In Defense of Phenomenology

Merleau-Pontys Philosophy

Douglas Low

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351513098
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued for the primary role perception plays in understanding the world as well as engaging with it. As a contributor to phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty faced his fair share of criticisms. In this new book, Douglas Low comes to the defence of both Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology.

In Defence of Phenomenology uses Merleau-Ponty's philosophy to counter the criticisms raised in Vincent Descombes's Modern French Philosophy point by point, arguing that it often misunderstood or misrepresented Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. Low clarifies Merleau-Ponty's claims, then makes the case for them. He also argues against Renaud Barbaras's well-known positions that there is a break in the development of Merleau-Ponty's thought, that Merleau-Ponty abandoned his earlier phenomenology, and that Merleau-Ponty equated being with phenomena. Low also clarifies Merleau-Ponty's complex relationship to Hegel and Marx. Finally, Low addresses the later works of Jean Baudrillard and their move away from phenomenology toward a more postmodernist philosophy, in which language and mass media images dominate culture and even construct our worldview.

In Defence of Phenomenology asserts that Merleau-Ponty more sensibly argued that even though humanity's interpretation of the world is influenced by language and the media, these linguistic and media messages are first suggested by a person's needful, embodied encounters with the world and with others. These messages would make little sense if they did not relate back to this more primordial encounter.

1
Early and Persistent Criticisms of Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy

In his Modern French Philosophy, Vincent Descombes enumerates a number of criticisms of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy from the point of view of the structuralist and postmodernist philosophies that succeed it. While Modern French Philosophy was published some time ago, originally in French in 1979 and in English in 1980, it has been reprinted over ten times (until 1998), with Google Scholar listing (to date) almost seven hundred citations. While it cannot be considered a current text, the book remains significant for the following reasons. First, it helped articulate, and circulate, the common criticisms of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy that were then being formed in France and elsewhere in the years immediately following his death. And secondly, since the book has been cited hundreds of times since its publication, it has contributed to the solidification of what has come to be regarded as common criticisms of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. The intent of this chapter 1 is to evaluate and defend Merleau-Ponty against these criticisms.

Phenomenology and Perceived Being

Descombes states: “In general terms, phenomenology maintains that the only meaning which ‘being’ can have for myself is ‘being for myself’” (MFP 64). Descombes reports that the critical claim by post–World War II structuralists against Merleau-Ponty is that his philosophy remains subjectivist; his philosophy remains a philosophy of the subject, one that is similar to the early Sartre’s, even though Merleau-Ponty criticizes Sartre’s position on these very grounds. Moreover, Descombes continues that even Merleau-Ponty’s (as well as the later Sartre’s) appeal to the anonymous or general subject remains subjectivist. The structuralist, on the contrary, grasps events and social relations as they are in themselves, objectively or formally, without the distorting influence of the subject. The subject, in fact, at least according to structuralists, must be thought of as part of these natural or formal relations—which frame, condition, and even determine the subject’s experience and life far more than the subject’s own decisions or interpretations (MFP 71–2).¹

This way of framing the issue follows the standard and traditional definitions of subjective and objective, which can be summarized as follows. Subjective means personal or particular to the individual, that all experience must be interpreted from the point of view of the subject’s own experiential perspective, and ultimately that all meaning is dependent upon the meaning that is determined by the subject. Objective means that reality is independent of individual consciousness and must be understood as it is in itself and that, subsequently, human knowledge must be understood as grasping the in itself, unadulterated with the projections and distortions of the individual’s consciousness. Formal relations are frequently associated with the objective, for they are taken to be true for all minds and are seen as providing the necessary conditions for reality itself, certainly for the human understanding of it. Here, in Descombes’s work, the subject is interpreted primarily as a Cartesian or even Sartrean subject, as an introspective awareness of one’s essentially private, conscious experience—which is set against a world of things in themselves.

First of all, it must be stated that Merleau-Ponty had long criticized Sartre’s emphasis on the subject and the dualism of the in itself and the for itself that he embraced, a dualism that also appears to be embraced by structuralists (at least as they are here presented by Descombes), with allegiances simply switched to the objective from the subjective. Merleau-Ponty challenges this dualism and attempts to overcome it. Secondly, Merleau-Ponty is severely critical of Sartre’s subjectivism and, again, fully develops his own independent view of the subject/object relationship. Thus the criticism leveled against Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy as a subjectivism must not be blindly associated with Sartre’s treatment of the subject—which, as Descombes admits, was the tendency of structuralists’ criticisms of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy after his death.² Thirdly, Merleau-Ponty criticizes the reduction of experience to objective factors alone, for this simply exchanges the subjective view for an objective one and thus likewise assumes the same subject/object dualism, the same definition of the subjective and objective using mutually exclusive terms. He claims that we must attempt to escape this subjectivism and objectivism—this dualism which sets one term against the other, with no possibility of their integration. If we start with a completely individualized subject, who creates all meaning, then we cannot understand how the world impacts upon the subject and how this subject can possibly come to share a view of the world with others (since experience is completely individualized and since the traditional “safety valve” escape from individualism by appealing to a universal rationality innate to all is no longer tenable). And if we start with the objective view, as traditionally defined above, we cannot account for the contributions of the aware subject or for human freedom, that is, for a conscious being who is not simply a product of physical cause and effect but who possesses both a degree of freedom of choice and the ability to integrate and organize his or her personal experience with a public perceptual and cultural field. For Merleau-Ponty we cannot eliminate consciousness, as objectivism seeks to do, for to consciously eliminate consciousness is self-contradictory, and, moreover, the only access we have to the object is by way of the human subject’s perceptual openness upon the world. Yet, on the other hand, we cannot (completely) eliminate the causal efficacy of the material world, as subjectivism seeks to do, for consciousness is embodied and the body necessarily exists in the world and is thus subject to its contingencies.

