the symbol . . . [Gestalt psychology] is really a psychology founded on the idea of intentionality. But this sense, which inhabits all psychic phenomena, is not produced by a pure activity of the spirit. It is, rather, an earthy and aboriginal sense, which constitutes itself by an organization of the so-called elements. (Primacy 77) The Gestalt is of the order of essences insofar as it is more than the factual conditions of its emergence, which means that it is of that in-between order between the traditional categories of activity and passivity, subject and object, as well as spirit and matter. The Gestalt is a spontaneous organization of the elements of perception which imposes itself on me, but not in the manner of an ‘object’ in the world, as naturalism would define it; neither is the Gestalt an external imposition of an internal mental entity on to the perceptual world. The Gestalt does not fit into the categories of the psychic, or spiritual or internal, and external as the traditional, Cartesian ontology defines them. The Gestalt is a production neither of causality nor of reason. Rather, the Gestalt, as the above quotation attests, is a spontaneous unity of elements that bears an ‘earthy and aboriginal sense which constitutes itself by an organization of the so-called elements’ (Primacy 77). Throughout the middle period, Merleau-Ponty

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often juxtaposes the ‘internal’ to the ‘external’; such language is meant to avoid traditional interpretations, i.e., the traditional dichotomies of external object and internal subjectivity, or external nature and internal spirit. He is trying to surpass these dichotomous categories. By ‘internal’ Merleau-Ponty means to indicate the spontaneous organization of sense which emerges from ‘the facts,’ a sense that cannot be reduced to factual analyses, which would, on Merleau-Ponty’s understanding, constitute an analysis of the ‘external.’ By associating this internal region – neither inside nor outside in traditional terms – of the Gestalt with Husserlian essences, Merleau-Ponty sees the deeper intentions of Husserl’s thought merging with the philosophic truth revealed in a Gestalt psychology freed from dogmatic naturalism. It also changes the nature of the essence and eidetic analysis. The Wesenschau, then, is simply the thematization of the intelligible sense that remains unthematized in spontaneous and unreflective experience. For Merleau-Ponty it is not a technique limited exclusively to phenomenology, but one that also includes the de facto activity of certain research projects operating in the sciences of man. According to MerleauPonty, insight into essences is nothing more mysterious than a specific sort of intellectual activity that seeks to explicate and clarify meaning inherent in spontaneous experience; as such, it is a reflective and, hence, retrospective activity. In this double-movement of consciousness – between experience and reflection – we can see the ‘envelopment’ that brings facts and essences together: It is true that reflective thought, which determines the meaning or essences ends by possessing its object and enveloping it. But it is also true that essential insight always understands the concrete perception of experience as something here and now which precedes and therefore envelops it. (Primacy 68) Ideas encroach on the facts insofar as ideal structures allow the facts to be grouped, categorized, and organized, but the facts also encroach on the ideas insofar as ideas are generated from the facts and remain open to continual elaboration and modification by factual experience. Reflective thought is able to recognize the essence that is internal to the facts, and which presents the mind with intelligible nuclei that are irreducible to the facts. To use the language Merleau-Ponty will employ in the later period of his career, fact and essence ‘intertwine’ so that one cannot think an essence without a corresponding individual; in other words, to think an essence one must pass through the factual. In spite of Husserl’s constant reaffirmation of the radical distinction between the natural and transcendental

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attitude, he was ‘well aware from the start that they do encroach upon one another and that every fact of consciousness bears the transcendental within it’ (Signs 106). This is the lesson of the Husserlian technique of ‘free-play in phantasy,’ in which one grasps the essence by varying certain facts. The truth of this technique is that the Wesenschau depends on concrete experience; that is, it depends on the facts. By showing that knowledge of essences is altogether experiential, it follows from Husserl’s starting point ‘that any knowledge of fact always involves an a priori understanding of essence’ (Primacy 72). Since the knowledge of essences is experiential, the phenomenological essences ‘are not, in Husserl’s terms, ‘‘exact essences’’ capable of univocal determinations; they are rather, ‘‘morphological essences’’ which are inexact by nature’ (Primacy 67). These inexact, morphological essences, determined as they are by lived, factical situation, denote a limited universality. Essences are, in effect, developmental; that is, they are open to modifications which result from further experience. This is a truth to which Husserl openly admitted late in his life and it explains why his final work seeks to describe the historical genesis and alteration of ideal objects. Since the essences are developmental and open to modification, any single given experience of the essence will not reveal all ‘logical’ possibilities of empirical manifestation; there is no ‘geometry of the lived’ or ‘mathematics of the phenomena,’ as even Husserl admitted. Even freeplay in phantasy – a technique which, on Husserl’s formulation, admits the need for factual experience but then goes on to surpass this experience by outlining all ‘logical’ possibilities based on the factual – does not escape its dependence on the factual. On Merleau-Ponty’s understanding, priority is placed on the concrete, lived experience that precedes the Wesenschau, for this experience is the genuine origin of the essence. Thus, the fundamental philosophic truth revealed in Husserl’s technique of imaginative variation, at least insofar as Merleau-Ponty is concerned, is that possibility is founded on actuality rather than vice versa. Concrete experience is temporally as well as philosophically prior to these essences. This is the fundamental insight by which Merleau-Ponty is ‘pushing Husserl further than he wished to go himself’ (Primacy 72). Consequently, the philosophical imagination is limited by concrete experience. This is a significant point of departure and marks a crucial distinction between Husserl’s and MerleauPonty’s views of essences. But, according to Merleau-Ponty, there are hints that Husserl was moving in this direction himself. In reference to a letter Husserl sent to the anthropologist Le´vy-Bruhl, Husserl3 himself seems to admit that: The facts go beyond what we imagine . . . It is as if the imagination, left to itself, is unable to represent the possibilities of existence which are

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realized in different cultures. . . . [Husserl] now saw that it is perhaps not possible for us, who live in certain historical traditions, to conceive of the historical possibilities of these primitive men by a mere variation of our imagination. (Primacy 90) This letter reveals Husserl’s emerging awareness that the philosophical imagination is limited by the de´ja` ve´cu. This admission is especially problematic if one is seeking to describe the a priori of the cultural world, but such an admission does not amount to claiming the triumph of cultural relativism, as historicism might suppose. Instead, it calls for the need to communicate with other people not only of our cultural tradition but of other traditions as well. Communication, ultimately, makes it at least possible that convergence can occur. Rationality is assured not by the activity of the transcendental ego and the eidetic reduction, but rather only when we communicatively co-exist with others. For Merleau-Ponty, relativism might be the first word in the human sciences, but it does not have to be the last. The work of the anthropologist helps to establish the lines of communication that allow us to overcome the distance between our tradition and that of others. Overcoming this distance and overcoming parochialism is possible only if the sociologist begins, as the philosopher must, from lived experience: We can expand our experience of social relationships and get a proper view of them only by analogy or contrast with those we have lived. We can do so, in short, only by subjecting the social relationships we have experienced to an imaginative variation. These lived relationships will no doubt take on a new meaning in comparison with this imaginative variation . . . but they will provide it with all the sociological meaning it can have. (Signs 100) The sociologist arrives at the universal of that group of phenomena called the ‘social’ not by passing beyond her lived situation – in an objective, ‘external’ approach towards the social – but by passing through that very situation itself towards others. The external approach objectifies certain aspects of the social, kinship structures for example, by merely recording the facts and then schematizing all possible variations of these facts, including our own lived experience, as one among many possible ways of living kinship structures. This view ignores the central truth that our lived experience of these structures is our only mode of access to any universal understanding we might arrive at: Since we are all hemmed in by history, it is up to us to understand that whatever truth we may have is to be gotten not in spite of but through

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our historical inherence. Superficially considered, our inherence destroys all truth; considered radically, it founds a new idea of truth. (Signs 109) The lesson to be learned here is that we arrive at the universal only through our own experience of the social, which can never be reduced to merely one among all possible variations but is rather the privileged experience in which we live the social structuring principle before thematizing it and noticing other possibilities of this principle no matter how different they might be. This privileged experience gets thrown ‘in and out of focus’ (Signs 100) by contact with other societies.4 This privilege is the privilege of an access that will itself become meaningful through the play of contrast and analogy. It is in concrete experience with the other and the alien that lived experience is ‘varied,’ and through the ‘variation’ presented in the encounter with Amazonian tribes, for example, that we are able to arrive at anything like a hidden kinship structure shared by all societies. What is usually taken as a limitation on rationality and the alibi by which the human sciences move towards relativism, namely that our factical situation is a hindrance to universality, is seen by Merleau-Ponty as our very access to universality. We pass through our factical condition to arrive at the universal. The role of phenomenology in relation to the human sciences, then, is not to oppose Platonism to relativism or to secure a domain for philosophy that is impervious to other fields of study. For phenomenology, after all, speaks of the same world that the natural and human sciences do. Phenomenology as ‘integral philosophy,’ rather, will need to avoid these alternatives and distinguish itself by pursuing ‘a certain mode of consciousness we have of others, of nature, or of ourselves’ (Signs 110) by returning to our initial (lived) contact with the phenomena. To admit that thought is factically conditioned need not lead to the fragmentation of thought into so many failed attempts to arrive at truth. In reality, our experience is that thought converges across divergent times and places not by passing beyond the factual world in a Hegelian-like absolute or by effectively situating the transcendental ego outside of any concrete situation, but only by encountering others and overcoming the challenges that other views, in this case other cultures, present to us in our factical situation. Relativism cannot have the last word if we are able to establish intersubjective communication with others in other factical situations. An account of communication and intersubjectivity is necessary, then, for phenomenology to respond properly to the problem of rationality, which emerges from a mistaken view of the relationship between the ideal and the factual. Husserl tends towards Platonism while the human sciences tend towards relativism; Merleau-Ponty, characteristically, seeks an

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account between these two alternatives. In keeping with the necessity for an account of communication and intersubjectivity, language moves to the center of the phenomenological consideration of rationality and the problem of ideal objects. Merleau-Ponty states: In the unpublished texts of Husserl – that of the Origin of Geometry, for example – he admitted that the problem of language is fundamental, if one wishes to gain any true clarity on the existence of ideas and cultural objects in the actual world. We must recognize that what we call ‘ideas’ are carried into the world of existence by their instruments of expression – books, museums, musical scores. If we wish to understand how the phenomenon of ‘ideal existence’ is possible for a number of subjects, who do not live at the same time, to participate in the same ideas, we must first understand how the thoughts of one single subject are incorporated in the cultural instruments which convey them outside and make them accessible to others. (Primacy 83–4) There is perhaps no single topic which occupied Merleau-Ponty’s thought more in the middle period than language. In keeping with his belief that the contemporary state of the human sciences betrays phenomenological habits of thought, he finds in the work of linguists, particularly Saussure, resources to present an account of language that has implications for the account of rationality that phenomenology requires. Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Saussure in the middle period parallels his understanding of Gestalt psychology in the early period and offers an opportunity to witness the rapprochement between the human sciences and phenomenology. Saussure’s insights deepen the fundamental insights of phenomenological thought. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty’s intense interest in linguistics and history in the middle period reflect his shift in interest from egological perceptual constitution of ideal objects to an intersubjective, historical institution of ideal objects.

V. Conclusion Merleau-Ponty’s interest in rationality leads him, shortly after the publication of the Phenomenology of Perception, to shift the site of interrogation from embodied subjectivity and bodily expressivity to an intersubjectively constituted cultural primordiality; that is, he seeks to describe the constitution of the intermonde, a problem that, as we have seen, arose naturally in the course of his investigations of perception, but which could not be accounted for solely in perceptual terms. In the middle period of his career, Merleau-Ponty no longer seeks the logos of the aesthetic world but

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the logos of the cultural world instead. Although the site of interrogation has shifted, his philosophic interest remains the same. As he notes in the 1952 letter to Martial Gueroult in support of his nomination to the Colle`ge de France, the studies he has undertaken since 1945 ‘will definitively fix the philosophic significance of my earlier works while they, in turn, determine the route and method of these later studies’ (Primacy 6). As he says in that work, the route of his thought leads him from perception proper to ‘the field of knowledge properly so called – i.e., the field in which the mind seeks to possess truth, to define its objects itself, and thus to attain a universal wisdom, not tied to the particularities of our situation’ (Primacy 6). He goes on to claim that the initial steps in this investigation had been already undertaken in the late forties but that what remains to be achieved is the philosophic foundations of ‘a theory of truth and . . . a theory of intersubjectivity’ (Primacy 6–7). Developing a theory of truth and a theory of intersubjectivity are interrelated, for language is a communal activity and ‘the least use of language implies the idea of truth’ (Primacy 10). Consequently, language will move to the center of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological reflections, which is no accident, for a full account of language and communication is necessary to complete the phenomenological account of rationality. Moreover, by seeking to articulate an account of rationality that does not give in to either relativism or Platonism, Merleau-Ponty, in his middle period, continues and develops Husserl’s philosophic interest in the human sciences. As we have seen in the case of the relationship between philosophy and the human sciences, this enterprise will require modification of several central phenomenological concepts. Finally, we can see in the above-quoted words of Merleau-Ponty himself, better than anywhere else perhaps, that the analyses of the middle period are meant to prolong and develop the achievements of his earlier thought. His interest in language and the constitution of the intermonde, not unlike his interest in perception, is largely an epistemological interest – but not without ontological ramifications, as his late thought testifies – that seeks to yield an account of rational practices and how the mind arrives at truth. The results of these latter analyses, however, will not leave his initial investigations unaffected.

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Language and Expression in the Middle Period

I. Introduction Beginning in his lectures in the mid 1940s at the University of Lyon, language became a more prominent theme in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, and by the early 50s he explicitly placed language at the center of phenomenological thought.1 This is clear in his important 1951 essay, ‘On the Phenomenology of Language,’ where he claims that the problem of language: ‘Provides us with our best basis for questioning phenomenology and recommencing Husserl’s efforts instead of simply repeating what he said. It allows us to resume, instead of his theses, the very movement of his thought’ (Signs 84). This claim is more than a methodological disclaimer intending to put the proper hermeneutic protocols in place; rather, it means that phenomenology must take up again the problem of language. The very movement of phenomenological thought demands this. Why is this so? Why does Merleau-Ponty move language to the center of phenomenological thought? Why is language the best basis for taking up and continuing Husserl’s thought? I would like to suggest that a phenomenology of language for Merleau-Ponty is not merely a regional inquiry but one which is necessary in order to provide a complete account of phenomenological rationality. Much in the same way that his Phenomenology of Perception is more than a regional phenomenological inquiry into perception because it also involves questions of rationality, his interest in language in the middle period is more than a regional phenomenological inquiry into language because it also has deeper ramifications for questions of rationality. In this sense, then, his interest in language in the middle period is tantamount to, and may even supplant, his interest in perception in the early period. Clearly, his phenomenology of perception was more than merely a phenomenological description of perception; it was an investigation that entailed broader implications for a phenomenological account of ideal objects.2 I shall argue below that the importance of language to phenomenology is motivated by a persistent problem at the heart of transcendental phenomenology, namely, the need for a

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transcendentally appropriate language. This problem, which arises internal to the phenomenological enterprise itself, is best articulated by one of Husserl’s closest assistants, Eugen Fink, in his important Sixth Cartesian Meditation.3

II. On the Possibility of a Transcendental Language In the short section of Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation that is dedicated to language, a problem internal to the phenomenological project itself is clearly articulated, namely the problem of transcendental language. It is a problem that will become more and more pressing for phenomenology as it is taken up by Husserl’s French commentators, but in Fink’s work, along with Husserl’s comments on it, we find the problem already clearly posed. In general, Husserl’s expressed views on language were less concerned with the phenomenology of language – a phenomenological explication of a region of intentional activity, namely, language use – than with the language of phenomenology, that is, how transcendental insights will be expressed in a phenomenologically appropriate language. Indeed, much of the criticism Husserl has received at the hands of his French commentators stems from his naive attitude towards language. These criticisms are not misplaced. The thrust of his thought on language in Ideas I, for example, betrays his belief that language is merely an important methodological concern,4 for there he states that due to the continual reexamination of phenomenological insights, ‘all concepts or terms must remain in flux in a certain way’ (Ideas I 201). The phenomenologist must be on constant guard against naively accepting language with its ordinary meanings, which have become fixed in the natural attitude, without first fixing their meaning phenomenologically. This methodological concern is a cautionary reminder. But due to this rather optimistic acceptance of the aptness of human language in general for expressing transcendental insights, in this early work, Husserl does not raise the question of the theoretical possibility of whether any natural language can adequately and fully express phenomenological insights. In the Sixth Cartesian Meditation, Fink raises this very question in a most pointed manner. To put the question bluntly: Is a transcendental language possible? This is a question on which Husserl’s published writings on language are silent. Such silence is problematic because the theoretical question of whether language can be rendered phenomenologically appropriate and the methodological question of how it can be so rendered need to be addressed in order for transcendental phenomenological theory to achieve its stated goal of becoming a science. This is so because for phenomenology to become a science, transcendental insights must be at least relatively ‘fixed’ and

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communicable, and, in order to achieve the latter, there must be some manner of communication between collaborating phenomenologists. While Husserl did not directly address the problem of the possibility of a transcendental language, he was not unaware of it. The fullest and most complete expression of the phenomenological problem of a transcendental language comes in Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation, most precisely in x10, ‘Phenomenologizing as Predication,’ which presents a full account of the problem of language facing transcendental phenomenology. Moreover, the results of this work were implicitly endorsed by Husserl himself, as his marginal comments attest. Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation, when read along with Husserl’s marginal comments, provide an illuminating account of the state of the problem of language for phenomenological activity late in Husserl’s life. Before turning to Fink’s work itself, however, it must be pointed out that Merleau-Ponty had studied a copy of Fink’s manuscript of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation as early as the summer of 19425 and had met Eugen Fink as early as 1939.6 Furthermore, in addition to the several citations of Fink’s published works throughout the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty openly cites Fink’s work in the Preface when speaking of the phenomenological reduction.7 It is reasonable to assume, then, that Merleau-Ponty was aware of the problem of the possibility of a transcendental language because he was familiar with Fink’s thought in general and with Fink’s thought on the reduction, in particular, where the problem of a transcendentally appropriate language emerges, as we shall see.8 In x10 of Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation the problem is clearly stated. For transcendental phenomenological analysis to become a science, that is, consist of truths available to ‘everyone,’ then phenomenological predication must ‘in some way exit from the transcendental attitude’ (SCM 84).9 For the insights acquired in the subjective activities of the transcendental spectator to be scientific truths, they must be outwardly expressed in order to become fixed and abiding scientific truths, open and available to nonphenomenologists as well as to fellow phenomenologists. It is the nature of the language of such expression that is at issue here. As far as Husserl is concerned, natural language is ontically informed and, as such, is unsuitable for transcendental predication. For natural language to function as a proper transcendental language, it must be ‘transformed’ (SCM 86). Before describing the details of this transformation, Fink notes the importance of such a transformation: ‘If this kind of transformation did not occur, then the phenomenologist would slip out of the transcendental attitude with every word he spoke’ (SCM 86). Thus, the transformation of natural language into a transcendentally appropriate language is necessary for the transcendental onlooker to maintain the transcendental attitude; otherwise, that attitude cannot be maintained. In other words, the

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transcendental reduction cannot be fully carried out. The question here is whether or not any natural language could be, in principle, transcendentally transformed. If the transformation of natural language into a suitable transcendental language is successful, Fink continues, then ‘not a single word can retain its natural sense’. The natural meanings of words and sentences serve merely as an ‘indicator’ for a transcendental sense (SCM 87). The result of such a transformation is a ‘doubleness of meaning’ (SCM 91), as Husserl calls it in his marginal comment. That is, there is a duality of meaning for the very same words used in natural language when they function in transcendental language. But how is such a duality possible? Fink claims that natural meanings of the words and sentences ‘point analogously to a corresponding transcendental sense’ (SCM 89). The inherent difficulty of such analogical meanings stems from the fact that ‘ontic meanings just cannot form an analogy to non-ontic transcendental meanings, for the two cannot be at all compared with one another’ (SCM 90). As a result there is a constant ‘rebellion’ and ‘protest’ (SCM 89) between the ‘doubleness of meaning’ of words and sentences, a conflict that can never be fully eradicated. An irreducible divergence remains, and, as a result, all transcendental explications have a special inadequacy. Such inadequacy of natural language is not merely characteristic of the initial language which the transcendental onlooker must employ immediately after performing the reduction – an inadequacy that could, in principle, be overcome in further and further refinements of the language, thus making it a purified ‘scientific language’ – but rather this inadequacy is a de jure inadequacy of human language for transcendental predication. Fink continues: Even if with ever greater advances in phenomenological knowledge the naivete´ of predicative explication is overcome and mundane concepts are freed more and more from the natural associations that adhere to them, still one can never succeed in abolishing the divergence of signifying that is present in every transcendental sentence between the natural sense of words and the transcendental sense that is indicated in them. Rather, there always remains an immanent conflict and contradiction in every transcendental predication. Indeed it is not even a desideratum that this divergence ever altogether disappear. The Idea of a transcendental language that would not need the meditation of natural language at all is in itself countersensical. (SCM 98) The thrust of the entire passage here indicates that this irreducible duality of meaning between the transcendental and natural meaning of words is necessary and even desirable. The question of a transcendental transformation of natural language remains. Despite the seeming

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insurmountability of overcoming the differences between natural and transcendental language, Husserl insists in a marginal note that the ‘miracle’ (SCM 86) of this transformation is possible; however, the possibility of a transcendentally modified, or to use a term Husserl employs elsewhere, a ‘purified’ natural language, is associated with the possibility of transforming the natural attitude in the transcendental reduction. One could suppose that failure to make the transformation in one sphere indicates failure to make it in the other sphere. In other words, transcendental language is a possibility of natural language if and only if the reduction can be successfully carried out. So when Fink goes on to say that transcendental language can never succeed in fully disengaging itself from natural language – that there is always a residuum of natural language in transcendental language – this is tantamount, in the well-known words of Merleau-Ponty, to the claim that ‘the most important lesson which the reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction’ (PP xiv). What this detour through Fink’s consideration of formulating a transcendental language suggests is that language is a problem that cuts to the heart of the phenomenological enterprise. Here we see that language is a problem that arises internal to the phenomenological project itself as it is articulated in a work of a phenomenological thinker closely engaged in the Husserlian enterprise. Moreover, considering the close working relationship between Husserl and Fink on the Sixth Cartesian Meditation,10 it is a problem of which Husserl himself was not unaware and, perhaps, was unable to solve. In any case, there can be little doubt that Merleau-Ponty was himself aware of the problem that language presents to Husserl’s transcendental theory; indeed, it is a problem that is certainly operative if rarely expressed in Merleau-Ponty’s writings. Most clearly put, the problem is that if we are unable to formulate a transcendental language which satisfies the requirements that Husserl demands – if the expression of transcendental insights are conditioned to some degree by natural language – then phenomenology cannot become the ‘science’ Husserl hoped for and demanded of it. Phenomenology, thus, fails as a ‘science,’ but this failure does not necessarily entail that phenomenology itself is a failure, even on its own terms. Instead, phenomenological rationality needs to be reconceived in light of the revelations provided by a robust phenomenology of language. Husserl’s naive expressivist conception of language – that language is merely an external ‘garb’ of the transcendental insight – originally articulated in the Logical Investigations and never abandoned throughout his life, presents phenomenological rationality with a potentially devastating problem. Perhaps a re-writing of the analogical relationship between natural and transcendental language would suffice to solve this problem.11 In any case, a robust phenomenology of language calls for a re-vision of phenomenology itself. I suggest that this is why

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language for Merleau-Ponty, ‘provides us with our best basis for questioning phenomenology and recommencing Husserl’s efforts instead of simply repeating what he said. It allows us to resume, instead of his theses, the very movement of his thought’ (Signs 84). The problem of language now moves to the center of phenomenology, and the analyses of language, as we shall see, will alter the most basic phenomenological categories, such as the transcendental, the mundane, the ideal, and the characterization of the transcendental ego. The task now facing phenomenology is to provide an account of language which shows that while the transcendental moment is conditioned by natural language, such conditioning need not compromise rationality. The question at issue is the transcendental function of language or, in other words: What function does natural language have in the constitution of transcendental language? Fink’s analysis of language shows that transcendental operations are not fully independent of the influence of natural language, but that natural language opens on to the transcendental. Rather than the one-way relationship between the transcendental and natural language suggested by Husserl’s account of language – that the transcendental ego takes over and alters natural language to express transcendental insights – Fink’s analysis suggests that there is a two-way, dialectical relationship between the transcendental and natural language. It is the dialectical relationship between natural language and the transcendental moment that Merleau-Ponty’s middle-period account of language, particularly in his account of novel expression, seeks to describe. In Merleau-Ponty’s account of novel expression, we will see how phenomenological language is ‘transformed natural language,’ which Fink calls for in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation (86).

