Phenomenology, Institution and History: Writings After Merleau-Ponty II 9781472547255, 9781847065315, 9781441158970

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Abbreviations

Works by Maurice 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). EO ‘The Experience of Others,’ trans. Fred Evans, Hugh J. Silverman, Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry, Vol. XVIII, nos. 1, 2 & 3, 1982–1983, pp. 33–63. EM ‘Eye and Mind,’ trans. Carleton Dallery, 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). HLP Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, ed. Leonard Lawlor, Bettina Bergo (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002). HT Humanism and Terror, trans. John O’Neill (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). IP L’Institution passivité: notes de cours au Collège de France 1954–1955, ed. Dominique Darmaillacq, Claude Lefort, Stéphanie Ménasé (Paris: Belin, 2003). IPP In Praise of Philosophy, trans. John Wild, James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1963). N Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003). NC Notes de cours au Collège de France 1958–1959 et 1960–1961, ed. Stéphanie Ménasé (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). PD Parcous deux (1951–1961), ed. Jacques Prunair (Lagrass: Verdier, 2000). PNP ‘Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Hegel,’ trans. Hugh J. Silverman, Telos No. 29, Fall 1976. PoP Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (revised by Forrest Williams) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962).

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Abbreviations PP PW S SB SNS TD TL VI WP

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The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964). The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963). Sense and Non Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus, Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964). Texts and Dialogues, ed. Hugh J. Silverman, James Barry, Jr. (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1992). Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France 1952–1960, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). The World of Perception, trans. Oliver David (London: Routledge, 2004).

Works by Edmund Husserl CM EJ

FTL I

I II

I III

Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorian Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 196). Experience and Judgment: Investigation in a Genealogy of Logic, trans. James S. Churchill, Karl Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book, General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff), 1982. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. Richard Rojcewicz, André Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989). Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences: Third Book, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. Ted E. Klein, William E. Pohl (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980).

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Abbreviations

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ITC K

LI PAS

On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, trans. John Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). Logical Investigations, in Two Volumes, trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970). Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, trans. Anthony J. Steinbock (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001).

Works of Gaston Bachelard ARPC FSM MR NSS PF PN PR PS RA WD

L’Activité rationaliste de la physique contemporaine (Paris: P.U.F., 1951). The Formation of the Scientific Mind, trans. Mary McAllester Jones (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2002). Matérialisme rationnel (Paris: P.U.F., 1953). The New Scientific Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984). The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan A. C.Ross (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). The Philosophy of No, trans. G. C. Waterman (New York: Orion Press, 1968). The Poetics of Reverie, trans. Daniel Russel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971). The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). Le rationalisme appliqué (Paris: P.U.F., 1949). Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. Edith R. Farrell (Dallas: The Pegasus Foundations, 1999).

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Chapter 1

From the Ethics of Ambiguity to the Dialectics of Virtue: Merleau-Ponty and the ‘Ruins of the Spirit’

I It might seem an understatement, granted challenges in recent thought, to claim that the classical phenomenological research program inaugurated by Edmund Husserl did not provide an ethics. On its own terms it seemed historically incapable of doing so. However, when this claim is merely asserted the result has also seemed simply an ideological or rhetorical matter. This was true not only with respect to external challenges to philosophy in general, raised through recourse to such figures as Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud. It was also true of the complex critiques that pivoted around the concept of “consciousness” asserting that it was intrinsically totalizing, egocentric or “for-itself.” The refusal of such figures as Levinas or Heidegger, whose work spurred such challenges, to separate their work from Phenomenology makes the issue only murkier.1 To concentrate, as will be the proposal here, upon figures who intervene within this complex itinerary, tracing in effect the coherent deformation of its history, may seem a matter of explaining the obscurus per obscurus. Yet it may be precisely here, their apparent underdeterminability notwithstanding, that these arguments’ interface emerges, standard interpretations of classical existentialism’s naïveté notwithstanding. Instead (and in this regard ‘existentialism’ may indeed be the “floating signifier” those captured by it claimed) what is at stake involves the opening from which more recent critiques arose, ones whose implications are as much epistemic as ontological, and as much ethical as logical. If those who labored under the sign of existentialism would not have the last word, they have an important role to play, and would bring an inextricable word to bear upon rendering these polemics on ethics and values intelligible. It might involve

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a word perhaps no more eruptive or “ambiguous” than that invoked in the final enigmatic sentences of Merleau-Ponty’s Preface to Signs’ appeal to ‘virtu.’ Such terms may be not only necessary to grasping the internal dynamics of the ethical within Phenomenology, but—insofar as it marked equally the echo of works he devoted over a decade earlier to Machiavelli and Montaigne—crucial to polemics about the rise of ethical and political modernism. Like much of Merleau-Ponty’s later writing, however, and especially in this case, striking in a statement for which he was peremptorily condemned, it can be made significant only by tracing the complex relations that form its antecedents within the phenomenological archive.2

II As we know overtly from Husserliana XXVIII, Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre (1908–1914), the question of ethics was not simply absent from Phenomenology, if it was neither central nor foundational for it.3 Nonetheless, the account of the ethical remained bound by the specificity of the paradigms in which Phenomenology had been articulated and, in particular, Husserl’s idea of the sciences in general (cf. LI, section 62). Phenomenology was from the outset an endeavor formulated on foundations that were to be demonstrably ultimate with regard to rational enquiry in general, renewing the idea of Wissenschaftslehre: an enquiry concerning ‘what makes science science’ (LI: 59). If it is critical to see that Husserl’s considerations on ethics remained subsumed beneath his account of analytics, it may also be necessary to recognize the extent to which this account remained theory-laden, bound, that is, to the very intransitivity of this Transcendental Ideal (LI: 225). Instead, as his lectures on ethics and theory of value demonstrate, Husserl’s logicism left his attempts to deal with ethical issues inevitably impoverished, even though he railed against Kant’s formalism and its subjectivization of the passions. From the outset the question of ethics was based upon a ‘parallelismus’ with questions of logic. To use Wittgenstein’s term, Husserl’s account of ethics perhaps remained mystified, captivated by a “picture” in its attempt to mimic the deductive determinacy of logic. Analytic phenomenology, as Husserl originally called it, was not simply “analytic” with respect to its pure descriptions of the appearance. It was likewise analytic with respect to a certain conception of the rational, which remained univocal, indisputably decidable, demonstrably determinate, and consequently devoid of internal epistemic shortfall. What Husserl had

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gleaned from Bolzano concerning the objectivity of truth could be reinstated in the moral domain, a merely analogical extension of the fulfillment of the manifolds of reason. This allowed Husserl to explicitly formulate his account of formal axiology, that is, through an analogy of methods. Husserl’s demands for reason could then be seen to imply a praxis of reason, its genitive fully objective, embarking once more upon a stoicism of internal necessity that had accompanied philosophical modernism’s commitment to certainty from its origins.4

III Nothing could be seemingly more dissonant with this than the comparison of Husserl’s parallelismus with the locus classicus of phenomenological ethics. Max Scheler’s Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (1913–1916) has always been ambiguously related to its discipline’s founder. Indeed, Scheler’s work is often described as lacking in Husserl’s rigors. In retrospect, such claims must be evaluated carefully. Scheler’s allegiance to the history of ethics led him to retain the classical distinction between practical and theoretical matters, which remained paradigmatically at odds with Husserl’s philosophy of strict science. Against Cartesianism, Scheler’s ethics proceeded not by subsuming feeling within a rational hierarchy nor, inversely, by simply succumbing to it, but acknowledging its insight, appealing thereby to a source that originally escaped strict pure thought: here he appealed to Pascal or Augustine’s logic of the heart for precedent.5 Owing to our age’s own rationalist ‘désordre du coeur,’ Scheler claimed, the intentional experience of feeling and the values disclosed therein has been rendered irrational. Such emphasis upon sociological or historical features also led Scheler, somewhat in advance of Husserl, to acknowledge the necessity of distinguishing between static and “genetic” explication and the transformation this entailed. This depended on the recognition that the intuitional or perceptual experiences that underwrote Husserl’s foundationism emerge from a broader epistemic process. Or to use Fichte’s terms, as Husserl had at points, it emerges through the ‘vocation’ constituted in its teleology. The historical extension and unfolding of consciousness is the means for its fulfillment and renewal. The verificational series itself generated its own rational—if transcendental—history. Granted this transformation from static to genetic analysis, as Husserl himself would realize, ‘immediately the problem becomes extended to include the other intentional references,

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those belonging to the situation in which, for example, the subject exercising the judicative activity is standing and to include, therefore the immanent unity of the temporality of the life that has its history therein . . .’ (FTL: 36). Phenomenology and history, far from being set off in opposition to one another, as Husserl’s early logicism had demanded, would be essentially conjoined. Even though Scheler had not pursued the point of this alteration from within the genre of Wissenschaftslehre in which the transformation became evident to Husserl, the point had been latent in Scheler’s Formalismus’s account of the rationality of ethical consciousness.6 From its opening page Scheler’s account denied any identification of the hierarchy of values with classical ontologies concerning the Good, the latter being dependent upon the acts through which they acquire their “valuability”. That is, ‘a good is related to a value as a thing to the quality that fulfill its properties.’7 Scheler’s 1926 Preface claimed that his account overcomes Kant’s formalism, while depending upon the latter’s critical ‘destruction’ (Zerstörung).8 The resulting account of values, barring ‘a return to the ancient static objectivism of goods,’ was phenomenologically relational in origins—and both conditional and perspectival.9 Without succumbing to subjectivism, he claimed, Scheler had also detached such insight into values from universal validity. ‘There can very well be an a priori for only one individual’s insight or one that only one individual can have.’10 Moreover, notwithstanding his overall realism, he had claimed that in principle ‘there are still infinitely more values than anyone has ever felt or grasped.’11 As with Husserl’s transcendental genesis, the absolute, in this sense, had been consigned to an infinite process of elaboration. What was at stake in an analysis of evaluation would consequently be ‘more, not less, historico-relativistic than Kant’s, but without giving up the idea of an absolute ethics itself.’12 Precisely because of this insight he would claim that ‘this most radical relativity of moral value estimations gives us no reason to assume a relativism of moral values themselves and their orders of ranks.’13 The rationalization of ethics, consequently, requires both differentiation and infinite elaboration, and hence further reference to Husserl’s extended and ‘other intentional references’—without turning simply relative.14

IV Further grasping Scheler’s theoretical difference vis-à-vis Husserl, however, requires the realization that, for all its explicit commitments to nonformalism,

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it was not without theoretical implications. Scheler’s account, too, at points rests upon a specific account of evidence. If the evidence in question is never complete, if the absolute is never simply determinable, if identity and difference are inseparable, this is not the failure but the formal condition of evidence: in effect, to be underdetermined without being dissolved. Scheler’s work, dating from the same time period as Husserl’s commitments to a logical parallelism between logic and ethics, anticipates Husserl’s own later developments. But Scheler’s work also departs from its account of the formal. While Wissenschaftstheorie for Husserl was both more than metaphysics and more than epistemology, Scheler disagreed on both counts: metaphysically, regarding the account of theoretization and the absolute, epistemologically, regarding the origins of evaluation. Nothing could be more portentous in this regard than Scheler’s analogy between formal science and “material” or concrete evaluation. He declares: ‘By way of analogy I could say that the discovery of new geometries with different axiomatic systems, which is to be sharply distinguished from the discovery of new propositions within each system, does not make geometry more relative than it was from the very start.’15 It is a quick analogy, as much metaphor as model, but a decisive one. It serves to further truncate the complex relations between the two positions. First, the geometrical analogue occurs in Husserl’s own discussion of ethics.16 It is not surprising in this context, since it is not simply analogical but paradigmatic for Husserl. From the beginning (cf. LI: 59–60) to the end of his career, culminating in the 1936 ‘Origin of Geometry,’ geometry remained exemplary to his foundational concerns. Though Husserl’s account of justificatory investigations alters during this period, moving from intuition to an extended account of perception, or static to genetic accounts, the point remains the same. As the ‘Origin of Geometry’ would repeat: ‘Original self-evidence must not be confused with the self-evidence of axioms’ (K: 365). The latter remain founded, even if they (genetically) always ‘appear on the scene in the form of tradition,’ in the invariant essential structures, the universal a priori of consciousness (K: 367). Any systematic explication of propositions presupposes the self-evidential origin from which they derive, and presupposes therefore the science of such an origin. Scheler had not swerved from this.17 It was, again, the rational question of ultimate adequation that had caused him to pause. Husserl had learned from Kant the idea of a categorical imperative and the purity of an ethics of values, but Scheler countered with Kant’s destruction. No determinate articulation could exhaustively deliver the finality of a truth or value in itself; it would invoke an ongoing sequence ‘with ever more seriousness, accuracy, and determinateness.’18

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In changing from the static to the genetic account, Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic, perhaps admitted to being overly indebted to a certain foundationalist reading of Hilbert in the attempt to model the phenomenological evidence upon the idea of complete axiomatic enumeration (cf. FTL: 94–7). The Origin’s commitment to complete disclosure still attests to it (K: 367). It is significant that Heidegger, who as early as 1912 had written on advances in mathematics and logic, already citing the work of Russell and Whitehead, was perhaps closer on this matter to Scheler. In 1925, he openly declared that Hilbert’s formalism, on the one hand, was opposed to Phenomenology and Brouwer and Weyl, on the other hand, was “influenced” by Phenomenology.19 Heidegger charged that Bolzano’s idea of science as a closed system of objectively decidable truths-in-themselves, ultimately conflicted with the phenomenological account of evidence (LI: 222–4).20 Later in the 1940s, Jean Cavaillès, who defended but again surpassed Husserl in this area, claimed that the enquiry into pure logic resulted not simply in a sequence of identically determinate repeatables but a series that, as both equally revelatory and creative, could not be apodictically “dominated” from the beginning by pure form. It involved an event where matter and form could not be separated.21 The demand for a parallelism between pure form and pure matter (semantics) would consequently be naïve. Husserl’s foundational attempts to imitate Hilbert were bound to fail: The possibility of assembling some privileged assertions at the outset is a source of illusion if we forget the operational rules which alone give them meaning. Concrete axiomatics, like those of Hilbert for geometry, are in part responsible for the error by their reference to well-known notions.22 Husserl’s own position is oblique in the end, granted his own alterations of the account of science and evidence, especially regarding the Cartesian account of the subject and the equivalence between apodicticity and adequacy it required. Cavaillès had already questioned whether the result of genetic analysis conflicted with Husserl’s reductivism, its pure semantic types inevitably confounded in the syntactic explicative sequences that underwrote ‘the science of infinite tasks.’23 The students of Husserl, whom Van Breda in the late thirties identified as a new Parisian school (Cavaillès, Hyppolite, Merleau-Ponty, Tran-Duc-Thao), saw the unpublished manuscripts to be not simply an enrichment of the phenomenological program, but, as Van Breda put it, manifestly ‘incompatible’ with the logicism of its ‘philosophical framework.’24 It was perhaps Cavaillès who faced Husserl most directly in his own theoretical research.

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The point here is not that Cavaillès is simply right about the foundations of logic or mathematics and that Husserl is simply wrong. Things are more heterogeneous than Husserl suspected. The problem involves less the concept of consciousness than the obstacles confronting its theoretical models. Were Husserl deprived of the model of providing the universal or “Archimedean” foundation he claimed to have in logic, a phenomenology of value would not be so readily or univocally calculated. Such a phenomenology, beyond its Cartesian or egological origins, would emerge from the “interplay” of “monads,” an intersubjective institution (Stiftung), and even a certain “classicism,” ironically retracing the Aristotelian refiguration of “ethics” out of ethos.

V If the material a priori required by an ethics of values originates in a nonempirical insight, its articulation would in fact always be finite. This eventuality caused the static account to flounder, turning its search for truths (or values) in themselves prejudicial (FTL: 277). The process of genetic differentiation or explication would never be exhausted, now a regulative—if still infinite—idea. As a result, the plurality of value estimations, far from providing a threat to this origin, would instead attest both to its abundance and the infinite task of its elaboration. Its objectivity is always scheme or perspective specific. The crucial problem of genesis emerges along with hidden and multiple intentional meaning. As Scheler put it in discussing the emergence of an ethos in general: It is precisely a correctly understood absolute ethics that strictly requires these differences—this value-perspectivism of values among peoples and their times and this openness in the formative stages of the ethos.25 Scheler’s Auseinandersetzung with Husserl may have operated as much from a certain internal dissonance within Husserl’s own system as it did from a failure to live up to its systematic requisites. In the end, the search for an ultimately adequatable parallelism between logic and ethics was misguided. Notwithstanding both Husserl’s and Scheler’s condemnations of Kant’s marginalization of feeling, their mutual allegiance to the critical project turned antinomial, an event which impacted the ethical in connecting the adequation of truth to matters of context and genesis. But in this respect—on

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either account—things will become complex for the account of ethical judgment. Questions in axiology could not be readily subsumed beneath the pure categories of reason; it would be incumbent to trace not only the encounter in which they arise but the complexity of their emergence. And, to use a term of Bachelard’s for the departure of non-Euclidean geometries with respect to Kant’s pure categories, it would be necessary to confront the necessary ‘complication’ of reason as a result.26 Again appealing to the model of non-Euclidean geometry, in On the Eternal in Man, Scheler once more denied the Kantian account of the imposition or constitution of the immutable form of knowledge that still underlies the Husserlian account.27 Just as he had denied the trivialization of Kant’s account of feeling, he contested what may be called ‘the eternal stability of human reason (truly a property of divine reason alone), which Kant presupposes in his attempt to exhaust this reason.’28 Instead, and still denying that relativism was the result, he claimed that neither being nor reason can ‘at any point in history be completely defined.’29 We will need to contest Kant’s principle of ‘the logical identity of the rational mind’ and to consider how ‘sets of essential insights enjoyed by different subjects’ may ‘differ from one another’ and yet historically open upon one another precisely in the Zweideutigkeit of their difference.30 And it was perhaps just the complexity of this event, its contingency or ambiguity, to invoke their terms, that would make the departures instituted by Scheler both attractive and “phenomenological” to the existentialists.

VI First we should examine the emergence of the question of value in the early works of the 1930s. Emmanuel Levinas’s 1931 The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology had in effect already opened French students not only to Husserl’s work, but also to the critical status of ethics with respect to it. Having elaborated what he, too, saw to be a certain fluctuation in Husserl’s thought between the primacy of theory and its explications concerning ‘concrete life,’ Levinas, surely not far from Scheler, ventured that this difficulty would be ultimately resolved in the ‘affirmation of the intentional character of practical and axiological life.’31 In many respects those who followed in his wake would affirm the same strategy. By 1936 and The Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre had been led to question the transcendental certainty of reflection and its Kantian stronghold.

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The notebooks of 1939 reveal the importance of his discovery of the question of value by reading Scheler: [R]eading Scheler made me understand that there existed values. Basically, until then, quite absorbed by the metaphysical doctrine of salvation, I’d never understood the specific problem of morality. The ‘ought-to-be’ seemed to me to be represented by the categorical imperative; and since I rejected the latter, it seemed to me that I rejected the former with it. But when I understood that there existed specific natures, equipped with an existence as of right, and called values; when I understood that these values, whether proclaimed or not, regulated each of my acts and judgments, and that by their nature they ‘ought to be’: then the problem became enormously more complex.32 Four years previous to the entry in Sartre’s notebooks, Merleau-Ponty’s first publication, a review of Scheler’s book on ressentiment affirms ‘the a priori materials, that is to say, some objects of concrete intention,’ provided by Scheler’s ‘alogical’ intuition of values.33 Here, Merleau-Ponty praises Scheler’s account precisely for its ‘super-abundance of life’ in responding to the failures of nineteenth century moral thought (Mill, Bentham, Nietzsche).34 This opposition could be characterized as an insistence upon moral realism, the right of ‘nature,’ as Sartre had put it.35 Still, it was inevitably more complex. The existentialist’s discovery of the early masters of Phenomenology remained both conditional and naïve not only with respect to how phenomenological resources might be applied to their own problems, but naïve with respect to the viability of the options and internal coherence of the phenomenological research program itself. Much still needs to be said of the dialogue constituted by the works of the major figures of the Parisian school of interpreters of Phenomenology in figures such as Cavaillès or Tran-Duc-Thao. If both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty found the origins of their ethical accounts in Scheler in the mid-thirties, it was not simply because Husserl’s later writings in ethics were unavailable, but rather because they were finding in the difference that arose between Scheler and Husserl a difference that resonated with their own confrontation with that project. This confrontation revolved around the issue of realist or concrete commitments to ontology and non-Cartesian accounts of judgment: seemingly, again, around the issue of “ambiguity.” Even here, however, both Scheler and Husserl’s work would be condemned for their inattention to history (PP: 94). For all of Scheler’s attention to the Cogito as a ‘conquest of

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culture,’ for Merleau-Ponty, he still maintained the attitude of a ‘new type of scholasticism’ in claiming the absolute indubitability of essential intuition, insufficiently acknowledging the ‘circularity’ between concept and intuition (CAL: 47; PP: 75).36

VII Tied to existentialism, the problem of ambiguity fully assumed—and fully transformed—its Hegelian ancestry; the issue of historical genesis now became a problem of explication and determinacy. Anticipating Scheler’s critique of formalism, Hegel’s 1803 treatise on Natural Law concerned itself with such problems in explicating the substance of ethical life.37 For Hegel, that is, the crux of the issue involved not only what he referred to as a certain ‘lack of skill’ in positive law’s explication of the ethical, but the lack of determinacy that undercuts its formalism. While Hegel overstates the case in arguing that ‘there is nothing whatever which cannot in this way be made into a moral law,’ the task of existentially instantiating formal criteria runs the risk of resulting in conflicting interpretations, ‘[b]oth of which [are] equally capable of being thought.’38 Positive law is always problematic insofar as it moves from event to judgment, intuition to concept. It is the role of speculative philosophy, Hegel claims, to bring to light false interpretation in the ‘ambiguous nature of what is called experience’ (in der zweideutigen Nature dessen, was Erfahrung genannt wird).39 Philosophy, in seizing the totality above the part, is to provide the bridging principles between being and understanding. ‘There in the dimension of time, this totality, secure in its absolute equilibrium, balances between the opposites’ and thus makes them available for univocal analysis and systematization.40 As early as the War Diaries, Sartre had argued that intuition and principle, ethos and law, were not univocally one, invoking Kierkegaard and an ambiguity that ‘would have been shocking to a systematic thinker.’41 Sartre acknowledged such ambiguity to be irreducible, an event with both ontological as well as epistemic implications. Sartre claims that human nature is now claimed to be at a distance from itself, one that is “unbridgeable.” If he agrees that understanding is historical, that is, if one grasps the world only through ‘a technology, a culture, a condition,’ it is true, too, that one never fully encompasses that nature through the totalization of consciousness.42 Consciousness exists, as Being and Nothingness later will impart, precisely as a detotalized totality. Human reality is still essentially connected with value,

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albeit one whose totalization is declared to be always a transcendental illusion.43 The adequation and realization of this totality is always divided from itself; the present is divided from itself, as the present is divided from the future. The totality, consequently, remains irredeemable. Sartre initially tended to concentrate upon the inevitable illusions of reason; Merleau-Ponty time and again argued that it was not thereby impossible.44 From the outset he argued that we would need to alter our idea of reason and our accounts of human actions in order to grasp it. If it is true that our actions are at least overdetermined, in the Freudian sense of having more than one meaning, they are also underdetermined: ‘All life is undeniably ambiguous and there is never any way to know the true meaning of what we do. Indeed perhaps our actions have no single true meaning’ (SNS: 34).45 There is then no ‘moral sense’ that might furnish the True or the Good in their immediacy (SNS: 40). Yet Merleau-Ponty refused from the outset a certain “existential” nihilism. Sartre famously argued that existentialism, somewhat heroically, remained a humanism in a world inherently devoid of meaning.46 But Merleau-Ponty argued for a ‘new classicism’ or a ‘humanism in extension,’ finding his precursors not only in Scheler’s Pascal, but in Machiavelli and Montaigne (SNS: 63; HT: 176). It is crucial for grasping this humanism that this “tradition” finds itself neither in traditional accounts nor in high modern humanism. Merleau-Ponty was unable to find it in Descartes, Kant, or Fichte, as Husserl’s neorationalism (and, to a lesser extent, Sartre) did. Both Husserl and Sartre had been condemned by Heidegger for the metaphysics of their Cartesian subjectivism.47 But neither did MerleauPonty simply find this humanism in Augustinian love or caritas, as did Scheler and early Heidegger.48 Instead, such a humanism neither denies the values of the passions nor the modern necessity of critique and, again, the recognition of their historicity. Appropriately, his discussion here is connected with authors poised on the passage between them, between “the ancients and the moderns.” In his 1948 article on Montaigne he finds a certain stoicism even in Montaigne’s skepticism of the passions: The critique of human understanding destroys it only if we cling to the idea of a complete or absolute understanding. . . . The critique of passions does not deprive them of their value if it is carried to the point of showing that we are never in possession of ourselves and that passion is ourselves. The only effect of our whole critique is to make our passions and opinions more precious by making us see that they are our only recourse. (S: 206)

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The ambiguity affecting values does not negate their validity nor our responsibility, if it restricts them, again, to the genesis out of which they become intelligible. Neither the humanisms of the ancients nor the moderns suffices for its grasp; there is no univocal “moral sense” or intuition, and ‘undoubtedly no solution to human problems, no way, for example, to eliminate the transcendence of time.’ The problem of the contingency of value remains, ‘between these fragments of time and that of eternity which erroneously believes it transcends time’ (SNS: 39–40). Yet, critically, there is the factum of value and the historicity that we are ourselves. This is evident, in fact, already in the concluding lines to Merleau-Ponty’s 1945 Temps Modernes’ discussion of de Beauvoir’s L’Invitée: True morality (La vrai morale) does not consist in following exterior rules or in respecting objective values: there are no ways to be just or to be saved. One would do better to pay less attention to the unusual situation of the three characters in L’Invitée and more to the good faith, the loyalty of promises, the respect for others, the generosity and the seriousness of the two principle characters. For the value is there (Car la valeur est là). It consists of actively being what we are by chance, of establishing that communication with others and with ourselves for which our temporal structure gives us the opportunity and of which our liberty is only the rough outline. (SNS: 40) It is a fortuitous review. De Beauvoir would soon write a classical text on existential ethics, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948), and, seven years later, finish her account of the ambiguous by trouncing Merleau-Ponty’s pseudo-Sartreanism.49 Merleau-Ponty himself emphasized the review’s importance. In the text submitted to Martial Gueroult to accompany his candidacy for the Collège de France, Merleau-Ponty privileges it as outlining a theory of intersubjectivity (SNS: 7). It is included among the works undertaken after 1945 that ‘will definitively fix the philosophical significance of his early works, while they, in turn, determine the route and the method of these later studies’ (PP: 6). This synopsis ends, however, by condemning the Phenomenology of Perception in exactly the same way the Working Notes to The Visible and the Invisible a decade later would condemn it: 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 phenomenon of expression, a spontaneity which

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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. To establish this wonder would be metaphysics itself and would at the same time give us the principle of an ethics. (PP: 11) Merleau-Ponty perhaps never finished elaborating the principles of this “metaphysics” and its “gathering together.” Not only because, as was true in other cases, he never lived to complete his work, but because, when it came to the study of communication and history, he came more and more to think that the principles that might form a propaedeutics to the metaphysics in question required revision. He became more and more aware of the errancy that underwrote a solipsistic philosophy of consciousness, divorced from a logic of institution (Stiftung). Merleau-Ponty’s review of de Beauvoir already had broken with the ethics of ambiguity. As early as 1946, he had begun to depart from existentialism and its decisionist subjectivity, confronted with the ambiguous opposition between universal and particular. Instead of the standard predicates of existentialism (paradox, division, anxiety, and decision [HT: 187]), he states: A more complete definition of existentialism than we get from talking of anxiety and the contradictions of the human condition might be found in the idea of a universality which men affirm by the mere fact of their being and at the very moment of their opposition to each other, in the idea of a reason immanent in unreason. (SNS: 70) Sense and Non-Sense’s Preface proclaimed, accordingly, ‘we must form a new idea of reason’ (SNS: 3). It would in fact form something of his itinerary insofar as it remained “phenomenological.” While hoping that phenomenological description would resolve the question of reason, the Phenomenology of Perception had blinkingly admitted that Husserl himself—for reasons already evident—had made reason problematic (PoP: 365n). Transcendental reflection or positing consciousness always depended upon a genesis that exceeds reflection. The Phenomenology sought to reveal a lesser reason to which all reason answers, one that escapes the dilemma of the in-itself and the foritself (PoP: 215). Early on, in defending Sartre, Merleau-Ponty had declared that this dilemma required development and a ‘theory of passivity’ and of the ‘social world’ (SNS: 77). He did so by invoking an event and the genesis of an embodied experience anterior to truth and falsity: an inexhaustible

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synthesis that takes place prereflectively, one upon which it relies beyond all hope (PoP: 296, 127). What was at stake was not an origin in which all events receive their ideal determinacy univocally, but a prereflective lived world to which all reflection returns. Far from being the guarantor of determinacy, this “space” prior to thematic space remained too indeterminate to receive in an original baptism its univocal, typical, and essential identity. Indeed to return again to the Husserlian rational exemplar, “lived” space itself, lacking in univocal determinacy, remains for Merleau-Ponty ‘no less amenable to non-Euclidean than Euclidean geometry (PoP: 391). For its grasp, rather than a Cartesian community of reflective investigators, another intersubjective rationality emerges. As The Structure of Behavior intimated, it remains far removed from a reflective a priori. Moreover morality, too, would emerge here not simply by intuition or right but by contingency and acquisition. It would emerge, that is, as an historical acquisition that is acquired, elucidated, and verified or transformed in ‘the dialectics of body and soul’ (SB: 223).

VIII Merleau-Ponty’s departure from the early work further erupts at this point. This “embodied dialectic” (like its account of the tacit Cogito in general), while demurring from a certain nihilism that threatens to turn existentialism into ‘a renewal of classical skepticism,’ still falls short (HT: 188). It tells us, once again, less how things are possible than that they are not impossible, remaining inhibited by its own strategy (VI: 176). The account again remains still abstract. Even the metaphysics of the novel in his review of Beauvoir only begins this articulation, its conclusion merely a demonstration of its lineaments. If philosophy and literature are in concurrence that, in default of pure concepts, the task becomes less a matter of explaining (explicitation) than explication, the mere explication of narratives (histoires) remains more descriptive than prescriptive (SNS: 27). If all existence is historical, as the dialectics of embodiment had shown, we would need an extended account of this incarnate history in its specificity, indeed an extended phenomenology of spirit (PoP: 170, 293). To cite Tran-Duc-Thoa’s claim, transcendental Generativität would need to be related to actual genesis.50 As the manuscript submitted to Geuroult indicated, the problem of intersubjectivity would need to be completed in the philosophy of history itself: an analysis which had been provisionally undertaken in Humanism

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and Terror. Whether one agrees with Aron’s claim that existentialism did not lead to Marxism in its classical version, Merleau-Ponty’s version did not conflict with it.51 Humanism and Terror remains faithful to the previous analyses, however, in refusing to adopt the philosophy of reflection; the reign of universal reason remains problematic. Reason, like liberty, has to be made in a world not predestined to it (HT: lxiii). It raises again the question of articulating its “ambiguous” depths, now understood precisely in terms of the bonds of its historical genesis. The classical account of political reflection, classical liberalism, is held, accordingly, to fall short; its categories—intention and act, circumstance and will, objective and subjective—remain mystified (HT: 43). If the account of the practice that results still remains Hegelian, a critique of theory that examines its actual relation to an ethos, the metanarrative for its articulation now became, for the existentialists, Marxist. The issue of Merleau-Ponty’s Marxism is complex. This much is clear: the synthesis of Marxism and Phenomenology was an unstable one. To use Lefort’s term, it is stricken with an essential ‘vacillation.’52 In 1947 MerleauPonty could insist that the privilege of Marxism was to have thought of the proletariat as bearing within itself this ambiguity, and could speak of the democracies of Western liberalism only in terms of ‘their fundamental hypocrisy.’ He equally admitted that the problem is knowing whether those conflicts can be overcome, and whether the predictions of Marxism recognizably bore upon problems of this sort (HT: 179). On the one hand, he was attracted to Marxism not only ‘as moral criticism, but also as an historical hypothesis’ (HT: 157). Merleau-Ponty claimed that if the proletariat is not the universal class, nothing else could replace it since apart from it ‘there is only the power of the few and the resignation of the rest’ (HT: 156). On the other hand, he had already realized that Marxism could not be taken as a demonstrable solution: When people demand a ‘solution’ they imply that the world and human coexistence are comparable to a geometry problem in which there is an unknown but an indeterminate factor and where what one is looking for is related to the data and their possible relationships in terms of a rule. (HT: 186) The failure of historicism, Marxist versions included, was to think the algorithm could be provided simply by the test of time. Instead, from the outset, Merleau-Ponty realized that ‘we can no longer count on an immanent force in things guiding them toward an equilibrium more

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probable than chaos’ (SNS: 124). If transcendental genesis raises the issue of its relation to actual history, it could not be, as Tran-Duc-Thao argued, a matter of ‘dialectical materialism [as] the truth of transcendental idealism.’53 This would reduce transcendental constitution to material processes, exchanging one theory of types for another: the ontic for the ontological and the écart of transcendental reduction for its commencement. Even as critique Marxism shared the same shortfall as the simple idea of democracy. It remained less political than restrictedly moral since ‘it poses no problem of social structure and considers the conditions for the exercise of justice to be given with humanity’ (SNS: 103). The categories of liberalism would be claimed to be abstract, divorcing intention and consequence. But if he thought ‘Western humanism is warped because it is also a war machine,’ it was equally true that he realized that neither could simply be dissolved (HT: 43, 186). Values in either case become both laden with and complicated by facts. The necessity of the political was a factual one, the result of historical necessity. As he had acknowledged early on: ‘Justice and truth, whose source men think they possess insofar as they are consciousness, are in reality based upon law courts, books, and tradition, and are therefore fragile like these and like them are threatened by individual judgment’ (SNS: 103). The relation between positive institution and moral substance, to recall Hegel’s terms, will as a result never be ‘easily demonstrated in each case.’54 Instead, the (Spinozistic) totality that bound their immanent relations in equilibrium, facilitating univocal theoretical analysis, is withdrawn. Hegel—and, it should be added, Heidegger after him—always presupposed that the ambiguity that called forth interpretation might be dissolved.55 Merleau-Ponty indicated in a protocol from the Phenomenology of Perception that what was essential was grasping the ‘positive indeterminacy (l’indétermination positive) of these modes of consciousness’ (PoP: 446). Still, Hegel’s later work provides an initial key for this failure of substance. The analyses of the Philosophy of Right undercut the positive philosophy’s commitment to moral substance and ethos. For Hegel, virtue could be univocally a matter of custom so long as the state is Sittlich. As he put it, ‘when individuals are simply identified with the actual order, ethical life (das Sittliche) appears as their general mode of conduct, i.e. as custom (Sitte)’; the ethical substantial order has attained its right and its right its validity, right and duty coalesce. Talk about virtue in this sense ‘readily borders on empty rhetoric,’ without its own legitimation.56

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Modernity and the “decomposition” of tradition(s) within civil society calls this coalescence into question.57 Hegel hoped, having seen the interruption of tradition, to replace it by the axioms of history and actuality in the realized constitution of the State—proceeding as if power were not somehow always problematic. Hegel’s work proceeded as if, to use Merleau-Ponty’s terms, ‘whether new or hereditary, power’ were not always ‘questionable and threatened’ (S: 213). Hegel’s work proceeded, in short, as if the justifications of legal positivism were not always shrouded in mysticism. Moreover, it is not insignificant that Merleau-Ponty recognizes this in the 1948 ‘A Note on Machiavelli.’ It was, after all, Machiavelli who first attested to the political realm as a play of forces divorced from the foundational virtues of tradition, the interruption of community, and the first to realize, in Merleau-Ponty’s terms, that ‘values are necessary but not sufficient’ (S: 221). The ancient hope of reconciling morals (honestum) with practice (utile) would be more complicated.58 In this regard Machiavelli was the first to recognize what Merleau-Ponty would call in 1960 ‘the abyss of modern society.’59

IX Merleau-Ponty’s conversion from Marxism, his metamorphosis into liberalism, and his so-called retreat from politics are all notoriously impacted. In one sense, however, his eventual “withdrawal” from political theory had occurred from the start, resulting precisely in the thought of the political itself as this withdrawal. The vacillation Lefort attributes to Humanism and Terror already prefigures the emergence of the political. As his remarkable book on Machiavelli attests, no one knows better than Lefort himself that this withdrawal and this vacillation is the space or ethos of modernity, the space of the political without substance, without ultimate foundation. The Adventures of the Dialectics had already outlined the milieu of political philosophy more directly on this oscillation. ‘Politics, whether of understanding or of reason, oscillates (va-et-vient) between the world of reality and that of values, between individual judgment and common action, between present and the future’ (AD: 6). Hence, as has been seen, its fragility. The privilege of Marxism now construed, was to have openly acknowledged it. Marxism is, like all the others, undemonstrable. The difference is that Marxist politics understands this and that it has more than any other, explored the labyrinth. (AD: 6)

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The early existentialists might simply have said that Marxism—like the war—had taught them contingency and the necessity of decision. From the outset, Merleau-Ponty rejected the simplicity of such a decision, and he would reject decisionism outright in his discussion of Weber (AD: 10). Instead the logic of events, the logic of theory and practice, is more complex. This discovery of the labyrinth, as Lefort put it, this ‘pensée de la politique,’ marked instead—in accord with Merleau-Ponty’s revalorization of the positivity of ambiguity—that of politics as ‘determined indetermination.’60 In one sense this seems to be a hermeneutic problem regarding the conflict of interpretations. Indeed, the differences in Merleau-Ponty’s account of Marxism looks like different interpretations of Lukács. Early on (1946), attempting to incorporate Marx into the existentialists’ account of experience, in which ‘knowledge finds itself put back into the totality of human praxis,’ he had appealed to Lukács to defend the Marxist notion of totality against positivist or scientistic interpretations (SNS: 126). In the same year, in Geneva, he had attempted to mediate between Jaspers’ existentialism that had denied such a concept of totality and Lukács’s aspiration or ‘intention to society in its totality,’ precisely by construing such a totality in terms of the Husserlian notion of horizon. In fact, he had presented a paper on the relevance of Husserl’s Crisis to these matters at the conference, but also suggested that “perspective” was a Marxist term. Husserl’s Crisis did not understand modern technical rationality in a Marxistsense, nor in any simple sense as restricted to a horizon, any more than Marx thought his account was limited to a perspective. Still, Merleau-Ponty would articulate this conceptual constellation from thence onward in different permutations. Notwithstanding the contingency of existentialist experience, we encounter in the Marxist account of history an unavoidable necessity, albeit accessible to our willing.61 By the time of Humanism and Terror, this emphasis upon the force of circumstances had been more strongly formulated. He still attempted ‘to preserve liberty while waiting for a fresh historical impulse which may allow us to engage it in a popular movement without ambiguity’ (HT: xxiii). While we await these contingencies in history, Humanism and Terror claimed that, without the proletariat there is no history; again, the perspective of Marxism remains ‘attractive’ both ‘as moral criticism and as philosophy of history’ (HT: 157). Indeed, Marxism—and specifically, as Lukács had argued, the task and the standpoint of the proletariat—‘is the philosophy of history and to renounce it is to dig the grave of Reason in history’ (HT: 153).

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By the time he wrote The Adventures of the Dialectic Merleau-Ponty doubted that Marxism involved such a privileged hypothesis: It is the certitude of judging history in the name of history, of saying nothing that history itself does not say, of passing on the present a judgment which is inscribed in it, of expressing in words and ideas preexisting relationships such as they are in things; in short, it is materialism that, in the guise of modesty, makes the Marxist critique a dogma and prevents it from being self criticism. (AD: 231) He still treats the early Lukács favorably, but as the theoretician of praxis, and, in certain respects, its rationality. Nonetheless, the account of rationality Marxists (and later, even Lukács) relied upon inevitably, Merleau-Ponty argued, suppressed this notion of the dialectic. In the true dialectic, he declared, one encounters a more complicated genesis of subject and objects: ‘the discovery of an entangling relationship between the dialectician and his object, the surprise of a spirit which finds itself outdistanced by things and anticipated in them’ (AD: 62). Instead of the indefinite confirmation in what Lukács calls ‘the intention to totality,’ however, Marxist realism succumbs to ‘the simple verification of certain descriptive features of history, even of nature’ (AD: 53, 62). In the proletarian ‘intention to society,’ however, Merleau-Ponty found a living relation to truth that exceeds reduction, again fragmented between time and eternity: This project is not the project of someone—of some proletarians, of all proletarians, or of a theoretician who arrogates to himself the right of reconstructing their profound will. It is not, like the meaning of our thoughts, a closed definitive unity. It is the cluster of relations of an ideology, a technique, and a movement of productive forces, each involving the others and receiving support from them, each in its time playing a directive role which is never exclusive, and all, together, producing a qualified phase of social development. As the milieu of these exchanges, praxis goes beyond the thought and feeling of the proletarians, and yet, says Lukács, it is not a ‘mere fiction,’ a disguise invented by the theoretician for his own ideas of history. (AD: 49) While not egologically reducible and not, as Lukács had put it, a ‘psychological fact,’ Merleau-Ponty insists that Lukács’s account of such consciousness as intention to totality still ‘admits that man is open to truth

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through his own relationship with totality’ precisely through the process in which ‘[h]istorical accumulation or “sedimentation” is not a deposit or a residue’ (AD: 43). Merleau-Ponty’s language is again phenomenological, and doubtless we must find therein the layers of intersubjective “habitualities,” “sympathies,” and “generosities” as did his phenomenological predecessors. These are all terms he invokes in varying analysis. Still, it is not clear how such ethical intuitions would appear within the historical or expressive dialectic Merleau-Ponty was now exploring.

X Like the reversibility of all such expression, both political and ethical forms of “expressive” sedimentation would also now need to be grasped as institution (Stiftung)—and in such a way that it would be truly dialectical. Such expressivity is always decadent, if presumed completed, abandoning the dialectical notion of a ‘history which makes itself and which nevertheless is to be made’ (AD: 57). In this respect, Merleau-Ponty ultimately held, Marxism presumed its own truth uncritically; it always presumed a destiny or “given” as entailed in the immediacy of commodization and the task of self-consciousness. Merleau-Ponty’s demurrals with respect to it were condemned by no less than Lukács himself.62 Instead Merleau-Ponty hoped to stake out a noncommunist left. He still claimed, recall, that Marx had explored the labyrinth of history more than anyone; his final lectures on our state of “non-philosophy” still explore this topic through Marx. In these final lectures new emphasis was being given to a rehabilitation of nature. Still, it was Marx, he claimed, who taught us that negativity could not be reduced from the dialectics of nature. As his final lectures on Hegel conclude, such negativity could not be understood through nature alone ‘with the added dimension of history as that which produces man and is produced by him. Hegel with his negativity descends into the flesh of the world’ (PNP: 103). Man and nature (or philosophy and its world) would need to be thought together as reciprocal expressions of a single matrix or infrastructure of an historical event (IPP: 56–7). This is why Lukács taught us, Merleau-Ponty held, that such dialectics, those of nature and history, or the visible and the invisible, could not be accessed by a ‘direct thought’ (PNP: 105). Merleau-Ponty further claimed that this issue confuses even Heidegger himself insofar as he, ‘searches for a direct expression of what is fundamental at the very moment he is showing its impossibility’ (TL: 111–12). It is all-important, then, to grasp not simply the silence or the

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mystery of Being or Logos (or Nature), but the complexity, the “reversibility,” of sensibility and ideality within the flesh of history. The effect of this complexity is evident even in the notion of the flesh of history itself, uniting Lukács and Saussure in one immeasurable breath: Why ask if history is made by men or things, since it is obvious that human initiatives do not annul the weight of things, and the ‘force of things’ always acts through men? It is just this failure of analysis, when it tries to bring everything down to one level, which reveals history’s true milieu. There is no ‘last analysis,’ because there is a flesh of history in which (as in our own body) everything counts and has a bearing—the infrastructure, our idea of it, and above all the perpetual exchanges between the two in which the weight of things becomes a sign as well, thoughts become forces, and the balance of the two becomes events. (S: 20) Marx, too, is still close by the attempt to outline such dialectical expressivity—albeit one Lukács himself traced, not only to Hegel, but as early as Proclus, and even more recently to Schlegel, as a ‘pioneer of the dialectical method.’63 Our “sense-history,” to invoke Husserl’s term, would still be at stake, albeit now dialectically demystified. Yet, notwithstanding his contribution in disclosing the horizon and infrastructure of history’s true milieu, now Marx, too, is in need of further clarification within this very history. This is not a simple rejection or simple negation of Marx. Beyond the logic of ‘verification’ or ‘refutation’—a ‘barbarous opposition’ as Merleau-Ponty puts it—Marx remains part of our horizon or “reliefs” (S: 9–10). Here, we find his doctrine of the classical: The history of thought does not summarily pronounce: This is true; that is false. Like all history, it has its veiled decisions. It dismantles or embalms certain doctrines, changing them into ‘messages’ or museum pieces. There are others, on the contrary, which it keeps active. These do not endure because there is some miraculous adequation or correspondence between them and an invariable ‘reality’—such an exact and fleshless truth is neither sufficient nor necessary for greatness of a doctrine—but because, as obligatory steps for those who want to go further, they retain an expressive power [parlantes au delà] which exceeds statements and propositions. These doctrines are the classics. They are recognized by the fact that no one takes them literally [à la lettre], and yet new facts are never absolutely outside their province but call forth new echoes from them and reveal new lustres [reliefs] in them. (S: 10–11)

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What remains of Marx (or Husserl) within this new classicism is not a matter of a hypothesis falsified by an event. Such an event would be neither necessary nor sufficient. The point is that the rationality of such events cannot be exhausted by such criteria. Lacking such ultimate demonstration does not imply that the text has been made simply Aufgehoben—if it does acknowledge that the Marxist text extends beyond it. This is less a question of logical problemata and their proofs or refutation than, like ‘in the sciences, an out-modeled theoretical framework can be reintegrated into the language of the one which replaced it: it remains significant, keeps its truth’ (S: 10). Unlike his more classical predecessors, concerned with meaning-invariance across the centuries, ‘the logical chain of centuries,’ to use Husserl’s terms, Merleau-Ponty was more concerned with the rationality of invention, transformation and “theory-change” (K: 365). And, while he arguably had grasped the truth of formalism, he understood the latter as dialectical and open-ended.64 Merleau-Ponty claimed in Humanism and Terror that there would be no philosophy of history apart from the proletariat. In the Preface to Signs he demurred, denying in fact that any doctrine could ‘endure because of a miraculous adequation or correspondence between them and an invariable “reality”’ (S: 10). The formal model returns again as it had for his phenomenological progenitors. Here it does so not as a model of rule-like determinability but of plurality and the dialectic and imaginative variation of other conceptual spaces: Marx’s theses can remain true as the Pythagorean theorem is true: no longer in the sense it was true for the one who invented it—but as a property of a certain space among other possible spaces. (S: 10)65 Sounding almost like Schlegel, Merleau-Ponty claims that dialectical thought invokes its absolute ironically, ‘solely for the sake of maintaining the position and the contours of the multiple and to oppose the absolutization of relation’ (TL: 57–8). It becomes, like Husserl’s late typic, ‘fluidified in them’ (PoP: 365n). Yet Marxism, underwritten still by ‘the matrix of the true human society’ was, ironically, ‘still too geometrical.’66 If its idea of the logic of history was historicist, it was not because it was relativist but because it remained, even more ironically, logicist, ‘a Marxism which remains true whatever it does, which does without proofs and verifications’ (AD: 232). The ‘exceeding of the signified by the signifier essential to reason,’ that demanded, in turn, that we give up the naïveté of ‘our old attachment to the object,’ was never simply formal however. As has been seen, it was never

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simply syntactic but “structural” and dialectical; its extension is the “extension” that underlies the historical genesis of phenomenological experience itself (VI: 168).67 Accordingly, in his final piece on Husserl that opens by claiming that ‘tradition is a forgetting of origins,’ MerleauPonty again traced its expression (S: 159). Such forgetting, after all, allowed both the fecundity and the renewal of tradition: as he put it elsewhere, ‘the noble form of memory’ (S: 59). He radicalized the transformation in question precisely in opening the passage of the rational epoché itself. The event of the transcendental reduction, that is, involved exactly the institution of this transformation (and the “forgetting”) of the natural attitude (both regarding “nature” and “culture”). It is now a venture of the primordial that, in retracing its adherence to the flesh of history, revealed ‘a secondary, derivative truth of naturalism’ (S: 164). The exchange between primary and secondary—between the ontic and the ontological, nature and institution, origin and tradition—is gathered together and ventured in the oscillation of this event.68

XI Here, finally, we can trace the transformation of his earlier ethical account, with its emphasis on existential decision and the intuitions of affectivity into an account more explicitly historical, intersubjective, and institutional. To begin, we can note that when, in the above cited passages, Merleau-Ponty refers to the ‘flesh of history’ for which ‘there is no “last analysis,”’ this is no simple metaphor (any more than it is a simple ahistorical indexical) (S: 20). ‘The Philosopher and His Shadow’ claims that the link between egoism and altruism are always historically articulated affairs, never constructible from a ‘solipsist layer’ (S: 175). Both emerge from an ‘original ecstasy,’ between affectivities (S: 174). The child ‘who anticipates devotion and love bears witness to the reality of that love and to the fact that he understands it and, in his weak and passive way, plays his role [son rôle] in it’ (S: 175). The problem of our Füreinander, both in reality and role, is an intersubjective (and intercarnal) relationality that ‘continues to uphold the greatest passions of our adult life and to be experienced anew in each of our perceptions’ (S: 175). The importance of the passions in our grasp of ourselves emerges once more from our shared histories and narratives. Merleau-Ponty rarely expanded upon the dialectic between the passions and their intersubjective setting: between histrionics, our roles and their history. This late text, however, echoes various presentations from the time

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of the Sorbonne Lectures where he articulated the emotions in terms of theatricality, role-playing and characterization. In one sense, as with Sartre, he claimed ‘all life is the invention of a role which exists only through the expression that I give it,’ and our ‘vocation consists always in the free decision to loose oneself (s’irréaliser) in a role’ (EO: 54). Nonetheless, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that such choices are conventionally or historically bound, stating that ‘one cannot help but notice how much the perception of other people becomes increasingly comparable to a language’ (EO: 57).69 As he often did at the time, he again invokes Saussure: such characterization, however, is to be compared not to language in ‘the rigorously defined sense’ but to ‘the use that we make of these words in speech . . . so that a new [inédite] signification appears to the listener’ (EO: 47; 51). As he had emphasized (and perhaps learned) in his reading of Montaigne, threatened with the failure of tradition, historical roles, like language and tradition, are capable of being hardened-up or ossified (S: 207). ‘A language [un langage] in danger of becoming stereotypic can be distinguished from fertile language’ (EO: 57).70 Thus, ‘living human beings’ are ‘always menaced by the possibility of a stereotype with which the role encloses them’ (EO: 57). Our roles always arise from a historical situation, emerging from ‘a particular conditioning drawn from the past’ (EO: 55). Crucially, however, in the theater, he notes, ‘one can always start over again,’ whereas in life our decisions always involve the confirmation or transformation of past possibilities, our Vorhabe (EO: 56). Comparing intersubjectivity to a language (and the language of the theater), a similar intertwining emerges between affectivity and history. It is not only our own past, but also, as with language, our historical narratives, roles, and cultural codes (the social or historical imaginary) that are at stake (AD: 17). In ‘The Philosopher and His Shadow,’ Merleau-Ponty attempted (à la Sartre or Levinas) to avoid both the epistemic and moral solipsism whose objectification would make phantoms of others. He also explicitly denied (à la Sartre or Heidegger) that because we die alone we therefore live alone (S: 175; cf. CAL: 49). ‘In reality, the solus ipse does not merit its name’ (S: 174). The antinomies of self and other, still lingering permutations of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, must be avoided. It all depends then on grasping how we belong-together. Still, he does not avoid the question of authenticity. He denied that authenticity simply involves self-loyalty or ‘devoting oneself entirely to the role that one has decided to play’ (EO: 54). But equally he denied that one could simply identify oneself or one’s role with a ‘soul of the world, group, or couple’ (S: 175).