Merleau-Ponty does not abandon an objective view for a subjective one. Throughout his professional life, he attempted to develop a third alternative, one in which stable structures of experience are formed and revealed at the point where the embodied subject opens upon and meets up with a public world. The objectivist criticism here is that, since Merleau-Ponty approaches the world through the subject’s perceptual experience, he does not truly reach the object as it is in itself, apart from human subjectivity. Yet the counterclaim from the point of view of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is that this is impossible, since we always and only perceive the world through the avenues of the human body. This, however, does not make his position subjectivist, at least in the above defined sense, since the conscious subject here is primarily the human body’s aware, anonymous, and general openness upon and entanglement with the world. The body’s anonymous and general awareness and the world’s objects are inextricably intertwined and thus must be regarded as participating in a cocreation of meaning. Merleau-Ponty thus attempts to overcome subject/object dualism by arguing that the human body is a third kind of thing, a mixture or integration of awareness and embodiment. The human body is an aware openness upon a world that it perceives as its homeland, something that the body exists within and is a part of. Human perception, then, must be thought of as the world becoming aware of itself through one of its own, the aware human body. In addition, the world must be grasped not as a pure in itself but as an embodied horizon that surrounds and subtends the human body and human experience.

Again, it is impossible for us to grasp the world solely as it is in itself, for we necessarily perceive the world through the avenues of the human body. As Merleau-Ponty argues in Phenomenology of Perception, the simplest perception must be regarded as a figure against a background (PhP 3–4). Even a white dot on a white surface is experienced in this way. This means that we cannot understand perception as the effect of atoms of isolated data causally impacting upon a tabula rasa consciousness or a neurological substrate. The body is always already involved in interpreting and organizing data. Furthermore, we must understand this interpretive grasping of events as something that is not just a causal end product of external events.

[I]f I look steadily at an object in front of me, the psychologist will say that—external conditions remaining the same—the mental image of the object has remained the same. But it would still be necessary to analyze the act by which at each instant I recognize this image as identical in its meaning to that of the proceeding instant … The mental image of the psychologist is one thing; what the consciousness of that thing is must still be understood. The act of knowing is not of the order of events; it is a taking possession of events. (SB 198–9)

In addition, in concrete acts of perception, there is “both the intimacy of the objects to the subject and the presence in them of solid structures which distinguish them from appearances” (SB 199). Thus even though the aware grasping of events must be taken into account to properly understand human experience, given within this aware grasping itself is the independence of the world and its objects.

To repeat, aware bodily perception helps organize the data it receives. When I perceive the Necker cube placed before me, for example, I perceive it as organized, either from above or below. Moreover, I can perceive it from above or below with a change of awareness and not necessarily with a change of location. Yet, it must be recognized that the cube’s orientation is dependent, at least in part, on the orientation of the perceiver. The physical conditions of the perception—the lines drawn on the paper before me, the light striking the object, its reflection into my eye, the transmission of the information to the brain, and so forth—are indeed the necessary conditions for the perception to occur. Yet, again, the physical conditions alone do not account for the orientation of the perception. We must, in addition, appeal to the awareness of the perceiving embodied subject and the power of interpretation that is present in this awareness. Moreover, the strictly empiricist approach, which claims that human experience and cognition must be seen as an effect of objective environmental conditions, ends in solipsism and skepticism, for the “effects” are individualized in the experience of each subject and are trapped there. Each individual becomes a mere effect of specific environmental conditions, with “knowledge” thus being reduced to an internal and isolated representation. As we have just seen, knowledge presupposes an apprehension of events, a taking hold of them that grasps their meaning. Consciousness, then, must be thought of as the body’s openness upon and active orientation toward the outside world. True, we never reach an object as it is purely in itself, for we necessarily perceive the world through the avenues of the human body. Yet, the fact that the embodied subject participates in the cocreation of meaning obviously does not mean that we are completely cut off from the object, that we do not know it at all. The avenues of human bodily perception do not screen us from the object. They are, rather, the means by which nature reveals itself, and we would not have a better idea of the world without the human body, for without it nature has no other way to manifest itself to us. We perceive the world with the greatest clarity and adaptability that we can achieve, an achievement that is accomplished by the aware, lived-through body. In this way we approximate the patterns of the world and help bring them to a more precise articulation. Moreover, since the bodily intentions of others can be read in their orientation toward the world, it is possible to establish a theory of intersubjectivity, for we each have the capacity to grasp (at least in part) the intentional gestures of others.

