Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism

Ariane Mildenberg, Ariane Mildenberg

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501302725
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: French Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism brings into dialogue Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology with modernist art, literature, music, film and neurophysiological discoveries, opening up the complexities of the philosopher's phenomenology of perception to a broader audience across the arts. An important resource for anyone interested in the links between modernism and philosophy, Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism offers close readings of Merleau-Ponty's key texts, explores modernist works in light of his thought, and provides an extended glossary of Merleau-Ponty's central terms and concepts.

Part One

Conceptualizing Merleau-Ponty

1

Merleau-Ponty’s Cogito

Thomas Baldwin

The title of Merleau-Ponty’s chapter, “Le Cogito,” alludes of course to Descartes; in particular to the argument in Descartes’s Discourse on the Method that the proposition “Cogito, ergo sum” (I am thinking, therefore I am) is “so firm and sure that all the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were incapable of shaking it,” with the result that he decided to take it as the first principle of his philosophy.¹ For Merleau-Ponty, as for most French philosophers, this text has a special status; and Merleau-Ponty comes back to it at the end of the chapter when presenting his account of the unity of a personal existence:

It is this advent or rather this transcendental event that the Cogito recovers. The fundamental truth is certainly that “I think,” but only on condition of understanding by this that “I belong to myself” (je suis à moi) in being in the world (en étant au monde). (PP Landes, 430)²

We shall see that on his way to this conclusion Merleau-Ponty takes issue with many of the central themes of Descartes’s philosophy. Nonetheless, it remains the case that at the end of the chapter he seeks to elucidate a fundamental truth that, he believes, Descartes glimpsed.

L’Être au monde and L’Être à soi

Merleau-Ponty’s chapter is placed at the start of part III of Phenomenology of Perception, which has the heading “L’Être pour soi et L’Être au monde” (“Being for itself and Being in the world”). I shall discuss “Being for itself” at the end of this section, but I start with “Being in the world” (“L’Être au monde”). Merleau-Ponty takes this phrase from Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s Being in Being and Time as “In-der-Welt-Sein,” and by “L’Être au monde” Merleau-Ponty signals the fact that our life is a way of being engaged with the world, not simply located within it. In earlier chapters of the book Merleau-Ponty has argued that the contents of our perceptions are the features of the world that are manifest to us and not sensations conceived as subjective qualia (indeed he takes sensation itself to be just the most simple of perceptions: PP Landes, 251). More generally, he argues that perception and action are ways in which we engage bodily with things, making sense of what we perceive as we move around in the course of our activities, so that we experience aspects of the natural world as the framework of our lives. In a similar way, our thoughts are expressed in bodily speech-acts which bring us into relationships with others and thereby into the social world.

Merleau-Ponty summarizes his complex account of these matters in the final paragraph of part II in which he prepares the ground for the return to the Cogito in the following chapter. He writes here:

Along with the natural world and social world, we have discovered that which is truly transcendental, which is not the collection of constitutive operations through which a transparent world, without shadows and without opacity, is spread out in front of an impartial spectator, but rather the ambiguous life where the Ursprung of transcendences takes place. (PP Landes, 382)

Merleau-Ponty here juxtaposes two positions: his own position, in which he affirms the role of our “ambiguous life,” and the position of an abstract rationalist who takes it that the natural and social worlds have an a priori structure rooted in the “constitutive operations” of the pure reason which is characteristic of an “impartial spectator.” This second position is a quasi-Kantian idealist philosophy which Merleau-Ponty often uses as a foil for his own position. But what is important here is Merleau-Ponty’s own position, that what is “truly transcendental” is “the ambiguous life where the Ursprung of transcendences takes place.” The phrase “the Ursprung of transcendences,” indicates that we are dealing with the fundamental ground of concepts which identify objects as “transcending” current experience, in the sense that the objects perceived are perceived as having properties other than those which are apparent to one, and indeed as existing when not perceived. In the idealist philosophy this ground is thought of as the “transcendental” power of pure reason and distinguished from our ordinary “empirical” sensory capacities. Despite his rejection of that philosophy, however, Merleau-Ponty retains the belief that there is something “truly transcendental,” something which provides a structure for our experience which ensures that it is experience of an objective world, a world which is both natural and social. That role is reassigned from “pure reason” to our “ambiguous life”; but what is this?

Part of what he means by this concerns perception and action: he contrasts the account of bodily movements which the idealist offers as one which “strips them of their transcendental signification” (PP Landes, 407) with an account which respects the status of bodily movement as an “original intentionality” (PP Landes, 407). So bodily movement has a “transcendental signification,” especially with respect to the spatial organization of experience and its objects, which is the “original intentionality” he is alluding to here. But what remains to be explained is the sense in which a life thus informed by perception and action is “ambiguous.” This claim, I think, is to be understood in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s reinterpretation of the empirical/transcendental distinction. The traditional idealist treats this as a distinction between two agents, an empirical self whose life is encompassed by the natural constraints and regularities inherent in the ordinary course of affairs, and an abstract rational transcendental self free from all natural constraints whose constitutive acts provide the a priori structure of the world. Merleau-Ponty denies that it makes sense to posit any such transcendental self distinct from the empirical self. Instead he argues that our perceptual and motor capacities themselves fulfill the transcendental role of making sense of experience and setting the basic framework of the perceived world; and language has a similar role in relation to the social world. So the status of our senses, of our capacity for movement, and of our power of language is “ambiguous.” On the one hand, they are among the evolved powers and capacities of members of the human species; and yet they also have a transcendental role in setting the basic structure of the perceived and spoken world. This conception of the “ambiguity” of the body is closely related to his thesis that “the body is a natural self and, as it were, the subject of perception” (PP Landes, 213) and lies at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. In developing this theme Merleau-Ponty makes explicit a theme that can be found in the work of many twentieth-century philosophers, perhaps best exemplified by Wittgenstein’s remark that “the human body is the best picture of the human soul.”³ Equally, the presence of the body as implicit subject is a central feature of writers such as D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce.⁴