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Instead, he emphasizes that our role arises out of the primordial we (on) that sustains our greatest passions and in which it finds the task of its ‘authenticity’ (S: 175). We can still find the virtues (good faith, the loyalty of promises, the respect for others) characterized, invented, and expressed in the various “role-players” of L’Invitée. This is the reappearance of classical virtue or honestum. Rather than being articulatable through egological or perceptual identification, they are grasped as ‘inter-monadic’ and historical expressions that emerge primordially among themselves: ‘entre nous’ (VI: 246). This is much as the promissory note to Gueroult had acknowledged, in its search, beyond perception, for a “good” or expressive ambiguity whose “wonder” would at the same time give us a the principle of an ethics. The Visible and the Invisible returns to Beauvoir’s L’Invitée to explicate these matters anew. Beauvoir’s novel now leads Merleau-Ponty to claim that the problem of the other is not the problem of a rival or a negation but our ‘entry into a constellation of others’ in which no group or couple ‘would be successful in the same sense’ (VI: 81n). The problem of the other is always the ‘initiation to a symbolics’ (VI: 82n). Clearly such a symbolics cannot be restricted to our cognitive history but also involves our passions, again our histrionics. Accordingly, Merleau-Ponty claimed that the mutual archaeologies of phenomenology and psychoanalysis are now ‘converging more than ever.’71 If Urempfindung sustains our passions, it does not derive solely from them, in isolation from the intersubjective histories, roles, and narratives between which each becomes expressed as écart. As in the mise en scène of the theater, signification is always an oblique, intersubjective, and “lateral” intervention (EO: 53). This intertwining now provides his final response to Scheler, whose account of alogical affectivity had still informed Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of sensible ideality in the later lectures (NC: 194): Then problems such as those of Scheler (how to understand the relation of the intentional with the affective which it crosses transversally, a love being transversal to the oscillations of pleasure and pain—personalism) disappear: for there is no hierarchy of orders or planes (always founded on the individual-essence distinction), there is dimensionality of every fact and facticity of every dimension.—This in virtue of the ‘ontological difference.’ (VI: 270) The existentialists’ account of determinability relied on such an inventive “differential” throughout in their engagement with the equivocity of the

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ambiguous, recognizing in it the need for a rationality that extended beyond traditional humanist solutions. We should not conclude too quickly; he had not thereby left his nod toward a renewed classicism behind. After all, his account of role-playing noted, in distinguishing the theatrical from the drama of life, that in life we cannot begin again. Thereby he had reencountered not only the ancient problem of tragedy, but the task and the fragility of human flourishing: the ‘marvel’ he found in Montaigne that in the appearances we can still search out (essayer) ‘the good and the true’ (S: 206). As Arendt saw, to whom Lefort would appeal in MerleauPonty’s wake in further elaborating the political, at stake was our capacity to discriminate (techne diakritike).72 Further, in explicitly distinguishing such imitation from mere iteration or re-presentation, Merleau-Ponty’s account linked it to more ancient accounts of mimesis (EO: 52). Once again, at the heart of such mimesis lay the problem of sympathy, that is, the differentiation of self and other: Füreinander (PP: 145).73 This reciprocal expressive intentionality reveals the remnants of the dialectic (EO: 50). Merleau-Ponty further articulated this expressive mimesis at the heart of language as well, where the self emerges from other people and consciousness from language (CAL: 37–9, 50). The rationality might still remain phenomenological, the gathering-together at stake, construed in “classical” phenomenological terms, a differentiating “synthesis” or explication across the realities (factical and ideal) of a motivated intersubjective historical manifold. Still, he remained adamant about Husserl’s own internal genesis beyond Cartesianism: reducing all this to an egological perspective is ‘perhaps to ignore the profoundest things Husserl is saying to us’ (S: 175). In retrospect, Merleau-Ponty had transformed Husserl’s “logicism” here in two ways. He reconfigured its Cartesianism into an intersubjective experience, including both an intersubjective and historical ethical-affective dimension. This transformation, he claimed, could already be found in Scheler (CAL: 47). Secondly, ‘the flesh of history’ is not simply a history of the affective, which, he claimed, Scheler left undifferentiated, threatening “pansychism” (CAL: 48). It requires a transformation within the history of the rational. Beyond Cartesian foundations, the latter generated an institutional history (Stiftung) largely understood in terms, beyond identity, of the dialectic and reversibility of expression and the expressed. Here Merleau-Ponty cites the Wechselspiel of Husserl’s zigzag between experience and concept, the present and the past, where ‘relative clarification of the one side sheds some light on the other, which in turn reflects back on the first’ (PP: 93; cf. K: 58). Moreover, here ‘Husserl rejoins Hegel,’ resulting,

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Merleau-Ponty claimed, in a more sophisticated account of the ethical than in Scheler or the facticity of the rational in Heidegger (PP: 93–4). Neither, according to Merleau-Ponty, had sufficiently grasped the institution of the rational.

XII Thus the “phenomenology of the spirit” did not simply disappear in Merleau-Ponty’s itinerary. But neither did it go unchanged. The interrogation of the specific “oscillation” of the ethical or the political did not collapse into nihilism, but it did not yield simply positive terms or ultimate rational resolution, in the sense of Aufhebung or Entstiftung. Devoid of finality or simple origin, or between them, in any case, we write in ‘the ruins of the Spirit’ (VI: 180). Politically, both revolutionary or heroic heroism and traditional humanism have ‘fallen into ruins’ (S: 22–3). He admonishes us, however, that ‘we should be careful . . . why could it not be a hope?’ (S: 23). Perhaps everywhere Merleau-Ponty articulates our ruins this is true. The Preface to Signs has traveled far beyond the orbit of both the Marxist and the existentialist protocols of Merleau-Ponty’s youth, while it invokes the dialectic between stereotype and invention of its imaginaire. Freedom and invention are in the minority of the opposition. Man is hidden, well hidden, and this time we must make no mistake about it: this does not mean that he is there beneath a mask, ready to appear. Alienation is not simply privation of what was our own by natural right [droit de nature]; and to bring it to an end, it will not suffice to steal what has been stolen, to give us back our due. The situation is far more serious: there are no faces underneath the masks, historical man has never been human, and yet no man is alone. (S: 33–4) Simple rebellion fails here just as the hope to simply reinstitute humanism. We would still require that humanism en extension that he had defended in 1947 against the failures of classicism in the forgetting of origins. It is an extension as much without telos as much as it is without arche, acknowledging in the end that the whole of human history is in his regard a ‘step-beyond’ which was at the same time stationary (PW: 189–90). The recognition of the later works is, thus, rejoined. No more than epistemology can ethics or politics involve a matter of simple return or reduction to foundations; instead both involve the expressive extensions

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of historical institutions. Here again the imagination becomes critical ‘as the true Stiftung of Being’ (VI: 262). And, once again, ‘the flesh of history’ involves a complicated intertwining that belies the ‘myth of the original indivision and coincidence as return’ (VI: 267). It is only in this respect that the issue of right and Naturrecht returns, that is, in the recognition that practices, institutions, habits, roles, and judgments will be ventured in discontinuity—even beyond the metaphysics of nature (human or otherwise) as ‘continuous ground’ (VI: 27). The classical Wechselspiel at stake in the phenomenon of reversibility has not simply been dissolved here; history is neither metaphysical ‘anthropology’ nor based on a ‘Nature in itself.’ As The Visible and the Invisible’s final Working Note concluded: ‘Worked-over-matter-men=chiasm’ (VI: 275). Here he adds that we are still ‘closer’ to Marx than to Sartre.74 This complexity made the youthful and romantic answers of despair and engagement impossible from the outset. As had been first realized over against Sartre’s political naïveté two decades previously, far from being devoid of meaning and in need of our decision, we are condemned to history’s meaning: ‘we cannot withhold from [history] at least a fragmentary meaning’ (PoP: 449). Granted the Vieldeutigkeit of such fragments, the problem is not the deprivation but the pluralization of meaning, the polymorphism of Being. It is still true in the concluding note that ‘the conception of history one will come to will be nowise ethical like that of Sartre’ (VI: 275). Values remain necessary but insufficient. Without collapsing the ethical into history, we remain similarly condemned to responsibility, divided still, to use Montaigne’s terms, between the useful or the expedient (utile) and the honorable (honestum). It was Sartre who first stressed Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Montaigne, though, as has become evident, it is not clear that he fully grasped it.75 At stake was neither simply a matter of decisionistic commitment nor events with full determinate history and effect. Both issues show their effect in Merleau-Ponty’s closing published words on this topic, in the Preface to Signs. Ventured beyond the mythic antimonies of nature and culture, “species being,” and “revolution,” he states: La conclusion, ce n’est pas la révolte, c’est la virtu sans aucune résignation. (S: 47) It was a syntagm with a complex responsibility and a complex history, betraying in the most ancient of words a modern political effect, precisely in the complexity of its interruption. While invoking the most ancient of

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moral resources, that is, these have been apprehended in their modern effect, from Machiavelli, who saw the space of this oscillation of value and event at the outset. Its rationality now requires a certain difference, the incarnate discernment that occurs within the irreducible difference of a “transcendental between”: between traditions, practices, roles, articulemes, and their matrixes. The venture (and forgetting) of origins here authorized neither utopian hope, nor simple restoration. By articulating an account of tradition as the critical forgetting of origins, Merleau-Ponty had delineated our belonging to the past, the classical, precisely in legitimating its refiguration or ‘extension’ beyond it, refiguring thereby even the passageway of epoché itself. Husserl’s Crisis claimed that the original Cartesian motif involved ‘pressing forward through the hell of an unsurpassable, quasi-skeptical epoché towards the gates of heaven of an absolutely rational philosophy’ (K: 77). In turning to history and toward Hegel, this passage found its true Golgotha of the spirit. At the end, it left both Hegel and Husserl in ruins and their corresponding metaphysical accounts of Geist in need of rethinking. It has been said by a defender of virtue (and perhaps the strongest critic of Machiavelli) that ‘men often speak of virtue without using the word.’76 In Merleau-Ponty’s case, it was less out of ignorance or for lack of commitment than out of respect for the withdrawal in which virtue would now be ventured, out of the experience of the difference, plurality and “oscillation” in which it became both threatened and legitimated— an oscillation as threatening to demands for its simple dissolution as the conservative denial of that venture’s necessity. But to think that either might be possible—either the dissolution of the risk or its denial—is to miss both the inevitability of this withdrawal as well as the complexity of Merleau-Ponty’s appeals within it: his Machiavelli, his Montaigne, and the labyrinth in which they had been explored in the passage through Marx.77 If Merleau-Ponty demurred from Marx it was out of respect for what had been at stake in them all. What in the end conjoined these figures, after all, was the oscillation between the extension and collapse of tradition, at the same time acknowledging the fragility in which they and the question of their “community” had been sustained—and without, as Merleau-Ponty demanded from the outset, either nostalgia or relativism. And, if his legacy remains one of unremittingly acknowledging both this as well as the complexity and its risk, it is in this vigilance that it retains prominence.

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Chapter 2

Why Phenomenology? The Long Farewell to Subject-Centered Rationality

I In the crucial text of his final thought, The Crisis of the European Sciences, Husserl attempted to address what he called an apparent paradox and ‘a truly serious difficulty which assails our whole undertaking’; phenomenologically, ‘everything objective is transformed into something subjective’ (K: 178). This problem, also termed by Husserl ‘the greatest enigma,’ is the event in which ‘human beings are subjects for the world (the world which for consciousness is their world) and at the same time are objects in this world’ (K: 180). In one sense the problem of this “enigma” brought back all the theoretical issues confronting the history of representationalism, the problem of binding the internal and the external, and ensuing debates between internalists and externalists. Husserl would ultimately argue that his account overcomes such issues. Still, it is not insignificant, and certainly consistent with the Crisis’ historical “turn,” that his own considerations at that point become immediately historical; Husserl separates his own “science” from traditional theology: the view that ‘God created the world and human beings within it, [and] that he endowed the latter with consciousness and reason.’ Many thought that his Bretanist commitments resonated with the “Thomistic” claim that ‘the intellect knows that it possesses truth by reflecting on itself’; indeed it sounded to many like a form of neo-scholasticism.1 Yet Husserl denied outright that one could make headway if ‘one adduces arguments from the workshops of past philosophers, say Aristotle or Thomas, and carries on a game of logical argumentations and refutations’ (K: 181). Rather, every bit as much as Hobbes who made similar claims about the ‘fools money’ of Thomas and Aristotle, we will require method, and for Husserl only the method of phenomenological elucidation itself can substantiate the claims that ultimately underwrite the rational.2

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Husserl further acknowledged that the above paradox was not the only serious difficulty he confronted. Indeed the Crisis itself is the presentation of a new way (i.e. proceeding by way of historical elucidation) as contrasted with the ‘Cartesian way’ of the classical transcendental phenomenological project. Attempting to bring the ego into view ‘in one leap [in einem Sprunge],’ the leap of the phenomenological epoché, the Cartesian way reveals ‘a great shortcoming’ since ‘it brings this ego into view as apparently empty of content [Inhaltsleer]’ (K: 155). Apparently lacking substantive content, that is, lacking objectivity, the Cartesian way gave rise to the paradox outlined above, that everything objective had been dissolved into the subjective. Indeed, precisely this lack necessitates the Crisis’ historical turn, revealing Transcendental Phenomenology not in a leap or beginning with a reduction immanently related to objectivity, but rather as the historical culmination of modern science and philosophia in general. In both of these moments, both in its appeals to the immanence of the given and the mediation of historical reflection, especially taken concomitantly, Phenomenology reconfronts what Hegel had called the problem of beginnings, even perhaps what The Science of Logic had called a certain witch’s circle (Hexenkreis).3 With respect to the initial paradox, concerning my being both a subject of the world and in the world, it is often held by Husserl’s defenders that the paradox is itself sufficiently overcome through internal transcendental clarification (a view that presupposes that the second paradox, Phenomenology’s being apparently devoid of content, has been resolved). But this surely obviates a second paradox, that the historical elucidation undertaken by the Crisis itself presupposes transcendental clarification of its own historical method. Either of these approaches thus seems equally to succumb to apparent paradox. A third alternative recently defended would have us view Husserl as presenting more an antinomy than a paradox, one to be resolved either by a decision to proceed transcendentally or by recourse to naturalism, abandoning the phenomenological standpoint outright.4 This latter account, which resonates with certain “stoic” moments in Husserl’s texts, must strike one as surely untenable as it stands, granted Husserl’s strong, foundational claims for the science of transcendental phenomenology. Husserl’s concerns reflect both internal and external criticism regarding his phenomenological standpoint. The Crisis reflects a response, for example, to Heideggerean heresies concerning “historicity” as well as those of Husserl’s more positivistic detractors, for example, Schlick or Carnap, concerning the vacuousness of its evidence. We should be leery

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of simple oppositions here. Even were his own works unclear about the matter, Heidegger continued to insist upon their phenomenological inheritance, and, as late as 1947, Carnap had wondered whether there remained some sort of Wesensschau at the foundation of mathematics.5 All told, it might be said, there was plenty of ambiguity to go around concerning Husserl’s claim to objectivity and the paradoxes awaiting him. These paradoxes may well remain, mutually taken, insurmountable. Moreover, they point to an interminable antinomy at the heart of Phenomenology— as others (e.g. Adorno) pointed out.6 Like the early Heidegger, Adorno viewed Husserl’s account to be in need of a Münchhausen solution; granted the circularity of self presupposition and self grounding, a certain ‘pulling oneself out by ones own bootstraps out of the mire’ is requisite.7 It led both to change grounds, even to abandon positive theory. My argument here, however, will remain more internal to the account, albeit closer to those like Merleau-Ponty, who abandoned its strong claims. The jist will be that like Kant’s antinomies, not simply independent of a certain phenomenological inheritance, as will be seen, these paradoxes do not point in themselves to an illusion (Schein) that warrants their simple abandonment (the so-called mathematical antinomy). Rather they indicate a heterogeneity in our rational practices whose extensions remain “dynamic” and, in some respects, inextricable.8 First, however, as this Kantian gesture already indicates, we should acknowledge that the question of Phenomenology is not without connection to the issue of theoretical systematics. Indeed it accompanied Husserl’s arguments from the outset. In addition, as Husserl himself ultimately acknowledged in the Crisis, this question is not without connection to the history of systematics. But, like Kant, Husserl came to the task of a history of pure reason almost as an afterthought. Our own Rücksfrage with respect to Phenomenology may need to question whether Husserl’s early attempts to purge history from reason were as coherent as they appeared, whether this purge lingers even in his later attempts to integrate it, and whether this history itself exhibits a logic concerning the very notion of a conceptual standpoint belying his strong claims for a science of Phenomenology.

II To begin, we should consider, as Husserl himself rarely did, some of the historical permutations under which the concept of “Phenomenology”

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appeared, considering in some detail—though admittedly, here only insufficiently—its complicated interaction with the history of modern philosophy and the philosophy of science. The result will already betray a polyvalent and somewhat conflicted concept. The project of Phenomenology accompanied the transcendental project from the outset. In a 1770 letter to Johann Henrich Lambert, Kant himself described the project of a phaenomenologia generalia as a work presupposed by metaphysics, albeit, Kant claimed, already anticipating the critical project, one resulting in a wholly negative science. In such a phaenomenologia generalia, ‘the principles of sensibility, their validity and their limitations would be determined, so that these principles could not be confusedly applied to objects of pure reason, as heretofore almost always happened.’9 The Critique of Pure Reason, discarding the precritical writing’s own attempts to vindicate metaphysics, would itself delimit the bounds of sensibility against the negative science of metaphysics, precisely insofar as metaphysics itself extends beyond the valid limits of such a “Phenomenology,” construed as a transcendental science of sensible experience (Erfahrung). In this new inversion, that is, along with his precritical commitments concerning the pure concepts of metaphysics, taken as a science of things in themselves, the warrant of Phenomenology still remained illusory— even if, in acknowledging this result, Kant now claimed to have salvaged objectivity through the Copernican turn. Kant’s complicated transformation, perhaps already dormant in his precritical distinctions, marks a rejoinder to a previous phenomenological theory. Six years prior to Kant’s letter, Lambert’s 1764 Neues Organon already contained a concluding section titled ‘Phaenomenologie oder Lehre von dem Schein.’ Lambert had begun straightforwardly—indeed empirically—by claiming that, because knowledge is relative to sensibility, the problem of appearance is central to knowledge. Lambert’s text had already noted the peculiar status of the task at hand, one, arguably, that already exceeded the limits of representation. He claimed that the problem is that for too long appearance had been limited to sense knowledge. Only in optics had the doctrine of appearance been sufficiently treated. Indeed, Lambert characterizes his own task as a ‘transcendent optics,’ generalizing the issues accompanying the investigation of perceptual dimensions or aspects (Seiten) of things and our point of view (Sehepunkt), ‘looking more closely at something,’ and clarifying—issues clearly already resonant with Husserl’s task.10 Still, Lambert distinguished Phenomenology from what Husserl would call “strict science.” Der Schein is neither true in itself nor simply false or illusory, he claimed, but rather something intermediate, a Mittelding

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between the true and the false.11 Rather than a domain in which the true and the false might be strictly and demonstrably distinguished, in a move that harkened back to ancient accounts of dialectic, the problem for Lambert became one of recognizing falsity by the truth that is in it. The problem of knowledge, that is, is ‘to reach truth through Scheinung,’ to distinguish thereby a task that would reach culmination in the grasping of truth in discourse, ‘hermeneutic or semiotic Schein,’ as he puts it.12 Now Kant’s own rejoinder was indeed complicated. While he, too, could understand concepts as ‘points of view,’ and conceptualized transcendental dialectic as a logic of Schein, such Scheinung, the (transcendent) extension of enquiry beyond strictly determined empirical subsumption, in the critical account would now result in “metaphysical” assertions incapable of being true or false. He distinguished such assertions from knowledge and conceptually determined experience (Erfahrung), and it is in this respect that he claims that such a transcendent “Phenomenology” remained a wholly negative science. Such a science would require a measure (Richtmas) and here such clarification remains devoid of such external criterion. Truth be told, however, no more than Lambert did Kant claim that such Scheinung amounted, to use his representationalist image, merely to ‘figments of the brain.’13 Of course, the standpoints articulated in the second and third Critique’s own ‘extensions’ would depend upon their not being such mere figments. Even here the question was how to maintain their “Mittelding” status without transforming such a Phenomenology into the absolute. Indeed the conceptual strategies of transcendental dialectic had from the outset been constructed to permit this possibility, precisely limiting knowledge in order to make room for faith. Moreover, there is some evidence of Husserl’s proximity to this account, insofar as he is said to have viewed Kant’s postulates of practical reason, as being ‘perhaps the greatest of Kant’s discoveries.’14 His idea of science as an infinite task surely retains Kantian overtones. But, even more directly, his attempt to vindicate an ‘extended notion of perception’ enabling us to “perceive” not only sense particulars but also nonsensible actualities is perhaps equally not far off from the extensions of Kant’s postulates (LI: II: 784–6). Still, a glance at Lambert’s own response to Kant reveals the issue. Granted Kant’s strict distinction between the sensible and the intelligible, Lambert questioned whether ‘these two ways of knowing are so completely separated that they never come together.’ Indeed one might think that Lambert himself in this precritical correspondence had provided Kant with the first Critique’s premises.15 Without going further into the details, it is clear that, unhappy with this separation, a great deal of post-Kantian Idealism itself was spent attempting

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(implicitly and explicitly) to provide “phenomenological” routes around Kant’s limits, beginning with Fichte and Hegel. Both linked Phenomenology to strict science, or in any case, a science of the absolute; Fichte did so in the 1804 Wissenschaftslehre, at least, to its pure exposition, while Hegel in various guises connected Phenomenology and its dialectical propaedeutic to such a Wissenschaftslehre.16 Bolzano in his 1831 Wissenschaftslehre (which would prove so influential for Husserl) already laid to waste such attempts to replace the rigors of deduction with the mysteries of intuition, or the “science” of dialectic—just as Russell would later provide similar arguments against Bradley’s mysterious internal relations that seemed always to accompany such dialectical claims.17 Similar objections can be found in Husserl’s own historical elaborations of the transcendental ego as absolute. In fact, Husserl was not incapable of praise for both Fichte and Hegel. As he puts it in the Crisis, ‘they were not at all lacking in the serious will to create philosophy as ultimately grounded science’ (K: 201). Nonetheless both, for Husserl, ‘remained bound to their style of mythical concept-constructions’ (ibid.). While both in the Crisis and in other works Husserl accused these thinkers of lacking a critique of reason (K: 201), his 1911 Philosophy as Strict Science was more direct in condemning their work to “Romanticism” and weakening the ‘impulse toward the constitution of philosophy as strict science.’18 We can only wonder that Husserl remained almost silent on the fact that all this had been done at one time or another under the rubric of “Phenomenology.” Still, we may ultimately have to question whether he was able to capture the fertility of the Romanticism to which he condemned them—or at least the confluences between his own explications and their so-called mythical concept-constructions.

III In the Crisis, Husserl condemns such theoretical failures to bad psychology. He claims that if ‘psychology had not failed it would have performed a necessary mediating work for a concrete, working transcendental philosophy freed, from all paradoxes’ (K: 203). When, in his investigations of logic and mathematics at the end of the nineteenth century, Husserl looked to Phenomenology to provide their conceptual (and experiential) foundations, he looked not to the metaphysical and speculative sciences of his idealist predecessors (or their rejection). Rather, like his teacher Brentano before him, he turned to psychology. Whether or not Husserl came to recognize

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the internal contradictions in attempting to found ultimate rational ideality in this psychological account of the ‘experiential, and many thought that he had, Frege did not hesitate to point them out himself.’19 This recognition led Husserl back into the camp of the idealists, completing this retrieval in his 1913 Ideas. Husserl’s initial attempts to combine the Leibnizian idea of the ars combinatora (as the Idea of pure logic) with Kant’s conception of ‘the condition of the possibility of science in general’ deliberately set aside the Kantian distinction of understanding and reason and their connection to the problem of the noumenon (LI: I: 214, 220). By simply calling all of these ‘mythical concepts’ he jeopardized the fertility (the conceptual roles) they played in the theoretical standpoint Kant had depended upon in replying to Humean skepticism—a fertility, as we have seen, that developed out of the Begriffstradition of “Phenomenology” itself. Rather than simply defending the coherence of the phenomenological standpoint, Husserl claimed unrestrictedly to have founded the ‘theoretical science of theory in general’ and positioned himself thereby to having to defeat all objections to the claims concerning such foundations. By the time the synthesis of Phenomenology and this absolute or strict science had finally been accomplished as a transcendental science (and removed from the putative necessities of psychology), it only seemed rationally bankrupt to other thinker’s attempts to provide the foundations of science. In his 1917 Erkenntnistheorie, for example, Schlick, somewhat kindly granting that Husserl’s contents were evident (if not evidential) in some sense, nonetheless questioned whether they amounted to knowledge.20 He questioned whether the famous Wesensschau, through which, using imaginative variation, insight into eidetic essence becomes possible, would remain insufficient to ground its claims concerning the veridicality of the evidence of appearance, that is, its justification as knowledge. As Husserl himself notes in the first book of Ideas, Wundt had already declared that the account of evidence as “evidencing” was tautologous in the worst sense, that Husserl’s accounts turn into mere ‘verbal repetitions, that evidence is evidence, abstraction is abstraction’ (I: 346). The reference is to the Logical Investigations’ attempts to ground unity and conflict, or the principle of identity and contradiction, phenomenologically, that is, to found these in the “concatenation” of evidences. The Investigations’ example points to the phenomenological incompatibility of the colors red and green (LI: 756). Looking at the same text Schlick would later claim such differences were not “eidetic” at all, but merely logical, that is, differences that concern not the “essence,” but the grammar of color.21

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Husserl’s own attempts to derive (or clarify) a pure logical grammar doubtless influenced many, including the formal commitments of his detractors, even Schlick and Carnap, the latter of whom attended his seminar in Freiburg. Still, the phenomenological account he sought to found seemed to have very little ground on which to stand, granted their objections. All of Husserl’s attempts to get us beyond “linguistic” grammar, beyond history, beyond convention to the ultimate phenomenological matters seemed to abandon the very tools of objectivity he had attempted to experientially found, devoid of any extrinsic criteria for adjudication. If, recently, charitable interpreters of Husserl like Michael Friedman could still see his project as aligned with science and acknowledging the importance of formal analysis (e.g. versus Heidegger or Rickert, both of whom, for Friedman, had given up on science for the sake of a more concrete analysis), Husserl in the end suffered from the same objections.22 Why wasn’t Husserl’s ‘evidence is evidencing’ in the end not just tautological in a way that, unlike the formalist, lacked all and any means of making its tautologies explicit, that is, perspicuous, to use Wittgenstein’s term? Was it in the end any different from the later Heidegger’s deliberate affirmations of tautological thinking, for example, ‘Die Sprache spricht?’23 At stake, as Wittgenstein realized, was the limit of language and what he called ‘the Kantian solution of the problem of philosophy,’ the recognition that is, that it is ‘impossible to describe the fact which corresponds to (is the translation of) a sentence, without simply repeating the sentence.’24 But for all of this Husserl seemed to lack any answer, let alone criteria, except for the seemingly empty appeal to die Sache selbst. But why then doesn’t Husserl’s account simply look like a museum piece of its own time, as Adorno and those who undertook its historical analysis from outside charged? All that Husserl had committed to the articulation of the phenomenologically given would then simply look like the ruins of personal and cultural history, better grasped by sociological “archaeology” than the genetic science Husserl ultimately posited. To use words Adorno reserved for the virtue of the work of art, why isn’t it the case in the end that phenomenology too remained ‘a priori helpless?’ Or, to borrow a term from Charles Taylor, perhaps we can say no more for these “scientific” than we can for the other more explicitly artistic “epiphanies” of the twentieth century.25 Husserl always claimed that phenomenological elucidation circumvents skepticism through transcendental reduction. While the skeptic always presupposes an experience and an objectivity that his or her denials must affirm, the phenomenologist will simply elucidate what is indubitably

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given: ‘we no longer need to argue with skepticism nor take into consideration objections of the old type’ (I: 345). From within the standpoint of his reduction (i.e. the phenomenological standpoint) this may be true. Still, granted the strong claims that accompany its foundational pretensions concerning the theory of theory, one is left with the outstanding charge: devoid of definite explicit criteria, it will be objected, Husserl will need to ish or cut bait. While Husserl (and Husserlians) might, as it were, “transcendentally stonewall” on the point that all knowledge entails veridical evidencing, the claim that the logicist “strong program” can be defended surely verges upon a kind of rational hubris, necessarily involving a kind of agonistic too dialectical (or contentious, in any case) to be recoupable.26 Husserlian “elucidations” do not seem to have the proofs they would need to defend their position from external or internal doubts. Husserl’s strong program depended upon the transcendental argument that, devoid of such epistemic capacities, all logical and mathematical truth, timeless, iterable, and objective, would crumble. But this surely can be doubted too, if for no other reason that there are theoretical alternatives. Here, perhaps it might be best to leave the quarrel to logicians. What can be said is that, insofar as the phenomenological account had divorced itself from such paradigms, to the extent that the epoché had been divorced from any science other than the phenomenological, it had removed itself from being adjudicated in terms other than its own parenthesized (and now modalized) “necessities.” The question is whether phenomenological “science” is up to the strong claims Husserl continually made for it—or whether it is “scientific” in any sense at all. The “Ich stehe hier” of phenomenological necessity is not the perspicuous necessity of logical proof (nor can it be simply equated with it), and, to the extent that Husserl might continue to maintain that it might be, the account would simply succumb to epistemic logicism. While I am surely not the first to worry about Husserl’s lingering logicism, it is important to note that, to the extent that Husserl had removed his account from objectivist or mundane “science,” he had removed it from needing to be logicist, or needing to be limited strictly to the paradigm of strictly scientific determinate results, that is, from the logicist program inherited from Bolzano that both he and Frege shared (I: 136). Devoid of such demands, we might then enquire anew about the extent to which phenomenological necessity must be distinguished from all factuality—and whether its “evidencing” either needs to be or can be divorced from the various conflations Husserl hoped to purge through the epoché: historicism, psychologism, or even naturalism. And, as these terms themselves signal, the resulting “softening” of

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phenomenological “necessity” would yield more difference and dissensus than the homogeneous community of enquirers (perhaps modeled again on the community of mathematicians) that comprised the homogeneous Wissenschaftslehre Husserl sought to found.

IV Would such “dissensus” then end the matter? Or might we still articulate a role for the standpoint of Phenomenology’s peculiar first-person rationality in our rational practices? As has become clear, the matter need not end here, but any defense will certainly need to soften “phenomenological” claims and will need to follow a more circuitous (and hence hermeneutic) route. We can do so by stressing the particular historicity of its theory, borrowing from the Begriffstradition we have already followed in ways to which we are not accustomed. Instead, to borrow a term from Husserl himself, it will require a certain “refiguration” that more emphatically (and perspicuously) acknowledges the historical edge of the phenomenological project as a theory. To see the point one can recur to an account in Husserl’s Experience and Judgment. There, Husserl, in distinguishing between bound and unbound ideality (in talking about a civil constitution), distinguishes between the ideality proper to a civil constitution that obtains for its citizens and ‘the possibility of figurative reactivation by the outsider, for example by one who understands this constitution in a merely “historical” fashion.’ On the basis of this distinction Husserl argues, ‘even cultural systems are not always completely free idealities.’ While in principle repeatable, such formations ‘are not repeatable in an adequate identity’ (EJ: 266–7). While we might initially be suspicious of the distinction between internal and external “reactivation,” hidden here may be Husserl’s complicated account of meaning that allows for meaning changes with change of understanding over time: here, too, ‘everything new reacts with the old’ (ITC: 56). Again, to many this may look like Husserl simply lacks a sufficient account of fixed reference, or, that this is just the objectivity issue viewed not, say, through the optics of epistemology (or philosophy of science), but the semantics of natural language. They might be right to note this lacuna. In all honesty, the problem, that is, the question of a transcendental “language” had been initially raised by Eugen Fink and then by Merleau-Ponty—and we shall need to return to their discussions.27

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Now it is not that Husserl gives no account here. It is rather that, when he does, it calls into question his “Cartesian” leanings. Take, for example, the following text from Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Thinking is carried out from the very beginning as linguistic. What resides in our practical horizon, as something to be shaped, is the still indeterminate idea of a formation that is already a linguistic one. The thought that we have in mind and that we bring to expression interiorly is already equivocal, though still determined in an incomplete manner. (PAS: 12) Granted its intrinsic connection to a linguistic ‘horizon,’ such a Phenomenology could not (and would not need to) be claimed to be ‘prelinguistic’—even when its claim concerns an experience never yet adequately brought to expression, to the “said.” The “equivocity” of expression, after all, is entailed by our always being able to speak or describe “otherwise.” But this interplay in “equivocity” would nonetheless seem to threaten (by “premising”) in advance Husserlian attempts to ultimately break with the coherence of the past linguistic and conceptual horizon. The ‘zig-zag’ or Wechselspiel between concept and intuition, the passage from the indeterminately fixed past to determinate expression is never absolute, always horizonally determined or internally ‘bound’ (K: 58; LI: 261). Still, given the proper hermeneutic turn, this lack perhaps becomes its virtue, its step beyond the dialectics of idealism and realism. Surely others have said as much. Clearly this is the origin of Gadamer’s claim that to understand is to understand differently, or Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion that we understand significative practices in general historically, as being always a system of ‘coherent deformations.’ The point is that, whatever else it might entail, understanding as understanding “differently” involves the claim that understanding is not simply a matter of iterative identity but, in addition, always involves interpretation and critique. The latter account is not simply (nor necessarily) a turn to historicism but rather involves understanding “understanding” as a historically premised endeavor. At stake is less a pure taking of the given but, like the interplay or Wechsel of the equivocal and the univocal in the ancient doctrine of analogy, its figuration and refiguration. We are reminded of Sellars’ statement that ‘as obscure and difficult’ as the issues accompanying “analogy,” this interplay of the univocal and the equivocal, might be, ‘it is as important to the philosophy of science as it has been to theology.’28 We should be cautious here. While claims concerning the bound character of linguistic or

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conceptual horizons of appearance has always seemed to phenomenologists to entail a linguistic skepticism (and it must entail a softening of phenomenological claims), it need not. As Merleau-Ponty realized, ‘although meaning is everywhere figurative (figuré), it is meaning which is at issue everywhere’ (S: 181). Nonetheless, to again invoke Husserl’s terminology, this should provide us with a “clue” (Leitfaden) for deciphering Husserl‘s own story of Phenomenology—and hence ‘a phenomenology of phenomenology,’ as Merleau-Ponty puts it, following Eugen Fink (PoP: 365).29 If we are to grasp the peculiar (historical) rationality at stake, we will need to attend more closely to the “horizonal” construction of the phenomenological articulemes themselves and the historical “sedimentation” out of which they emerged. Couched, if you will, within the logical syntax of Husserl’s pure grammatical forms, intentionally linked to mythic or purely “given” (eidetic) correlates (e.g. furnishing the pure types of the life world), are the historical philosophemes that construct his accounts of Bedeutung. This perhaps explains the suspicion provoked in Husserl’s readers that his Lebenswelt may be less the Urgrund of all theoretical enquiry than it is just a new form of Aristotelianism—versus, for example, the Galilean account to which he opposed it. Instead of pure description, to borrow a phrase from Roland Barthes, all transcendental construction perhaps is better viewed as ‘cubist.’ The coherence of such descriptions is dependent upon their own Vorhabe. Description is always already a move within a larger (historical) whole and the inferential holism of a certain theoretical “montage.” In accord with the equivocity of expression noted above, ‘immanence’ here is always latently an instance of a certain hidden or implicit metonymy. And this must include the concept of “experience” itself, divided not only conceptually between the “universal” and the particular, but the “encounter” between different epistemic theories that account for these— and perhaps to speak Foucauldian, even different epistemes. The invocation of “experience,” in any case, is always already refiguration. Moreover, as we have seen, this figuration is explicit in Husserl’s own reception and transformation of the term “Phenomenology” itself, linking it, now, beyond the middle realm of dialectical appearances, to the apodicticities of strict science. One could further articulate this point by analyzing his own historical reconstitutions or refigurations of modern philosophy, say in Erste Philosophie or more explicitly and foundationally to his method in The Crisis—Husserl’s Descartes, his Galileo, or his Hobbes. As Weyl noted, ‘Hobbes in his treatise de Corpore starts with a fictitious annihilation of the universe (similar to Husserl’s epoché) in order to let it

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rise again by a step by step construction from reason.’30 But one might question, as others like Merleau-Ponty have, whether, granted our rational dependancies, such a complete annihilation (let alone reduction) is possible. One might question thereby, again, as Merleau-Ponty (and Fink), did, the models that underwrote Phenomenology, whether its experience were not thereby theory-laden—and even better exhibited by other models. What should be insisted is that the Crisis’s historical turn be taken at its word, that Phenomenology be forced out of its descriptive armchair to confront the implicit dialogue with the history of theory from which it emerges. Lacking this acknowledgment, it remains monological. Here it becomes evident that the profound and deep, unshakable (and ahistorical) certainties Husserl sought were at most “limit cases” constructed from within historical horizons (EJ: 275). Phenomenology always in effect enters the theatrum philosophicum not simply to return to pretheoretical givens, but instead as a development (and implicitly an argumentative defense) within a contested theoretical context—and in this sense precisely out of the lapsus when unquestioned and seemingly reliable objectivities have been interrupted (EJ: 101). Indeed if judgment emerges, as Husserl argued, when doxic belief has been disturbed, or at least is questionable, that is, when the ‘intention toward homogeneity has been disturbed,’ it might be said that such homogeneity (at least, qua questionable) is always already disturbed, always theoretically contestable (EJ: 192). However much Husserl continued to claim that doubting, or negation, or cancellation ‘presupposes normal, original object-constitution,’ it does not simply follow that we have immediate access to such givens (EJ: 91). This was the Kantian point concerning Lambert’s “Phenomenology,” that such isolated appeals to a logic of Schein were simply assertoric and, construed as anything more, transcendentally illusory. usserl concurs at least this much, that judgments (the judgments of Phenomenology included presumably) arise only in the lapse of such doxic certainty within a context that is always already linguistic (and conceptual). While invoking the quest for experiential grounds from Kant, Husserl had forgotten the standpoint from which such grounds could be asserted, one that always turned illusory as a claim to totality or completeness. The rationality of such judgments remains always, to use his phenomenological term, “horizonal”: to use Kant’s terms, an extension in indefinitum. Bracketing Husserl’s limit cases, the issues become much more complicated. Both factually and eidetically perhaps, to again quote Taylor, we live in a time in which there is no framework that ‘can sink to the phenomenological status of unquestioned fact.’31 Notwithstanding such theoretical dissensus however, that is because, like the concept of a pure

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perception upon which it rests, there may again be something at best “mythic” or nostalgic and at worst conceptually incoherent about strict or “pure” phenomenological claims. Like the mixture of imagination and percept that constitutes phenomenological necessity in general, in all these claims there is as much fiction as truth, as much theoretical construct as description in its eidetics—and Husserl, of course, recognized this too, though again always stonewalling. As he once ironically put it, ‘feigning [Fiktion] is the source from which the cognition of “eternal truths” is fed’ (I: para. 70). Here too perhaps, we should just take him at his word.

V We might then be led to say of phenomenologists just what Taylor has said (in reference to Adorno) of those ecstatic artists at the end of modernity. Thereby the imaginative variations of phenomenological invention would both disclose and criticize realities: ‘What we can look for, and what the best art can give us, are hints and intimations of “redemption,” in addition to a keenly critical eye from the shortcomings of the present reality.’32 This is, of course, the point about Romanticism in general and its elevation of imaginative possibility. Notwithstanding his own “swipes” at Romanticism (and its philosophers), Husserl’s own commitment to the potentials of imagination were surely considerable, granted the essential role it played in the delineation of phenomenological possibility and its eidetic necessities. Despite all this, however, Husserl remained in his sense a ‘positivist’ about the given; he remained perhaps incapable of seeing the imaginative variations that facilitated the Wesensschau for what they were. They were, after all, as much invention as intuition, inventions (or imaginative variations) that took place within a broader historical (and objective) context. Hence the transcendental illusion that always accompanied descriptive assertion with pure objectivity. So what should we say about phenomenological description or clarification? Well we have said that it turns “hermeneutic,” that is, that it is not independent from conceptual appearance, to use Lambert’s terms—or to use Wittgenstein’s, that seeing is always “seeing as.” And, we can say that Phenomenology is not without its historical edge, its “historicity,” as later hermeneut’s put it. All this is not new. But it may not be enough either. To say that phenomenological descriptors are articulemes, is to acknowledge the historical and argumentative web, to use a term of Husserl’s, the ‘symbolic rhythmics,’ out of which they emerge (FTL: 179). Husserl could

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almost acknowledge this, as for example in Ideas II, where he claims that we would not have a grasp of the physical world without the intersubjective modality of other embodied subjects.33 But here, too, he thinks it is transcendental purity that he has; that is, that it is the simple presence of the other’s body that “objectively” fleshes out my concept of bodily presence. He proceeds as if the “lived body” doesn’t have (and entail) a conceptual history as well as an “experience.” Just as Kuhn could say that Einstein’s conception of space is closer to Aristotle’s than it is to Newton’s, we might say that Husserl’s “lived body” is not Aristotle’s, is not Aquinas’s, and the like—though it is more Aristotelian or Thomistic than Hobbes or Dennett’s. Such claims, of course, amount to a casting of analogy against analogy, to use a phrase of Derrida’s. But they force us to acknowledge that their terms are not uninterpreted. They emerge from a conceptual web of differences, an operative (fungierende) intentional history, to use the Crisis’ term—and in this respect, their articulation is always a reestablishment (Nachstiftung) and modification (Abwandlung) of a tradition or sense-history (K: 71). But then what does “description” bring to this history? What does the exemplification of the Husserlian Wesensschau bring to the field of arguments from which he so strongly attempted to remove it, that is, in removing it ‘from the workshops of past philosophers, say Aristotle and Thomas’? To say it bluntly now, this “removal”—or reduction—is what seems to be untenable; claims concerning the purity of descriptive eidetics seemed every bit as guilty of ‘mythical construction’ as he had charged Kant’s (and the post-Kantians’) account (K: 115). Moreover, as Merleau-Ponty put it, everything may hinge upon grasping their mythic or symbolic function within the rational, ‘the exceeding of the signified by the signifier essential to reason’ (VI: 168). Such descriptions and their exemplifications remain schemata for conceptual augmentation, amplification, and argumentation, and they remain sedimented within a specific interpretive, cultural, argumentative, and articulative history.34 Phenomenological Evidenz thus remains restrictedly always “evidence for,” evidence that obtains or modifies a specific (sedimented) context, its Vorhabe. The ‘articulemes’ of phenomenological “insight” thus participate in their own conceptual development, precisely as a determinate history or ‘zig-zag,’ to again use Husserl’s term, between concept and intuition (K: 58; cf. LI: I: 261). As Aron Gurwitsch pointed out, even the concept of the ‘lifeworld’ is a ‘polemical’ concept: ‘if we didn’t have science we wouldn’t need this concept.’35 But we might question whether the same is not true of all the concepts through which ‘phenomenological theory’ becomes articulated.

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For example, as has been intimated above, rather than the simple content to which Husserl appeals in the concept of the lived body, we can trace the critical transformations, the concept of the lived body undergoes within modernity, its own phenomenological Begriffstradition. The lived body involves both our opening upon the world and the schematics or explorations of a conceptual history. Beyond the besouled metaphysics of medieval transcendent metaphysics, we might point, as has Bakhtin, to Rabelais’ (or Montaigne’s) emphasis on corporeality that opposes to such transcendence the heterogeneous experience of material individuality. Or, within the post-Kantian transcendental tradition, we might point to the early Fichte’s or Schelling’s articulation of the lived body in his account of natural right as the ‘schema of freedom.’36 Indeed, we might say of post-Kantian Naturphilosophie as it concerns the lived body, what Kierkegaard stated of Schlegel, in particular, that this thought involved a certain ‘rehabilitation of the flesh’ (Rehabilitation des Fleiches).37 Recently, in Husserl’s own important analysis of the kinesthetic phenomenological aesthetic, we have learned more explicitly about the constitutive presence of the lived body, the originality of the Ich Kann. And, more recently still, we have learned the importance of the question of the body’s being gendered or raced. We should be leery of seeing here the reemergence of a new finality or even perhaps a renewed continuity (or the return of Hegel and the progress of an immanent Idea). Still, we can also note that this concern with the lived body appears also, often concomitantly, as certain retrieval, or reopening of the ancients’ concern with nature (physis). It admits what Merleau-Ponty called, citing Husserl’s Ideas II, ‘even a derivative secondary truth of naturalism,’ namely that ‘the psychic reality is founded in the organismal matter, but this is not conversely founded in the psyche.’38 While such (neoclassical) appeals, however, may seem like simple nostalgia (and accompanied Romanticism from the outset), it is precisely here that environmentalists like Arne Naess found resources for combating the modern technological ‘image’ of nature.39 Phenomenologically, the lived body (and the “nature” in which it opens) could no more be reduced to mechanism than it could be reduced to an art: the psychic (or the structure of intelligibility) always already operates on what exceeds it. Even so, however, we are still one step from Butler’s account of the excessive body irreducible to institution or convention.40 The point in all this perhaps is the epistemic and theoretical fecundity in the event at stake, an operative opening less indubitably present to itself than one, to use Merleau-Ponty’s terms that always ‘waits to be won back, fixed and made explicit’ (PoP: 404).41

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In all these complicated transitions the result involves less a simple determinate theory, description or inventory of a range of pretheoretical entities, than a question and an operative experience and a conceptual elucidation that opens in the midst of our discursive practices, divided epistemically between strict, systematic conceptual constitution (Erfahrung) (the account of which Phenomenology shares with Kantianism of various stripes, “neo”-and-otherwise) and the instance of its singular encounter (Erlebnis).42 What distinguishes Phenomenology from other accounts is that it sees in this encounter an event that is both inextricable and always potentially rational, perhaps even a rationality “otherwise” than the continuities of previous systematic explication. This distinction both points to the theoretical history that structures “experience” itself and explains what lies contested in Merleau-Ponty’s recurrent attempts at a ‘phenomenology of phenomenology,’ divided, that is, between Erlebnis and Erfahrung, its “genitive” irrevocably divided between the objective and the subjective.43 If “experience” is an epistemic event, it is never a pure event, nor uninterrupted. Perhaps Merleau-Ponty caught this best, in insisting on linking the transcendental to an unfinished intersubjective, historical, and in some cases even intercultural field whose most basic terms remain equally unfinished and continually open to refiguration. Admittedly, however, we are not far from the conclusion of his early colleague, Jean Cavaillès, that even ‘the term “consciousness” does not admit of univocity of application,’ its concept always theoretically ‘polyvalent.’44 The recognition of such historical “modifications,” however, provides the glimpse of an answer to the question, “Why Phenomenology?” Because Phenomenology continues to mine a theoretical practice at most rarely accessed elsewhere, the practice of elucidating “ourselves,” of articulating “lived experience.” This might be construed simply as a practice with a certain Nietzschean edge, the practice of inventing or interpreting or— critically—the ‘affirmation of oneself.’ The importance of argumentative appeals to such experiential “explications” may be inextricable: if they don’t speak for themselves against the received views, they almost do. Still, such “exemplifications” looks less like a purity removed from historical-conceptual conditions, than, again like schemata of Kantian exemplification, problemata that make possible further exploration in the construction of concepts. And yet experience cannot be reduced to a formal problem, a hypothesis or a series of such interconnected hypotheses: lived experience remains still, if you will a Mittelding, as Lambert had already put it, involving more a matter of reflective than determining judgment. It is just in this respect that thinkers like Heidegger, Fink, and Merleau-Ponty

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stressed Kant’s account of reflective judgment in their extensions of the schematism, reaffirming the importance of productive imagination.45 Accordingly they all claimed that our conceptual practices cannot make sense (and be acquired) without them, since, at the very least, our ability to communicate presupposes some noninferential observation (or application of observational concepts) of others, that is, an intersubjective operative “experience.”46 Nonetheless, in articulating the transition between experience and concept, or concept application and inference, such a model of schematization acknowledges the truth of the “holism” of its theoretical constellation. No more than there is a pure perception whose Bedeutung is immanently fixed is there a simple conceptual or noematic correlate. Instead, such explicata must be conceptually fixed, articulated, applied, and defended within a theoretical web classical (static) phenomenology could not envision.47 Moreover, while thus insisting on the hermeneutic refiguration that underlies phenomenological articulation, we should not exclude the same insistence with respect to classical formulations of hermeneutics itself. For example, Gadamer’s goal of the hermeneutic ‘fusion of horizons’ also would not make sense outside of the very conceptual development from Lambert to Kant to Husserl that we have traced, and perhaps attempts to preserve Husserl’s pretheoretical defense of our ‘pre-judice.’48

VI Confronted with objections to Husserlian accounts of evidence and objectivity, objections made by thinkers as diverse as Natorp, or Schlick, or Adorno, there seemed to be little recourse. Yet if we have affirmed what Wittgenstein called the Kantian solution to philosophy, binding objectivity to norm and (historical) convention, we must likewise acknowledge what Alberto Coffa aptly called Kant’s ‘mixed message’ to those in his wake.49 Natorp had accused Husserl of having missed the Kantian message, committing a category mistake in thinking that knowledge might be strictly “reduced” to subjectivity: objectivity alone begets objectivity.50 Still, notwithstanding the limits of objectivity, as again Kant fully acknowledged, ‘we have an understanding which problematically extends further.’51 And perhaps nowhere was this problematic (and, for reasons now evident, hermeneutic) extension more evident than in the ‘indeterminate intuition’ by which Kant almost half-heartedly articulated the “existence” of the self as the

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‘I think’—albeit one that strictly construed, ‘cannot be known’ as a determinate substance.52 Its problematic would be continually mined both in the phenomenologies of Kant’s later Critique’s and by phenomenologists thereafter, before and often against the received views concerning the self. What makes up phenomenological description is then neither conceptual history nor pure description (or its “experience”) but a ciphering of both. Taken conjointly, that is, as a singular historical of a domain always (and only) open to a problematic defense, this relational encounter might be construed, following Heidegger, as “the Dasein thesis.” Yet, as Marc Richir pointed out, even the “Da” of Dasein is dependent upon a linguistic schemata and a specific conceptual and ontological tradition.53 Phenomenology always takes place against an historical and objective backdrop or Vorhabe. This is just to acknowledge that such experiential accounts both reestablish and modify a conceptual tradition, and gain (or lose) their legitimacy in the mix. Thus we can affirm that such appeals to the (experientially) given are mythic in isolation, that their status is that of historical “ruin,” Adorno’s museum pieces, momentarily divorced from history—and affirm the implicit rationality that emerges in their Begriffstradition, in their very conditionality the transition, the “coherent deformation,” that they invoke. Hence Merleau-Ponty’s softened claims for phenomenological justification: I can never be sure that my vision of an essence is anything more than a prejudice rooted in language—if it does not enable me to hold together all the facts which are known and which may be brought into relation with it. (PP: 75) Still, a final caveat appears for the phenomenologist in all this. We can defend a certain inextricability in our recourse to experientially based claims—and precisely as experientially based claims, that is, elucidations of experiences conceptually articulated within historically received ‘conventions.’ Nonetheless we must also refuse, as did Kant, to simply vindicate such experiences by themselves detached from the historical or conceptual field from which they emerge. This means that Phenomenology is neither the whole nor the ultimate foundation of our rational practices; it is not, to use Husserlian metaphors, the homogeneous center whose center is everywhere and the periphery nowhere, nor our immovable “earth,” and the like—if it may form a “periphery” to the web of belief that at critical moments institutes something of a last resort. What should