III. Novel Expression and Rationality Crucial to Merleau-Ponty’s account of novel expression is Saussurian linguistics, which, as he understands it, follows a general trend found in the human sciences insofar as that which is taken as the ‘object’ of inquiry is a reality, the being of which calls into question ‘the classical alternative between ‘‘existence as a thing’’ and ‘‘existence as consciousness,’’ [and, furthermore, establishes] a communication between and mixture of objective and subjective’ (SNS 86). Language is neither a thing as naive, objective thought understands it, nor is it merely a by-product of speaking subjects, a sort of epiphenomenon of the linguistic community. Rather, language is a milieu that always already surrounds the speaking subject prior to the activity of speech. This means that linguistic expression takes

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place within an expressive system that is established before the speaker utters her first words. Appropriately, linguistics studies: That general spirit which we all constitute by living our life in common, that intention already deposited in the given system of language, preconscious because the speaking subject espouses it before he becomes aware of it and elevates it to the level of knowledge, and yet which only subsists on the condition of being taken up or assumed by speaking subjects and lives on their desire for communication. (SNS 88) Much like the Gestalt in psychology, language is neither a thing nor a consciousness but a site of contact between the subjective and objective. In addition to its study of the objective, quantifiable forms of language, linguistics seeks to bring to light the deep, ‘internal organization’ (SNS 87) of a language, which shows us that the language in which we express ourselves is always already operative at the preconscious level. The speaker does not constitute the meaning of every spoken word but instead depends on common, ordinary usage, which is established by what has already been said by others. It is crucial to note that the preconscious here is not an ‘unconscious’; nor is it necessarily understood in bodily terms. The question here is the way in which inherited linguistic structures operate in individual idiolects when the least use of language implies conditioning at the preconscious level. It is a question that calls for a return to origins in terms other than embodiment. In other words, the search for linguistic origins can no longer be sought in terms of a foundation on embodied experience as, for example, in the gestural theory of expression in the Phenomenology of Perception, but must be pursued in terms of shared historical context. This shift in Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the ‘preconscious’ in terms of an inherited linguistic tradition raises the question of rationality in new terms. The problem that must be faced now is the following: If language has ‘its own inertia, its own demands, constraints, and internal logic’ (SNS 87), then how are we to understand the speaker’s ability to maneuver within the structures of language to express her experience? This question is especially pressing if the existing structures are inadequate to express certain privileged experiences, namely, novel experience. This problem is located at the frontier of sense and non-sense. That is, how and under what conditions can the speaking subject liberate itself from the constraints of established language while continuing to be understood by others and to speak rationally? How do we avoid the domination of rationality by language without abandoning the rationality of language? Can thought, on this account, escape language? If so, how and under what circumstances?

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For Merleau-Ponty, the problem is no sooner posed than is its resolution indicated. For, as already noted, language exists in the in-between region of subject and object, and, as such, it is a reality that depends on contributions of both orders. Language subsists only ‘on the condition of being taken up or assumed by the speaking subjects and lives on their desire for communication’ (SNS 88). Language depends for its very existence on the active participation of speaking subjects, which indicates that established language itself is at least open to modification and correction, if need be, by the activity of the speaking subject. Thus, the way out of the domination of thought by language is to articulate the circumstances in which the speaking subject can act on language to modify it. Simply put, novel expression (or ‘authentic speech’ as it is called in the Phenomenology of Perception) modifies inherited linguistic structures because such modifications are based on experience that extends beyond the initial experience that instituted the structures themselves. These modifications are genuinely successful on those occasions when something new has been said, that is, when the novel expression has a meaning such that it is not merely uttered once but is also taken up by others and used repeatedly. Language is open to modification insofar as novel expression is always possible, which ultimately indicates that thought is not dominated by language because the possibility is opened up for the speaking subject to escape from established truths and to return to the things themselves; such a return is witnessed in novel expression. The goal of phenomenology, to return to the things themselves, is possible for Merleau-Ponty in the middle period only by going through language in novel expression. The possibility of novel expression is, however, threatened by ‘Platonist’ as well as ‘nominalist’ views of language. To avoid this, Merleau-Ponty’s account of language in the middle period continues to resist attempts to separate language from thought, as already articulated in the Phenomenology of Perception. But, unlike in that work, in the middle period MerleauPonty does not argue against ‘intellectualism and empiricism’ (PP 177). Rather, the target of his critique is an objective view of language that reaches its apotheosis in what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘the specter of a pure language’ (PW 7) in which: The word [la parole] possesses no virtue of its own; there is no power hidden in it. It is a pure sign standing for a pure signification. The person speaking is coding his thought. He replaces his thought with a visible or sonorous pattern which is nothing but sounds in the air or ink spots on the paper. Thought understands itself and is self-sufficient. Thought signifies outside itself through a message which does not carry it and conveys it unequivocally only to another mind, which can read the message because it attaches the same signification to the same sign,

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whether by habit, by human convention, or by divine institution. In any case, we never find among other people’s words any that we have not put there ourselves. Communication is an appearance; it never brings us anything truly new. (PW 7) According to Merleau-Ponty, Husserl’s search for an ‘ ‘‘eidetic of language’’ or ‘‘pure grammar,’’ which he outlined in his early writings’ (PW 16) fits into this ‘Platonist’12 account of language. The problem with this view is that it fails to account for the entire phenomenon of language itself, for there is more than this in our experience of language. For we certainly do learn from others, which indicates that genuine communication must take place, but the Platonist account does not allow for learning and communication. There are, however, deeper problems inherent in this view. The first is the obvious proliferation of non-univocal meanings in everyday languages, which, on the Platonist account, would relegate most of ordinary language to non-sense, because it is often not univocal. The second problem is that there is no longer the possibility of ‘a logic of invention’ (PW 16). That is, a ‘pure’ language is unable to offer an account of how and why linguistic transformations occur, and it assumes no such account is needed. But we cannot deny that language certainly does change and evolve. For underlying this theory is the thesis that ideal meanings are univocal and exhaustive, so that linguistic signification can do nothing more than discover what was always already there. Language functions purely as a code, translating omnitudo realitas into a human medium of exchange. But there is no account of how one moves from one use to another in the development of language. What is needed is to show how from the ‘alleged chaos’ (PW 16) of historical conditioning new relations will be found, which will make it both necessary and possible to introduce new symbols designating hitherto unknown relations among things and – only thereby – justifying the old ones beyond the limits of iterative coherence. Once we seek to introduce language into history, however, there is another threat to the rationality of language. For as soon as we begin to consider the historical constitution of language, we are tempted to slide into a view which Merleau-Ponty characterizes as a ‘nominalism,’ in which ‘words contain nothing but the sum of misunderstandings and misinterpretations which have brought them from their proper meaning to their figurative meaning’ (PW 21). If we look to the etymology of words, we will find nothing more than a litany of mistakes, figurative uses, corrupted locutions, and metaphorical alterations. We find no logical development of language. In brief, language is nothing more than the sum of historical contingencies. But, then, as Husserl realized, the rationality of language is dissolved into irrationality; ideal meanings are reduced to their factual

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utterances. Upon analysis, this view equally fails to account for our experience of language, for it is undeniable that despite the historical contingencies in the constitution of language, it has meaning for us: ‘Language is not, while it is functioning, the simple product of the past it carries with it. The past history of language is the visible trace of a power of expression which that history in no way invalidates’ (PW 22). In reality, this view of language amounts to stopping halfway on the road to understanding the action of historical contingency on language, but it points the direction to solving the problem for Merleau-Ponty: ‘We must find in history itself, with all its disorder, that which nevertheless makes possible the phenomenon of communication and meaning’ (PW 22). There is a power of expression internal to historically constituted language, which escapes the dilemma posed by Platonism and nominalism. MerleauPonty’s middle-period account of language seeks to demonstrate this by showing how active language, the language of the speaking subject, surpasses its contingent historical conditioning, thereby establishes ideal meanings. As far as Merleau-Ponty is concerned, whether one adopts a Platonic or a nominalist view of language, one’s approach to language is from outside language itself, which ultimately has the effect of separating language from thought. However, for Merleau-Ponty, external approaches miss the problem of rationality and fail to account for language. The external approach to language, while seeking to bring us closer to reality by delineating the relation between language and the things themselves, actually separates us further from them, for, from the external view, no real relation between things and language can be established. Either language is an accidental addition to the things themselves (Platonist), or the things themselves are lost in the historical conditioning of language (nominalist). In either case, there is no real relation between language and the things themselves. We cannot, however, return to the things themselves from outside of language but only through language. The task now facing a phenomenological account of expression is to begin from the inside of language and show that despite the effects of historical conditioning, rationality emerges. It must be pointed out that this is a problem that has always accompanied the phenomenological project, one that repeatedly led Husserl towards the Platonist position of a ‘pure’ language, as seen above. Rather than seeking to secure rationality in the stronghold of a pure language, Merleau-Ponty seeks to show that undeniable factical conditions need not prevent rationality from emerging, and that returning to the things themselves is possible by passing through language. We approach language from the inside and re-unite language and thought when we begin from language in its creative state, that is, from living language and the speaking subject as it takes over inherited

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language and adapts it to a fresh usage in saying something new. The speaking subject actively unites thought and language in novel expression. As we shall see, Merleau-Ponty’s account of novel expression amounts to a re-writing of the transcendental moment. Each act of novel expression that succeeds in establishing itself as meaningful is not only a liberation from the past but also a re-organization of the structure of language, which, consequently, gives language its future. It must be shown how novel expression is possible, how one can say something meaningful and true, despite the historical contingency of inherited language. In other words, a description of the logical constraints that make a linguistic state coherent does not say how language comes into being and begins to become rationally meaningful for the individual speaker(s). Nor does it say how language or any means of expression functions in the genesis of ideal objects. But this is precisely the issue at stake in Husserl’s late thought on ideal objects, particularly in the Origin of Geometry: In the unpublished texts of Husserl – that on The Origin of Geometry, for example – he admitted that the problem of language is fundamental, if one wishes to gain any true clarity on the existence of ideas and cultural objects in the actual world. We must recognize that what we call ‘ideas’ are carried into the world of existence by their instruments of expression – books, museums, musical scores, [and] writings. If we wish to understand how the phenomenon of ‘ideal existence’ is possible for a number of subjects, who do not live at the same time, to participate in the same ideas, we must first understand how the thoughts of one single subject are incorporated in the cultural instruments which convey them outside and make them accessible to others. (Primacy 83–4) Understanding language comes to be fundamental to a phenomenological inquiry into the origin of ideal objects, insofar as the ‘original institution’ (Husserl uses the term Urstiftung) of ideal objects is tied up in factual instruments of linguistic expression. This indicates that the genesis of the ideal is in the factual. This genesis relies on the public ‘document’ (Signs 96) that bears perpetual witness to the original expression by which a singular experience accedes to universal validity by becoming accessible to others. A description of the conditions and possibility of this genesis of meaning is to be found in the novel expressions of influential writers whose ‘documents’ come to be part of the linguistic archive, which always remains at the disposal of the speaking subject. In brief, the situation of the proto-geometers described in Husserl’s Origin of Geometry mentioned in the above quotation is nothing other than the situation of novel expression that Merleau-Ponty seeks to describe in the middle period. The science of linguistics, particularly Saussure, aids Merleau-Ponty in this endeavor.

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IV. Novel Expression and the Voices of Silence There is evidence of Saussure’s distinction between language (langage) and speech (parole) already operating in the Phenomenology of Perception,13 but we find the first explicit reference to Saussure in 1947.14 And in the published lectures from the 1949–50 lecture course given at the University of Paris, entitled La Conscience et l’acquisition du langage, we see a deepening of Saussure’s influence on Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of language. More importantly, however, Merleau-Ponty indicates that the Saussurian model of language, if extended, could offer a general account of historical rationality: ‘One could apply [Saussure’s] conception of the history of language to history as a whole’ (CAL 101). This sentiment is echoed much more strongly a few years later in the posthumously published Prose of the World:15 ‘Saussure has the great merit of having taken the step which liberates history from historicism and makes a new conception of reason possible’ (23). Motivating these strong statements is Merleau-Ponty’s belief that the Saussurian model of language, if extended to a more general account of historical rationality, would cut between two competing views of rationality both of which entail undesirable consequences. The first, historicism, sees rational activity as a product of chance historical events, while the second seeks to eliminate contingency by placing the movement of thought outside the influence of historical events but not beyond historical becoming. In phenomenological terms, it is the threat of the former that continually led Husserl towards the latter. Thus, Merleau-Ponty’s encounter with Saussurian linguistics is profound, for by extending it to historical rationality, he finds philosophic implications that promise to offer a solution to the long-standing problem of phenomenological rationality. For Merleau-Ponty, the Saussurian distinction between language and speech is crucial to understanding how it is that despite the historical contingencies of language we find it meaningful. Moreover, this distinction is crucial for Merleau-Ponty to account for the emergence of novel meaning. Language taken synchronically in a given ‘language-state’16 is a stable system of terms and relations that can be codified in a ‘grammar,’ while the diachronic study of language approaches it longitudinally over time, which exposes the various changes and evolutions of a given language. Beginning with this basic Saussurian distinction, Merleau-Ponty does not simply juxtapose the synchronic and the diachronic views of language, seeing them as two separate orders of language; rather he seeks to bring them closer together by outlining an account of linguistic evolution based on a phenomenological account of temporality. It is crucial to understanding Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Saussure to recognize the Husserlian account of temporality in it.

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There can be little doubt that Husserl’s account of time-consciousness profoundly affected Merleau-Ponty. The account of time we find in the ‘Temporality’ chapter of the Phenomenology of Perception is very close to Husserl’s express views, but with at least one crucial difference relevant here. With the introduction of the notions of protentions and retentions, the question of the unity of temporal moments (Abschattungen) in the ‘living present’ becomes pressing. For Merleau-Ponty, the synthesis of temporal moments is not an ‘identity synthesis’ which he thinks Husserl’s account requires. Instead, the synthesis of moments is achieved in what Merleau-Ponty calls a ‘transition synthesis.’ The various temporal moments are bound together ‘not by an identifying synthesis, which would ¨ bergangssynthfix them at a point in time, but by a transition synthesis [U esis], in so far as they issue one from another’ (PP 419). Such a synthesis indicates that the unity of temporal moments arises not from an external but from an internal organizing principle. This unity is effected from within the movement of temporal moments and is not due to the express act of the ego. It is, in other words, a spontaneous synthesis internal to the temporal development itself. This type of unity is characteristic of the spontaneous unity of the moments prior to an express intentional act by consciousness: ‘we do not have to bring together, by means of an intellectual act, a series of Abschattungen, for they possess a natural and primordial unity’ (PP 419). The spontaneous unity of moments of consciousness is characteristic of a transition synthesis. Such a synthesis functions in Merleau-Ponty’s early-period account of ‘attention’ in the initial chapter of the Phenomenology of Perception: The miracle of consciousness consists in its bringing to light, through attention, phenomena which re-establish the unity of the object in a new dimension at the very moment when they destroy it. Thus attention is neither an association of images, nor the return to itself of thought already in control of its objects, but the active constitution of a new object which makes explicit and articulate what was until then presented as no more than an horizon. At the same time as it sets attention in motion, the object is at every moment recaptured and placed once more in a state of dependence on it. It gives rise to the ‘knowledge-bringing event,’ which is to transform it only by means of the still ambiguous meaning which it requires that event to clarify; it is therefore the motive and not the cause of the event. . . . This passage from the indeterminate to the determinate, this recasting at every moment of its own history, in the unity of a new meaning, is thought itself. (PP 30–1) In the internal ‘history’ of an individual consciousness, thetic acts such as attention do not create their intentional object ex nihilo but rather further

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determine a spontaneous unity given to consciousness.17 In such determination, the meaning inherent in previous moments is fulfilled or developed in a movement which, in turn, alters the original meaning. This development is not purely an external imposition on the object by thetic activity; rather, the development of meaning is made possible by the object itself. In a sense, then, developed meaning is internal to the object itself, and, to use a concept mentioned in the above quotation, which we will explicate below, it is ‘motivated’ by the previous moments themselves, which in turn sustains the object of consciousness in its newly altered state at a higher level of consciousness. The point at issue here is that throughout the movement of consciousness in higher and higher acts, the object is altered at each new level, but this alteration takes place in such a manner that the intentional object itself maintains a unity that is ‘motivated’ by the object itself. For Merleau-Ponty, the unity of the object across intentional modifications – which, in the above quotation, is the movement of ‘thought itself’ – is not an ideal unity characteristic of an identity synthesis because the alteration of the object in its intentional development prevents us from speaking of an identity in the strict sense. In the movement of thought, such an identity synthesis is not possible. Rather it is a unity characteristic of a transition synthesis, which designates the unity of an intentional object throughout several moments of consciousness and throughout several modifications. In brief, the intentional object maintains a unity throughout and across the various levels of conscious activity; this unity-in-modification is a transition synthesis unity, which indicates an internal ‘motivation’ uniting the various moments. This account of the unity of the object of thought throughout the movement of thought in the private ‘history’ of egological consciousness in the Phenomenology of Perception, gets applied in the middle period to the unity of the ideal object throughout the movement of thought in intersubjective history. In other words, when Merleau-Ponty turns his attention away from the ‘history’ of a movement of thought in an individual, egological consciousness to the movement of thought through intersubjective history, something analogous to a transition synthesis is implied but unexpressed in his writings on the intersubjective, historical development of ideal objects. Particularly, this can be seen in his application of a phenomenological account of temporality to the Saussurian distinction between language and speech. Of speech he claims that ‘it is not necessary for the synchronic viewpoint to be instantaneous . . . it must also be the overlap of one temporal phase upon another’ (PW 23). The synchronic view of language, on Merleau-Ponty’s reading, is not an instantaneous moment of a language like a snapshot, but it is much closer to the Husserlian view of the ‘living present,’ which is replete with retentions and protentions: ‘The solution of the doubts concerning language is to be

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found not in a recourse to any universal language hovering over history, but in what Husserl latter calls the ‘‘living present’’ ’ (PW 25). On MerleauPonty’s understanding, the terms and relations that function in speech are not fully settled; rather, speech is a moment of language that has its own internal coherence, which is less a logical than an expressive or transitional coherence characteristic of the dialectic of protentions and retentions in the living present. With this similarity in mind, the synchronic moment in which speech intervenes must be seen as a relatively stable period in which moments of the past, like retentions, are still operative and in which future alterations are, like protentions, anticipated or adumbrated. In non-phenomenological terms, the present state of a language is in tension between archaic elements in the process of decay and the nascent elements already working to replace them. The dialectical movement of residual and nascent linguistic elements in the present of a ‘living language’ is the working out of a subterranean logos, or an ‘operative intentionality (fungierende Intentionalita¨t)’ (PP 418), to use the language of the Phenomenology of Perception. This operative, historical intentionality accounts for the continuity from moment to moment of a given language, so that linguistic change is not seen as a radical break but as a development or extension already inherent in what came before. Merleau-Ponty says: The accidents of history have been absorbed internally by an intention to communicate which transforms them into a system of expression, and this they remain today in the effort I make to understand the past of the language. External history repeats itself in internal history, which, from the synchrony to synchrony, gives a common meaning to at least certain cycles of development. (PW 25) Speech, then, shares the temporal unity characteristic of the living present, while the unity of language throughout its evolution is a unity characteristic of the operative intentionality of a transition synthesis. Crucial to this account is the understanding that the movement from synchrony to synchrony is not a radical, irrational break, nor is it an exact repetition of what came before. If it were the latter, then the unity of language throughout its evolution would be an identity synthesis, while if it were the former, language would be fragmented and rationality would be dissolved in a Foucauldian series of epistemes. Rather than these alternatives, there is a common intentional unity from synchrony to synchrony, which overlap and encroach upon each other. It is this ‘envelopment of language by language which saves rationality’ (PW 24) because the transitions from synchrony to synchrony are not completely arbitrary, but instead are the result of what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘coherent motivations’

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(PW 24) through which contingent, historical accidents have been incorporated into a self-maintaining system of expression.18 For this account to be complete, a word needs to be said about the concept of motivation. The phenomenological concept of ‘motivation’ was introduced explicitly in the Phenomenology of Perception, where it is treated as a privileged concept of phenomenology intended to escape the formulations of empiricism and idealism. Motivation is neither a ‘cause’ nor a ‘reason’ but is between these two alternatives: The phenomenological notion of motivation is one of those ‘fluid’ concepts which have to be formed if we want to get back to the phenomena. One phenomenon releases another, not by means of some objective efficient cause, like those which link together natural events, but by the meaning which it holds out – there is a raison d’eˆtre for a thing which guides the flow of phenomena without being explicitly laid down in any one of them, a sort of operative reason. . . . To the degree that the motivated phenomenon comes into being, an internal relation to the motivating phenomenon appears; hence, instead of the one merely succeeding the other, the motivated phenomenon makes the motivating phenomenon explicit and comprehensible, and thus seems to have pre-existed its own motive. (PP 49–50) In keeping with the overall thrust of the Phenomenology of Perception, ‘motivation’ is an innovative concept native to phenomenological analyses; it is a concept that cuts between the traditional distinction between the empiricist’s ‘cause’ and the idealist’s ‘reason’ while maintaining the realism of empiricism and the rationality of idealism. In the Phenomenology of Perception, motivation is an important concept for maintaining the correlation between reason and reality or thought and the things themselves. This is phenomenologically sound because even for Husserl ‘motivation’ signifies ‘rational motivation’ in terms of evidence : ‘For every rational position characterized by a motivational relation to originariness of givenness, the expression originary evidence would be available’ (Ideas I 330). More particularly for present purposes, motivation indicates the rational evidence of actualizing open possibilities, which are outlined in a given experience and fulfilled in further experience: Yet it is to be observed that the motivated possibility, of which we spoke above, is to be sharply distinguished from empty possibility: it is motivationally determined by that which the positum includes in itself, given such as it is fulfilled. It is an empty possibility that the now unseen underside of this desk here has ten legs instead of four, which is actually the case. In contrast, the number four is a motivated possibility for the

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determinate perception which I am in the process of effecting. For any perception whatever it is a motivated possibility that, in certain ways, perceptual ‘circumstances’ can change, that ‘as a consequence’ in corresponding modes the perception can change into a series of perceptions of determinate kinds predelineated by the sense of my perception and which fulfills it and confirms its positing. (Ideas I 336–7) Any given perception in process anticipates possibilities that may or may not be fulfilled in future perceptual experience. It is the evidence provided by future experience that distinguishes empty possibility, or what one might call ‘pure’ possibility, from motivated possibility, or what one might call ‘circumscribed’ possibility. Motivated possibilities are given in evidential experience of the things themselves. We might even say that they are internal to the experience itself, as opposed to empty, ‘logical,’ or ‘pure’ possibility. Future perceptual experience may or may not fulfill motivated possibilities; this amounts to saying nothing more than that present anticipations are open to falsification, which, in turn, implies that any given experience can be falsified, as well as confirmed, by future experience. In any given case, what decides the issue is the evidence given in future experience. Merleau-Ponty is attempting to extend the ‘fluid’ concept of motivation from egological perception to intersubjective history; there is good reason for such an extension. Husserl himself extends the notion of motivation from perception to history in the ‘Vienna Lecture.’ When justifying the basic attitude shift of Greek culture from a mythical-practical attitude to a theoretical attitude, the decisive shift in European consciousness, Husserl employs the concept of motivation: ‘Naturally the outbreak of the theoretical attitude, like everything that develops historically, has its factual motivation in the concrete framework of historical occurrence’ (Crisis 285). For Husserl, in order to understand the attitude shift necessary for the institution of the theoretical attitude, which brings about for the first time the idea of universal science and the idea of truth, an inquiry into the factual motivations which give rise to these ideals is required. In other words, it is necessary to understand the motivations by which philosophic wonder, which originated in a concrete historical circumstance, became the idea of universal science, understood as an ‘infinite task’ (Crisis 289). The concept of motivation in the ‘Vienna Lecture’ still has evidential implications, but due to Husserl’s mature understanding of temporality and passive genesis, it has begun to function outside of an egological perceptual framework towards an open-ended ‘infinite task’ characteristic of intersubjective ideal investigations. In brief, the concept of motivation comes to signify the evidential motivations that allow the passage from the factual to the ideal. This is how Merleau-Ponty understands it.

