Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), French
philosopher and public intellectual, was the leading academic
proponent of existentialism and phenomenology in post-war France. Best
known for his original and influential work on embodiment, perception,
and ontology, he also made important contributions to the philosophy
of art, history, language, nature, and politics. Associated in his
early years with the existentialist movement through his friendship
with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty played a
central role in the dissemination of phenomenology, which he sought to
integrate with Gestalt psychology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and
Saussurian linguistics. Major influences on his thinking include Henri
Bergson, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler, and Jean-Paul
Sartre, as well as neurologist Kurt Goldstein, Gestalt theorists such
as Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, and literary figures
including Marcel Proust, Paul Claudel, and Paul Valéry. In
turn, he influenced the post-structuralist generation of French
thinkers who succeeded him, including Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze,
and Jacques Derrida, whose similarities with and debt to the later
Merleau-Ponty have often been underestimated. Merleau-Ponty published
two major theoretical texts during his lifetime: The Structure of
Behavior (1942 SC) and
Phenomenology of Perception (1945 PP). Other important
publications include two volumes of political philosophy, Humanism
and Terror (1947 HT) and Adventures of the Dialectic
(1955 AdD), as well as two books of collected essays on art,
philosophy, and politics: Sense and Non-Sense
([1948]1996b/1964) and Signs (1960/1964). Two unfinished
manuscripts appeared posthumously: The Prose of the World
(1969/1973), drafted in 1950–51; and The Visible and the
Invisible (1964 V&I), on which he was working at the time of
his death. Lecture notes and student transcriptions of many of his
courses at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France have also
been published.
For most of his career, Merleau-Ponty focused on the problems of
perception and embodiment as a starting point for clarifying the
relation between the mind and the body, the objective world and the
experienced world, expression in language and art, history, politics,
and nature. Although phenomenology provided the overarching framework
for these investigations, Merleau-Ponty also drew freely on empirical
research in psychology and ethology, anthropology, psychoanalysis,
linguistics, and the arts. His constant points of historical reference
are Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Marx. The characteristic approach of
Merleau-Ponty’s theoretical work is his effort to identify an
alternative to intellectualism or idealism, on the one hand, and
empiricism or realism, on the other, by critiquing their common
presupposition of a ready-made world and failure to account for the
historical and embodied character of experience. In his later
writings, Merleau-Ponty becomes increasingly critical of the
intellectualist tendencies of the phenomenological method as well,
although with the intention of reforming rather than abandoning it.
The posthumous writings collected in The Visible and the
Invisible aim to clarify the ontological implications of a
phenomenology that would self-critically account for its own
limitations. This leads him to propose concepts such as
“flesh” and “chiasm” that many consider to be
his most fruitful philosophical contributions.
Merleau-Ponty’s thought has continued to inspire contemporary
research beyond the usual intellectual history and interpretive
scholarship, especially in the areas of feminist philosophy,
philosophy of mind and cognitive science, environmental philosophy and
philosophy of nature, political philosophy, philosophy of art,
philosophy of language, and phenomenological ontology. His work has
also been widely influential on researchers outside the discipline of
philosophy proper, especially in anthropology, architecture, the arts,
cognitive science, environmental theory, film studies, linguistics,
literature, and political theory.
1. Life and Works
Merleau-Ponty was born in Rochefort-sur-Mer, in the province of
Charente-Maritime, on March 14,
1908.[1]
After the death in 1913 of his father, a colonial artillery captain
and a knight of the Legion of Honor, he moved with his family to
Paris. He would later describe his childhood as incomparably happy,
and he remained very close to his mother until her death in 1953.
Merleau-Ponty pursued secondary studies at the Parisian lycees
Janson-de-Sailly and Louis-le-Grand, completing his first course in
philosophy at Janson-de-Sailly with Gustave Rodrigues in
1923–24. He won the school’s “Award for Outstanding
Achievement” in philosophy that year and would later trace his
commitment to the vocation of philosophy to this first course. He was
also awarded “First Prize in Philosophy” at Louis-le-Grand
in 1924–25. He attended the École Normale
Supérieure from 1926 to 1930, where he befriended Simone de
Beauvoir and Claude Lévi-Straus. Some evidence suggests that,
during these years, Merleau-Ponty authored a novel, Nord.