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be denied is that Phenomenology (by itself) ever rises above the realm of Scheinung: intuitions without (contextually justified) concepts remain meaningless—and, potentially, still blind to the foibles of their own prejudices, their own unconscious, their own past, and the like. If one can parse this Scheinung as having a certain Nietzschean edge, we must preclude Nietzsche’s claim that ‘ “Semblance [Schein]” . . . is the actual and sole reality of things.’54 The point has been the more limited, stoic claim: the explications of such “experiences” remain important instances or schemata in our rational and argumentative history—not that they are immanently the foundation or the resolution (let alone the reality) of that history. Notwithstanding their provisional status, they remain rational in a very important sense, a very important sense still related to our quite singular lives, lives not simply argued about, but also at stake and lived in such histories. In disregarding the challenge of the skeptic, Husserl himself, in one sense, saw this, but in quite another, did not. Notwithstanding those curious passages in which Husserl found himself “ontotheologically” arguing that God himself could not intuit things differently than the transcendental ego or that skepticism is childishness, he also acknowledged at the same time that his Phenomenology was in the end a very stoic enterprise. But then what of Husserl’s transcendental pretensions? As has become apparent, it all depends on what one means by “transcendental.” If one means a foundational account that cuts across all categories, foundational in the sense of a uniquely necessary rational science of all sciences, what I have argued is that this, as Husserl queried at one point, is a dream well lost (K: 389). A science of infinite tasks, after all, really is just a science of infinite tasks. No science, physics, mathematics, or “Phenomenology” can lay claim either to have established such (uninterpreted) right or necessity. Moreover, we are not reduced to skepticism without it; instead we need another account than such a ‘theory of theory.’55 But what of the other sense of transcendental, the one that Kant, some had claimed, had somewhat surreptitiously linked to the first, that is, the question of the experience of knowledge that accompanies objective representation? Husserl had attempted to resolve this question into the interrogation of the evidential link between knowledge and its presentation to the self. He remained staunchly committed to this standpoint perhaps even beyond the classical formulations of Transcendental Phenomenology’s theoretical shortcomings—even when he admitted such presentations, in accord with the archive of phenomenological presentation traced above, remain always horizon-specific.56 Hence the famous text affirming the

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phenomenological task in Formal and Transcendental Logic to which we have already alluded: Whether convenient or inconvenient, and even though (because of no matter what prejudices) it may sound monstrous to me, it is the primal matter of fact to which I must hold fast [es ist die Urtatsache, der Ich standhalten muss], which I as philosopher, must not disregard for a single instant. For children in philosophy, this may be the dark corner haunted by the specters of solipsism and, perhaps, of psychologism. The true philosopher, instead of running away, will prefer to fill the dark corner with light. (FTL: 237) Husserl’s invocation to us that we ‘hold fast,’ even while haunted by the shadows of ignorance, here must strike one less as a matter of scientific necessity, or even “transcendental deduction” than, precisely as he states, his Ich stehe hier. It reminds us, as Kant had previously realized, that not only do experiences have their horizons but—as Husserl came to realize against his earlier views—so do their concepts. That is, without simply being reduced to them, our concepts, as Kant claimed, are part of our horizons too. They are, as he puts it, what makes up our standpoints (Standpunkten). Moreover they are not simply determinate “in themselves,” or without their own inner plurality and difference—or not in need of variation.57 While acknowledging that ‘we are unable to know above our horizon,’ Kant himself outlines a certain interplay of general and particular conceptual, subjective and intersubjective horizons (and their “standpoints”) and realized that what was at stake was a matter of rational and historical knowledge. In one sense, of course, this meant that he had himself also surpassed the Copernican turn that restricted knowledge to ‘appearance.’58 Again, the logical plurality of such standpoints is part of the solution to the antinomy of practical reasons, the conceptual two standpoints of autonomy and determinism, theoretical and practical reason—and arguably this position underwrites the account of transcendental dialectic, illusion and the extensions of reflective judgment.59 The suggestion here is that Husserl’s own extended notion of perception must be understood in this light. Husserl’s strong program had omitted Kant’s stoic protocols: the experiment in finitude which, in contrast to Hume, without such strong claims, would save the appearances.60 Evidently then such “standpoints” are theoretically complex: neither reducible simply to a set of systematic propositions nor their confirmations since both depend upon the “horizons” of an operative context. Nor can

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they give rise to an unchallengeable method (if they may still embody them). While they remain nonetheless rationally motivated, they are never simply value free—without prejudice, to use Husserl term.61 There remains then a certain inextricability (as linked to a certain life and even a certain sense-history) to what Kant called the ‘subjective or conditioned horizon’ of the phenomenological standpoint. This inextricability is the reason that phenomenologists continually denied that theirs’ was simply a relative ‘standpoint.’ It is inextricable, that is, as linked to the problematic experience that we are—and which the very concept of ‘the standpoint of experience’ opens up. What this argues against, however, is the strong claim that all of being has received its ‘whole being-sense for me from my effective intentionality; not a shadow [nicht ein Schatten] of that sense remains excluded from my effective intentionality’ (FTL: 234). Rather, as has become evident, Merleau-Ponty realized instead: ‘the philosopher must bear his shadow’ under the recognition, as he puts it, that Vieldeutigkeit cannot be conceived as the absence of true light (S: 178). To mention Merleau-Ponty, whose account of Phenomenology is so closely identified with the phenomenology of embodiment, at this point is not simply accidental and is indicative of our result. As has become evident, even the phenomenology of embodiment is neither simply an ahistorical description, nor would it escape the history of its articulemes. Perhaps more than any other phenomenologist, Merleau-Ponty realized that philosophy is both an incarnate and an historical affair: the philosopher ‘understands himself by the history of philosophy, and he understands this history by himself’ (PP: 93). Indeed such historical interrogation is then part of the reduction itself (VI: 179). Still, Merleau-Ponty would have none of Husserl’s strong programs, his apodicticities, his ultimate adequacies, his pure perceptions, his “European” science with its ‘spectacle [Schauspiel] of the Europeanization of all other civilizations’ (K: 16). Philosophy, in short, can no longer be linked to a ‘philosopher-subject, master of all that is possible’ (S: 104). For Merleau-Ponty, even the Wesensschau has become a complex induction linked to its factual horizons and, like the zigzag between concept and intuition it involved, even a certain reading (un lecture d’essence) [PP: 69; PoP: 108]. The transformation that results neither escapes its historicity nor remains restrictedly factical; to invoke Bachelard’s term, such in-ductions involve less a (reductive) generalization or a simple enumerative or ‘amplifying induction’ than a refiguration or ‘transcendental induction.’62 As has been seen, even here Merleau-Ponty is taking Husserl at his word: ‘Every historical philosopher performs his self-reflection, carries on his

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dealings with the philosophers of the past. He expresses himself about all this, fixes through these confrontations [Auseinandersetzungen] his own position’ (K: 72). The rationality of Phenomenology emerges from this spectacle (Schauspiel) or this Wechselspiel (K: 58). On several occasions Merleau-Ponty himself models his own philosophy on this “spectacle,” albeit by refusing the strict opposition between concept and intuition under which classical Phenomenology had labored (e.g. PP: 93; VI: 178–82). This is why, even when he remains close to Husserl, not least of which in Husserl’s description of the animate body in Ideas II or the Cartesian Meditations, the result becomes in certain respects quite different. First, the lived body in Merleau-Ponty’s account does not become the siege of pure (i.e. absolutely veridical) or “analytic” reflection. This is not simply an Oedipal quarrel between phenomenologists, as it is often portrayed; it is equally a theoretical quarrel between philosophers. Perhaps no more proof of the latter is that once again we see the articulemes of the phenomenological past come into play. The body is precisely the opening of our standpoint upon the world, our medium for having a world, even a schematism of world possibilities and horizons—but not the semantic or metaphysical foundation that makes all science possible, let alone a science of pure being (PoP: 330). If Phenomenology is a Schauspiel, the body is less its conceptually fixed primal ground than its mise en scène. Second, accordingly, rather than pure descriptions the articulemes are deliberately understood here more problematically, more in the guise of the third Critique than the first.63 The result is less the clarification by pure descriptors than an ‘epistemological structure having its quality as concrete realization, and, in the language of Kant, exhibition’ (PoP: 114). We have briefly traced in this regard the Begriffstradition through which the lived body emerged, a Begriffstradition having epistemological, ontological, and even ethical and political implications. This is precisely why the phenomenological standpoint articulated through concept of “the lived body” in the end cannot be confused with neo-Aristotelianism or teleological substance. The point is more restricted: the body is always a body ‘for us,’ understood within the constellation of a historical experience (IP: 166–8). If Husserl may have blinkingly seen this, he continued to link his critical and historical reflections on the science of the Wesensschau less to the modern accounts of autonomy, individuality, rational criticism, and scientific (or political) revolution than to the theoria, the sciencia of aeterna veritas he found in classical Europe (K: 71, 377). In particular, he stressed, in opposition to the “mythical practical attitude,” the tradition of philosophia perennis that acquired its original foundation (Urstiftung) in Plato and Aristotle (K: 71, 285). For Merleau-Ponty (as for others discussed above, for example, Arne Naess, Jean Cavaillès), the concept

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of a pure (or an ahistorical) Wesensschau, thus understood, had itself become mythic (VI: 116).64 Like the embodied practices from which it emerges, Phenomenology involves less an (ultimate transcendental) claim about making sense possible or making sense “of it all” than a matter of making sense to ourselves and the interpretive practices that can make no sense without it. Husserl claimed that all this takes place as a history and within a history—albeit by mining an operative lived depth of experience (Tiefenleben) that always accompanies the history of theory. Still, as we have seen, it encounters therein a more robust sense of the historical or objectivity than Husserl’s experiential reductionism could envision. In a sense this issue had accompanied the account from the outset. This is precisely what Natorp had suggested in his early review of the Logical Investigation, that only the concept of time (and ultimately conceptual history) could mediate between the ideal and the real in Husserl’s account.65 While Natorp’s argument had perhaps already led Husserl toward a genetic account, among his progeny Merleau-Ponty had best seen that the fabled return to the things themselves Husserl projected would not lie in a reduction that would take us to a simple pretheoretical or primal beginning. Phenomenology’s exhibitions would remain partial, divided between experience and concept, lacking completeness (complètitude) (VI: 178). They would emerge only at the horizon that a history and a Vorhabe and its institutions, norms and problems make possible (HLP: 22). Just as reflection is always “embodied,” dependent upon its Vorhabe, so are its historical articulations (VI: 192). Just as science, Husserl acknowledged, is a ‘propagative process’ phenomenology, for Merleau-Ponty, remained in this respect always a certain transformative divergence (écart) or coherent deformation. Phenomenology’s task is less a science of pure experience (and reduction) than its interrogation, transformation (and refinement). To use Bachelard’s terms, its process is as much theoretical complication as reduction (NSS: 138).66 Here the assertoric return to the things themselves ‘does not lie in the beginning of language but at the end of language’s effort’ (PW: 110). It risks the possibility both rationally and semantically that the “sayable” and the “said” (the actual and the necessary, “essential possibility”) need not coincide. In this regard, to use Merleau-Ponty’s terms, imaginative variation, too, is always the variation of a certain (ontic) Vorhabe or convention. Its assertion involve then a certain risk, that is, a risking of ‘the hypothesis of nonlanguage’ not yet fully contained in such a Vorhabe—and remains always underwritten thereby by the rationality of transition, transformation, extension, interpretation, and critique (HLP: 39).

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Chapter 3

Theoretical Crisis, Dialogue, and the Stoicism of the Transcendental Singular

I can never say ‘I’ Absolutely. (PoP: 208) One could speak of a bad existentialism, which exhausts itself in the description of the collision between reason and the contradictions of experience and terminates in the consciousness of defeat. But that is nothing but a renewal of classical skepticism—and an incomplete description. (HT: 188) There is meaning (il y a du sens), something and not nothing . . . (PoP: 397)

I In his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel articulated a dialectic between stoicism and skepticism that now seems—perhaps like many of the Phenomenology’s dialectical schemata—less resolved than simply interminable. Stoicism is granted ‘independence from content,’ having historically and conceptually emerged out of the ruins of the master-slave encounter. Yet stoic commitment to the ‘otherness’ of the Good or the True is held to remain not only still related to the ‘other,’ but baffled by the problem concerning a criterion for grasping what exceeds it. In the end, Hegel claimed, the absolute escaped it.1 Contrariwise, while, in accord with ‘the absolute unrest of the dialectic,’ skepticism is aware of ‘the non-independent character of this other,’ it is always in danger of losing its own relation to objectivity, lapsing thereby into sophistry—or its Hegelian equivalent, empiricism (i.e. non-philosophy). Hence: What skepticism causes to vanish is not only objective reality as such, but its own relationship to it, in which the “other” is held to be objective and is established as such, and hence, too, its perceiving, along with firmly securing what it is in danger of losing, viz. sophistry, and the truth it has itself determined and established.2

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Even the latter self-engendered ‘disorder’ stands disrupted, however, ‘for it is the negativity of all singularity and all difference.’3 Now it is not at all clear that Hegel’s dilemma has been surpassed—surely not by the dialectic itself, to which, as he puts it, consciousness always seems simply to be at mercy. Moreover, if skepticism is claimed to be the result of stoicism, it is not at all clear, as Blanchot, for example, has claimed, that Hegel ‘made skepticism a privileged moment of the system.’4 Hyppolite not only claimed that Hegel privileged skepticism, but claimed that ‘skeptic consciousness is the experience of the dialectic.’5 Still, if there is anything about which one seemingly ought to be skeptical, it is perhaps the speculative ‘resolution’ (Aufhebung) to all of this, the attempt to privilege any figure, the dialectical figure (Gestalt) included. Better perhaps to invoke Levinas’s notion of a certain periodical return of skepticism, where ‘the periodic return of skepticism and its refutation signify a temporality in which the instants refuse memory which recuperates and represents.’6 Yet the import of such a semiotics and its refusal to put the truths of reason on the same level with the ‘skeptical discourse which states the rupture, the failure, the impotence or impossibility of disclosure,’ remains unclear. How would such a discourse that exceeds representation appropriate what exceeds recollection (or signify the unsignified) without, after all, assuming it? In the case of Levinas himself, who would speak (beyond the “said”) on behalf of a Good that escapes reason, how would such a discourse escape the dialectic of stoicism? To use terms from Merleau-Ponty’s final lecture course on philosophy and non-philosophy since Hegel, itself firmly positioned in this dialectic, if philosophy is neither to be immanence nor nihilism, how can philosophy avoid the dichotomy of skepticism and dogmatism (PNP: 52)? How could such a dialectic occur without acknowledging a “splitting” that occurs not only between reason and its other (it was Hegel after all, who claimed stoicism had simply identified the Good and reason), but equally internal to reason itself: a splitting of all transcendentality itself.7 But then what would such a discourse and its experience, its Phenomenology, be like? How would such a Phenomenology occur without acknowledging the periodic return of the crisis that is internal to it, the crisis of a saying that can never be “said,” to use Levinas,’ almost Wittgensteinian language? Without being able to simply resolve these issues—such resolution would indeed amount to the periodic return of the speculative—perhaps we can begin to articulate a certain conceptual field for grasping their intelligibility. Still, to make sense of this dispersion, all this may require a more extended account of both Phenomenology and its link to the transcendental and to “reason”—or more specifically

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“transcendentality.” Here, too, it might be argued, the periodic question of reason and its “abyss” (Abrgund) continually intruded.8 At the same time, however, this intrusion (and its history) may be inseparable from the movement (Uebergang) or pathway (again Husserl’s zigzag) of experience itself.

II As becomes clear, the history of transcendental philosophy is a complicated affair. Beginning with Kant, transcendental philosophy was constructed by means of a theoretics that contained a manifold of commitments interconnecting disciplines as diverse as epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind or history and aesthetics. As transformations in each of those disciplines developed, transcendental philosophy itself underwent inevitable modification, with increasingly complicated results. This, as much as internal theoretical disagreements, is surely what explains the proximity and the seeming incommensurability in thinkers like Husserl or Frege, Heidegger or Carnap, Ryle or Merleau-Ponty, Searle or Derrida, or Lyotard and Rorty, and the like. When debates occurred between these thinkers—as they did in the case of all of these disjuncts—inevitably (and this inevitably is more formal than historical), they were destined to misfire. Litigants on all sides seemed divided between commitments, beliefs, premises, and ultimately, of course, theories. Indeed, construed as formal theories, if one could get consensus on “formal” matters, one might be inclined to search for something like generative grammars or discursive formations for the “surface” disagreements between the assertions of these thinkers. This might begin the task of articulating the diachronics of the transcendental since Kant. Conceptual explanations of what is often called “the Analytic/Continental divide” might more fittingly begin here, rather than the usual but now somewhat anachronistic claims about the clarity and explanatory power of “logical” analysis versus say intuitions about existential or “life” philosophy. There are reasons to be skeptical of the possibilities of success for such a project. Still, its very idea is itself elucidating. It emphasizes, after all, that none of these concepts by themselves, is particularly meaningful, anymore than the terms “Analysis” or “Continental” themselves. Arguably, both of these terms would, additionally, require not only theoretical exposition, but sociological explanation. Even more to the point, it is not at all clear that within these two “traditions” we can find the continuities that are often ascribed to these terms, with the result that here, too, as is the case

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with all such conceptual historiography, the analysis will be both local and provisional. The point becomes even doubly complicated should it turn out that formal or transcendental discourses are themselves essentially and irreducibly historical and not meaning-invariant. Of necessity, then, analyses here will be restrictive; I begin by noting that what follows concerns the lingering intrinsic link between post-Kantian philosophy and Transcendental Phenomenologies. This is to be understood not simply in terms of reflective self-intuition, but equally as a set of discourses (and thereby an historical inheritance) that circulate (either in affirmation or denial) around intentionality as a distinguishing characteristic of rational self-consciousness. In addition, however, I want to articulate the link between such discourses concerning ourselves and our epistemic capacities and the problem of theoretical crisis, beginning particularly with the origin of Transcendental Phenomenology, in the work of Edmund Husserl, where it became so increasingly prominent as a general problem. At the end of that tradition, the first of the Working Notes to Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible still reveals that it is precisely the problem of crisis that spurs on the work: ‘Our state of non-philosophy . . . never has the crisis been so radical’ (VI: 165). We are not focused on the issue, then, simply as an historical matter. Rather, the issue is still one of shedding light (Erklarung), to use Husserl’s term, on the status of Phenomenology itself. The discourse concerning such crisis was by no means simply political or existential or even spiritual, as is often enough supposed, perhaps even among phenomenologists themselves. Husserl himself, after all, spent much of his life fending off such foundational crises: to cite them ontogenetically, crises concerning the concept of number, the foundations of logic, psychologism, historicism, positivism, anthropologism, or the crisis of the European sciences as a whole. Transcendental Phenomenology seemed to be almost the science of such crises and its itinerary something of a catalogue of the calamities that threatened its accounts of the rational. Add to these developments the history of Phenomenology’s “postmodern” crises, in light of such imputed failures as the death of the subject, its purported attachment to the metaphysics of presence, or charges that its archaeology of sedimented history only preserves relics of the “bourgeois museum,” and then the science of crises seems to be a science of permanent but irrelevant crises. But here we seem to be tossed between point and counterpoint. Terms like “presence,” “subject,” “archaeology,” or “relic,” and the like seemed only to be tossed back and forth, as if to grant them theoretical use, let alone to affirm them would be the sign of a certain transcendental illusion—supposing (as Kant before Husserl did not) that

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such transcendental illusions were extricable. Such accusations or apologetics seem to suppose that terms like “subject,” “presence,” “absence,” and the like, might mean one and only one thing and were not themselves theoryladen, as much matters of tradition and sense-history as they were logical problemata. Debates between Husserlians and Derrideans, or Husserlians and Heideggereans, or Derrideans and Searlians, on such assumptions, would never find common ground, let alone resolution. Both Husserl and Heidegger (and Merleau-Ponty in their wake) kept insisting that they could escape the vagaries of intuitional and interpretive circularity, that such circles need not be vicious. Still, the question is whether one can escape this circle, or whether, instead, its “inescapability” implies, as seems to be indicated by such polemics, that the crisis of science (perhaps phenomenological and even otherwise) had become its norm—almost as if there never were such a thing as “normal” science.

III Thus, a century after Husserl’s return to origins one might ask still, with respect both to intuition and concept, experience and judgment, ‘What is transcendental philosophy?’ But, however one ultimately responds to this question, this perhaps should be acknowledged first: like all theories, transcendental theory is not without its competitors. Appeals to the veridical, evidential givenness of experience (or its internal relation, “beingappeared-to”) are not of themselves self-justifying, any more than claims like ‘all knowing implies a knower,’ a claim, after all, Hobbes’ objections to Descartes already had denied.9 Of course, as the debates between Hobbes and Descartes attest, such appeals may be true granted a set of theoretical beliefs; but its the “granted” that is in question. If transcendental philosophy means the theoretical endeavor aimed at articulating the conditions for the possibility of knowledge, then it surely does not just mean simply Transcendental Phenomenology. The tradition that runs from Kant to Frege to Schlick, Carnap, Quine, and Davidson surely qualifies under such a description, that description being satisfied continually by clarifying truth by appeals, to use Fregean terms, to the laws that govern truth’s assertibility. If classical advocates of transcendental philosophy, however, understood themselves implicitly or explicitly to be committed to taking intentionality to be somehow essential to knowledge, they would need to deny the cogency of such reductions, as well as provide an adequate account (a transcendental

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deduction) of the peculiar link between intentionality and knowledge. I am inclined to think that they can do the former—basically, as will become further evident, by appealing to the irreducibility of our (singular) experience of truth. For the same reason, that is, the problem of determination or adequation, such an account is precluded from the latter, granted the conflicts in which its evidence emerges. The result is that the experience of truth becomes somewhat precarious: more an excess or an extension to theory evaluation than its simple resolution or foundation.10 The intrinsic link between intentionality and knowledge cannot be strictly guaranteed or warranted. In one sense Brentano’s account of intentionality as characteristic of the mental seemed to be poised to provide such a link: hence his account of intentionality as “judgment with insight.” These terms themselves, understood to be simply concomitant with knowledge as justified true belief, might then be taken to provide the epistemic protocols of a Transcendental Phenomenology. Their “science,” construed to be universally presupposed in all our knowledge, would almost inevitably give rise to claims already at work in the Logical Investigations’ commitment to phenomenological foundations for the ‘theoretical science of theory in general’ (LI: 246). It is striking, however, that Brentano, who had taken the term “intentionality” from medieval, Thomistic, and Aristotelian sources, himself had misgivings not regarding Husserl’s Cartesian turn linking judgment to intentional evidence, but his Platonizing of it.11 As Brentano’s difference with Husserl attests, the science of Transcendental Phenomenology emerges from already conflicted historical origins and these origins may be older than Husserl himself had allowed. J. N. Findlay once summed up Brentano’s theoretical innovation regarding intentionality in these terms: While the scholastic ‘intention’ was a strange piece of machinery designed to carry out a strange task, on which it threw not the smallest light, Brentano substituted the task for the machinery, the performance for the instrument, so that an intention ceased to be something that explained mental transcendence, and simply became a case of transcendence itself.12 In such a performance or Leistung we can see again, however, the circularity (and crisis) that afflicted reflective and egological accounts beginning with Descartes, extending through Fichte and beyond. Brentano and Husserl, of course, still both thought the gamble worth it. Without ultimately attempting to adjudicate their differences here, Brentano, I think it can be

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said, saw in the early Husserl’s Platonizing the return of the machinery, exchanging the questioning of transcendence (or Evidenz) for the assurance and explanation under the rubric of transcendental necessity . . . ‘if truth was to be possible.’ Surely Brentano agreed with Husserl that Descartes had correctly caught the notion of evidence, though he argued that Descartes wrongly classified evidence as an idea rather than a judgment. The result of the Cartesian misclassification, Brentano saw, was that the evidence in question, devoid of the link with judgment, could then be classified as a habit—and ultimately in turn could be dissolved in Hume’s post-Hobbesian attack on the irrational (and unreliable) presumptions of custom.13 Already however, as their 1905 correspondence reveals, salvaging the link between evidence and judgment, that is, affirming this other sense of the Cartesian subject, did not lead Brentano to assent to the unifying science of all sciences Husserl thought, following Bolzano, it implied.14 Brentano, ever appealing to Aristotle here, perhaps realized that the ancients knew better than to hope to get everything certain in this strict sense in the beginning (or the end)—as much as the “postmoderns” wondered whether there was a theoretical beginning of this sort at all. Nor did such denials restrict us to psychologism, were we still committed to the intentional, as Husserl charged in their correspondence. This is not to deny that there are not similar resources in Husserl; the point instead is that such appeals remained correlated to a form of Wissenschaftstheorie that inevitably failed. In retrospect we might question whether Brentano were not right to demure from Husserl’s strongly Platonist bent, that is, the Bolzanoan Platonism concerning objectivity, as a matrix of truths-in-themselves. He may well have been right, moreover (as would Scheler and Heidegger and Gadamer after them), to be continuously in dialogue with the ancient’s for alternate accounts of the rationality that accompanies the intentional than those correlated with strict demonstration. In this respect it was less the experience of truth than its link with what Husserl called the idea of truth (i.e. its ‘truth-theory’) that looks most mistaken in retrospect, an idea it ironically shares with the theoretical constructions of the reductionism he himself contested under the banner of Erfahrung. The result was that the ancients’ epoché, which had always acknowledged the problematic status of the rational, became construed through strongly transcendental protocols, connecting it to a method with univocally universal, strict and determinate results sufficient to turn the manifolds of pure reason definite, in accord with the modern mathesis universalis (K: 74). But this retention of Cartesian “truth-theory” to account for its experience would perhaps be no less

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controversial than had its physics, which, Husserl argued, had condemned Descartes to psychologism. And, both psychologism and logicism had been at stake in Husserl’s detractors’ objections and the demeurals of his own disciples. Brentano’s own solution, however, would surely fair no better. Brentano hoped to maintain realism by almost precritically recurring to simple experience that would remain “thetic” rather than constitutive and synthetic. But the given that resulted remained clearly uncertain: its status is as unwieldy as were the arguments concerning the immanent facts of consciousness or nature in his idealist predecessors, Fichte and Schelling.15 What, after all, would “real” uncontroversially mean here? The real in this regard is neither “directly” given, as Brentano’s naïve (or psychological) evidentialism had declared, nor intrinsically the scientific correlate of the objects of knowledge.16 Intentionality, as a result, was always, to use terms of Heidegger’s, as much a problem as a solution. The intuition that accompanied judgment with insight was, to use a formulation of the early Heidegger’s, always a matter of ‘hermeneutic intuition.’17

IV Against the theoretical conflicts that threaten it, what are we to say about Descartes, or in any case, the Cartesian turn, and finally, the transcendental turn inward to the epistemic sovereignty of individual judgment? Even Husserl himself is often claimed to increasingly move away from the Cartesian account to ground Transcendental Phenomenology in features of intersubjective rationality and historical analysis. Still, the “sense-history” from which the Cogito emerges does not allow an “either/or” here. The epistemic sovereign subject, like sovereignty in general in the critical tribunals of modernity, remains divided: the effect of a certain demise of tradition and (strict) certainty, the canons of rationality contested. The ‘I think’ that accompanies all epistemic representation no more of itself simply constitutes truth than it can invent its Evidenz. Too much intervenes in the semantics of truth: institution, history, and theoretical articuleme. All of this is part of ‘the possibility of the object,’ as Kant realized and at issue, consequently, in our reference to the real. However, we must equally confront those who would simply affirm the failure of the Cogito, simply exchanging the experience of truth for the already constituted laws governing its institution. For example, Canguilhem suggested in a review of Foucault’s The Order of Things that it was not that reason (or even man)

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had come to an end but that the Cogito construed as founding epistemic subject had become theoretically exhausted.18 But such claims may be overly strong, stuck in the same antinomy that had generated Hobbes’ denials regarding it. The Cogito may not be a simply exhausted historical invention. Still, the Cogito is an invention, a Cogito, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, ‘which took shape three centuries ago in the mind of Descartes’ and that we now ‘read,’ dependent upon language and institution (PoP: 369). But, as MerleauPonty adds, Descartes ‘never even mentions language as the condition of the reading of the Cogito’ (PoP: 402). Moreover, as such, the Cogito emerges within the crisis and the complications of a specific or concrete history. It arises, as Descartes himself attests, in the reflective disequilibrium of ‘one of Europe’s finest schools.’ Whatever else it might involve, it is precisely in this sense that the Cogito is inherently connected to the crises of the European sciences and inherently, too, to the events of detraditionalization surrounding it. Or, as Kierkegaard will put it, who will again catch the link between such failure and the problem it bequeaths to individual rationality: a question of the ‘quiet and solitary thinker’ in a time of ‘warped knowledge.’19 Moreover, as such it is not simply transcendentally immanent to the world. Here, as Jean-Luc Marion has put it, ‘phenomenology universalized the Cartesian result.’20 But the result, so construed, verged upon a certain transcendental illusion, a subreption that confused the peculiar transcendence that accompanies the tentative quid facti of its Evidenz with the quid juris of the strong transcendentalist program. For Descartes himself, as Marion notes, the Cogito remains individualized: problematized before God, before the world, and before the other.21 Recall that Descartes was similarly tentative even about the question of method. Indeed in both cases the evidence in question was tied from the outset to the tentative reflections of individuality. It is in this respect that Descartes still insists upon the connection between individuality and sovereignty itself; the individual remains a kind of Letzbegrundung. The Cogito’s self, it might be said, is not inherently thereby self-certain; its sovereignty is not monarchial, but, again, divided. Hence arises, of course, the problem of the “ideal” in the “Platonizing” of the third Meditation, which, as those like Levinas suggest, overwhelms the Ego from beyond (even in guaranteeing it, but by abandoning one form of justification for another, that of one’s standing before God).22 Still, there may be a kind of transcendental fideism lurking, both among those who take the idea of truth to be “presupposed” (this is the legacy of transcendental deduction devoid of the noumenon) and those who think such claims to be

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simply “suspicious” simpliciter and to abandon theory altogether; we should be skeptical in this regard of moves like Levinas’s continuing defense of the periodic return of skepticism, all the while emphasizing the positive transcendence of the third Meditation’s account of the Cogito. The adumbrative richness of Husserl’s internalism, which acknowledged the rational inadequacies concerning our grasp of the world’s transcendence, often enough risked being transformed by his followers into forms of externalism, fideism, or revelation.23 Husserl’s own response however is equally telling. His rationalism committed him to thinking that Descartes’ ontological proof was just wrongheaded: ‘the thought was quite remote from him that the whole world could be a cogitatum arising out of the universal synthesis of the variously flowing cogitationes’ (K: 90). But it is the status of the universality that is in question; crucial, perhaps, is that Descartes grounded both transcendence and immanence in the ontological proof; that is, not only was there something beyond me, but this “beyond” is the guarantor of my own epistemic adequacy. Again, there is the rub: how could the “proof” do both at the same time without turning “phenomenal,” that is, circular? Rather than pronouncing the proof invalid, we perhaps should see it phenomenologically as inadequately fulfilled, a circularity that “need not” be vicious. There is a certain “hidden metonymy” in the concept of experience, divided between concept and intuition, Erfahrung and Erlebnis. We might be reminded thereby of Husserl’s notion of science of infinite tasks—as would his followers in transforming the latter, understanding it (as did Fink) by means of reflective judgment and transcendental dialectic.24 Critically, in any case, we should not forget Descartes’ solitary quest (its status, as Pierre Hadot reminds us as soliloquy or meditation) rather than simply understanding it as truth-theory (or its inversion). Lacking such caveats, we shall surely still face Hobbes’ objection to such Cartesian speculations: ‘How did Descartes get into the mind of God?’25 Heidegger’s similar critical demeurals would be obvious in the writings of his early period. The 1925 Sophist lectures show Heidegger concerned about the “dogmatism” of phenomenological description, the problem of how might ‘make oneself free of history by a leap.’26 Heidegger supplanted phenomenological description with historical investigation, thereby hoping to salvage the past from the leveling distortions of tradition. The latter was not without its own dogmatism, assuming, after all, that truth and “the past” might be univocally bound together. The later Heidegger, however, attempted to grasp the epoché not through active suspension and intervention, descriptive or genealogical, but by attention to the withdrawal

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of Being.27 But one could almost not help wondering (and surely MerleauPonty had) if all connection to the evidential quest that had driven Descartes’ and Hobbes’ methodological concerns in the lapse of traditional authority had been dissolved—and if therefore the account had just relapsed into a precritical affair.

V It is perhaps worth recalling that the epoché had been divided in this regard from the outset of theoretical modernity, contested between Montaigne’s humanistic “skepticism” and the rational method of the new science. While Montaigne’s humanistic alternative would always seem theoretically weak against the onslaught of modern rationalism, those confounded by the latter’s success (e.g. Merleau-Ponty or Adorno) would still invoke him in the antinomies constituted between ancient transcendence and modern heresies, experimental and otherwise.28 Within such antinomies, the ‘splitting’ or Entzweiung, to use Hegel’s term, that underwrites ancient stoicism continues to find historical effect: an event divided before a transcendence that is both apparent and problematic. Precisely thereby it delineates, by means of the zigzag between concept and intuition that this Entzweiung entails, an experiential and theoretical standpoint that may still be inextricable. It is just in this sense that the “Cartesian” epoché as evidential perhaps still finds warrant. This epistemic epoché would not be the biconditional of reductionism or positivism, phenomenological or otherwise. Its strictness would not yield the desired necessity of transcendental deduction. Instead Phenomenology would be the origin of an experimental venture that extends beyond reduction and beyond origin in the very moment in which the given itself had become problematic, ascending to a “beyond” that it articulates devoid of strict reduction to immanence. Tellingly, notwithstanding the Phenomenology of Spirit’s criticism of the abstract independence of stoicism, in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel himself sees in the stoic’s Entzweiung a historical pathway to Plotinus, toward whom he is much more favorably disposed. In Plotinus, Hegel claims, the account of transcendence or ekstasis elevates rational thought beyond the limitations of ordinary consciousness and sense perception.29 Hegel himself understood science to be precisely the overcoming and reduction of this difference, a result that led Schelling aptly (and again somewhat stoically) to declare about its abandonments of ordinary

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conception, that ‘if the torment of an unnatural system is greater than the burden of ignorance, then one prefers still to carry the latter.’30 But here again, in the issue that divided them, the issue of this Entzweiung itself might already be grasped as the legacy of the Cartesian Cogito. For Hegel, it was not that the Cartesian proof was simply false but rather that it was incomplete or abstract, while, for Schelling, the Cartesian inference was both false and lacking in concreteness. If Plotinus, for Hegel, had seen the necessity of transcending sensuous perception, Descartes (for Hegel) had seen the ‘I think’ as the form of the deduction of such content, the science of Phenomenology, thus, ultimately articulating the movement of self-certainty to the Absolute Knowledge. Schelling, still saw in this claim the remnants of what Kant called dogmatism.31 But he agreed that the origins of this relation to the Absolute were in Descartes. For Schelling, however, being and thinking are not immediately but only problematically linked, not an unconditional ‘Ergo sum’ but a ‘Sum qua cogitans.’ ‘Hence even in the Ergo Sum, “I am absolutely” cannot be self-contained, only I am in one way or another.’32 And, everything that is ‘in one way or another’ is for precisely that reason problematic or doubtful. Moreover, we can distinguish in this ‘one way or another’ that which is thinking in me and that which is reflecting upon such thinking, a proto-Sartrean acknowledgment, as is often noted, between the reflecting and the unreflected. Without simply denying the insurpassability of the “I,” Schelling has denied the validity of the inference between Being and Thinking, or the immediate unity of immanence and transcendence. Descartes’ appeal to the ontological argument thus confounds our attempt to grasp the self. Readers of Heidegger will see here a precursor to his account of Cartesian ontotheology and readers of Merleau-Ponty will see the critique of a reflection that would capture itself in its own act. The former would lead us to an investigation of Sum qua as the hermeneutic “as”: the latter, to an account of “radical reflection” that would acknowledge its own dispossession and decentering before the unreflective. Reflection is always indirect, identification by divergence, coherent deformation: always only partial coincidence. Provocatively, Merleau-Ponty’s last lectures refer to all of this as ‘the Schellingian circle, one which, like the hermeneutic circle, again ‘is not a vicious circle’ (N: 46–7). Readers of Husserl, on the other hand, will surely be reminded of Husserl’s ultimate admission in his own Cartesian Meditations, that, with regard to the existence of the self, apodicticity and adequacy need not always coincide (CM: 15). Yet, Schelling adds, granted the conditionality that haunts such reflection, objectivity has become detached from

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subjectivity: ‘Indeed, true thinking must even be objectively independent of that subject that reflects upon it.’33 We are, again, perhaps not far from Merleau-Ponty, who often found himself retracing Schelling’s steps: We must not only adopt a reflective attitude in an impregnable Cogito, but furthermore reflect on this reflection, understand the natural situation which it is conscious of succeeding and which is therefore part of its definition. . . . Only on this condition can philosophical knowledge become absolute knowledge. (PoP: 62) But Merleau-Ponty adds, we can do so only by abandoning apodictic certainty and self-possession, resulting, again in accord with reflective judgment, in a unity and a synthesis never more than presumptive (PoP: 343). Now, the implications of such an acknowledgment are far from clear. But this much does seem clear: if we take it seriously, we are surely a long way from being able to assent to Husserl’s construal that correlates intuition and the given, correlating justification and appearance so that ‘everything originally . . . offered to us in “intuition” is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being’ (I: 44). Accordingly, for Husserl, Kant’s account of transcendental imagination ‘is nothing other than what we call passive constitution’ and makes possible the presentation of the “in itself” (PAS: 410–16). For both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, however, closer to Kant’s stress on finitude, it was a matter fraught with “withdrawal,” difference and “écart,” the interplay of presence and absence, the given and its horizon, or ekstasis.

VI Like intentionality itself, the appeal to the “givenness” of the given is as much a problem as a solution. Here the transcendental “homelands” of community, or nature and epistemic authority have fallen into uncertainty. Experience no longer means the reliability of the past, the wisdom of the years, to use Aristotle’s terms, but the originary space of the ordinary where such “transcendence” is in question. Still, unlike many contemporary appeals to the ordinary ‘world,’ as a simple return to immanence, neither immanence nor transcendence can be simply connected with “the ordinary.” This is especially true if we find this recurrence to the ordinary as inextricable “factual” in the ruins of traditionality. The ordinary emerges only and

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everywhere as a matter of difference. To again use Husserl’s terms, if everywhere it is a matter of ‘tradition producing tradition out of itself,’ it is also true that we are already removed from it; ‘we already know that tradition is precisely tradition’ (K: 354–5). We might wonder, accordingly, in what sense the possibility of ‘lasting traditionalization’ can be had, or can be had Platonistically, in accord with ‘the logical chain of the centuries’ (K: 367, 365). We might wonder whether, notwithstanding his (correct) recognition that ‘original self-evidence cannot be confused with the evidence of an axiom’ (K: 365), Husserl ever thought through the difference between axioms and explications; the latter’s logic, the logic of making distinctions, perhaps is more dialectical than deductive, more hypothetical than deductive, more “epagogic,” to use Aristotle’s terms, than demonstrative. Further, with respect to such “traditionalization,” it is worth recalling that, against Descartes’ appeal to rational method to ground the event of the Cogito (an event still cognate with Hobbes, after all), Schelling had appealed, prior to both, to Bacon. At stake was an event more inductive than deductive, albeit one, Schelling argued, against British empiricism, that did not preclude the generation of principles: only, whatever ultimate certainty was to be had could not emerge at the beginning.34 We are reminded of Gadamer’s all too brief acknowledgment of Bacon as a hermeneutic model of ‘another way of philosophizing’ over against “method,” while Husserl himself seemed often committed to the opposite.35 There remained, for Husserl, an implicitly presupposed universal history ‘which in spite of all vague background-indeterminacy is the presupposition of all determinability, or of all intention to seek and to established determined facts’ (K: 373). While the logician’s task certainly can be acknowledged thereby, the question is always, what would vindicate such an assertion, or at least vindicate it phenomenologically? What bridging-principle would span the abyss between the implicit and the explicit, the indeterminate and the determinate? This is, again, the problem of the criterion, one that stood behind Kant’s Copernican turn before the problem of the noumenon and one, too, which led him to inevitably privilege the logic of explanation (Erklaren) over explication (Explicare)—and led neo-Kantians in Kant’s wake to subsume Erlebnis under Erfahrung, so “explained.” But the problem at stake in this “abyss” of the criterion is the problem of our grasp of Being, to speak Heideggerean. This means, again as Fink saw in linking it to the problem of transcendental dialectic, that simple ‘static’ phenomenological appeals to the given will never be free from the transcendental illusions

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of reductionism. Here, then, it is hard not to concur with Jean Cavaillès in the end: ‘If the epoché, in separating [the] transcendental consciousness from a consciousness situated in the world, removes the naïve aspect and somewhat scandalous aggressiveness of logical empiricism and psychologism, they still lurk beneath the surface of phenomenological development.’36 Yet, as Brentano saw from the outset, attempts to dissolve the link between insight and evidence (or to deliver consciousness over to its unconscious) would simply miss it. As Brentano had responded to Sidwart, Evidenz is not, when all is said and done, compulsion—even confronted with our darkest suspicions.37 Even after his massive critique of “ontotheology” and Husserl’s lingering Cartesian dogmatism, Heidegger himself similarly continued to defend a concept of phenomenological motivation against causal reductions.38 If, after all, the evidential remains problematic, it remains evidence: true or false, hypothesized or contested. In this sense we again meet the problem of the Entzweiung. The evidential event remains divided, pluralized, or fragmented: divided, that is, between subjects, theories, articulemes, histories, ideologies. If Descartes’ Meditations is a soliloquy, it is not thereby monological. It remains the articulation of a theoretical dialogue undertaken in the collapse of univocal transcendental authority. Even Descartes himself ‘cannot make a gesture without entering the labyrinth of Cartesian interpretation and waiting for others to meet him there’ (PW: 12). Hence again the problem of hermeneutics, or to use Merleau-Ponty’s “an initiation to a symbolics” in which, deprived of its monological privilege, ‘being for itself and being for other are reflective variants and not the essential forms’ (VI: 82n).

VII Even the best of “hermeneuts” have found their own theoretical appeals to “dialogue” unwieldy, however. Gadamer ultimately acknowledged that the notion of temporal distance with the past would not be sufficient to found the rationality of dialogue, that it did not sufficiently grasp the notion of otherness (and the Other) out of which dialogue proceeds.39 But such “otherness” remains insufficient to found dialogue. Like the notion of objectivity at risk within it, the appeal to dialogue is similarly complicated, as Hobbes and Descartes’ text demonstrate, divided between the lapse of transcendental authority (or now, shared theoretical commitments) and the internal limitations of rational laws themselves.

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What the appeal to dialogue acknowledges is that reason, similarly internally divided, will always be contested before others, divided before the problem of justification, between theories and ‘rivals projects,’ to use Gadamer’s term. As Merleau-Ponty puts it: ‘Our relation to the true passes through others’ (IPP: 131). As will become further evident, the point is obviously not without political implications, as recent accounts of the emergence of liberalism have caught: modernity would always be contested between this mixture of principle and transcendence.40 The question of interpretation would be its ever-accompanying “modern” legacy. The dialogue in question, moreover, is not the Romantic dialogue of the Thou. It is more Hobbesian. It is also a dialogue of each against all, a dialogue with the devil or an evil génie, one attesting to the radical failure in the systematic accounts that surround it—but equally as Derrida and Foucault argued (and argued among themselves), the problem of internal epistemic illusion or folie).41 Here we are reminded once more that intentionality is again both an event and a theory, both Erlebnis and Erfahrung. Transcendental subjectivity, however, construed as the noetic correlate of a Platonist idea of truth, may never have been sufficiently liberated from its speculative past. The venture of its experience instead became reinvested in a science that belied it. The irony however (and Brentano’s appeal to the medievals is a perfect example) is that the very experience through which Descartes challenged the past is often invoked now to reinstate its ruins, the ruins of an Aristotelian tradition, to use Heidegger’s terms. This tradition is insufficient; neither nature, polis, nor the opinions of the past cohere. But, as has been seen, the appeal to the self-veridicality of intentional presentation seemed no more to suffice. Instead, we will need to reinterpret the refiguration of experience at work in early modern philosophy. If as Adorno provocatively put it, Hamlet as ‘the first wholly self-aware and despondently self reflecting individual, experienced his essence as something absolutely transitory,’ Montaigne and Descartes may be said to be the first to epistemically attempt to make sense of it.42 Even Descartes did so, as has been seen, by acknowledging his limitations, if not before tradition, then certainly, if ironically, before God. As it has been figured here, experience is ironical through and through: “judgment with insight” should not (or not simply, in any case) be viewed as a simple appeal to what is but as emerging from a specific (sense) history. Implicitly, after all, this recognition was at stake from the outset of Descartes’ stoicism and his critique of tradition. Instead, rightly understood, the formula acknowledges the underdeterminacy that

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haunts judgment. It acknowledges, again, the conventional or historical “law of truth” and the insight whose expressive or rational potential both acknowledges this law and critically escapes thereby: a saying that exceeds the said. Truth might be no more simply (or statically) grounded in an “I” than it can in principle escape an “I.” Thus, we confront the problem of the given, and, in its fragmentation, the problem of synthesis—and in the problem of its figure, the transcendental synthesis, transcendental imagination. This doubtless explains the “depth-analysis” in Husserl’s account of synthesis, his step beyond Brentano. Here the given is subjected to the explication of a (historical) flux, and, through its “symbolic rhythmics,” beyond immanence, becomes explicated through an Aspekt, a profile or standpoint. Moreover, beyond Schelling and Hegel’s speculative identities, (phenomenological) science becomes subjected to the “explication” of an infinite task. Here its ‘explications’ attest to the lingering remnants of Neoplatonism over against the speculative Platonism. Yet all this is figure and not simple presentation (Darstellung). The result, pace the speculative sciences of Husserl’s idealist predecessors, remains always perhaps (or potentially) destabilized. We may forever need to invoke the claim that the ‘I think must accompany our representation.’ But we shall also need to raise the Sartrean question regarding adequacy: “But does it?”43 In one sense this again looked like Brentano’s objection to Husserl’s ego; hence realists like Chisholm’s continuing demurrals from the idealist turn.44 The transcendental reduction, as Merleau-Ponty would similarly see, cannot be completed—any more, perhaps than any other form of reductionism, as Cavaillès added. If, again, as Merleau-Ponty saw, consciousness cannot be reduced to a Wortbedeutung, it is true too that its own reference is not fixed (PoP: xv). This mixture of experience and tradition led him to inventive rereadings of Montaigne and Machiavelli, but equally to rethink the indeterminancies accompany the epistemics of the phenomenological event. This is what Jean Cavaillès, invoking yet another of Hegel’s terms, rightly referred to as the ‘indefinite plasticity’ of phenomenology: ‘The term “consciousness” does not admit of univocity of application—no more than does the thing, as the unity which can be isolated.’45 But that is because the experience in question was not ultimately reducible from the outset: pace Husserl’s reductionism, experience involved a venture that exceeds, without strictly founding, rational reduction. The experience of truth will never be extricable from the subjective—any more than objectivity, as Foucault would put it forty years later, could be freed from the question of ideology.

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VIII There remains much still to be pondered in those famous pages that conclude the Formal and Transcendental Logic, a text that reflects the transformation the exploration of transcendental genesis would effect. First and foremost there is the “clue” that underlies Husserl’s gloss on transcendental philosophy, the clue he had found in Brentano: ‘Brentano’s discovery of intentionality never led to seeing in it a complex of performances, which are included as sedimented history.’ Fully confident that the shadow could be illuminated in this sedimented history, Husserl never stopped believing that this history was one that ‘one can always uncover by following a strict method’ (FTL: 245). As has become evident, however, ‘method,’ especially construed as the evidential correlate to all necessity, logical and otherwise, seems too strong for the task of the phenomenological explication of givenness. It carries with it the baggage of the mathesis universalis, and with it, the reduction of the rational to the determinate certainty of calculative equivalence. This was, after all, the account of the rational that had accompanied the “sense-history” of modern mathesis universalis. It’s not that Husserl thought, as Kant did, that a doctrine has just so much science as it has mathematics in it, or as Hobbes, that reason itself was a matter of addition and subtraction and where these have no place ‘there Reason has nothing at all to do.’46 But he did think that, in order to be strict, Phenomenology would need to be up to these modalities. But such strictness may be too heavy a burden for the less restricted experiential cards we are dealt. Here things remain more underdetermined, theory-laden, and interpretive; the “experience” that accompanies the rational (as even its etymology attests, ever close to “periculum”) remains a venture always at risk. Even the ancient theoretical frameworks that provided the articulemes of the intentional field are not innocent descriptors. As Merleau-Ponty saw, who was at this point very close not only to Fink, but to Cavaillès: ‘the essence is here not the end but the means.’ The concept of essence itself, that is, remains an articuleme or ‘sketch’ (dessin) invoked by thought ‘in order to become acquainted with and to prevail over its facticity’ (S: 179, PoP: xiv–v). But this should not hinder the matter. There is the other possibility that Husserl affirms regarding this sedimentary history that we all live through. That is, there is the motivated experience, which ‘whether convenient or inconvenient,’ remains the ‘primal matter of fact to which I must hold fast’ and ‘no matter how monstrous it might sound to me’ (FTL: 237). As Merleau-Ponty would put it at the end of his career, that is because, after Descartes, two monsters, our philosophy and our science, still haunt us (PP: 177).