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When applied to novel expression and language, the concept of motivation allows Merleau-Ponty to give an account of ideal meanings that avoids Platonism and nominalism. Understood in terms of language, Merleau-Ponty claims that the rational process of articulating the evidential protentions and retentions that occur in speech indicates that despite the contingent, factual conditioning of language, we are not closed off from the things themselves: ‘In the end language must signify something and not always be language about language’ (PW footnote 37). This is so because while language might well outline possibility, this possibility is under-determined. It does not determine exactly what can possibly or ought to be said. What can be said cannot be reduced to the already said. MerleauPonty affirms that ‘language is not like a prison’ (PW 103). In fact, Merleau-Ponty’s entire analysis of language is oriented away from an account that would settle for a language that merely repeats everyday or established truths because saying something new amounts to actualizing undetermined possibility operative in language. When this occurs, a new meaning has been expressed, something new has been said. The move from under-determined possibility in language to novel expression in speech is evidentially motivated by the things themselves, for he writes that ‘even though the history of a language contains too many hazards to permit a logical development, it nevertheless produces nothing which is not motivated’ (PW 22; my translation). The dynamic development of language, then, is the non-explicit working out of protentions and retentions present in speech in light of further experience and the evidence of the things themselves. In this movement we can see how ‘language leads us to the things themselves’ (PW 14). Novel expression which feeds off, but which also, in the end, surpasses, established truths does not merely tell but shows the things themselves. It articulates them as they truly are. Ultimately, Merleau-Ponty’s account of novel expression is an attempt to re-write the transcendental moment, which is no longer the privilege of a reflectively reduced ego but rather is found in the activity of the speaking subject seeking to extend and develop the expressive possibilities internal to the language as hitherto constituted in past expressions. In light of the problem of transcendental language described in Section II above, the transformation of natural language that Fink’s analysis requires is effected in novel expression. In sum, Merleau-Ponty does not seek to reduce transcendental to natural language, but rather he seeks to give an account of the conditioning factor that natural language inevitably bears on transcendental insights without those factors preventing us from arriving at truth. One final step needs to be taken to bring Saussure back into the picture and complete Merleau-Ponty’s account of novel expression. Rather than denoting an external relation between phenomena such as a ‘reason’ or

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‘cause,’ as would be revealed in objective thought, the phenomenological concept of ‘motive’ denotes an ‘internal relation’ (PP 50). Thus, the real value of Saussurian linguistics for questions of rationality is that it identified an interior of language:19 ‘Saussure shows it is necessary that there be an interior of language, a thought distinct from the linguistic material, and yet tied to it, not ‘‘logical’’ ’ (PW 24). The internal aspect of language is, properly speaking, neither thought nor language but the condition for the emergence of novel thought within language. This ‘non-logical’ logos, this interior to language, is the pregnant silence that precedes and makes possible novel expressions; or, in the terms of the Phenomenology of Perception, it is the ‘operative intentionality’ that guides the flow of phenomena without being explicit in any one of them. Beneath spoken language (la parole parle´e), with its repertoire of ready-made significations, we detect ‘an operant or speaking language [la parole parlant], whose words have a silent life . . . and come together or separate according to the needs of their lateral or indirect signification’ (PW 87). It is this operant or ‘speaking language’ that Merleau-Ponty describes variously as ‘silence,’ ‘latency,’ ‘lateral or oblique meaning’ (PW 46) characteristic of the interior of language. In keeping with the Saussurian paradigm, the interior of language refers to the differential relationship between sign and sign, that is, to all actual and possible relationships implied in the already established relationships between sign and sign in established usage. Thus, the ‘lateral’ aspect so crucial to the middle-period account of language is meant to highlight the adumbrative nature of all actual, as well as possible, relationships between signs, which is the condition for the possibility of novel expression. The speaker who truly says something new, exploits the hitherto undetermined possibilities inherent in spoken language in a linguistic event in which the speaking subject surpasses the conventions and the established relationships in a language towards the things themselves. ‘It is by considering language,’ Merleau-Ponty says, ‘that we would best see how we are to and how we are not to return to the things themselves’ (VI 125). It is only by moving through the interior of language that we arrive at the exterior of language, the world and the things themselves. In novel expression, the author’s speech is meaningful insofar as I come to understand the author’s view of the world as a possible perspective on the world that we share; that is, I find in another’s speech a possible way in which the things themselves get articulated in the author’s language, so that I not only share in the author’s language and thought but also come to dwell in the author’s world alongside the author, in a common undertaking of expression. Novel expression, thus, leaves an ‘echo.’ For every expression is, in itself, incomplete. It has an incompleteness that calls for a sequel, which seeks to

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bring to full expression all that was implied in the silence and latency of the already said. In authentic speech, I am not seeking to express another’s experience. This sort of repetition is impossible. Rather, I seek to express my own experience in light of the linguistic significance outlined in former expressions, and, insofar as these words are adequate to articulate the things themselves, I take them over and repeat them. But in those cases when inherited language is inadequate, there is another form of ‘repetition,’ an authentic form of ‘repetition.’ In this case, when I take over the indirect signification adumbrated in them, I invest them with a novel, motivated meaning, thus transforming them, but this novelty also makes possible and outlines a future that will surpass it, if and when it proves no longer adequate. Living language destroys to preserve. This merely indicates that each expression calls for and provides the means of its own surpassing. This movement is not the death of language but is its very life. This is living language. The unsaid, with its plethora of indirect or lateral significations, gives language a future. Analytic analysis of language purports to be the final word, to say things clearly once and for all. But this is not possible, and, even if it were possible, such an achievement – taken by itself and outlined above as the ‘specter of pure language’ – would not be the culmination of language but precisely the opposite: it would be the death of language. Thought would be ceaselessly entangled in the sedimentations of the past. It is the interior of language, which is pregnant with possibilities, that adumbrates and makes possible future expressions, which will not come to negate former expressions but will remain true to the original speaking intention, seeking to bring it to fuller articulation. Pure language, if such a thing were possible, would exhaust possibility in actuality and would cease to hold significant value for speakers. Such a language would be moribund. As a result, living language cannot be detached in an attempt to locate objective structures from outside the human dimension of history, culture, and the empirical means of expression. On the contrary, the structures of language are accessible from the inside in their latent operation in every attempt at novel expression, the attempt to express more adequately what so many others have struggled to express before us.

V. Conclusion Soon after the publication of the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty places language at the center of his phenomenological reflections. This move is a response to a problem that arises internal to phenomenological thought, namely, the need to outline the conditions for the possibility of a transcendental language. Best articulated in Eugen Fink’s Sixth Cartesian

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Meditation, this problem remained an outstanding problem for phenomenology, one of which both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty were aware. By integrating the deeper insights of Saussurian linguistics, Merleau-Ponty is responding to this phenomenological problem. Moreover, Saussurian linguistics offers an account of language that is not at odds with phenomenology, and also the Saussurian emphasis on linguistic evolution, when coupled with the phenomenological concepts of the living present and evidential motivation, allows Merleau-Ponty to give an account of novel expression that re-integrates transcendental language into natural language without allowing the latter to dominate the former. Transcendental insights are expressed in coherent deformations of natural language, deformations that are circumscribed possibilities inherent in established language and motivated by the things themselves. Thus, the middle-period account of novel expression amounts to a re-writing of the transcendental moment, which, on this account, is the privilege of the speaking subject fully at home in a language in those moments of authentic expression that – while being possibilities outlined in spoken language – in the end surpass established language to become expressive of the things themselves. The transcendental moment no longer belongs to the transcendental ego with a ‘purified’ natural language; rather, transcendental insight becomes the greatest achievement of the speaking subject ensconced in a living language. This achievement is made possible by a natural, living language. Novel expression, thus, provides us with an instance of the double envelopment, or encroachment, Merleau-Ponty will come to speak of in reference to the encroachment of the natural on the transcendental and vice versa. We have seen how novel expression restores our relation with the things themselves. When expanded to account for communication, it also restores our relations with others.

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Intersubjectivity and the Intermonde

I. Constitution of the Intermonde Merleau-Ponty’s account of novel expression not only shows how a transcendental language is possible, it also points out the necessary intersubjective character of language and thought. Language exists neither as a thing nor as a consciousness. It is more like an organism in evolution, a dimension of our existence with a ‘life’ and movement of its own. As such, it is not impervious to the influences of speaking subjects. Rather, it is sustained in its very being insofar as it remains meaningful and continues to offer resources to reward speakers’ initiative to take it up and to say something new. In phenomenological terms, novel expression is the attempt to ‘re-join’ (PW 133) the expressive intention of others in order to bring it to fulfillment in light of further experience. As a consequence, the activity of speaking is an act of participation in a language with no identifiable author.1 Novel expression and the account of language that supports it thus have implications for the question of the constitution of the intermonde, which, as indicated in Chapter 3 above, is a problem for a phenomenological account of rationality. Language is a public institution in which the speaking subject participates with others. But this leads to a further question: What is the nature of this participation and what does it say about the speaking subject? In the activity of re-joining the speaking intention of others, language itself is sustained and constituted, but more than this is implied. For in such re-joining, the other is made accessible in a radically new way. Merleau-Ponty’s thought on language thus returns to the question of intersubjectivity and the problem of the constitution of the intermonde, which, as we saw above, is a problem announced but left unresolved in the Phenomenology of Perception. As described earlier, intersubjectivity is pursued largely in terms of perception in the Phenomenology of Perception. While the account found there succeeds in avoiding the problem of solipsism and establishes a shared world of perception between self and other, it broaches but does not provide an account of the other as thinking subject, which, in turn, implies the problem of the status of the cultural world in general. We saw above that Merleau-Ponty leaves for another occasion an account of the

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constitution of a shared cultural world because its complete description goes beyond what an analysis of perception can provide. In terms of the Phenomenology of Perception, it will be recalled, the question at issue is: by whom and for whom is the intermonde constituted? In that early text, it was established that the subjectivity that held such constitutive power belonged to a we-subjectivity understood in terms of generality and anonymity; that is, it belongs to no one in particular but to all who belong to a given culture in general. In brief, the intermonde is constituted anonymously and intersubjectively. The question now becomes the individual’s relation to this anonymously constituted cultural generality. Merleau-Ponty’s response to this question can be found in his account of dialogue and communication in the middle period, which, when fully developed, indicates an initial step away from a ‘philosophy of consciousness,’ which is the self-criticism Merleau-Ponty levels against his early thought in The Visible and the Invisible.2 In the Phenomenology of Perception, the problem of how there can be others for me is resolved at the pre-reflective level of perception and feeling. But the task at hand, left unresolved in that text and returned to in the middle period, is to show ‘how language prolongs and transforms the silent relation with the other’ (PW 139). Not surprisingly, MerleauPonty’s analysis of the other as present in language is modeled on the primordial analysis of the other in perception. Linguistic expression is a dimension of my very being, so that Merleau-Ponty can say, ‘I am also speech’ (PW 143), which we are to take in the same sense as when he says in the Phenomenology of Perception, ‘I am my body.’ I am ‘enlanguaged,’ to coin a term, as I am embodied. And much like carnal generality yields a common situation between me and the other, ‘the common language which we speak is something like the anonymous corporeality which we share with other organisms’ (PW 140). This indicates that by speaking a language, I have a primordial relationship to language in its active state. Active language or ‘speech’ is thus understood as a dimension of being in which I actively participate. Speech establishes a common situation, ‘which is no longer only a community of being but a community of doing’ (PW 140). Speech is possible because we are inaugurated into a linguistic praxis, which is a dimension of our existence with others who share the same language. It is in speech that the ‘silence’ between self and other is finally broken, and self and other slip into the shared world of language and thought. To understand the speech that finally breaks the silence and allows communication and genuine intersubjectivity, we can return to the phenomenon of novel expression in its paradigmatic form of literary expression. When I begin to read a literary work that really says something new to me, I bring to my reading the ‘sedimented language’ (PW 13) that

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the author and I share by virtue of speaking the same language, but as I read, I become disoriented. My world becomes disrupted by a consistent deviation. The author’s style presents a view of the world that is a ‘coherent deformation’ (PW 60)3 of my view. In other words, the author’s language is a ‘coherent deformation’ of my idiolect. The deformation is not arbitrary but a response to certain possibilities that fringed the things in my world. It is a subtle shift that indicates a possible way in which the world can be articulated, and if the author really says something new, I will recognize and come to accept this altered view of the world as justifiably expressing the things themselves. Reading a literary work, thus, is not a matter of passively noting what the author says as if she were merely picking out and parading clearly established significations, for oftentimes these significations have yet to become significations. Reading a literary work is an active response to a proffered meaning, and novel signification is constituted only if I take up the author’s intention, following along and making that intention my own. Of Stendhal, Merleau-Ponty says: I have access to Stendhal’s outlook through the commonplace words he uses. But in his hands, these words are given a new twist. The cross references multiply. More and more arrows point in the direction of a thought I have never encountered before and perhaps would have never met without Stendhal. At the same time, the contexts in which Stendhal uses common words reveal even more majestically the new meaning with which he endows them. I get closer and closer to him, until in the end I read his words with the very same intention that he gave them. . . . the author’s voice results in my assuming his thoughts. (PW 13) For Merleau-Ponty, language is implicated in every thought, and vice versa. By re-joining the speaking intention of the other, I make the thought of the other my own. Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of literary expression indicates that insofar as language is implicated in my thought – that which is very much mine4 – the other is implicated in my thought as well. By re-joining the expressive intention of the other, I am able to integrate the thought of the other into my own in an expressive operation that surpasses us as monadic individuals. The case of philosophic thought is a privileged locus to witness this rejoining. Take Descartes, for example. When, as philosophers, we re-join Descartes’ thought, Merleau-Ponty asks: ‘How can we draw a line between Descartes’ thought and what we have thought on the basis of it, between what we owe him and what we lend to him in our interpretations?’ (PW 92). The implication is that such a line, strictly speaking, cannot be clearly drawn. In any literary expression, such as is found in classic philosophic texts, the other contributes to my thought and I to the other’s, so that I am

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able to only provisionally – but not ultimately – distinguish between the other’s thought and mine, between the other and myself: In speech the impossible agreement between two rival totalities is realized not because speech forces us back upon ourselves to discover some unique spirit in which we participate but because speech concerns us, catches us indirectly, seduces us, trails us along, transforms us into the other and him into us, abolishes the limit between mine and not-mine, and ends the alternative between what has sense for me and what is nonsense for me, between me as subject and the other as object. (PW 145) Merleau-Ponty characterizes this re-joining of thought as an ‘intentional transgression’ (Signs 94, 96).5 For Merleau-Ponty, it means that intentional activity, and hence the intentional object, is not personal but pre-personal and neutral with respect to self and other. Intentionality understood in non-personalist terms indicates that Merleau-Ponty is extending Husserl’s use of the term ‘intentionality,’ and by doing so, destabilizing both it and the view of the philosophic subject that supports it. Intentional transgression is initially experienced in embodiment, but, here, it is being extended to language. It characterizes not only the ‘coupling’ (Husserl’s ‘Paarung’) that occurs in my carnal relations with others but also my linguistic relations with others. In phenomenological terms, consciousness, intentionality, and the intentional object are being re-written in these middle-period writings on language and communication. The initial steps of this re-writing were being taken in the early period of Merleau-Ponty’s career but were stopped at the doorstep of thought and language, the stronghold of the traditional philosophic subject. In more traditional terms, thought and language are being re-written in intersubjective terms, and the traditional philosophic subject is being de-centered. This reciprocal trespass of self and other, which undercuts the traditional philosophic subject, is paradigmatic in linguistic expression and is characteristic of all genuine communication, especially dialogue. When I do not immediately understand the speech of another, it comes as a provocation to me. It is on the margin of sense and non-sense. Originally encountered as non-sense, the other’s speech comes as a challenge to me and my hold on things; it is a disruptive challenge which calls on me to either adopt or reject an altered view of the world. As I come to understand the view presented by the other, it moves out of the margin of nonsense to become meaningful. This movement is best noticed in dialogue in which, by responding to my interlocutor, my own thought is drawn from me. The other, Merleau-Ponty says in this regard, ‘teaches me my own thoughts’ (PW 143) so that, in the end, whether we come to agreement or disagreement, I cannot say strictly what is mine and what is his.

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Provocation by the other implies a response: I can dismiss the challenge presented by the other as non-sense or finally re-join the common expressive intention and attempt to ‘think along with’ the other. In any case, when the other speaks, I am not a passive listener being assaulted by the thought of the other. Instead, I actively re-join the thought of the other: Between myself as speech and the other as speech, or more generally myself as expression and the other as expression, there is no longer that alteration which makes a rivalry of the relation between minds. I am not active only when speaking; rather, I precede my thought in the listener. I am not passive while I am listening; rather, I speak according to what the other is saying. Speaking is not just my own initiative, listening is not submitting to the initiative of the other, because as speaking subjects we are continuing, we are resuming a common effort more ancient than we, upon which we are grafted to one another and which is the manifestation, the growth, of truth. (PW 144) Genuine communication is a movement of thought in mutual engagement between interlocutors who already share a common intellectual heritage. It is not the thought of a cogito or a monadic transcendental subject but the thought of a speaking subject engaged with others in a concrete historical world. That is, such a movement is itself a continuation of a thought already underway before the other or I come to it. Merleau-Ponty’s use of the term, ‘coherent deformation’ to describe novel expression indicates that my perspective is being disrupted by the perspective of another. Deformation gives me alterity; however, this deformation is not an alien invasion of or challenge to my world as it is for Sartre. Instead, it is another perspective on a common world. It is through such coherent deformations that I am assured of ascending to a world shared by others with different perspectives on the world. They are perspectives, however, which I can, through effort, come to understand. The author does not express already constituted pure ideas that reside in the intellect or in a Platonic heaven of ideas; instead, by saying something new, the writer offers me a re-vision (or to avoid the ocular metaphor, a rearticulation) of the concrete historical world which we share. In this sense, a coherent deformation is similar to a Gestalt switch insofar as it is a revision, but it is a re-vision with a crucial difference. A Gestalt is a closed structure, and a Gestalt switch is the re-arrangement of the terms of that structure. A coherent deformation, on the other hand, signifies an open structure, that is, a total restructuring not only of the relations between the terms but also an alteration of those very terms themselves, such that the unity of the structure itself is disrupted from the outside. Novel

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expression, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘is charged with revealing relations not only between terms given from elsewhere but even the very terms of these relations’ (PW 141). It is the radical alteration of a coherent deformation that introduces the ‘hazardous in literary communication’ (Signs 77), the ever-present possibility of misunderstanding; it is an irreducible opacity that is a weakness of language which one could not and should not even try to overcome. Rather ‘it is the price we must pay to have a literature, that is, a conquering language which introduces us to unfamiliar perspectives instead of confirming us in our own’ (Signs 77). For there to be novel expression, we must admit the possibility of misunderstanding. Attempts at novel expression carry no guarantees. But Merleau-Ponty stresses that more often than not there is convergence and meaning. There can be signification only insofar as the other throws me outside myself, only insofar as her view on the world differs from mine; analogously, there can be a perceptual world for me because the other, by responding to it, announces to me that the same objects exist for her as well, despite the fact that the objects in the world are offering to her different perspectives. In communication I re-join the intention of others as in perception, when looking at an object seen by others, I re-join or join-in the other’s perceptual intentions. I know that the perceptual object is beyond my view on it, that there are other views on the object, that the object is at least potentially seen by everyone. Correspondingly, the intentional object of communication is beyond my or any individual intention of it, and such transcendence indicates the reality, or in terms of rationality, the validity of the common intentions. In terms of rationality, the givenness of the object of communication beyond any single intentional attitude ‘is not a skeptical principle; on the contrary, it is a principle of truth; we really inhabit the same world and are open to truth precisely because there arises this diffusion among thoughts’ (PW 94). Of course, such validity and truth is not absolute but rather is the result of convergence. The cultural sedimentations we share make the surpassing of difference possible via a shared meaning that comes to be mutually understood. It is here that language opens out on to truth. Rather than iterable communicability, linguistic meaning is, then, coconstituted, or to use a term Merleau-Ponty adopts from Husserl, is instituted (Stiftungen) in the provocation–response movement of the speaking subject and active listener characteristic of literary expression and all genuine communication. Merleau-Ponty’s analysis implies that we must come to model ideal objects on the institution of meaning in literary and artistic experience, and not on mathematical experience as Husserl does. The upshot of Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of literary expression is that language, thought, and subjectivity are intertwined when we move from the

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thinking subject to the speaking subject and, finally, to what he calls the ‘instituting subject’ (IPP 108). The reciprocal trespass of self and other in the ‘intentional transgression’ shows that intentionality can no longer be adequately conceived in terms of a constituting bestowal (Sinngebung) originating solely from the transcendental subject. For a robust account of historicity has shown that Husserlian intentionality has been disrupted: the noesis and noema have been de-centered from a constituting consciousness to an instituting intersubjectivity. The ultimate upshot of this is that the primordial silence that precedes speech is no longer understood as pre-predicative perceptual silence but rather is characterized as an intersubjective silence of that which is adumbrated but which remains unspoken in a tradition. In sum, the silence that precedes speech is the unthought and unsaid of others. Undoubtedly, the instituting subject cannot be identified with the Cartesian cogito any more than it can be identified with the Husserlian transcendental ego, but, more importantly to my thesis here, the instituting subject cannot be identified with the tacit cogito as articulated in the Phenomenology of Perception. The silence that precedes speech is not entirely bodily. From the moment I speak, I am outside myself – ahead of myself and behind myself – already re-joining the thought of others from the past and future, as well as the present. To answer the question posed in the Phenomenology of Perception – who constitutes the intermonde – we can say that the intermonde is an achievement of instituting intersubjectivity, not embodied subjectivity; it is a semiological space that has already been prepared for by the speech of others when we enter it and take up our position as members of a linguistic and cultural community. The intermonde is what Merleau-Ponty loosely calls ‘culture’ in the middle period and is the object of his most intense interrogation as the site of the origin of meaning. We have come to see one aspect of the structure of the intermonde : It is the constitutingconstituted thought of historical individuals in a given culture. It is constituting because by being born into a specific culture and language, I am given over to all possible and actual meaning inherent in the linguistic sedimentations; it is constituted insofar as these sedimentations can be meaningful only if I take them up and further determine them and, ultimately, alter them in light of my own experience. In other words, I am given over to cultural sedimentation insofar as, when speaking, I cannot but continue to live the meaning inherent in them in the mode of acceptance, rejection, or amplification. That which is very much mine, my thought, is, thus, affected from a distance by the thought of others but not without my complicity and consent, for my relation with the intermonde is one of active participation or, better, a dialectic movement between public institution and personal intention, between my idiolect and the common language. The provocation–response structure of the intermonde de-centers

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the thinking subject and implicates it in the intersubjective institution of the intermonde. Ultimately, Merleau-Ponty’s account of the constituting nature of the intermonde as the original site of meaning is an initial indication that the Fundierung account of ideal objects, which is articulated in the Phenomenology of Perception, is being surpassed by an emerging Stiftung account of ideal objects. Taken in itself, the intermonde is that quasi-independent – but by no means purely anonymous – symbolic space in which cultural sedimentations are institutionally intelligible. Thus, it is at least possible to say that their intelligibility and rationality are ‘structured like language,’ that is to say, characterized by differentially related terms, which always and forever remain open to individual initiatives. In terms of ideal objects, the ideal world is not a stable Platonic heaven of ideas nor a fluid nominalism but is better characterized as ‘matrices of ideas’ (PW 90) that: Have no pre-existence and which can, for a longer or shorter time, influence history itself and then disappear not by external forces but through an internal disintegration or because one of their secondary elements becomes predominant and changes their nature. (AD 16–17) Ideal objects are cultural creations, ways of organizing and signifying common experience; thus, they originate from factical situations and remain, in real terms, significant as long as their interpretive power remains effective. The ideal is never fully liberated from the factual and remains tied to it until that time it can no longer be ‘verified’ in further experience and is surpassed; but this is nothing more than the movement of novel expression detailed above. And Merleau-Ponty’s interest in art and literature, in the middle period, appears to be motivated by a nonexplicit desire to give phenomenology another model for understanding ideal objects, one that differs from Husserl’s model. Husserl insisted on using mathematical ideas as the model by which all ideal objects are to be understood. While this model fits his rationalistic tendencies, it fails to fully account for all ideal objects because it becomes problematic when one seeks to describe non-mathematical ideal objects. But a phenomenological account of rationality does not depend on a Husserlian mathematical model of the ideal. What I want to suggest is that Merleau-Ponty’s writings on art, literature, history, and linguistics are an attempt to offer a different model for understanding ideal objects, a model that takes into account the factical conditions necessary for the emergence and maintenance of ideal objects. Husserl’s late thought was, at best, perhaps tending in this direction, and Merleau-Ponty seeks to develop this late tendency, often pushing Husserl further than he would have gone himself. Idealities are sustained as meaning-structuring

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‘matrices’ in the activity of the participants of a given tradition; as such they never reach the density of objects but are rather open-ended structures, which either evolve over time in further elaboration or atrophy and are surpassed. While he was always interested in history, Merleau-Ponty’s thought on ideal objects and tradition led him to concentrate more and more on historical rationality, particularly institution and iterability, as his thought progressed through the middle period such that by the middle of the 1950s his lectures at the Colle`ge de France centered on institution and history.