Récit de l’arctique, under the pseudonym Jacques
Heller (Alloa 2013b). His professors at ENS included Léon
Brunschvicg and Émile Bréhier, the latter supervising
his research on Plotinus for the Diplôme d’études
supérieures in 1929. Bréhier would continue to supervise
Merleau-Ponty’s research through the completion of his two
doctoral dissertations in 1945. During his student years,
Merleau-Ponty attended Husserl’s 1929 Sorbonne lectures and
Georges Gurvitch’s 1928–1930 courses on German philosophy.
He received the agrégation in philosophy in 1930,
ranking in second place.
After a year of mandatory military service, Merleau-Ponty taught at
the lycee in Beauvais from 1931 to 1933, pursued a year of research on
perception funded by a subvention from the Caisse nationale des
sciences (the precursor of today’s Centre national de la
recherche scientifique) in 1933–34, and taught at the lycee in
Chartres in 1934–35. From 1935 to 1940, he was a tutor
(agégé-répétiteur) at the
École Normale Supérieure, where his primary duty was to
prepare students for the agrégation. During this
period, he attended Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel
and Aron Gurwitsch’s lectures on Gestalt psychology. His first
publications also appeared during these years, as a series of review
essays on Max Scheler’s Ressentiment (1935), Gabriel
Marcel’s Being and Having (1936), and Sartre’s
Imagination
(1936).[2]
In 1938, he completed his thèse
complémentaire, originally titled Conscience et
comportement [Consciousness and Behavior] and published
in 1942 as La structure du comportement [The Structure of
Behavior, SC]. He was the first outside visitor to the newly
established Husserl Archives in Louvain, Belgium, in April 1939, where
he met Eugen Fink and consulted Husserl’s unpublished
manuscripts, including Ideen II and later sections of Die
Krisis.
With the outbreak of World War Two, Merleau-Ponty served for a year as
lieutenant in the 5th Infantry Regiment and 59th
Light Infantry Division, until he was wounded in battle in June 1940,
days before the signing of the armistice between France and Germany.
He was awarded the Croix de guerre, recognizing bravery in
combat. After several months of convalescence, he returned to teaching
at the Lycée Carnot in Paris, where he remained from 1940 until
1944. In November 1940, he married Suzanne Jolibois, and their
daughter Marianne was born in June 1941. In the winter of
1940–41, Merleau-Ponty renewed his acquaintance with Jean-Paul
Sartre, whom he had met as a student at the École Normale,
through their involvement in the resistance group Socialisme et
Liberté. The group published around ten issues of an
underground review until the arrest of two members in early 1942 led
to its dissolution. After the conclusion of the war, in 1945,
Merleau-Ponty would collaborate with Sartre and Beauvoir to found
Les Temps Modernes, a journal devoted to
“littérature engagée”, for which he served
as political editor until 1952.
At the end of the 1943–44 school year, Merleau-Ponty completed
his main thesis, Phénoménologie de la
perception [Phenomenology of Perception, PP], and in
1944–45 he taught at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris,
replacing Sartre during the latter’s leave from this position.
Merleau-Ponty defended his two dissertations in July 1945, fulfilling
the requirements for the Docteur ès lettres, which was
awarded “with distinction”. In October 1945, Les Temps
Modernes published its inaugural issue; Merleau-Ponty was a
founding member of the journal’s governing board, managed its
daily affairs, and penned many of its editorials that were signed
simply “T.M.”, even though he refused to allow his name to
be printed on the cover alongside Sartre’s as the review’s
Director. That fall, Merleau-Ponty was appointed to the post of
Maître de conférences in Psychology at the
University of Lyon, where he was promoted to the rank of Professor in
the Chair of Psychology in 1948. From 1947 to 1949, he also taught
supplementary courses at the École Normale Supérieure,
where his students included the young Michel Foucault. Student notes
(taken by Jean Deprun) from Merleau-Ponty’s 1947–48 course
on “The Union of the Soul and the Body in Malebranche, Biran,
and Bergson”—a course that he taught at both Lyon and
E.N.S. to prepare students for the agrégation and
which was attended by Foucault—were published in 1968
(1997b/2001).
