Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Context

Philosophy and Politics in the Twenty-First Century

Douglas Low

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351505680
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This volume presents the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a great philosopher and social theorist of mid-twentieth century, as a viable alternative to both modernism and postmodernism. Douglas Low argues that Merleau-Ponty's philosophy offers explanations and solves problems that other philosophies grapple with, but do not resolve, given their respective theoretical presuppositions and assumptions. Low brings the work of Merleau-Ponty into critical contact with important thinkers, including Sartre, Heidegger, Derrida, and Marx. He highlights Merleau-Ponty's connection to the early Hegel, especially with regard to the criticism of modernism's "representational consciousness" and its subsequent skepticism with regard to our being in the world. Merleau-Ponty made a concerted effort to solve the problems that come about due to a wide variety of Western dualisms: body and mind, perception and conception, self and other, etc. He frequently does so by demonstrating the connection between these disparate terms, the connection of perception with affect and interest, fact with value, and a broadened view of science with moral and philosophical judgment. Merleau-Ponty's unique contribution is his focus on the lived-through perceiving body and its relationship to abstract thought and language. In his detailed analysis of the work of Merleau-Ponty, Low brings attention to a twentieth-century master capable of altering the landscape of modern and social philosophy in the twenty-first century.

Part I

Philosophy and Method

1

Six Reasons for a New Philosophy

In his introduction to his late collection of essays entitled Signs,¹ Merleau-Ponty writes in 1960 that “our age calls for a philosophical interpretation,” or, more precisely, for a philosophical reinterpretation—in part making reference to the then century-long shift away from modernism: away from the Cartesian idea of the isolated self in complete possession of a rational interior, who, with Divine assistance, is in complete possession of the rational principles of both the natural and social world; away from the idea of a rational universe founded on and logically derived from indubitable first principles; away from the social contract theory of isolated individuals rationally calculating the maximization of their own pleasures; and away from the corresponding idea of an isolated political state that rationally calculates the fulfillment of its needs, etc. We now know, he says, that this whole modernist “philosophy of the God-like survey was only an episode—and that it is over” (Signs 14).

What can we now put in its place? Merleau-Ponty here sketches a brief answer, one that he has been developing and refining in great detail for at least twenty years. The sketch (which will be slightly embellished here) can be enumerated as follows.

1. “Now as before, philosophy begins with a ‘What is thinking?’ and is absorbed in the question to begin with. No instruments or organs here. It is a pure ‘It seems to me that’” (Signs 14). Even though many postmodernist authors have abandoned “epistemology,” since it supposedly presumes a modernist subject, and have put the play of language in its place, they must still address the question “What is thinking?” even if their answer is that it is only the play of language. Merleau-Ponty’s point here, contrary to the position held by most postmodernists, is that neither human experience nor human knowledge can be accounted for without addressing human awareness. Even though he is troubled by the word “consciousness” because of its association with the Cartesian modernism, and even though his last works are casting about for a replacement term, he does not jettison human awareness.² Human perceptual awareness, he says, is an original order of meaning. It cannot be reduced to nature in itself, to discrete bits of matter in external causal relationships, since the perceptual, always a gestalt structure, is a meaningful whole that is greater than, or qualitatively different from, the mere sum of its parts. Nor can it be conceived as a mere manifestation of conceptual relations that are the product of various mental faculties or instruments, since this ignores the concrete specificity and ambiguity of experience as well as the nonconceptual unity of the different senses. Nor can it be understood as pure self-possession devoid of a body and its exterior, since human awareness is ek-stace, is the body’s openness upon and relationship to the world (PhP 70). While we may imagine (as Descartes did) a visual consciousness that hovers above the world, detached from the body, it is difficult to do so when we consider the body’s tactile experience. To touch (with the body, not with a detached mind) is to be touched from the outside by other embodied objects. To touch is to be in the world and to be touched by it. Human experience, then, must be understood as the body’s lived-through active openness upon an exterior world. Moreover, since this awareness is primarily a prereflective act, it can never be fully grasped as an object, since the moment the reflective act occurs the prereflective slips away. A glimpse of the prereflective act is possible, for reflective awareness, after all, is connected to it, as its succeeding act, yet, full possession of it is not, since the prereflective always just temporally slips away from reflection. Questions regarding human knowledge must therefore begin with embodied human awareness, and they must begin with this awareness as a prereflective act.