II. Fundierung, Stiftung, and the Standard Reading of the Middle Period The account of intersubjectivity, ideal objects, and the intermonde in the middle period signify an important shift in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. We have seen that the analysis of language in the Phenomenology of Perception is based on a gestural model of meaning, which locates the origin of linguistic meaning in a Fundierung. Linguistic signification is caught up in a founded/founding relationship with perceptual sens. We have also seen that difficulties in this original account led Merleau-Ponty in the middle period to turn his attention to the historical constitution of language. In phenomenological terms, due to the inherence of linguistic meaning in cultural sedimentations, tracing the origin of linguistic meaning to perception now appears inadequate to fully account for linguistic meaning and ideal objects. In response to this shortcoming, the task of the middle period is to account for the various ways in which cultural sedimentations complicate phenomenological investigations hitherto undertaken. This is the problematic that motivates Merleau-Ponty’s interest in Saussurian linguistics, specifically Saussure’s account of the evolution of language. What we notice in the middle-period writings on language, communication, and intersubjectivity is, again, a disruption and complication of the gestural account of meaning and the Fundierung relationship. As a result, an alternative account of meaning is emerging in these writings, one that is exposed by investigating the diacritical structure of the interior of language. We might call this a ‘lateral’ account of meaning, which locates the origin of meaning in an intersubjective act of Stiftung (or institution). While the full emergence of this second account of meaning must wait until Merleau-Ponty’s final writings, we can see already in the middle period that it differs from the gestural account in important aspects. These differences doubtless betray an implicit self-criticism of the gestural account, criticisms that are crucial to understanding the motivating

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problematic of Merleau-Ponty’s late thought. However, due to its inchoate state and the fact that the middle period is often neglected, the ‘lateral’ account of language emerging in the middle period is quite often overlooked by readers of Merleau-Ponty. In this subsection, I shall interrupt my account of ideal objects to briefly outline what we might call the ‘standard’ reading of Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre in order to show how it overlooks crucial developments in Merleau-Ponty’s thought in the middle period and, thus, distorts the overall itinerary of Merleau-Ponty’s thought. According to the standard reading,6 Merleau-Ponty’s gestural account of language articulated in the Phenomenology of Perception, which bases linguistic meaning in a perceptual Fundierung, is elaborated and modified through the middle period to the extent that the concept of reversibility ultimately comes to supplant Fundierung in Merleau-Ponty’s late thought. Furthermore, despite Merleau-Ponty’s abandonment of the language of Fundierung for that of reversibility, what remains constant throughout Merleau-Ponty’s entire career is the thesis that all linguistic meaning originates from perceptual sense and that, in one manner or another, it ultimately returns or refers to the perceptual world such that the rational legitimacy of language is underwritten by perception. Correlatively, language remains essentially a gestural expression of the perceptual world. These are the essential elements of the standard reading. What remains unclear in this reading is exactly what occurs between the Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible such that Merleau-Ponty sees the need to abandon the language of ‘Fundierung’ for that of ‘reversibility.’ Why does he not continue to speak of Fundierung ? The standard reading fails to notice the novelty of the middle period and in so doing fails to see Merleau-Ponty’s implicit self-criticism of his earlier work. Indeed, according to the standard reading, writings from the middle period are rarely considered separately. If the middle period is considered at all, it is seen either as merely a continuation of the early period or as nothing more than an anticipation of the late period. Either approach obscures important developments in Merleau-Ponty’s thought in the middle period. Indeed, such a reading is even misleading when one is trying to account for Merleau-Ponty’s final view of language in The Visible and the Invisible by highlighting its consonance with or divergence from his initial view of language in the Phenomenology of Perception. In addition to presenting Merleau-Ponty’s account of ideal objects, the present work seeks to develop a reading of the middle period that will correct these oversights and thereby aid us in understanding more clearly Merleau-Ponty’s final thought, especially its relation to his early period. With this brief outline of the standard reading in view, we can turn to its more specific shortcomings. First, it fails to notice the emergence of the Husserlian concept of Stiftung in place of Fundierung, which signifies an

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initial step away from the formulations in the Phenomenology of Perception on the way to reversibility, and second, it fails to notice crucial differences between the emerging, Saussurian-inspired ‘lateral’ account of language and Merleau-Ponty’s earlier gestural account of language. First, the standard reading fails to notice the emergence and the importance of the Stiftung analysis for Merleau-Ponty’s account of language.7 There is some textual basis for this oversight, for Merleau-Ponty himself does not clearly distinguish Fundierung and Stiftung in the Phenomenology of Perception when he first broaches the concept of Fundierung.8 There are also several passages in the middle period, in which MerleauPonty continues to understand Stiftung and Fundierung to have the same function – as the locus at which meaning emerges from non-meaning, the frontier of sense and non-sense – without noting the crucial difference between them, namely that Fundierung is associated with egological, perceptual sens, while Stiftung implies an intersubjective, historical origin of meaning. But, and this is the crucial point here, what also emerges in the middle-period writings is a meaning of Stiftung that cannot be identified with the meaning of Fundierung, especially its association with the narrow sense of perception, that is, understood as sensuous perception. It is this emergent meaning that is at stake in the middle period and which ultimately leads to the re-conceptualization of the origin of linguistic meaning from Fundierung through Stiftung and finally to reversibility. That is, we can see in the emerging difference between the dialectical relationship implied in Fundierung and that which is implied in Stiftung a silent reappraisal and self-criticism of his earlier conceptions of the origin of linguistic meaning and an initial step away from a ‘philosophy of consciousness,’ which, again, is his criticism of the Phenomenology of Perception found in The Visible and the Invisible. In the Themes from the 1954–55 lecture series, ‘Institution in Personal and Public History,’ Merleau-Ponty claims that ‘the concept of institution [Stiftung] may help us to find a solution to difficulties in the philosophy of consciousness’ (IPP 107; my translation). This revealing quote indicates that due to the intersubjective implications of the Stiftung, the initial move away from a ‘philosophy of consciousness’ is implicitly taken when the origin of meaning is located in a Stiftung, rather than in a Fundierung. This is so because Fundierung is an essentially egological notion, while Stiftung is an essentially intersubjective one. It will be recalled that the Fundierung relationship initially described in the Phenomenology of Perception was meant to indicate the non-reductive character of the founded/founding relationship between perception and understanding. In the ‘dialectic of [intelligible] form and [sensible] content’ (PP 127), neither term is primary. It is crucial to note here the hierarchical, egological character of Fundierung ; it refers, after all, to the

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founding/founded relationship in egological consciousness. In his most explicit statement on Stiftung in the middle period, it is clear that what Merleau-Ponty says about Stiftung disrupts and complicates this straightforward founding/founded relationship. When speaking of the ‘metamorphosis’ accomplished by the painter, Merleau-Ponty claims: It is also a response to what the world, the past, and the completed works demanded. It is accomplishment and fraternity. Husserl has used the fine word Stiftung – foundation or establishment – to designate first of all the unlimited fecundity of each present which, precisely because it is singular and passes, can never stop having been and thus being universally; but above all to designate that fecundity of the products of culture which continue to have value after their appearance and which open a field of investigation in which they will perpetually come to life again. It is thus that the world as soon as he has seen it, his first attempts at painting, and the whole past of painting all deliver up a tradition to the painter – that is, Husserl remarks, the power to forget origins and to give to the past not a survival, which is the hypocritical form of forgetfulness, but a new life, which is the noble form of memory. (PW 68)9 In general, Stiftung is a richer notion than Fundierung, seeking to take into account the multiple involvements in the origin of meaning. More specifically, first, Stiftung implies intersubjectivity; it is not an intrapersonal event but an interpersonal one. Fundierung insufficiently recognizes the inherent intersubjective character in the origin of meaning. Second, Stiftung is a temporal notion. The relationship between what is established and its development is a historical relationship: Stiftung implies a past and calls for a future. Stiftung, thus, takes into account any temporal development of meaning, which includes the dialectic between perception and understanding found in the Fundierung account. That is, personal ‘history’ merges with interpersonal history in the Stiftung. Finally, and most importantly here, Stiftung is an establishment insofar as it not only emerges from a past but also opens a field of investigation that calls for further elaboration. That is, it opens up a region of being beyond what was hitherto opened; hence, in this regard, it opens up a field that allows things to present themselves. In other words, it is the origin in terms of being the condition for the possibility of any field of presence. Due to its status as an origin or opening, the Stiftung calls for elaboration, which only the future can provide. Such elaboration is neither purely peremptory nor merely optional but is the adumbration of the possible. Every Stiftung calls for a response, which it itself allows but does not provide. Thus if we ask, ‘what is instituted?’ we must say that a tradition, understood as an intersubjective field of sens, is founded, which implies that a region

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of being is opened up that calls for further explication, further interrogations. Such interrogations can be considered ‘repetitions’ only insofar as the ‘forgotten’ origin is implicitly maintained in each expressive act in which the field is coherently developed, much in the same way that subsequent perceptual moments (Abschattungen) coherently develop those that came before. Because it is in the past, the origin cannot be simply repeated, but it is iteratively developed, even in ‘coherent deformations.’ However, this amounts to a surpassing – in novel expression – of what the tradition has already established. In this way, novel expression repeats and maintains the origin and subsequent sedimentations through alteration and elaboration by further developing the region of being opened up by the Stiftung. In this final sense of an origin, one that is to be further explicated in subsequent intentional development – and only in this sense – can perception said to be a Stiftung : Perception makes what is expressed dwell in signs, not through some previous convention but through the eloquence of their very arrangement and configuration. It implants a meaning in what did not have one and thus, instead of exhausting itself in the moment it occurs, perception inaugurates an order and founds an institution or tradition. (PW 78–9) Perception ‘founds’ such a ‘tradition’ insofar as it opens a field for higher cognitive operations to develop the meaning that is inherent in the perceptual field itself. But, and this is the crucial point, to say that perception, like speech, ‘founds’ a tradition of sens is not to say that all traditions are founded on perception. It is this latter claim that the standard reading espouses. But by ignoring the essential historical and intersubjective character of the notion of Stiftung, such a reading overlooks the contribution of cultural sedimentations to language. It ignores the fact that language has resources other than egological perception. By interrogating the conditioning factor of cultural sedimentations and by linking the origin of linguistic signification to a Stiftung rather than to a Fundierung, Merleau-Ponty is acknowledging the limitations of his earlier, perceptual analyses and is seeking to elaborate them with a more mature conception, one which takes into account the altering effects of ‘sedimentation’ on linguistic meaning. Therefore, by overlooking the Stiftung account in the middle period, the standard reading fails to take note of precisely the way in which the concept of Stiftung acknowledges the limitations of his earlier analysis, as well as ignoring Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to overcome, through elaboration, these limitations in the middle period with a more robust analysis that takes into account the conditioning factor of cultural sedimentations on language and thought, all of which are incorporated into his late-period concept of reversibility.

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Not only does the Stiftung account come to supplant the Fundierung account in the middle period but also the gestural theory of language as articulated in the Phenomenology of Perception is displaced for what we can call, because of its Saussurian heritage, a ‘lateral’ theory of language. Furthermore, just as the emergence of the Stiftung account implies a silent criticism of the Fundierung account, likewise, the ‘lateral’ theory of language that emerges in the middle period contains an implicit self-criticism of the gestural theory. This silent self-criticism, however, is especially difficult to see, particularly because Merleau-Ponty continues to speak of gesture when explicating the expressive function of language. For instance, speech is ‘the expressive gesture’ (PW 140), a ‘linguistic gesture’ (Signs 42, 81), and even a ‘semiological gesticulation’ (CAL 51). To understand the shift gestating in Merleau-Ponty’s thought at this time, it will be helpful to recall the virtues of the gestural theory of language in order to distinguish bodily gestures from the paradoxical-sounding ‘linguistic gestures.’ It will be recalled from above (Chapter 2, Section III) that the gestural theory of meaning was meant to support Merleau-Ponty’s claim against intellectual and empirical accounts of language both of which ultimately ignore the speaking subject. Merleau-Ponty insists that ‘the word has a meaning’ (PP 177). We noted furthermore that this gestural theory of meaning implies three things. First, it implies that meaning is integrated into the very act of expression. The meaning of the hand raised in anger is not separate from the movement of the raising of the hand itself but is constituted in and through this movement. We will call this the inseparability thesis: meaning cannot be separated from its articulation but is constituted in the articulation itself. This implies, second, that the gesture is self-expressive of the other; I do not need to infer the anger of the other in some hidden consciousness. It is given to me in the raised hand ready to strike. Thus, the meaning implicit in the gesture is intersubjective meaning without the difficulties of other ‘minds’ or ‘consciousnesses.’ We will call this implication of the gestural theory of meaning the intersubjective thesis, which implies, finally, that to be meaningful, the gesture presupposes a common surrounding world to which the gesture refers and from which gestural significance stands out. We will call this the commonworld thesis. Finally, it was noted above that the gestural theory of meaning is characterized by the Fundierung relationship, that the shared perceptual world stands in a founded/founding relationship to gestural meaning. But what is implied in the gestural theory of meaning is that the gesture refers to and presupposes an already constituted shared world prior to the gesture, which in this case is the perceptual world, but it does not account for the original institution of this world. In the middle period, the task is to interrogate the nature of the already

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constituted shared perceptual world. In phenomenological terms, the question in the middle-period writings on language, history, and intersubjectivity is the institution of the cultural sedimentations that are implied in all expression, even gestural expression. What leads to confusion and obscures a significant shift in Merleau-Ponty’s thought is that during the middle period he continues to speak of speech and expression in terms of gesture. These formulations (‘expressive gesture’ and ‘linguistic gesture’) ultimately imply that the conquering speech that institutes meaning – which is the question at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s most intense interrogation in the middle period – can be considered gestures insofar as they maintain both inseparability and intersubjectivity theses, but not insofar as meaning is founded on an already constituted world of perception because it is the very institution of the common world that is at stake in ‘conquering speech.’ In the final analysis, the gestural theory of meaning as it is articulated in the Phenomenology of Perception bases meaning on an already established common world, but it is insufficient to account for the establishment of the objects and relations of this world as well as for the cultural sedimentations from which gestures draw their meaning. The origin of meaning, then, cannot be found in the bodily gesture but in the linguistic ‘gesture’ of speech: Speech has to teach its own meaning to both the speaker and listener. It is not enough for speech to convey a meaning already given to either side. Speech must bring meaning into existence. . . . It is therefore necessary to conceive the operation of speech as outside any previously institutionalized signification, as a unique act whereby a man’s speaking furnishes his listener and a culture that is common to them. Certainly, speech is nowhere visible. (PW 141) Speech, the primordial expressive operation, is nowhere visible but is rather the condition for the possibility of things becoming visible, which it achieves by opening a field for beings to show themselves; it is this sort of origin that speech effects in a Stiftung, an institution, which is ‘beneath’ even perception in the already established intermonde and is the basis for even the most rudimentary gesture. In the end, we must see that phrases such as ‘linguistic gesture’ and ‘expressive gesture’ are meant to indicate that every gesture is ‘linguistic’ all the way down, as it were, not that language is bodily and perceptual all the way up. Furthermore, as with the Fundierung/Stiftung distinction, we can say that gestures can be speech insofar as they bring meaning into existence but not that all speech is a gesture. It is the latter that the standard reading endorses. If Merleau-Ponty continues to speak of gesture in the middle period, it is because idealistic and nominalistic theories of language – the twin threat in the middle

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period, both of which seek to separate meaning from its articulation, which amounts to ignoring the speaking subject – are never far off. Merleau-Ponty continues to talk of gesture in order to emphasize the inseparability and intersubjectivity theses, which he sought to establish in his earliest analyses of language. Because Merleau-Ponty continues to speak of language in terms of gesture in the middle period, a subtle but crucial shift in his thought is understandably obscured and often overlooked by the standard reading, which, in brief, claims that Merleau-Ponty maintains throughout his career the essential elements of the Fundierung account of the relationship between perception and language and, concomitantly, that all three theses of the gestural account of language are maintained. The reading I am trying to establish here, however, seeks to highlight oversights in the standard reading, most particularly to indicate the more complicated relation of perception and language signaled by his use of Stiftung to describe the origin of meaning, the emergence of the ‘lateral’ view of language, and the importance of speech in the middle period. As a result of MerleauPonty’s middle-period analyses, the shared common world can no longer be seen in straightforward terms of perception as we find in the Phenomenology of Perception. For, in the middle period especially, ‘the world’ implies more than the perceptual world, for there is the intermonde, that is, the ideal world, as well, which is the historical, cultural world, the interrogation of which is the motivating problematic of the middle period.

III. Stiftung, Repetition, and Truth We saw in the last chapter that Merleau-Ponty develops an account of novel expression that responds to a problem internal to phenomenology, namely, the problem of transcendental language, and we have seen in this chapter that he also turns away from Fundierung and a gestural theory of language towards Stiftung and a ‘lateral’ theory of language. All of this implies that truth is involved with history. In this section, I will examine what this involvement entails for Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of truth. Implicit in Merleau-Ponty’s account of novel expression, intersubjectivity, Stiftung, and tradition, is his understanding of truth. Certainly, one cannot say that Merleau-Ponty had a theory of truth; nor did he go to great lengths to elaborate his thoughts on the matter, preferring instead to express them in epigrammatic statements at crucial points in his analyses. There is no doubt that the question of truth interests him greatly. It is difficult to pigeonhole Merleau-Ponty’s account of truth. One can say most clearly what it is not. Truth, for Merleau-Ponty, is not a matter of correspondence between categories and being; nor is it the mind’s simple

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intuitive coincidence with the truth. And it is not adequation of concept to thing. These alternatives fail to capture what is most distinctive in MerleauPonty’s thought on truth. On the more positive side, Merleau-Ponty – in accord with the account of Wesenschau vis-a`-vis the sociological, historical, and linguistic conditioning of experience – claims that we do not arrive at truth in solitary reflection but only in dialogical engagement with others; we go through others to arrive at truth. Hence, the possibility of truth requires a linguistic tradition in which we are actively engaged. By truly speaking and listening, we are ‘resuming a common effort more ancient than we, upon which we are grafted to one another and which is the manifestation, the growth, of truth’ (PW 144). To say that truth implies a tradition of sens does not relegate us to merely repeating established, that is, traditional truths; rather, it implies that we must go through others to get at the truth at all. Speech always involves the possibility of novel speech, which creates a broader truth through a ‘coherent deformation’ – which is not merely a negative move of ‘crossing out’ but a positive one of actualizing possibilities that fringed the world – of established truths. Merleau-Ponty’s account of novel expression plays a central role in his thought on truth and rationality. Novel speech is a necessary condition for truth because it opens us to the possibility of a mode of expression that becomes expressive of the things themselves. The upshot of it is that we are not hemmed in by traditional truths but are tasked to validate them in light of our own encounter with the things themselves. His claim, thus, that ‘truth is another name for sedimentation’ (Signs 96) is not an affirmation of traditional truths. But it implies that sedimented truths make a claim on us not in order to affirm them unquestioningly but precisely in order to put them to the test; tradition becomes a task for us to affirm or deny in our own experience. Rather than being oriented by the past, Merleau-Ponty’s account of truth is essentially future-oriented: ‘The foundation of truth is not outside of time; it is in the opening of each moment of knowledge to those who will resume it and change its sense’ (PW 144). Truth depends on the future for its ‘justification.’ Past expressions depend on future experience that will bear out whether or not they are truly expressive of the things themselves. To think an idea as true implies, ‘that we arrogate to ourselves the right of recovering the past, either to treat it as an anticipation of the present, or at least to place the past and the present in the same world’ (IPP 29). Ultimately, the ‘justification’ of our present expressions will be the future, but not all of our truths will survive this encounter. In fact, we can be confident that some of our truths will not survive. They may be abandoned, modified, or transcended. Such transcendence of meaning does not announce the failure of past formulations, but it indicates the unavoidable incompleteness inherent in any ‘self-development of meaning’ (PW 127). There are,

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however, moments when past expressions are borne out in present and future experience; they are ‘verified.’ In these moments we re-join the thought of others and set the stage for future others to re-join our thought. Merleau-Ponty is adamant that no expression is final, definitive, and ultimately adequate to fully express the things themselves: ‘Thus the highest point of truth is still only perspective’ (PW 132). There is always work to do; there is ‘truth to be made [ve´rite´ a` faire]’ (AD 200). Given this description, Merleau-Ponty’s view on truth begins to look like a form of conventionalism, that agreement among members in a linguistic community is sufficient for an expression to be true. While much of what Merleau-Ponty says leads in this direction, in one brief passage he unequivocally shows that his view of truth is not just a form of conventionalism: Our relationship to the true passes through others. Either we go towards the true with them, or it is not towards the true that we are going. But the real difficulty is that, if the true is not an idol, the others in their turn are not gods. There is no truth without them, but it does not suffice to attain the truth to be with them. (IPP 31) Agreement with others is necessary but not sufficient to arrive at the truth. For all his attention to the classical phenomenological account, it is not agreement with others that determines the truthfulness of an expression but still how well it expresses the things themselves. There is a persistent phenomenological realism that runs through Merleau-Ponty’s thought, although it is rarely expressed directly and in so many words, but like much of his thought, it is obliquely implied in his writings. In sum, Merleau-Ponty’s account of our encounter with truth is based on his understanding of thought as a response to a provocation inherent in a tradition. In terms of truth, the provocation would be that which is posed to contemporary thought by past formulations that claim truthfulness; response would be, then, fulfillment or supersession in affirmation or transcendence always in light of motivations originating from the things themselves. In either case, past truths do not emerge from the provocation–response structure of the movement of thought as false but rather as necessary-but-limited stages that need to be transcended so that a fuller truth can emerge. Again, it is unexpressed but at least implied that progress is possible. There can be, however, no hope for a final truth, a final theory, or a final synthesis, which would exhaust truth. In this regard, Merleau-Ponty continually emphasizes the partiality of truth, the perspectivism and situatedness of all truth claims. No truth is absolute – it always remains partial. This need not be a limit to truth but, on the contrary, represents our only access to truth. To say that partial truth(s)

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can never, once and for all, make the final passage to the absolute is less and less a via negativa to truth and more and more a via media between the absolute and the relative, which, in the final analysis, is what Husserl was always seeking: a science of ‘infinite tasks.’