In 1947, Merleau-Ponty participated regularly in the Collège
philosophique, an association formed by Jean Wahl to provide an open
venue for intellectual exchange without the academic formality of the
Sorbonne, and frequented by many leading Parisian thinkers.
Merleau-Ponty published his first book of political philosophy in
1947, Humanisme et terreur, essai sur le problème
communiste [Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist
Problem, 1969, HT], in which he responded to the developing
opposition between liberal democracies and communism by cautioning a
“wait-and-see” attitude toward Marxism. A collection of
essays concerning the arts, philosophy, and politics, Sens et
non-sense [Sense and Non-Sense, 1996b/1964], appeared in
1948. In the fall of 1948, Merleau-Ponty delivered a series of seven
weekly lectures on French national radio that were subsequently
published as Causeries 1948 (2002/2004).
Merleau-Ponty declined an invitation to join the Department of
Philosophy at the University of Chicago as a Visiting Professor in
1948–49, but instead received a leave from Lyon for the year to
present a series of lectures at the University of Mexico in early
1949. Later in 1949, Merleau-Ponty was appointed Professor of Child
Psychology and Pedagogy at the University of Paris, and in this
position lectured widely on child development, psychoanalysis,
phenomenology, Gestalt psychology, and anthropology. His eight courses
from the Sorbonne are known from compiled student notes reviewed by
him and published in the Sorbonne’s Bulletin de
psychologie (1988/2010). Merleau-Ponty held this position for
three years until his election, in 1952, to the Chair of Philosophy at
the Collège de France, the most prestigious post for a
philosopher in France, which he would hold until his death in 1961. At
forty-four, Merleau-Ponty was the youngest person ever elected to this
position, but his appointment was not without controversy. Rather than
following the typical procedure of ratifying the vote of the General
Assembly of Professors, who had selected Merleau-Ponty as their lead
candidate, the Académie des sciences morales et
politiques made the unprecedented decision to remove his name
from the list of candidates; the Académie’s
decision was subsequently overturned by the Minister of Education
himself, who allowed the faculty vote in favor of Merleau-Ponty to
stand. Merleau-Ponty’s January 1953 inaugural lecture at the
Collège de France was published under the title
Éloge de la Philosophie [In Praise of
Philosophy, 1953/1963]. Many of his courses from the
Collège de France have subsequently been published, based
either on student notes or Merleau-Ponty’s own lecture notes
(1964b, 1968/1970, 1995/2003, 1996a, 1998/2002, 2003/2010, 2011,
2013).
