Things Seen and Unseen

The Logic of Incarnation in Merleau-Ponty's Metaphysics of Flesh

Edgar

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781498202626
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty was developing into a radical ontology when he died prematurely in 1961. Merleau-Ponty identified this nascent ontology as a philosophy of incarnation that carries us beyond entrenched dualisms in philosophical thinking about perception, the body, animality, nature, and God.What does this ontology have to do with the Catholic language of incarnation, sacrament, and logos on which it draws? In this book, Orion Edgar argues that Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is dependent upon a logic of incarnation that finds its roots and fulfillment in theology, and that Merleau-Ponty drew from the Catholic faith of his youth. Merleau-Ponty's final abandonment of Christianity was based on an understanding of God that was ultimately Kantian rather than orthodox, and this misunderstanding is shared by many thinkers, both Christian and not. As such, Merleau-Ponty's philosophy suggests a new kind of natural theology, one that grounds an account of God as ipsum esse subsistens in the questions produced by a phenomenological account of the world. This philosophical ontology also offers to Christian theology a route away from dualistic compromises and back to its own deepest insight.

Part One

Perception

1

Merleau-Ponty’s Embodied Philosophy

In this chapter I introduce Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thought. I show how his developing philosophy provides an avenue for thinking about the human person, the world, and knowledge beyond fundamental (though often latent or unnoticed) dualisms in contemporary philosophy. Thinking with Merleau-Ponty, and the embodied mode of philosophy of which he is a key source, we will see that our understanding of perception is crucial for the formation of a paradigm for viewing the relation of the human person with the world around him: for, in perception, the domain of causes, of physical events, is connected to the domain of reasons, or mental events; things are connected to thoughts. Philosophy has tended to conceptualize perception as internal visual representation, making central the question of how an internal “picture” of the world is formed, and how we can know how much and in what ways that picture is in accord with the external world of causes, and so asking how the individual senses are connected to one another. These are the classical questions of epistemology. We will see how Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception may dispel this picture, which, according to Wittgenstein, “held us captive.”

In the following chapter I will go on to propose a richer account of perception which will ask instead how our originary common sense of the world is analyzed into the five individual senses, and will take the more concrete (and more inextricably intertwined) senses of taste, smell, and touch, in their primordial relation to the more abstract senses, as primary. If we form our paradigm for perception in light of the act of eating, we can form a robust idea of perception beyond the epistemological picture, as the communion of persons with the world, which are not two basically incommensurable categories. We will see that the human being is from the beginning at the heart of things, not a spirit alien in the world, but rather an incarnate, bodily subject of an objective world. This conception of human being will lead to a reconsideration of the concept of nature as implied by the notion of a domain of causes, and of the concept of freedom as implied by the domain of reasons, leading to a conception of nature that has situated freedom at its heart, and opening onto the investigation of an incarnational ontology of flesh in the latter part of this book.

Merleau-Ponty’s Gestalt Phenomenology

In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty traces out a conception of the human subject that is opposed to the problematic and too abstract conceptions of human being in the philosophy of his time. He begins by analyzing the accounts of the perception of objects offered on the one hand by the scientifically-minded Empiricists, and on the other by rationalist Intellectualists, starting with the idea of sensation.

Both the realist Empiricist and the idealist Intellectualist account for the object in terms of its atomic components in perception—pure sensations. This seemingly common-sense starting point already governs the trajectory of such accounts in a problematic direction, by misconceiving the relationship of the object of perception to its subject.

For the empiricist, perception offers access to the world as it is, and this is in part because the world is composed of deterministic entities that stand in observable relation to one another; consciousness, then, must be another thing in the world, and perception a theoretically observable relation between things. By contrast, for the intellectualist, we can only come to know the world-as-experienced, and consciousness cannot be accounted for as part of that world, but is the experiencer that constitutes the world as experienced. Nevertheless, the world as experienced is, for the Intellectualist, composed of determinable entities that stand in relation to one another, which is to say a reductive analysis of it is possible.10

Merleau-Ponty’s dual-headed attack on these two positions focuses on what they share—the thought that the world, whether real or experienced, is analyzable into determinate parts whose relation to one another can be reduced into determinate constituent elements. This is the significance of his notion of gestalt. In the long introduction (comprising the first four chapters) to Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty opposes this gestaltist view to the reductive view, which supposes sensations as atomistic units of perception and which asserts the “Constancy Hypothesis”—that is, that these sensed units are part of a simple one-to-one correspondence between sensory stimuli and perceived qualities, so that a mental representation of the world corresponding to these stimuli, is built up out of these atomic units.