So far I have been discussing “L’Être au monde” (Being in the world), but we should now turn to the other phrase which Merleau-Ponty uses in the heading of Part III—“L’Être pour soi” (Being for itself). “Being for itself” is usually contrasted with “Being in itself” (L’Être en soi) and among philosophers who use this terminology the distinction is taken to be a distinction between things, such as physical objects, whose identity involves only properties which they possess “in themselves,” and states of consciousness whose identity is taken to arise from the ways in which they are “for themselves,” that is, how they appear to consciousness. The classic proponent of this distinction was Merleau-Ponty’s great contemporary, J-P. Sartre, who builds his phenomenological ontology around it in Being and Nothingness (1958). As we have seen, however, for Merleau-Ponty what is fundamental is the conception of objects and properties as they are manifest in our ways of being in the world, rather than a bare conception of them as they are in themselves. Merleau-Ponty similarly rejects Sartre’s conception of states of consciousness as states whose identity is given by the ways in which they present themselves to us. He develops his critique of this conception in the chapter on the Cogito, and we will come to it below. But the core of his position is that the traditional categories of being in itself and being for itself are inadequate both for the bodily systems which underpin our behavior and for the perceptions, thoughts, and feelings which form our personal life. Our habitual bodily responses are informed by an intentional sensitivity to the world, so they are not just systems whose being is being in itself; and in respect of our perceptions, thoughts, and feelings we are inherently vulnerable to mistakes about ourselves, so these are not just states of consciousness which are as they appear to be.

Nonetheless Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on Descartes’s Cogito include a discussion of self-conscious thoughts, and as the passage (cited earlier) from the end of the chapter shows, the message he takes from Descartes gives us his new way of thinking of our relation to ourselves, whereby he reinterprets the way in which we are said to be “for ourselves” (pour soi) as one in which we belong to ourselves (à soi): so our being is “L’Être à soi”:

The fundamental truth is certainly that “I think,” but only on condition of understanding by this that “I belong to myself” (je suis à moi) in being in the world/belonging to the world (en étant au monde). (PP Landes, 430)

Translation here is difficult: not only does English lack a possessive pronoun comparable to the use here of “à” in “à moi,” it is also impossible to find a single phrase in English to capture the double sense here of the Merleau-Ponty’s use of “étant au monde” as both “being in the world” and “belonging to the world.” But to work out what Merleau-Ponty means by this difficult, but suggestive, passage we need now to turn to his chapter on “Le Cogito.”

Against Descartes

“Cogito ergo sum” was the first result of Descartes’s method of radical doubt which he introduced in order to identify the foundations for scientific knowledge. A central feature of this method was the way in which Descartes argued that, on the one hand, the truth of claims about the “external” world, including those about the most apparently obvious objects of experience, can be sensibly called into doubt if we introduce a hypothesis such as that our senses and memory have come under the control of an “evil genius” who has the power to generate within us completely persuasive delusions, while, on the other hand, no such radical doubt can infect our beliefs about own “inner” thoughts and experience, for example, about how things appear to us to be (even while we doubt that they are as they appear) or indeed about the way in which we are in doubt whether things are as they appear to us to be. In this way Descartes used his method of doubt to induce a radical epistemological distinction between the external world and, for each of us, our own inner consciousness, with the latter providing the certainty manifest in the starting point of the Cogito, namely, “Cogito” (“I am thinking”).

The merits and drawbacks of Descartes’s method of doubt and his general epistemological project remain disputed. F or us it is only necessary to reflect on them at one remove as we consider Merleau-Ponty’s critical discussion of Descartes’s method. Merleau-Ponty, characteristically, begins his critical examination of Descartes with the case of vision. Starting with a statement of the Cartesian position—“I am not certain that there is an ashtray or a pipe over there, but I am certain that I think I see an ashtray or a pipe” (PP Landes, 393)—he immediately introduces his challenge:

Is it as easy to dissociate these two affirmations as is often thought, and to maintain—independent of every judgment concerning the thing seen—the evidentness of my “thought that I am seeing”? On the contrary, this is impossible. (PP Landes, 393)

In order to substantiate this challenge Merleau-Ponty introduces his conception of vision as an “active transcendence” (PP Landes, 395), a way of relating ourselves to things seen, so that one cannot r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Preface
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “The Surface of a Depth” Ariane Mildenberg
• Part One Conceptualizing Merleau-Ponty
• Part Two Merleau-Ponty, Aesthetics, and the Lived Body
• Part Three Glossary
• Index
• Copyright