In the face of growing political disagreements with Sartre set in
motion by the Korean War, Merleau-Ponty resigned his role as political
editor of Les Temps Modernes in December of 1952 and withdrew
from the editorial board altogether in 1953. His critique of
Sartre’s politics became public in 1955 with Les Aventures
de la dialectique [Adventures of the Dialectic, 1973
AdD], in which Merleau-Ponty distanced himself from revolutionary
Marxism and sharply criticized Sartre for
“ultrabolshevism”. Beauvoir’s equally biting
rebuttal, “Merleau-Ponty and Pseudo-Sartreanism”,
published the same year in Les Temps Modernes, accuses
Merleau-Ponty of willfully misrepresenting Sartre’s position,
opening a rift between the three former friends that would never
entirely heal. Merleau-Ponty’s intellectual circle during his
years at the Collège de France included Lévi-Straus and
Jacques Lacan, and for several years he was a regular contributor to
the popular weekly magazine L’Express. In October and
November 1955, on a commission from Alliance
française, Merleau-Ponty visited several African
countries, including Tunisia, French Equatorial Africa, the Belgian
Congo, and Kenya, where he delivered a series of lectures on the
concept of race, colonialism, and development. In 1956, he published
Les Philosophes célèbres [Famous
Philosophers], a large edited volume of original introductions to
key historical and contemporary thinkers (beginning, interestingly,
with philosophers from India and China) whose contributors included
Gilles Deleuze, Gilbert Ryle, Alfred Schutz, and Jean Starobinski. In
April 1957, Merleau-Ponty declined to accept induction into
France’s Order of the Legion of Honor, presumably in protest
over the inhumane actions of the Fourth Republic, including the use of
torture, during the Battle of Algiers. In October and November of
1957, as his second commission from Alliance
française, he lectured in Madagascar, Reunion Island, and
Mauritius, citing as a primary motivation for accepting the commission
his desire to see first-hand the effects of reforms in French policies
governing overseas territories. The last book Merleau-Ponty published
during his lifetime, Signes [Signs, 1960/1964],
appearing in 1960, collecting essays on art, language, the history of
philosophy, and politics that spanned more than a decade. His last
published essay, “L’Œil et l’esprit”
[“Eye and Mind”, 1964a OEE] addressing the ontological
implications of painting, appeared in the 1961 inaugural issue of
Art de France. Merleau-Ponty died of a heart attack in Paris
on May 3rd, 1961, at the age of 53, with Descartes’
Optics open on his desk.
Merleau-Ponty’s friend and former student Claude Lefort
published two of his teacher’s unfinished manuscripts
posthumously: La prose du monde [The Prose of the
World, 1969/1973], an exploration of literature and expression
drafted in 1950–51 and apparently abandoned; and Le visible
et l’invisible [The Visible and the Invisible,
1968 V&I], a manuscript and numerous working notes from
1959–1961 that present elements of Merleau-Ponty’s mature
ontology. The latter manuscript was apparently part of a larger
project, Être et Monde [Being and World], for
which two additional unpublished sections were substantially drafted
in 1957–1958: La Nature ou le monde du silence
[Nature or the World of Silence] and Introduction
à l’ontologie [Introduction to Ontology]
(Saint Aubert 2013:
28).[3]
These manuscripts, along with many of Merleau-Ponty’s other
unpublished notes and papers, were donated to the Bibliothèque
Nationale de France by Suzanne Merleau-Ponty in 1992 and are available
for consultation by
scholars.[4]
2. The Nature of Perception and The Structure of Behavior
Merleau-Ponty’s lifelong interest in the philosophical status of
perception is already reflected in his successful 1933 application for
a subvention to study the nature of perception, where he proposes to
synthesize recent findings in experimental psychology (especially
Gestalt psychology) and neurology to develop an alternative to
dominant intellectualist accounts of perception inspired by critical
(Kantian) philosophy. Interestingly, this early proposal emphasizes
the significance of the perception of one’s own body for
distinguishing between the “universe of perception” and
its intellectual reconstructions, and it gestures toward the
“realist philosophers of England and America” (presumably
William James and A. N. Whitehead, as presented in Jean Wahl’s
1932 Vers le concret) for their insights into the
irreducibility of the sensory and the concrete to intellectual
relations. While this initial proposal makes no mention of
phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty’s subsequent 1934 report on the
year’s research, noting the limitations of approaching the
philosophical study of perception through empirical research alone,
emphasizes the promise of Husserlian phenomenology for providing a
distinctively philosophical framework for the investigation of
psychology. In particular, Merleau-Ponty mentions the distinction
between the natural and transcendental attitudes and the
intentionality of consciousness as valuable for “revising the
very notions of consciousness and sensation” (NP: 192/78). He also
cites approvingly Aron Gurwitsch’s claim that Husserl’s
analyses “lead to the threshold of
Gestaltpsychologie”, the second area of focus in this
early study. The Gestalt is “a spontaneous organization of the
sensory field” in which there are “only organizations,
more or less stable, more or less articulated” (NP: 193/79).