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Again, we confront, in the ruins of our own historicity, the singularity and stoicism of this experiential venture (experiri). It is the experience to which I remain attached, whether or not I remain committed thereby, to ‘the dark corner haunted by spectres of solipsism and, perhaps, of psychologism, of relativism’ (FTL: 237). These ghosts are indeed close at hand. They are the fellow travelers, the evil génies of Husserl’s development, but equally the developments of modernity for which his work provides less a foundation than a certain Cartesian coda—and for which, in retrospect, his early demands for strictness occasionally sounded, perhaps like all Cartesianism, too “quixotic.” As Foucault realized, the “quixotic” is the other side of the Cogito’s strong pretensions—an “other” that was again inextricable, Derrida replied.47 In these two accounts, divided between surpassing and affirming the epistemic shortfall of the Cogito, we again confront a debate that is perhaps as interminable as it is “undecidable,” divided again between concept and experience. When all is said and done, there remains the problem of truth and its Evidenz and Husserl’s stoicism regarding it, but one that surely rendered his Platonism (stoically) problematic in ways he never fully grasped. This problematizing of the Cartesian legacy, as has become evident, can be poignantly first witnessed in Schelling, who abandoned its a priori intuitions for the inductive movement of Bacon, albeit by insisting that he had equally abandoned reductive empiricism for a “higher empiricism” and a “positive” system.48 For reasons similar to those he had regarding Hegel’s dogmatisms, we remain skeptical about the possibility of its evidence—and then doubtless, again, stoic about the Evidenz that the Cogito imparts. Against such stoicism, Schelling himself, like many after him, chose what he openly called “epicureanism.” [T]he Epicurean system is a refuge precisely because of what appears in it, the so-called clinamen atomorum [inclination of atoms], via which it introduces coincidence as, so to speak, the highest principle. . . . [E]ven today, I say, the Epicurean system would have to be seized upon and sought after, despite or rather because of this inconsistency, as a refuge of freedom of every free and freedom-loving spirit, in preference to the Stoic system.49 Against such identity or its inversions, so-called higher empiricism, one can still argue for a difference and plasticity internal to Phenomenology that remains stoic, distinct from its dogmatic tendencies, singular and evidential. Schelling was surely right in this regard to distinguish reflection and

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objectivity. The latter however depends, even more than he grasped, upon history, theories, and institutions, and remains not only independent but also irreducible to reflection and the idiolect of any founding ego, transcendental or otherwise. This history (i.e. the history of rational “objectivity”) is precisely what precludes empiricism from being replaced by any pseudo or “higher” empiricism—and precludes attempt to read Schelling’s or his followers (e.g. Marx, Nietzsche, Freud) appeals to “nature” as “naturalism.” Hence, Merleau-Ponty claims that Hegel is right when he attacks Schelling’s speculative constructions, that is, ‘a domain that is only a second physics aiming at a Nature than that of the science of Nature’ (N: 49). For the same reasons, the idea of a finished and final resolution or adequation of truth, independent of the subject that reflects upon it, is equally devoid of immanence, as devoid of Platonism as it is of its inversion; objectivity remains always an historical inference and a factical construct, an institution (Stiftung) and establishment (Leistung). Hence, to use Merleau-Ponty’s terms for articulating our being-in-the-world, the rationality at stake can no more be reduced to the third person than to the first (PoP: 80). The antinomy here is less between stoicism and skepticism but between dogmatism and skepticism (PNP: 73). Whatever remains of the “absolute” is divided between interminably incomplete reductions, again transcendental or otherwise, albeit not without epistemic resources (or poetics). Indeed this is what Merleau-Ponty retains from Schelling: ‘a non-prosaic conception of consciousness,’ not without its own evidence, whose refigurations do ‘not possess its object totally’ (N: 50). While surely not dissolved, or dissipated in skepticism, Merleau-Ponty acknowledges that the stoicism that results in a sense resigns itself to the insufficiency of its own fragility: ‘consciousness, if it is not absolute truth or a-letheia, at least rules out absolute falsity’ (PoP: 398). Nor should we miss the fertility of its opening. If it is true that ‘the absolute positing of a single object is the death of consciousness’ (PoP: 71), there remains both the evidence given to singularity and the historicity of objectivity itself. If objectivity depends upon a set of practices, norms, and histories, posited literally “over against” subjectivity, it nowise follows that objectivity is thereby independent full stop. It remains dependent upon history, theory, institution, and interpretation. Nor does it follow that truth can be reduced to objectivity so construed. But it also need not follow, as Merleau-Ponty himself claimed at one time, that ‘“objective” thought (in Kierkegaard’s sense)—being that of common sense and science—finally causes us to lose contact with perceptual consciousness, of which it is the outcome and the natural sequel’ (PoP: 71). This is

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true only if we think they might be conceptualized in isolation, an isolation that proves transcendentally illusory: a matter of ‘bad ambiguity.’ If the conceptions of subjectivity and objectivity share anything in common, after all, they share a common history. This is why Kierkegaard’s solution that “truth is subjectivity” is no less monstrous than the theoretical monstrosities he inherits and condemns; we should deny attempts to reunify what has been rendered asunder: either by subjective or objective “reduction.” As Merleau-Ponty realized, the ‘ruin of philosophy’ (Fink’s terms) called in ‘question not only the classical philosophy but also the philosophies of the dead god (Kierkegaard—Nietzsche—Sartre) in as much as they are it’s contrary (and also, of course, the dialectic as a “maneuver”)’ [VI: 183]. Beyond the classical antinomies of certainty and skepticism, the lingering, albeit fragmented, connection between self-trust and truth remains yet to be confronted. The result doubtless affected many in his wake. Adorno, for example, having recognized motifs of the stoic standpoint in Heidegger’s emphatic embrace of freedom, still claimed his account remained narrow-minded in so far as he saw no other possibility than to submit, entrapped ultimately in “totality,” without the possibility of breaking through it. But Adorno’s argument against stoicism (which remains speculatively Hegelian after all) no more adequately accounts for the relation between “subjective” and “objective” than Heidegger’s. The problem (to continue the speculative language) is to grasp how they “belong-together” without dissolving the Entzweiung that disjoins them.50 If objectivity is a construct, it is our (historical) construct and if it is a reflective product, this product never reduces to the facticity of our reflection or actions. This is just to state, as Husserl realized, that in either case, science remains a regulative idea, an infinite task. Experience, again, never coincides with such an “idea,” never, qua regulative, ever fully constitutes it: this is the complication out of which both subjectivity and objectivity become constituted. As such, “singularity” always, if not inevitably, potentially conflicts with such “objectivity” (or else the inventive freedom or “excess” scientific progress itself requires of its agents remains irrational). It is in this sense, as has been seen, that such singularity, as Descartes’ own account (or Galileo’s or Einstein’s) instantiates, is precisely the possibility of a “crisis” that lies at the heart of the rational. All this makes extrinsic the internal link between the singularity of consciousness and its crises, to which, on more classical reading, consciousness only occasionally and unnaturally succumbs. Doubtless there are political overtones at work here also. Yet while all this sounds too Kierkegaardian,

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it is not: subjectivity is not epistemically subject to revelation, it nowise intrinsically possesses the truth, it is not the “universal-singular,” nor does it master truth—if it remains still possible to say that I have an experience of truth (Habemus ideam veram) (PoP: 395). If Husserl nowhere quite grasped the fragility of this excess perhaps, as those like Merleau-Ponty or Cavaillès realized, no one better grasped the experiential task of this “idea” that never finally becomes an idea. On Merleau-Ponty’s reading, it was not Descartes in the end but Montaigne who had grasped it, where the dialectic between skepticism and stoicism is already at play: [T]he mind’s movement and irresolution are only half the truth. The other half is the marvel that our volubility has stopped, and at each moment stops again, in appearances which we may indeed show cannot withstand examination, but which had the air of truth and gave us the idea of it. (S: 206) Hence Merleau-Ponty distinguishes Montaigne from classical skepticism and he distinguished his own position from nihilistic accounts of existentialism, invoking a good ambiguity and the inventive capacities of the imagination. Hence his difference with Sartre: Sartre (invoking Hegel) had compared the inventions of aesthetic modernism to the epoché of the third-century skeptics, who left the failure of everyday reality intact; Merleau-Ponty saw in aesthetic modernism an ally in the articulation of a non-prosaic conception of consciousness and a figured philosophy that might surpass the rational limitations of our Vorhabe.51

IX The interplay of stoicism and skepticism has plagued philosophy of late, and many would say it has plagued philosophy at least since Hegel. It is perhaps just in this irony that Merleau-Ponty’s own response to skepticism is to be understood. At stake is not simply a return to self, though as he realized ‘there would be nothing if there were not that abyss of self.’ But neither is this abyss, the “abyss” of skepticism simpliciter; such an abyss, as Hegel had already realized, would loose perception (Wahr-nehmung) itself. Nor, as we have seen, is the return to origins merely an immanent return to the percept. The latter’s historical genesis emerges, for MerleauPonty, only in the intertwining of the visible and the visible and is poorly grasped, then, simply as a “noematic” event. This became especially evident

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in Merleau-Ponty’s response to Hegel, where, beyond skepticism and dogmatism (or beyond Hegel’s lingering representationalism), there is the acknowledgment that whatever remains of the absolute never appears except as figured.52 Philosophy itself is construed as the conversion of experience (Erlebnis), which is always ‘necessary but not sufficient’ (PNP: 75). It remains insufficient as long as it ‘carries a background which it has not explored.’53 In a move that Derrida identified as “Schellinginan,” those like Levinas argued for a figureless philosophy that still risked succumbing into its own dogmatism and what Merleau-Ponty called ‘the banality of immanence.’54 Merleau-Ponty’s account of the reversibility of perceptual faith’s ‘consciousness of’ recognized that the genitives are interchangeable (PNP: 75). Even when he construed this event libidinally, in tracing the “narcissism” in my belonging to the visible, such narcissism was not Merleau-Ponty’s figure for the speculative Identitätsphilosophie or “Darstellung,” but for the dialectic of experience and the realization that intentionality ‘calls for its own reversal (umkehrung)’ and the recognition of its own complication (PNP: 58). At stake was consciousness’s “being-outside itself”—and thereby its internal “alterity” as Derrida saw.55 As close as Merleau-Ponty had come to Schelling (or Derrida), he did not simply join him here. If the very idea of consciousness is intrinsically evidential, that is, differential (“consciousness of”), the very idea of a consciousness without difference, without presupposition, without horizon, without flesh, would be not only metaphysically lifeless (or angelic in any case), but nonsensical; the very idea of sense implies this conversion, task, or pathway of figures. Even “absolute knowledge” as Merleau-Ponty responded to Hegel, ‘remains a figure of consciousness’; hence, ‘there is no definitive recovery’ (PNP: 81). There remains the event of appearance, the art of imagination and the task to be done, experiri. But this result remained insufficient for those demanding that philosophy must escape its figures. Especially railing against the figural, Levinas argued that beauty (or its figured appearance: Schein) remained a betrayal, all too figured for the Good.56 But semantically, in its withdrawal, and syntactically, in its neutrality (linked to no ontic particular), the Good (like the True or the Beautiful) indicated less a sublimity beyond the experience of all figure, but an event or radiance (Er-scheinung) that erupts inescapably figured within it: in this regard ‘an impossible presence.’57 For Merleau-Ponty, at stake was a transcendence always in need of interrogation and interpretation. ‘There is no figureless philosophy.’ Why doesn’t this entail skepticism, or even its more developed (Hegelian)

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form: ‘why isn’t all consciousness unhappy?’ (PNP: 53). Because even if ‘meaning is everywhere figurative it is everywhere meaning which is at issue everywhere’ (S: 181). We should deny the alternative through which, disregarding (or dissolving) the figure, metaphysics and empiricism might coincide. If we need a figured philosophy it is precisely under the recognition that philosophy, too, is a figure. It is a pathway, a history, an essayer or a ‘work (travail),’ as he puts it in reference to Montaigne in his Hegel lectures. Indeed almost following the trajectory that we have followed, he states: ‘What there is, is work not according to my rules, but according to the context, knowledge at work according to its necessities and its constellation or “cohesion (Zusammenhang)”’ (PNP: 75, 63).58 As Merleau-Ponty saw, neither the immanences of the past (arche) nor the future (telos) have been guaranteed therein: ‘There is no conservation in the Hegelian sense (because of forgetfulness) and there is no overcoming in the Hegelian sense (because of Urstiftung)’ (HLP: 81n). Both arche and telos have been transformed by means of horizon and relief, the result of an ‘open, and not “unhappy” thought’ (HLP: 14). One might conclude of Merleau-Ponty as he did himself in describing Montaigne in 1947: ‘He sought and maybe found the secret of being simultaneously ironic and solemn, faithful and free’ (S: 196).59 Perhaps this tells us something about the epistemic consequences of what Heidegger stoically called “self-loyalty” or self-trust as well.60 Beyond all voluntarism, such self-trust, is neither without irony nor free from doubt, it ‘being the carrying forward of a tradition of thought which cannot be condensed into an evident “truth” without my giving up all attempts to make it explicit” (PoP: 396). Such self-trust is not the whole but a moment that emerges within our operative history; it is, ironically, that moment in which transcendence interrupts the phantasm, the passage beyond egoism (beyond the false antinomies of skepticism and naïve self-certainty). As Merleau-Ponty put it in his inaugural lecture, again fully facing Hegel, ‘the limping of philosophy is its virtue. True irony is not an alibi; it is a task’ (IPP: 63). It is not accidental, then, that Merleau-Ponty’s references to Montaigne occurs here (as it did to others, for example, Adorno), precisely as a response to Hegel. Levinas too ultimately saw that, even viewed as resignation, Stoic nobility ‘already owes its energy to the openness to the beyond essence’—but only perhaps by acknowledging the task in our midst and the fundamental historicity that Levinas refused.61

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Chapter 4

Notes on Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty: Between Phenomenology and Poetics

In what, precisely, does belief in reality consist? . . . The belief in reality is essentially the conviction that an entity transcends immediate sense data; or to put the same point more plainly, it is the conviction that what is real but hidden has more content than what is given and obvious.—Bachelard (NSS: 31–2) The ‘Originating’ is not of one sole type, it is not all behind us; the restoration of the true past, of the pre-existence is not all of philosophy.—Merleau-Ponty (VI: 124) But, finally, it is necessary to know that one investigates and clearly distinguishes between the dreams of materiality and the positive experiences operating in the world of tangible matters. It is necessary to study, separately, apart from science, an enormous domain of convictions that draw upon a kind of innate materialism, inscribed in all flesh (inscrit dans toute chair), an unconscious materialism, reinforced by immediate kinesthetic experiences. There we rest in the domain of the natal flesh, intimate warmth, truths of the blood. For a long time we have pursued the study of these imagined convictions, of incarnate convictions, under the sign of the material imagination of the four elements.—Bachelard (MR: 21) Our first ardent belief is in the well-being of the body. It is in the flesh and organs that the first material images are formed.—Bachelard (WD: 8)

At a culminating moment, Merleau-Ponty’s final manuscript, The Visible and the Invisible, turns to Gaston Bachelard to articulate what he called his ‘ultimate notion’ of the flesh (VI: 140). He discarded several other metaphysical candidates for its elaboration, such as matter as corpuscle or matter as psychic material, claiming that the flesh is neither a fact nor a sum of “material” or “spiritual” facts (VI: 139). Nor is it even a representation for a mind; a representation could not be captured by its own representation, whereas the flesh of the world involves a horizon that not only captivates,

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but withdraws from us. In addition, Merleau-Ponty articulated it as one in which the flesh of my body and the flesh of the world share something in common, even if the flesh of the world is not ‘self-sensing.’ Yet none of my experiences nor my ideas ever quite simply escape this histoire sauvage: they, like myself, are ‘of it’ and participate in a ‘reciprocal intertwining’ (IP: 170; S: 177). As much as he called for a ‘truce of metaphors’ here, Merleau-Ponty’s text regarding this ‘wrapping of the body around itself’ seemed to be compounding trope upon trope (N: 209). We learn from his lectures that the phrase, ‘flesh of the world’ was also invoked with reference to Claude Simon, just as the model of incarnate self-affection was drawn from Husserl’s analyses of hand touching hand in Ideas II. In all these cases I discover that I ‘belong to it’ or am ‘of it’ without being reducible to it, that experience emerges from a ‘formative milieu’ prior to subject and object (VI: 197). If it is to provide the ‘explicitation of Being,’ the flesh is not the ‘hard atom of being,’ the in itself—and yet its opening is never elsewhere (N: 206; VI: 147). Still, it is not here and now in the way that the objects are to which, qua corporeal, we adhere (N: 206; VI: 147). ‘To designate it, we should need the old term “element,” in the sense of general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being whenever there is a fragment of being’ (VI: 139). We learn only from the Working Notes of the time that, in invoking the term “element,” he has Gaston Bachelard in mind in articulating this incarnate field that emerges before subject and object and eludes their coincidence: ‘nonthetic being before being’ (VI: 267). But this, too, to invoke another of Bachelard’s master terms, would not be without ‘obstacles,’ making this already difficult text even more complicated. Inter alia, it is hard to imagine, after all these pages, that he could just name it, that he could arrive at this index, this name for what ‘has no name in philosophy’ (VI: 147). It was Bachelard himself who claimed that Phenomenology as science failed because its commitments to the ‘primacy of the perceived’ involved ‘an epistemological culture of the primitive,’ based upon the indexical (ARPC: 2). But for both thinkers, perhaps, it was a matter of articulating the adventure of the dialectic in Phenomenology’s midst. Merleau-Ponty’s references to Bachelard are extremely rare. Indeed, granted Bachelard’s criticisms of Phenomenology, specifically the Phenomenology of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, his silence is striking. Early in the Introduction to his Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre had differentiated his own account of dialectics from that of Bachelard’s account of the

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‘new rationalism’ of science. Science involves the assertion of ‘unity conceived as the perpetual unification of an increasingly real diversity.’1 But it does so not without presupposition. ‘Whatever the object of his research, whatever its orientation, the scientist, in his activity, assumes that reality will manifest itself in such a way that a provisional and fluid rationality can be constituted in and through it.’2 Sartre claims this contrasts with his own dialectic, which is both knowledge of the dialectic and presuppositionless with respect to the real: the object, too, is developing. Since the concern here is with Merleau-Ponty, I will not attempt to adjudicate Sartre’s reading (or criticism) of Bachelard, which, as will become further evident, is complicated both by Bachelard’s account of experimentation as well as his poetics. Just a few years previously, Merleau-Ponty’s own Adventures of the Dialectic had sought to outline what his lectures referred to as a dialectical absolute whose charge was ‘maintaining the position and contours of the multiple and to oppose the absolutization of relations. It is ‘fluidified’ in them and it is immanent to experience’ (TL: 56–7). Bachelard had argued early on that scientific rationality is similarly relational and fluid (NSS: 31; PN: 114). But Merleau-Ponty sought such a fluidity of experience from the outset in Husserl, in particular, the genetic account of the rational that had departed from the immanence of static object-description (PoP: 365n). Arguably, when, in ‘The Philosopher and His Shadow,’ Merleau-Ponty reinterprets the reductions in Husserl’s ‘adventures of constitutive analysis,’ resulting in only ‘convergent but discontinuous moments of clarity,’ he is in fact applying his account of dialectic (S: 177, 180). Bachelard, however, from the outset denounced such “reductionism” as overly Cartesian and naïve. It was the job of scientific rationality to transcend naïve immanence, something it inevitably accomplished by the explanatory transformations afforded through mathematization of the manifold; the result involved an ‘experimental transcendence’ of intuition through which induction supersedes naïve reduction (PN: 8; NSS: 138).3 Phenomenology’s naïve Cartesianism, especially in its French version, abandoning Husserl’s commitment to scientific rigor, led it to overly stress perception and privilege vision (ARPC: 2; MR: 11). Even Husserl’s normativist rigors belied him however; even in its scientific formulations, classical Phenomenology does not attain the moment of the rationalization of concepts, the instant of a transition to a new consciousness (ARPC: 2). ‘One of the most important modifications that quantum physics brings to phenomenology’ is the recognition that science is not a discourse concerning phenomena but introduces variations or ‘modifications’ in the phenomena (PN: 77).

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The rationality of consciousness thus extends beyond naïve commitments to presence and the given (MR: 87). Such a rectified “Phenomenology” would involve less a return to origins, a science of commencement, but a science of recommencement (RA: 155). Finally, intuition would come not at the beginning, but at the end of extended theoretical endeavor, accompanied by ‘a genuine surprise at the implications of theoretical speculation’ (NSS: 173). The initial or natural intuition would be only a particular, naïve case of intuition (PN: 13). Throughout, Bachelard’s archetype for such a new rationality was the emergence of non-Euclidean geometry and the ensuing transformation of Newtonian to Einsteinian physics. As a result, reason could no longer be understood as absolute, unchanging and timeless. Nor could it be reduced to the founding intuitions of an “I think” or consciousness (NSS: 167). Reality would need to be defined as much by inference as discovery (NSS: 160). The requisite non-Cartesian epistemology for this task emerges through the correction of prior knowledge, the extension of a system or the completion of an idea, a generalization by negation; it arises less by simplification than by complication (PN: 23). Rather than involving a reduction or repetition of fixed axioms, this new account of the rationality of scientific construction involves (or implies) its extension, a ‘surrational’ or open-ended rationalism (PN: 12). And here: ‘[S]cience informs reason. Reason must obey science, the most highly evolved science, science in the process of evolution. Reason has no right to put a premium upon an immediate experience’ (PN: 122). Merleau-Ponty seemingly could not be further from such constructivism. While he acknowledged that ‘modern criticism of the sciences has clearly shown the constructive element in them,’ he also claimed, initially, that Phenomenology remained removed from such criticism: ‘the space in which we live is no less amenable to non-Euclidean than to Euclidean geometry’ (PoP: 391). This is a contested claim. Some in Merleau-Ponty’s wake attempted to defend an account of such original knowledge, while others have pointed out its insufficiency, especially in light of the Phenomenology’s discussions of mathematics. For example, the chapter on the Cogito sought to ground the meaning of a triangle in perceptual experience and ‘the unformulated axioms on which reason is said to rest’—which is intuition, ‘the place in which certainty arises and in which truth makes its appearance’(PoP: 385). Such a founding and univocal correlation would become complicated with the introduction of non-Euclidean geometry. On the other hand, Merleau-Ponty distinguished between mathematical and phenomenological

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knowledge by claiming, following Husserl, that ‘there can be no geometry of the lived’; mathematical multiplicities, he claims ‘can be exhaustively defined—that is, by a system of axioms’ (PP: 67). Bachelard will contest the limitations of such a dichotomous view—as will later scholars of MerleauPonty, who will claim that mathematics, too, is always only implicitly defined: to use Merleau-Ponty’s terms, expressively instituted. The relation between the perceived and mathematics is not one way, but like linguistics or artistic expression, a matter of coherent deformation (PoP: 385).4 In addition, complicating matters is the argument, originally (and rightly) stressed by Patrick Heelan, that the details of the perceptual field in Merleau-Ponty’s account of adumbrative embodied spatiality is already nonhomogeneous and non-Euclidean.5 Whether the adumbrative incarnate field that Merleau-Ponty articulates depends upon non-Euclidean geometry is perhaps another question. Heidegger’s lectures, prior to Being and Time, interpreted relativity theory as an example amplifying his own account of Being-in-the-world.6 In this respect he had perhaps already anticipated Merleau-Ponty’s criticism: ‘the radical opposition, traced by Heidegger between ontic science and ontological philosophy is valid only in the case of Cartesian science which posits nature as an object spread out in front of us, and not in the case of modern science, which places its own object and its relation to this object in question’ (N: 85). The adventure to which it attests, thus, risks its own internal crises—and the crisis of philosophy itself. In fact, the first (1959) Working Note to The Visible and the Invisible states that the project develops as an attempt to confront ‘the crisis of philosophy’ (VI: 18, 165). His 1955, ‘Einstein and the Crisis of Reason,’ included Einstein’s rejection of lived experience as part of that crisis. Merleau-Ponty argued that his own account of adumbrative incarnate experience not only did not conflict with Einstein’s account of relativity, but criticized the latter’s rejection of such experience as based upon a classical account of reason that assumed or possessed its object in advance (S: 192). One might conclude that, far from simply depending upon non-Euclidean geometry, Heidegger’s or Merleau-Ponty’s account, in Bachelardian terms, becomes part of its articulation or ‘elaboration’; both would be cases of what Bachelard calls the ‘dynamic ontology’ that the latter reserves for scientific rationality. Moreover, it attests to a dynamics at work in Merleau-Ponty’s own account. His initial readings of nonEuclidean geometry insisted that it be related to its lived foundation, and thus remained largely a reiteration of Husserl’s (or Bergson’s) account. Later treatments were perhaps more consistent with the particular’s

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of relativity. He insisted that far from being linked to a universal founding consciousness (a Euclidean correlate, Bachelard argued), lived experience remained bound to the horizons of incarnate singularity (S: 196). Understood as (constituting) “consciousness,” it intrinsically depends upon a certain self-forgetfulness of the conditions of its adherence; perception ‘masks itself, makes itself Euclidean’ (VI: 213). Whatever privilege Euclidean perception may have acquired culturally ‘is contested as absolute by the transcendence’ of the Offenheit of experience itself (VI: 213) If, á la Husserl, Einstein is criticized for forgetting the horizons of the field to which our perceptual faith adheres, Husserl himself articulates, perhaps against himself, the very Selbst-vergessenheit that attends such experience and dispossesses the analysis and experience of unconditioned consciousness (VI: 18; S 173; HLP: 32).7 Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Einstein’s account as an ontology that presupposes its object in advance will be later echoed in Sartre’s criticism of Bachelard’s dialectic. Still, as has become evident, it also echoes Merleau-Ponty’s criticisms of Husserl, even if Husserl would not follow Einstein (or Bachelard) in claiming that such objectivity eluded subjectivity. In such transparent objectivity, both Husserl and Einstein are said to belong to that history in which, assuming that the real is the rational, ‘the classical spirit reaches its extreme limit’ (S: 193). If Husserl were thus a classic, it was a question now of thinking over the unthought possibilities that remained in his work (HLP: 14). In this respect it was true of all classical moments, a question of integrating the truth in the limitation of prior errors into a new experience, again a question of recommencement (S: 10). Pointedly, like Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty found the paradigm of such ‘restructuration’ in the emergence of nonEuclidean geometry (PW: 127). We shall need then to ultimately wonder about the extent to which Merleau-Ponty escapes Bachelard’s criticisms of phenomenological Cartesianism. However, as much as Merleau-Ponty in other places seemed to divide his existential account from the rationality of science—and was thus assigned as a result, by Bachelard, to the primitive—Bachelard himself “primitized” the archetypes of the imagination, appealing to Jung as his predecessor, albeit to remove this sphere from the rational (MR: 26, 48–54; PF: 22). As strongly as Sartre, Bachelard seemed to have divided the imaginary and the real, but he insisted that his psychoanalysis of the elements would assist in giving good or happy consciousness to the imaginary, again justifying the right to dream (MR: 18). In both cases moreover a certain ‘derealization’ would be involved.

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Bachelard’s proximity in this regard to surrealism had been apparent since his initial 1936 characterization of ‘surrationalism,’ comparing the latter to Tristan Tzara’s poetic liberty: An experimental reason will be established, capable of organizing reality as the experimental dream of Tristan Tzara organizes poetic liberty surrealistically. Two kinds of spiritual tasks may be anticipated—they are already dimly discernible in the scientific development of our epoch: reason will subdivide spontaneously by an internal dialectic; reason will subdivide on the experiential obstacle, by an external dialectic. The interreference of these two dialectics will determine, finally, the surempiricisms of a strange new force.8 The dialectic inherent to experiential reason became explicit, ‘the day Lobochevski dialectized the idea of the parallel.’9 As the mystery of the elements provokes rational enquiry, so poetic liberty will break through the limitations of the everyday prosic phenomena: ‘both sensibility and reason will then mutually be restored to their fluidity.’10 Tzara had similarly spoken of the poetic or the lyrical and the rational, describing the former as infrastructure and the latter as superstructure.11 As Bachelard had linked his account of pure poetic image to Jung’s archetypes, Tzara linked his account of poetic thinking to Jung’s distinction between directed or purposeful thinking and phantasy thinking that turns away from reality (and from ordinary language), articulating its own subjective phantasy. Tzara himself further linked it to the primitive and to social reality: Western civilization impoverishes the latter in technical rationality.12 Without endorsing this claim, Bachelard endorsed Tzara’s poetics in a number of the early writings on the elements and appeals to Tzara for the claim that imagination, rather than will or élan vital, is “the true source of psychic production” (PF: 110). Human destiny is linked not to passivity but to transformations—to what Tzara had called ‘approximative man’ (ARPC: 4).13 Sartre’s What is Literature? (as would Tzara, himself, later) would take great pains to attack the surrealists not only for their irrationality, but also for their lack of mediation and transformation of historical reality.14 What perhaps the Critique’s reference to Bachelard’s account of scientific rationality attests is that Bachelard formed one of his most critical adversaries: an endorsement of surrealist poetics that would have nothing of Sartre’s claims concerning its irrationality nor Sartre’s claim on heroic realism. We would require a living and open rationality that battles reality and always has the option to redefine it (PN: 26). Hence the need

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for an approfondissement of the naïve commitments of Phenomenology (MR: 183). Merleau-Ponty’s final manuscript, The Visible and the Invisible clearly outlines an approfondissement of Husserl’s Phenomenology. Yet notwithstanding their differences, in extending Ideas II’s analysis of affective experience to account for the formative milieu of the object and the subject, MerleauPonty turns ultimately to Bachelard’s poetics to articulate his ultimate notion of the flesh. Midway between individual and idea, the flesh is an ‘“element” of being.’ As has been seen, the final Working Notes attribute this use of the element explicitly to Bachelard, further distinguishing both being and the imaginary as elements—and specifically distinguishing them from Sartre’s account in which they are still viewed as objects (VI: 267). Both emerge within an interwoven sensible field, ‘auto-inscriptions’ of our formative milieu. Further, as Bachelard’s poetics undertook a psychoanalysis of the elements, Merleau-Ponty intends to ‘[d]o a psychoanalysis of Nature: it is the flesh, the mother’ and without it psychoanalysis remains anthropology (VI: 267). Alluding to Schelling, as he had in his studies on Husserl, he states that it involves a ‘barbarous principle,’ a kind of ‘existential eternity,’ albeit one, that, in reciprocally articulating the intertwining of the visible and the invisible (its dehiscence or dialectic), belies the ‘myth of original indivision’ (VI: 267). While Bachelard could credit Schelling with ‘great metaphysical intuition,’ it remained prescientific and ‘literary’ (FSM: 102, 91).This is an objection Merleau-Ponty himself had heard before concerning his own Phenomenology.15 It is true that Merleau-Ponty sought aesthetic means for its grasp, as his reference to Simon in articulating the ‘flesh of the world’ or to Proust for the ‘general conception’ of ideality of the sensible evidence (NC: 193). For Merleau-Ponty the ‘durable’ and ‘visible wisdom’ of literature has an irreplaceable function for philosophy; both participate in the ‘history of being’ (NC: 204). He even could find such ‘existential eternity,’ the transcendence of the sensible, in Paul Klee’s ‘touches of color,’ revealing a ‘milieu in which are circumscribed relations of proximity, of development’ (VI: 210). Such a space can be seen as a ‘model for being’: lacking in perspective, the Euclidean space upon which perspective is modeled, and, he claims, the ontology of the Ens realissimum that accompanies it (VI: 210).16 Still, it remains to be understood how all of this is to enter into philosophy. Bachelard’s poetics had proceeded by a variation of pure images. Such variation, unlike the conceptual, does not constitute; rather it involves an encounter with the reverberation of the elementary (PS: xii–xv).

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It involved a ‘not-knowing’ that was ‘not a sort of ignorance but a difficult transcendence of knowledge’ (PS: xxix). Here ‘phenomenology liquidates the past and confronts what is new’ (PS: xxviii). Moreover it escapes the semantics of its context: ‘The poetic image is always a little above the language of signification . . . and stands out from the ordinary rank of pragmatic language’ (PS: xxiii). In 1957, Jean Hyppolite wrote a classic interpretation of Bachelard aptly titled, ‘Gaston Bachelard or the Romanticism of Intelligence.’17 Bachelard himself had quoted Jean Paul’s claim that ‘Reproductive imagination is the prose of productive imagination’ (PS: xxxi). If, as Hyppolite pointed out, Bachelard’s scientific dialectic could be traced to the fluctuating dialectic of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, his account of poetic imagination of the elements could be traced to the magical or fantastic transcendental of Novalis.18 Indeed, Bachelard’s cites Novalis a number of times and The Psychoanalysis of Fire undertook an analysis of ‘the Novalis complex’ in its third chapter. Elsewhere I have argued for the proximity of Merleau-Ponty and Novalis (and Schlegel), albeit less in terms of Novalis’ magical idealism than the transformations inaugurated in his Fichte Studies.19 While Hyppolite had raised the question concerning the unity of the two sides of Bachelard’s work, Merleau-Ponty seemed to explicitly attempt to bring them together: the fluctuation or Weschsel, the Stiftung of imagination and the articulation or Abschattung of our rational history.20 But here the conflict between Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty seems to become fully apparent. If Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy alludes to Bachelard’s account of the poetic element, it also seems categorically at odds with his account of philosophy which must take its lead from scientific rationality. Taken as philosophy, Merleau-Ponty’s position initially sounds just like the position Bachelard had argued against from early on: return to origins, a rational tradition that owes its emergence not to imagination but to memory. As Bachelard began his article on surrationalism: ‘the decisive action of reason is almost always confused with monotonous recourse to the certitudes of memory.’21 In the name of science, Husserl had indeed sought to restore just such a philosophia perennis, what he called as early as 1911, ‘a science of true beginnings or origins.’22 Bachelard’s next sentence almost sounds likes its parody: ‘That which is well known, which has often been experienced, that which one faithfully repeats, easily, vehemently, gives the impression of rational and objective coherence.’23 Against such a stable rational tradition based upon evident determinate repeatables, Bachelard’s science, following the dialectic of rationality, has ‘abandoned the rigidity of the a priori and welcomes the a posteriori.’24 It has given up the stabilities of pure science for

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the contingencies of science Husserl strongly eschewed: the contingencies of technical rationality that would be always open-ended and evolving. As he puts it at one point, instead of seeking to avoid the transformations internal to science, ‘Non-Cartesian epistemology is thus by essence and not by accident in a constant state of crisis’ (NSS: 160). Merleau-Ponty’s claim in Sense and Non-Sense, that ‘we must form a new conception of reason’ seems hard to place here (SNS: 3). If he began by marking this century’s revolt of life’s immediacy against reason, he also claimed that our mathematics ‘no longer resembles a long chain of reasoning’ (SNS: 4). One might think he was of more than one mind about this. It is true: Merleau-Ponty famously began his last article, ‘Eye and Mind,’ by stating that ‘Science manipulates things and gives up living in them’ (EM: 159). This may be too often the way we remember him, as an existential philosopher of (and against) science. Often enough, however, this was not his position. This gloss was true, after all, of a certain lingering positivism that he himself traced back, prior to Einstein’s ‘crisis of reason,’ to Comte’s positivism and its hope that, through science, we might ‘dominate existence’ (S: 192). He would find it later in logical positivism and the Vienna Circle, and later still in his arguments against Ryle’s analytic philosophy (PoP: xv). Nonetheless, we forget, then, Merleau-Ponty’s reliance upon Gestalt psychology, Dreisch and von Uexküll for his understanding of the organism, structural linguistics for his account of institution and expression, Lévi-Strauss for his understanding of the social and symbolic character and of the rational and, like Bachelard, even non-Euclidean geometry and relativity theory for understanding the rationality of history and tradition. In forgetting all this we will be overly surprised when the Nature lectures declare that ‘everything is science and everything is philosophy’ (N: 213). We forget, moreover, that he denied that ‘thought can ever quite cease to be inductive’ (PoP: 63). Merleau-Ponty thought that Husserl’s Wesensschau to be closely related to induction (PP: 70–1). Yet even empirical induction ‘is not a mere inventory of facts . . . the invariable and unconditioned antecedent’ (PoP: 115). Rather, as he had learned from Brunschwicg, ‘it creates notions capable of coordinating facts’ and is as much discovered as created (PoP: 115). This is why, strictly speaking, ‘no induction can avail itself of any critical experiment’ (PoP: 115). Put otherwise: ‘The genuine inductive method is not a differential method; it consists in correctly reading the phenomenon’ (PoP: 108). The Sorbonne lectures on ‘Phenomenology and the Human Sciences’ state that such ‘reading’ still ‘requires the use of that free variation of which Husserl spoke’ (PP: 71). Merleau-Ponty himself cites Husserl’s claim that

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the physicist proceeds by ‘idealisierend Fiktionen cum fundamento in re’ (PP: 69). In both cases, acknowledging that he is ‘pushing Husserl further than he wished to go himself,’ Merleau-Ponty, claims that, in the Wechselspiel between fact and essence or idea, there emerges an ‘inevitable dialectic of the concept of essence’ (PP: 72). While there may be a difference of degree between the inductive and the eidetic, thought never stops being what it is in induction; eidetic intuition does ‘not involve any kind of supersensory faculty’ and remains, in this respect, ‘as contingent as the fact’ (PP: 72). Moreover, so does its defense. An ‘eidetic’ claim can be defended from the charge of subjective prejudice only ‘if it enables me hold together all the facts which are known and which may be brought in relation to it’ (PP: 75). He further acknowledged that such claims are not independent of their particular expression. Here, however, he tacitly acknowledges the previously rejected Viennese Circle claim that ‘we can enter into relations only with meanings’ (PoP: xv). “Consciousness” is not independent of its ‘semantic development.’ It was, again, a question of grasping the intertwining at stake (PW: 104). Just as there is an Abschattung to the perceived, so, too, there is a similar historical development in language—and not a leap into the “spiritual” (PW: 39n). As Bachelard had put it, a concept is not just appraised in a closed eidetic correlate, but involves a ‘double perspective’: it has an ‘experimental and a theoretical side’ (RA: 159). A concept is thus an ‘abstract-concrete organization’ (RA: 159). If Merleau-Ponty understood this experiment through intentional intuition he still grasped its ‘reading’ through a ‘double reference’: to the ‘mute being which it interrogates and the tractable [maniable] meaning which is derived from it’ (IPP: 19). As Merleau-Ponty came to understand this double reference more historically and institutionally, he also sought to understand it formally. We have already witnessed the ambiguity in his lingering foundationalism. But he equally was understanding Husserl’s account of sedimentation in a way that was not unaffected by the expressivity of construction. The perceived object, with its viscous significations, has a twofold understanding to what is understood. On the one hand, it is only the sketch (ébouche) or fragment of meaning which calls for a repetition that fixes the perceived object and finally makes it exist. On the other, the perceived object is the prototype of meaning and alone accomplishes the actual truth of which is understood. To be sure, if we are to understand the sensible as quality, it must contain everything we think, although almost nothing in human perception is entirely sensible, since the sensible is indiscoverable. But there is also nothing that we can

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actually and effectively think without relating it to our field of presence, to the actual existence of the perceived object—and in this sense the field of presence contains everything. There is no truth that can be conceived only outside of the field of presence, outside the limits of some situation or some structure. (PW: 106–7) There is a dialectic between structure and appearance; the truth of the presence depends upon unending corrections of the past. There is no signification which is not surrounded by an horizon of naïve beliefs and is thus not in need of other clarifications. There is no expressive operation that exhausts its object. Euclid’s demonstrations were rigorous, although they were always encumbered with a coefficeincy of facticity that rested upon a massive intuition of space which could be made thematic only later. In order for there to be truth, the restructuring which yields a new meaning must truly repeat the initial structure even though it has its gaps and opacities. (PW: 127) Resuming his study of nature a few years later, he states that we will arrive at the problem of ontology, issuing from a long a program ‘which took us several years (language)’ (N: 220). Notwithstanding his own claims about the prototypes of perception (a prototype, arguably, the reversibility of the visible and the invisible will further ‘dialectize,’ to use Bachelard’s term), it is striking how close Merleau-Ponty’s account of an open-ended reason is to Bachelard. But how are we to understand his use of Bachelard’s poetics in his own approfondissement of Phenomenology? In a sense he, too, had detached Phenomenology from its Cartesian foundation; he had forced it into the open, to realize that it was not simply a matter of description or discovery, but also one of construction, explication and inference. In the final writings, Merleau-Ponty’s concern with formalism and the algorithm will grow more faint; they were already expunged from his published version, ‘Indirect language and the Voices of Silence.’ He was perhaps already leery of the limitations of his own limited or derivative account of the algorithm that had overly distinguished mathematics from his account of expression. He would further stress, as will become evident, that philosophy, too, depends upon the indirect voices of silence, invoking the ‘silence’ of linguistic potential in our attempts to see the things anew: part of what the Phenomenology described as our ‘relearning to look at the world’ (PoP: xvi). But he will still appeal to Bachelard’s truth regarding non-Euclidean

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science and the barbarity of simple verification as he will call it, denying, for example, that Marx’s account of historical materialism has been simply been refuted or falsified. ‘Even in the sciences, an outmoded theoretical framework can be reintegrated into the language of the one which replaced it; it remains significant, keeps its truth’ (S: 10). Hence: ‘Marx’s theses can remain true as the Pythagorean theorem is true: no longer in the sense it was true for the one who invented it—as an immutable truth and a property of space itself—but as a property of a certain model of space among possible spaces’ (S: 10). Clearly, such a polymorphic and institutional account of meaning and truth had departed from Husserl’s foundational descriptive science— every bit as much as Bachelard had insisted that science was inherently nonfoundational: a science of recommencement (RA: 119). In such recommencement we could also discover ‘a new departure for phenomenology (un nouveau depart pour la phénoménologie)’; it begins again—by extension and not return (MR: 105). Arguably Merleau-Ponty’s claims concerning the incomplétitude of the reduction, and our constant need to begin anew, had precisely transformed Husserl’s reduction into extension, purging it of any lingering ties to reductionism (PoP: xiv).25 Still, Bachelard insisted that such a new departure was best exemplified in ‘the rationalist activity of contemporary physics’ (MR: 105). As has become apparent, it would be wrong to say that Merleau-Ponty simply disagreed on this point (N: 213). Yet, he criticized the inherent prejudices of the ontology of contemporary physics, which he thought to be still stuck in the immanence and adequations of classical thought. In this respect Merleau-Ponty demanded that we further ‘psychoanalyze science’ (N: 85). It remained still insufficiently dynamic and had insufficiently grappled with the idea of transcendence, a word Bachelard too often equated with the irrational. Such a psychoanalysis would involve ‘a reading (lecture) of science itself as a certain (reduced) ontology in the broader context of the most primordial Being’ (N: 206). Merleau-Ponty insisted that all such rationalist activity, even as ‘experimental transcendence’ involved an operative and horizontal intentionality (PN: 9). Bachelard had spoken of classical phenomenology’s insufficiencies regarding the approfondissement of rationalist or conceptualizing consciousness that required a new departure that turns its back on its initial intuition (MR: 209, 105). As he put it elsewhere, phenomenological intentionality, devoid of dialectic or ‘tension’, remained abstract, too intellectual, ‘too “formal,” too intellectual’ (WD: 159). Here he insisted on stressing the activism of conceptualization,

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bringing Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the world as representation to its conclusion: ‘I understand the world because I surprise it’ (WD: 159–60). Merleau-Ponty’s account of operational intentionality, as Bachelard insisted it must be, was surely beyond the opposition of intuition and concept—it remains historical—and yet still adheres to the sensible (or the visible). The world, as Bachelard puts it, is my ‘provocation’ (WD: 159). But Merleau-Ponty still insisted on reading its dialectic as phenomenological, a dialectic internal to the reciprocal relations between the sensible and the intelligible, ‘the dialectic of the visible and the invisible’ (NC: 391). Here even ‘sense data’ are historical and vary ‘throughout the centuries’ (S: 48). Bachelard criticized Husserl for too strictly (or statically) distinguishing between analysis and synthesis, the active and the passive (or the given). Husserl’s account remained insufficiently reciprocal and thus incapable of articulating concrete conceptual development (RA: 43). Synthesis was inherently development and invention, activity within materiality (MR: 23). It was precisely in this respect that Merleau-Ponty had come to acknowledge that the originating is not all behind us: our accounts would need to constantly be reinvented, criticized and rearticulated (VI: 124). Beyond the language of conventional use it would again require the transformation of our linguistic resources: the language, as he put it ‘that is involved in the fabrication of a book’ (VI: 268). Here, too, is where Merleau-Ponty himself depended upon the poetics of surrealism, relying precisely upon the ‘sursignification’ in language, a transformation of the conventional, varying ‘the halos of signification words owe to their history and uses’ (PW: 144; S: 234). Every bit as much as Bachelard’s surrationalism, it too involved an inventive and experimental transformation of our inheritance. Such, of course, was the case with his own use of that word which has ‘no name in any philosophy,’ the flesh (VI: 147). It, too, responded, beyond the abstractions of “subject” and “object,” or “mind” and “matter,” to our need ‘to reinspect and redefine the most well grounded notions, to create new ones, with new words to designate them, to undertake a true reform of the understanding’ (VI: 3). Claims concerning whatever ‘relative justification’ such abstractions are to retrain will depend upon their reelaboration and extension (S: 165). Recourse to imagination is thus inextricable in our exploration of Being; reality remains reciprocally and historically motivated. The intertwining of the visible and the invisible precisely mirrors this reciprocity. In fact this intertwining (Verflechtung) again is specifically taken over from Husserl’s account of the ‘reciprocal relation,’ in which nature, the body and the soul

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are interwoven or intertwined (S: 177n). But it is not simply a return to the foundation of a sensible stratum or origin. One cannot ‘reduce history to the visible’ (VI: 266). The visible is always the visible of some invisible: some culture, some history (VI: 229). The appearance of the sensible always contains the institution and means whereby it is sketched out or rendered visible (S: 172). Here, too, and not just in science, to use Bachelard’s terms, intuition is always ‘elaborated intuition’ (PN: 13). Even a description ‘is not a return to the immediate’ (PP: 30). This is why the sensible as such is indiscoverable (introuvable). The flesh always involves inherently a histoire sauvage. In both cases, both in the visible and the invisible, articulation is not reduction but extension, differentiation and reinstitution. Husserl’s mistake, again, was attempting to strictly ‘disentangle’ the differentiation at work in this intertwining—and which Merleau-Ponty account of its reversibility deliberately sought to capture (VI: 268). Here Merleau-Ponty surpasses the static given of Phenomenology, in arriving at the historical and ‘semantic thickness’ out of which the rational emerges (S: 234). In so doing it equally goes beyond what Bachelard termed the naïve reduction, the given of Cartesianism. The flesh ‘is the Urpräsentierbarkeit of the Nichturpräsentierten as such, the visibility of the invisible’ (N: 209). If Merleau-Ponty returns to Bachelard to understand the flesh as an element, his proximity to his account of the rational is evident. Yet also he did not fail to indicate his objection to Bachelard’s ‘operational’ definition of experience in The New Scientific Spirit: ‘Experience comprises . . . a single unit with the definition of Being. Every definition is an experience.’ Thus: ‘tell me how we are looking for you, and I will tell you who you are’ (N: 203). As has been seen, Merleau-Ponty had not denied Bachelard’s claims that concepts are abstract/concrete syntheses, but he insisted that, like Bachelard’s criticism of Phenomenology, Bachelard’s own account be precluded from being ‘only a return to idealism and to immanence’ (N: 203). We are again close to ‘Eye and Mind’’s criticism of operationalism. Like Sartre’s similar objection, however, this is probably unfair to Bachelard’s conception of the inherent historical revisability and recommencement of science. Bachelard’s surrationalism is not reducible to operationalism any more than it is reducible to relativism—as his non-Cartesian epistemology, non-Euclidean philosophy of science, and perhaps even, what he calls elsewhere, his non-Lautréamontist poetics obviate. If Merleau-Ponty were to appeal to an operative intentionality at work in science, he would have to give up Husserl’s phenomenological ‘positivism’ that he still affirmed in the Phenomenology. In its place he outlined an operative history in which ‘no one philosopher coincides

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with the “intentional interiority” that they all invoke and that as a group they constitutite.’26 “Experience” here is never independent of the history and the definitions through which it becomes sketched out. But what he also insisted was that such successive definitions not be simply equated with the simple lexical or literal formulation, but that they be ‘read’ by understanding them ‘in the meaning they acquire from within the experience which they announce.’27 Perhaps both Merleau-Ponty and Sartre’s accounts became more proximate to Bachelard’s than their earlier foundationalist phenomenological accounts would have allowed. On the one hand, Bachelard’s criticism of Phenomenology grew more circumspect; what once required a psychoanalysis of the poetic later was openly equated with a pure Phenomenology. Hyppolite ascribes this transformation to an ongoing dialogue between Bachelard and his daughter, Suzanne, who authored one of the first serious interpretations of Husserl’s logic.28 On the other hand, Dominique Lecourt has noted the continuity between the works of the thirties, with their criticism of Meyerson’s realism, and the works of the fifties critical of Sartre.29 But he would be equally critical of Merleau-Ponty. If a dialectical scientific rationality corrects naïve Phenomenology and if a poetics of the image will proceed by a pure Phenomenology, the result will in both cases be the same: ‘the phenomenology of perception must stand aside’ (PR: 14). Even if he would ‘dialectize’ perception, how could Merleau-Ponty claim that such a Phenomenology was inherent to the rational? And more to the point how did he think that what was for Bachelard, merely poetic, incarnate conviction, was inherent to the rational, namely an ontology of the flesh? Doesn’t this smack of the false continuity to which traditional philosophers succumbed in Bachelard’s eyes (MR: 21)? Beyond a Phenomenology based upon the static image, Bachelard insisted on a phenomenological materialism that would articulate the will within a scientific field of obstacles: theoretical, technical, and material. Lacking the resistance of such matter the account of consciousness remains an idealist philosophy (MR: 12). The opposite of a philosophy of contemplation, it requires an activist rationality. Merleau-Ponty had similarly insisted on a philosophy of structure and institution, developing Husserl’s account of operative intentionality beyond its idealizing adequacies. Philosophy itself thus becomes inherently ‘operative history’ (VI: 198). But what becomes of the transcendental within the logic of institutions? In criticizing reduction and directly confronting Husserl, Bachelard found the value of apodicticity once more in extension: that is, less in terms of logical principles that would perdure throughout its history and more in terms

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of an emergent apodicticity; the superstructure of science would thus consolidate the various regions (RA: 120–1). One can doubt that Husserl would have been convinced.30 But what can be acknowledged—and it is surely physics that spurs the problem from Bachelard’s earliest works—is that a transcendental theory worth the word will need to acknowledge not only the rationality of concept formation, but also the implications of theory-change and a transcendental framework that was much more polymorphic than any Husserl envisioned. As Hermann Weyl, himself greatly influenced by Husserl once stated: while the urge to totality here may still be preserved, ‘that desire can be fulfilled on one condition only, namely that we are satisfied with the symbol and renounce the mystical error of expecting the transcendent ever to fall within the lighted circle of intuition.’31 Moreover, Weyl, too, was specific about the transformation that ensues for the rational. Justification becomes both ‘subjective-absolute’ while at the same time ‘objective-relative’ a pair of opposites whose metonymic juxtaposition expresses, Weyl claimed, ‘one of the most fundamental epistemological insights which can be gleaned from science.’32 Merleau-Ponty had claimed at the outset that we must give up the idea of apodicticity and even claimed that Husserl had already done so (PoP: xvi). Later, when he had thought through the idea of the institution of rationality, his position came more proximate to Weyl’s insight. The Phenomenology’s Preface, citing Fink, had denied that phenomenology could be established through ‘a disinterested spectator’ that would ‘rediscover an already given rationality’ (PoP: xx). Instead its ‘justification’ could be acquired only by taking ‘our own history upon ourselves’ (PoP: xx). Later, in the wake of his account of the rationality of institution, he would declare that Phenomenology, too, was a matter of operative history—‘and hence of the history of philosophy (it implies the use of language and the history operative within us)’ (VI: 198). It would require an operative history and an ‘operative imaginary, which is part of our institution, and which is indispensable for the definition of Being itself’ (VI: 85). It is essential to the institution of the real and, to use Bachelard’s term, the derealization of the initial image by science, an oneirics precluding the simple adequatio of classical reason. Still, for Merleau-Ponty, if Bachelard indicated a unity between the truths of science and what he called at one point the convictions of the flesh, he never grasped their chiasm. To use Baudelaire’s terms he never saw the specificity of their ‘correspondence’: such correspondence involves less an identity in their differences than the simultaneity (and the reversibility) in their differences (VI: 132). In any case, the imaginary (like the dream)

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becomes equally incomprehensible whether one separates or merely adds the imaginary to the real (VI: 262). The dream, too, is ‘a stiftung of being’ of which ‘observation and the articulated body are special variants’ of our history: both articulations of transcendence (VI: 262). In this sense reality cannot be simply distinguished from the dream as being and nothingness (or day and night).33 Such a logic of opposition again turns the imaginary or the unconscious into simple anthropology; it presupposes the very “origin” that they are intended to explain (VI: 266). For Merleau-Ponty, the imaginary and Being were to be understood as ‘elements (in Bachelard’s sense), that is, not objects, but fields, subdued being, nonthetic being, being before being—and moreover involving their auto-inscription’ (VI: 267). Doubtless here, too, a concept is being complicated and refigured. But, as has been seen, Bachelard had also spoken of such an inscription regarding the truths of the flesh, though he also understood them ‘as a kind of innate materialism’ that is reinforced by our kinesthetic experience (MR: 21). For Merleau-Ponty, this inscription of ‘sensible-ideality’ is a matter of reversibility between the visible and the invisible and philosophy itself never simply escapes such inscription (VI: 197). Pure poetic images for Bachelard were ‘essentially variational’ (PS: xv); for Merleau-Ponty, like all experiments and all Wesensschau, they also involved a reading that emerged from the shadowing-forth (Ab-schattung) of our histoire sauvage, ‘the art of grasping a meaning in a style before it has been put into concepts’ (IPP: 19–20). It involved the elucidations of a domain ‘midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea’. This, again, was his characterization Bachelard’s element (VI: 139). What perhaps Bachelard also reminds us is that, if they are to be understood as historical and experimental, like all experiments, even if they involve the Urpräsentierbarkeit, they involved less a return to origins than an extension or adventure, a step into the unknown, into the Nichturpräsentierbar, into the invisible—an event never free of the oneiric, but also the plural and the symbolic. At one point in his 1955–1956 lectures on the concept of nature, Merleau-Ponty invoked the criticisms of Phenomenology made five years previously by Bachelard in L’activité rationaliste de la physique contemporaine. Certainly the position of the philosopher is not without risk. As Bachelard says, what we call ‘natural’ is often only bad theory. But if we are aware of the artificiality of thinking, as Bachelard is, do we need to find a dialectical contrary for it, this opposing entity—if not Nature, at least the perceived? (N: 85)

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Initially this sounds again like the inevitable dialectic between fact and essence he found at stake in all phenomenological Wesensschau—and it is. In the end perhaps he thought that neither positivity, neither perception nor nature, sufficed for its foundation; foundationalism and dialectics, as Bachelard had insisted, really were at odds. Thinking about both Nature and perception would require as much extension as return. Not without assistance from Bachelard himself, such an extension might reveal what as yet had no name in any philosophy: a flesh which is the ‘formative milieu’ of both. Still, if the flesh is an ‘ultimate notion’ it cannot be a ‘closed notion,’ to use Bachelard’s term. Again, it is not the hard atom of Being, the in itself . In the era of relativity, Bachelard claimed, the notional atoms of Newtonian physics (absolute space, absolute time, and absolute mass) become open to further and more complicated analysis (PN: 25). In effect, they become further articulated along with their own formative milieu. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty held, the role of the participant in this analysis could no longer be grasped as its simple universal coefficient, kosmostheoros. Merleau-Ponty questioned whether the scientist had sufficiently asked whether the world was an artifact, whether it is our construct, whether ‘the philosopher must ask himself if it is closed’ (VI: 97). Bachelard already realized that it was open—and that it was modern scientific rationality that had demonstrated this. Merleau-Ponty acknowledged that ‘the going beyond the thinking of Euclidean space has an ontological significance,’ transforming our Cartesian myths (N: 213–14). Perhaps, he had learned this more from Bachelard than from Heidegger, whose ontology he criticized for being insufficiently non-Cartesian. Merleau-Ponty, however, went further, inquiring whether the ‘ontological significance’ at stake did not also require the inclusion of its histoire sauvage: ‘a horizon of brute being, and of brute mind, from which the constructed object and the significations emerge and which they do not account for’ (VI: 97). The result, he realized, could be neither a ‘secret science’ nor a ‘supersensible science,’ any more than it could be a ‘rival’ science (N: 204).34 Yet this, too, was true of the break with Descartes and Newton: ‘the space in front of us (projective) cedes its place to a space where we are, since it is only the metric of the physical world’ (N: 213). Here the only recourse for ‘our philosophy is set out toward the prospection of the actual world’ (EM: 177). For MerleauPonty, the extension required for its grasp would need to rely not only on science, but the right to dream, both Bachelard’s science and his poetics; the only justification in both respects involves ‘taking our history upon

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ourselves.’ In this historicité sauvage, no more than the imaginary and the real, the elemental and the dialectical could not be opposed to one another. But the extension at stake also involved the risk that, without succumbing to ‘non-philosophy,’ an operative Phenomenology might still remain at work between them. For Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard’s work attested not only to the resources, but to the experiment and the risk such a Phenomenology entailed—and, in many respects, Bachelard’s work still remains its measure.