IV. Conclusion to the Middle Period The middle period of Merleau-Ponty’s career reveals a profound alteration and deepening of a thought already well underway in his early work. The primary site of interrogation – the primordial – shifts from perceptual primordiality to intersubjective primordiality, namely, the intermonde and cultural sedimentations. This shift deepens and extends his analysis of the original site of primordiality, namely perception, which remains primary in the middle period as the privileged locus to witness the emergence of linguistic sens from the non-linguistic, but it is not the only origin of sens. Commentators often confuse the primacy of perception as privileged locus with the absolute primacy of perception, mistakenly claiming that all linguistic meaning is ultimately derivative from and, in some terms or another, founded on perception. We have seen this confusion in the standard reading. Such a mistake amounts to maintaining the Fundierung account of linguistic sense and ideal objects while also ignoring the emergence of the Stiftung account. Doing so ultimately omits a significant achievement of the middle period, namely, the introduction of a Husserlian-inspired reading of Saussurian linguistics, which provides a phenomenological account of historical rationality. But as I have tried to show, a close reading of the middle-period writings reveals this to be a mistaken understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s middle period and should not be sustained. Moreover, such a reading of Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre overlooks crucial achievements of the middle period and misses the silent selfcritique inherent in Merleau-Ponty’s middle-period writings, a self-critique that becomes more explicit in the working notes to The Visible and the Invisible. The middle-period writings thus represent a shift in Merleau-Ponty’s interrogations from searching for the logos of the perceptual world to seeking the logos of the cultural world. Such a shift is an extension of a phenomenological inquiry of perception and is motivated by the same epistemological interest, but, more importantly, this altered inquiry remains essentially phenomenological. For it is certainly motivated by phenomenological problems – seeking the origin of meaning and being – which, as we have seen, ultimately requires the Sinngenesis to be understood in terms of Stiftung rather than Fundierung. More particularly, however, Merleau-Ponty’s intense interest in language and expression,

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particularly Saussurian linguistics, during the middle period resulted from two problems internal to the phenomenological project itself. The first is the question of the status of phenomenology vis-a`-vis the human sciences – the continual ‘crisis’ in Western rationality – and the second is the question of the relation between transcendental language and natural language, as articulated in Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation. The two problems converge in the more general problem of the relationship of the transcendental to the concrete historical world, which remained a persistent problem for Husserl, and the ramifications for truth, intersubjectivity, and the problem of ideal objects that this relationship implies. Merleau-Ponty’s response is complex and difficult to disentangle; like the holism he consistently espoused, his response must be taken holistically. In the past three chapters, I have tried to outline various points at which we can see different topics and influences on his thought emerge, in order to see more clearly his response to this problem. Central to Merleau-Ponty’s response is his account of novel expression. Saussure’s account of linguistic evolution, when joined with the essential insight of Husserl’s analysis of temporality – the dialectic of protentions and retentions – along with the phenomenological concept of ‘motivation,’ and Malraux’s ‘coherent deformation,’ yield an account of novel expression that allows language to escape domination by the past and the possibility of a return to the things themselves. The transcendental moment can no longer be the privilege of the transcendental ego isolated from its situation through an epoche´ but is the privilege of the outstanding individual who, by working within a historical, psychological, sociological situation and a given mode of discourse, is able to transcend that situation and return to the things themselves in light of evidential motivations. As Merleau-Ponty reminds us, we are open to the truth and can return to the things themselves precisely because of our inherence in a concrete historical situation. In short, our situation gives us the requisite access to the world and truth towards which we go not in isolation but with others. This is a point that bears repeating in light of the persistent claims, current in Merleau-Ponty’s time as well as our own, that our situation dominates rationality, thus making all rationality culturally relative. As Merleau-Ponty insists, our experience is often one of cross-cultural convergence, rather than persistent divergence. Furthermore, inherent in this account of novel expression is an account of historical consciousness, which, in its Hegelian moment, sees the past in a positive light. Not one to be given over to nostalgia, Merleau-Ponty is still acutely aware of the fundamental role that tradition plays in rationality. All rational inquiry – or to use MerleauPonty’s term in The Visible and the Invisible, all interrogation – is carried out within a tradition, the original institution of which, while forgotten and operating pre-consciously, continues to function in all expressive

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operations. The original institution makes speech and thought possible. But again, he insists that the function of a tradition is to outline possibilities that are neither necessary nor peremptory except for the tasks they present us with. It is up to us to take up and develop – to either affirm or to deny – traditional truths. In the end, this task is nothing other than the call to continually re-apply the insights inherent in the tradition to our experience in order to continually verify them in light of the things themselves. The ultimate truth of a given tradition – and this is the Husserlian moment of Merleau-Ponty’s account of historical rationality – is in the future. This does not deny or delay rationality, for, as Merleau-Ponty says, ‘we cannot be irrational; we are condemned to reason’ (TD 46). But rationality is constantly menaced and always partial. There is no guarantee that future experience will verify and carry forward current truths, but this does not contradict their present truthfulness. Furthermore, by appealing to the past, the future, and others, MerleauPonty is recasting transcendental subjectivity as intersubjectivity and taking the first steps away from the ‘philosophy of consciousness.’ In the middle period, the other is not an isolated redoubt whose thoughts forever remain alien to me but is a dialogue partner whose intentions I can re-join in a common project of expressing the world that we share both as embodied beings, inheritors of a shared tradition, and as dialogue partners. As a result of this account of expression, the transcendental ego has been displaced in favor of an ‘instituting subject.’ But, if the transcendental subject has been displaced in these terms, so has the tacit cogito. We can hardly image an identification of the tacit cogito and the instituting subject, for the tacit cogito remains as isolated from history as the transcendental ego. The characterization of the silence that precedes speech in the middle period is the silence that emerges only from within a tradition, which speech seeks to bring to expression. Its characterization is not the mute pre-predicative experience that precedes and founds signification, as one finds in the Phenomenology of Perception, but the silence that beckons us both within and beyond a tradition. The instituting subject is thoroughly ensconced in history, and its institutions originate and are continually intertwined with the historical becoming of the intermonde. Finally, the understanding of ideal objects implicit in the middle period attempts to be historical without becoming historicized. Ideal objects originate as rational constitutions in factual history but do not remain bound to the situation of their institution. Instead, they carry within themselves the possibility of universality, for they can organize experiences in other factual situations. They are transtemporal, and as far as universality is concerned, they are trans-traditional. In short, they can apply to other times and other places, for they are not limited to the tradition in which they originated. Since they are historical entities, ideal objects are

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not objects per se – they never reach the full density of an object because they are never fully present at any given time – but are rather ‘matrices,’ that is, open-ended networks of possibilities for organizing future experiences. To say that ‘the transcendental descends into history’ is to say that the a priori applies itself to the a posteriori, but also the reverse. This bold claim not only foreshadows its fuller articulation as reversibility in The Visible and the Invisible, but it also re-unites the rational enterprises of the human sciences with philosophy because all rational inquiry aims at the same world and reveals the same truth. There is no simple hierarchy between philosophy and the human sciences; neither leads and neither obeys. Philosophy as phenomenology continues to have a meta-reflective function insofar as it retains the right to clarify the ultimate meaning and significance of the guiding terms and concepts of the human sciences, but this is a task that the phenomenologist undertakes hand-in-hand with the human sciences. The phenomenologist must get her hands dirty, so to speak. Merleau-Ponty’s interest in language in the middle period, with all its historical and intersubjective implications, seeks to provide an account of rationality that avoids the Scylla of Platonism and the Charybdis of nominalism.

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Ideal Objects in the Late Period I. Introduction I have been arguing that Merleau-Ponty’s middle-period writings on language, history, and intersubjectivity are crucial to understanding the content and motivation of his late thought. The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes is highly provocative not only because of the novelty of the investigations but also because of the self-criticisms of his earlier thought found in the working notes. How are we to account for the new concepts, the ontological orientation, and the self-criticisms? The first step to answering these questions is to recall that much of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, including The Visible and the Invisible, is an attempt to bring mute experience ‘to the pure expression of its own meaning’ (PP XV), a Husserlian formulation that is often quoted by Merleau-Ponty.1 One might go so far as to say that Merleau-Ponty’s enduring philosophic interest is to bring mute experience to adequate expression. The Visible and the Invisible represents a renewed return to mute, primordial experience, which, as we have seen, motivated his initial phenomenological interrogations into perception and embodiment, as well as his middle-period investigations into expression, history, and the constitution of the intermonde; however, Merleau-Ponty’s return to mute experience in The Visible and the Invisible does not remain unaffected by his middle-period researches. In light of this, we can say that the way to the late-period ontology passes through the problems of expression, language, and the constitution of the intermonde. In this chapter, I outline Merleau-Ponty’s late thought on ideal objects and indicate ways in which it is indebted to his middle-period treatment of expression, language, and tradition as well as indicate his final position on the theoretical viability and sustainability of phenomenology. This will be a difficult task, for I will be relying on fragmentary writings: the posthumously published The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes along with recently published lecture notes. In short, his late thought is incomplete, tragically terminated by his untimely death. Compounding this difficulty is the fact that what he says about ideal objects is also fragmentary and deeply embedded in his incompletely articulated late thought. Nonetheless, we can detect in these writings the general tenor of his thought and the direction it was heading.

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II. Phenomenology and History From his early work2 onward, providing a response to historicism, which infected the human sciences, was crucial to Husserl’s understanding of phenomenology. Seeking the foundations of the sciences, natural as well as human, is one of Husserl’s abiding philosophic interests. Up to the end of the 1920s, this interest took the form of a regressive reflective analysis from scientific concepts back to their foundations in mute, pre-predicative experience. But due to his researches into passive genesis and intersubjectivity, the nature of this regressive analysis begins to shift in the 1930s. In the Crisis-era writings, Husserl no longer seeks the foundations of scientific concepts exclusively in mute, pre-predicative experience, turning instead to the concrete, historical lifeworld, as the ground that precedes and maintains all scientific activity and productions. The consequence of this shift is that the phenomenological regressive inquiry (Ru ¨ ckfrage) ceases to be reflection on distinctly intra-subjective egological experience and begins to involve historical investigations of a particular sort – not empirical history, not history of ideas, not a philosophy of history per se, but an internal, intentional history that seeks to uncover the origins of the theoretical attitude itself, which is the guiding idea of all properly scientific activity, including philosophy. In short, phenomenological investigations come to involve a regressive inquiry into the origins and development of the very idea of the theoretical attitude itself. This shift has far-reaching implications for phenomenology, which MerleauPonty pursues when he turns his attention to the historicity of the lifeworld, or in the Merleau-Pontian terms described above, the constitution of the intermonde. As I described in Chapter 1, Husserl’s historical investigations in the Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology are motivated by a perceived epistemological and existential crisis in European sciences. Due to the prevailing objectivist development of rationality since the Renaissance, the sciences are beset by skepticism and irrationalism and have abandoned the original idea of philosophy. Overcoming this crisis will involve re-establishing the original idea of philosophy as the proper goal of philosophic inquiry; Husserl attempts to do this ‘by way of a teleological-historical reflection upon the origins of our critical scientific and philosophic situation’ (CES 3). Such historical investigations will involve eliciting and understanding the unity running through all the philosophical projects that oppose one another and work together in their changing forms. Husserl’s historical investigations into the origin of the ‘modern spirit,’ which began with Galileo’s mathematization of nature and developed through rationalism and empiricism, seeks to recover the original idea of philosophy as it was formulated in ancient Greece.

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Furthermore, these investigations are meant to establish phenomenology as a necessary re-orientation of the original idea of philosophy away from its one-sided development in modern philosophy. It is in this historically significant function that the phenomenologist must understand her philosophic task. In short, transcendental phenomenology is necessary for the re-institution of the idea of philosophy. Consequently, what appears at first to be an entirely new dimension of inquiry for phenomenology – the historicity of the lifeworld – turns out to be yet another way into transcendental phenomenology. Thus, Husserl’s historical investigations in the Crisis amount to another way into phenomenology, the historical way as opposed to what Husserl characterizes as the ‘ ‘‘Cartesian way’’ ’ (CES 155). Husserl’s turn to history then, as we find it articulated internal to the problematic of the Crisis, is intended to establish the necessity and urgency of transcendental phenomenology itself. However, the historical investigation into the primordial institution of the idea of philosophy that Husserl undertakes in the Crisis (and its re-institution and modification in modern philosophy) raises far-reaching questions for phenomenology when compared to his earlier articulations of phenomenology. Questions such as: Whether and in what way do historical investigations become necessary for the phenomenological method? What are the conditions and possibilities of such investigations? Can ‘static’ phenomenology as described in the Ideas bear the scrutiny of historical investigation? Or does it change the universalistic aspirations Husserl held for phenomenology? Can phenomenology, in the end, escape historicism? The challenge to phenomenology is that if internal, intentional-historical investigations are necessary for phenomenology to be properly founded – as the Crisis seems to suggest – how does this modify phenomenology as it has been hitherto conceived? In short, just what does Husserl’s turn to history signify for phenomenology? These questions remain relevant for Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of phenomenology because, as we have seen, he takes his orientation from Husserl’s late views. To begin answering these questions, Merleau-Ponty would resist what we might call the ‘strong’ reading of Husserl’s turn to history that is shared by other French interpretations of Husserl. This strong reading sees the historical turn as constituting a break or an internal contradiction with Husserl’s earlier formulations of phenomenology.3 Merleau-Ponty’s ‘weaker,’ and perhaps more charitable reading is that while Husserl’s late thought signifies a decisive modification of his earlier thought, it does not constitute a contradiction or outright break with it; in fact, Merleau-Ponty sees the turn to the lifeworld and history as a consistent development of certain themes prevalent in Husserl’s earlier articulations of the phenomenological problematic.4 Much of Merleau-Ponty’s thought in the middle period, which

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exercises a deep and far-reaching influence on his later thought, is a development of Husserl’s idea of an internal, intentional history and the ramifications such an enterprise has for the constitution of the lifeworld and intersubjectivity. In the rest of this chapter, I would like to elaborate this in more detail in order to present a more complete picture of Merleau-Ponty’s final view of phenomenology, rationality, and ideal objects. To begin, Merleau-Ponty understands Husserl’s historical turn in the Crisis to indicate that historical investigations are not a mere complement to the real work of phenomenology, something introductory, preparatory, or preliminary to phenomenology. Rather, historical reflection becomes a necessary component of actually doing phenomenology. In short, historical reflection has been integrated into the phenomenological method in an irrevocable manner. The historical character of the phenomenological method is not an accidental but is a necessary consequence of our status as rational and temporal beings. Our very mode of being is temporal, which indicates that not only is our thought temporally dispersed but that it is historically conditioned by sedimentations that exert a sort of action at a distance: past thought affects present thought. What is decisive in the phenomenological turn to history is the acknowledgement that such action is inter subjective as well as intra subjective. My previous insights are abiding acquisitions for me, but as soon as they are communicated, they become abiding acquisitions for others as well. Likewise, the insights of others are available for me. Due to their historical, inter-generational nature, such intersubjective acquisitions become sedimented, that is, separated from their originary evidences. This is inevitable and necessary for there to be progress in any given science. As a result, much comes to be understood merely passively, and, throughout the history of conceptual development, ‘technization,’ as Husserl calls it, sets in. Hence the possibility for a crisis and the subsequent need for a reactivation of these primary evidences becomes necessary. Husserl’s Crisis and the shorter work, ‘Origin of Geometry’5 purport to be models of how such an historical regressive inquiry is to proceed. But, for Merleau-Ponty, the fact that such a move becomes necessary and that Husserl undertakes it, indicates a decisive shift in phenomenological analysis. The latter can no longer be understood in ‘static’ phenomenological terms as descriptive analysis of egological intentional consciousness and its objects, for intentionality (as well as the intentional object) is now to be understood in intersubjective and historical terms. Why such a shift is crucial for phenomenology is clear. An intentional history – that is to say, a unitary inter-generational development of sense – is possible only if transcendental subjectivity gives way to transcendental inter subjectivity, one which Merleau-Ponty rightly claims to find, at least implied if not explicitly endorsed, in Husserl’s final thought. Merleau-Ponty appears justified, then, in extending Husserl’s late

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thought, namely that intentional historical investigations are necessary for phenomenology and that the possibility of such a history requires a reconceiving of transcendental subjectivity as transcendental intersubjectivity. Husserl’s turn towards history in the Crisis, however, implies further modifications to basic phenomenological categories such as consciousness, intentionality (and its object), as well as evidence, the phenomenological method, and the subject matter of phenomenology. And it is in these areas that Merleau-Ponty’s thought differs markedly from Husserl’s, as we shall see.

III. History and Rationality Husserl’s turn to history in the Crisis and his description of the lifeworld pose a problem for phenomenology, which Husserl’s intentional-historical account of philosophy seeks to overcome. Merleau-Ponty returns to this problem, in the early working notes of The Visible and the Invisible, when he says that the lifeworld leads to a crucial problem for phenomenology because: Everything we said and say did and does involve [the lifeworld]. It was there precisely as non-thematized lifeworld. In a sense it is still involved as non-thematized by the very statements that describe it: for the statements as such will in their turn be sedimented, ‘taken back’ by the lifeworld, will be comprehended in it rather than they comprehend it . . . But this does not prevent philosophy from having value, from being something else than and more than the simple partial product of the lifeworld, enclosed in a language that leads us on. (VI 170) The problem Merleau-Ponty points out here is that the very way in which the lifeworld gets thematized depends on what is obvious and taken for granted in the lifeworld; moreover, all philosophic reflection, including reflection on the lifeworld – which is the proper province of phenomenology – returns to further condition the lifeworld. It might seem that, given Merleau-Ponty’s description here, Husserl finally gave into historicism late in his life. This is so because understanding the lifeworld as the ground of all higher, logical substructions determines not only those substructions but also our very way of thematizing what precedes and conditions thought. In other words, it seems that we can never establish the rationality of our tradition because we can never come to evaluate our presuppositions in a way that will avoid these evaluations being affected by those very presuppositions. But despite this, Merleau-Ponty insists, philosophy is ‘more than the simple partial product of the lifeworld, enclosed

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in a language that leads it on’ (VI 170). Language is not all seduction and error. Husserl himself came to the same conclusion but for different reasons. The best place to illuminate the differences between Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on the question of the rationality of a tradition can be found in Merleau-Ponty’s recently published lecture notes on Husserl’s ‘Origin of Geometry.’ These lecture notes are from Merleau-Ponty’s Monday Course at the Colle`ge de France in 1959–60, entitled ‘Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology.’6 Merleau-Ponty’s public commentary on the ‘Origin of Geometry’ in the late period of his career confirms and extends his reflections on language, intersubjectivity, and the intermonde in the middle period; hence it serves as a crucial locus to demonstrate the deep connections between the middle and late periods of his career as well as a privileged locus to highlight both his debt to and divergence from Husserl. That is, certain concepts developed in the lecture notes, which derive from his reading of Husserl, illuminate pivotal concepts in The Visible and the Invisible and aid us in fixing his final view of phenomenology, rationality, and ideal objects. Moreover, the lecture notes demonstrate the continuing influence of Husserl on Merleau-Ponty’s final thought, and they also testify to the crucial differences between Husserl and MerleauPonty’s account of the role of language in the institution of ideal objects. Finally, these lecture notes show the influence of the middle-period, Stiftung account on Merleau-Ponty’s final view of ideal objects. Husserl’s interest in the ‘Origin of Geometry’ is the intersubjective and cultural temporalization of geometry as a science of ideas. Although Geometry is a deductive science, the results of these investigations are exemplary and apply to all sciences; indeed, to some degree, they apply to all cultural ideas insofar as they are the result of human idealizing activity. Husserl’s interest, thus, is broadly understood as the historicity of a tradition, that is to say, the history of the primal institution (Urstiftung), its development, advancement and alteration throughout its intergenerational development, and its continued validity throughout the development up to the present. It is not a factual history – for factual history is unable to account for the unity of a tradition – it is an ‘internal history’ (CES 378) that reveals the ‘teleology and reason’ (CES 378) running through a tradition, uniting its seemingly disparate moments. Geometry, or any cultural tradition that we find ourselves in, is obvious and taken as valid when we take it up and seek to advance it. Keeping in mind Husserl’s thesis in the Crisis that when a science becomes obvious for those in a tradition (and its validity assured), then a crucial loss of meaning has occurred; the evidential procedures by which it achieved legitimacy are absent. As a result, the tradition is in an epistemological crisis. It is a crisis of origins that can be overcome through a regressive

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inquiry (Ru ¨ ckfrage) that seeks to recover the original motivating evidences of the primal institution. Much of Husserl’s thought in the ‘Origin of Geometry’ is addressed to the methodological presuppositions such a regressive inquiry requires. Merleau-Ponty will accept many of these presuppositions but not without altering them in crucial details, thus producing a radically divergent account of the nature of cultural ideas, the function of language in the institution and development of a tradition, and the intersubjective constitution required for an intentional-historical development of sense.7 We have already seen that Merleau-Ponty’s thought in the 1950s intensified around these topics, and it is my thesis that these interests are crucial for understanding the genesis and meaning of his final thought. Before turning to Merleau-Ponty, we need to glimpse, in outline form, Husserl’s account of the origin and development of Geometry. As products of an inter-generational activity, the objects of geometry, as well as the objects of all human cultural accomplishments, are ideal objects; that is to say, they are supertemporal, available to everyone, and repeatable in many spatio-temporal individuals. Given this, Husserl asks: ‘How does geometric ideality (just like that of all sciences) proceed from its primary intrapersonal origin, where it is a structure within the conscious space of the first inventor’s soul, to its ideal objectivity’ (CES 357–8). For Husserl, the question is how can something given self-evidently in a moment of psychic life become first an intrapsychic object for a single subject that is repeatable at will, then an intersubjective object repeatable within a living community, and, finally, an ideal object that is repeatable in every possible human community. In his answer, Husserl outlines a development that requires three crucial steps. The first step is achieved through recollection and memory, the second through the function of empathy and linguistic communication, and the third through linguistic expression that is documented and sedimented in writing and, subsequently, reactivated by other cognizing subjects. The first step takes place in the subjectivity of the inventor, the original moment of self-givenness turns from a present experience to passivity in the form of a memory that can be reactivated in recollection. If the recollection is brought to fulfillment, then the meaning structure selfevidently given in the past is given again in the present as identical. Once brought to fulfillment in recollection, the past meaning structure, henceforth, can be intrapsychically repeated at will. Thus, an intrapsychic objectivity arises that then can be communicated intersubjectively in language through which a similar identity of original production and reproduction occurs between individuals. In successful linguistic understanding, there is ‘the self-evident consciousness of the identity of the mental structure in the productions of both the receiver of the

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communication and the communicator’ (CES 360). At this point, intersubjective objectivity is achieved, but we have not yet arrived at ideal objectivity. For what is lacking is the ‘persisting existence of the ‘‘ideal objects’’ even during periods in which the inventor and his fellows are no longer wakefully so related or even are no longer alive’ (CES 360). The final transformation from intersubjective objectivity to ideal objectivity occurs in writing. Once documented in writing, objective insights are temporally and spatially liberated from immediate personal address. Communication is possible when the original speaker is long dead and the original speaking community gone; this leads Husserl to say that the written word is ‘communication become virtual’ (CES 361). Past insights sedimented in written language are now potentially open to all times and all peoples. They become open to being reactivated much like a past memory can be recollected in the present. At first, when read or heard, the linguistic sights and sounds passively reawaken a signification that is taken up as valid without question. Such passive understanding can be brought to clarity and fulfilling self-evidence in the activity of ‘explication’ (CES 364). In such explication, the passively received meaning structure becomes an active production given as identical to the original. In short, the meaning structure of the original past insight is repeated in a renewed activity in the present. Given the nature of written language, this becomes an ever- present possibility, thus, giving ideal objects their omnitemporal nature. They become potentially abiding acquisitions of all humanity. With this brief summary of Husserl’s understanding of the origin and development of ideal objects, we can turn to Merleau-Ponty’s critical reading of it. Husserl’s task in the ‘Origin of Geometry’ is to outline the formal conditions by which a regressive inquiry can be carried out so that idealizing sciences can overcome their epistemological crisis, which involves reactivation of the original meaning structure along with the reactivation of all subsequent original developments. Merleau-Ponty, however, questions whether and in what way such a reactivation is possible. Certainly, such a reactivation is not necessary for a science to progress. In fact, in order for a science to be a progressive enterprise of ever greater and greater knowledge, past achievements must be accepted passively; otherwise the practicing scientist would spend all her time in regressive inquiry. This is especially so in sciences that are well developed, and sciences continue to develop, despite the fact that practitioners do not actively engage in regressive inquiry. This suggests that past achievements continue to operate in current scientific thinking without being made explicit. In practice, then, reactivation is not necessary. Husserl would admit this; however, he would insist that it must be possible, in principle, to reactivate the original institution and all subsequent developments. Merleau-Ponty

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denies this, for, in the case of geometry, doing so would involve returning to the practical interests that motivated the proto-geometers to conceive the geometric approach to the world. This would involve reactivating the original motives and original self-evidences of the pre-given lifeworld of the proto-geometers. For Merleau-Ponty, such a reactivation simply is not possible because to pretend that we could make such a return ignores not only the decisive shifts in meaning that have occurred and become sedimented, but it also ignores the modifications that such historical reflections introduce into the development of meaning. For Merleau-Ponty, the inability to return to the originary evidences of the primal institution indicates that there can be no return to the original, motivating evidences. He claims in The Visible and the Invisible : ‘A lost immediate, arduous to restore, will, if we do restore it, bear within itself the sediment of the critical procedures through which we will have found it anew; it will therefore not be the immediate’ (122). We cannot return to the motivational evidences that originally gave rise to geometry because our only access is through sedimentations, which are preserved in present practices, language, and ‘documents.’ Such preservation effectively precludes the type of return that Husserl has in mind. But not only does Merleau-Ponty object to the possibility of reactivation, he also objects to Husserl’s understanding of the unity of a scientific tradition that such a requirement must assume. Merleau-Ponty insists on the impossibility of reactivation; nonetheless, he agrees with Husserl that the unity of a science, in every age, operatively emerges in the present. This unity is not something that needs to be explicitly achieved because it is always already given, at least operatively, that is, as a task. The science of geometry, for example, is a cumulative series of re-institutions (Nachstiftungen) that at each moment effectively unifies the tradition in the present. It is at any moment an operative unity, but total reactivation of this development is not possible for the very same reason that reactivation of original evidence is not possible, namely because the very mode of being of such evidences is by means of sedimentation in practices, procedures, and ‘documents.’ On Merleau-Ponty’s reading, the unity of science at any given moment is the unity characteristic of a ¨ bergangssynthesis]’ (PP 419) as we find it initially ‘transitional synthesis [U articulated in the Phenomenology of Perception (and described above in Chapter 4). First articulated in that early work, Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the difference between ‘transitional synthesis’ and ‘identity synthesis’ remains operative in his understanding of all developments of meaning, and here we find it extended to intersubjective, institutional developments of meaning. According to Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl’s explicit account of the temporality of consciousness in the Phenomenology of Perception, express