Merleau-Ponty’s brief summary of Gestalt psychology,
anticipating research presented in his first two books, emphasizes the
figure-ground structure of perception, the phenomena of depth and
movement, and the syncretic perception of children. Nevertheless,
Merleau-Ponty concludes—again citing Gurwitsch—that the
epistemological framework of Gestalt psychology remains Kantian,
requiring that one look “in a very different direction, for a
very different solution” to the problem of the relation between
the world described naturalistically and the world as perceived (NP: 198/82).
Merleau-Ponty’s first book, The Structure of Behavior
(SC), resumes the project of synthesizing and reworking the insights
of Gestalt theory and phenomenology to propose an original
understanding of the relationship between “consciousness”
and “nature”. Whereas the neo-Kantian idealism then
dominant in France (e.g., Léon Brunschvicg, Jules Lachelier)
treated nature as an objective unity dependent on the synthetic
activity of consciousness, the realism of the natural sciences and
empirical psychology assumed nature to be composed of external things
and events interacting causally. Merleau-Ponty argues that neither
approach is tenable: organic life and human consciousness are emergent
from a natural world that is not reducible to its meaning for a mind;
yet this natural world is not the causal nexus of pre-existing
objective realities, since it is fundamentally composed of nested
Gestalts, spontaneously emerging structures of organization at
multiple levels and degrees of integration. On the one hand, the
idealist critique of naturalism should be extended to the naturalistic
assumptions framing Gestalt theory. On the other hand, there is a
justified truth in naturalism that limits the idealist
universalization of consciousness, and this is discovered when Gestalt
structures are recognized to be ontologically basic and the
limitations of consciousness are thereby exposed. The notion of
“behavior”, taken by Merleau-Ponty as parallel to the
phenomenological concept of “experience” (in explicit
contrast with the American school of behaviorism), is a privileged
starting point for the analysis thanks to its neutrality with respect
to classical distinctions between the “mental” and the
“physiological” (SC: 2/4).
The Structure of Behavior first critiques traditional reflex
accounts of the relation between stimulus and reaction in light of the
findings of Kurt Goldstein and other contemporary physiologists,
arguing that the organism is not passive but imposes its own
conditions between the given stimulus and the expected response, so
that behavior remains inexplicable in purely anatomical or atomistic
terms. Merleau-Ponty instead describes the nervous system as a
“field of forces” apportioned according to “modes of
preferred distribution”, a model inspired by Wolfgang
Köhler’s Gestalt physics (SC: 48/46). Both physiology and
behavior are “forms”, that is,
total processes whose properties are not the sum of those which the
isolated parts would possess…. [T]here is form wherever the
properties of a system are modified by every change brought about in a
single one of its parts and, on the contrary, are conserved when they
all change while maintaining the same relationship among themselves.
(SC: 49–50/47)
Form or structure therefore describes dialectical, non-linear, and
dynamic relationships that can function relatively autonomously and
are irreducible to linear mechanical causality (see Thompson
2007).
The critique of physiological atomism is also extended to theories of
higher behavior, such as Pavlov’s theory of conditioned
reflexes. Merleau-Ponty argues that such accounts rely on gratuitous
hypotheses lacking experimental justification and cannot effectively
explain brain function or learning. In the case of brain function,
experimental work on brain damage demonstrates that localization
hypotheses must be rejected in favor of a global process of neural
organization comparable to the figure-ground structures of perceptual
organization. Similarly, learning cannot be explained in terms of
trial-and-error fixing of habitual reactions, but instead involves a
general aptitude with respect to typical structures of situations.
Merleau-Ponty proposes an alternative tripartite classification of
behavior according to the degree to which the structures toward which
it is oriented emerge thematically from their content.