The notion of sensation is problematic because we perceive not just sensations, but things, persons, and, indeed, a world. These perceptions, on the model of objective thought, must be produced in some way by the combination of sensations in the space of mental representation. But if, as the realist might prefer to say, they are combined according to a manner determined by the object itself (that is, individual sensations refer to the object, and provide the principle according to which they are combined into the object that is the source of the stimulus), then the notion of “sensation” must be excluded, for the simple property is not sensed, but rather a thing with certain analyzable properties is sensed—the sensations are artificial abstractions from the prior reality of intentional perception.

Alternatively, if sensations are not combined in a manner given by the object, they must be combined according to some principle internal to me, and there is in fact no reason to think that our perception refers to the world at all: I may happen to combine certain kinds of sensation in certain ways but there is no rule by which such combinations could be compared to real objects and affirmed or rejected as veridical or illusory.

For the empiricist, the subject must combine sensations into perceived objects according to a principle given by the objects themselves. Thus consciousness is simply part of a causal chain, and just another thing in the world. It is, though, hard to see in what sense there is truly a pure and neutral “sensation,” in this case—it seems that perception must already have intentionality, must already refer to a perceived “thing,” or else the manner in which sensations are combined into objects must not be according to the principle given by the thing itself, in which case it is hard to see how perception can refer to anything at all. For the intellectualist, it is clear that sensations are combined according to a principle given by consciousness, which constitutes the world as perceived. In this case, sense experience would seem to be understood as a form of judgment, which erases the common-sense distinction between judgment and perception, making it very difficult to understand what it means for things to “seem” one way (as in many optical illusions, for example) when we in fact know that they are another way.

Otherwise, if perception is not already a form of judgment for the intellectualist, then their account will fall foul of the same problems as the empiricist account—either perception of the object is given according to the object, or there is no reason to think that perception represents the real world at all. The second part of this faulty theorization of perception, the Constancy Hypothesis, is equally easily shown to be false, according to Merleau-Ponty. For him, it

enters into conflict with the givens of consciousness, and the same psychologists who posit it also acknowledge its theoretical character. For example, the intensity of a sound lowers its [perceived] pitch under certain conditions; the addition of auxiliary lines renders two objectively equal shapes unequal [in the Müller-Lyer illusion]; and a colored area appears uniformly colored even though the chromatic thresholds of the different regions of the retina ought to make it red here and orange there, and in certain cases even colorless. [. . .] When red and green presented together give a resulting gray, it is conceded that the central combination of stimuli may immediately give rise to a sensation different from what the objective stimuli would require. When the apparent size of an object varies with its apparent distance, or when its apparent color varies with the memories we have of it, it is conceded that “sensorial processes are not impervious to central influences.” In this case, then, the “sensible” can no longer be defined as the immediate effect of an external stimulus.11

Merleau-Ponty’s arguments here do not carry the force of deductive certainty. Nevertheless, they open up, in the pages that follow, a way of viewing the world that makes good sense of the human situation. In the preface to the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty has told us that

Because we are through and through related to the world, the only way for us to catch sight of ourselves is by suspending this movement, by refusing to be complicit with it (or as Hussserl often says, to see it ohne mitzumachen [without taking part]), or again, to put it out of play. This is not because we renounce the certainties of common sense and the natural attitude—on the contrary, these ar...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Logic of Incarnation in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology
• Part One: Perception
• Middle Part: The Crossing
• Part Two: Ontology
• Conclusion: The Logic of Incarnation in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology
• Bibliography