2. “But the first truth,” that we must recognize human awareness, “can only be a half-truth. There would be nothing if there were not the abyss of the self. But an abyss is not nothing; it has environs and edges.” As was just mentioned above, “one always thinks … in contact with something. Even the action of thinking is caught up in the push and shove of being”—including the push and shove of time, a dimension of being. Since the moments of time are not discrete units but overlap, blend into one another, and hold together, and since consciousness opens upon and fuses with time, thoughts are able to overlap and hold together. “Time and thought are mutually entangled” (Signs 14–15).

3. “Along with time’s secret linkages, I learn those of the perceived world, its incompatible and simultaneous ‘faces’” (Signs 15). Since I am aware that my consciousness opens to a temporal and spatial field that includes me, I am thus aware that my perspectives open to a world that includes other perspectives, other possible observation points. My specificity thus crosses over into a generality that crosses back into me. Thus, “whenever I try to understand myself the whole fabric of the perceptible world comes too, and with it come the others who are caught in it” (Signs 15). Again, then, my perceptual experience opens upon an exterior world that includes me, the possibility of other perspectives, and, in addition, the possibility of other perceivers. Moreover, I do not see others as just a projection of my own interior, for there must first be something that occurs in their appearance that prompts this projection. And I do not and cannot literally think another person’s thoughts. This is impossible, even if we grant the universality of logical principles of thinking, for formal systems do not capture the unique richness of individual’s thought. Yet, I can still perceive other perceivers. As my perception actively gestures into and opens upon the world, I am able to perceive other perceivers as they likewise actively gesture into and open upon this same world. “Vision sketches out what is accomplished by desire when it pushes two ‘thoughts’ out toward that line of fire between them, that blazing surface where they seek a fulfillment which will be identically the same for two of them, as the sensible world is for everyone” (Signs 17).

4. We have already seen above that we must not begin with thought, certainly not abstract thought, that language would then simply be a code for or a representation of. Rather, we must begin with active bodily perceptual interpretation, which is already a meaningful gesture, since it is the act that first creates the sign as sign, since it is the act that first takes scattered givens and pulls them together as a unified meaning. Linguistic gestures will thus have their roots in perception. They are suggested by perception, which is still open and ambiguous, yet they are needed to fold back upon perception in order to express it more precisely. Here we see that linguistic expression has its origins in the body’s perceptual encounter with the world, yet neither perceptual nor, especially, linguistic expressions occur in social isolation. Both occur in social/historical contexts that help determine the meaning perceived and expressed. Moreover, as cultural expressions become more abstract, meanings can be developed by “reorganizing things-said, affecting them with a new index of curvature, and binding them to a certain enhancement of meaning” (Signs 19).

5. Yet, even though language/abstract thought can say something new, “we know now that to find [the source of thought] we must seek beneath statements” in perception and in lived-through prereflective experience.³ This is especially true of Descartes’ famous statement “in order to think one must exist.” The meaning of this statement betrays it, for at the very moment that it refers to an articulated and thus expressed and formed thought, it should be considering the lived experience that helps create the unity of this thought—“for which the established meanings of things and ideas are only the clue.” We must then recognize that “Descartes’ spoken word is the gesture which reveals in each of us that fundamental thought. ‘Fundamental’ because it is not borne by anything, but not fundamental as if with it one reached a foundation upon which one ought to base oneself and stay. As a matter of principle, fundamental thought is bottomless. It is, if you wish, an abyss. This means that it is never with itself, that we find it next to or setting out from things thought, that it is an opening out—the other invisible extremity of the axis which connects us to ideas and things” (Signs 21).