Syncretic behaviors, typical of simpler organisms such as
ants or toads, respond to all stimuli as analogues of vital situations
for which the organism’s responses are instinctually prescribed
by its “species a priori”, with no possibility for
adaptive learning or improvisation. Amovable behaviors are
oriented toward signals of varying complexity that are not a function
of the organism’s instinctual equipment and can lead to genuine
learning. Here the organism, guided by its vital norms, responds to
signals as relational structures rather than as objective properties
of things. Drawing on Köhler’s experimental work with
chimpanzees, Merleau-Ponty argues that even intelligent non-human
animals lack an orientation toward objective things, which emerges
only at the level of symbolic behavior. While amovable
behavior remains attached to immediate functional structures, symbolic
behavior (here limited to humans) is open to virtual, expressive, and
recursive relationships across structures, making possible the human
orientation toward objectivity, truth, creativity, and freedom from
biologically determined norms.
More generally, Merleau-Ponty proposes that matter, life, and mind are
increasingly integrative levels of Gestalt structure, ontologically
continuous but structurally discontinuous, and distinguished by the
characteristic properties emergent at each integrative level of
complexity. A form is defined here as
a field of forces characterized by a law which has no meaning outside
the limits of the dynamic structure considered, and which on the other
hand assigns its properties to each internal point so much so that
they will never be absolute properties, properties of this
point. (SC: 148/137–38)
Merleau-Ponty argues that this understanding extends to all physical
laws, which “express a structure and have meaning only within
this structure”; the laws of physics always refer back to
“a sensible or historical given” and ultimately to the
history of the universe (SC: 149/138, 157/145). At the level of life, form is
characterized by a dialectical relation between the organism and its
environment that is a function of the organism’s vital norms,
its “optimal conditions of activity and its proper manner of
realizing equilibrium”, which express its style or
“general attitude toward the world” (SC: 161/148). Living
things are not oriented toward an objective world but toward an
environment that is organized meaningfully in terms of their
individual and specific style and vital goals.
Mind, the symbolic level of form that Merleau-Ponty identifies with
the human, is organized not toward vital goals but by the
characteristic structures of the human world: tools, language,
culture, and so on. These are not originally encountered as things or
ideas, but rather as “significative intentions” embodied
within the world. Mind or consciousness cannot be defined formally in
terms of self-knowledge or representation, then, but is essentially
engaged in the structures and actions of the human world and
encompasses all of the diverse intentional orientations of human life.
While mind integrates within itself the subordinate structures of
matter and life, it goes beyond these in its thematic orientation
toward structures as such, which is the condition for such
characteristically human symbolic activities as language and
expression, the creation of new structures beyond those set by vital
needs, and the power of choosing and varying points of view (which
make truth and objectivity possible). In short, mind as a second-order
or recursive structure is oriented toward the virtual rather than
simply toward the real. Ideally, the subordinate structure of life
would be fully absorbed into the higher order of mind in a fully
integrated human being; the biological would be transcended by the
“spiritual”. But integration is never perfect or complete,
and mind can never be detached from its moorings in a concrete and
embodied situation.
Merleau-Ponty emphasizes throughout The Structure of Behavior
that form, even though ontologically fundamental, cannot be accounted
for in the terms of traditional realism; since form is fundamentally
perceptual, an “immanent signification”, it retains an
essential relationship with consciousness. But the “perceptual
consciousness” at stake here is not the transcendental
consciousness of critical philosophy. The last chapter of The
Structure of Behavior clarifies this revised understanding of
consciousness in dialogue with the classical problem of the relation
between the soul and the body in order to account for the relative
truths of both transcendental philosophy and naturalism. The issue
concerns how to reconcile the perspective of consciousness as
“universal milieu” (i.e., transcendental consciousness)
with consciousness as “enrooted in the subordinated
dialectics”, that is, as a Gestalt emerging from lower-order
Gestalts (i.e., perceptual consciousness) (SC: 199/184). In the natural
attitude of our pre-reflective lives, we are committed to the view
that our perceptual experience of things is always situated and
perspectival (i.e., that physical objects are presented through
“profiles”, Husserl’s Abschattungen), but
also that we thereby experience things “in themselves”, as
they really are in the mind-independent world; the perspectival
character of our opening onto the world is not a limitation of our
access but rather the very condition of the world’s disclosure
in its inexhaustibility. At the level of this prereflective faith in
the world, there is no dilemma of the soul’s separation from the
body; “the soul remains coextensive with nature” (SC:
203/189).