Thus, in sum, Merleau-Ponty does not accept the dualism of the Cartesian tradition. He does not accept Sartre’s dualism of a for itself and an in itself. He does not separate the subject and the object into separate categories and claim that knowledge is only subjective, with no reference to the forces of the world as they impact upon us. His point in talking about the necessity of the presence of a perceiver is that we never get to the object purely in itself. This is impossible because we only know the world’s objects via the avenues of the human body perception. Yet for Melreau-Ponty human perceptual consciousness is not just a tabula rasa, a blank tablet that simply receives what’s there objectively in the external world. Human perception is not a simple mirroring phenomenon. It is not a blank tablet. In fact, Merleau-Ponty speaks of our perceptual relation to the world as a Fundierung relationship, a relationship in which terms reciprocally influence one another, with the advantage given to one of the terms, in this case the world. Moreover, just like perception and the world, perception and language can also be characterized as a Fundierung relationship, here with perception as the more primary term. Perception does not cause but motivates certain linguistic expressions that fold back on the perceived to help articulate it. Just as a person fishing can only see the dark outline of the fish moving deep below the surface of the sea and just as his or her fishing line pulls the fish toward the surface and into the light of precise identification, so also the outlines of our initial perceptions frequently appear with ambiguity, until they are taken up and expressed in language. Language must be regarded as making a contribution to the articulation of perception in more precise and exact categories. However, the perceptual field does remain open to a variety of interpretations, and this will always be so. This does not mean that linguistic interpretations are arbitrary, for some interpretations fit better than others, for the perceived remains the primary, motivating term, the term that still “measures” the interpretation. We must continually adjust our theories (which are, of course, expressed in language) to the world that we perceive, always attempting to express our hold on the world with greater clarity and greater adaptability.

Finally, we must recognize in Merleau-Ponty’s work that there is no simple equation of being with being perceived. As we have just seen above, he does argue that we must approach being through perceiving, but he also claims that being runs beyond our perception of it. Merleau-Ponty does not maintain, as Descombes claims above, “that the only meaning which ‘being can have for myself is ‘being for myself’.” (MFP 64) He tries to address the paradox of how being can be both for me and in itself. He does this by saying that there is a transcendence that appears within the immanence of embodied human experience.³ The world is known to me, is experienced by me, only through my embodied experience, but it is experienced as existing independently of me. He claims this in his early book The Structure of Behavior,⁴ in his midcareer Phenomenology of Perception,⁵ in his late lectures published as Themes from the Lectures,⁶ and in his posthumous The Visible and the Invisible.⁷ The following, rather-long quotations are offered to prove this point.

The Structure of Behavior: “The perceived is grasped in an indivisible manner as ‘in-itself’ … and as ‘for-me,’ that is, as given ‘in person’ through its momentary aspects” (SB 186). “[Things] are mediated by their perspectival appearances; but it is not a question of a logical mediation since it introduces us to their bodily reality; I grasp in a perspectival appearance … the thing itself which transcends it. A transcendence which is nevertheless open to my knowledge” (SB 187). “[T]he realism of naïve consciousness is an empirical realism—[with] assurances of an external experience …,” [of an external world that runs beyond and that exists outside of the perceptual process] (SB 188, my bracket additions).

Phenomenology of Perception: “The self-evidence of perception is not adequate thought or apodictic self-evidence. The world is not what I think, but what I live through. I am open to the world, I have no doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible. ‘There is a world,’ or rather: ‘There is the world’; I can never completely account for this ever-reiterated assertion in my life” (PhP xvi–xvii). “When I perceive a thing, a fireplace for example, it is not the concordance of its various aspects which leads me to believe in the existence of the fireplace as the geometrized projection and collective significance of all these perspectives. On the contrary I perceive the thing in its own self-evident completeness and this is what gives me the assurance that, in the course of perceptual experience, I shall be presented with an indefinite set of concordant views” (PhP 185). “In perception we do not think the object …, we are given over to the object …” (PhP 238). “Perception and the perceived necessarily have the same existential modality, since perception is inseparable from the consciousness which it has, or rather is, of reaching the thing itself.” (PhP 374f) [Perceptual consciousness, then,] “is the actual effecting of vision. I reassure myself that I see by [actually] seeing this or that …” (PhP 376–7). “It is the deep-seated momentum of transcendence which is my very being, the simultaneous contact with my own being and with the world’s being” (PhP 377).

Themes form the Lectures: “[H]owever surcharged with historical significations man’s perception may be, it borrows from the primordial at least its manner of presenting the object and its ambiguous evidence. Nature … ‘is there from the first day.’ It presents itself always as already there before us, and yet as new before the gaze” (TFL 65).

The Visible and Invisible: “What is … this singular virtue of the visibl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Early and Persistent Criticisms of Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy
• 2 One Merleau-Ponty, Not Two
• 3 Merleau-Ponty’s Criticism and Embrace of Hegel and Marx
• 4 Marx, Baudrillard, and Merleau-Ponty on Alienation
• Bibliography
• Index