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Chapter 5

The Question of Community: An Interpretation of Lefort

Heterogeneity . . . occurs when an intention toward homogeneity has preceded and is disappointed, if e.g., with the attempt at an overlapping coincidence, complete conflict takes place. The question whether such heterogeneity is in general possible at all, or whether everything constituted in a consciousness does not still have a community [Gemeinsamkeit], a kind of likeness, we leave open here.—Husserl (EJ: 192) But where, it will be asked, is [Machiavelli’s] benefit for humanism? It lies first of all in the fact that Machiavelli introduces us to the milieu proper to politics and allows us to estimate the task we are faced with if we want to bring some truth to it. It also lies in the fact that we are shown a beginning of a human community emerging from collective life.—Merleau-Ponty (S: 214)

I Over the decades, in a number of settings, Jacques Derrida reflected many thinkers’ concerns in stating that he found the concept of community deeply problematic.1 The very concept of community, that is, seemed to smuggle in illicit and unfounded (“metaphysical”) notions of identity, nature and substance for an event or an experience and a conceptual problem that remained irreducible to such unities, commonalities, natural kinds: in short, traits constituted or possessed in common (communio). Against appeals to such traditional forms of identity, whatever remains of community seemed strictly detraditionalized, lacking in ultimate unity, simultaneity, or substance. Indeed, if anything at all, what we share in common, as Julia Kristeva put it, seemed to be precisely this ‘fragmented time’ itself, one better grasped by a Benjamin or a Proust than a Kant or Husserl.2 Hence derives the relevance of deconstruction for such accounts, it is claimed; attempts to provide substantial foundations or

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transcendental or common conceptuality would, as a result, be rendered “transcendentally illusory.” Granted the heterogeneity that confronts us, what could be more delusory (and traditionally authoritarian) than to project a commonality upon what inherently belies such unity? Against such authoritarianism there arises what Manfred Frank has rightly called the need for a certain heresy: the heresy of individuality that exceeds such false pretensions to the universal, to genus, and to natural kind.3 This need would openly contest the attempt to bridge the gap between the finite and the transcendent. It would contest, thereby, the ancients’ hope that, as Hannah Arendt often pointed out, sought immortality through the practical events united in great words and deeds.4 We are perhaps more convinced that such speculative identities have not been achieved or perhaps are not achievable, that, against the demand for foundational great words and deeds, not all has been said or done—is not perhaps even sayable “as such.” These suspicions notwithstanding, the persistence of the problem, if not the simple affirmation, of community in recent “Continental” thought is striking, a persistence that extends and has overdetermined it from its more recent roots in Husserl and Heidegger to present thinkers.5 This was true of course in thinkers like Kristeva or Derrida (or those closely associated with him, for example, Nancy), but also on a broader basis as well.6 Axel Honneth, in the wake of Habermas’ more formalist models of political rationality, similarly invoked the need for a post-traditional account of Sittlichkeit.7 Some might say that such appeals are not only striking, but also ironic, granted the post-Kantian origins of contemporary Continental philosophy, to which commentators such as Frank or Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe attested.8 Such logic accompanies, if not overdetermines, affirmations of the need for community elsewhere, which emerge often enough, as did Romantic accounts, in lamenting the ironic fragmentation of the political. Both the concept of community and the Romantic account of irony have been long associated (though this view is changing) with the critique of modernity and liberalism.9 Indeed, it might then seem curious that so much of recent Continental philosophy has circulated around issues associated with the question of community and accompanying issues of nature and culture, or physis and logos: questions that concern common identity, substance, their recognition or lack thereof. While many of this tradition’s roots lie in post-Hegelian social and political philosophy, the issue of community is pre-Hegelian, and in large matter a profoundly anti-Enlightenment account of belonging-together. At least since Herder, the concept of community provided the catalyst for an

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account of belonging-together more fundamental than what reason, science, or enlightenment might deduce of dictate—and hence, an account potentially (and often times actually) irrational in outlining the determinate affirmation of people, nation, race, and destiny.10 The question is whether the theoretical richness the concept of community may have traditionally afforded can be reinterpreted to avoid such failures. One might wonder whether it is a concept and perhaps a question that belongs (for better or for worse) to a world well lost. Granted that possibility, we might simply be satisfied with calling what we currently do “community.” Granted that rationality must in some respects be ruled governed, community in the end just would be whatever common vocabulary we have left, a move fraught with Rortian resignation—and perhaps without, as is often pointed out, sufficient normative edge even in the end to justify our own resignation before the received views. Our conception of the rational surely must provide an adequate account of when to change the rules. It does not follow that what we share in common is necessarily worth sharing, after all. Indeed, that seemed to be precisely the question, provoked by a certain detraditionalization and withdrawal of transcendence that always accompanied the history of modern liberalism. It is just in this sense that liberals of various stripes found such appeals to community nostalgic. It is precisely this loss that seemed to ignite the modern “adventure” of democracy, as even those more internal to the research programs of Continental philosophy—and perhaps especially them— argued. It is just in such terms that Claude Lefort, for example, demanded that we conceptualize the specificity of modern democracy, likewise calling the figure of community into question.

II Granted Lefort’s prominence in recent debates, his work can frame the issue for us. Lefort proceeds less by empirical inventory or conceptual analysis than the exposition of a certain Begriffstradition, a certain ‘genealogy of democratic representation,’ one that far from revealing a continuous history, reveals ‘the extent of the break within it.’11 Rather than understanding democracy as one among many possible regimes open to theoretical (or metaphysical) scrutiny, and as underwritten with a certain a priori foundational or transcendental legitimacy, for Lefort, the modern conception of democracy arises precisely out of the interruption in such transcendental authority. It emerges precisely out of the departure of ‘the markers of

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certainty,’ as he puts it. No longer simply the recognition of immanent plurality, as was the ancient account of democracy, borne from the experience of shared aristocracy, modern democracy arises instead in the experience of the default of transcendence and a lacuna in its midst. In contrast with the metaphysical pluralism of the ancients, modern democracy arises and opens its quest for legitimacy in acknowledging the conflict that underlies transcendence. Lefort views the virtue of modern democracy to provide a setting (mise en scène) for the venture of such competing differences. This mise en scène becomes fully evident not simply in contrast with the ancients, but, pointedly, in contrast with its medieval predecessor. For the medievals, the link between religion and monarchy ideologically guaranteed the immanence of justice. The question of the political and the link between power, law, and knowledge could always be determinately referred to another place, could always be referred to the sacred and mediated in the religious figure of the monarch’s two (i.e. earthly and sacred) bodies. For Lefort, modern democracy opens in the idea of the indeterminate figure of society; its division of power calls into question any ultimate link to immanence in the relations between knowledge, law, and power. Rather than referring itself transcendentally (or theologically) to the Other, or identifying such transcendence in self-identity, modern democracy articulates this other in the very differentiation of its internal division, one that is anything but accidental since this division ‘generates its constitution.’ It is precisely in this regard that the specific rationality of democracy opens an institutional space for playing out difference and conflict. It provides an institutional space, that is, where reasonable people can acknowledge disagreement. Consensus is always consensus within difference, its truth always truth in opposition; its identity, consequently, is always provisional and divided, that is, symbolic. Rather than a sensus communis, the modern account of the political is implicitly the acknowledgment of the dissensus communis.12 This dissensus is essential, Lefort claims, to the critical role of modern rationality in general. This account of the emptying of transcendence could be told for the emergence of modern thought generally, from Bacon’s attempts to shore up our foundations to Kant’s resigned acknowledgment before the noumenon; such transcendence is perhaps less often simply denied outright than internally limited. The question is how to interpret its implications. Lefort further wondered whether the question of democracy could leave philosophical thought untouched, since the political effect of this default involves an effect extending throughout the rational.13 The failure to

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recognize this effect recoils upon the political itself. Failure to heed this loss of immanence is one explanation, Lefort elsewhere claimed, for the illusion that underwrote the way in which ‘many contemporary philosophers—and by no means only minor figures—have become compromised in the adventure of Nazism, fascism or communism.’14 It is not simply ‘because they submit to a charismatic authority that they lend their support totalitarian regimes.’ Instead such thinking surrenders to the attraction of a ‘renewed certainty’ in the ideological guise of the proletariat, or the nation or the Volk. The point is that, often enough, in any case, and even when trying to make up for its deficiency, philosophers have failed to capture the specific rationality that emerges with the dissensus communis of modernity. To examine his point I will return briefly to two of Lefort’s phenomenological predecessors, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The justification for doing so must remain in some respects peremptory; Lefort almost never mentions Heidegger, to whom he is seemingly opposed, not just on theoretical grounds, and rarely mentions Husserl, though always in a more favorable light, especially the Crisis period’s treatment of science and the lifeworld. In the first place, we can note that Lefort’s teacher, MerleauPonty, from whom he claimed to have learned much of his views on the social, had already linked Heidegger and Husserl to the issue of transcendence—and its default (PoP: 413). But such an approach also enables us to gain further access to Lefort’s account while further elaborating, beyond modern proceduralism, the character of the rationality that both accompanies the political and has eluded his immediate predecessors. We can acknowledge, thereby, the necessity of experience or first-person rationality that Husserl argued has accompanied modern accounts of the rational since its inception, while acknowledging the need for their augmentation or extension through Heideggerean, or a Heideggerean-like, hermeneutics. For reasons that are by now obviously overdetermined, I will attend to texts of the mid-thirties, and I will, again, of necessity, be peremptory. My point is less expository than theoretical; I hope both to attend to certain contributions as well as certain critical lacunae in these accounts. In addition, the texts in questions are trying ones. These are complicated texts written in complicated times and under complicated personal circumstances—ones to which the authors, for quite varying reasons, were not always up to the challenge. Equally important, however, these are texts where the questions that accompany the political, those of community, tradition, reason and their contemporary crises, both political and cultural, and theoretical and scientific, form a complicated web. But without simply

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eluding this complexity, I will begin peremptorily—and perhaps somewhat nonstandardly—by simply noting some obvious agreements between these thinkers.

III Both of these thinkers were in agreement that theirs was a time of crisis. Husserl wrote a book on the subject that traced the crisis of European philosophy to the origins of modern rationality in a famous analysis of Galileo. But his is by no means the only book. As Otto Pöggeler reminds us, Heidegger had spoken of the problem of crisis as early as Being and Time.15 Heidegger there related that work’s theoretical advances to contemporary crises. He did so both in the hard sciences, ranging from the foundations of mathematics, to relativity theory, to the concept of life in the biological sciences, to those of classical humanistic disciplines, history, theology and ultimately to their classical foundation, philosophy. A decade later, Heidegger’s famous Beiträge, which had departed from the grand synthesis of fundamental ontology, would still represent that work’s Dasein analytic as a philosophical crisis similarly to be grasped “hermeneutically.”16 However, Husserl’s account of crisis, ironically, remained more spiritual than theoretical; there was no crisis in the foundations of theory: the need was for theory to be adequately, that is transcendentally, clarified. Uncannily, however, what I would like to suggest, for reasons that will become evident, is that it was Hobbes and not Galileo who represents the “crisis” of modern philosophy for Husserl and perhaps his own version of its resolution, with implications both political and theoretical in effect. As is well known, Husserl’s Galileo analysis is undertaken as part of substantial revision of his transcendental philosophy. While the status of this transition is still controversial, Husserl claimed that his prior Cartesianism contained what he called ‘a great shortcoming’ since it remains ‘apparently devoid of content’ (K: 155). For this lack Husserl’s Crisis introduced a ‘new way,’ a propaedeutic to transcendental philosophy taking the form of an extended historical meditation on the advent of European sciences and ‘the spectacle (Schauspiel) of Europeanization’ (K: 16). Unlike his previous descriptive inventory of the immanent contents of consciousness, here Husserl proceeded by what he termed a ‘zig zag’—not (as previously) between judgment and content—but the ‘relative clarification’ or ‘mutual elucidation’ between past and present17 (K: 58; cf. LI: 261). In this way, ‘relative clarification on one side brings some elucidation on the other,

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which in turn casts light back on the former’ (K: 58). The necessity of this circular enquiry, exemplified in the Galileo analysis, is inextricable: at one point Husserl claimed that his concept of the transcendental now ‘is demonstrable only’ from this new historical approach (K: 98). What results from this account is a defense of Husserl’s concept of the transcendental ground of the lifeworld, the everyday experience of a unified world always presupposed in our rational endeavors—and, seen against the fabric of this new historical enquiry, the bedrock of all transcendental historicity. While this account is well known, what is perhaps not often stressed is Husserl’s elucidation of these foundations as historically articulated. Indeed while writings of the period claim that we are always involved in ‘innumerable traditions’—that is, that ontically our modern traditionality may be seen (again somewhat romantically) as fragmented and indeterminately plural—phenomenological method now elucidates the Urtraditionalität out of which rationality would emerge as a transcendental ‘community of empathy and language’ (K: 360). The articulation of the latter would be achieved through the clarification of the experiential origins of transcendental historicity, providing thereby an ultimately unified rational ‘tradition producing tradition out of itself’ (K: 174). However, rather than simply being constituted in an initial sense-bestowal at its conscious inception or institution (Stiftung), Husserl now claimed that transcendental purity is to be unlocked retrospectively, precisely out of the ‘zig zag’ of historical reflection. This history becomes intelligible only as its final meaning (Enstiftung) becomes fully evident in, and as, this scientific elucidation. What the Galileo analysis purportedly revealed about this historicity is the mathematization of the manifold of the everyday lifeworld, the metathexis, as Husserl put it, of the real in the ideal. Here he invoked an argument he had made against intuitionists and formalists throughout his career. Husserl claimed that, despite their advance, shorn of their ultimate link with the intentional backdrop of everyday experience, the technical advances of modern mechanics remained at best radically, that is transcendentally, insufficient, since they lost sight of the evaluative acts that lie at their origins—and, at worse, ultimately meaningless, since the mathematical becomes a mere technique, devoid of intentional reference to the real. In either case, through a ‘surreptitious substitution,’ we substitute what is strictly a method for a mode of being (K: 50–6). The resulting “constructed” manner of being or nature (and its theorization, “naturalism,” though Husserl does not use the word here) is one in which we no longer recognize our rational capacities, our responsibilities, or ourselves. It is just this eventuality that has provoked our current ‘spiritual’ crisis, in which, now,

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through ‘sedimentation or traditionalization,’ science becomes almost unthinkingly and unchallengeably machine-like (K: 52). Indeed, granted the almost necessary forgetfulness, one he compares to ‘the problem of the instincts,’ such techniques demand that their true meaning become graspable only by a kind of psychoanalysis or depth-analysis of their missing rational dimension (K: 52). Moreover, ‘if one adduces arguments from the workshops of past philosophers,’ say Aristotle or Thomas and carries on a game of logical argumentations and refutations we become similarly ensnared in aporiae (K: 181, 132). Now the point to all this is not that Husserl thinks that modern science is at odds with the ‘life world’: indeed far from it. Galileo is by no means an ambiguous hero for Husserl; formalization of the manifold is both legitimate and necessary (K: 47). In precipitating this tradition, Galileo is at the top of the list of the greatest discovers of modern times (K: 53). In effect, the problem is that philosophy did not keep pace with science. Had it done so, it would have fulfilled the ancient pretensions of Greek philosophia. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, in articulating the Enstiftung of modern scientific rationality, is claimed precisely to have fulfilled this task, precisely insofar as it has brought the latter’s task to ‘consummate clarity’ (K: 72). Now, does this amount to the return of what Lefort calls the illusions of ‘religious certainty’? In appealing to the founding certainty of the lifeworld, Husserl is not contrasting the rational with the irrational nor the universal with the concrete. While Husserl thinks, for example, that there are such things as singular essences, he claims every bit as much as a Thomist that such things are evidently within reason’s grasp. Doubtless there appears to be a certain Thomism to Husserl’s intentionalism (if only, through Brentano, indirectly). One might argue, more than an external analogy is at work here; analogy is at work in both thinkers, making possible, to use Aquinas’s terms, a ‘community’ and a ‘communicability’ among substances, an almost always already preestablished harmony. But that is not the argument I want to make here. Nor does it involve the Rortian claim that such appeals beyond the web of our shared practices as found not only in Aquinas (or Plato or Kant), but in Husserl, are simply a blind alley beyond social convention; we will need to be even more “Aristotelian” about the patchwork or the heterogeneity of theory.18 Moreover, the external comparison between Husserl and Aquinas is probably insufficient as an account of Thomism, which is not, after all, scientific in the modern sense. But, more importantly, the comparison with Aquinas is insufficient as well to account for Husserl’s version of what I have called his

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“stoic modernism,” rightly construed. This is a point to which I shall return. The question that must be asked first is Husserl’s, whether Husserl’s is an adequate account of science, or whether, more generally, it is adequate to the account of modern rationality he purports to clarify. And, to come to the point, the question is whether Husserl can capture the aspect Lefort has focused upon in his account of the rational, that aspect I referred to above as the dissensus communis. The point is crucial. In staking out his own transcendental account of history, Husserl immediately warns us against a misunderstanding: Every historical philosopher performs his self-reflections, carries on his dealings with the philosophers of his present and past. He expresses himself about all this, fixes through these confrontations [Auseinandersetzungen] his own position, and thus creates a self-understanding of his own deeds in accord with the way his published theories have grown up within him in the consciousness of what he was striving for. But no matter how precisely we may be informed, through historical research, about such ‘self-interpretations’ (even about those of a whole series of philosophers), we learn nothing in this way about what, through all these philosophers, ‘the point of it’ ultimately was, in the hidden intentional inwardness which alone constitutes the unity of history. (K: 72–3) The latter elucidation hermeneutically, Husserl claims, ‘enables us to understand past thinkers in a way that they could never have understood themselves’ (K: 73). Instead depth-analysis would reveal that ‘the true meaning of these theories—the meaning which is genuine in terms of their origins—remained and had to remain hidden from the physicists, including the great and the greatest’ (K: 53). The issue however, and I am by no means the first to raise it, is whether this demand for transcendental depth-analysis has not put itself out of play in a way that threatens its own legitimacy. Husserl in the Crisis, as always, claims that transcendental analysis should not be confused with the vagaries of such interpretations, that his is ‘not a “view” [Auffasung], an “interpretation” [Interpretation] bestowed upon the world’ (K: 152). Yet why should the physicist assent to it? Surely not simply because it is formally consistent, nor because it is in accord with appearances, nor simply because of the higher theoretical unity afforded by the Enstiftung. The issue is surely much more complicated. It is Husserl who argued that consistency is not enough: this was his argument against the formalists, whose meanings were not ultimate or original (intentionally exhibited). But such meanings are

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not simple either. The appeals to the appearance and the things themselves are surely complicated by the question, ‘Whose things, the physicists or the phenomenologists?’ The appeal to a higher spiritually founded theoretical unity, however, is what modern science openly rejected. Naturalists from Hobbes to Dennett have remained fully unconvinced concerning such spiritual or intentionalist accounts.19 Indeed many of these objections can be found, not in Galileo himself, but in the figure Husserl attributes the dangerous misinterpretation of Galileo, Hobbes. This is what makes him a critical figure here, both to Husserl’s neoclassical pretensions to culminate Western science, but also in grasping the critical rationality of modern science and politics, the detraditionalization of the dissensus communis. The point here is not that Husserl is wrong tout court. The Husserlian claim that naturalism is simply blind to origins does not own up to the potential defeaters that awaits Husserl’s teleological vindications, the very sort of vindications to which naturalism always strategically objected. The problem is that naturalism, rather than being taken seriously as a strategy of theoretical reduction, as a theoretical alternative to Phenomenology, is always just “naturalism defeated” in Husserl. Moreover, the very idea that a transcendental theory would need to make room for rational disagreement, is perhaps equally thereby defeated in advance; Husserl has removed his thought from the vagaries of interpretation and disagreement (Auseinandersetzung). It is not accidental that Husserl remains attracted to and perhaps blinded by the Greek notion of philosophy. His thought almost remains paralyzed before Galileo’s accomplishment: on the one hand, Galileo’s theoretical advance is undeniable to Husserl, while, on the other hand, Galileo’s potential challenges to the ancient authorities of logos and philosophia are defused in a (somewhat pseudo) scientific renewal of ancient metatheory, beyond all rational dissensus.

IV Turning to Heidegger, his account can now be treated at less length. Moreover, I will comment on Heidegger less in himself than as an alternate to Husserl. On the issue of scientific rationality, while Heidegger’s criticism are more full-blown—and hence his demand is much more one for an alternative and not a foundation—this is one of those issues in which his premises remain strongly Husserlian, or at least coherent with the latter. In fact, like Husserl, Heidegger had shown a much earlier interest in the

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account of Galilean science for understanding the role of Phenomenology. Like Husserl, his mid-thirties theoretical accounts had been constructed, inter alia, not simply, say, with Hölderlin (or Hitler), but with modern science in mind and the complications of any of these connections should not be lost.20 Again, the focus here is on the issue of scientific rationality insofar as it brings us proximate to the issues raised by Lefort concerning the rationality of modern political democracy. But Heidegger’s difference with Husserl now becomes evident, since on this issue the point is not simply that they are at odds, but that Heidegger attempts to radicalize and thereby transform the Husserlian claim. Thus it is not true to say, as is often charged, that Heidegger is simply an antimodernist; unlike Husserl, time and again Heidegger claims that he is neither challenging nor correcting—nor even fulfilling—modern scientific rationality.21 While, like Husserl, this meant often enough a return to the Greeks, it meant, for Heidegger at the time, less a search for an Urstiftung that concerned the origins of a lost intentional meaning than an encounter with an alien beginning that spurs us on to a ‘new’ or ‘another beginning’ or another realm of thinking modern rationality had precluded.22 The ambiguity in this double gesture, its reciprocal rejoinder (Erwiderung) with the past and the resulting ambiguous reading of the decline in the translation from the Greeks unconcealing logos to the medievals’ (and ultimately moderns) propositional and nominalist ratio remained unresolved—and doubtless pleased his readers of different stripes. Conservative readers saw in this return to the Greeks something more true than modern science, while Nietzscheans saw in it an eschatological vision that escapes all that tragically threaten us in modernity. Perhaps Heidegger himself had not decided and that was why Dasein became itself the site of a certain crisis. It is perhaps more apt to say that Heidegger is both at his best and his worst here; while, too often, the decline in this history of the rational implicated for him something “against reason,” often enough, it meant appropriating rational resources (or a Denken) that lie in excess to the theoretical concerns of modern science. Heidegger, in any case, saw the problem in much larger terms than Husserl. The rise of modern science and its emphasis on efficient causality involves not simply a reduction of the original intentional meanings to one mode of being, to use Husserl’s terms, but a falsification of another more ‘primordial’ realm and a questioning that escaped scientific reduction of any kind, transcendental included. Naturalism is not simply naturalism to be epistemically defeated, that is, bad science, but a naturalism that threatens our very being in another

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sense, in precluding thinking other than science. While Husserl had claimed that the rigor of the particular sciences is not encroached upon by this crisis, and Heidegger, too, claimed that he was not simply trying to outthink science, Heidegger was perhaps less sure about the implications of such scientific “neutrality.” Science is not simply like a technical machine, based, as Husserl had concurred, on calculation, one whose underlying rational community still needs clarification (K: 333). It is a kind of being itself, Machenschaft, that leads to giganticism, technologization, and the like in culture more generally.23 It is less the epistemic incoherence in which we no longer recognize ourselves than the dominance of science as a totalizing and exclusionary enterprise that concerns Heidegger. While Husserl had concurred that a one-sided rationality can become an evil, for Heidegger it was not epistemic incoherence but the predominance of such methodologies to preclude “modes’ of thinking otherwise about being (K: 291). Granted this predominance (and the danger) of technology, we need to think “otherwise,” we will need to think anew: hence the uncanniness of the ‘Heideggerean mode of interpretation,’ as he himself called it in 1935.24 Still, the objection by now, in any case, is easily raised. Why should we listen to Heidegger’s call for thinking otherwise, even if it is the perduring “call” (or dispensation) of “Being”? Wasn’t it just such noncritical authorities that had been called into question at the outset of modernity, and hasn’t this demand for critique of authority been a fellow traveler of science from its beginning? Hobbes, for example, had already cried out against those who would abandon human calculation in order, in the name of conscience, to speak to ‘God Almighty face to face.’25 Isn’t it just such abandonment of science that allowed Heidegger, not only to ask us to read Hölderlin again, but to again succumb to romantic illusions that connected nation and Volk? Didn’t such abandonment allow him to underwrite claims concerning a special type of belonging-together that escaped all political limitation, not to mention the limitations he found in democracy, pairing the latter with the very failure he had criticized in science at the time: the calculative, the utilitarian, the totalitarian, the Christian, the Bolshevist, the American? Surely great thinkers are prone not only to greatness and great ventures, to use his terms, but, to use terms, Heidegger often enough avoided, great fallacies as well. What possibly could Lefortian meditations on democracy find in “Heideggerean interpretation” but great disasters? Again, his absence from Lefort’s text seems only to underline this. Still, what Heidegger meant by the ontological difference at stake in the Seinsfrage is surely apparent in Lefort’s claim that democracy is the recognition that Being and appearance are not the same; consequently,

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no institution can simply or procedurally guarantee truth, democracy included. Once again, we confront what Heidegger already called the empty place (Stelle) of the sacred in modern accounts and the tendency to pragmatically dissolve its indeterminacies within the realm of current calculability.26 Here it is anything but nostalgia that motivates Heidegger’s account: we can no more return to premodern ‘sacred’ determinacies than we can simply forget our insufficiencies. The opposition between Lefort’s politics of the “empty place” of transcendence and those like Rorty’s hopes to have Heidegger without the Seinsfrage could not be more complete. The pragmatist’s hope to be devoid of such questioning and the “big picture” is as hopeless as the claim that we already have one; scientific realism turns crass as Realpolitik, as incapable of justifying itself as it is of dialogue with others. Heidegger’s critique of technology surely stands in this regard as a decisive claim against thinly pragmatic readings of democracy. We will need a thicker conception of its rationality—or again, why there is a need to share judgments. There is no absolute judgment here; whether we have religious commitments or not, we have been theoretically disconnected from the ontotheology of the last judgment—and surely thereby (and perhaps especially) fallible, calculated, or instrumental replacements. It was, after all, the gap between mortal and absolute that had invested monarchy with divinity for the Middle Ages. A new form of Averroism cannot refigure the “people” with the status of agent intellect: this too is the problem of community. Heidegger saw this in raising the question of the who of Dasein in 1927. His glaring failures notwithstanding, he would stress it perhaps even more in the thirties in confronting the problem of who “we” are in the ‘open between that lights up and shelters— between earth and world.’27 We do not need to go into the figures of Heidegger’s own language here. The point again remains more restrictedly theoretical. Husserl could neatly, if paradoxically (and still almost angelically), parse the transcendental “I” from the ‘we men’ of earthly humanity (K: 331). Heidegger’s historicity had refused the idea of a simple homiosis or community of substance, paradoxical or otherwise: ‘no “we” and “you” no “I” and “thou,” no community setting itself up by itself’ suffices to grasp either this event of the self, or the opening from which the truth that stands between us emerges.28 We will need to refuse such “ontic” reductions while acknowledging what lies “between” us in such exceeding. This point must remain a complicated one; the refigurations that emerge here are neither without evidence nor without the acknowledgment of transcendence and our ultimate insufficiencies—and we can wonder whether Heidegger ever caught this.

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Without dissolving the ontic or the institutional for what opens beyond it, we will need to see the opening beyond ontic institution precisely in our midst. That is, we will need to broach the issue in grasping the unsurpassable fragility of our own ontic and institutional insufficiency, errancy—and doubtless achievements. But notwithstanding their talk of ontological difference or transcendental paradox, as Lefort has rightly noted, there is perhaps not enough, maybe even very little in Heidegger or Husserl to help us here.29 Here we confront their limitations. Husserl perhaps always thought of community modeled on the community of mathematicians. Indeed the abstraction of transcendental purity was perhaps even more impoverished; community remains modeled here less upon the critical difference between mathematicians than upon the communicability (and commutability) of mathematical truth.30 Husserl’s arguments are most convincing when modeled on the corresponding noetics of mathematical truth, bolstered by the “perspicuity” of its proofs. It is doubtful that they can be generalized beyond such stabilized modes of identity. Noetically, Husserl’s notion of dissensus and its Auseinandersetzung, while intersubjective, remains always iteratively founded in the “agent intellect” of transcendental (egological) identity. While Heidegger’s account had more openly acknowledged the differences at stake and, in the model of the encounter between great thinkers, he could acknowledge the idea of an ‘ethics (or poetics) of Auseindandersetzung,’ he could not think its institution, nor the historicity (or norms) of its convention.31 Neither an account of the community of mathematicians nor the community of poets will suffice here, even if one argues that an adequate account must include both. Notwithstanding the validity of their own attacks on its voluntarism or nominalism, there is perhaps not enough in Husserl and Heidegger’s work to assist us in understanding democratic institutions as a modern and critical matter in which truth institutionally emerges from rational discord, the dissensus communis. But granted the complexities of Heidegger’s and Husserl’s origins, openings and excesses, we should perhaps, with Lefort in mind, shift grounds.

V Especially since de Toqueville, Lefort notes, democracy has been recognized to suffer from an inherent fragility, its justice internally divided. While committed to majority rule, democracy remains contingent upon commitments

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that no legislature can ultimately or procedurally guarantee: politics and the political, like being and appearance, as Kant realized, lack any simple identity relation. Here we meet again the problem of the ‘empty place’ in the departure of the ‘markers of certainty.’ Doubtless this has motivated the argument that the flourishing of democracy depends upon the good intentions, that is, the virtue of its citizens. The hope to simply empower virtue itself, however, may be no less undemocratic. This should be kept in mind in evaluating even recent attempts (e.g. Levinas) to reinvoke virtue (and, in particular, Montesquieu’s account) as the substantial basis for democracy.32 As Montesquieu had seen before Toqueville (and Arendt never tired pointing it out), there is no limit concerning what can be linked to the abuse of power: hence, even virtue must be limited.33 However, all legislating is dependent upon what cannot be legislated; beyond method, judgment will require art. Even Habermas acknowledged this much.34 As Lefort has put it, in a more directly Lacanian fashion, power is always symbolic and the denial of this symbolic status is always catastrophic: rationally, dialectically illusory. The hope to make up for this procedural shortfall by committing the remainder (of social practice) to the free play of self interest (and liberty in its name) has remained woefully unsatisfactory as well; indeed it is just the ethical failings of egoism that fallaciously motivated antidemocratic sentiment—and doubtless fallacious theories. It is in this regard that Axel Honneth, among others (Arendt for one), has suggested, we will need alternate traditions to those of Hobbes. At issue again will be a thicker conception of the rationality of democracy. Thus Honneth has argued for a post-traditional account of Sittlichkeit.35 But he, too, acknowledges that this cannot be deduced a priori. He cites at least three possibilities that might rise as solidarity forces (solidierende Krafte) within social struggle: civic republicanism, ecologically based asceticism, or collective existentialism.36 While it is not clear how these are to be interpreted, their very plurality doubtless beckons further interpretations—not to speak of the question of interpretation that has always been a fellow traveler of what Lefort termed “the question of democracy.” Hannah Arendt in fact defends what she too calls ‘another tradition,’ that of Athenian isonomy and Roman civitas, neither of which reduced power to domination and obedience.37 Surely there are other accounts among those thinkers we are considering. We might, for example, invoke the early Heidegger’s account of care for others (Fürsorge), or for nature in general, generally, the care for Being—or the later account’s less voluntarist, attuned reservedness (Verhaltenheit).38 Out of this account came Heidegger’s “neo-Sophoclean” or “neo-Hölderlinian” attachment to the uncanniness

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of the home, the near, and the like, all undertaken as attempts to refigure the past for a time in which ‘all love and concern has burnt out,’ as he put it. The extent to which such notions can be refigured within a democratic context may well seem controversial. Even Husserl’s rational community’s combination of communication and empathy, however, was ultimately grounded as a community of love.39 Obviously one might generate further alternatives, for example, in Levinas or Lacanian accounts of the exclusionary nature of law, the we, and the like. The point, in any case, must be that there is more than one way to acknowledge this requirement for a democratic Sittlichkeit. To use Merleau-Ponty’s Freudian term, there is a ‘polymorphism’ to the political. This plurality, this ‘indeterminacy,’ to use Lefort’s logical term, reminds us that, however much politics requires reflection on the empty place of the political, that is, reflection on its detraditionalization and the emptying of transcendence, it cannot end there. If politics will require the Seinsfrage, without being confused with or replacing the latter, politics will of necessity be about appearance, the refiguration of the past and how we go through time together. Moreover, such appearance, however symbolic, will of necessity be “deontologized”: appearance remains always a matter of “appearance for.” Here, against Rorty’s and Habermas’ penchant for social reductionism (or alternately neo-Kantian commitments to the abstraction of “autonomy”), we will need to acknowledge that politics is inextricably tied to the singular. In one sense, of course, this again was Manfred Frank’s claim: any post-traditional Sittlichkeit will need to acknowledge a “heretical tradition” that defends what cannot be communalized. Without denying coherence or necessity, we will need to acknowledge an experience and a freedom that remains indeterminate with respect to convention or factical community. And, if one follows Lefort (or Manfred Frank), this other individuality is less the autonomous individuality French neoliberals (e.g. Renault, Ferry) have analytically tied to Enlightenment progress, than it is the indeterminate excess that accompanies our experience of the rational: in our practices, in our judgment, in our imaginative (synthetic) capacities to think and to be affected otherwise.40 This is less “antireductionism” than it is to acknowledge the limits of reduction, less denying community or identity or even “normal science” than it is to acknowledge the complication that constitutes the conditions of their rationality. Thus, having insisted on the critical character of democracy, having insisted, to use Lefort’s terms, on the complicated ontology of the social and or its rationality as dissensus communis, it will be necessary to insist that is also inevitably an ontic event, inevitably “phenomenological.” This is true,

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even if we accept the myriad of arguments concerning the insufficiency of any scientific Phenomenology. But curiously, this too seems to have internally blocked pathways as well. For example, Klaus Held has also claimed that democracy requires an account that extends beyond the procedural, and similarly turns to considerations on Husserl’s account of the lifeworld for the habituation that must sustain democracy. Moreover, similarly critical of Husserl’s overly egological foundationalism, he sought to connect the lifeworld account of the horizonality of human experience to the ancient awe that inspired democracy, and to the extended means of thinking such horizons open up.41 Like Honneth, Held argued that the (now “phenomenological”) ethos of democracy could not be theoretically directed, that ‘the attempt to philosophically found an ethos contradicts the awe before the intractability of habitualization, that ‘an ethos cannot be produced.’42 But, while in one sense this seems to fit the open-ended character of democratic rationality, in another it remains troubling. The polypereia, the plurality of experiences the ancients sought to sustain democracy, will certainly need to be detached from its organic metaphysics.43 But have we nothing more to say about the experience related therein? As Husserl realized, unlike the case of explicative identity, the apprehension of plurality forces us to acknowledge passivity (or difference and “alterity”), but it does not preclude further conceptualization that would articulate such differences.44 Indeed, successfully or not, this was the point of Husserl phenomenology of intersubjective ‘pairing,’ premised from the outset as a matter, in contrast to ‘a synthesis of identification’ as a synthesis of ‘mutual distinctness’ that would provide ‘the consciousness of “different”’ (CM: para. 51). Certainly, we should steer clear of Heidegger’s hopes for a rehabilitation of philosophy in the sphere of every day opinion. The Alltäglichkeit remains an all but permanently derogatory event for him, an event, as Being and Time put it, always in need of mastery if ‘only for a moment’ (BT: 422). Ironically, however, demurrals like Held’s or Honneth’s (or Rorty’s) in the end seemed almost as decisionist and mystified, to the extent that each remains very close to reendorsing a monolithic and irrationally based Romantic conception of tradition: the point being, as Wittgenstein claimed, like many neoconservatives, that if you don’t already share a tradition then you can’t get one.45 But surely we need a different account of tradition (or detraditionalized Sittlichkeit) than this and a different account of the link between theory (or critique) and practice. In one sense it seems perfectly apt to leave the specifics of democracy beyond theoretical decree: here we can agree with Held or Honneth. While an account of democracy

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that extends beyond the procedural will need to be affirmed, we also require one that both acknowledges our historicity and our abilities to intervene. And it can’t be so technical that only psychoanalysts or logicians, or poets (or physicists) can participate in it. Here criticisms like Rorty’s concerning the ‘obscurantisms’ of Continental political theory seems hard to avoid.46 Instead, as Lefort reminds us, the virtues of the vernacular have defied modern tyrants: the witness and testimony of singular experience has not only been decisive but has, at times, made all the difference, a difference both symbolic and real.47 The protocols for such a symbolics (and its rationality qua democratic) might be “previewed” in Lefort’s teacher, Merleau-Ponty. First of all, such an account emerges concomitantly with Merleau-Ponty’s argument for an expressivist account of the symbolic function as the source of all reason and unreason. While the terms are oblique, by now we can unpack them. If the transcendental descends both into history and to language it is not dissolved there; first and foremost it requires an adherence to language that enables speakers to practice both by excess and by interruption: For the number and richness of significations man has at his disposal always exceed [excedent] the circle of definite objects which warrant the name ‘signified,’ because the symbolic function must always be ahead of its object and find reality only by anticipating it in imagination. Thus our task is to broaden [elargir] our reasoning to make it capable of grasping what in ourselves and other, precedes and exceeds reason. (S: 122) As has been seen, this extension or broadening of reason began with Merleau-Ponty’s work in the late forties. But it is a complicated event. While the expressive speech act (la parole) is dependent upon the conventions of language for coherence, these internally require the former (and its imaginative potential) both to account for its malleability (or origin) and their rationality (i.e. critique). From the outset of his concerns with Saussure, Merleau-Ponty focused on the issue of institution and tradition: ‘a language which exists, is in effect a tradition, but a tradition is an appeal to renew expression, to recommence the initial creative task (travail)’ (PD: 345). In one sense, as has become evident, Merleau-Ponty could still find here Husserl’s conception of tradition as Stiftung, in which, establishing a tradition means forgetting its origins (S: 159). Or more gently put, ‘the power to forget origins’ is to give to the past power not a survival, ‘which is the hypocritical form of forgetfulness, but a new life, which is the noble form of memory’— and we should add, critique (S: 59). In Merleau-Ponty’s account, this occurs,

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as it did in Husserl’s, by a series of critical comparative or juxtaposed ‘zig zags’ between the past and the present (VI: 91; K: 58). On the other hand, such expressivity is never unconditional or without its own reliance on institutionalized convention; the certainties at stake are inevitably finite and local. It requires attention then to ‘what, in ourselves and others,’ precedes and exceeds such ontic effects—and which themselves remain consequently always symbolic, and symbolically problematic. Epistemically, such a “Cogito” remains internally divided: (stoically) related to its own evidence while being problematically related to both internal (or unconscious) conflict, as well as the experience of (and dialogue between) others. Politically, this division is surely the symbolic effect (and potential) of democracy and this is how Merleau-Ponty aptly characterized it: the ‘only known institution that guarantees a minimum of opposition and of truth’ (AD: 226). But here, as becomes apparent, having granted Machiavelli’s detraditionalized truth that values are necessary but not sufficient—and acknowledging thereby the distance between the expedient and the honorable—he responded through Montaigne: ‘Then we find the fixed point we need (if we want to bring our versatility to a stop) . . . in the fact that there is opinion, the appearance of the true and the good’ (S: 206). But how is this to be understood?

VI It has become clear that we will need both a richer account of the rational and a richer account of its interpretation—and, as connected to the singular and to appearance, then inevitably in some sense still connected to a “Hermeneutic Phenomenology.” This is obviously to invoke an outdated term that cannot be invoked innocently or without revision; while Lefort invokes both occasionally, neither terms conjoined here, neither “Hermeneutics” nor “Phenomenology,” nor their ironic conjunction, metonymically combining presence and transcendence—can be taken to be either the foundational or post-metaphysical disciplines of philosophy. But what has equally become clear is that both terms have a certain inextricable logic and conceptual history (Begriffstradition) to them, linked both to the question of interpretation and the art of appearances. Moreover they have a history too often simply confined to an idealized philosophy of consciousness (e.g. Habermas, Honneth) or a positivist and illicit metaphysics of the subject (Heidegger). Similarly, the question of democracy can be neither reductively resolved into a decision procedure or

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algorithm nor committed to the deferrals of an incessant alterity, skepticism, or impossibility; its institution remains divided between consensus and the Hermeneutics of the difference out of which such consensus arises and attains its legitimacy. Here we can see that the very rationality of the modern as dissensus communis requires both phenomenology and hermeneutics in the very same moment that it requires the phenomenologist to acknowledge the constraint of the social, the coherence of received objectivity and the loss of immanence (and identity) that detraditionalization incurs. If objectivity must be linked to singularity, it can neither be fully reduced nor ultimately “founded” there. Phenomenology, that is, by itself cannot deliver the objectivity that it always depends upon—even in transcendentally challenging it. Here again we meet the issue of Phenomenology’s insufficiency, its ‘indeterminate determinacy,’ to use Lefort’s term.48 Otherwise stated, as Merleau-Ponty already declared, Phenomenology always opens within a historically constituted (instituted) field of objectivity. Or, as Derrida puts it with respect to Husserl, Phenomenology always opens as a warp upon a woof that is not its own.49 That surely does not provide grounds for dissolving its evidence, let alone reducing it. While others have spoken in this regard of the need to recur to a ‘weak’ Hermeneutics (Vattimo) or a ‘minimal’ Phenomenology (Janicaud) we should demur, I think.50 Certainly one can make sense of such claims: “weak” doubtless is to be contrasted with the strong or strict claims of a science of being and “minimal” can be understood in contrast to the universalizing science Husserl too often sought. Against his stronger foundational moments we will need to maintain Husserl’s “stoic” reserve against the dissolution of the first-person singular (hence the stoic antecedents of the epoché). This is less to endorse his “Thomistic” account where the a priori unity of natural reason is metaphysically endorsed than its inevitable Augustinian moments (e.g. linking reason to the vagaries of time and appearance) where the self as aenigma is acknowledged. Still, if we understand such an account as still warranted only as linked to the evidence that attaches to a singular experience, then it just is the claim that, “as” linked to “appearance,” Phenomenology can only be problematically (i.e. symbolically) linked to Being and then such a phenomenology just is interpretive, that is, “hermeneutic.” We will need an account of the link between transcendence and what thrusts itself upon us in its experience (experiri)— and its plurality, its polypereia, as has become evident.51 But we will further need an account of both this “excess” and its constraint, its historicity, convention, and objectivity: in short, a better account of interpretation and, politically, of its agency.

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Lefort often seems lacking on this point. For its account one might recur (as did Merleau-Ponty at critical points) to the concluding chapter on the indeterminacy’s of interpretation in Lefort’s Machiavelli book.52 This alerts us, moreover, to Lefort’s own response to attempts to derive a posttraditional Sittlichkeit, where indeterminacy, imagination, and argument become intertwined. Like Hegel before him in defending a Sittlichkeit in which the link between history and truth had become problematic, Lefort sees in Machiavelli not simply the threat of calculating reduction and will to power, but a history in which power, transcendence and the dawning recognition of the interrupted plurality of tradition becomes first obviated. He prefigures thereby the possibility of a Sittlichkeit that attends both to ancient virtue, the requisites of modern uncertainty, and the acknowledgment of “alterity.” As Honneth and others recognized Hegel simply resolved (or subsumed) these indeterminacies in the metaphysics of Absolute Spirit. If what is at stake in such a post-traditional Sittlichkeit is the problem of the Good—or, ontically, social good(s) beyond egoism—we will need to acknowledge that our communal or shared life is not simply the Good’s equivalent but its ongoing interpretation. The Good life and the life as legislated are not simple equivalents. And, the question of legitimation will be similarly complicated.53 Beyond the limits of an historical account of social identity, the problem of difference and the excess figured in the empty place both accompanies and haunts our dialogue of “community.” This dialogue at times implies, of course, not only a dialogue internal to communitarian consensus, but a (lateral) dialogue undertaken with respect to the conventions of the past and other cultures (actual or possible). The question of community, divided between convention and transcendence, consensus and interpretation is always the question of transformation and recognition: consensus is always already dissensus—and yet not for all that “delegitimated.” This is simply to acknowledge, again, that legitimization is a historical matter; questions of validity and soundness, consensus and truth, norm and justice are never simply distinguishable, nor perhaps never simply equatable, either. It cannot then involve simply returning to the ancients. As Lefort points out, the ancients lacked the idea of a critical democracy.54 Still, such “hermeneutic” appeals to its Begriffstradition can remind us that the “excess” that accompanies the question of shared social life, participates still within the itinerary of the ancient question of the Good; the latter, after all, as always beyond the True, was never simply its equivalent. Like the question of interpretation, the question of the Good is another issue that accompanies

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our conceptual traditionality concerning transcendence (or its ‘empty place’) and both remain linked to the question of community. But the retrieval of this ancient “appeal” also indicates the modernity of the hermeneutic. As even classical formulations like Gadamer’s acknowledged, hermeneutics emerged (and became recognized as a theoretical problem) only when communication, community, and the sensus communis had been interrupted: ‘there would be no hermeneutical task if there were no mutual understanding that had been disturbed and that those involved in conversation must search for and find again together.’55 This indicates why none of these, neither community, the Good, nor even truth itself is recoverable by simple descriptive phenomenology or decision procedure. Involved is a domain whose “analogics” remains more dialectical than demonstrative, now fully lacking in demonstrative referent, whether ontotheological or cosmotheological, to use Kantian terms. Arguably however, all have been historically linked from the outset. But this much in any case, is true: granted the dissensus communis, the Good’s “phenomenologies” now will be less socially confirmed in immanence than historically risked, that is, ventured, by means of what Merleau-Ponty called the operative history that passes through us. Perhaps Lefort had also learned this from Merleau-Ponty; he openly acknowledged that he had learned his account of the ontology of the social from him. As Merleau-Ponty claimed, 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 to the truth to be with them.56 This view provided the background for his objection to Sartre’s doctrine of ‘constant engagement’ based on individual judgment. Merleau-Ponty still saw such an account to be ‘too Cartesian.’ Referring to a 1953 lecture, Merleau-Ponty stated in a letter to Sartre: But I tried to say that equivocation is bad philosophy and that good philosophy is a healthy ambiguity because it affirms the basic agreement and disagreement de facto between the individual, others and the truth and since it is patience which makes them all work together in some way or another.57 This patience (and the ‘healthy’ plurality it ventures) is perhaps both close to and far away from the notion of patience as ‘belated perseverance’

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Blanchot will speak of later—that is, as, linked by him to skepticism. I have spoken instead of Merleau-Ponty’s venture here as a kind of stoicism that accompanies the account of difference (and patience) with respect to its relation to truth (and the other). Later, as has been seen, Merleau-Ponty would find here the “intertwining” and Ineinandersein at stake in Husserl’s account of traditionality of sense—and thereby its account of community (Gemeinschaft) as institution (Stiftung) (HLP: 25–9). Nonetheless what Merleau-Ponty immediately adds in his letter to Sartre perhaps takes one aback, almost affirming the “withdrawal” from politics, of which he had been accused. He distinguishes the above account from politics: ‘I said that, understood in this way, philosophy was perhaps a stranger to professional politics, but not to people.’58 Lefort perhaps saw what Merleau-Ponty did not immediately acknowledge—or at least did not assert in this context. Politics and the venture of truth would not be so readily separable; both were at risk in this withdrawal. Democracy had not only been the guarantee of opposition, but the institution for the symbolization and the invention of plurality. Yet the Working Notes to the Visible and Invisible continuously distinguishes Lefort’s Machiavelli for understanding the history of philosophy not simply as a matter of problems and solutions, but rather ‘interrogative ensembles’ in which different or later interpretations do not supervene or overcome but exist, interrelate, “interlace” (and refer) and transform one another by divergence or écart (VI: 187). The divergence out of which the philosopher remains a stranger to politics is also essential to philosophy itself. True enough, but what Lefort also saw (and without denying that Merleau-Ponty may have concurred) was that none of this escaped the relations of power or empowerment; the question of interpretation and power were not far removed from one another: this, too, “motivated” the question of democracy.59 Hence the conclusion: the genealogy of democratic representation reveals a dissensus between power, knowledge, and law, the very condition of its rationality. Community here is, consequently, always in question: possessed neither by a singular subject nor a majority. If community is not a simple substance possessed in common (communio), neither can it be reduced to a simple instrumental function that would authorize a contract ‘thanks to which a minority submits to a government formed by a majority.’60 Strictly taken, Lefort acknowledges, the community he has in mind then remains ultimately ‘indefinable’ and yet not for all that unsignifiable, unintelligible, or simply an illusion.61 To invoke the shadowing-forth (Abschattungen) through which Merleau-Ponty claims the rational becomes articulated: our relation to the absolute is ‘figurative knowledge’ and not

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‘“free” knowledge’ (PNP: 51). Again, not without irony, he adds, like perception: ‘In order to be total it must be partial’ (PNP: 51). If identity and institution are always open to question, always at play and in need of interpretation, it doesn’t follow that we know nothing about them, that our conceptual analyses are insufficient tout court, or that they have lost their legitimacy. Neither appearance nor being have been dissolved here. Nor, for Merleau-Ponty, has our capacity as agents to intervene been undermined; politics has not been set adrift in impossibility. The world of the political remains, like the world the phenomenologists articulated, “rationally motivated.” The complicated and ambiguous relations between institution, experience, and judgment delineate instead the “adventure” of democratic community, to use a term Lefort still takes from Merleau-Ponty. At stake is an event still always “underway,” to use a Heideggerean term—or, an “infinite task,” to use Husserl’s. And here their decisive contributions to such matters as the “plenum” of the real, the transcendence of Being, the singular narratives of life (and death), or the “incarnations” of lived embodiment remain inextricable. Notwithstanding Husserl and Heidegger’s decisive contributions to our grasping the links between experience and transcendence, the ambiguous relations between institution, appearance, history, and truth, precisely constitute the possibility of our rationality and community in ways that neither could have grasped. Instead of mastering or founding, ultimately retrieving or surpassing this experience, their works attest to a history, a traditionality and its lapse—and a need for critique—that continually erupts in their midst.