Again, this openness is not nothing, for “if it were ‘nothing,’ the difference between the nearby and the far (the contour lines of all existence) would be effaced before it. Dimensionality and opening would no longer make any sense … It would be better to speak of the ‘visible and the invisible,’ pointing out that they are not contradictory, than to speak of ‘being and nothingness’” (Signs 21). This invisible is not an absolute invisible but the other side of the visible, and in at least three senses. First, the invisible is that which is implied in the visible, the side and back of the building as I perceive the front. It is also the lines of force that run between a perceptual foreground and its embodied background, lines that are formed as the embodied subject opens upon the world and interacts with it. And finally, the invisible is the openness of the embodied subject upon the world, the active awareness that can never be reflected upon and grasped fully as an object because this act must always be presupposed. Here again the invisible is attached to the visible, for consciousness (the invisible) is embodied (and thus visible) openness upon the visible world around it. As we have already seen above, we may well catch a glimpse of this act of awareness, since we are this openness that appears through the body, yet it can never be grasped as a fully revealed object, since its basic mode of existence is that of an act, an opening out. The human being, Merleau-Ponty says, is a two-dimensional being, an awareness that is embodied, an opening out that can be perceived from the outside, an interior that has an exterior. This interior and exterior overlap or cross into one another; the hand touches because it is touched, yet they never exactly coincide, since the lived and the reflective are, as we have seen, separated by the passage or spread of time.

6. Philosophy, then, cannot place itself above the world in order to see the world as a manifestation of the abstract thought—as modernists attempted to do. “It seeks contact with brute being, and in any case informs itself in the company of those who have never lost that contact” (Signs 22). Again, philosophy must begin with the world as it is lived by embodied perceptual subjects. It must help us make sense of the world as we live it together, as we seek recognition within it, including within social, economic, cultural, and linguistic institutions.

This brief presentation of Merleau-Ponty’s own brief presentation of his thought, written shortly before his death in 1961, and thus written near the end of his life, is fundamentally consistent with his earlier philosophical studies, specifically with The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception. The case can thus be made that there is no significant shift away from perception and phenomenology toward language or ontology in the body of his work, or that this supposed shift results in two distinctly different and thus inconsistent political/ historical treatises, as some have claimed. As already mentioned, the author himself states that it is part of his research plan to proceed to the study of expression and language in order to understand their proper connection to perception. “Knowledge and communication sublimate rather than suppress our incarnation,” and even more, the abstract concepts that come to be expressed in language “recaptures our corporeal existence and uses it to symbolize …” (PrP 7) Merleau-Ponty’s unique philosophy of the birth of meaning in the body’s lived-through perceptual encounter with the world and others, of the sublimation of this meaning in the expressions of language, of the sublimation of the perceptual logos in the logos that comes to be expressed in the structure of language, is present and remains fundamentally consistent throughout the different periods of its development. Granted that there is development, this unique philosophy of perceptual rationality, of a rationality that is “grounded” in a lived-through embodied perception that always already opens upon a public world, remains consistent throughout the body of his work, as does the criticism of modernist rationality that this perceptual rationality necessarily engenders.

Notes

1. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964). Referred to in the text as Signs.

2. For an essay-length treatment of this issue, see Douglas Low, “Merleau-Ponty’s Criticism of Phenomenology of Perception,” International Studies in Philosophy 34, no. 1 (2002): 81–111.

3. Here, in a text written in 1960, approximately a year before his death, we see that Merleau-Ponty does not abandon lived-through perception as the prereflective source of meaning, as some have maintained.