This prereflective unity eventually splinters under our awareness of
illness, illusion, and anatomy, which teach us to separate nature,
body, and thought into distinct orders of events partes extra
partes. This culminates in a naturalism that cannot account for
the originary situation of perception that it displaces, yet on which
it tacitly relies; perception requires an “internal”
analysis, paving the way for transcendental idealism’s treatment
of subject and object as “inseparable correlatives” (SC:
215/199). But transcendental idealism in the critical tradition
subsequently goes too far: by taking consciousness as “milieu of
the universe, presupposed by every affirmation of the world”, it
obscures the original character of the perceptual relation and
culminates in “the dialectic of the epistemological subject and
the scientific object” (SC: 216/200, 217/201). Merleau-Ponty aims to
integrate the truth of naturalism and transcendental thought by
reinterpreting both through the concept of structure, which accounts
for the unity of soul and body as well as their relative distinction.
Against the conception of transcendental consciousness as a pure
spectator correlated with the world, Merleau-Ponty insists that mind
is an accomplishment of structural integration that remains
essentially conditioned by the matter and life in which it is
embodied; the truth of naturalism lies in the fact that such
integration is essentially fragile and incomplete. Since
“integration is never absolute and always fails”, the
dualism of mind and body
is not a simple fact; it is founded in principle—all integration
presupposing the normal functioning of subordinated formations, which
always demand their own due. (SC: 226–27/210)
The Structure of Behavior concludes with a call for further
investigation of “perceptual consciousness”, a task taken
up by its sequel, Phenomenology of Perception. In the
concluding pages of Structure, Merleau-Ponty offers a
preliminary sketch of phenomenologically inspired approaches to the
“problem of perception” that set the stage for his
subsequent work, emphasizing (a) the difference between what is
directly given as an aspect of individual lived experience and
intersubjective significations that are only encountered virtually;
and (b) the distinctiveness of one’s own body, which is never
experienced directly as one objective thing among many. The book
concludes by identifying the “problem of perception” as
its encompassing concern:
Can one conceptualize perceptual consciousness without eliminating it
as an original mode; can one maintain its specificity without
rendering inconceivable its relation to intellectual consciousness?
(SC: 241/224)
The solution requires a “return to perception as to a type of
originary experience” by means of an “inversion of the
natural movement of consciousness”, an inversion that
Merleau-Ponty here equates with Husserl’s phenomenological
reduction (SC: 236/220). If successful, this rehabilitation of the status
of perception would lead to a redefinition of transcendental
philosophy “in such a way as to integrate with it the very
phenomenon of the real” (SC: 241/224).
3. Phenomenology of Perception
Completed in 1944 and published the following year, Phenomenology
of Perception (PP) is the work for which Merleau-Ponty was best
known during his lifetime and that established him as the leading
French phenomenologist of his generation. Here Merleau-Ponty develops
his own distinctive interpretation of phenomenology’s method,
informed by his new familiarity with Husserl’s unpublished
manuscripts and his deepened engagement with other thinkers in this
tradition, such as Eugen Fink and Martin Heidegger. Phenomenology
of Perception again draws extensively on Gestalt theory and
contemporary research in psychology and neurology; the case of
Schneider, a brain-damaged patient studied by Adhémar Gelb and
Kurt Goldstein, serves as an extended case-study. Psychological
research complements and, at times, serves as a counterpoint to
phenomenological descriptions of perceptual experience across a wide
range of existential dimensions, including sexuality, language, space,
nature, intersubjectivity, time, and freedom. In
Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty develops a characteristic rhythm
of presenting, first, the realist or empiricist approach to a
particular dimension of experience, followed then by its idealist or
intellectualist alternative, before developing a third way that avoids
the problematic assumption common to both, namely, their
“unquestioned belief in the world”: the prejudice that the
objective world exists as a ready-made and fully present reality.