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Chapter 6

Beyond the Antinomies of Expression: Writing After Merleau-Ponty

Whatever I encounter as an existing object is something that . . . has received its whole being-sense for me from my effective intentionality; not a shadow [nicht ein Schatten] of that sense remains excluded from my effective intentionality. (FTL: 234) The philosopher must bear his shadow [son ombre], which is not simply the factual absence of future light. (S: 178)

I. The reorientation of phenomenology: Beyond ‘the ambition to see everything’ Some three decades after Husserl wrote the above words in his Formal and Transcendental Logic, Merleau-Ponty in turn wrote ‘The Philosopher and His Shadow.’ There he undertook his own explication and reappraisal of Husserl’s philosophical project. Merleau-Ponty questioned whether Husserl’s account of Phenomenology and its ‘analytical tools’ could be ‘left intact’ (S: 165). In the opening Working Note to his final manuscript, The Visible and the Invisible, he understood himself to be undertaking that project’s ‘prolonging (prolongeant),’ still attempting to mine its hidden resources (VI: 165). In both places Merleau-Ponty articulated the ‘shadow’ of a project to which he linked himself as well as a theoretical shadow intrinsic to the phenomenological tradition, granted what Husserl acknowledged to be its infinite task and the antinomies that threatened it. Still, this did not entail abandoning analysis any more than it entailed submitting philosophy to the ‘murmur’ of words. Critically, given the task, ‘The Philosopher and His Shadow’ had began problematically—and ironically—by stating that ‘establishing a tradition means forgetting its origins’ (S: 159). This forgetfulness (Vergessenheit), like the question of the shadow itself (not to speak of

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Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis upon embodiment), had not only Nietzschean overtones, but also had been ongoing for two decades in his works.1 If experience is always “experience of,” however, experience itself is always an event that problematically exceeds its articulation. The result remains conceptually contingent, if for no other reason than that the logic of such concepts is historical; the articulation of this itinerary emerges only through the sequence (or “transitional syntheses”) of conceptual coherence. As becomes evident, and has so throughout the itinerary of post-Kantian transcendentalism from Jacobi to Derrida, there is no a priori guarantor of the link between concepts and intuition (or experiences in the strict or prereflective sense). Consequently, there can be nothing like a rational self-taking or pure perception; our conceptual expositions are just the history of our attempts (experiri). This is not to say such attempts are without justification, but that their justifications will be complex: to use Bachelard’s terms, an internal development that emerges as much through a series of ‘extensions’ and ‘complications’ as ‘reductions.’2 The itinerary of Merleau-Ponty’s work similarly followed this recognition. In 1935, he affirmatively cited Gabriel Marcel’s claim that there is no historical sedimentation to these matters (TD: 105). By the mid-forties, having encountered the later Husserl, Merleau-Ponty had begun to think more seriously about the question of rationality as a question of tradition and the history of attempt and “reinstitution” (Nachstiftung). In this respect, even the Cartesian Cogito, upon which so much of Phenomenology was conceptually modeled, was undeniably a “cultural” being (PoP: 44, 360). More and more, Merleau-Ponty (like Husserl himself) attempted to capture this transcendental (and its ideality) in its complexity, that is, its historicity.3 The question, in the first place, concerned the extent to which Husserl’s program could remain intact. For Merleau-Ponty, it increasingly called for transformations unforeseeable in Phenomenology’s classical past. Rather than a return to the simple description of the things themselves, to the description of ‘the transparent correlations between acts of thoughts and objects of thoughts,’ as Merleau-Ponty saw it, Husserl kept bringing to light ‘fragments of being which disconcerted his frame of reference.’4 This disorientation interrupted ‘the ambition to see everything, which animates the phenomenological reduction.’5 He included here, not only the phenomenology of the body, with which Merleau-Ponty is usually associated, but also the passage of inner time, intersubjectivity, and history, ‘which is my life in others and the life of others in me.’6 This fragmented experience, taken conjointly, as primordial historicity, disrupted the phenomenological project from within, bringing the status of its own fragmented expression

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out of the shadows. The denial of the ambition to see everything also impacted the principle that from the start had underwritten its account of language; in addition to the denial of the ambition to see everything, it denied what might be called Husserl’s logicist principle of expressibility, the ambition that everything can be said (cf. LI: 321–2). To speak the language of classical transcendentalism, in disrupting the unity between concept and intuition, it disrupted the transparent or descriptive correlations between experience as lived (Erlebnis) and its systematic “exposition” (Erfahrung). Phenomenology thus revealed a disrupted “metonymy” or “disjunctive synthesis” between the singularity of our experience and our rational history: between experience as an event and “experience” as the expressive coherent deformation of a sense-history or tradition.7 If the subject is an indeclinable self-presence, ‘it is also true that it provides itself with symbols of itself in both succession and multiplicity, and that these symbols are it, since without them it would, like an articulate cry, fail to achieve selfconsciousness’ (PoP: 427). It is precisely in this significative matrix, he adds, that ‘what we provisionally termed the passive synthesis becomes clarified’ (PoP: 427). Here also, as has been seen, is where he came to invoke the Wechselspiel between expression and intuition of Husserl’s Crisis: ‘A relative clarification of the one side sheds some light on the other, which it its turn reflects back on the other’ (PP: 93; K: 58). For Merleau-Ponty, however, the double intentionality at stake in this zigzag was interminable. To use Husserl’s terms, like all such shadowing-forth (Abschattungen), it involved ‘a mixture of fulfilled and unfulfilled intentions’ (LI II: 714). The idea of a simple fulfillment needs to be questioned (VI: 195). What needs to be confronted now is a mixture or ‘chiasma’ of the visible and the invisible. The philosophy which lays bare this chiasma of the visible is the exact opposite of a philosophy of God-like survey. It plunges into the perceptible, into time and history, towards their articulations [jointures]. (S: 21) “Experience” is thus an overdetermined event for Merleau-Ponty; it involves both an ecstatic event and a symbolic matrix: historicity and occurrence, intuition and concept intertwined. Like the unfinished world of Malebranche he kept invoking, ‘Far from being already finished, everything needs to be done or redone’ (TD: 9). As Marc Richir has put it of Merleau-Ponty’s new departure: It consists in the incompletion in principle of the world, of phenomena, and of ourselves, which founds in reality the opening itself of perceptual faith to

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the world, of perceptual faith to itself, of me to the other, of the sensible to the intelligible, of the mute world to expression, etc. For us, this is without doubt the most profound and lasting lesson of the late work of Merleau-Ponty—a lesson which connects it with others in a very great philosophical tradition—namely that of Kant and Schelling. The lesson is that every being, of whatever sort, is always and in principle unfinished, repeatedly open to horizons of completion which are themselves irreducibly penetrated with incompletion. And . . . it is this incompletion in principle of every thing and every thought which gives Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology a unique character which makes it impossible to ignore.8 While somewhat overstated, this philosophical task conceptually acknowledges (and presupposes) both a provisionalness and a revisability inherent to its endeavor, where ‘the very idea of a complete statement is inconsistent’ (S: 17). Our sentences too, as Merleau-Ponty said of Claude Simon and Michel Butor’s writings, are fragmented or ‘interrupted,’ for ‘while I hold on to the circle of ipseity, I trace it as well’ (TD: 141). This acknowledges the very fragility of a philosophy of experience, an event, as the classical account of its Wechsel had acknowledged, cast adrift between the particular and the universal. This paradox nonetheless complicated his own attempts from early on. As with his initial dismissal of history, the Phenomenology of Perception’s Preface had begun by claiming that neither rationality nor the world are problematic but are more a mystery. It was a matter of ‘relearning [rapprendre à voir] to see the world’ otherwise (PoP: xx). Still, such ‘relearning to see’ would be anything but a simple (let alone immanent) matter. Merleau-Ponty’s own philosophy, too, remained unfinished. For reasons equally essential, the very idea that the task to which he had devoted himself could ultimately find completeness and determinacy was precluded from the start. The impossibility of completing the reduction, Phenomenology’s inachèvement, required not only a turn toward its genesis and historicity of experience (PoP: xiv, xxi); it required, to use terms he borrowed (and refigured) from Husserl, that its typic no longer be static, but inventive and ‘fluid (flieszende)’ (PoP: 365). Merleau-Ponty would, accordingly, transform the classical (Cartesian) account of imagination. He called increasingly for a “figured” philosophy that impacted even the purity of phenomenological descriptors themselves.9 As has become evident, even the leading articulemes of his interrogations, for example, the ‘lived body,’ or ‘perception,’ or the ‘natural world,’ are less the pure phenomenological descriptors that Husserl hoped would emerge

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from regional enquiry than articulemes with the same historical fluidity and provisionalness he claimed attached to the rationality of experience itself. As the transformations of The Visible and the Invisible attest, such articulemes are never free of the need for reinterpretation and refinement. Granted the interplay of history, imagination, and institution, this expressive provisionalness occurs for reasons that are ineluctable—as others, for example, Lefort, observed in stressing the indeterminacy of interpretation itself. It is significant that this affirmation occurs in Lefort’s book, Le travail de l’oeuvre machiavel, a work Merleau-Ponty took to be exemplary for the question of interpretation (VI: 186). Lefort, himself, invoking Blanchot’s notion of parole plurielle, viewed interpretation as an interminable entrietien that, knowingly or not, articulates and transforms the plurality of the work that solicits it.10 Merleau-Ponty, too, invoked Blanchot’s account of the plurality at the heart of the I’s ‘interior monologue,’ one that emerges from my relations with others and the relations between them: always ‘entre nous’ (IP: 200; VI: 246). The indeterminacy that accompanies the transformation and refinement of Merleau-Ponty’s work demonstrates the effect and the theoretical “stylistics” that attend such thinking (and historicity). Such indeterminacy bequeaths an open-ended space of interpretation— and this again for essential (and historical) reason. But it also entails that, so construed, even the return to the perceptual faith undertaken in the opening parts of The Visible and the Invisible, was equally ‘an exercise of history’ (VI: 186). As Merleau-Ponty saw, this expressive history was crucial, even—and perhaps especially—to Phenomenology’s own “perceptual faith,” which in turn became extended beyond the foundations of perception itself to include everything originary to man’s experience: ‘whether we are considering things perceived in the ordinary sense of the word, or his initiation into the past, the imaginary, language, the predicative truth of science, works of art, the other, or history’ (VI: 158). The opening lines of The Visible and the Invisible explains the gesture in this transformation: [Ceaselessly the philosopher finds himself] obliged to reinspect and redefine the most well grounded notions, to create new ones, with new words to designate them, to undertake a true reform of the understanding. . . . It is at the same time true that the world is what we see and that, nonetheless, we must learn to see it. (VI: 4–5) Again, this stress on radical invention is overstated; it is critical that we grasp it historically as a stress on reinvention. It is not accidental however that

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Merleau-Ponty invoked Kant’s reflective judgment in the Phenomenology’s Preface and the question of its rationality. Where the method is in doubt, as Kant realized with respect to reflective judgment, that is, where the particulars are “given” but their conceptual articulation is in question, what is at stake is more a manner than a demonstrable method.11 From Phenomenology’s beginning, neo-Kantianism condemned this account of a singular encounter as meaningless or irrational. Husserl’s classical formulations, as Merleau-Ponty notes, did not successfully escape these attacks. In invoking the singular encounter of Kant’s reflective judgment, Merleau-Ponty’s work is transgressing classical transcendentalism, the early Husserl’s included. To invoke Sartre’s terms, this often brought him to ‘cross paths’ with Heidegger, insofar as his task shared the conceptual “space” of the latter’s Seinsfrage and its stress upon finitude. Here, one might add, resides Heidegger’s interest in the Kantian schematism, one that the Phenomenology reaffirms (PoP: 426). Husserl throughout remained a Humean at this point, denying the problem of finitude played a role in either experience or judgment; it was simply a matter of articulating the constitutive sense-bestowals that had eluded Hume’s account of sensation. For Merleau-Ponty, however, even sensation itself betrays this Seinsfrage: the sensible is nothing but a “vague beckoning” for which ‘I must find the reply to a question which is obscurely expressed’ (PoP: 214). Beyond the a priori correlation of Being and intentional act, Heidegger construes the schematism, in accord with the Seinsfrage, not as technique or a methodical application but an “exploration”—or what Merleau-Ponty will call “interrogation.”12 And, both realized that it affected the very language of “lived experience” itself and attempts at its simple description. As Heidegger put it as early as 1919: ‘The term “lived experience” (Erlebnis) is today so faded and worn thin that, if it were not so fitting, it would be best to leave it aside.’13 Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty’s brief but decisive references to the third Critique established a path beyond the dissolutions of neo-Kantianism (and its manifold legacies), similarly returning us to the question of a singular encounter that precedes reduction as its Vorhabe.14 Granted the metonymy that attends the concept of experience, the phenomenological return to origins could no longer be conceived as a return to immediacy or to coincidence, nor could its method be circumscribed in pure (direct or simple) description (LI: 249). Phenomenology was neither simply conceptually determinate, nor simply aconceptual and ahistorical. Even its preconceptuality depended upon an exhibitio originera that, precisely because of its own historicity the stylistics of expressive speech (parole parlant) might still make explicit (PoP: 60–2).

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The result involves a complicated gesture, an experience that is equally the exploration and transformation of experiential context and a conceptual tradition. Moreover, this experience does not arise through a ‘reduction’ to a universal-singular (Sartre’s term). Here, too, history is ‘my life in others and the life of others in me’; it arises as a language ‘borne from intermediaries (a first-second person singular),’ as Merleau-Ponty put it, again in relation to Simon and Butor (TD: 141). From the Phenomenology of Perception onward, Merleau-Ponty had denied that our being-in-the-world could be reduced either to the reflective acts of the first-person standpoint (a Cogito) or third-person processes independent of our concrete involvement (PoP: 80). Now this event would need to be articulated through the sense-history of linguistic enunciation, a phenomenon that similarly contested first- and third-personal functional or foundational antinomies. At stake instead was a language of historical plurality or “interruption”—or in any case, attesting to the disruption in its midst, “interrupted sentences” again borne through intermediaries (TD: 141). In Merleau-Ponty’s case, these intermediaries often enough included Husserl, or Heidegger, or Fink or Sartre, or more distantly the postKantians—and even more distantly those in Descartes’ wake. But for reasons now evident, for Merleau-Ponty, the history of such “intermediaries” is a necessary aspect of coming to grips with the “experience” it unlocks. In its own way, it is the Wittgensteinian recognition that there is no private language. This too is part of the history of the failure of Cartesianism, and one, Merleau-Ponty himself was attempting more and more to rethink—albeit in ways clearly different from post-Wittgensteinian philosophers.

II. Historicity, the horizons of analysis and ‘the first-second person singular’ Mr. Ryle says that there are propositions in the first person and propositions in the third person. But if we are to speak of grammar [since he does] does he accept that there are also propositions in the second person, and that according to him one can pose philosophical problems in regard to them? Said otherwise, is the following a legitimate philosophical question: For what reason does it happen that the altogether extraordinary property [propriété] of those propositions in the first person is in some manner shared [participable] by other propositions besides the one we ourselves pronounce? When I hear Mr. Ryle, he is quite certain

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that I consider him as a first person who is not myself. Does this transference of the first person outside of ourselves raise a problem requiring philosophical elucidation? (TD: 68) Granted his insistence on Phenomenology’s historicity, Merleau-Ponty brought a very specific emphasis on this history of exchanges at the heart of experience, seeing it essential to grasping the rationality of philosophy and its task of ‘relearning to see the world.’ Again, it is most fully developed in his final years—and even in striking settings. Granted this emphasis, it is not surprising that Merleau-Ponty raised this issue, that is, the issue of ‘what we owe to others,’ in a conference at Royaumont in 1960. Gilbert Ryle suggested that the ‘Europeans’ read Husserl too ‘assiduously’ (a remark Ryle made to Van Breda). Instead of such homages to specific proper names, ‘the idea that one would be in total agreement with someone or about some problem, this seems to me to be the death blow to all philosophical enterprise’ (TD: 69–70). Indeed, Ryle replied, ‘to learn something from a philosopher is to learn to recognize those points on which one disagrees with him’ (TD: 70). Ryle’s presentation had been a summary of his book, The Concept of Mind, a work he described to his Royaumont audience as ‘a sustained essay in phenomenology.’15 As in other reviews and summaries of Phenomenology that he had undertaken over the years (including one of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit), Ryle did not import Phenomenology unchanged. He spent considerable time at Royaumont explaining what he called ‘the Cambridge transformation of the theory of concepts,’ a transformation that, following Frege and Wittgenstein, understood concepts as parts of (logical) sentences and the work of philosophy to ‘investigate the modi operandi of all the threads of a spider’s web of inter-working concepts.’ In so doing, he held, seemingly at odds with the phenomenologists in his audience, we can disentangle ‘elucidation from the obsessive notion of object description.’16 Ryle devoted considerable attention to undoing notions connected with classical accounts of phenomenological constitution. First, he distinguished dispositional and activity concepts, claiming that knowledge must as a result be understood as an achievement rather than an occult process. Second, in an analysis of imagination (noting his agreements with Sartre), he distinguished imagination from an internal or ‘private chamber’ whose contents are merely faint percepts. Finally, he distinguished between first-person and third-person pronouncements, claiming that first-person avowals of the ‘I think’ are not the result of an angelic observer or an expert but simply, like a report, an ‘avowal’ neither intrinsically connected with certitude nor

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authority. In fact such avowals remain conceptually unfixed. While Ryle’s formal presentation seemed confident concerning the analysis of such first-person avowals, he later admitted to being a little embarrassed; somewhat like Merleau-Ponty’s own phenomenological stoicism, such ‘avowals’ seem anomalous in the epistemological order: they are neither simply certain, nor simply deniable (TD: 70). Noting his considerable agreement with all of this at Royaumont, Merleau-Ponty, claiming to have previously ‘worked with his Concept of Mind,’ questioned Ryle’s presentation concerning an omission that, he suggested, had gone not only untreated, but also unrecognized in it (TD: 67). As has become evident, he had little reason to doubt that our concepts belong to a conceptual web, nor that knowledge had a grammar different from its process, nor that the imaginary and the real were distinct, nonprivate events and not simply the result of occult “acts.” Merleau-Ponty’s own account would involve different construals. For Merleau-Ponty, as has been emphasized, the web of belief was not without history and the articulation of this expressive history was essential to grasping its rationality. The achievement of knowledge was always an ongoing achievement within a context or horizon. While image and percept were to be distinguished, their distinction was not adequately grasped as one of strict opposition but would need to be parsed more in terms of their contextual intertwining, the reversible or reciprocal interdependence out of which they emerged. Still, his quarrel with Ryle did not center on these phenomenological distinctions—nor even, for the most part, the status of Phenomenology itself. He certainly did not think, for example, that the experience that accompanies our conceptual histories is incontestable. His question concerned the emergence of such a conceptual web and its strict distinction between propositions of the first and the second person. It concerned, as had a number of writings over the prior decade (still following the later Husserl), the question of our belonging to a tradition or ‘sense-history.’ This meant that the meanings at stake in this expressivity, and, in particular, the exploration it entailed, could not simply be reduced to what Husserl called conventional concepts or ordinary language (Wortbedeutung). The events (and the experience) in question were more complicated and would require further mining of Ryle’s loathed “object-description” for their grasp. As a Working Note from 1959 put it: One can claim that the order of the phenomenal is second by reference to the objective order, is but a province of it, when one considers only the intra-mundane relations between objects. But as soon as one introduces

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the other and even the living body, the work of art, the historical milieu, one realizes that the order of the phenomenal must be considered as autonomous and that, if one does not recognize the autonomy in it, it is definitely impenetrable. (VI: 209) It was just such considerations that had led Merleau-Ponty to expand the solipsistic account of Phenomenology to a “thick” description of the operative historical milieu that subtends analysis. As close as Ryle’s concern with propositions in the first person that ‘seem to present affirmations their author would be unable to doubt’ were to Husserl, it is clear such views, especially in a conference on Phenomenology, would have provoked critical response from Merleau-Ponty. Still, we should not jump to simplistic conclusions here, as did many of Merleau-Ponty’s poststructuralist successors, largely overwhelmed by concerns regarding the illusions of epistemic selfpresence, the problem of the unconscious, with their ensuing critique of the “subject.” Merleau-Ponty did not doubt an internal veridical connection between consciousness and certainty—or self-trust, I have argued. But from the outset he had ‘removed apodictic certainty’ and ‘full possession’ from the account of consciousness at stake (PoP: 343). Here, too, however, the situation is more complex than the classical Cartesian predicates allowed. He doubted neither their ontic nor transcendental necessity, nor their ontological contingency in the end. As Charles Taylor said of such ‘transcendental arguments,’ aptly a propos MerleauPonty, ‘there remains an ultimate, ontological question they cannot foreclose—for Kant, that of the things in themselves; for the thesis of embodied agency, the basic explanatory language of human behavior.’17 Merleau-Ponty acknowledged that even if we have no recourse but to trust our thoughts, we do so without immanent proof; here enters his debt to the likes of Bergson and Malebranche, Novalis and Schlegel, Montaigne and Machiavelli, or even Augustine and Socrates before them—a tradition Ryle clearly did not travel with. Indeed, when Ryle diagnosed it in Heidegger, he found an ‘odd smell’ to it.18 Merleau-Ponty found Ryle’s analysis concerning such “indubitabilities” further insufficient, however. What makes the experience trustworthy (albeit not indubitable) is precisely the experiential sequence to which it adheres. Merleau-Ponty thus questioned whether Ryle had sufficiently grasped and elucidated the enigma at stake in our sense-history, the rationality of its dialogue, or what Ryle called ‘the case where one person converses with another’ (TD: 70). This domain belongs neither to the realm of verifiable first-person certainty, nor refers timelessly to the metaphysical

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realm of average middle-size dry goods, nor is it immanently open to transparent analyses that might link them. Instead, the sequences, or to use Merleau-Ponty’s term, ‘transferences,’ he has in mind are interpersonal, cultural, and historical. At stake are cultural practices where both meaning and truth belong intrinsically or immanently to neither of “us,” but lie, if anywhere, sharable (participable) between us.19 Moreover, the contrast between shared iterable meaning and simple cognitive disagreement with the other (as Ryle had claimed) seemed profoundly insufficient to the exploratory task that lies at stake in its experience. The Vorhabe of this embodied history was not simply a matter of isolated speech acts, nor the possession of a discrete idiolect, nor a function of an ahistorical state of language open to simple analysis. As a result, his issue with Ryle became straightforward. While Ryle, as much as any Cartesian, admitted the important role of imagination or of invention, the question was whether he had sufficiently grasped the critical role of imagination, and our expressive ability not only to participate in and interpret, but to transcend and transform the (ontically) conventional: whether, consequently, he had sufficiently grasped language as an intersubjective, historical, and interrogative event (TD: 66–8). In fine, MerleauPonty wondered whether Ryle had adequately grasped the requisites of a philosophy of language, both concerning the (critical) rationality that exceeds the conventional and, thereby, the itinerary we have traced concerning writing itself. Does Mr. Ryle think that when we deal with dispositional concepts it is only a matter of knowing the regular usage of these concepts at play in a public language, or rather does he accept that philosophy can question the legitimacy of such concepts, the legitimacy of the notion of the possible and of its relations with that of the actual? (TD: 67) Now to speak truly, Merleau-Ponty’s critique of such conceptual limits was not unique to him; similar objections to the limitations of the analysis of conventional concept formation (hence to what Ryle circumscribed as the “Cambridge Transformation”) could be found throughout the descent of “Continental” philosophy, beginning with Husserl’s objections to Frege, or Heidegger’s to Carnap, or Habermas and Derrida’s to Searle and Austin.20 What was unique to Merleau-Ponty’s objection was less an emphasis on a foundational or transcendental semantics than an emphasis on the rational expressivity that critically accompanies, exceeds, and potentially transforms the “web of belief.”

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Hence, against Ryle’s lingering ‘Cartesianism,’ and in accord with his similar criticism of Husserl’s transparent elucidations of acts and contents, his ‘actualism,’ Merleau-Ponty questioned whether this set of issues were not still ‘a problem requiring philosophical elucidation’ (TD: 67–8). Later he would say in reference to the Royaumont event, ‘one might wonder if truly productive and creative work can take place in the midst of such impromptu personal exchanges’ (TD: 9).21 Against Ryle’s assertion that to learn something from a philosopher is to recognize one’s disagreements, Merleau-Ponty claimed, in accord with his account of the rationality of expression, that ‘refutations are not very interesting. It is better to attempt to produce what one reproaches others for not bringing forth’ (TD: 9). Clearly, to use Husserl’s term, two very different ‘styles’ of philosophizing were at work. Still, Merleau-Ponty was insisting that the implications of such second-person elucidations were not simply of regional import. Nor, granted the historicity at stake, did it simply involve a negation of the conventional or the classical, which would again involve a “retreat” from our historicity. Precisely therein lay the problem of our relation to institution, history, and tradition—and in general, as has been seen, the problem of the classical itself. Such ‘classical’ philosophers (and their texts) ‘are recognized by the fact that no one takes them literally [à la lettre] and yet new facts are never absolutely outside their province but call forth new echoes from them and reveal new lustres [reliefs] in them’ (S: 11). Merleau-Ponty had claimed more positively in this regard (and as early as 1949) that ‘Husserl’s philosophical endeavor deserves by now the name of a classic’ (TD: 161). At one point at Royaumont, Ryle spoke similarly of his relation to Wittgenstein and Russell, who had ‘opened some pathways without giving the solution to any problems’ (TD: 70). But, as has become evident, it was not simply problems and solutions that were at stake in such pathways, nor could the latter’s emergence, coherence (nor ‘theory of concepts’) be reduced to such logical problemata. It could not be simply a matter of problems and solutions, or truths and refutations were at stake: ‘as if the “true” and the “false” were the only modes of intellectual existence’ (S: 10). All emerge from a historical context and undergo transformation. Beyond such isolated analyses of meaning-invariance, the dialectic of problems and solutions arises out of, gains prominence and coherence, validity and contestation (again, their sedimentation and potential) only within a certain sense-history. As remote as they might seem from all this, similar charges were raised at the same time by Theodor Adorno in an exchange with Karl Popper.

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Popper’s claim that ‘what really exists are problems and solutions, and scientific traditions’ was similarly criticized by Adorno for making the concept of problem itself ‘atomistic.’ It was incapable of accounting either for rational (or dialectical) development—or its experience.22 Moreover, Adorno, too, linked this issue explicitly to Husserl’s late account of sensehistory.23 Still, Husserl’s ‘inner history’ Adorno claimed, ‘cannot remain internal, a pure form.’24 The inner historicity of thought is inseparable from its content, and thus inescapable from its concrete history. And, for the latter, ‘a fictitious, one-dimensional “now” cannot become the cognitive ground of all inner meaning.’25 The double intentionality of such a ‘now,’ the dialectic between historical flux and content would require further exploration of a history that cannot be possessed in the immanence of a subjective present—nor even a simple intersubjective present. In a text on the question of interpreting Husserl, Merleau-Ponty had similarly railed against meditations disguised as dialogue when what lies at stake is an event possessed by neither, where modification cannot, to use Husserl’s terms, be a matter of isolation, formulation and simple repetition (Nacheinander), but always involves rational articulation and development. If, suitably transformed, Husserl remained a “classic” for Merleau-Ponty, if his accounts still remained significant, it was ‘precisely because he is not enclosed (Wittgenstein) (the British) in the immanence of language, conceived as thing, but follows its implication of sense: they unconceal’ (HLP: 43). This remained the purport of the question Merleau-Ponty raised in articulating, especially after 1950, the problem of our rational relation to other philosophers as a specific (critical) instance of phenomenological intersubjectivity—or, in general, how we belong to others as Ineinander. The intersubjective here eludes classical phenomenological formulation: the other is neither (or not simply) epistemically our double (or our rival) nor ontologically the opening of a nihilation, as Sartre thought. Nor, inversely, is the other our initiation into the infinite, as Levinas thought. Instead, first and foremost the other involves our ‘initiation to a symbolics,’ in which ‘being for itself and the being for the other are reflective variants and not the essential forms’ (VI: 80–1n). Hence we are always already beyond monologics; or, put otherwise, the solipsistic monologue of the self is always a modification of a more generalized experience and it symbolics. In this history language and the others ‘teach me my thoughts.’ Even in the alleged silence of the reduction Merleau-Ponty again invoked Blanchot’s notion of interior monologue—and indirectly, the plurality of speech or ‘polylogue’ out of which monologue and dialogue are variants themselves.26 This, too, affects the rationality of our historicity. How does one elucidate what cannot be

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in any simple sense reduced and possessed, but must instead, precisely out of this plurality, be explicated and opened up or exhibited—indeed like time and historicity itself? Merleau-Ponty elsewhere claimed with respect to the classical, “pairing” Freud and Husserl on the question of the unconscious, that what was at stake was a question of our “archaeology.” What is required to account for such a sedimented history is less a logical architectonics than the archaeology of the horizons and reliefs, or profiles of our present. The necessity for such an archeology had also become increasingly clear. What fails about the intentional analysis, as he had again learned from Fink, who had first invoked the need for such an archeology, is that it abstracts such analysis from its emergence. As in the Freudian case, that of the past, Husserl’s account of consciousness continually blocks the acknowledgment that ‘the past is no longer here a “modification” of the Bewusstsein von, conversely it is the Bewusstsein von, the having perceived that is borne by the past as massive Being’ (VI: 244). The same of course is true of our relation to the “monumental past” of language (la langue); again, ‘the present in the broad sense is a symbolic matrix’ (VI: 192). In both cases (like that of the visible and the invisible, or the real and the imaginary), it is a mistake to think of consciousness reducing or dissolving the shadow that haunts it. Rather ‘the philosopher must bear his shadow, which is not simply the factual absence of light’ (S: 178). In neither of these cases is consciousness simply dissolved into its opposite, its unconscious, as in the idealist tradition (or its inversions), but emerges precisely rather as Ineinander, to again use Husserl’s term. In a Working Note dating from the same time as his encounter with Ryle, even perhaps with the charge that Europeans read Husserl too assiduously in mind, Merleau-Ponty wrote the following: There is a danger that a philosophy of speech [parole] would justify the indefinite proliferation of writings—and even pre-writings (working notes—Husserl’s Forschungsmanuskript. With him notion of the Arbeitsproblem—Arbeit: that impossible enterprise of grasping the transcendental consciousness in the act). (VI: 239) Husserl initially had wrestled with the issue of Phenomenology’s ‘impossibility’ in the form of objections made by Natorp, who had doubted claims to immediacy such as Husserl’s (LI: 548–9). Before that, postKantians like Novalis already claimed that all of explications of the ego would be symbolic, indirect, figurative or ‘hieroglyphic.’27 This is the elusive

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circle of ipseity and articuleme noted previously. As has become evident, Merleau-Ponty’s Notes de travail themselves indicate a similar Arbeitsproblem. But they also trace the lineaments of a text that refuses to erase the Arbeitsproblem itself. Again to use Lefort’s terms, they outline this task in which philosophy both as experience and concept (as both travail and oeuvre) exceeds the said and its past. Merleau-Ponty’s refigurations of Husserl provide us precisely with an example of how not to read Husserl ‘too assiduously,’ a hermeneutics that extends its sense-history beyond the honorifics of the proper name. Merleau-Ponty realized (and indeed realized in his response to Ryle) that the rationality of such a “hermeneutics” requires a philosophy that depends upon the expressive resources, the plasticity of language—or its ‘langagière’ character, as he puts it following his study of Saussure. Beyond being a mere “inventory of meanings” such resources critically open the possibility that imagination and invention might still justify the task itself by means of its own development: ‘Auseinander,’ to use Husserl’s terms—or ‘complication’ to use Bachelard’s. As the Phenomenology’s Preface had put it in reference to Fink, this would involve ‘taking our own history upon ourselves’ (PoP: xx). The only works that would escape the ‘proliferation’ of writings, Merleau-Ponty’s Working Note on the Arbeitsproblem somewhat cynically suggests, would be “academic.” Instead, granted the possibility he had sought to defend, granted, that is, the langagière character of expressivity he concludes: ‘There is a remedy, which is not to return to American analytic-academic method—which would be to retreat from the problem—but to proceed over and beyond by facing the things again’ (VI: 239). He had previously said that it is in grasping the transformational potential in language, its expressive capacity for proceeding ‘over and beyond’ the conventional, that ‘we would best see how we are to and how we are not to return to the things themselves’ (VI: 125). We do so by inhabiting the metonymy of experience, confronting both our conceptual past and our lived experience and depending upon the expressive possibilities latent in history and language itself, a capacity that exceeds the language (la langue) of direct (conventional) reference: a ‘sur-signification,’ as he said of surrealism (S: 234). Merleau-Ponty emphasized this “indirect” or “diacritical” potential to which, he claimed, the diachronic expressivity of language implicitly attests. Yet his study of Saussure had also revealed thought’s dependence upon language for its internal coherence: the things themselves could not be accessed by the single blow or the reduction of a single reflective idiolect. As much as Ryle’s insistence on ‘the Cambridge transformation

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of the theory of concepts,’ Saussure’s theory dictated that Husserl’s Cartesiansim would have to be abandoned. Still, neither logic, nor method nor even the possibility of recognizing language as work (oeuvre) have been denied—if they have been mutually ventured (and limited) in this opening (TD: 66). Neither analysis, nor judgment, nor identity has been denied; instead they are differentiations that depend upon the constellation from which they emerge. To still invoke the terms of Husserl’s sense-history, they depend upon the particular expressive “space” of rational-exhibition within which they become intelligible—their spectacle, their Schauspiel (K: 16).

III. The ‘dehiscence’ of interpretation, the body as mise en scène and philosophy as incarnate history ‘I realize that the painter interprets it,’ said Cézanne. ‘The painter is not an imbecile.’ (SNS: 15) Writing, after Merleau-Ponty, is thus a historical task involving expressive interpretation and refiguration. In ‘The Philosopher and His Shadow,’ Merleau-Ponty warns us against simply seeing interpretation in terms of the boundaries of representation, either in terms of recovery and simple iteration or simple surpassing and distortion: The reason why we think that interpretation is restricted to either inevitable distortion or literal reproduction is that we want the meaning of a man’s works to be wholly positive and by rights susceptible to an inventory which sets forth what is and is not in those works. (S: 159–60) Once more, Merleau-Ponty writes specifically of Husserl. He does so by invoking Heidegger’s claim that ‘the greater the work accomplished . . . the richer the unthought-of-element in that work’ (S: 160). MerleauPonty’s “interpretations” of Husserl were notoriously complex—and not least of all complicated from the beginning with attempting to read him in confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with Heidegger (PoP: vii). Both Husserl and Heidegger had invoked this term for the historical emergence of philosophy. Still, Husserl and Heidegger were too often at odds with one another to apply one style of reading to the other: either Husserl’s “scientific” descriptions or Heidegger’s “hermeneutic” or poetic interpretations.

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Husserl continually argued that his histories were neither interpretations nor mere ‘views.’ Heidegger, however, acknowledged the ‘violence’ of his own interpretations. As ever, Merleau-Ponty continued to try to think between these theoretical differences, or, in any case, to view them as mutually enlightening. From the outset, the Phenomenology had also carried on an extensive “deconstruction” of interpretation as a representation or application (PoP: 33–7). It did so not simply in favor of “mute” or pure description but in favor of the gesture of expression that accompanies discernment: without, that is, reducing it to strict “noetic” subsumption. The point, again, was to capture the event and its conceptuality in its complexity. Such interpretations are reducible neither to judgment (application) nor phantasm (illusion). It involves first and foremost the development of our historical opening upon the work and its “visibility,” it’s ‘shadowingforth,’ its Ab-schattung beyond representation. As he put it with respect to Husserl: ‘there is no dilemma of objective interpretation or arbitrariness with respect to these articulations, since (like shadow and reflection) they would be destroyed by being subject to analytic observation or taken out of context, since we can be faithful to and find them only by thinking again’— only by refiguring them (S: 160). Granted trends toward creative redescriptions and textual idealism, however, it is worthwhile to point out what does not result from MerleauPonty’s synthesis between the ‘unthought-of elements’ of Husserl and Heidegger’s works. It might be thought that the greater the work the more we find ourselves in them, the more they provoke us, and thereby the richer the truth they motivate. This is not the case. Rather, such a view articulates the field of rationality or sense-genesis less as a field of provocations (or sublime effects) than a field that remains “rationally motivated”: again, both imaginatively developed and critically modified. The point is less that such a field belies logic and argument or rational development than that such arguments are always historically articulated. Nor is this to reduce the ontological to the ontic or its phantasm. It is to acknowledge the emergence and development of the rational itself. Of, course, not just any interpretation of the object will do. As Husserl realized early on—and it is the phenomenological claim to which all in his wake assented—‘we are not wholly free to interpret a content as this or as that . . . since the content to be interpreted sets limits to us’ (LI: 741–2). Still, this content only emerges out of an equally specific operative history. Hence then the chiasma of its twofold character: the “dehiscence of interpretation” and “shadowing-forth” of the visible. Here, too, Heidegger may have forgotten ‘the “mirrors” of Being’ in which we operate in ciphering

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the ontological differences (TL: 112). Even Merleau-Ponty’s commitments to the primacy of perception and the “pre-objective order” continues to articulate the ciphering of the difference in its “circularity”: The pre-objective order is not primary, since it is established (and to tell the truth fully begins to exist) only by being fulfilled in the founding of logical objectivity. Yet logical objectivity is not self-sufficient: it is limited to consecrating the labors of the pre-objective layer, existing only as the outcome of the Logos of the esthetic world.(S: 173) While Merleau-Ponty still approaches this relation as one of Fundierung, he had increasingly explored the “circularity,” the dialectic and ultimately the “reversibility” at stake through figures in the history of philosophy such as Schelling and Hegel, or Lukács and Heidegger. The point remains the same: if we are to arrive at this “pre-objective” or “preconventional” world, the issue is how? Husserl and Merleau-Ponty concurred that there is a circularity to this endeavor. Merleau-Ponty further stressed that our interrogation is always ‘de-centered’ in relation to the factical or conventional history from which it emerges: it is always a coherent deformation (HLP: 26). If the rational is the infinite task of critique and verification, there remains the task of its exceeding, ‘experiencing the excess of what is to be said’ (S: 53). Moreover, this remains true even if, as was Husserl’s logicist or at least nomological (and hence still neo-Kantian) tendency, the rational is viewed as the infinite reiteration (or return) of the Same. The rational is insufficiently thought as mere iteration, merely the performative achievement of following a rule or norm. Such an account might stipulate the truth conditions of a given theory, but it would not account for its rational development, complication, or theory-change. Critically, even the confirmation of past practices requires that we (comparatively and differentially) exceed them: only in such development, in the exceeding of expression and our critical ability to distance ourselves from the past can it be the case that in such iterations ‘our present keeps the promises of the past; we keep others’ promises’ (S: 95). There is, to reiterate Husserl’s terms, a certain ‘symbolic rhythmics’ to the transcendental moment; not simply factically but rationally the present exceeds its Jetzpunkt, as extensio and its horizon. The acknowledgment of this symbolic rhythmics was perhaps as close as Husserl came to acknowledging (without grasping its problematic status) what Kant called, and Heidegger reemphasized, the issue of transcendental schematism. Such a schematism at the heart of the rational, ‘an art concealed in the depths of the human

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soul,’ to use Kant’s terms, would figurally discern or introduce order, an exhibitio originera, into the mere lapse of time and the ‘rhapsody of perception.’28 Against it, Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis upon the body, or the body schema as ‘a universal setting, a schema of all types of perceptual unfolding,’ still seemed to many to threaten to collapse into naturalism (PoP: 326). Or, alternately, this emphasis seemed to involve simply the Nietzschean reduction of spirit to the ‘great intelligence’ of the body, simply a matter or existential or ‘earthly virtue,’ to use Nietzsche’s terms. Without denying such allusions, the point for Merleau-Ponty was equally that the “science” Phenomenology had found in the question of the body was less a psychological or simply a natural event than the ‘opening’ and ‘dehiscence’ of the origin, the advent of the universal. It is so as the sedimentation of history, individual, and culture, as Husserl already realized— even if he did not grasp its epistemic consequences (PAS: 637). Granted the incarnate ‘symbolic matrix’ out of which the rational becomes articulated, the body could not be viewed, as it had been previously, as an appendage, for example, simply the tool of reason (Fichte) nor even the organ of the a priori (Cohen); but nor could its simple (thematic or a ahistorical) description be viewed as its solution, a substantive truth empirical science had simply overlooked.29 As Merleau-Ponty asserts, at stake is ‘not a concession of mind to nature: for although meaning is everywhere figurative, it is meaning which is at stake everywhere’ (S: 180). Now, Merleau-Ponty has much to add to both an empirical science of the “lived body” and the analyses of philosophical psychology. Neither, of course, can be equated with his account of philosophy—nor with Phenomenology understood as a conceptual or transcendental science.’ The reason the body could not be viewed as a foundation for a renewed science of Phenomenology is that claims to immanence or ultimate self-possession here involved a certain conceptual illusion that was also transcendental. Such initial analyses, as Fink had already pointed out, were always provisional. There remained the task of taking our history upon ourselves. In this regard, Fink understood Phenomenology’s science of infinite tasks in terms of the illusive search for the whole of transcendental dialectic, the relation of the given to the not-given.30 Here, too, ‘the very idea of a complete statement is inconsistent’ (S: 17). Stated otherwise, the very “metonomy” that attaches to the experience of the “lived body” indicates conceptually both a certain reversibility and a certain disequilibrium at the heart of our discourses about reason and truth, sensibility and intelligibility: Being and beings, to use Heidegger’s terms. In this light, the point of Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis upon the lived body was not that it provided the solution to the question of

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Being nor that it provided the first principles of a science transcendental reflection could not. Instead, the body’s “meting out” of physis and logos, was the milieu or opening, the mise en scène of the rational as an experiential history, its incarnate or “l’histoire sauvage”—and not its ultimately clarified Archimedean point (IP: 179). The result involved an unwieldy event. Even Heidegger himself, who concerned himself both with the question of being and its opening (Offenheit) had missed this in claiming that the phenomenology of the body presupposes the Seinsfrage.31 The priority of the body with respect to the a priori, in accord with the reversibility of the visible and the invisible, is that of concomitant of the Seinsfrage and its ‘equiprimordiality of constitutive items.’32 The experience of time is always ‘someone’s’: there is ‘one sphere of being that is so close to me’ that ‘I cannot see it, just as I cannot see my face’ (PoP: 422–3). My body is no more detachable from the experience of Being than the operant history that it incarnates. As was the case with Husserl’s transcendental ego, the body cannot be treated as the Seinsfrage’s ‘shadow or wake’ (PoP: 426). Its omission from Heidegger’s account is not simply an oversight that would be undone by simple emendation, nor perhaps even by further phenomenological Inderweltsein description: it was, part and parcel bound up with the question of historicity and Weltlichkeit itself. Arguably, this lapsus judicii threatened to turn Heidegger’s Offenheit itself, like so many of Heidegger’s articulemes, mythic in themselves, disjoined from the diacritics of sedimentation and their own sense-history (cf. NC: 127). While Heidegger had acknowledged the hermeneutic status of Phenomenology, rarely did he explicitly practice the ciphering of the views and concepts that articulate (and are presupposed by) his account— even if, as he argued, such ciphering was an historical matter. Had he done so, surely the stark reality of its status would have been simply apparent: the concept of the body could not simply be parsed ontically or ontologically. Within the concepts of classical ontology, at the risk of illusions as semantic as they are transcendental, the lived body can be neither simply theoretically constructed nor readily deconstructed, complicating Phenomenology’s reductionist commitments. To use terms of Derrida, Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the lived ‘body’ is one of those cases in which ‘[t]radition’s name are maintained, but they are struck with the difference between the major and the minor. The archaic and the classical. This is the only way, within discourse, to mark that which separates discourse from its excess.’33 As Merleau-Ponty himself put it: ‘I have always been struck by the fact that when he touched on the body [corps], Husserl does not speak the same language.’34 The lived body cannot be transcendentally reduced. The concept

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of the “lived body,” interminably divided between Erlebnis and Erfahrung, its “experience” as lived and as theoretical exposition, belies the attempt to derive it from either a prior totality or a first principle—and hence, to speak Kantian (and Heidegger did at this point), any cosmotheology or ontotheology.35 Thus, even on Heideggerean grounds, the question of embodiment, for reasons both a priori historical and a posteriori, “empirical,” would involve an inextricable articuleme of the Seinsfrage itself. Without becoming foundational—after all, strictly taken, it is neither simply an experience nor a concept that is at stake—the body’s ‘dehiscence’ incarnates both as an “experiential” and a conceptual problematic or mise en scène. Looking back upon these debates we can say that Merleau-Ponty’s reluctance to separate experience and concept was not simply a matter of “ambiguity,” to use his famous word. Nor was it simply his reliance on a ‘good ambiguity in the phenomenon of expression,’ a certain acknowledgment of the ancient analogy of being now in ruins (PP: 11). Rather, without wholly abandoning either, it is the acknowledgment of the historicity and coherent deformation within the institution of Phenomenology itself. Against the lingering foundationalism of a phenomenology of perception, Merleau-Ponty came to realize that, rather than founding ideality, that is, the invisible, the visible always already “adheres” to it, that the visibles themselves ‘are only centered on a nucleus of absence . . . the invisible community, the invisible other, the invisible culture’ (VI: 229). This sheds light on how we are to grasp his late notion of simultaneity that facilitates several entries, a simultaneity in which ‘to go in one direction is truly to go in the other’ (HLP: 41). In accord with the metonymy or the chiasm that accompanies experience, such simultaneity did not result in an Identitätsphilosophie, but a philosophy of “thick identity,” of reversibility and latency, where the visible is never without its invisible matrix and the invisible never fully detaches from its lived or incarnate history. Our descriptions are always theory-laden: our theoretical analyses always contextually and historically embodied, dependent upon our inventive capacities to refigure the past and the received views.