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reflection affects an identifying synthesis linking the various moments of consciousness ‘into an ideal unity’ (PP 417). But Merleau-Ponty finds beneath this explicit unity a prior unity, already achieved, the moments of which are united in a ‘transitional synthesis,’ which implies that the various moments are characterized by a transitional development in which ‘the active constitution of a new object which makes explicit and articulate what was until then presented as no more than an indeterminate horizon’ (PP 30). Paralleling this primordial unity of the intentional object is an operant and never entirely active intentionality that Merleau-Ponty calls ‘ ‘‘operative’’ intentionality’ (PP 418). The unity of the perceptual object is already achieved at any given moment prior to reflection, thus revealing a deeper unity, the description of which, for Merleau-Ponty, is crucial to constitutive phenomenology. Operative intentionality is here extended to the historical, intersubjective institutions of scientific idealizations within a linguistic tradition; it comes to be associated with the unthought (impense´e) of others. I will say more about this below. Nonetheless, in both his perceptual and historical analyses, Merleau-Ponty turned his attention to syntheses anterior to pure reflection and to the operant intentionality that this activity suggests. What is ultimately at stake in Merleau-Ponty’s use and extension of operative intentionality is that Husserl’s conception of reflection always remains inadequate. Although never explicitly stated by Merleau-Ponty, there is an implicit critique of Husserl here, namely that intrasubjective memory and recollection is an inadequate model to understand the intersubjective communication necessary for an inter-generational development of meaning. Speech is crucial in this development insofar as it mediates past activity that has sunk into sedimentation and present activity that renews the past productivity. Merleau-Ponty is seeking a different model and better vocabulary to articulate our access to the intersubjective past and the task that it requires than what is found in Husserl’s strong account of philosophic reflection, based as it is on an egological model of memory and recollection. But equally, Merleau-Ponty does not seek to dissolve reflection into a pre-reflective void. The past is operantly accessible to us, and we can return to it not in pure reflective acts that recover the originary but in the task of taking up the unthought (impense´e) of past thinkers in expressive and, hence, novel originating operations that seek to develop the deepest intentions of instituted intersubjective significations. In short, the historical questioning back is not a privilege of philosophic reflection but, rather, is implied in every attempt at novel expression; it is implied in every attempt to re-join and extend the unthought of past thinkers. This means that reactivation is not only impossible but also superfluous, for the past is already present in the form of the unthought, which is not pure void and nothingness but a

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circumscribed absence that calls out for further articulation. MerleauPonty calls the past production an ‘operative negation’ (HAL 26). It is a possibility adumbrated in past thought that is available for ‘explication’ in a recovery and renewal in the present speaking intention that itself is a movement of transcendence, uniting past, present, and future as well as self and other. Genuine rationality, thus, is not achieved through reflective retrieval but is the task of thinking anew, the task of speaking again, and thereby – and not through reflective identical iteration of past meaning structures – extending what has hitherto been given. Rather than the explicit reflective recovery suggested by Husserl, Merleau-Ponty’s analysis thus suggests a living engagement with the past. Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of a ‘living tradition,’ which he develops in the middle period, stems from a kind of passively active thought that he finds articulated in Husserl’s ‘Origin of Geometry.’ Husserl distinguished between the active understanding of the original geometers and the passive acceptance of sedimented meanings, merely passively understood, what Husserl calls the ‘seduction of language’ (CES 362). Then, Husserl goes on to dissolve the rigidity of this distinction: There is a distinction, then, between passively understanding the expression and making it self-evident by reactivating its meaning. But there also exist possibilities of a kind of activity, a thinking in terms of things that have been taken up merely receptively, passively, which deals with significations only passively understood and taken over, without any of the self-evidence of original activity. (CES 361) For Merleau-Ponty, this passive activity is decisive, for it indicates the latent or operative intentionality embedded in the sedimentations and circumscribed in language. In other words, operative intentionality is located in the diacritical development of language, which is witnessed most directly in the activity of speech. In his lecture notes on this passage, MerleauPonty says that this passive activity shows, in accord with its task, that: Language must supplant the originally intuitive life, that otherwise thought would remain captive – that, at ‘higher’ structures, thought does not go from the ‘originally intuitive life which creates its originally self-evident structures through activities on the basis of senseexperience’ [Merleau-Ponty quoting Husserl], that there are shortcuts, that the universe of thought, like that of perception, is lacunary and baroque in itself, that there is lateral evidence, between the acts, and not only progressive frontal evidence, and all of this follows because to think is not having but not having. (HAL 26) Merleau-Ponty admits that he is pushing Husserl further than he himself

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wanted to go, and he is correct. For this passage indicated that language is not simply an empty carrier of meaning, but that it has a life, history, and development of its own such that thoughts and their objects can never be a possession of consciousness. If this is true, then the subject of linguistic understanding cannot be a constituting consciousness capable of establishing and re-establishing an ideal unity in an external act of sense bestowal. Rather the subject of linguistic understanding is an instituting subject, practically engaged in bringing the world to articulation according to its task, as much possessed as possessor in the unfolding of the logos. Merleau-Ponty is hinting at the ultimate upshot of this, namely that there are evidential sources other than those provided by ‘frontal’ evidence. In the end, a full account of passivity and historical-intentional questioning back reveals a mode of intentionality and a kind of evidence that phenomenology – and Merleau-Ponty’s early Fundierung account of intentional development is included here – hitherto conceived seems unable to accommodate. It is a non-egological intentional development of sense based on Stiftung, developed in the middle period, extended in the late period, and, consequently, in need of ontological articulation. The ontological articulation of the Stiftung account of sense development, the subject of linguistic understanding, and the passive activity8 it implies, thus become the central motivating forces in The Visible and the Invisible. For Husserl, of course, such passivity threatens rationality; however Merleau-Ponty believes that despite the impossibility of reactivation as Husserl understands it, it is still possible to ensure the rationality of a tradition. While for Husserl passivity – in this case, sedimentation – is potentially dangerous, requiring a regressive inquiry that seeks to uncover the original motivation and evidence, Merleau-Ponty attempts on its basis to articulate a phenomenological rationality. The question is whether or not our current beliefs are properly expressive of the things themselves. Of course, this too can only be revealed in our current experience of the world. Here we must speak of a divergence (e´cart) and a re-joining between the received formulations and our lived experience. The various sciences and our rational expressive practices, thus, become many ways of thinking and speaking in terms of meanings that have been taken up receptively. Such thinking and speaking cut between the distinctions of sheer activity/ mere passivity and sheer spontaneity/mere receptivity. The point is that a living tradition is the development and continuation of a practice of bringing the world to linguistic articulation, which seeks to confirm and extend the intellectual productions of instituted modes of discourse. But novel expression always remains a possibility of language, and insofar as it provides for critical alternatives, it is the guarantor of rationality. We are not condemned to an infinite iteration of past mistakes, for we can escape them by speaking otherwise and anew.

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We can now return to the problem of historicism with which I began this section. Merleau-Ponty’s account of rationality based on Stiftung might appear to return phenomenology to a sort of cultural relativism. Since reflection on language is always internal to it, it might seem that we are hemmed in by linguistic constraints. As a result, the universalistic aspirations of phenomenology as understood by Husserl would need to be modified. But how will they be modified? Merleau-Ponty’s analysis implies that the openness of a linguistic tradition makes it at least possible to reach cross-cultural and trans-historical agreement. Indeed, beyond the present evidence that confronts us, the sole assurance we have that our conceptual schemes are universal is that we find them repeated in other cultures. But such universality will not be an absolute but a greater universality. While universality is not the first word, at least it is possible that it be the last. We begin in relativity and work our way out into universality. The expressivity fully manifest in language is not a threat to the universal but is our very access to it. In summary, while challenging many aspects of its reflective task, Merleau-Ponty largely accepts Husserl’s understanding of an intellectual tradition, based on the Stiftung. This implies that an historical development of meaning, open to internal, intentional history, is possible and, further, that phenomenology needs to engage in such historical investigations. But Merleau-Ponty objects to Husserl’s understanding of the access the reflecting phenomenologist can have to such a history and of the results that such a history can produce. In particular, Merleau-Ponty is dubious about the possibility of reactivation required by Husserl’s analysis. Moreover, Husserl’s continued insistence on treating mathematical ideas as the model of ideal being leads him to ignore crucial questions about the ideal nature of language and our rationality in general. By assuming an already existing ideal structure – natural language – as a necessary and already adequate pre-requisite for the communication of geometric ideas, Husserl overlooks a crucial element in the institution of ideal objects. Indeed, by insisting on the paradigmatic status of mathematical ideas and by announcing yet ignoring ‘the general problem which also arises here of the origin of language in its ideal existence and its existence in the real world grounded in utterance and documentation’ (CES 358), Husserl’s analysis of the origin of ideal objects begins to appear limited, even question-begging, when one considers that the analyses of the ‘exemplary’ nature of geometric ideas applies to all cultural ideas such as ‘the constructions of fine literature’ (CES 357). By returning to the problem of the ideal nature of language, overlooked by Husserl, Merleau-Ponty reveals the historical institution of language in the emergence of ideal objects.

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IV. Language and the Institution of Ideal Objects In Merleau-Ponty’s lecture notes on the ‘Origin of Geometry,’ the concept of institution implies that a historical development of sense requires an original foundation that is forgotten in sedimentation and is, thus, open to subsequent reactivation. This requirement is necessitated by the very mode of being of ideal objects. For ideas to be transtemporal beings, they must remain available for subsequent reactivation at other times and places. But the forgetfulness of origins is also required for a given science to advance. In a sufficiently advanced stage, it is simply not practical for the scientists to reactivate the previous levels of knowledge back to their origins. For Merleau-Ponty, however, this entails that in order for speakers in a living tradition to speak meaningfully, they need not, indeed cannot, reactivate the original institution in the manner that Husserl envisions. Rather, a mode of discourse sufficiently developed operatively encompasses within itself transmitted insights that must be presupposed in order for it to be a means of speaking rationally. Past insights remain operative in present speech. The reflective enterprise Husserl seeks to enact is, then, in a sense superfluous, for my very first intention to speak already re-joins spoken intentions of others. Original insights must be documented and sedimented in order for reactivation to be possible. Hence the original sense, along with subsequent elaborations, can be maintained only in and by language. This implies that ideal objects emerge and persist in the transtemporal medium of spoken and written language. It is in MerleauPonty’s reflection on the function of speech (la parole) and written language (e´criture) in the emergence of ideal objects that we can finally fix Merleau-Ponty’s late account of ideal objects. Thanks to the account of intersubjective communication, and in particular, Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the diacritical development of language developed in the middle period, we are able to understand how language opens on to a common world in which self, other, and world intertwine. Given that account, then, the first geometrical utterances were instances of novel expression, which is precisely how Merleau-Ponty understands the origin of geometry. As we saw above in Chapter 4, linguistic expression of transcendental insights relies on spoken speech, but in order to escape the ontic determinacy of established usage, language must be able to take on an ontological function. It does so in novel expression. It is crucial to see here that novel expression is required in Husserl’s analysis of the origin of geometric ideas, but, to repeat my point from Chapter 4 above, Husserl’s understanding of language faces difficulties on precisely this issue – the possibility of natural language serving a transcendental function – whether any natural language can be transcendentally, i.e., ultimately and fundamentally, purified in the manner

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Husserl required. It was precisely this difficulty that prompted MerleauPonty to develop an account of communication that at least does not preclude the expression of transcendental insights in novel speech; if we cannot speak with an ultimate purity that escapes convention, at the very least, we can speak otherwise and anew, and thereby work our way towards the truth. Charitably, Merleau-Ponty reads this necessary correction back into Husserl’s account of the linguistic community of the first geometers, claiming that ‘Husserl turns towards Sprache [speech]’ (HAL 34) in his analysis of the origin of mathematical ideas. In other words, on MerleauPonty’s reading, Husserl is beginning to recognize the ontological function of language. It is not enough to distinguish the ideal and the factual, as Husserl does. We must also understand how they are united, and, on this issue, the inadequacies of Husserl’s understanding of language emerge. On Merleau-Ponty’s reading, it is the function of speech to effect this unity: ‘Sprache [speech] makes the sense descend into the real world and sets it up at the same time in ideal being’ (HAL 34). Speech by itself, however, is insufficient to establish the intersubjectivity and transtemporality that ideal objects require. It is only in written language (e´criture) that this is achieved. Ideas become documented and sedimented in writing. Geometric objectivities emerge as genuine ideal objects only after the original foundations have been forgotten and reactivated by others, which implies that the original insights must be documented in written language. Written language, Merleau-Ponty says, ‘metamorphoses definitively the sense of spoken words into ideal being, and moreover transforms human sociability’ (HAL 8). Sedimentation in written language gives ideal structures their proper transtemporal existence. Once documented, the original insights exist virtually everywhere at all times; they are open to reactivation at any time and any place, leading Merleau-Ponty to say that ‘sedimentation is the sole mode of being of ideality’ (VI 235). With its documentation in writing, intra-cultural objectivities are opened to transcultural communication; universalizability of ideal objects becomes possible. What Merleau-Ponty calls at one point, ‘transcendental humanity’ (HAL 29) becomes the horizon of the sayable, which cannot be reduced to the already said. In this sense speech is, borrowing Husserl’s word, a ‘function’ of man. Man makes the world objective by bringing the mute experience into linguistic expression. The crucial difference between Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’s view of the function of language in the genesis of sense is that for Merleau-Ponty natural language takes on a transcendental function – it is integral to the constitution of ideal meaning and not simply a reconstitution – but for Husserl natural language cannot serve a transcendental function. Language certainly is not crucial to the Sinn und Bedeutung of transcendental insights, which is first revealed

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within the purified transcendental reduction and then later linguistically expressed for the purposes of communication. Husserl’s view of language, initially articulated in the Logical Investigations, is maintained in the ‘Origin of Geometry,’ insofar as he insists on strictly distinguishing ‘that about which it is said (its meaning) from the assertion’ (CES 357). At several places, however, Merleau-Ponty overlooks these explicit statements and instead follows what we might call the ‘implicit logic’ of Husserl’s description of the origin of mathematical ideas. Following this ‘implicit logic’ gives us a much different view of ideal objects than that suggested by Husserl’s Platonism.9 Taking as our test case the dialogic understanding that occurs in linguistic understanding, such as in reading a philosophic text, we do not reactivate in identity the ideas of the other. Doing so would be to believe that we could objectively grasp these ideas as a disinterested spectator; Merleau-Ponty calls this ‘highaltitude thought’ in The Visible and the Invisible. It would be equally wrongheaded to believe that our understanding is purely subjective, purely a product of our own projections. Such subjectivism ignores the traditionality of all thought: the unthought of others is always operative in my initiatives to understand. The question at issue here is the nature of the objects of thought that I share with others. If Platonism is associated with the first view of objectivity, then a radical sort of relativism is associated with the second – subjective projectionist – view. And it is the threat of relativism, whether in the guise of psychologism or historicism, that continually led Husserl, against some of his profound insights, to tend towards Platonism. Characteristically, Merleau-Ponty seeks to chart a course between these two alternatives. For Merleau-Ponty, ideal objects are transtemporal, hence universalizable, and they can not be reduced down to their articulations in any given language; nor are they external to all language but are embedded in language, that is, internal to language in its operative state. This means that: Ideality is neither first nor second in relation to the linguistic understanding, that ideality emerges in linguistic understanding, that it is not reduced to it as a positive content . . . Ideality is at the hinge of the connection between me and others. It functions in this connection; it is operative, effective there. (HAL 24) Ideal objectivity emerges in the intertwining of self and others that occurs in linguistic understanding. There is not first an ideal order and then intersubjectivity; nor is there an intersubjective community and an ideal objectivity that emerges as a function of intersubjective exchanges. Self, other, and ideal object are simultaneously realized in linguistic

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understanding; no order has primacy. The ideal object emerges at this junction of self, other, and world. The ideal object is described as an ‘operative negation’ (HAL 26) in the sense that meaning exceeds but always depends on prior usage, and it emerges in the intertwining or at the ‘hinge’ of self, world, and other. On this understanding, the ideal object is not an object per se, in the sense that it exists outside of the expressive order that brings it to expression. Ideal being is internal to the expressive order; better, the ideal ‘object’ is a moment of the expressive order not in the sense that it is fully absorbed into that order; nor is it exhausted in the instant of its emerging. For every expression and the ideal meaning that it houses carries a past and outlines a future, which are themselves moments that express ‘variations’ of the ideal object without being identical to it. Ideal being, thus, resides in a quasi-perpetual becoming in the temporal horizon of human expressivity not as a function of it, nor as reducible to it, but as its ultimate telos. The ideal object, thus, is elusive, escaping the expressive intention. In its plentitude, it refuses to be fully taken up in the expressive moment, reserving a surplus for future expressions. Hence, it never fully emerges from the domain of the unthought and the unsaid but must remain on the horizon. This is so, if it is to have a life in future thoughts and future expressions.10 Merleau-Ponty’s description of ideal objects in his commentary on Husserl’s ‘Origin of Geometry’ can inform our understanding of essences in The Visible and the Invisible. There we find that individuals are not spacetime atoms, complete in and by themselves. They bear reference to other individuals of the past, of the future, and of elsewhere. Individuals are, to employ Husserlian vocabulary, variants of others. The essences, then, to continue with Husserlian formulations, are in-variants. The ‘in,’ however, should be seen in two related but distinguishable ways. In the first sense, the essence is in-variant as that which is intended in the many variations and, thus, is inseparable from its empirical manifestations. The ideal and the factual intertwine. In this sense the essence is an in-visible sunk into the heart of the visible, not in the sense that a better situated view such as a purified transcendental ego or a god could glimpse the pure essence but that the essence needs the factual variants to be at all. Each individual diverges from and bears a relation to the others; the interreferentiality between multiple individuals, thus, implies a series of invisible temporal and spatial relations between individuals. If I can have access to the essences, this is because in the living present, my present opens on to the past and the future as well as other places – not because I soar over time or can extricate myself from space, but precisely because I am an incarnate spatio-temporal being in a concrete historical situation or context. There is no need, then, to add to the multiplicity of spatiotemporal individuals a transversal dimension of essences beyond space

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and time because the essences are embedded within the diacritically divergent multiplicity of individuals as the absent principle of divergence among the inter-referential relations between individuals. Because the essence is irretrievably intertwined with the visible, there is no other access to this invisible internality except through the visible. This ‘oblique’ approach to the essence is distinguished from the ‘frontal’ approach characteristic of philosophic reflection. The more one approaches essences directly, the more they recede from one’s grasp. Thus, although the essences are not the mere ‘shadow of the actual but its principle’ (VI 152), the essences arrived at can no longer be understood as ‘pure’ essences; rather, the essence we find is the ‘operative, functioning essence’ (VI 118) that operates within the visible. This formulation of the essence as in-variant leads to its second sense. In the second sense of the essence as in-variant, the essence is ‘a negativity that is not nothing’ (VI 151). In acts of ideation, I disengage from my present experience and actively intervene, imaginatively varying the object, but, unlike Husserlian variation in phantasy, for Merleau-Ponty this phenomenological technique does not give access to all possible experience. Rather in variation, I alter my experience to eliminate the impossible, which does not give me an exhaustive account of the possible. In variation, I am able to ‘determine the inessential,’ which does not ‘definitively give me the essentiality of the essence’ (VI 112). Variation is a specific kind of cognitive activity that draws on a fund of passivity and a horizon of future possibility, which, according to the Stiftung analysis, is beyond full recovery. There is a plentitude that no variation can exhaust. The essence, as it is caught up in the interior of the visible, and as the depth of the world, outlines ‘a bound and not a free possibility’ (VI 205). The essence may, in the future, articulate itself in unforeseen and unforeseeable ways. This does not throw us into a radical relativism because we have purchase over certain phases of experiences. For Merleau-Ponty, Husserl’s attempt to posit the essence as the telos of infinite idealization is the first step down the Platonist path, for by understanding the essence in this way, we are well on our way to erecting a second layer of positive essences over and above the factual individuals. This move, ultimately, makes the essence inaccessible, and from the very beginning of his career, Merleau-Ponty maintains that a distinctive element of phenomenology is that it ‘puts essences back into existence’ (PP vii). MerleauPonty is not objecting to Husserl’s infinite idealization. He is objecting to the terminus, even in principle, of this idealization, for Being continually eludes our best efforts at capturing it. The essence in its imperfect positivity signifies this plentitude. But since we cannot effect a total variation – because it would effectively eliminate all that does not authentically belong to the thing – a decidedly Husserlian concern raises itself here:

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How are we to understand ‘pure ideality’? Merleau-Ponty raises the issue himself. The Visible and the Invisible is, as is well known, an incomplete beginning to a much larger work, and on this topic Merleau-Ponty’s thought was still in development. He says that ‘it is too soon now to clarify this type of surpassing’ (VI 153). He is speaking of the surpassing of the operative essence to ‘pure ideality.’ He does go so far as to say that language is crucial to this: Let us only say that the pure ideality is not itself without flesh nor freed from horizontal structures. . . . It is as though the visibility that animates the sensible world were to emigrate, not outside every body, but into another less heavy, more transparent body, as though it were to change flesh, abandoning the flesh of the body for that of language and thereby would be emancipated but not freed from every condition. (VI 153) ‘Pure’ ideal objects, thus, are not freed from all conditions; they have their own material condition, namely the written and spoken word. If we are to speak of such things, ‘pure’ ideal objects are caught up in the activity of language insofar as all novel expression feeds off the operative language, which itself is dependent on materiality. The closest we come to Husserl’s ‘pure’ ideal objects in Merleau-Ponty’s analysis is in the surpassing of instituted language in novel expression, which, as we have seen, is crucial to his account of rationality. While this account is not free from its own shortcomings, which I describe below, it is crucial for my argument here to see that the entire analysis of the relationship between speech and language of the middle period informs this analysis of ‘pure ideality.’ Although Merleau-Ponty says little about it in The Visible and the Invisible, we know from those analyses, as is true of the visible in general, that language has an interior, or in the words of The Visible and the Invisible, language has a depth, has its own flesh, which underwrites the passage from the ‘operative Word’ to the ‘universal Word’ (VI 154). The metamorphosis from the operative to the universal is neither complete destruction nor pure conservation of the originating, but an internal development; moreover, this metamorphosis draws on funds other than incarnate perception, namely, the activity of language itself contributes to this movement. Ultimately, if we are to understand the reversibility of mute experience and speech, we will need to take into account the Stiftung analysis of the middle period as the locus at which the Fundierung account of ideal objects is initially surpassed. The flesh of the idea is language, and as the operative essence is the interior armature of the visible, so too is the ‘pure’ idea the interior of language. The reversibility of the operative and the universal cannot be

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understood in terms of the dialectic of intelligible form and sensible content – the Fundierung account – but instead is the Stiftung account in operation insofar as the account of ideal objects we find in The Visible and the Invisible is described as a diacritical divergence of individuals from a not fully present but continually operative principle. Merleau-Ponty’s use of the language of divergence (e´cart) to describe the relationship of the essence to the individual bears the unmistakable stamp of Saussure’s influence. Every individual is a variant of each and every one of the others of the same species. In other words, each individual diverges (e´cart) from all the others in a difference that cannot be thought of in positive terms but must be understood as absence. It also allows him to rethink the problem of transcendence.