2

Method and Ground

As has already been stated above, a number of contemporary authors have put forth the claim that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy (again, along with Dewey’s) provides the best alternative for a sensible philosophical future. Many agree with the claim that his philosophy provides a viable theoretical framework, the theoretical framework that is perhaps the most explanatory, because it is the theoretical framework that provides the greatest clarity. More specifically, a case can be made that his theory can stand up to (as well as or better than competing theories) the generally accepted criteria for the acceptability of a scientific hypothesis or a theory in general: that a theory be comprehensive, comprehensible, consistent, simple, and testable. (1) A theory must be comprehensible, that is, formally speaking, the facts under consideration must be deducible from the theory, or, phenomenologically speaking, a theory must explain our experience as it is lived. Yet, Merleau-Ponty insists, comprehension is not just about the number of facts that can be explained by the theory but must also be about understanding their relationship to each other and, thus, the clarity that it is able to bring to them. We will see below that Merleau-Ponty’s work is in constant dialogue with competing theories and that he attempts to explain what these other theories cannot. (2) A theory must be comprehensive, that is, it must explain all that it needs to explain within experience. A general philosophical theory, for example, should be able to explain perception, language, and thought (and their connection), sexuality, the phantom limb, intersubjectivity, ethics, politics, etc. Merleau-Ponty spent a life-time producing this comprehensive integration, as we will see below. (3) A theory must be consistent with respect to experience, as in (1) above, and with respect to how it is applied to experience, as in (2) above, and with respect to logical principles. In spite of Merleau-Ponty’s criticism that both empiricist and rationalist forms of modernism begin with the world already conceived in the categories of abstract thought and logic, he is not an enemy of abstract thought, logic, or logical consistency. Rather his objection is to their separation from the experiences from which they arise, in a word, to their reification. He is thus certainly critical of the conscious or unconscious projection of abstractions back into nature as if they preexisted our experience of it. He is critical of making the principles of Western logic into the principles of rational thought and to their treatment as metaphysical principles, i.e., as the very structures of reality itself. Rather, we must begin with our actual lived-through prereflective perceptual contact with a really existing world, without the presuppositions of formal logic, since the actual should not be prematurely based on the formal. We should not begin with an experience that presupposes that this experience must occur within the context of various necessary formal conditions, since this places the possible before the actual. We should begin with actual experience and describe and explain it as it appears to us. We must begin with the simplest perceptual contact as it actually appears to us, which is always as a patterned figure within the context of an open and shifting background. We must begin with perceptual profiles that blend and overlap within the perceiver as the perceiver actively opens upon the world and that blend with the perspectives of others as we actively open upon the world together. From this patterned figure and blending of perspectives, we can certainly develop abstract concepts, frameworks, and algorithms that will help us clarify and organize our experience, and we can perhaps see here even the basis for the abstract logical principles of identity, noncontradiction, and excluded middle. Yet these principles are abstractions, since gestalt perception is open, relational, shifting, and ambiguous, as well as stable and prone to consistent blending. As Merleau-Ponty says in Adventures of the Dialectic,¹ given what we now know about human experience and our experience of and collusion with a really existing world, given our active openness upon the world and what it presents to us as we actively meet it and take it up together, we must adopt a relational, dialogical, dialectical logic with the following characteristics: “reciprocal action” of parts, elements, people, and events; “solidarity of opposites and their sublation”; “a development that starts itself again”; and “the cross growth of quality that establishes as a new order a change which until then had been quantitative” (AD 203). In addition, we may even say within the context of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy (and certainly within the context of Dewey’s) that formal principles must be treated as abstract tools to help us clarify our attempts to understand and adapt to nature and each other. Aristotelian logic, then, must be placed in the context of a dialectical logic and even in the context of a practical adaptation. Again, given what we now know about experience and the world upon which it opens and with which it interacts, it is Merleau-Ponty’s theoretical logic that is among the most clarifying, and it is a theoretical, dialectical logic that is based in and drawn from experience itself.² (4) Generally we should accept the theory with the most elegant or simplest explanation, with the explanation that avoids adding a multitude of auxiliary hypothesis to make the theory work. Merleau-Ponty’s theory of lived embodiment is simple in the sense that it does not need added hypothesis for it to make sense and in the sense that it is unconditional, i.e., in the sense that it does not need anything else to explain it, in the sense that it is (as we will see below) drawn from experience itself. Moreover, one of his frequent philosophical strategies is to point out that the modernist versions of both empiricism and rationalism must frequently add hypotheses in order to save their respective positions. (5) The theory of lived-through embodiment is also testable, the final criteria for the acceptance o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Philosophy and Method
• Part II: Between Modernism and Postmodernism
• Part III: Ethics and Politics
• Selected Works by Merleau-Ponty
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index