IV. Philosophy and ‘the murmur’ of the word In this stress upon Phenomenology’s theoretical refinement or refiguration, Merleau-Ponty increasingly aligned himself with the “figural” language of aesthetics and the task of the writer as ‘irreplaceable’ sources for articulating

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the world and ‘the history of Being’ (NC: 204). Similarly emerging from an interrupted or fragmented history, both the aesthetic and philosophy, extending beyond reduction or identity, ‘oblige us to admit a truth which does not resemble things’ (S: 57). Still, this is by no means to say that philosophy, by an inversion of the expressive antinomy simply becomes poetry or literature any more than they operate out of unbridgeable opposition—and we should not miss the differences at stake. For example, Michael Foucault, also in the early 1960s, attended to what he called the ‘invasion’ of philosophy by the novel. For him, however, it indicated ‘the inadequacy, the profound silence, of a philosophical language that has been chased from its natural element, from its original dialectics, by the novelists found in its domains.’36 In its midst Foucault, following Bataille, and yet still in this regard Sartrean, found only a stark antinomy.37 We do not experience the end of philosophy, but a philosophy which regains its speech and finds itself again only in the marginal region which borders its limits: that is, which finds itself either in a purified metalanguage or in the thickness of words enclosed by their darkness, by their blind truth.38 This blind truth that escapes rational discourse through recourse to the ‘murmur’ of words is what Foucault previously analyzed in various permutations throughout his explorations of the history of madness. For classical reason such madness had been fully exclusionary; it operates by ‘a law which excludes all dialectic and all reconciliation.’39 For the madman ‘the shadows are the way to perceive daylight. Which means that, seeing the night and nothingness of the night, he does not see at all.’40 Literature preserves the excluded or blind truth of this murmur: it is ‘the contestation of philology’ and leads language back to the naked power of speech. Beyond the grasp of the object of knowledge, beyond the attempts to control or mastering language, it affirms ‘its own precipitous existence.’41 This contrasts with the totalizing internalization to which Foucault links philosophy since Kant. Philosophy now finds itself split asunder, divided by the techniques of formalization or the limits of a literature that escapes it in affirming ‘the thickness of words enclosed by their blind truth.’42 Again with reference to Bataille, who exemplifies this encounter, as Warhol did in painting, Foucault states that, viewed from the standpoint of reflection, philosophy here encounters ‘the possibility of the mad philosopher.’43 Elsewhere Foucault had dismissed the Derridean notion of écriture and its own attempts to surmount the subjective domination of the text as simply

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the return of the transcendental. It returns now as an anonymous transcendental subject reintroducing ‘the religious principle of hidden margins (which require interpretation) and the critical assumption of implicit signification, silent purposes, and obscure contents (which give rise to commentary).’44 As proximate as this may seem to Merleau-Ponty’s account of indirect meaning, for reason already clear, it is not. Indeed, his response to both Derrida and Foucault would be similar. Against such a ‘blind truth’ within the murmur of the word, MerleauPonty ventured the expressive potential of language—again, its ‘silence’ as he put it following Mallarmé (S: 44). As has been seen, he also identified with a certain surrealism whose acknowledgment of ‘sur-signification’ or ‘semantic thickness’ in language remains ‘one of the constants of our time’ (S: 234). Without appealing to a gaze or a metalanguage that would dominate the “dispersion” of language, he found in the novelists’ expression an attempt, beyond the constraints of algorithm and the ‘blind truth’ of fiction, at saying ‘the things themselves’ anew. He relied on what Blanchot called the alterity in philosophical discourse, one, Blanchot, in turn, found in Merleau-Ponty’s own.45 Not without poetry perhaps, but not simply in turning propositions into poetry, The Visible and the Invisible thus began: [P]hilosophy is not a lexicon, it is not concerned with ‘word-meanings,’ it does not seek a verbal substitute for the world we see, it does not transform it into something said, it does not install itself in the order of the said or of the written as does the logician in the proposition, the poet in the word, or the musician in the music. It is the things themselves, from the depths of their silence, that it wishes to bring to expression. (VI: 4) Here we would return to things “in the flesh” and the world of the flesh (S: 167). As his references to Claude Simon or Proust in articulating the flesh of the world (la chair du monde) indicate, Merleau-Ponty could deploy the figures of literary within the philosopher’s text—and, in particular, Husserl’s later account of intersubjectivity as intercorporeality—to express this task (NC: 204–19).46 But as Blanchot reminds us, like Heidegger’s “aletheia” or Hegel’s “Aufheben,” ‘the one with the help of a hypothetical (or probable) etymology, the other by a verbal analysis,’ such figures are not simply borrowed or invoked, but are argumentatively invented.47 The Working Notes to The Visible and the Invisible clearly articulate this movement, distinguishing the flesh from a simple metaphor.48 This is neither simply recourse to formal analysis nor an attempt to dominate or control language—any more than it is an abandonment of

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the rational for the murmur of the word. Merleau-Ponty has detached the phenomenological project from its classical reading: the philosopher is no longer ‘philosopher-subject, master of all that is possible’ (S: 104). Writing is no longer an exercise in representation, but, again, a ‘hieroglyphics’ that attaches to historical dialectic detached from totalization, from internalization (NC: 203). Like all dialectical thought, for Merleau-Ponty, it ‘appears through a plural participation’ and maintains ‘the contours of the multiple’ (Themes: 57). Merleau-Ponty thus resumes the countermovement to the totalizing dialectic of Western thought that, Foucault claims, originates in Kant’s anthropological thought.49 For Foucault, this countermovement originated in ‘the post-Kantian crisis’ where ‘the fundamental concerns of Western culture abruptly emerged’ and challenged the former.50 Against such totalizing dialectic, on Foucault’s Bataillian reading, Hölderlin links the work to ‘its own absence and to dissolution in the madness that had accompanied it from the beginning.’51 In this context, I have argued, Merleau-Ponty, still proximate to Blanchot, would need to be understood in relation to Novalis and Schlegel: an experiment or passage that refuses ‘direct thought’ and refigures the priority (and independence) of direct reference. Writing of Schlegel’s account of the fragment, Blanchot stated that such ‘fragmentary writing is risk’; it refuses to ‘separate speaking and silence; it makes of silence already a kind of speaking; already it says in silence the speaking that silence is.’52 MerleauPonty and Blanchot concurred that literary modernism (e.g. Mallarmé, Baudelaire) involved further exploration of this silent potential in language. Again, the dialectic between expression and the expressed, beyond iteration and primary recollection, becomes an exploration of the possible, an exploratory venture, an historical adventure of the philosophical dialectic (HLP: 20). But, for Merleau-Ponty, it likewise proceeds out of a specific context or theoretical constellation and is tied to a specific coherence out of which analysis and problematization emerges. Equally significant is that that he could read Husserl dialectically here, acknowledging again that ‘these adventure of constitutive analysis—these encroachments, reboundings, and circularities’ that belie the distinction of the continuous and the discontinuous ‘do not . . . seem to bother Husserl very much’ (S: 177). As has been seen, this dialectic remains proximate to Adorno’s critique of positivism. Less inclined to view the horizons of phenomenological and concrete history to be opposed, Merleau-Ponty further extended the Husserlian account of a sense-history than Adorno. For example, Lukács’s critique of ‘direct thought’ remained part of the explorations of sense-history in the

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itinerary of Merleau-Ponty’s writing. Indeed it might be taken to be essential to the explorations at stake in much of his writing. Adorno, too, had emphasized écriture as a hieroglyph and had found it characteristic of modern works—though it is true of all art works that they require additional interpretation in that ‘they remain hieroglyphs of which the code has been lost.’53 As Merleau-Ponty added, in this regard, it is not a question of classical works of art being finished and modern ones fragmentary. When we are told this, he said in 1947, we should be reminded that even Leonardo left unfinished works: ‘“modern” consciousness has not discovered a modern truth but rather a truth of all time which is simply more visible—supremely acute—in today’s world’ (WP: 112). Hence the prominence—and the rationality—of the fragment.54 Now Husserl, too (like Hegel before him), had traced the significative functions of both speech and writing back to the hieroglyphic, understanding the process of the emergence of the representative sign as a process of ‘wearing away and later on by the formation of technical terms, algebraic symbols and so on.’55 Merleau-Ponty had denied, as he had denied the apodicticities and self-possession of consciousness, that such wearing away ever achieves completeness (complètitude); beyond description or representation, the task of the exploration of significative transcendence remains inextricable. The exploratory “sur-signification” at stake in all expression is not simply a murmur, nor a transgression of limits, nor only a distortion of the literal (both of which remain Kantian themes); it is equally part of the fecundity that facilitates historical rationality (HLP: 20). Truths of the past are not simply relegated to the past but become critically refigured. This, again, is his account of the classics. But it is not simply a humanist hermeneutics that is at stake. ‘Even in the sciences,’ as Merleau-Ponty pointed out, ‘an outdated theoretical framework can be reintegrated into the language of the one that replaced it’ (S: 10). This curvature in the system of signs, this metaphorization, is equally essential to the rationality of science.56 Thus, attempts, following Foucault, to consign Merleau-Ponty’s account of originary language to the irrational murmur of madness, the antipode to reduction to a pure grammar, have missed the account.57 Rather it invokes an account of imagination that is essential to the rational and its history, as a transformation or ‘variation of “conventions,” always vorgegeben’ (NC: 127). This is also true of Merleau-Ponty’s refiguration of the flesh in The Visible and the Invisible, which has ‘no name in traditional philosophy’ (VI: 139). The Working Notes demonstrate how the ‘flesh,’ too, becomes intelligible by means of a conceptual history; it emerges through refigurations

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of Husserl and Hegel, Kant and Descartes. In so doing, as he put it somewhat autobiographically elsewhere, while the nineteenth century understood the body as a bit of matter ‘[t]he twentieth century has restored and deepened the notion of flesh’ (S: 227). More pragmatic hopes that one could do without such figures, that one could have Heidegger without the Seinsfrage or Merleau-Ponty without the flesh simply look retrospectively like a positivist hangover. Such hopes would find here only an appeal to mythic source of knowledge or a poetry the scientist could not distinguish from babble.58 Clearly, this too, operates under the dichotomies of the classical reason, condemning what cannot be perspicuously brought to light to babble, or to use what, since Hobbes, has been its philosophical expression, ‘jargon.’59 Such claims, again to speak Kantian, still suffered (rightly or wrongly attempting to dissolve the transcendental) from their own transcendental illusion. The appeal to transcendence may not be the whole of the rational, any more than it might be its foundation, but neither can it be excluded nor reduced from it. As Heidegger originally saw regarding the ‘abortive attempt’ to interpret imagination through anthropological (pragmatic) reduction: ‘anthropology does not pose the question of transcendence at all.’60 Moreover, Heidegger first found this blindness in Hobbes himself.61 The issue of transcendence reraises the ancient problem of Being itself, which, as Aristotle originally formulated it, could be “said” in many ways. Clearly Merleau-Ponty’s “concept” of the flesh has not been univocally vindicated (i.e. demonstrated) by opening the conceptual space of its possibility; this is what separates his expositions from transcendental deduction. The issue of the plurality of theoretical languages is unavoidable. Hence Merleau-Ponty’s approving citation of Neils Bohr’s account of semiological and cultural plurality: ‘The traditional differences [between cultures] . . . in many respects resemble the difference and equivalent ways in which physical experiences may be described’ (S: 122). This semantic “polymorphism” reminds us that, for Merleau-Ponty, even physical experience in its internal differences (and equivalences) is not a concept without analogical or figurative edge; we should not loose the rational complexity here. ‘No ontology is exactly required by the thought proper to physics’— any more, perhaps, than the notion of flesh in Merleau-Ponty’s own case was without physical or biological articulation and rational implication (VI: 17; N: 139–53). Both remain echoed in his lingering invocation of the Husserlian ontological concept of worldhood and the task of its epistemic (and evidential) encounter with ‘the things themselves.’ The question was whether this event had been captured in its specificity, whether, in its haste

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to imitate science, philosophy, even phenomenological philosophy, had owned up to the concrete and the ‘fragility of the real’. This is true both respect to the fragmented character of its experience and the plurality of its ‘models.’62 Here as Merleau-Ponty again put it, at the same time as his discussion with Ryle, ‘Anglo-American analytic philosophy is a deliberate retreat into a universe of thought where contingency, ambiguity, and the concrete have no place’ (TD: 9). As Charles Taylor argued, instead of acknowledging the expressive-historical dimension of language, ‘what emerges in the AngloSaxon world is a range of theories which are still in line of descent from the original epistemological and naturalist insights. They are still founded on the notion of representation.’63 In light of our remove from these debates, we may have come to doubt these oppositions concerning the “continents.” For Merleau-Ponty, in any case, this retreat was true of all thought that was stifled by ‘Cartesianism,’ and thereby the bulk of contemporary philosophy.64 In this respect there is no little irony in MerleauPonty’s condemnations of Cartesianism. Every bit as much as his own The Structure of Behavior, Ryle’s Concept of Mind had intently criticized the Cartesian ‘ghost’ in the machine. During the time of his exchange with Ryle, and in the very same terms, Merleau-Ponty had criticized the false “immanence” of Gueroult’s rationalist account of Cartesianism that had reduced it to an axiomatic system of problems. Grasping the history of Cartesianism would again require ‘use of the history operative within us’; it would require that we ‘read between the lines’ in order to grasp not only its meaning (or its failures), but equally its possibility and a truth beyond resemblance or representation (HLP: 14; VI: 198). Merleau-Ponty’s gloss on Cartesianism and its doubles still invokes the antinomies (and ghosts) of contemporary philosophy. Perhaps more to the point was his claim that ‘our science and our philosophy are two faithful and unfaithful consequences of Cartesianism, two monsters born from its dismemberment’ (EM: 177). He claimed that they still affected Einstein’s rejection of lived time, for example (S: 196). Such ghosts not only haunted Einstein, but Husserl, both of whose attempts to gain intellectual possession of the world devoid of transcendence, for Merleau-Ponty, delineated the ‘extreme limits’ of classical reason (S: 193). These terms must be placed within their own theoretical context (and again their “constellation”) and what he meant by the “lived” experience that exceeds or belies such axiomatic or methodological “enumeration.” What he denied, in any case, was the idea that a “linguistic analysis” or science can suppose that ‘language has its evidence in itself’ or contains ‘the secret of being in the

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world’—a “secret” he worried about just as much in Heidegger’s own mystic etymologies (VI: 96; NC 199). But, as has become evident, he would also deny the illusions of philosophy’s inversion, its ultimate dispossession before the murmur of the word—the antinomy that casts it into madness. We will require, again, a language or writing that steps beyond such univocal construals for its interrogations. Husserl himself was not simply unaware of this. Beginning with the Logical Investigations, he had thematized the phenomenological realm by means of an ‘extended sense (erweiterter Sinn) of perception’ (LI: 785). And he had understood its method by means of the metaphor of a ‘zig zag’: ‘a metaphor all the more apt since the close interdependence of our various epistemological concepts leads us back again and again to our original analyses, where the new confirms the old and the old the new’ (LI: 261). As has become evident, Merleau-Ponty clearly extends this refinement and the double intentionality of its zigzag; the issue, for him, is less Husserl’s stress upon sense-history than the theory of theory in which it became encumbered. We have further traced his reliance, not only upon his phenomenological precursors, Husserl or Heidegger, or literary figures such as Mallarmé and Baudelaire, but also Saussurian linguistics for its reinvention. Extending Husserl’s rational ‘zig zag’, Merleau-Ponty’s later works thus exhibit ‘an operative imaginary, which is part of our institution, and is indispensable for the definition of Being itself’ (VI: 85). Merleau-Ponty still thought all this could be accessed only through the remainder of phenomenological or “intentional explication,” sufficiently reinterpreted and extended. This interpretive task in turn, divided between experience and concept, would become accessible only through the explication of an operative history: both the operative history that underwrites the history of philosophy and—not far from Adorno or Foucault—history more broadly construed. Here Merleau-Ponty included, for example, not only, as has become evident, the ‘sophisticated literature of the moderns,’ but also ‘the study of painting, the analysis of sexuality, the neo-capitalist experience, or social demography’ (TD: 9).65 These themes anticipated many of the investigations that would take place after his death. But, as has become evident as well, they may well have received different construals in his account. Here both the differences and the contributions within Merleau-Ponty’s account remain to be further explored.

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Compare in this regard Heidegger’s ‘My Way to Phenomenology,’ in On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972) or remarks of Levinas, for example, in the debate to be found in Autrement que savoir, introd. Pierre Jean Labarriere and with contributions by Guy Petitdemange and Jacques Rolland (Paris: Editions Osiris, 1988), ch. III. See Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Merleau-Ponty,’ in Situations, trans. Benita Eisler (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, 1969), p. 220. See Edmund Husserl, Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre (1908–1914), herausgegeben von Ulrich Melle, Husserliana Bd XXVII (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988). As Husserl moved away from static analysis to genetic analysis, he moved beyond such a formal or “static” ethics to issues more related to genesis, the problem of motivation and love and issues that accompany intersubjectivity and communitarianism (and closer in spirit to the later Fichte than Brentano in ethics). As with the shift from static to genetic analysis, this doubtless occurs not without theoretical transformation—and both in epistemology and ethics (which Merleau-Ponty did not know). Merleau-Ponty would have found Husserl’s ultimate account insufficient and still driven by the overreaching demands of his Wissenschaftslehre. For further discussion of Husserl’s development, see for example, Ullrich Melle, ‘Edmund Husserl: From Reason to Love,’ in Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy, ed. John J. Drummond, Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002). Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, trans. Manfred S. Frings, Roger L. Funk (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 253–64. Also see ‘Ordo Amoris’ in Max Scheler, Selected Philosophical Essay, trans. David Lachterman (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 122. For further discussion of this issue see my ‘On the Agon of Phenomenology: Intentional Idioms and Justification,’ Extensions: Essays on Interpretation, Rationality, and the Closure of Modernism (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1992), ch. IV. Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, p. 70. Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception cites Scheler’s 1926 edition. Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, p. xxviii. Ibid., p. 76. Ibid., p. 270. Scheler notes that to claim that a value is relative does not entail that it is subjectivist (97n). Also see Scheler’s discussion of Daseinsrelativität in Selected Essays, trans. David R. Lachterman (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 303.

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Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, p. xxix. Ibid., p. 303. By comparison, one can point similarly to Hermann Weyl’s transformation of Husserl’s account of evidence in his Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949)—most of which dates from the twenties. Justification here too became both “subjective-absolute” while at the same time “objective-relative,” a distinction that, Weyl claimed, is ‘one of the most fundamental epistemological insights which can be gleaned from science’ (116). Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, p. 303. Still, Scheler did not deny the purity of Phenomenology if not the parallel with geometry: ‘The main point is that wherever and insofar as they exist, these acts and their objects obey laws that are as independent of inductive experience as are the propositions concerning the geometry of colors and sounds’ (272). Husserl, Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre (1908–1914), p. 173. See Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, p. 74. Ibid., p. 270. While Scheler himself did not always abide by this, as MerleauPonty will charge in condemning his scholasticism (partially because of its immanentism), one might invoke here his claim that the phenomenology of the value-idea of God does not ‘presuppose any historical or inductive experience’ and yet guides all of its ‘conceptualizations’ and ‘pictorial representations’ that are ‘secondarily formed’ with respect to it. See pp. 293–4. Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 3. Compare Heidegger’s interpretation: ‘The usual presentations of the phenomenological theory of truth confine themselves to what has been said in the critical prolegomena (Vol. I) and mention that it is connected with Bolzano’s theory of the proposition. But the positive phenomenological Interpretations, which differ basically from Bolzano’s theory, have been neglected.’ See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie, Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 493–4n. Jean Cavaillès, ‘On Logic and the Theory of Science,’ trans. Theodore J. Kisiel in Phenomenology and the Natural Sciences, ed. J. Kockelmans and T. Kisiel (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 360. ‘Consciousness’ thus would no longer ‘dominate’ the ‘indeterminate polymorphy of intertwined procedures’ (ibid). Merleau-Ponty would speak in similar terms. While Cavaillès and Albert Lautman (like Merleau-Ponty) took aim at the Vienna School (as well as Russell) they were not always convincing. See, for example, the 1947 review of their work by Max Black. ‘The metaphysical conclusions presented by Cavaillès and Lautman seem to the reviewer to be based upon fragmentary and incomplete evidence and to be expressed in a terminology which can only promote obfuscation.’ The Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 12, no. 1 (March, 1947), p. 21. Nonetheless, the influence of Cavaillès’ and Lautman’s views would be felt from Merleau-Ponty and Suzanne Bachelard to Derrida and Deleuze’s readings of Husserl. Ibid., p. 406. For further discussion of the relation between Hilbert and Husserl, see Jean Toussaint Desanti, La philosophie silencieuse ou critique des philosophies de la science (Paris: Seuil, 1975), pp. 78–109. Cavaillès, ‘On Logic and the Theory of Science,’ p. 401.

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H. L. Van Breda, ‘Maurice Merleau-Ponty et les Archives-Husserl à Louvain,’ Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, Vol. LXVII (1962), pp. 419–20; Tran-Duc-Thao, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, trans. Daniel J. Herman, Donald V. Morano (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1986), p. 123. Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Value, pp. 303–4. See NSS 21, 138. Chapter four will return to Merleau-Ponty’s relation with Bachelard. Max Scheler, On the Eternal in Man, trans. Bernard Noble (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press, 1972), p. 82. On the model of non-Euclidean geometry, which, Scheler holds, contests the Kantian attempt to determine and exhaustively define human reason, see p. 208. Also, see p. 238. While it should be noted that neither Sartre nor Merleau-Ponty directly appeals to Scheler’s model here, Mikel Dufrenne, writing in their wake does, noting both the fertility of its account of an historical a priori while also, like Merleau-Ponty, noting its limitations. See Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey, Albert A. Anderson, Willis Domingo, Leon Jakobson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 493–7. Scheler, On the Eternal in Man, p. 203. Ibid. Ibid., p. 202. ‘(E)ven if there is a realm of essences which offers a constitutional model for all possible worlds and realities made from matters of fact (not only for our world of possible human milieu), we may still expect—considering that every man and more especially every large group of humanity has a different path of access from contingent fact to that realm—that mental functions and their laws, which have come into being through the functionalization of essential insights, will show differences in everything which goes beyond the purely formal determination of objects as such’ (202–3). Instead, identity is conceivable only across such differences, that is, ‘in light of the identity of the formal essences of the object which are given in the simplest and basic insights’ (202). See Emmanuel Levinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. André Orianne (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 158. Jean-Paul Sartre, The War Diaries, trans. Quinton Hoare (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 88. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Christianity and Ressentiment’ (Review of Scheler’s ‘L’homme du ressentiment,’ (French translation), trans. Gerald Wenning, Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, Vol. IX, Winter, 1968, p. 11. Ibid., p. 5. The early existentialists alone did not radically distinguish their readings of Scheler from Husserl, indicative inter alia of a certain plasticity in the texts themselves perhaps. Scheler himself acknowledged his position to being amenable enough that it was not dissimilar to G. E. Moore’s. See Formalism in Ethics and NonFormal Ethics of Values, p. xxi. For a general discussion of the theoretical status of axiology, as both related to and extending beyond ethics as its presupposition, the question of what is worthwhile per se, see J. N. Findlay, Axiological Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 3–4. As such, far from being simply an ontic enumeration reducible to calculation, axiology was from the outset an articulation fraught with ontological difference, the question of is and ought, of being and the good.

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Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, p. 50. G. W. F. Hegel, Natural Law, trans. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975). This issue (as well its text) was likewise part of Kojève’s famous lectures of the thirties. See his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969). Ibid., p. 77. Ibid., p. 118. Compare Scheler: ‘Ethics deserves to be philosophical ethics in the proper sense not only when it deals with the derivation of applied existing ethics from principles, but also when it begins to measure the applied rules of assessment, after they have been logically ordered and systematized, against the contents of the ethos, and when it critically evaluates those rules on the basis of the “intended” essential evidence in the ethos.’ See Formalism in Ethics and NonFormal Ethics of Values, p. 308. Ibid., p. 124. Sartre, The War Diaries, p. 120. Ibid., p. 107. Ibid., pp. 108–10. Accordingly, continuing his arguments against the unity of transcendental apperception outlined in The Transcendence of the Ego, in Being and Nothingness, Sartre claimed that ‘this identity of temporal essence does not prevent the incommunicable diversity of times any more than the identity of the essence of man prevents the incommunicable diversity of human consciousness.’ See JeanPaul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), p. 308. Merleau-Ponty argued, however, without simply denying the claim, that if two consciousnesses preclude one another, two temporalities do not. The same complex logic concerning ambiguity, the relations between overdetermination and “underdetermination” or “indetermination” appears in Sartre’s Introduction to Les Temps Modernes (Vol. 1, No. 1, 1945). It is precisely this complexity that distinguishes both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty from earlier existentialist (Kierkegaardian) versions of ambiguity. And yet, as will be seen, in large part, what was at stake between Merleau-Ponty and Sartre concerned the implications of this logic. See Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Existentialism,’ in Existentialism and Human Emotions, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957). This historically significant document, originally delivered in October, 1945, expresses the antinomies Merleau-Ponty attempts to escape. Sartre, on the one hand, denies that there are formal rules sufficient for moral judgment (the categorical imperative is underdetermined) and, on the other hand, that moral feeling or the passions are sufficient (Sartre appeals to Gide’s impasse, that willed feeling and experienced feeling are indistinguishable and indifferent). At the same time, Merleau-Ponty sought to avoid Sartre’s ethical (or reflective) decisionism, arguing, as will be seen, that Sartre’s account lacks a sufficient account of intersubjectivity and passivity: in both cases aspects of a dialectical account of expressive historicity (and virtue) he will himself develop. See Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism,’ in Basic Writings, trans. Frank Capuzzi, G. Glenn Gray (San Francisco, Calif.: Harper Collins Publishers, 1993).

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Being and Time’s Dasein analytic and its account of care was claimed to similarly arise from Heidegger’s attempts to ‘Interpret the Augustinian (i.e. Helleno Christian) anthropology with regard to the foundational principles reached in the ontology of Aristotle.’ See Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 492n. His account of state of mind (Bedfindlichkeit) similarly resonates with Scheler, in understanding feeling apart from knowledge: ‘Dasein cannot know anything of this sort because the possibilities of disclosure that belong to cognition reach far too short a way compared with the primordial disclosure of moods, in which Dasein is brought before its Being as “there”’ (173). See Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Citadel, 1948) and ‘Merleau-Ponty and Pseudo-Sartreanism,’ trans. Veronique Zaytzeff, International Studies in Philosophy, Vol. XXI, 1989. Tran-Duc-Thao, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, p. 127. See Ramond Aron, Marxism and the Existentialists, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 21. Claude Lefort, ‘Introduction’ to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et terreur (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), p. 37. Tran-Duc-Thao, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, p. 129. Likewise see the 1953 Esprit review by Paul Ricoeur, which (similarly) both affirms the importance of Tran-Duc-Thao’s text while at the same time criticizes its reductive and naturalistic reading of phenomenology. This review is translated in Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 5, No. 4, 1974. Hegel, Natural Law, p. 118. This is true, in any case, of the Heidegger of Being and Time, where Zweideutigkeit becomes articulated by means of Verfallenheit, indicative in the end, not only of the extent to which Heidegger remains still bound by Husserl’s reductive and foundational accounts of the rational (and the authentic—cf. LI: 725–8), but equally his inability to positively come to grips with civil society and the everyday—both of which will require a positive account of Vieldeutigkeit. See Being and Time, p. 217. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 151–5, pp. 108–10. The point is that the rise of modern freedom, unleashed from the sacred or metaphysical metanarratives that provided it unity, is then the opening of an alterity that ruptures the transcendental unity of Being (and the Good) underlying the virtues. Instead, the event of this rupture, as Kant had seen, is the opening of alterity, transforming its narratives into antinomies. Freedom by itself ‘as a separate principle’ then becomes contingent negation, the emergence of the possibility of nihilism. See The Logic of Hegel, the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. William Wallace (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 87. Hence the attempt to overcome the intricacies of freedom, necessity, and contingency in the event of actuality (158–69). Compare in this regard Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the rupture between the Good and Being and Sartre’s conception of freedom in ‘The Battle over Existentialism.’ Here Merleau-Ponty claims that the battle is not between Christianity and Marxism but Aristotle and Descartes or St. Thomas and Pascal—protocols, as will be seen, that reemerge in his reading of Machiavelli and Montaigne (SNS: 75).

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Two classical studies that Merleau-Ponty greatly influenced should be consulted in this regard. First should be noted, Claude Lefort, Le travil de l’oeuvre machiavel (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). This work greatly influenced, in turn, Merleau-Ponty’s own conception of philosophy and The Visible and the Invisible cites it at critical moments (VI: 186–7). Secondly, one should note John O’Neill’s Essaying Montaigne (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), on which I am relying at this point. See, p. 148. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, interview with Madeleine Chapsal, Les écrivains en personne (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1973). Compare Hegel’s similar reading of Machiavelli’s Prince: This book has been thrown away in disgust, as replete with the maxims of the most revolting tyranny; but nothing worse can be urged against it than that the writer, having the profound consciousness of the necessity of a State, has here exhibited the principles on which alone states could be founded in the circumstances of the time . . . (ones in which) an indomitable contempt for principle and an utter depravity of morals, were thoroughly engrained in them.

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See G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 403. Claude Lefort, ‘La Politique et la Pensée de la Politique,’ Les Lettres Nouvelles, No. 32, Feb. 1963, pp. 68–9. The Phenomenology had in fact already articulated the “existential project” of political action as ‘une vie vers un but déterminé—indéterminé don’t elle n’a aucune représentation’ (PoP: 446/509). See L ‘Esprit Europeen (Geneve: editions de la Baconniere, 1946), pp. 252–3. See Georg Lukács, ‘Lettre de G. Lukács à la rédaction des cahiers du Communisme in Mésaventures de l’antimarxisme,’ Les malheurs de Merleau-Ponty, ed. R. Garaudy (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1956), pp. 158–60. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingston (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), p. 206, 215n. For further discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation here, see my ‘Cancellations: Hegel, Husserl, and the Remainder of the Dialectic,’ in volume one of this work, In the Shadow of Phenomenology: Writings After Merleau-Ponty I (London: Continuum, 2009). As will become further evident, one finds the first lineaments of this account of the classical and its ‘development of meaning’ in the unpublished sections of the Prose of the World. See PW: 127. Here we find both the account of institution as Stiftung and the expressivism as ‘the shift of restructuration which is characteristic of language’ (P: 128). Interview with Madeleine Chapsal, Les écrivains en personne, p. 210. See, for example, Merleau-Ponty’s contribution in Sens et usages du terme structure dans le sciences humaines et sociales, ed. Roger Bastide (‘s-Gravenhage: Mouton, 1962), pp. 152–5. Having delineated the use of the term in mathematics, psychology, anthropology, and the like, he concludes that it requires that we reform our ontology, detaching it from our ‘old attachment to the object.’ This is, inter alia, the project of The Visible and the Invisible. Compare on the other hand Lévi-Strauss’

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attempt to retain the exclusively formal characteristics of the term denying any attribution of reality to it (157). While the latter position may achieve a certain parsimony for theoretical practices in the philosophy of science, it fares less well elsewhere. For further discussion of this economics, in effect tracing the economics of the oscillation of the political now as the chiasm of ontology, one moreover, actively reinvesting the Wechsel of classical transcendentalism, see my ‘Merleau-Ponty, Transcendental Imagination, and Body-Schema: On the Delineation of the Visible,’ in my Extensions, ch. VII. This relation between the perception of others and language becomes further elaborated in chapter five of The Prose of the World, ‘Dialogue and the Perception of Others,’ where the topics of the analysis of EO are briefly noted: expressivity, speech, role, and ‘universality of feeling’ (PW: 137–9). Again, Sartre’s early analyses can be taken to provide Merleau-Ponty’s protocols. See Sartre’s analysis of the waiter’s ‘bad faith’ investment in his professional role (and the ensuing critique of sincerity) in Being and Nothingness, p. 102–106. Consistent with his claim that Sartre’s account lacked an account of passivity, the Phenomenology denied that Sartre’s distinction between the in-itself and the foritself could account for the dialectic between the role and the situation: ‘‘[T]he generality of the ‘role’ and of the situation comes to the aid of decision, and in this exchange between the situation and the person who takes it up, it is impossible to determine precisely the ‘share contributed by the situation’ and the ‘share contributed by freedom’’ (PoP: 453). While this account of conditioned freedom originally is linked to the influence of Fink (PoP: 454), as the references to language now evidences, Merleau-Ponty ultimately attempted to extend this person and situation model through his emerging account of expressive institution and symbolic Füreinander. See ‘Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis: Preface to Hesnard’s L’Oeuvre De Freud,’ in The Essential Writings of Merleau-Ponty, trans. Alden L. Fisher (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1969), p. 85. See Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 37. Here we can see moreover a complicated intersection left unfinished in MerleauPonty’s work, the intersection of phenomenology, psychoanalysis (especially the psychoanalytic account of role-playing and ambiguity), and an ethics of authenticity. Compare his treatment of Wallon’s account of mimesis, recognition and sympathy (PP: 142–6) with the account of intersubjective Füreinander in ‘The Philosopher and His Shadow’ (S: 175). Here, too, Merleau-Ponty remains close to Husserl, whom he similarly quotes in ‘The Philosopher and His Shadow’: ‘Nature, the body, and also interwoven (in ihre Verflechtung) with the body, the soul are constituted all together in a reciprocal relationship (Wechselbezogenheit) with one another’ (S: 177n). Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Merleau-Ponty,’ Situations, p. 210. On his own understanding of the late Merleau-Ponty’s stress upon virtue, see, pp. 219–20. Leo Strauss, ‘Niccolo Machiavelli,’ Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 210. It would be wrong to view the emergence of virtu as something of an afterthought in Merleau-Ponty’s itinerary. From the outset it had been recognized that, if the

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fallibility or “ambiguity” of judgment were unsurpassable, the interrogation of its extension remained equally unavoidable. It demanded instead the reemergence of a certain form of phronesis now purged of its metaphysical underpinnings, a “mixed” event that appeals still to the virtue or honestum of a certain courage whose resoluteness precludes neither humility nor honesty. As the review of de Beauvoir put it: ‘We have no other recourse at any moment than to act according to the judgments we have made as honestly and as intelligently as possible, as if these judgments were incontestable. But it would be dishonest and foolish ever to feel acquitted by the judgment of others. One moment of time cannot blot out another’ (SNS: 37). The same tenor reappears in the encounter with Machiavelli and the attempt by means of its “Marxist Machiavellianism” to ‘alter ambiguity through the awareness of ambiguity’ (HT: 120) and the fortuna that divides power. The claim is that ‘Our role is perhaps not very important. But we should not abandon it’ (HT: 179). It requires again the frailty of l’humanisme en extension: To seek harmony with ourselves and others, in a word, truth, not only in a priori reflection and solitary thought but through the living experience of concrete situations and in a living dialogue with others apart from which internal evidence cannot validate its universal right, is the exact contrary of irrationalism, since it accepts our incoherence and conflict with others as constants but assumes we are able to minimize them. It rules out the inevitability of reason as well as that of chaos. (HT: 187)

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See Thomas Aquinas, The Disputed Questions on Truth, trans. Robert W. Mulligan (Chicago, Ill.: Henry Regnery, 1952), Q1.a9. While Husserl claimed to have read the De Verita (in Edith Stein’s translation) much of this was in the background of Brentano’s thought. Hobbes, Leviathan, I 4. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969), p. 461. David Carr, The Paradox of Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). I will defend a version of this thesis myself. See Rudolf Carnap, Letter to Quine, April 13, 1947 in Dear Carnap/Dear Van (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 405–6. I thank David Vessey for this reference. Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology: Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies, trans. Willis Domingo (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982). Ibid., p. 231. See Martin Heidegger, Towards the Definition of Philosophy, trans. Ted Sadler (London: Continuum, 2000), p. 14. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1973), p. 462. Following the standard practice I will cite the first and second, or A and B editions.

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Kant, Letter to Johann Henrich Lambert, 1770, Philosophical Correspondence, trans. Arnulf Zweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 59. Lambert, Philosophische Schriften, Vol. 2 Neues Organanon (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1965), p. 220. Ibid., p. 217. Ibid., pp. 217; 236. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (314/B371). Cf. Iso Kern, Husserl und Kant (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1974). See R. Bernet, I. Kern, E. Marbauch, An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), p. 233. J. H. Lambert, Letter to Kant, October 13, 1770, in Kant, Philosophical Correspondence, p. 61. See Fichte’s account of Phenomenology in the 1804 Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte’s Werke, Vol. 10 (Berlin: de Gruter, 1971), pp. 195–8. See Bernard Bolzano, Theory of Science, trans. Rolf George (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1972). For the discussion of Hegel, for example, see section 22. Edmund Husserl, ‘Philosophy as Strict Science,’ in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 77. See ‘Frege-Husserl Correspondence,’ trans. J. N. Mohanty, Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 5. No. 3, 1974, pp. 83–96. Moritz Schlick, General Theory of Knowledge (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1974), p. 138. Schlick, ‘Is There a Factual a Priori?’ trans. Wilfred Sellars, in Readings in Philosophical Analysis, ed. Herbert Feig, Wilfred Sellars (New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1949), p. 284. See Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago, Ill.: Open Court, 2000), ch. 8. For Heidegger’s own account of ‘tautological thinking’—often enough parsed explicitly in contrast to Kant—see, for example, Identity and Difference, pp. 27, 64, 133. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 10. The citation dates from 1931. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), ch. 24. For further discussion of this issue, see my ‘On the Agon of the Phenomenological: Intentional Idioms and the Foundations of Justification,’ Extension: Essays on Interpretation, Rationality, and the Closure of Modernism, ch. IV. See Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation, trans. Ronald Bruzina (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 94–100. See PoP: III.1. For MerleauPonty’s own self-criticism of this position, see VI: 175. See Wilfred Sellars, Science and Metaphysics (New York: Humanities Press, 1968), p. 18. For Sellar’s own account of ‘analogical concept formation in science’ see ‘Scientific Realism or Irenic Instrumentalism,’ Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, ed. Robert S. Cohen, Marx W. Wartofsky (New York, 1961), sections 19–37. The question of Phenomenology’s articulemes, their historical sedimentation, and even the terms for this enterprise as a ‘phenomenology of phenomenology’ or

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‘constructive phenomenology’ derives from Eugen Fink. See Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation, trans. Ronald Bruzina (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 8. Merleau-Ponty refers to Fink’s project on the first page of the Phenomenology (PoP: vii). Arguably, Merleau-Ponty’s account of the institutional character of philosophy makes this account more explicit than Fink’s. See Herman Weyl, Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science, trans. Olaf Helmer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), p. 112. Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 17. Ibid., p. 479. Hence Husserl’s complicated analysis in which ‘the solus ipse is unaware of the Objective body in the full and proper sense . . .’ (I II: 86). Here we can link up with Heidegger’s own (hermeneutic) reading of the Kantian schematism as exploratory. See Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 127. See Aron Gurwitsch and Alfred Schutz, Philosophers in Exile: The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch, 1930–1959, ed. Richard Grathoff, trans. J. Claude Evans (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 233. See M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson, Michael Holquist (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 171–206. See Fichte, ‘Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation,’ in Fichte’s Early Philosophical Writings, trans. Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 153–61. Schelling, ‘New Deduction of Natural Right,’ in The Unconditional in Human Knowledge, trans. Fritz Marti (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1980), p. 222. See Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, trans. Howard V. Hong, Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 286. See Husserl, I III: 104. (Cited in Merleau-Ponty: S: 168). See Arne Naess, Four Modern Philosophers: Carnap, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sartre, trans. Alastair Haney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). See Judith Butler, Exitable Speech (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 141. This is Merleau-Ponty’s fully “ironized” formulation of the “tacit” Cogito: ‘The tacit Cogito is a cogito only when it has found expression for itself’ (PoP: 404). Precisely here it could be argued, is the moment of “Romanticism” alluded to above that Husserl missed. Still, the position is not without formal implications. As Desanti noted, Husserl’s attempts to couple a formal analytics to the indeterminacies of its genetic horizons was intrinsically instable: the indeterminate multiplicity of the horizon is not capable of being posited as a determinate object or a determinate manifold. See Jean Toussaint Desanti, Les idéalités mathématiques (Paris: Seul, 1968), pp. 99–100. See Friedman, A Parting of the Ways, pp. 28f. See, for example, PoP: 365; also see S: 178. ‘We can expand our experience of social relations and get a proper view of them only by analogy or in contrast with those we have lived. We can do so, in short, only by subjecting social experience to an imaginary variation’ (S: 100). Also see Cavaillès, ‘On Logic and The Theory of Science,’ p. 409. Nonetheless, as Desanti appropriately responds to Cavaillès’ attempts to transform Husserl’s genetic account into a philosophy of the concept, it all depends not only on what one

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means by “conciousness”, but what one means by a “concept”. See Jean Toussaint Desant, Le philosophie silencieuse, p. 62. While the Kantian account of idea and reflective judgment informed the idea of the Seinsfrage from the beginning, perhaps Heidegger’s most perspicuous use of Kant’s account of reflective judgment occurs in the Nietzsche lectures. See Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. I, The Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco, Calif.: Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 107–14. Also, see Vol. III, The Will To Power as Knowledge and Metaphysics, trans. Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell, Frank Capuzzi (San Francisco, Calif.: Harper & Row, 1987), pp. 68–76. On this “Sellarsian” point, see Robert B. Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), ch. 12. On the problem of the schematism latent within phenomenology see Marc Richir, Phénomènes, temps, l’ êtres: ontologie et phénomènes (Montbonnot-St Martin: Jerome Millon, 1987), ch. 5; John Sallis, Double Truth (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1995), ch. 7. I have further analyzed the development of the concept of horizons in my ‘On the Right to Interpret: Beyond the Copernican Turn,’ Extensions, ch. VIII. On the concept of prejudice compare FTL: 276–7 and Gadamer’s Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer, Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989), pp. 302–7. While calling into question the “isolated horizon” of the present—and like Husserl, the solus ipse—we might question whether the concept of “fusion” doesn’t preserve the notion of immanence. See Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 304, 306. See J. Alberto Coffa, The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap: To the Vienna Station (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 43–7. For further analysis of this problem, see my Tradition(s) II: Hermeneutics, Ethics and the Dispensation of the Good (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 224–34. See Paul Natorp, ‘On the Question of Logical Method in Relation to Edmund Husserl’s Prolegomena to Pure Logic,’ trans. J. N. Mohanty, in Readings on Edmund Husserl Logical Investigations, ed. J. N. Mohanty (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977) and ‘On the Objective and Subjective Grounding of Knowledge,’ trans. Lois Phillips, David Kolb, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 12, 1981,pp. 245–66. It is to be noted that Husserl discusses the latter in a number of places in LI. Recently, following Kern (Husserl und Kant), Dan Zahavi has again affirmed the importance of Natorp in Husserl’s thought, again suggesting that it is Natorp’s challenge that leads Husserl to develop genetic (or what he called elsewhere ‘explanatory’ phenomenology (PAS: 631). See Dan Zahavi, ‘How to Investigate Subjectivity: Natorp and Heidegger on Reflection,’ Continental Philosophy Review, 36, 2003, pp. 155–76. Zahavi moreover defends the Husserlian account of reflection, suggesting that Natorp’s own construction of subjectivity is phenomenological and again articulately defends Husserl’s account of inner awareness as both necessary and sufficient. Here, as will be seen, I differ, following Merleau-Ponty (and Kant as it will turn out); while necessary, Husserl’s account remains on its own evidentially (i.e. intuitionally) insufficient, that is, problematic, in need of further historical articulation, conceptual amplification, and theoretical refinement. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (A255/B310). Ibid. (B422n). See Marc Richir, Phénoménologie et institution symbolique (Montbonnot-St Martin: Jerome Millon, 1988), p. 165.

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See Friedrich Nietzsche, Grossoktausgabe (Leipzig, 1905) Vol. XIII, p. 50, cited in M. Heidegger Nietzsche, Vol. I: The Will to Power as Art, p. 215. Notwithstanding his continuous attempts to distinguish Phenomenology from mathematical models—and even in his most logicist period—Husserl’s ‘theory of theory’ looked to many suspiciously (i.e. paradoxically) like the set of all sets. If we have encountered the problem of determinability in the question of expression and articulation, we note here Husserl’s continuing proximity to the axiom of completeness in Hilbert. See, for example, I: 164. For further discussion of this development and the transformation in Husserl’s account (its commitments to genetic or “horizonal” phenomenology ultimately forcing Husserl to abandon claims to ultimate adequacy, see Robert Sokolowski’s classical study, The Formation of Husserl’s Concept of Constitution (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964). Immanuel Kant, Logic, trans. Robert Hartman, Wolfgang Schwarz (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs Merrill, 1974), pp. 44–50. Compare Critique of Pure Reason, p. 606 (A757/B787). For Merleau-Ponty’s relation to this extension beyond the Copernican revolution see Marc Richir, Au-delà du renversement copernicien: la question de la phénoménologie et son fondement (La Haye: Nijhoff, 1976). See my ‘On the Right to Interpret: Beyond the Copernican Turn,’ Extensions, ch. VIII. See Critique of Pure Reason, p. 486 (A569/B597). Compare Bas Van Frassen, The Empirical Stance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 47. I take Van Frassen’s empiricism, never free from history, provisionalness, or ambiguity, to be very close to Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, at least on the Merleau-Pontian version I am offering. Indeed, arguably it depends historically upon the emergence of the phenomenological standpoint in classical German philosophy traced above. Finally, on the Husserlian account of “rational motivation” in the broad sense at stake in a phenomenology of reason, see I: 328. On the distinction between ‘amplifying inductions’ and ‘transcendental inductions,’ see NSS: 44. Bachelard claims that Einstein’s physics cannot be derived from Newton’s by simple amplification. As has become evident, this is an example Merleau-Ponty will also invoke for his account of historical rationality and the dialectic of the classical. It involves, for Bachelard, a dialectics ‘that grew out of the correction of an error.’ Science ‘depends upon this differential of knowledge at the frontier of the unknown’ (172). For Merleau-Ponty, the Wesensschau is an imaginative reading that enables me to ‘hold together all the facts which are known and which may be brought into relation with it’ (PoP: 75). In stressing ‘the fundamental homogeneity of these two modes of knowledge, the inductive and the essential,’ Merleau-Ponty acknowledges that he is ‘pushing Husserl further than he wished to go himself’ (PP: 72). Throughout, however, he questioned the purity of the fact/essence distinction and its historical correlate: iterative reconstitution or reactivation. See my ‘Beyond the Speaking of Things: Merleau-Ponty’s Reconstruction of Phenomenology and the Models of Kant’s Third Critique,’ Philosophy Today, 2008, Supplement.

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See Arne Naess, ‘Husserl on the Apodictic Evidence of Ideal Laws,’ in Readings on Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, pp. 67–75; Cavaillès, ‘On Logic and the Theory of Science,’ pp. 353–409. None of these thinkers had simply denied Husserl’s claims concerning ideality but only that its “science” had been turned ideal in the regulative sense. See Paul Natorp, ‘On the Question of Logical Method in relation to Edmund Husserl’s Prolegomena to Pure Logic,’ in Readings on Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, p. 66. In his 1919 lectures, Heidegger remarked that ‘Until now Natorp is the only person to have brought scientifically noteworthy objections against phenomenology.’ See Heidegger, Towards the Definition of Philosophy, p. 85. Nonetheless, he concludes that Natorp’s attempts at the reconstruction of subjectivity out of objectivity cannot account for the “the unmediated immediate” that is to be reconstructed and argues for a Phenomenology that is pretheoretical, indeed prior to any standpoint (90). Indeed he claims that for Phenomenology ‘the original sin would be the opinion that it is itself a standpoint’ (93). As noted above, we have attempted to go between the horns of this dilemma, following Heidegger’s later understanding of the Kantian schematism as “exploratory.” See Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 127. Likewise see Heidegger’s reworking of Kant’s anthropological standpoint in The Essence of Reasons, trans. Terrence Malick (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969), pp. 75–83. NSS: 138. Such theoretical complications (e.g. Relativity theory and its reliance on non-Euclidean geometry) extend beyond the reductions or ordinary (Cartesian) experience. This account was influential in a number of significant thinkers after Bachelard, for example, Cavaillès. Merleau-Ponty himself invokes this issue in formulating his doctrine of the classics (PW: 127–8; S: 10). After Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, in turn, would invoke Bachelard in criticizing MerleauPonty’s appeal to common sense in the Phenomenology and representational thought in general, further criticizing the requisites of transcendental memory such representation entails. See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), ch. 3 and p. 320 nn. 6, 9. He further traces the couplet explication (a term phenomenologists after Husserl invoke) and complication back to Neoplatonism, claiming, consistent with Bachelard, that such complication contest Cartesianism. See Expressionism in Philosophy, trans. Martin Joughlin (New York: Zone Books, 1990), pp. 16–17. Merleau-Ponty’s later works however appeal to a forgetfulness and historical extension that also points to a transformation of the Cartesian position, in accord with the account above (e.g. HLP: 28–31; S: 173–80). Finally, for further discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s own interpretation of Einstein, see volume one of this work, In the Shadow of Phenomenology, ch. 4 and p. 163 n. 44.

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G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 122. Ibid., p. 124. Ibid., p. 125.

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Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 76. Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Experience, trans. Samuel Cherniak, John Heckman (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 187. As Hyppolite later realized, skepticism, like ineffability, is ultimately rejected in the recognition that the outcome of dialectical conflict is not nothingness, but determinate negation, determination, and refiguration. Interruption and dissolution are always possible. Nonetheless: “Skepticism itself finishes with the abstraction of nothingness; it isolates this nothingness as the ineffable, instead of thinking it as the internal negativity which allows discourse to follow its course by going from determination to determination.” See Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlor, Amit Sen (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), p. 12. This is Hyppolite’s version of Merleau-Ponty’s response to Sartre’s claim that we are condemned to be free. Freedom (or nothingness) is determinate: “We are condemned to meaning” (PoP: xix). Or: “There is meaning (ily a du sens), something and not nothing…” (PoP 397). Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1974), p. 167. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 122. See my ‘Abysses,’ Extensions, ch. 1. See The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane, G. R. T. Ross, Vol. II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1972), II.II. For a further discussion of the problem of extensions here see my Extensions: Essays on Interpretation, Rationality, and the Closure of Modernism, Introduction. Franz Brentano, The True and the Evident, trans. Roderick M. Chisholm, Ilse Politzer, Kurt R. Fischer (New York: Humanities, 1966), pp. 135ff. J. N. Findlay, Axiological Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 17. Franz Brentano, The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong, ed. Oskar Kraus, trans. Roderick M. Chisholm, Elizabeth H. Schneedwind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 76. Brentano, The True and the Evident, pp. 135–7. See Roderick M. Chisholm, Wilfred Sellars, ‘The Chisholm-Sellars Correspondence on Intentionality,’ Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 2, ed. H. Feigl, M. Scriven (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1958). I take this to be definitively the result of internal challenges to the first-person standpoint in “Analytic” philosophy since Gettier. In “Continental” philosophy, simply conceived, those internal challenges have been associated with the names of Marx, Nietszche, and Freud. As I will argue below, while rendering such accounts problematic, none of these accounts simply can be equated with denying the evidence of the first person. See Martin Heidegger, Towards the Definition of Philosophy, p. 99. Georges Canguilhem, ‘The Death of Man, or Exhaustion of the Cogito,’ trans. Catherine Porter, The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 71–91. See Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Howard V. Hong, Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 6. Jean-Luc Marion, ‘L’autre philosophie premiere et la question de la donation,’ Philosophie, No. 49, March 1996, p. 78.

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164 21 22

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Ibid. See Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1969), pp. 48–50. A classic account of this transformation of the Husserlian account can be found in Edith Stein’s 1929 study of Husserl and Aquinas. See her Husserl and Aquinas: A Comparison in Knowledge and Faith, trans. Walter Redmond (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 2000). While Stein too denies the adequacy of Husserl’s account, claiming that the quest to eliminate all doubt is unattainable and that traces of transcendence showed up even in this sphere (23), her appeal to faith as the ‘highest form of certainty’ (18), that ‘faith is its own guarantee’ (20) surely amounts to an equivocation on certainty, for Husserl. Eugen Fink was perhaps the first (followed by Merleau-Ponty) to explicitly linkphenomenological experience to reflective judgment and the extension of reason at stake in transcendental dialectic. See Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation, trans. Ronald Bruzina (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 64. I have further discussed this issue in the Introduction to the first volume of this work. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Objection XXX.V. See Martin Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz, Andre Schawer (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 286. See Martin Heidegger, ‘The Anaximander Fragment,’ in Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrel Krell, Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco, Calif.: Harper & Row, 1984), p. 26. See Michel de Montaigne, ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond,’ in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), p. 374. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. 2, trans. E. S. Haldane, Francis H. Simson (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), pp. 408–9. F. W. J. Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, trans. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 163. Ibid., p. 162. Ibid., p. 47. For further discussion of these issues, see Manfred Frank, What is Neostructuralism? (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 297–9. Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, p. 47. Ibid., pp. 62–3. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer, Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989), p. 23. Jean Cavaillès, ‘Logic and the Theory of Science,’ p. 409. Brentano, The True and the Evident, p. 52. See Martin Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars, trans. F. Mayr, R. Askay (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001). See Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Reflections on my Philosophical Journey,’ in The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahm (Chicago, Ill.: Open Court, 1997), p. 45. ‘(T)he argument for the significance of temporal distance, as persuasive as it is in itself, was a poor preparation for discussing the fundamental significance of the otherness of the other and the fundamental role played by language as conversation.’

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See, for example, Blandine Kriegel, The State and the Rule of Law, trans. Marc A. LePain, Jeffrey C. Cohen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). See, the analyses of Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), pp. 108–12, and Jacques Derrida, ‘Cogito and the History of Madness,’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), ch. 2—and Foucault’s response, ‘My Body, This Paper, the Fire,’ trans. Geoff Bennington, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1982, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1998), Vol. II, pp. 393–417. I have traced the relation between transcendental illusion and such ‘madness’ in Kant in ‘Regulations: Kant and Derrida at the End of Metaphysics,’ Deconstruction and Philosophy, ed. John Sallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), ch. 6. See Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 136. For further discussion of Shakespeare’s ‘characteristic’ of modern individuality, see my Tradition(s): Refiguring Community and Virtue in Classical German Thought (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1997), ch. 4. See Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. Forrest Williams, Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1957), p. 34. See Roderick M. Chisholm, ‘Gadamer and Realism: Reaching an Understanding,’ in The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Edwin Hahn (Chicago, Ill.: Open Court, 1997), ch. 2. Cavaillès, ‘Logic and the Theory of Science,’ p. 409. Hobbes, Leviathan, I V. See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, pp. 31–7. Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, p. 190. Ibid., pp. 189–90. See Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, p. 112. Compare Hegel’s criticism of stoicism, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. 2, pp. 264–76. See Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1978), pp. 172–3. Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of a ‘non-prosaic conception of consciousness’ emerges from his discussion of Schelling (N: 50). For further discussion of this issue, see my ‘Sartre, Klee, Surrealism and Philosophy: Towards a “Non-Prosaic” Conception of Philosophy,’ in Issues in Interpretation Theory, ed. Pol Vandevelde (Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press, 2006). This ‘as’ is explicitly construed as Heidegger’s (PNP: 74). See Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience, trans. Kenley Rorce Dove (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 104 (Merleau-Ponty cites Heidegger text). See Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics,’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 153. This equation of empiricism and metaphysics became even more general perhaps, recognizable in thinkers like Deleuze or Lyotard). Also see PNP: 67. Ibid., p. 314. See Emannuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 263. I take this semantic and syntactic characterization from Gadamer where its figural status remains still unthought. See ‘Articulating Transcendence,’ The Beginning

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and the Beyond: Papers from the Gadamer and Voegelin Conferences, Vol. 4. ed. Fred Lawrence (Boston College, 1984), pp. 5f. This Hegelian account is again immediately glossed in relation to Husserl: ‘(cf. Husserl: all blocked perception is replaced by a true one)’ (PNP: 63). For further discussion of Hegel and Husserl’s ‘dialectic’ see chapter four of Vol. I of this work, In the Shadow of Phenomenology. In a 1959 lecture, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the role that his teacher, Léon Brunschwicg, played in conveying ‘the heritage of Kantian idealism’ as well as the idea of science as a ‘creative and constructive activities of the mind’ (TD: 130). As a footnote to his Montaigne article also attests, Brunschvicg’s conception of the ‘thick’ history in which Descartes, Pascal, and Montaigne are interwoven attests to his influence here as well (S: 202). See Brunschwicg’s Descarte et Pascal Lecteurs de Montaigne (Paris: Brentano’s, 1944). Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 443. Still, Merleau-Ponty criticized Heidegger’s account of resolute authenticity with its emphasis upon the future at the expense of the present and the reasons accompanying its evidence (PoP: 427). As he put it in responding to issues surrounding Sartre’s criticism of sincerity, preoutlining his account of perceptual faith: Sincerity is not a goal, but, for exactly the same reasons, insincerity must never be a system, a rule, or a habit. If commitment goes beyond reason, it should never run contrary to reason. Man’s value does not consist in either an explosive, maniac sincerity or an unquestioned faith. Instead, it consists of a higher awareness which enables him to determine the moment when it is reasonable to take things on trust and the moment when questioning is in order, to combine faith and good faith within himself . . . [SNS: 179–180].

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Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: New Left Books, 1976), p. 20. Ibid., p. 19. See FSM: 229: ‘[W]e ourselves believe that mathematical thought forms the basis of physical explanation and that conditions of abstract thought are from now on inseparable from those of scientific experiment.’ See Pierre Cassou-Nogues, ‘Pour une épistémologie merleau-pontienne en mathématiques,’ Chiasm 1, pp. 286–300. For further discussion of these issues, see Jean-Toussaint Desanti, La philosophie silencieuse, pp. 99–106. Invoking MerleauPonty’s terms for the passage at stake between positing, thematization or construction and its horizons, Desanti claims that the relation between manifestation and designation will be one of écart. See Patrick Heelan, Space Perception and the Philosophy of Science (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1983), p. 46.

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Martin Heidegger Plato’s Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz, Andre Schuwer (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 80–1. Hence Merleau-Ponty ultimately claims that space and time must be understood through an ontology of écart and chiasm: The Stiftung of a point of time can be transmitted to the others without ‘continuity’ without ‘conservation,’ without fictitious ‘support’ in the psyche the moment that one understands time as chiasm. Then past and present are Ineinander, each enveloping and enveloped—and that itself is the flesh. (VI: 267–8)

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Gaston Bachelard, ‘Surrationalism,’ Arsenal, Vol. 4, 1989, trans. Julien Levy, p. 112. This article appeared in 1936 in the journal, Inquisitions, the ‘Organe du Groupe d’études pour la Phénoménologie Humaine,’ whose directors were Louis Aragon, Roger Callois, J. N. Monnero, and Tristan Tzara. Ibid., p. 113. Ibid., p. 112. Nonetheless (as is the case of Merleau-Ponty’s account of dialectic as ‘the fluidity of the multiple’) the fluidity, the movement and the rhythm at stake here remain consistent with Hegel’s classical account of the rationality of the dialectic – if not its resolution. See Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 20: Thoughts become fluid [flussig] when pure thinking, this inner immediacy, recognizes itself as a moment, or when the pure certainty of self abstracts from itself – not by leaving itself out, or setting itself aside, but by giving up the fixity of its self-positing…but also the fixity of the differentiated moments, which, posited in the element [Element] of pure thinking, share the unconditioned nature of the ‘I’. Through this movement the pure thoughts become Notions, and are only now what they are in truth, self-movements, circles, spiritual essences, which is what their substance is.