V. The Problem of Transcendence and The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty’s final view of language informs his radical re-thinking of the problem of the transcendence of Being, the solution to which is already operant in his middle-period account of communication. E´cart, a concept central to The Visible and the Invisible, seeks to express the initial divergence of subject and object, self and other, as well as activity and passivity, already seen in the middle-period account of intentional encroachment of self and other in dialogue and communication in the constitution of the intermonde. The account found there is extended in Merleau-Ponty’s late ontological investigations. We have already seen that in dialogue and communication, my thought involves a distinguishing, and hence a divergence (e´cart), of self from other, which is but a moment because communication also requires the activity of re-joining my thought with others such that self and other intertwine (entrelacs) in a mutual engagement of thought and language of which neither can be considered the sole author. Here e´cart is not absolute transcendence of self and other, for my thought carries on a silent life in others as theirs does in mine. Communication involves this dialectic of divergence and re-joining that distinguishes self from other and past from present. Building on this, the late account of language seeks to show how language is a divergence from but not absolutely transcendent to Being. Traditionally, the question of transcendence is answered by conceiving of some sort of coincidence or immediate contact with Being. With the concept of e´cart, Merleau-Ponty insists that non-coincidence does not nullify our contact with the things themselves but acknowledges that our access to Being is always a ‘proximity through distance’ (VI 128), that our

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relation to being is mediated. Those philosophies that seek to overcome transcendence in coincidence remain faithful to what we might call a ‘metaphysics of coincidence.’ Such philosophies persist in seeing language as a source of error and deception without adding that these errors can be, in the words of Husserl, ‘crossed out’ in novel expression. Without admitting that language can, at least potentially, arrive at the things themselves, such views are akin to Descartes’ wholesale condemnation of perception – because of its occasional erroneousness – only here language is condemned rather than perception. The error, however, is the same, for both views ‘take out an insurance against doubt whose premiums are more costly than the loss for which it is to indemnify us’ (VI 36); both views cut us off totally from Being. What is not considered in philosophies of coincidence is ‘that every being presents itself at a distance, which does not prevent us from knowing it, which is on the contrary the guarantee for knowing it’ (VI 127). This ‘proximity through distance’ that allows genuine access to Being and that Merleau-Ponty characterizes as e´cart, was originally articulated in the middle-period account of communication understood as a dialectic of divergence and re-joining of self and other. In symbolic structures, Being-for-us diverges from Being, but, as we saw in communication, this divergence is a moment accompanied by re-joining. The re-joining is not merely a re-joining the intentions of others because the original institution is a movement coming from Being; so in re-joining, I am not moving solely in language, for this movement itself follows the articulations within Being. Language originates in the things themselves, and, in its unfolding, never leaves them. Hence Merleau-Ponty insists that language does not amount to a barrier to Being but is our very access to it. Language is ‘the double’ (VI 120) of mute Being not because language becomes our world – there is not nothing outside of language – but because language articulates the world, which most definitely precedes and antedates it but only in another form of non-language. ‘It is by considering language,’ Merleau-Ponty says, ‘that we would best see how we are to and how we are not to return to the things themselves’ (VI 125). Language is not a foreign imposition on Being by a constituting consciousness or Cartesian cogito but rather is a divergence within Being. To say this is not to abandon us to the night of the unconscious11 or to an infinite iteration of the past, but rather precisely to put our most ‘ultimate relation to Being’ (VI 121) – interrogation – back into its proper milieu, namely, in our perpetual contact with Being. All interrogation re-joins Being, ‘if only by virtue of its being a question, it has already frequented Being, it is returning from it’ (VI 120). With the notion that cognitive activity is interrogation, philosophic reflection thus begins from atop a mountain of idealizations, as it were, and it cannot content itself with pure descriptions of the constitutive history from mute experience to its

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expression in language. This is what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘high-altitude thought’ insofar as it proposes that reflection ‘is not caught up in the movement of thought’ (VI 70). Rather, reflection must become what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘hyper-reflection,’ which is not the pure gaze of a spectator, nor is it a blind passivity. It knows itself in its own involvement in Being. Hyper-reflection is a thought that accompanies the achievements of thought always as a slight divergence. It does not seek to strictly coincide or to recover but instead to accompany the institutive movement as a selfconscious activity bearing witness to the advent of sense in the human order. It seeks to accompany this movement – and thereby to participate in the metamorphosis – of brute Being to being-for-us. Ultimately, philosophic reflection must acknowledge that it is not, indeed, it cannot be, pure description but is an active participation in the advent of sense and the institution of ideal objects. Husserl’s philosophy is taken as a philosophy of coincidence, seeking to guarantee our access to Being in the privilege of a transcendentally reduced ego. Merleau-Ponty’s own initial formulation of language in terms of Fundierung comes suspiciously close to repeating this error. But even in the Phenomenology of Perception, there is a persistent doubt of the efficaciousness of such an enterprise. Indeed, the Stiftung analysis is gestating in the Phenomenology of Perception but not yet fully articulated. It comes to full articulation in the middle-period account of expression, which replaces a Fundierung account of the genesis of sense with a Stiftung account. The task of philosophic reflection is to show – beginning from this surrounded state and multiple involvements, rather than surveying from above – how meaning comes to be and how expression, whether bodily or symbolically, does not separate us from Being but rather prolongs and transforms our initial contact with Being. The task of philosophy becomes re-joining in the creative metamorphosis of Being into being-for-us and to show that such metamorphoses do not amount to an initial separation from Being but are our very linkage to it. As I have emphasized above, the Fundierung account of language is limited; it can only present to us the perceptual being-for-us of nature and does not account for the being-for-us of others and the being of the past. Moreover, that account, indebted as it is to Husserlian formulations, tends towards an epistemic and a metaphysics of coincidence; it is, however, a compromised tendency. The very notion of e´cart clearly stems from Saussurian formulations in the middle period, where it had already proven fruitful in the account of intentional encroachment, the conceptual precursor to reversibility in The Visible and the Invisible. The problem of transcendence, whether the transcendence of the perceptual object, the other, or the past, is the same problem and has the same solution, namely re-conceiving the ontological status of perceiver and perceived, self and

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other, past and present – us and Being – and the interrelation between these ‘abstractions’ as one of the differentiation of institution, e´cart, rejoindre, and perpetual entrelacs. This reconceptualization is underway in The Visible and the Invisible, and the novel concepts developed there are not only already operant in the middle-period writings but, I would go so far as to say, unthinkable without having passed through the middle period. Undoubtedly, the way to the late ontology passes through the problem of expression of the middle period. That is, these concepts are not simply and unproblematically extensions of the Phenomenology of Perception and the problematic pursued there but arise out of the detailed and serious consideration of language and intersubjectivity in the middle period. Too often this is overlooked.

VI. Conclusion To conclude, Merleau-Ponty’s re-writing of Husserl’s Crisis outlines a philosophy of history in terms of a diacritical development of rationality. Reason develops in history through the articulations of concepts in novel expression, which is nothing other than clarifying obscurities and filling in lacunae in a language that does not negate them absolutely but which strives to say finally what they were struggling to say all along, that is, to bring them to intentional fulfillment. This is to acknowledge that thought may be always inadequate to Being, that the concept is inadequate to the experience it seeks to express, and that consciousness has its ‘blind spots.’ It is to acknowledge that philosophy will never be finished, that thought will never be complete; but this is not an abandonment of rationality. Rather, it is an affirmation of the finitude of all thought and the fallibility of past and present formulations as well as indicating the task of continually returning to ‘brute or wild being’ (VI 102) with our present conceptual resources at our disposal, awaiting their confirmation without precluding the possibility of their disconfirmation. Historical rationality confirms what Husserl was saying all along, namely, that future experience might cross out or nullify past and present truths. This is not to admit the impotence of reason, however, but merely to acknowledge its limits. This is why, at the limits of phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty finds not nonphenomenology but an opening out on to its deepest aspirations. If phenomenology is not a set of timelessly true propositions and fixed concepts, then the surpassing of a ‘philosophy of consciousness’ can be nothing other than traveling the path laid out by Husserl, even if it leads away from consciousness as he conceived it. But it is not to give up on what Husserl strove above all to do, namely, to bring mute experience to expression, to bring Being into language. Husserl sought to return to the origin from

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which philosophy and all thought springs. Merleau-Ponty’s late thought rejoins this venture by returning to the primordial at a more radical level, to the ‘brute or wild being’ (VI 102) that precedes but gives rise to concepts such as subject/object, self/other, past/present, and essence/individual. Merleau-Ponty’s final thought, thus, remains phenomenological insofar as it seeks to fulfill Husserl’s original philosophic motivation, namely, seeking to bring the mute world to its fullest expression.

Conclusion

I began this work with the question of whether or not Merleau-Ponty’s selfcriticisms in The Visible and the Invisible signify a repudiation of his earlier phenomenological investigations. Do they amount to an abandonment of phenomenology? I do not think that his final thought represents a break with or repudiation of phenomenology; rather, it is an attempt, internal to phenomenology itself, to continue and to correct earlier articulations, both his own and Husserl’s, in light of further investigations. Critical to the continuity between Merleau-Ponty’s early and late thought is his middle-period account of language, history, and intersubjectivity, the centerpiece of which is the Stiftung account of rationality and ideal objects developed there, which, as I have argued, is motivated by the shortcomings inherent in the Fundierung account of language and ideal objects articulated in the Phenomenology of Perception. The Visible and the Invisible, then, is a recommencing from within phenomenology, insofar as it is motivated by the Husserlian problematic, namely to bring mute experience to its fullest expression. Such a recommencing is a testament to the truth that, as Husserl said, the phenomenologist is a perpetual beginner, which does not mean that every recommencement is a mark of theoretical repudiation or reversal of earlier formulations. It is to return to the things themselves better informed of the lacunae and gaps that persist after initial interrogations, with the results of those investigations continually in the background. The return to primordial experience, if it is to be truly radical, must not preclude the possibility that the evidence found there might ‘cross out’ earlier formulations, indeed, that evidence might even belie our most basic categories. In the case of The Visible and the Invisible, even the most basic phenomenological categories cannot be assured beforehand.1 In the end, the characterization of the philosopher as perpetual beginner indicates that philosophy can never be complete, that descriptions hitherto offered are not definitive or final, and, furthermore, that the ‘crossing out’ of previous formulations is not a sign of past failure but of present success. In terms more amenable to Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of philosophy, incomplete past expressions are surpassed in a movement that seeks to express more adequately the things themselves: that which has been

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struggling for full expression from the very first articulations. Such is the development of a science of ‘infinite tasks,’ to use Husserl’s term. But, again, even these surpassing formulations are never apodictically assured; the phenomenologist must rest content with adequacy, knowing that future expressions can and probably will surpass present expressions. There can be no final formulation that says once and for all what needs to be said. Phenomenology is a theory with its own history and its own internal transformations. Once strict apodicticity has been abandoned, it would be the height of philosophic folly to believe that one could deliver a final and definitive theoretical expression of a thought continually coming to its own fullest expression. It is in this sense that The Visible and the Invisible is a re-commencing within phenomenology, in which no presupposition is sacred. The results of earlier formulations – such as Fundierung, the tacit cogito, and the gestural theory of meaning – are at risk of being crossed out, of being deepened in light of investigations into intersubjectivity, the intermonde, and Stiftung, but this deepening is just the movement of thought in its return to the things themselves, bringing them to fuller expression. In the end, The Visible and the Invisible is less of a repudiation of the earlier thought and more of a renewal of the initial phenomenological problematic, a recommencing not outside of phenomenology but undertaken from within the very movement of the problems and theoretical development of phenomenological thought. In Merleau-Ponty’s own terms of historical rationality, it is a reinstitution of phenomenology already adumbrated in the unthought of Husserl’s investigation of the lifeworld. Adumbrated in Husserl’s late thought, Merleau-Ponty finds a Stiftungbased account of rationality that, as we have seen, is clearly operative in his middle- and late-period accounts of ideal objects. What, ultimately, is of value in Merleau-Ponty’s account of institution is that by exploiting it he was struggling to articulate an account of historical rationality that does not give in to historicism or some form of Platonism. As we have seen, Husserl, at points, seems to Merleau-Ponty to come suspiciously close to the latter. By denying Husserl’s understanding of reactivation and the account of reflection it entails, Merleau-Ponty was seeking to transform – while maintaining the crucial concept of Stiftung and the related ideas of an internal, intentional history – Husserl’s Crisis account of the development of ‘reason in history.’ Crucial to this is Husserl’s account of geometric ideas in the ‘Origin of Geometry.’ I have claimed that Merleau-Ponty’s reading of this work includes an implicit criticism of Husserl’s late account of ideal objects, but it is a criticism that raises a potential problem for Merleau-Ponty’s own final account of ideal objects, a problem that needs to be mentioned here. Husserl insisted on treating mathematical ideas as exemplary and, hence,

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generalizable to all other regions of ideal objects. Merleau-Ponty questions whether Husserl’s account of mathematical ideas can be generalized – indeed, he questions whether it is even applicable outside of mathematicals – because doing so would effectively establish a second order of pure ideas outside the temporal and the factual. This is problematic because the virtue of phenomenology, in Merleau-Ponty’s terms, is that it integrates the ideal in the factual. To articulate this – and contrary to Husserl – in his own analysis, Merleau-Ponty takes the expressivity exemplified in the problems of aesthetic, historical, and political novelty as paradigmatic of the ideal. While this account has a broader scope than Husserl’s, the question that arises for Merleau-Ponty’s account is whether it can still account for mathematical ideas. For is it not the case that we believe the Pythagorean Theorem, for example, to be true of triangles, whether or not anyone engages in a geometric mode of discourse? Are they not true whether or not anyone knows them? The objection continues, is it not the case that mathematical ideas are precisely that class of ideal objects that can and do exist independently of temporal and factual conditions? Given this objection, it seems that Merleau-Ponty’s account of ideal objects, too, cannot be generalized to all regions of ideal objects, for it fails to account for the being of mathematicals. Thus, the region of ideal objects that Husserl took as paradigmatic is precisely that region for which MerleauPonty’s account is inadequate. Although Merleau-Ponty tried several times in his career to give an account of ‘pure ideality,’ even as late as in his chapter on the Chiasm in The Visible and the Invisible, it is not clear whether he ever adequately accounted for mathematical ideas. Throughout his career he insisted that arriving at ‘pure ideality,’ as Husserl understood it, requires a faulty view of philosophical reflection. Merleau-Ponty continually insists that such reflection is in fact impossible, at least as a generalizable model to all forms of the ideal. Rather, he emphasizes that factical conditioning, whether it be bodily or sedimented-linguistic, should not be seen as a hindrance to arriving at a ‘pure idea’ but as our very access to it; hence the ideas that we arrive at can never be fully purified. The reduction, as he said early on, can never be fully carried out. Throughout his career, MerleauPonty continued to emphasize the factual conditions of a mathematical idea – its genesis in some factual motivation, its maintenance in some factual, linguistic ‘document’ and praxis, its need for some factual experience to validate and continue to validate its truth. Simply put, establishing its existence and truthfulness independently of factual conditions is, in fact, unthinkable for Merleau-Ponty, for how could one even think it in purely non-factual terms? Still, we might have to admit that while Merleau-Ponty successfully broadens the scope of a phenomenological account of ideal objects, mathematical ideas might well be a limit case for it. That is, there

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may be more than one mode of ideal being. While Merleau-Ponty followed Husserl’s description of the constitution of the lifeworld, it is clear that he has rigorously deviated from Husserl’s logocism. As I indicated in the first chapter, Husserl’s articulation of the problematic of the lifeworld is beset by a delicate tension which, when pushed, threatens to break apart: namely, the characterization of the lifeworld as both a perceptual and a concrete historical world. Because of the centrality of the lifeworld for Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of ideal objects, this tension is repeated to some extent in Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre. In the preceding chapters, I have identified two directions in which the phenomenological search for origins is pursued by Merleau-Ponty. In the early period, the origin of meaning and being is sought in terms of incarnate perceptual sense, while, in the middle and late periods, it is pursued in terms of the diacritical structure of language. Each is accompanied by a model of ideal objects: the Fundierung account bases ideal objects on a non-reductive relationship between pre-predicative perceptual experience and higher orders of thought, while the Stiftung account understands ideal objects to be caught up in a diacritical development with a continually operative but never fully recoverable origin. To some extent, these two models repeat the tension found in Husserl’s articulation of the lifeworld in the Crisis, for the former emphasizes the origin of all meaning in mute, pre-predicative egological perceptual experience, while the latter accentuates the ever-renewed development of meaning in an intersubjective movement of thought, which is found primarily in language and other symbolic structures. The tension inherent in Merleau-Ponty’s early and middle views of ideal objects is seen most clearly in the two accounts of expression and language represented in the early and middle periods. The Fundierung account of ideal objects locates the birth of meaning in a silent, carnal contact with Being, which issues in gestural expression; all further symbolic developments stand in a founded/founding relationship to this primary ‘gestural sense,’ or ‘emotional essence.’ Intersubjective expression is founded on a more primary, bodily expressivity. Hence, spoken or written language is seen as derivative, even as an alien addition that covers over originary, carnal experience. Restoration of this originary contact requires stripping away linguistic accretions in order to uncover the primal nudity beneath. It is this sort of stripping away that is the task of philosophic reflection. On this account, we will come to see that the various languages of the world are ‘several ways for the human body to sing the world’s praises and in the last resort to live it’ (PP 187). The Stiftung account of language, on the other hand, which developed in the middle period and is affirmed in The Visible and the Invisible, denies that one can locate the genesis of meaning outside an intersubjective

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symbolic structure; instead, it insists on the ever-renewed development of meaning as a creative metamorphosis of previous linguistic formulations. The emergence of meaning depends on the creative retrieval and renewal of scattered linguistic remains in the provocation–response structure of a diacritical development of meaning internal to language without the assurance of coinciding with an original site of meaning. The task of philosophic reflection is to acknowledge this embeddedness and seek, upon its journey back to the originary, not recovery of a past origin but active participation in the metamorphosis from brute Being to being-forus. Phenomenology is no longer purely descriptive but participatory. Thus, on the one hand, language is seen as derivative from and parasitic on an originary carnal experience, which underwrites its truthfulness, while on the other hand, language is seen as a continual creative return to an unrecoverable-but-operative origin that seeks to bring the originary to its own most symbolic fulfillment. On this account, language might well sing the world’s praises, but it is decidedly not simply a carnal song. I characterize the Fundierung and Stiftung accounts as being in tension rather than in an outright contradiction because linguistic expression for Merleau-Ponty is, as Jacques Taminiaux rightly notes, neither ‘pure creation without prior support nor a coincidence with a silent and primordial experience of meaning.’2 Expression is not a creation of meaning ex nihilo; there is no more pure experience than there is pure expression. We are originally surrounded by meaning prior to any reflective enterprise. The question is how are we to return to the origin of this meaning? In short, how is the phenomenological clarification of origins to be carried out? The Fundierung account seeks this return by focusing on egological, bodily terms, while the Stiftung account extends the latter by seeking it in intersubjective, linguistic terms. This is where the decisive difference emerges, which, in the final analysis, might well constitute more than a benign tension. Is the phenomenological clarification of origins bodily or linguistic? Either one places the primacy on one or the other: either carnal meaning is ultimately culturally conditioned, or linguistic meaning is founded on a deeper bodily meaning. Merleau-Ponty’s early thought certainly embraced the latter. His final view, I think, repudiates this, but it does not simply embrace the former. Rather, Merleau-Ponty’s final view seeks to escape this either/or characterization altogether, almost as if it is a false dichotomy. In attending to the reversibility of the visible and invisible, bodily meaning is the reverse of cultural, linguistic significance, and vice versa. Neither is primary; neither is originary of the other. Certainly, neither could found the other. Merleau-Ponty’s late notion of reversibility, thus, surpasses the Fundierung, but, to repeat, this surpassing passes through the Stiftung. In the end, the phenomenological clarification of origins is neither exclusively bodily nor exclusively historical but must

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involve both, for ‘the appeal to the originating goes in several directions: the originating breaks up, and philosophy must accompany this break-up, this non-coincidence, this differentiation’ (VI 124). In order for meaning to come its own fullest expression, the task of phenomenology is to bear witness to the multiple involvements of the origin of meaning and to do so in an interrogative mode rather than in a reflective recovery.

Notes

Introduction 1

‘The problems posed in the Phenomenology of Perception are insoluble because I start there from the ‘‘consciousness’’–‘‘object’’ distinction.’ (VI 200) 2 This line is argued in G.B. Madison’s book The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty: ‘We must not allow ourselves to be mistaken. The Visible and the Invisible is not merely a continuation of the Phenomenology and the author’s other writings, but is rather a radical calling into question of them. Since absolutely everything has changed in this last work, under no circumstance could one simply juxtapose The Visible and the Invisible and the Phenomenology of Perception and interpret one in terms of the other. It must on the contrary be recognized that The Visible and the Invisible takes up a position on a much deeper level than the Phenomenology and constitutes a whole new starting point.’ (The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty: The Search for the Limits to Consciousness. Trans. G.B. Madison. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981, p. 167.) Also see G. Granel: ‘Phenomenology’s attempt to survive as a philosophical school has produced epigones, or has led to the ritual murder of the father, which Merleau-Ponty piously and pitilessly had set out to perform, and would have performed had he not himself died.’ (Le Sens du Temps et de la Perception chez E. Husserl. Paris: Gallimard, 1968, p. 103.) 3 Jacques Taminiaux: ‘In dealing with Merleau-Ponty’s relationship with phenomenology in his last writings, we are dealing with an internal relationship, one which continued to be a question for him.’ (‘Phenomenology in Merleau-Ponty’s Late Work.’ Life-World and Consciousness: Essays for Aron Gurwitsch. Ed. Lester Embree. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973, p. 311.) 4 The three stages of his career are as follows: the early period stems from 1939– 45 and includes the Structure of Behavior and the Phenomenology of Perception; the middle period is roughly from 1947–57, including the essays collected in Sense and Non-Sense, Humanism and Terror, Signs, Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, and the Prose of the World; and the late period runs from 1958 until his death in 1961 and includes various published lecture notes, several resume´ du cours and The Visible and the Invisible. This division is somewhat standard in secondary literature and is succinctly stated in G.B. Madison’s The Phenomenology of MerleauPonty, p. 327, footnote 12. 5 Waldenfels. ‘Perception and Structure in Merleau-Ponty.’ Research in Phenomenology. Vol. 10 (1980): 22. While I find much of value in Waldenfels’ ‘development’ of Merleau-Ponty’s late thought, this approach continues the entrenched

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attitude of ignoring the middle period, an oversight that I seek to redress in this work. 6 Martin Dillon. Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology. 2nd ed. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997. See especially Part Three: ‘The Explicit Ontology of The Visible and the Invisible.’ See also Douglas Low’s Merleau-Ponty’s Last Vision: A Proposal for the Completion of The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern UP: 2000). In Chapter 5, I will argue against the shortcomings and misunderstandings inherent in this approach.

Chapter 1 1

I will often refer to this work simply as ‘the Crisis.’ The ‘Origin of Geometry as an Intentional-Historical Problem’ is perhaps the only place where Husserl pursues the origin of ideal objects in both aspects simultaneously. This is one reason why that short work is so provocative and remains a focal point for phenomenological accounts of the problem of ideal objects. 3 David Carr convincingly argues that as a result of the role of history in the Crisis, historical investigations are indeed necessary for phenomenology to ensure that it is properly founded: ‘We must be aware of the task of philosophy in order to philosophize properly. . . . Here historical reflections are not merely helpful, it seems, but necessary.’ And: ‘That such [historical-teleological] reflections should constitute, ‘‘in their own right’’ as Husserl says, an introduction to phenomenology; that the way into ‘‘phenomenological transcendental philosophy’’ should involve a passage through the history of philosophy – this is what is important and new about the Crisis.’ (David Carr, Phenomenology and the Problem of History: A Study of Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974, pp. 54 and 64, respectively.) 2

Chapter 2 1

Here Merleau-Ponty makes explicit reference to Husserlian Abschattungen as found in the Ideas. See p. 186 and footnote 2 on p. 246 of the Structure of Behavior. 2 Rather than picking out specific philosophers, Merleau-Ponty portrays realism and critical thought (which Merleau-Ponty sometimes refers to as ‘transcendental thought’ or more simply as ‘idealism’) as two ways of approaching the problem of perception or two attitudes towards the relationship between sensation and intelligence in questions of perception. Merleau-Ponty’s relationship to critical thought is crucial, and while it is clear that his account of critical thought is meant to include such thinkers as Kant and Brunschvicg, it is less clear whether Husserl fits in here. But Merleau-Ponty’s description of critical thought appears to apply to some aspects of Husserlian Transcendental Idealism. See especially, PP 171–3. 3 It would be inaccurate to understand Merleau-Ponty’s return to perception in reductionist terms even if these terms are non-causal. It is clear in his essay ‘The

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Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophic Consequences,’ particularly in the discussion, that some of Merleau-Ponty’s contemporaries understood him in this way. That is why Merleau-Ponty’s comments here are instructive on this point. The primacy of perception ‘is not a question of reducing human knowledge to sensation’ (Primacy 25); rather it is a way of treating perceptual consciousness as the privileged locus to witness the ‘fundamental structures’ (Primacy 32) of the various modes of objectifying activity: ‘We find in perception a mode of access to the object which is rediscovered at every level’ (Primacy 34). In this sense, perception is primary because it offers a model by which we can understand idealizing conscious activity. 4 Phe´nome´nologie de la Perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945, p. 60. The ambiguity of the French word ‘motif ’ should be noted. On the one hand, it indicates a motive as in: What was the motive for the defendant to commit the crime? Here motive indicates a motivating factor in the sense of giving a reason for action. But it also indicates a theme in an artistic expression that is repeated and often slightly transformed throughout a work or body of work and is ultimately what the work of art is all ‘about.’ Thus, the motif is not fully bound by any single manifestation in the specific material that manifests it, but it cannot be separated from all the material conditions on which its existence is ‘founded.’ I suggest both meanings are operative in this attempt to block the reductionist move. This double meaning of motif (in French) or ‘motive’ (in English) is also found in Husserl’s use of the word. In Chapter 4 below, I will develop the importance of the phenomenological concept of ‘motif’ and ‘motivation’ for Merleau-Ponty. 5 While Merleau-Ponty does not explicitly name Husserl, there are good reasons to believe that this critique of the ‘intellectualists’ accounts of language includes Husserl’s view of language, which was originally articulated in the Logical Investigations and was essentially unchanged throughout his career. Below (in Chapter 4), I will argue that Merleau-Ponty’s middle-period view of language is meant as a response to a problem internal to Husserl’s understanding of language, namely that a purified transcendental language is not possible, or in other words, that transcendental insights cannot fully escape the conditioning effects of natural language. In the middle period, it will be crucial for Merleau-Ponty to present an account of language that successfully accounts for novel expression and communication. Here in the Phenomenology of Perception, it seems that he is already aware of this difficulty in Husserl’s account of language, but his response – the gestural theory of language – which was intended, at least in part, as a response to this problem, is itself saddled with its own difficulty, namely, it is unable to account for the historical conditioning of language. This is precisely what the middle-period theory of language seeks to describe and clarify. 6 Merleau-Ponty admits as much in the working notes to The Visible and the Invisible: ‘The tacit Cogito does not, of course, solve these problems [the relationship between the tacit cogito and the speaking subject]. In disclosing it as I did in the Phenomenology of Perception I did not arrive at a solution (my chapter on the Cogito is not connected to the chapter on speech): on the contrary I posed a problem. The tacit Cogito should make understood how language is not impossible, but cannot make understood how it is possible – There remains the problem

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of the passage from perceptual meaning [sens] to the meaning of language [sens] . . . Like all praxis language supposes . . . an institution’ (VI 176). Also in the working notes we find: ‘What I call the tacit Cogito [in the Phenomenology of Perception] 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 relations other than the relations that have served to form them [the inner possibilities of language]) that I form the transcendental attitude, that I constitute the constitutive consciousness’ (VI 171). As we will come to see, much of Merleau-Ponty’s writings in the middle period seek to provide a solution to these shortcomings.

