Phenomenology, Institution and History

Writings After Merleau-Ponty II

Stephen H. Watson

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441130457
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is widely known for his emphasis on embodied perceptual experience. This emphasis initially relied heavily on the positive results of Gestalt psychology in addressing issues in philosophical psychology and philosophy of mind from a phenomenological standpoint. However, far less work has been done in addressing his evolving conception of how such an account influenced more general philosophical issues in epistemology, accounts of rationality, or its status of theoretical discourse. Developing the work he has already done in In the Shadow of Phenomenology to address this gap in the literature, Stephen H. Watson further examines the responses to Merleau-Ponty's contributions to these issues. This book emphasises the historical and intersubjective underpinnings of Merleau-Ponty's late accounts, in relation to rationality, institution and community, and examines its implications.

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 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 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, 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, 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

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.

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 non-empirical 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 strictl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• 1. From the Ethics of Ambiguity to the Dialectics of Virtue: Merleau-Ponty and the ‘Ruins of the Spirit’
• 2. Why Phenomenology? The Long Farewell to Subject-Centered Rationality
• 3. Theoretical Crisis, Dialogue, and the Stoicism of the Transcendental Singular
• 4. Notes on Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty: Between Phenomenology and Poetics
• 5. The Question of Community: An Interpretation of Lefort
• 6. Beyond the Antinomies of Expression: Writing After Merleau-Ponty
• Notes
• Index