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As will become evident, grasping, in Bachelard’s terms, ‘the mutual fluidity of sensibility and reason’ (in Merleau-Ponty’s terms, their ‘reversibility’) all depends on how Hegel’s own ‘element’ of thought is now to be construed. Tristan Tzara, Grains et Issues (Paris: Editions Denoel et Steele, 1935), p. 210. See C. J. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1927), p. 22. Elsewhere I have discussed Jung’s (and Husserl’s) debts to William James for the account of free association, in the former case, and adumbrative consciousness, in the latter. Those debts doubtless remain contested between phenomenology’s account of free variation and Bachelard’s pure poetics. Tristan Tzara, ‘Essai sur la Situation de la Poésie,’ LSASDLR (Le surrealism au service de la revolution), December, 1931 reprinted in Arno Series of Contemporary Art, No. 4, (New York: Arno Press, 1968), pp. 16–20. See Tristan Tzara, ‘Approximative Man,’ in Approximative Man and Other Writings, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1973). See my ‘Of Sartre, Klee, Surrealism and Philosophy: Towards a “Non-Prosaic” Conception of Consciousness,’ in Issues in Interpretation Theory, ed. Pol Vandevelde ( Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press, 2006), pp. 37–71. Also see Tristan Tzara, Le surréalisme et l’après-guerre (Paris: Nagel, 1947).

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Bréhier charged that Merleau-Ponty’s ‘philosophy results in a novel’ at his 1946 defense before the Société française de philosophie (PP: 30). On Merleau-Ponty’s use of models in his later philosophy, see my ‘Beyond the Speaking of Things: Merleau-Ponty’s Reconstruction of Phenomenology and the Models of Kant’s Third Critique,’ Philosophy Today, 2008 Supplement. For further discussion of Merleau-Ponty and Klee’s use of color, see my Crescent Moon over the Rational: Philosophical Interpretations of Paul Klee (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), ch. 6. Finally, to the extent that the Phenomenology had still committed itself to the world as ‘omnitudo realitas,’ as he put it in a gloss on Husserl, we can gage the extent to which it, too, remains linked to the foundationalism of this classical ontology, notwithstanding its ‘non-Euclidean’ account of embodied perception (PoP: 398). See Jean Hyppolite, Figures de la pensée philosophique II (Paris: PUF, 1971), pp. 643–60. Ibid., p. 653. See my Introduction to the first volume of this work, In the Shadow of Phenomenology. Hyppolite, ‘L’Épistémologie de Gaston Bachelard,’ Figures II, p. 683. Compare Merleau-Ponty’s citation of Hyppolite’s account of the sensible as ‘dispossession’ in the Nature lectures: ‘The sensed = I don’t know and I have always known it’ (N: 283). It is perhaps worth noting that Hyppolite previously identified Hegel’s ‘milieu’ of absolute knowledge, the dialectic of discourse, as an element, ‘as when we say the ‘element of water’. See Logic and Existence, p. 11. Still Bachelard himself denied that imagination might provide the unity between the two domains: ‘My scientific investigations have nothing to do with the problem of imagination.’ Revue Internationale de Philosophie, No. 66, 1963, p. 487. Cited in Dominique Lecourt, Le jour et la nuit (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 1974), p. 145. Lecourt attributes this denial to an attempt to reinstitute the subject (146), a claim that seems anachronistic, probably. Bachelard, ‘Surrationalism,’ p. 112. Edmund Husserl, ‘Philosophy as Rigorous Science,’ in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, p. 146. I have similarly stressed the tension between Husserl’s account of modern science and his lingering hopes to refound philosophia perennis in chapter 2. Bachelard, ‘Surrationalism,’ p. 112. Ibid., p. 113. For further discussion of this account of the rational see my Extensions: Essays on Interpretation, Rationality, and the Closure of Modernism. Here it should be added that, as close as Merleau-Ponty had come to Cavaillès, who too, had invoked Fink’s account of archaeology, he separated from him -- or perhaps enriched the account. Cavaillès (like Bachelard) had found science only in recommencement: ‘Here there is on longer a return to the origin, but an orientation according to the flux of a becoming which presents itself as such only only by the intelligible enrichment of its terms.’ See Cavaillès, ‘On Logic and the theory of Science,’ p. 409. Merleau-Ponty’s ultimate recognition that the origin is not all behind us, once again denying the complete surpassing of the speculative dialectic, articulates the ‘reversibility’ inherent to the flux itself. Cavaillès was surely right about the limits of Husserl’s reduction in affirming the idea of science as continual revision. Even the notion of the flesh , if ‘ultimate’, is not without history. Still, as

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Cavaillès nod to the flux itself notes, the meaning of Stiftung here is time. As Merleau-Ponty’s state elsewhere: ‘Time is itself the model of institution’, the chiasm between the sensible and the intelligible (IP: 36). Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis: Preface to Hesnard’s L’Oeuvre de Freud,’ pp. 84–5. Ibid., p. 86. See Hyppolite, ‘L’Imaginaire et le science chez Gaston Bachelard,’ Figures II, p. 676. See Dominique Lecourt, L’épistemology historique de Gaston Bachelard (Paris: Vrin, 1974), p. 81. On this issue see the careful treatment of Bachelard’s criticism of Husserl by Bernard Barsotti, Bachelard critique de Husserl: aux raciness de la fracture épistémologique/phénoménologie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), pp. 143–51. While this is a work to which my own analysis remains very close, I have stressed MerleauPonty’s differences with Sartre, on the one hand, and his transformation of Husserl’s account of the rational, on the other hand, one, that in many respects, brought him closer to Bachelard. One could go further in this direction; one might, for example, trace the proximity of Merleau-Ponty’s account of the narcissism of the flesh and Bachelard’s discussion of cosmic narcissism, which, ‘(i)nstead of the precise, analytic narcissism of brightly lit reflection’ one can speak of the ‘foggy narcissism’ or ‘veiled (voilé) narcissism’ of the elemental (WD: 25). But such issues are beyond the scope of the present discussion. Hermann Weyl, Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science, p. 66. Ibid., p. 116. For further discussion of this issue see Merleau-Ponty’s Nature lectures’ similar discussion of the philosophy of structure relative to Paulette Felvier’s La structure des théories physiques (N: 97–9). See Paulette, Felvier, La structure des théories physiques (Paris: PUF, 1951), pp. 142–146, 314–16. The notion of structure will remain evident in Merleau-Ponty’s final writings. See PD: 317–19; VI: 187. See Dominique Lecourt, Bachelard: le jour et la nuit, pp. 165–171. As has been seen, Merleau-Ponty had condemned Heidegger’s account of the ontic/ontological distinction in these terms. But as I have suggested elsewhere, his own commitments concerning such a “secret science” were not unequivocal. See my ‘The De-Aestheticization of the Work of Art: On Painting as a “Secret Science,”’ in volume one of this work.

Chapter 5 1

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See, for example, Jacques Derrida, On the Name, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey Jr., and Ian McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 46, and Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, ed. John D. Caputo (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), p. 11. Julia Kristeva, Proust and the Sense of Time, trans. Stephen Bann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 4–5. Manfred Frank, What is Neostructuralism?, trans. Sabine Wilke, Richard Grey (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 362–3.

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See Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), p. 68. While I have previously noted my reservations with the term, “Continental Philosophy,” here I note that this chapter originated as an invited paper session on this topic at the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association meetings. Here it is associated with post-Kantian or Idealist political philosophy from Kant to Derrida, but these terms are doubtless equally inexact. See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). See Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). See Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millan-Zaibert (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2004); Philippe LacoueLabarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, trans. Philip Barnard, Cherly Lester (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1988). See, for example, Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Essay on the Concept of Civic Republicanism,’ occasioned by the Kantian Tract, ‘Perpetual Peace,’ in The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics, trans. Frederick C. Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 93–112. See Charles Larmore, The Romantic Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 49. See Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 255. Such a genealogy, it could be argued, avoids both the organic metaphysics of romantic concepts of community as well as the nominalism of modern political accounts’ reduction of society to discrete particulars and the concatenation of interests. I allude here to the collection of essays on this topic, Dissensus Communis: Between Ethics and Politics, ed. Philippe Van haute, Peg Birmingham (Kampen, The Netherlands: Kok Pharos Publishing House, 1991). In so doing, as will become evident, I will stress, following certain indications by Lefort, the positive phenomenon of this dissensus as underlying post-traditional forms of the rational and too often neglected in classical phenomenological accounts—both in this domain and perhaps more generally. In addition, the editors’ note, as do others, that the question of the dissensus communis emerges (critically) in relation to the Kantian account of sensus communis articulated in The Critique of Judgment (para. 40). It is later linked to the classical task of the humanities and ‘the reciprocal communication of ideas’ (para. 60). As will become apparent, critically, that is, transcendentally, at stake in this regard, is the problem of communicability, communication, and the transcendental horizons of conceptuality. As I have discussed elsewhere both are linked in the transcendental concept of substance in the first Critique’s table of categories. See my Tradition(s) II: Hermeneutics, Ethics, and the Dispensation of the Good, Introduction. Here I will be more explicitly detailing this issue vis-à-vis the question of interpretation and phenomenological horizonality, precisely insofar as such “appearing” is critical to the question of community. Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, p. 20. Ibid., p. 233.

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Otto Pöggeler, ‘Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Politics,’ The Heidegger Case, ed. Tom Rockmore, Joseph Margolis (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University, 1992), p. 127. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad, Kenneth Maly (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 226. Among treatments of Husserl’s theoretical account of this methodological zigzag, see, for example, Ron Bruzina, ‘The Future Past and Present—and Not Yet Perfect—of Phenomenology,’ Research in Phenomenology, Vol. XXX, 2000. Without differing from this account I note, following Merleau-Ponty, the decisive transformation that is at stake in Husserl’s use of the terms for a historical analyses. See Richard Rorty, ‘Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality,’ in Truth and Progress, Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 171. Also see Rorty’s discussion of Husserl in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), ch. IV. For a Husserlian reply to Dennett, see David Carr, ‘Phenomenology and Fiction in Dennett,’ International Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol. 6, No. 3 (September, 1998), pp. 331–44. See, for example, Martin Heidegger What is a Thing? Trans. W. B. Barton, Vera Deutsch (Chicago, Ill.: Henry Regnery, 1967). See, for example, ibid., p. 10. See Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, p. 307. Ibid., p. 91. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried, Richard Polt (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 187. Hobbes, Leviathan, III 34. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Word of Nietzsche: “God is Dead,”’ in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 100. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, p. 226. Ibid. Compare Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, p. 10. This mathematical model remains active even in Husserl’s most richly adumbrated (analogical) account of community, Cartesian Meditations. Arguably the mathematical case ‘very important in itself’ still functions as a pros hen for all forms of community. See CM, para. 55. For further discussion of this issue, see R. Philip Buckley’s ‘Husserl’s Gottingen Years and the Genesis of a Theory of Community,’ in Reinterpreting the Political: Continental Philosophy and Political Theory, ed. Lenore Langsdorf, Stephen H. Watson (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1998). Buckley notes both the mathematical model and the tension between individual and community at risk within it. Elsewhere, it should be noted, Buckley has similarly hit upon the lacunae of the rationality of dissensus communis: ‘For Husserl, conflict is always a sign of crisis. . . . Yet might there not be an authentic philosophic stance which could be called agreeing to disagree? The admission that there could be totally different and yet, still valid views on a question, or perhaps different types of justification for the same view, might not be a negation of rationality, but rather a rational reflection on the limits of rationality.’ See R. Phillip Buckley, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Crisis of Philosophical Responsibility (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992), p. 117. I am suggesting that

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such an eventuality is less a limitation on rationality than, to use a term of Bachelard’s, a ‘complication’ that Husserl’s reductive analyses had not foreseen and that must now be regarded as one of its constitutive features. See Rudolphe Gasché, ‘Towards an Ethics of Auseinandersetzung,’ in Enlightenment: Encounters Between Critical Theory and Contemporary French Thought, ed. H. de Vries, H. Kunneman (Leuven: Peters Publishing, 1993). See Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Transcendence and Height,’ in Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 23. See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Pelican Books, 1986), p. 152. See Jürgen Habermas. Between Facts and Norms, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 113–18. Honneth, part I. Honneth, p. 179. See Arendt, On Violence, p. 40. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, pp. 24–6. The best account of Husserl’s Liebesgemeinschaft remains James G. Hart, The Person and the Common Life (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992), pp. 247ff. See Alain Renault, The Era of the Individual, trans. M. B. DeBoise, F. Philip (Princeton: Princeton University Pres, 1997). Lefort has confronted this argument in the review of Pierre Manent, ‘Democratie et totalitarisme,’ Commentaire, IV, 16 (1982–1983). See Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, pp. 30–1. Likewise, for Lefort’s appeal to a singular experience that ‘is neither an individual in the contemporary sense of the word nor a subject in the philosophical sense of the word,’ see p. 279. Klaus Held, ‘The Ethics of Democracy from a Phenomenological Point of View,’ in Self-awareness, Temporality, and Alterity, ed. Dan Zahavi (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998), p. 201. Ibid., p. 204. See Christian Meier, The Greek Discovery of Politics, p. 199. See EJ: §24d. In fact, for Husserl, such passivity is the origin of intellection, of all synthesis and diaresis, see pp. 209, 245. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 76: ‘Tradition is not something a man can learn; not a thread he can pick up when he feels like it; any more than a man can choose his ancestors. Someone lacking a tradition who would like to have one is like a man unhappily in love.’ See Richard Rorty, Achieving our Country (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 96. Rorty, I am suggesting, is right in his claim that Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida ‘are largely right in their criticism of enlightenment rationalism’ and that ‘traditional liberalism and traditional liberalism are entirely compatible with such criticism.’ Still, since these thinkers offer a ‘quasi-religious’ form of spiritual pathos, Rorty claimed, ‘they should be relegated to private life and not taken as guide to political deliberation’(96). Lefort’s argument, analyzing the religious and historical backdrop to modernity in effect provides a “thicker” conception of these thinkers’ appeals beyond the conventional limits of the public realm—or at least to Rorty’s impoverished version of

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the public. In Arendtian terms, this involves, politically, the principle of publicness, the right “to appear” (or its denial). What I am emphasizing is that such a plurality is not simply intrinsically linked to modern democracy, but that the latter is intrinsically linked to its standing as rational: hence that Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida’s contributions as critical of enlightenment rationality betray the fragmentation of transcendence in its midst and the very possibility for refiguring the hope Rorty claimed to be essential to community. Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, pp. 271, 281. I have noted further the instability of Phenomenology and the insufficiency in classical formulations to account for conventional objectivity in my Tradition(s) II, pp. 217–25. As such, it is the mirror image of objectivism, which cannot account for the question of origin and interpretation. Both insufficiencies are analyzed as responses to what has been called Kant’s ‘mixed-messages.’ See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 67. Dominique Janicaud, ‘Toward A Minimalist Phenomenology,’ Research in Phenomenology, Vol. XXX, 2000; Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). Suzanne Bachelard similarly spoke in terms of a ‘minimal phenomenology’ in the wake of Cavaillès and her father, Gaston’s, criticisms: ‘[O]riginal phenomenology has introduced a specific type of analysis which has enough force to remain active in a “weakened” form.’ See ‘Phenomenology and Mathematical Physics,’trans. Joseph J. Kocklemans in Phenomenology and the Natural Sciences, p. 417. I have demurred here, claiming that once its strong (Wissenschaftlich) models have rightly been abandoned, Phenomenology acquires its specific justification. See Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, pp. 110–15. See Claude Lefort, Le travail de l’oeuvre machiavel (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), ch. VI, ‘L’oeuvre, l’idéologie et l’interprétation.’ For Merleau-Ponty’s use of this text see VI: 186–7. If the question of legitimation has become complicated, surely legitimation has not thereby been dissolved. Here again the link between scientific rationality and critique is a portentous one—even if it involves, as Kant himself realized, no more than an analogy. It is in this sense that we can readdress the question of legitimation, albeit by acknowledging its infinite task. No more than the recognition of indeterminancies threatened the scientific rationality that provoked the theoretical question of legitimation, should such indeterminancies undermine objectivity here. They are the acknowledgment that such objectivity is historically emergent, that, without losing its normative edge, objectivity remains both necessary and open to question, that is, dialogical. Bluntly stated, we can no more abandon our commitment to human rights than we can the principles of physics. Here we can see the critical role of modern scientific rationality even for “phenomenological” accounts. Both involve the recognition that legitimation is a historical, conventional, and normative question. For further discussion of these issues, see my Tradition(s) II, ch. 5. Lefort makes this claim in relation to Arendt. See Democracy and Political Theory, p. 55. Whether this criticism of Arendt is justified is another matter. As other

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authors have noted, this dissensus and distance with respect to the past informs and makes possible even the ancient account of democracy. See Meier, The Greek Discovery of Politics. Still, while Meier provides a conceptual reconstruction of this interruption at work in the ancient emergency of democracy, the modern account of democracy, as he notes, explicitly begins theoretically with this problem, the problem of interpretation. Hence Hobbes’ famous statement that ‘all laws have need of interpretation.’ Moreover this is especially true, he points out, of the natural law, which has ‘the greatest need of able Interpreters’ (Leviathan, II 46). It is this question of interpretation that distinguishes the modern problem of law from the cosmological account of nomos and dike of the ancients. Hence as Walter Benjamin noted and Meier agrees (138), while the subject matter of Greek tragedy is myth, the subject matter of the modern is explicitly historical. It is in this sense, again, that Husserl’s turn to history in the Crisis is perhaps inherently political. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. David E. Linge (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1977), p. 25. See IPP: 31. Not only can one note Merleau-Ponty’s epistemic account here, but equally his posing of the problem in theological and figural terms (idolization), as would Lefort after him. I note, finally, that further analysis of these issues would need to focus on the issue of temporality in both writers’ account. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, letter to Jean-Paul Sartre, July 8, 1953, in The Debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, ed. Jon Stewart (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), p. 340. Ibid. See Lefort, Machiavel. For Merleau-Ponty’s “concurrence” see ‘A Note on Machiavelli’: ‘But what is original about Machiavelli is that, having laid down the source of struggle, he goes beyond it without forgetting it. He finds something other than antagonism in struggle itself’ (S: 211). Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, pp. 226, 232. Ibid., p. 232.

Chapter 6 1

See Nietzsche’s aphorisms collected under the title, ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow,’ in Human All Too Human or discussions of the shadow and its ‘call’ or the ‘great intelligence’ of the body, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 62, 283f. While Merleau-Ponty’s interest in Nietzsche dates from his earliest publications in the mid-thirties, it is also at work in Merleau-Ponty’s final lectures. Compare the opening of Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Hegel and its gloss on The Birth of Tragedy: ‘Do not seek to “see” everything “in its nakedness,” to “know” all—to be superficial through profundity (Apollo and Dionysius)’ (PNP: 45). While this interest in Nietzsche extends throughout Merleau-Ponty’s career, it was not uncritical. Moreover, ‘The Philosopher and His Shadow’ links the notion of forgetfulness to Husserl’s Ideas II (S: 173). The account of traditionality that results is no more simply Nietzschean than it is Husserlian, as will become evident.

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See (NSS: 138). Bachelard, as has been seen, claimed that scientific rationality extends beyond ordinary experience, remains irreducible to it and emerges through its internal problematization or complications. His main example is the emergence of non-Euclidean geometry, which dialectically competed past errors and brought “crude approximations to more subtle and complete theories” (174). As has also become evident, Merleau-Ponty also invoked this example at points to understand the emergence of historical rationality and its classical formulations. Strikingly, Bachelard’s dialectical or surrationalism compares the mathematical exploration of the real to Mallarmé (58)—as did Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘sur-signification’ with respect to Saussurian diacritics. See volume one of this work, In the Shadow of Phenomenology, chapter two. See, for example, Ludwig Langrebe, ‘Husserl’s Departure from Cartesianism,’ The Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl: Six Essays, ed. Donn Welton (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981). Merleau-Ponty, ‘Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis: Preface to Hesnard’s “L’Ouevre de Freud,”’ in The Essential Writings of Merleau-Ponty, p. 84. Ibid. Ibid., p. 84. In articulating this differential through the concept of metonymy I return to a Lacanian theme: ‘Metonymy is, as I have shown you, that effect made possible by the fact that there is no signification that does not refer to another signification, and in which their common denominator is produced, namely the little meaning (frequently confused with the insignificant).’ See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 259. See the commentary on this text by Jean-Luc Nancy, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Title of the Letter A Reading of Lacan, trans. Francois Raffoul, David Pettigrew (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1992), pp. 73–6. Their reading further stresses the link between metonymy, understood by Lacan as ‘the desire for something else’ to Heidegger’s account of truth as unconcealment or aleitheia. See pp. 99–102. Without equating the two concepts, I am suggesting that Merleau-Ponty’s account of écart between the visible and the invisible is best understood in this site and that the idea of reversibility similarly emerges from such an metonymic logic, albeit one that also bears witness to the classical (but interminable) dialectic or Wechsel that emerges in post-Kantian thought. In short, what standard interpretations call “the reversibility thesis” in Merleau-Ponty’s later writings is anything but a thesis. Marc Richir, ‘The Meaning of Phenomenology in The Visible and the Invisible,’ Thesis Eleven, No. 36, pp. 67–8. The argument could be made that it was the later works’ idea of a ‘figured philosophy’ that had already been at work in the Phenomenology’s interpretation of the lived body: the latter transforms the natural body’s mechanisms providing it with a ‘figurative significance (sens figuré),’ whereby a contraction of the throat, a sibilant emission of air between the tongue and the teeth is transformed into language, desire into love, the uncoordinated gestures of infancy into gesture. See PoP: 194. See Claude Lefort, Le travail de l’oeuvre machiavel, p. 696. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987), p. 187. Still, even Kant attempts to make the distinction between manner and method in terms of feelings and concepts, the modus aestheticus and

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modus logicus—and, as the “mode” talk obviates, leaves unquestioned the commensurability between them. See Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 127. This was both the ‘violence’ and the virtue of his Kant interpretation, Heidegger admitted. Martin Heidegger, The Idea of Philosophy, p. 55. See my ‘Heidegger, Rationality, and the Critique of Judgment,’ Review of Metaphysics Vol. 41 (1988), pp. 461–99. See Gilbert Ryle, ‘Phenomenology versus “The Concept of Mind,”’ Collected Papers Vol. 1 (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971), p. 188. Ibid., pp. 188–9. See Charles Taylor, ‘The Validity of Transcendental Arguments,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. LXXIV, 1978–1979, p. 165. Ryle, ‘Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit,’ Collected Papers, Vol. I, p. 213. Compare Charles Taylor, ‘Theories of Meaning,’ Philosophical Papers I, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 255. Here too, evidently, Taylor’s thesis coheres with, if not derives, from Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. Such a thesis has drawn the ire of intentionalists and anti-intentionalists alike. Compare Richard Rorty’s objection to Taylor in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 103. Rorty denied that such practices are different than any other, that is, that all our rational practices are language constituted. Welton, on the other hand, in defense of Husserl, claimed that such intersubjective and expressivist accounts remain parasitic upon “monologic” intentional representation. Compare Donn Welton, The Other Husserl (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press 2000), pp. 387–91. Both sorts of objections, I am arguing, attempt elicit reductions of Taylor’s (and Merleau-Ponty’s) account of the interconstituted experience of social practice and its expressivity. While such reductions, to use Rorty’s terms, were made in hopes that they would ‘create few philosophical problems’ (104), it is not clear that this was the result. Against both the (representational) intentionalist and the anti-intentionalist, Merleau-Ponty and Taylor privilege, what, as will be seen, Merleau-Ponty calls the expressive capacity (langagière) of language. In brief, as Taylor argued, now invocative context becomes privileged and decisive in the account of meaning and the rational. We will further require what he calls “the principle of embodiment” for its grasp, namely that humans are expressive beings, beings whose thinking is always in an historical, expressive medium (85). Ryle’s ‘Cambridge transformation’ of concepts, as we have learned from historians like Michael Dummett or Robert Brandom is actually Fregean. The argument here involves not a denial of the Fregean view but rather claims that it is insufficient to account for our rational “historicity.” Like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty claims, ‘philosophical life remains provincial, almost clandestine.’ Academic conferences are an ‘American Idea—and an extreme one—to believe that clarity comes from a conference. One might wonder whether truly productive and creative work can take place in the midst of such impromptu personal exchanges’ (TD: 9). He had, as has been seen, similar demeurals about the écart required with respect to politics. See Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Introduction’ to The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, trans. Glyn Adey, David Frisbey (London: Hinemann, 1976), p. 41.

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Notes 23

24 25 26

27

28

29

177

See Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), p. 54. Ibid. Ibid., p. 53. See IP: 200–1. Merleau-Ponty cites Blanchot’s ‘Mort du dernier écrivain,’ Nouvelle Revue Francaise, Mars, 1955. Novalis, Fichte Studies, ed. Jane Kneller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 5–8. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 183 (A141, B181); p. 193 (A 156/ B 195). See Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 87–107. See my ‘On the Delineation of the Visible,’ Extensions, ch. VII. Beyond its false ambition to foundationally deduce or possess its object, Phenomenology retains the rationality of a ‘un vie près de soi’ with its interpretive and experimental (‘hieroglyphic’) attempts at self-explication (VI: 19). Hence: We are never wholly one with constitutive genesis; we barely manage to accompany it for short segments. . . . There is nothing but convergent but discontinuous intentions, moments of clarity.’ . . . Originally a project to gain intellectual possession of the world, constitution becomes increasingly, as Husserl’s thought matures, the means of unveiling a back side of things that we have not constituted (S: 180).

30

31

32

For Merleau-Ponty, here constitution becomes aware of the institutions that sustain us, including the Stiftung of the body (IPP: 37ff). Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation, p. 64. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty states, ‘the ultimate task of phenomenology as philosophy of consciousness is to understand its relation to non-phenomenology’(S: 179) What escapes such a philosophy of consciousness are precisely the themes of his later work, not only the body, but the other and the history that joins them together. For discussion of this issue see, for example, Martin Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars, ed. Menard Boss, trans. Franz Mayr, Richard Askay (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001), pp. 155–61. As was noted above with respect to Nietzsche and Husserl, perhaps in dealing with Nietzsche, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty’s ‘paths crossed,’ to use Sartre’s figure. Here we find Heidegger’s richest ontological account of the body as ‘bodying forth into chaos.’ See Nietzsche, Volume III, The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, trans. Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell, Frank A Capuzzi (San Francisco, Calif.: Harper & Row, 1987), pp. 77–83. Having denied that philosophy possesses the absolute, instead of an Archimedean foundation, Merleau-Ponty was able to understand his account in relation to Nietzsche’s embrace of the phenomena (PNP: 44–6). On the notion of ‘the equiprimordiality of constitution items,’ which ‘has often been disregarded in ontology, because of a methodologically unrestrained tendency to derive everything and anything from some simple “primal ground,”’ see Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 170. Granted such equiprimordiality, identity here will involve difference, the interplay of presence and absence. Reductive analysis will always encounter what on its terms remains unpresentable: for example, in the case of the body, no matter how much I depend upon the experience of my body, it remains incomplete. This is what Merleau-Ponty means in pointing out that I cannot see my own face.

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178 33

34

35

36

37

38 39 40 41

42 43

44 45 46

47 48

49

50 51 52

53

Notes

Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Allan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 272. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘La Philosophie et La Politique Sont Solidaires,’ Parcours Deux, ed. Jacques Prunair (Paris: Verdier, 200), p. 303. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 525 (A632/B660). See Martin Heidegger, ‘The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,’ that is, The End of Philosophy. See Michel Foucault, ‘A Preface to Transgression,’ in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 41. Sartre’s account had similarly bifurcated philosophy and literature, albeit stressing literature’s political and semantic failures. See What is Literature, trans. Bernard Frechtman (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1978). Beginning in 1948, Merleau-Ponty began to study this work and eventually radically distance himself from it (PW: xvi). On Merleau-Ponty’s attempts to overcome the antinomies between Sartre and Bataille, see my ‘Of Sartre, Klee, Surrealism and Philosophy: Towards a “Non-Prosaic” Conception of Philosophy,’ in Issues in Interpretation Theory. Foucault, ‘A Preface to Transgression,’ p. 41. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, pp. 109–11. Ibid., p. 108. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1970), p. 300. Foucault, ‘Preface to Transgression,’ p. 41. Ibid., p. 44. For an analysis of Foucault’s discussion of Warhol, see ‘The De-Aestheticization of the Work of Art’ in volume one of this work, In the Shadow of Phenomenology, ch. 3. Ibid., ‘What is an Author,’ p. 120. Maurice Blanchot, ‘Le “Discours Philosophique,”’ L’Arc, 1990, pp. 1–4. For further discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s use of this trope, see the Introduction to volume one of this work. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, pp. 94–5. Hence: ‘The flesh of the world is not self-sensing (se-sentir) as is my flesh—It is sensible and not sentient—I call it flesh nonetheless (for example, the relief, depth, life in Michotte’s experiments) in order to say that it is a pregnancy of possibles, Weltmöglichkeit (the possible worlds variants of this world, the world beneath the singular and the plural) . . . It is by the flesh of the world that in the last analysis one can understand the lived body (corps propre)’ (VI: 250). See my ‘Kant and Foucault: On the Beginnings and Ends of Anthropology,’ Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, Vol. 47, No. 1, 1985. See Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, pp. 38–40, 85. Ibid., p. 84. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 59. Theodore W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hull-Kentor (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 124. Like Merleau-Ponty, Adorno stresses the work of Paul Klee here. For further discussion of this issues see my

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Notes

54

55

56

57

58

59 60

61

62

63 64

179

‘On the Withdrawal of the Beautiful: Merleau-Ponty and Adorno’s Readings of Paul Klee,’ Chiasmi, Vol. 5, 2004. See my ‘On the Rationality of the Fragment,’ Extensions: Essays on Interpretation, Rationality, and the Closure of Modernism, ch. X. See Edmund Husserl, Phantasy, Image, Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), trans. John B. Brough (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), p. 39. Also see G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics, pp. 356–7. The classical text here is Mary Hesse, Models and Analogies in Science (London: Sheed & Ward, 1963). See Claude Imbert, Phénoménologies et langues formulaires (Paris: PUF, 1992). Imbert’s attempt to theorize Merleau-Ponty’s account of originary language in opposition to apophansis may be too antinomic. As has become evident, it is not without its argumentative and logical effect. The flesh is no metaphor (VI: 221). On the other hand, especially in her book on Merleau-Ponty, Imbert aptly interprets Merleau-Ponty’s articulative use of literary language in conjunction with Cavaillès; as a result Merleau-Ponty relies upon an indirect language that forms a decisive alternative to the ‘perceptual enunciation’ of the early work, surpassing, as has been seen, his early commitments to existentialist ambiguity. See Claude Imbert, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Paris: ADPF (Association pour la diffusion de la pensèe française), 2005), pp. 57–59. See Richard Rorty, Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 172. On Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of babble, see CAL: 11–19. Babble provides the instrumental underpinnings for (rational) speech, which in turn must be understood within the expressive, historical and cultural account of our sense-history. ‘The same relationship exists between babbling and language as between scribbling and drawing.’ Hobbes, Leviathan, IV 46. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 91. The conjunction of anthropology and “pragmatism” occurs from the outset in Kant. See his Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Mary J. Gregor (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974). See Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1982), p. 190. In its blindness to the ‘fundamental significance of the transcendentals’ Hobbes view, he claims ‘is of particular significance for the understanding of contemporary logic’(ibid.). For further discussion of this issue see my Tradition(s): Refiguring Community and Virtue in Classical German Thought, Introduction. See Merleau-Ponty, ‘Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis: Preface to Hesnard, “L’Oeuvre de Freud,”’ in The Essential Writings of Merleau-Ponty, pp. 86–7. For further discussion of Merleau-Ponty use of models see my ‘Beyond the Speaking of Things: Merleau-Ponty’s Reconstruction of Phenomenology and the Models of Kant’s third Critique,’ Philosophy Today, 2008 Supplement. Taylor, Philosophical Papers I, p. 252. Along with Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty had come to think of the strict requisites of modern philosophy as dominated by Cartesian science. See, for example, the 1960–1961 lectures on “Cartesian Ontology and Contemporary Ontology” (NC: 159–268). Like Heidegger’s condemnations of positivism, Merleau-Ponty’s characterizes analytic philosophy as a kind of crypto-Cartesianism.

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Notes

180 65

Compare N: 227: These relations of the visible and the invisible, of the logos of the visible world and the logos of ideality, will be studied (The Visible and the Invisible) only in the next few years with language, with other systems of expression (painting, cinema), with history and its architectonic. Necessity of these studies: They make the passage to invisible being

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Index

absolute 54, 76 Absolute Knowledge 65 Absolute Spirit 118 Adorno, Theodor W. 32, 37, 43, 47–8, 69, 74, 77, 133–4, 145–6, 149 Adventures of the Dialectics (Merleau-Ponty) 17, 19, 80 altruism 23 appearance 41, 89, 106–7, 109, 117 Aquinas, Thomas 105, 117 Arendt, Hannah 26, 99, 112 Aristotle 41, 44, 52, 60, 67, 69, 105, 147 articuleme (sketch) 29, 41, 43, 47, 51–2, 61, 71, 126, 136, 141–2 Bachelard, Gaston 51, 78, 82–3, 123, 136, 161n.62, 162n.66, 169n.30, 175n.2 complication versus reduction 53 criticism of Husserl’s strict distinction between intuition and concept 91 criticism of phenomenology’s primacy of the perceived 79 and Merleau-Ponty 86–97 nonCartesian epistemology 81 notion of concept as both experimental and theoretical 88 phenomenology and poetics 85 quantum physics as a modification of phenomena 80 and surrationalism 84 theoretical obstacle 79 and Tristan Tzara 84

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Bachelard, Suzanne 93 Bacon, Francis 67, 72, 101 Bakhtin, Mikhail 45 Barthes, Roland 41 Bataille, Georges 143 beauty 76 Begriffstradition 36, 39, 45, 48, 52, 100, 118 Being 21, 28, 51, 63, 65, 67, 79, 91–2, 94–6, 109, 112, 117, 127, 135, 140–1, 147 Being and Time (Heidegger) 103, 114 Black, Max on Cavaillès 151n.21 Blanchot, Maurice 120, 126, 134, 144–5 Bohr, Neils 147 Bolzano, Bernard 6, 35, 38, 60 Bradley, F. H. 35 Brentano, Franz 35, 59–61, 68–71 Brunschwicg, Léon 87 Butler, Judith 45 Butor, Michel 125, 128 Canguilhem, Georges 61–2 caritas 11 Carnap, Rudolf 31–2, 37 Cartesian Meditations (Husserl) 52, 65 Cavaillès, Jean 6–7, 9, 46, 52, 68, 70–1, 75, 151n.21, 168n.25 Chisholm, Roderick M. 70 Coffa, Alberto 47 Cogito 9–10, 14, 61–3, 65–7, 72, 81, 116, 123 community 100, 105, 111, 118–21 concept 40, 44, 50, 52, 63, 142, 149 Concept of Mind (Ryle) 129–30, 148

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182

Index

conceptual fluidity in Bachelard 80, 84, 167n.10 in Hegel 167n.10 in Husserl 22 in Merleau-Ponty 22, 80, 125 consciousness 1, 3–4, 10, 70, 73–4, 76–7, 80, 83, 88, 116, 135 Crisis of the European Sciences (Husserl) 30–2, 35, 42, 44, 103, 106, 124 Critique of Dialectical Reason (Sartre) 79, 84 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 33–4 Dasein 48, 108, 127 De Beauvoir, Simone de 12–14, 25 de Corpore (Hobbes) 41–2 dehiscence 85, 137, 142 democracy 100–1, 109–18, 120 Derrida, Jacques 44, 69, 72, 76, 98–9, 117, 141, 143–4 Desanti, Jean-Toussaint 151n.22, 159–60nn.41,44, 166n.4 Descartes, René 3, 7, 11, 14, 26, 29, 31, 40, 58–64, 65, 67–9, 71–2, 74–5, 80, 82–3, 87, 92, 96, 119, 123, 125, 128, 147 dessin see articuleme (sketch) determinacy 2, 10, 14, 16, 125 dialectical thought 22, 35, 91 dialogue 9, 60, 68–9, 110, 116, 118, 131, 134 dissensus communis 101–2, 106–7, 111, 117, 119, 170n.12 dogmatism 63, 65, 72–3, 76 dream 49, 83, 94–6 egotism 23 Einstein, Albert 44, 82–3, 87, 148 Einstein and the Crisis of Reason (Merleau-Ponty) 82, 87 element as compared to ancient elements in Hyppolite 168n.20 in Merleau-Ponty 79 as flesh in Bachelard 78 in Merleau-Ponty 79, 82

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as speculative element in Hegel 167n.10 in Hyppolite 168n.20 empiricism 54, 68, 72 enigma 30, 131 epicureanism 72, 73 epoché 29, 38, 60, 63–4, 68, 117 Erkenntnistheorie (Schlick) 36 ethics 7–8, 27–8 Ethics of Ambiguity (De Beauvoir) 12 Euclidian/non-Euclidean geometry 81–3, 85, 87, 89–90, 96 evidence 5, 36–7, 44, 60, 72 existentialism 1, 10, 11, 13, 18, 25–6, 27, 75 experience as concept and event 45–7, 91, 124, 142 metonymy of 41, 63, 124, 142, 175n.7 as symbolic matrix 124 as theory-laden 42, 71 and tradition 70 Experience and Judgement (Husserl) 39 Eye and Mind (Merleau-Ponty) 87 Fichte, J. G. 3, 35, 45, 59, 61, 86, 140 fideism 62–3 Findlay, J. N. 59 Fink, Eugen 39, 41, 42, 46–7, 67, 71, 74, 94, 136, 140, 159n.29, 164n.24, 177n.30 flesh 78–9, 92, 95–6, 146–7 Formal and Transcendental Logic (Husserl) 6, 50, 71, 122 Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (Scheler) 3 Foucault, Michel 61–2, 69–70, 143–5, 149 foundationalism 88, 92, 96, 114, 142 Frank, Manfred 99, 113 freedom 74, 113, 154n.57 Frege, Gottlob 36, 38, 67, 129, 132 Freud, Sigmund 135 Friedman, Michael 37 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 40, 67–9, 119, 164n.39, 165n.57 Galileo, Galilei 103–5, 107

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Index Gaston Bachelard or the Romanticism of Intelligence (Hyppolite) 86 God 30, 49, 62, 63, 69 Good 4, 11, 55, 76, 118–19 Gueroult, Martial 12, 14, 148 Gurwitsch, Aron 44 Habermas, Jürgen 99, 112, 113, 116 Hadot, Pierre 63 Heelan, Patrick 82 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 10, 16–17, 20–1, 24, 29, 31, 35, 45, 54–5, 64–5, 70, 72–7, 99, 118, 144, 166n.58 Heidegger, Martin 1, 6, 16, 20, 24, 27, 31–2, 37, 58, 63, 66–9, 77, 82, 96, 99, 102–3, 107, 112–13, 116, 121, 127, 131, 137–40, 144, 147–9, 151n.20, 154n.48, 159n.34, 177n.32 account of the body in 141–2 ambiguity in 15 community 110 condemnation of Sartre’s and Husserl’s Cartesianism 11 defense of phenomenological motivation 32 emphasis on Kant’s schematism 46–8 hermeneutic intuition 61 and Münchhausen problem 32 ontotheology 65 science and Machenschaft 109 Seinsfrage and reflective judgment 141–2 Held, Klaus 114 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 99–100 hermeneutic circle 65 Hilbert, David 6, 67 historicism 15, 38–9, 40, 43, 72, 104, 110, 123, 129, 133–4, 142 history 20, 22–6, 28, 37, 43–5, 52–3, 57, 61, 63, 71–2, 87, 124, 128, 130, 132, 134 Hobbes, Thomas 30, 41, 58, 62–4, 67–9, 71, 103, 107, 109, 112, 147 Hölderlin, Friedrich 109, 145 Honneth, Axel 99, 112, 114, 116, 118

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183

horizons 160n.48 humanism 11, 12, 16, 27 Humanism and Terror (Merleau-Ponty) 15, 18, 22 Hume, David 50, 60, 127 Husserl, Edmund 8, 11, 13–14, 18, 21, 23, 26, 29, 33, 35, 37–9, 39–45, 49–53, 55, 57–8, 63, 65–8, 70–2, 74–5, 79, 82–3, 85–8, 90–4, 99, 102–9, 111, 113–17, 120–1, 122–7, 129–41, 144–99, 150n.4, 151n.14, 161n.55, 164n.23, 171–2n.30 Crisis’ historical turn 30–1, 42 ethics and values 1, 3, 5 evidence/objectivity 36, 47, 60–2 history 4 and Kant 50–1 meaning invariance versus theory change 22, 80, 139 static/genetic account 3 theory of science 2–3, 59, 67 zig zag between concept and intuition 26, 40, 149 see also phenomenology Hyppolite, Jean 55, 86, 93 idealism 16, 34, 39, 40, 43, 53, 86, 92, 138 Ideas (Husserl) 36 Ideas II (Husserl) 43, 45, 52, 79, 85 imaginary 83, 85, 94–6, 126, 135 Imbert, Claude 179n.57 immanence 55, 65 induction 51, 161n.62 institution 7, 13, 20, 26, 28, 73, 86, 95, 104, 115, 120 as coherent deformation 146 as development (Auseinander) 136 as embodiment 177n.29 as establishment (Leistung) 73 as final meaning or institution (Enstiftung)104, 105, 106 and objectivity 73–4 as operative imaginary, essential to the definition of Being 94 as originating institution (Urstiftung) 108

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Index

institution (contd.) as philosophy 159n.29 as reinstitution (Nachstiftung) 123 and singularity 74 as variation of convention 146 intersubjectivity 12, 14, 24 intuition 40, 49, 52, 63, 80, 92 Jaspers, Karl 18 Jung, Carl 84 justice 16, 101, 111, 118 Kant, Immanuel 2, 4, 5, 7–8, 32–7, 42, 44–52, 56–7, 65–7, 71, 101, 112, 119, 127, 131, 139–40, 142, 143, 145–6, 160n.45 Kierkegaard, Søren 10, 45, 62, 73–5 Klee, Paul 85 knowledge 34, 49–50, 58–9, 120–1, 130, 163n.16 Kristeva, Julia 98–9 Kuhn, Thomas 44 Lacan, Jacques 112–13 Lambert, Johann Henrich 33–4, 42–3, 46–7 language 24, 116, 135–7 Le travail de l’oeuvre machiavel (Lefort) 126 Lecourt, Dominique 93 Lectures on the History of Philosophy (Hegel) 64 Lefort, Claude 17–18, 100–2, 105–6, 108–13, 116, 118–21, 126, 136, 173–4n.54 legitimation 118, 173n.53 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 87 Levinas, Emmanuel 1, 8, 24, 55, 62–3, 76–7, 112–13, 134 liberalism 15–16, 17, 69, 100 L’Invitée (de Beauvoir) 12, 25 lived body as experience and concept 44–7, 52 in Heidegger 141–2, 177n.31 as historical concept 45–7 in Husserl 141 as mise en scène 52, 140–2 as Stiftung 177n.29

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logic 7, 26, 38, 61, 137 Logical Investigations (Husserl) 53, 59, 149 Lukács, György 18–21, 145 Machiavelli, Niccolò 17, 29, 70, 116, 118, 120 Marcel, Gabriel 123 Marion, Jean-Luc 62 Marxism 15–16, 17–22, 27, 29, 90 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 2, 9–23, 29, 32, 39, 40–2, 45–8, 52–3, 55, 57–8, 62, 64–6, 68–71, 73, 76, 78–83, 85, 97, 102, 113, 115–21, 129–37, 144–9, 155nn.59, 65–7, 156–7nn.73–7, 159n.41, 166n.59, 167n.7, 169n.34, 174n.56, 176n.21, 179n.64 appropriation of Bachelard 86–96 beyond reductionism and foundationalism: the body as mis en scène 138–42 beyond the antinomies of expression: ad Foucault and the word’s murmur 138–42 ad Ryle and analysis 128–33 dialectics of virtue 23–8 essence as reading/sketch 51, 77 ethics of ambiguity 12–13 operative intentionality and history 91–3 phenomenology and symbolic function 44 philosophy as operant history 141 and stoicism (Montaigne) 11, 75, 77 tradition and forgetfulness, imagination and refinement 122–8 withdrawal from the political 17 see also phenomenology metaphysics 5, 9, 13, 33 metonymy 41, 63, 124, 127, 136, 142, 175n.7 modernity 17, 69, 75 Montaigne, Michel de 11, 24, 26, 28, 69, 70, 75, 77, 116

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Index Montesquieu, Baron de 112 moral law 10, 12 moral realism 9 multiple 22, 80, 145 Naess, Arne 45, 52 Natorp, Paul 47, 53, 135, 160n.50, 162n.65 Natural Law (Hegel) 10 naturalism 31, 38, 45, 73, 107–8, 140 Nature 20–1, 23, 73, 85, 95–6 neorationalism 11 New Scientific Spirit (Bachelard) 92 Nietzsche, Friedrich 46, 49, 108, 123, 140, 174n.1 nihilism 11, 27, 55, 134 A Note on Machiavelli (Merleau-Ponty) 17 Notes de travail (Merleau-Ponty) 136 noumenon 36, 62, 67 Novalis 86, 135, 145 On the Eternal in Man (Scheler) 8 operant intentionality 91–3 operative history 77, 92–4, 119, 138, 149 opposition of philosophy and science 87 Order of Things (Foucault) 61–2 Origin of Geometry (Husserl) 5–6 Other, the 25, 54, 62, 101, 120, 134 perspective 7, 18, 26, 85, 88 phantasm 77, 138 phenomenology 9, 13, 25, 27, 36, 37, 41, 53, 64–5, 71, 79–81, 85–7, 89–90, 92–5, 97, 105, 107–8, 114, 116–18, 122–31, 135–6, 138, 140–2 and Adorno 32 analytic phenomenology (Husserl) 1–2, 52 and Bolzano 35, 38 and Carnap 32 Cavaillès’ criticism of Husserl’s foundationalist reading of Hilbert 6, 60 Cogito 61–2, 66, 72

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185

consensus versus dissensus 39, 42, 106–7, 119 criterion problem 67 Desanti’s criticism of Husserl’s account of determinate multiplicity 159n.41 and forgetting of origins 23 and Frege 3, 35 and history 4, 31–2 horizon and standpoint 50–5 and Kant 33–4 in Lambert 33–4, 46 and language 40 and meaning invariance 22 and philosophia perennis 52 as polemical concept (Gurwitsch) 44 rationality 52 and reflective judgment (Kant) 47, 27, 63, 127 and Schlick 36 as spectacle (Schauspiel) 52 status of historical argument in 30 stoicism versus skepticism in 49, 72, 75 theoretical crisis 57–8 Thoa’s interpretation of Husserl’s generativity 14 see also Heidegger; Husserl; Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty) 13, 16, 125, 128, 136, 175n.9 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) 54, 64 Philosopher and His Shadow (MerleauPonty) 24, 80, 122–3, 137 philosophy 1, 3, 10, 13–17, 22, 29, 33, 35, 37, 40–1, 47, 50–2, 55–8, 69, 71, 74–7, 79, 82, 86–7, 89, 91–7, 79, 82, 86–7, 89, 91–7, 99–100, 103, 105, 107, 114, 116, 120, 122–5, 129, 132, 136–40, 142–3, 145–9, 146 Philosophy as Strict Science (Husserl) 35 Plato 59–60, 67, 69, 70, 72–3 Plotinus 64–5 Pöggler, Otto 103 politics 17–18, 27–8, 113–14, 120

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Index

polymorphism 113, 147 Popper, Karl 133–4 Proust, Marcel 85, 144 Psychoanalysis of Fire (Bachelard) 86 psychologism 38, 61, 68, 72 rationality 39, 41–2, 46, 48, 52–3, 60–2, 68, 73, 80–4, 86–7, 93–4, 96, 99–115, 117, 120–1, 123, 125–7, 129–36, 138, 146 realism 4, 9, 19, 40, 53, 61, 84, 93, 110 reason 8, 11, 13, 15, 81 reciprocal relation 91–2 reduction as extension 90 reductionism 53, 60, 64, 68, 70, 80, 90–1, 113 refiguration 39 reflection 65 relativism 4, 8, 29, 72, 92 representationalism 30, 76 revelation 63, 75 Richir, Marc 48, 124–5 role 23–5, 157 Romanticism 35, 43, 69, 99, 114 Rorty, Richard 105, 110, 113–15, 172–3n.46 Royaument encounter with Ryle 129–33 Russell, Bertrand 35, 133 Ryle, Gilbert 87, 128–33, 135–7, 148 Sartre, Jean-Paul 8–13, 24, 28, 65, 70, 75, 79–80, 83–6, 93, 119, 127–9, 134, 143, 156n.75, 176n.37 Saussure, Ferdinand de 21, 24, 115, 136–7, 149 Scheler, Max 3–9, 11, 25–7, 152n.25, 27–30, 35, 153nn.36–40 Schelling, Friedrich 45, 61, 64–7, 70, 72–3, 76, 85 Schellingian circle 65 schema of freedom 45 Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich 22, 45 Schlick, Moritz 31, 36–7, 47 Schopenhauer, Arthur 91 science 80–1, 86–7, 90, 94, 105, 108–9

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The Science of Logic (Hegel) 31 self trust (versus certainty) 77, 131 Sellars, Wilfried 40 sense history 21, 44, 51, 61, 124, 128, 130–1, 133–4, 136–7, 145, 149 Semblance 49 Sense and Nonsense (Merleau-Ponty) 13, 87 Signs (Merleau-Ponty) 22, 27–8 Simon, Claude 79, 85, 125, 128, 144 singular/singularity 46, 48, 49, 55, 59, 72–4, 113, 115–17, 120–1, 124, 127–8 Sittlich 16, 113, 118 skepticism 14, 36, 37–8, 41, 49, 54–6, 63, 73, 75–7, 117, 120 Sorbonne Lectures (Merleau-Ponty) 24 Spinoza, Baruch 16 Stein, Edith 163n.23 Stiftung see institution stoic modernism 106 stoicism 53, 55, 64, 69, 72–5, 120, 130 Structure of Behavior (Merleau-Ponty) 14, 148 subjectivity 4, 11, 73–4 surrationalism 86, 91–2 Taylor, Charles 37, 42–3, 131, 148, 176n.19 Temps Modernes’ (Merleau-Ponty) 12 Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology (Levinas) 8 thinking 65, 84 Tocqueville, Alexis de 111–12 Tran-Duc-Thao 9, 14, 16 Transcendence of the Ego (Sartre) 8–9 transcendental consciousness 68 transcendental dialectic 63, 67 transcendental Generativität 14 transcendental idealism 16 transcendental imagination 66 transcendental phenomenology 31, 49, 57, 59, 61 transcendental philosophy 35, 56–8 transcendental schematism 139–40 transferences 132

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Index truth 11, 16, 34, 43, 59–61, 69–70, 75, 77, 110, 118–20 truth-theory 60–1, 63 Tzara, Tristan 84, 167n.11 value 8, 10–12 Van Breda, Herman 6 Van Frassen, Bas 161n.61 virtue 16, 29, 156–7n.77 Visible and the Invisible (MerleauPonty) 57, 78, 82, 85, 120, 122, 126, 144, 146, 178n.48 Vorhabe 53, 75, 127, 132 War Diaries (Sartre) 10 Warhol, Andy 143 Wesensschau 36, 44, 52–3, 87 Weyl, Hermann 94, 151n.14

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187

What is Literature? (Sartre) 84 Wissenschaftslehre 4–5 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 2, 37, 43, 47, 55, 114, 128–9, 133 Wundt, Wilhelm Maximilian 36 zig zag in phenomenological experience between concept and intuition 26, 40, 44, 48, 149 between judgment and content 103 between past and present 103 as historical reflection 104, 116, 149 as reading [lecture]of essence 51, 51, 87, 161n.62 as splitting [Entzweiung] between concept and intuition 64

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