Chapter 3 1

Phe´nome´nologie de la Perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945 pp. 409–10. The essays ‘Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man,’ ‘The Philosopher and Sociology’ and ‘From Mauss to Le´vi-Strauss’ are the central texts of MerleauPonty’s explicit treatment of the relationship of the sciences of man and philosophy. 3 In another reference to this letter, Merleau-Ponty claims: ‘Here [Husserl] seems to admit that the philosopher could not possibly have immediate access to the universal by reflection alone – that he is in no position to do without anthropological experience or to construct what constitutes the meaning of other experiences and other civilizations by a purely imaginative variation of his own experiences’ (Signs 107). 4 The full quote clarifies that this description of imaginative variation comes very close to what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘coherent deformation’ in reference to linguistic universals, which I shall describe below: ‘Let us make it perfectly clear that the underlying dynamics of the social whole is certainly not given with our narrow experience of living among others, yet it is only by throwing this experience in and out of focus that we succeed in representing it to ourselves . . .’ (Signs 100). Arriving at universal understanding is thus possible not through solitary reflection but only through contact with alterity, only by coming into contact with views that challenge mine. It is by passing through ourselves and into the other that we can arrive at universal understanding. 2

Chapter 4 1

His main writings on language include: Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language. Trans. Hugh J. Silverman. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973; ‘Indirect Language and The Voices of Silence’ and ‘On the Phenomenology of Language’ in Signs. Trans. Richard C. McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964; The Prose of the World. Ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. John O’Neill.

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Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974; ‘The Sensible World and the World of Expression,’ ‘Studies in the Literary Uses of Language,’ ‘The Problem of Speech’ in Themes from the Lectures at the Colle`ge de France 1952–1960. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. 2 There are indications that as early as 1947 Merleau-Ponty had already begun to abandon the Fundierung account of linguistic signification in light of the problems of the historical conditioning of language. In Hugh Silverman’s characterization of unpublished lecture notes from Merleau-Ponty’s 1947–48 course taught at Lyon, titled ‘Language and Communication,’ Silverman notes the emerging importance of the connection between language, history, and rationality in Merleau-Ponty’s thought: ‘History is mind poured out into cultural objects. It is not the mind of the cogito. This indicates that, for Merleau-Ponty, there is mind outside of selfconsciousness. . . . The cogito is formulated; its words say something. If we return to the tacit cogito that concerned Merleau-Ponty at the end of the Phenomenology of Perception, we rediscover an inseparable thought of a certain historical and linguistic thickness. Everything that I now say is conditioned by my linguistic learning. The presence of my thought is a presence through the already accomplished, the already seen (de´ja` vu).’ (‘Merleau-Ponty on Language and Communication.’ Research in Phenomenology. Vol. 9 (1979): 176.) 3 Ronald Bruzina clarifies the history of this text and its importance in Husserl’s late thought in his Translator’s Preface (vi–xxii) to Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). 4 Ronald Bruzina makes the distinction between the methodological and theoretical in Husserl’s interest of language in his illuminating article, ‘Does the Transcendental Ego Speak in Tongues? or The Problem of Language for Transcendental Reflection in Husserl’s Phenomenology.’ In Phenomenology in a Pluralistic Context. Ed. William L. McBride. Albany: SUNY, 1993, pp. 205–15. 5 In a letter to Van Breda, dated July 14, 1942, Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘In Marseilles I was able to consult, with G. Berger, the Sixth [Cartesian] Meditation; I read it in the tranquility of the small university town of Aix-en-Provence. . . .’ (‘MerleauPonty and the Husserl Archives at Louvain.’ In Texts and Dialogues: Merleau-Ponty. Eds. Silverman and Barry, p. 156.) Bruzina notes in the translator’s introduction to the Sixth Cartesian Meditation that Gaston Berger ‘returned to Marseille with Fink’s own carbon copy of the Sixth [Cartesian] Meditation’ (xxi) when Berger met Husserl and Fink at Freiburg in mid-August 1934. 6 Again, Van Breda notes: ‘In the course of [Merleau-Ponty’s] visit, I had the opportunity to introduce him to Eugen Fink. Although each man encountered serious difficulties in expressing himself in the language of the other, they enjoyed a long and very interesting exchange of opinions.’ (Ibid., p. 152.) 7 ‘The best formulation of the reduction is probably that given by Eugen Fink, Husserl’s assistant, when he spoke of that ‘‘wonder’’ in the face of the world.’ (PP xiii). 8 For a more detailed documentation of the contact between Fink and MerleauPonty see Ronald Bruzina’s essay, ‘Eugen Fink and Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Philosophical Lineage in Phenomenology,’ especially pages 174–8, in Merleau-

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Ponty’s Reading of Husserl. Eds. T. Toadvine and L. Embree. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002, pp. 173–200. 9 To Fink’s claim here Husserl responds: ‘What is problematic here is, on the one hand, the predication of someone thinking and discoursing in the egological sphere, on the other hand, the possibility of intersubjective predication and of the intersubjective being of scientific truths (as constructs) for everyone, whereby getting beyond the transcendental attitude seems to become necessary’ (SCM 84– 5). Husserl’s addition here is crucial, for even if we are able to arrive at language suitable for transcendental intersubjectivity, we still have not yet arrived at the demands made on language if phenomenology is to become a science. For transcendental language must, at some point, exit the transcendental sphere. 10 See the first two sections of Bruzina’s Translator’s Introduction to the Sixth Cartesian Meditation (pp. vii–xxxii) for a description of the relationship between Husserl and Fink when they were working on the revisions of the Cartesian Meditations. 11 It is here that we might find Merleau-Ponty’s espousal of a Saussurian model of language to be at least partially inspired by phenomenological problems. For if, like Merleau-Ponty, we believe that transcendental language cannot be purified of natural language influences, and if we continue to think of natural language as having some sort of transcendental function, then the analogous relationship between transcendental and natural language needs to be re-conceived. Even a cursory understanding of Saussure shows that analogy is crucial to his account of linguistic change and evolution: ‘Each time a new formation becomes definitely installed and eliminates its rival, something is actually created and something else abandoned, with the result that analogy occupies a preponderant place in the theory of evolution [of languages].’ (Ferdinand de Saussure. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959, p. 169.) On Saussure’s analysis, analogy allows for the rational replacement of one language form by another. On Merleau-Ponty’s reading, the evolution of language is crucial to the relationship between the Saussurian distinction established between language and speech. Of course, Merleau-Ponty does not directly address analogy, preferring to understand linguistic creation as a ‘coherent deformation,’ as I shall detail below, but the heritage of the problem of analogy is operative in his understanding of creative linguistic meaning, or in other words, novel expression. For another way to understand a ‘coherent deformation’ is to speak of analogy. 12 Merleau-Ponty himself characterizes this view as ‘Platonist.’ See pages 15–16 in the Prose of the World. 13 Stephen H. Watson. ‘Merleau-Ponty’s Involvement with Saussure.’ Continental Philosophy in America. Eds. Hugh Silverman, et. al. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press: 1983, pp. 208–26. See especially pp. 209–10. Watson cites the following quotation from Merleau-Ponty: ‘It might be said, restating a celebrated distinction, that languages [langage] or constituted systems of vocabulary and syntax, empirically existing ‘‘means of expression,’’ are both the repository and the residue of acts of speech [parole] in which unformulated significance not only finds the means of being conveyed outwardly, but moreover acquires significance, for itself, and is genuinely created as significance.’ (PP 196–7)

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14

‘The Metaphysical in Man.’ Originally appearing in the 1947 Revue de Me´taphysique et Morale and reprinted in Sense and Non-Sense p. 87. 15 Claude Lefort dates the bulk of the work published as The Prose of the World between late 1950 and early 1952. See ‘Editor’s Preface.’ (Prose of the World. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973, pp. xi–xvi.) 16 Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 81. 17 Beneath the unity of temporal moments necessary in express intentional acts Merleau-Ponty detects a unity already ‘operative,’ which makes express conscious acts possible: ‘In Husserl’s language, beneath the ‘‘intentionality of the act,’’ which is the thetic consciousness of the object, and which, in intellectual memory for example, converts ‘‘this’’ into an idea, we must recognize an ‘‘operative’’ intentionality (fungierende Intentionalita¨t) which makes the former possible, and which is what Heidegger terms transcendence’ (PP 418). Express conscious acts develop and, in this development, alter the objects of the ‘operative intentionality.’ 18 Later in The Prose of the World, when Merleau-Ponty considers Andre´ Malraux’s thought on art, he adopts Malraux’s phrase, ‘coherent deformation’ (PW 60, 91) to describe the meaningful transformation that novel expression introduces into a signifying system. Likewise, in the essay ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,’ he also describes novel expression as a ‘coherent deformation’ (Signs 78). Although Merleau-Ponty is known for the phrase ‘coherent deformation’ to describe novel expression, in the present work, I shall focus on his earlier formulation, ‘coherent motivation,’ in order to reveal crucial implications for phenomenology that arise from his interest in linguistic change and alteration. Merleau-Ponty appears to use the terms interchangeably. 19 In Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, the interior of language was expressed in Wilhelm von Humbolt’s concept of the ‘innere Sprachform’: ‘The innere Sprachform is the totality of processes and expressions that are produced when we are at the point of expressing our thought or of understanding the thought of other people. The juncture of pure thought and of language occurs, then, in the innere Sprachform. . . .’ (CAL 76). This understanding of the innere Sprachform is echoed in Merleau-Ponty’s 1953 lectures on the function of speech in language; the interior of language is an ‘immanent spirit of language the mediator which Saussure calls parole’ (IPP 92).

Chapter 5 1 ‘We are saying that in the same cultural world everyone’s thoughts lead a hidden life in the others, as a kind of obsession, each being moved by the other and entangled with him the moment he begins to offer resistance. This is not a skeptical principle; on the contrary, it is a principle of truth. We really inhabit the same world and are open to truth precisely because there arises this diffusion among thoughts, this osmosis which makes the cloistering of thought impossible and deprives of all meaning the question of: to whom a thought belongs.’ (PW 94) 2 ‘. . . the problems posed in the Phenomenology of Perception are insoluble because I start there from the ‘‘consciousness’’–‘‘object’’ distinction’ (VI 200).

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3

Merleau-Ponty borrows this term from Andre´ Malraux. This formulation recurs often in the text of the Prose of the World; see also pp. 61, 91, 104, and 113. See also Signs pp. 54, 78, and 81. 4 ‘For language is the system of differentiations through which the individual articulates his relation to the world.’ (IPP 91). 5 This phrase is encountered often in the middle-period writings (see also pp. 65 and 83 of Primacy, for example). This is Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of what Husserl called intentionale Modification in x52 of the Cartesian Meditations. It is also akin to Husserl’s concept of Paarung. See translator’s note number 39, page 43, and page 49 in Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language. 6 A fine example of what I am calling the standard reading can be found in Martin Dillon’s well-known monograph, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology. See particularly chapter 10. See also Paul K. Jacobson’s article, ‘Language, Thought, and Truth in the Works of Merleau-Ponty: 1949–1953.’ Research in Phenomenology. Vol. 9 (1979): 144–67. For a more recent presentation of the standard reading see Douglas Low’s Merleau-Ponty’s Last Vision: A Proposal for the Completion of The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000. 7 Dillon clearly conflates Fundierung with Stiftung: ‘I leave the term [Fundierung] in its German form in order to distinguish the specific and technical meaning of ‘‘Fundierung’’ from the general and ordinary usage of ‘‘foundation.’’ (MerleauPonty also uses the term ‘‘Stiftung’’ – another appropriation from Husserl – to designate the founding/founded relation. ‘‘Stiftung’’ is usually translated as ‘‘foundation’’ or ‘‘establishment’’.)’ Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, p. 278, footnote 43. Low ignores the Husserlian heritage of the concept of Stiftung (institution), especially for Merleau-Ponty, by stressing its Hegelian origin (Merleau-Ponty’s Last Vision, pp. 80–3). 8 The relevant passage is found on pages 126–7. 9 My translation. This quotation is also found in Signs, p. 59. Another very similar passage is found in the Themes from the Lectures: ‘Thus what we understand by the concept of institution are those events in experience which endow it with durable dimensions, in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will acquire meaning, will form an intelligible series or a history – or again those events which sediment in me a meaning, not just as survivals or residues, but as the invitation to a sequel, the necessity of a future.’ (IPP 108–9).

Chapter 6 1

It is quoted for the first time by Merleau-Ponty in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Perception, and as late as The Visible and the Invisible. Already in the initial paragraphs of The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty says: ‘It is the things themselves, from the depths of their silence, that [philosophy] wishes to bring to expression. If the philosopher questions, and hence feigns ignorance of the world and of the vision of the world which are operative and take form continually within him, he does so precisely in order to make them speak, because he believes in

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them and expects from them all his future science’ (4). See also page 129 of The Visible and the Invisible. 2 See the 1911 Logos essay, ‘Philosophy as Rigorous Science’ in Husserl: Shorter Works. Trans. Quentin Lauer, et al. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1981, 166–97. 3 Such a strong reading can be found in Jacques Derrida’s Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction. Trans. John P. Leavey Jr. Lincoln: University Press Nebraska, 1978. A Marxist-inspired version of this strong reading can also be found in Tran Duc Thao’s Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism. Trans. Herman, Daniel J. and Morano, Donald V. Boston: Kluwer, 1986. 4 More recently, David Carr has argued for a similar reading of Husserl’s turn to history in Chapters 3 and 4 of Phenomenology and the Problem of History. There he claims: ‘There are two themes in Husserl’s phenomenology which can be said to have ‘‘resulted’’ in the late ‘‘historical turn’’ described in the previous chapter. While it is impossible to retrace Husserl’s actual train of thought, it is at least possible to show that these themes, when developed and combined, suggest and make understandable the historical framework of the Crisis. These themes fall under the following headings: (a) genetic phenomenology; (b) the phenomenology of intersubjectivity. As we shall see neither of these themes of the Crisis period is really new. In fact, each can be traced to the very beginnings of Husserl’s phenomenological writings.’ (David Carr. Phenomenology and the Problem of History: A Study of Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974, p. 68.) 5 This brief work, originally titled, ‘‘Der Ursprung der Geometrie als intentionalhistorisches Problem’ is included in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, pages 353–78. 6 A summary of this course was originally published in the 1968 Re´sume´s de cours, Colle`ge de France 1952–1960 by E´ditions Gallimard, Paris. (English: In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans John O’Neill. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. 181–91.) A more detailed presentation of the course is found in Merleau-Ponty’s lecture notes published in 1998 under the title, Merleau-Ponty: Notes de Cours sur L’Origine de la Ge´ome´try de Husserl, edited by Renaud Barbaras, and published by Presses Universitaires de France. The English translation of these notes is published as, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology. Trans. Leonard Lawlor and Bettina Bergo. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002. All my quotations will refer to the page numbers in the English version. 7 Husserl refers to this inter-subjectivity as the inter-generational ‘accomplishing subjectivity’ (CES 356). Merleau-Ponty is interested in this problem late in the working notes of The Visible and the Invisible. Speaking of the ‘savage mind,’ he says, ‘the problem is to grasp what, across the successive and simultaneous community of speaking subjects, wishes, speaks, and finally thinks’ (VI 176). 8 It is this passive activity and the implications involved that Merleau-Ponty has in mind when he says in a working note to The Visible and the Invisible: ‘Philosophy has never spoken – I do not say of passivity; we are not affects – but I would say of the passivity of our activity. . . . The soul always thinks: this is in it a property of its state, it cannot not think because a field has been opened in which something or the

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absence of something is always inscribed. This is not an activity of the soul, nor a production of thoughts in the plural, and I am not even the author of that hollow that forms within me by the passage from the present to the retention, it is not I who makes myself think any more than it is I who makes my heart beat. From there leave the philosophy of Erlebnisse and pass to the philosophy of our Urstiftung.’ (VI 221) 9 Husserl’s Platonism is clear in the following passage from the ‘Origin of Geometry’: ‘The Pythagorean Theorem, indeed all of geometry, exists only once, no matter how often or even in what language it may be expressed. It is identically the same in the ‘‘original language’’ of Euclid and in all ‘‘translations’’; and within each language it is again the same, no matter how many times it has been sensibly uttered, from the original expression and writing-down to the innumerable oral utterances or written and other documentations. The sensible utterances have spatiotemporal individuation in the world like all corporeal occurrences, like everything embodied in bodies as such; but this is not true of the spiritual form itself, which is called an ‘‘ideal object.’’ ’ (CES 357) 10 In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty uses a slightly different metaphor to indicate the same lack: ‘Whether in discussion or in monologue, the essence in the living and active state is always a certain vanishing point, indicated by the arrangement of the words, their ‘‘other side,’’ inaccessible, save for him who accepts to live first and always in them’ (119). 11 ‘This unconscious is to be sought not at the bottom of ourselves, behind the back of our ‘‘consciousness,’’ but in front of us, as articulations of our field. It is ‘‘unconscious’’ by the fact that it is not an object, but it is that through which objects are possible, it is the constellation wherein our future is read . . . the Ineinander of others in us and of us in them.’ (VI 180)

Conclusion 1

In the opening of The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty says, ‘For us the essential is to know precisely what the being of the world means. Here we must presuppose nothing – neither the naive idea of being in itself, therefore, nor the correlative idea of a being of representation, of a being for the consciousness, of a being for man: these, along with the being of the world, are all notions that we have to rethink with regard to our experience of the world.’ (VI 6) 2 Jacques Taminiaux, ‘Experience, Expression, and Form in Merleau-Ponty’s Itinerary.’ Dialectic and Difference: Finitude in Modern Thought. New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1985, p. 146.

Bibliography

Works by Merleau-Ponty (Where applicable, the French title is given and followed by the English translation.) Les Aventures de la dialectique. Paris: Gallimard, 1955. Adventures of the Dialectic. Trans. Joseph Bien. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. ‘La Conscience et l’acquisition du langage.’ Bulletin de psychologie. No. 236 (1964): 183–256. Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language. Trans. Hugh J. Silverman. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. E´loge de la Philosophie. Paris: Gallimard, 1953. In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. James Edie, John O’Neill, and John Wild. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. Humanisme et Terreur, Essai sur le Proble`me Communiste. Paris: Gallimard, 1947. Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem. Trans. John O’Neill. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Notes des Cours au Colle`ge de France: 1958–1959 et 1960–1961. Paris: Gallimard, 1974. Notes de Cours sur L’Origine de la ge´ome´trie de Husserl, suivi de Recherches sur la phe´nome´nologie de Merleau-Ponty sous la direction de Renaud Barbaras. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998. Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology. Eds. and Trans. Leonard Lawlor and Bettina Bergo. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002. L’Oeil et l’esprit. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. ‘Eye and Mind.’ The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenology, Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Ed. James M. Edie. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. ‘Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis: Preface to Hesnard’s L’Oeuvre de Freud.’ The Essential Writings of Merleau-Ponty. Ed. Alden L. Fisher. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969. Phe´nome´nologie de la Perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1962. Le Primat de la perception et ses conse´quences philosophiques. Grenoble: Cynara, 1989. ‘The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences.’

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Works by Other Authors Barbaras, Renaud. De l’eˆtre du phe´nome`ne. Grenoble: Millon, 1991. The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology. Trans. Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Bernet, Rudolf. ‘Perception as Teleological Cognition.’ Analecta Husserliana. Vol. IX (1979): 119–32. Bien, Joseph. ‘Merleau-Ponty’s Conception of History.’ The Horizons of the Flesh: Critical Perspectives on the Thought of Merleau-Ponty. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973, 127–42. Bruzina, Ronald. ‘Dependence on Language and the Autonomy of Reason: An Husserlian Perspective.’ Man and World. Vol. 14 (1981): 355–68. ——, ‘Does the Transcendental Ego Speak in Tongues? or The Problem of Language for Transcendental Reflection in Husserl’s Phenomenology.’ Phenomenology in a Pluralistic Context. Ed. William L. McBride. Albany: The SUNY Press, 1993, 205–15. ——, ‘Eugen Fink and Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Philosophical Lineage

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Index

activity / passivity 62–3, 122–5, 132 coherent deformation 89, 93, 95, 96, 103, 107, 110, 149n. 18 Descartes 22, 43–5, 93, 133 Dilthey, Wilhelm 8 embodiment and expression 32–43, 46 epoche´ 61, 73, 110 essence 2, 31, 36, 49, 59, 61–4, 66 and facts 28–9, 63 free-play in phantasy 64–5, 129–31 Fink, Eugen 5–6, 70–4, 86, 88, 110 form and content 29–32, 110, 132 Fundierung 26, 29–32, 37, 43, 45, 48–50, 98, 99–106, 109, 124, 131, 134, 140–1, see also Stiftung Galileo 16, 114 Gestalt 21–7, 62–4, 68, 75, 95 gestalt psychology 62, 67 gesture see ‘language’ historical constitution 44–9, 117–32 historicism 4, 8, 19, 57, 59, 65, 80, 114–15, 117, 124, 128, 138 Husserl, Edmund 1–2, 4, 29, 30, 33, 34, 48, 57, 64, 80, 81, 85, 96, 98, 109, 110, 126, 137–40 history 14–20, 113–17, 138 language 69–74, 77 the human sciences 58–60, 64–5 identity synthesis 81–3, 121–2

impense´e 122 institution 37, 38, 45, 48, see also Stiftung instituting subject 96–7, 111, 124 intermonde 5, 54–6, 91–2, 97–8, 106, 109, 111 intentional transgression 94, 97, 134, 150n. 5 intentionality 2, 8, 16, 55, 56, 62, 94, 97, 116–17 bodily 32–3 historical 31–2, 83 operative 17, 33, 83, 87, 122–3, 149 language 91–6 active see ‘novel expression’ diachronic 80–2 e´criture 126–7 gesture 5, 34–43, 46–50, 100, 104–6 ideal meanings 40–3, 126–32 rationality 68, 69–74, 78–9, 93–4 synchronic 80–2 lifeworld 4, 7, 9–20, 48, 114–15, 117, 121, 138, 140 linguistics 67, 74–5, 79, 99 logical idealization 11–14 Malraux, Andre´ 110 motivation 5, 17, 82–6, 89, 108, 110, 121, 124, 139 noesis and noema 8, 97 novel expression 5, 6, 37–40, 43, 74–6, 78–8, 92–6, 107–9 Origin of Geometry 6, 67, 79, 116, 118–25, 127–9, 138–9

160

Index

passivity 26–7, 130, 134 perception 52–6, 104–6, 109 as foundation 10–14, 26, see also Fundierung Platonism 6, 30, 41, 60, 66, 67, 68, 76–8, 86, 112, 128, 138–9 phenomenology crisis 13, 15–16, 110, 113, 115–16 history 14–20, 114–17 and human sciences 8–10, 19, 58–61, 66, 67, 110, 112, 114 reflection 21, 26, 30–3 passivity 25 pre-predicative experience 4, 6, 9, 11–14, 20, 21, 26, 28, 30, 43, 45, 49, 97, 111, 114, 140 primordial 5, 12, 36, 38, 43, 46, 52–6, 67, 92, 97, 109, 111, 114, 137 psychologism 4, 7–8, 19, 57–9, 128 pure ideas 42, 49, 129–32, 139 rationality 56–58, 65–67, 108–9, 111 crisis in 57–58 history 14–20, 114–17, 135–6 and language 68, 80 relativism 65–6, 68, 110 transcendence 132–5

re-join (rejoindre) 91, 93–7, 107–8, 111, 122, 124, 126, 132–4, 136 reversibility 6, 100–1, 103, 112, 131, 134, 141 Sartre, Jean-Paul 95 Saussure, Ferdinand de 67, 79–80, 82, 86–8, 99, 110, 132 Schneider 28–9 speech see ‘novel expression’ Stendhal 93 synthesis identifying 81–3, 121–2 transition 32, 81–3, 121–2 Stiftung 6, 51, 96, 98, 99, 124, 131, 134, 137, 138, 140–1 Endstiftung 16 and Fundierung 99–106, 109 Urstiftung 16, 79, 110 tacit cogito 43–6, 49, 56, 97, 111, 138, 145–6n. 6 transcendental aesthetic 4, 13–14, 20–1, 25, 27–8, 51 truth 65–6, 106–10 Wesenschau 61–4, 107