Phenomenology of Perception introduces its inquiry with a
critique of the “classical prejudices” of empiricism and
intellectualism. Merleau-Ponty rejects the empiricist understanding of
sensation, with its correlative “constancy hypothesis”,
and the role empiricism grants to association and the projection of
memory for treating the basic units of sensation as determinate atoms
rather than as meaningful wholes. These wholes include ambiguities,
indeterminacies, and contextual relations that defy explanation in
terms of the causal action of determinate things. Intellectualism aims
to provide an alternative to empiricism by introducing judgment or
attention as mental activities that synthesize experience from the
sensory givens, yet it adopts empiricism’s starting point in
dispersed, atomic sensations. Both approaches are guilty of reading
the results of perception (the objective world) back into perceptual
experience, thereby falsifying perception’s characteristic
structure: the spontaneous organization or configuration of perceived
phenomena themselves, with their indeterminacies and ambiguities, and
the dynamic character of perception as an historical process involving
development and transformation. By treating perception as a causal
process of transmission or a cognitive judgment, empiricism and
intellectualism deny any meaningful configuration to the perceived as
such and treat all values and meanings as projections, leaving no
basis in perception itself for distinguishing the true from the
illusory.
In contrast, Merleau-Ponty argues that the basic level of perceptual
experience is the gestalt, the meaningful whole of figure against
ground, and that the indeterminate and contextual aspects of the
perceived world are positive phenomenon that cannot be eliminated from
a complete account. Sensing, in contrast with knowing, is a
“living communication with the world that makes it present to us
as the familiar place of our life” (PP: 79/53), investing the
perceived world with meanings and values that refer essentially to our
bodies and lives. We forget this “phenomenal field”, the
world as it appears directly to perception, as a consequence of
perception’s own tendency to forget itself in favor of the
perceived that it discloses. Perception orients itself toward the
truth, placing its faith in the eventual convergence of perspectives
and progressive determination of what was previously indeterminate.
But it thereby naturally projects a completed and invariant
“truth in itself” as its goal. Science extends and
amplifies this natural tendency through increasingly precise
measurements of the invariants in perception, leading eventually to
the theoretical construction of an objective world of determinate
things. Once this determinism of the “in itself” is
extended universally and applied even to the body and the perceptual
relation itself, then its ongoing dependence on the “originary
faith” of perception is obscured; perception is reduced to
“confused appearances” that require methodical
reinterpretation, and the eventual result is dualism, solipsism, and
skepticism. The “fundamental philosophical act” would
therefore be to “return to the lived world beneath the objective
world” (PP: 83/57). This requires a transcendental reduction: a
reversal of perception’s natural tendency to cover its own
tracks and a bracketing of our unquestioned belief in the objective
world. Yet this cannot be a recourse to any transcendental
consciousness that looks on the world from outside and is not itself
emergent from and conditioned by the phenomenal field. Rather than a
transcendental ego, Merleau-Ponty speaks of a “transcendental
field”, emphasizing that reflection always has a situated and
partial perspective as a consequence of being located within the field
on which it reflects.
The first of the three major parts of Phenomenology concerns
the body. As we have seen, perception transcends itself toward a
determinate object “in itself”, culminating in an
objective interpretation of the body. Part One shows the limits of
this objective account and sketches an alternative understanding of
the body across a series of domains, including the experience of
one’s own body, lived space, sexuality, and language. Through a
contrast with pathological cases such as phantom limbs, Merleau-Ponty
describes the body’s typical mode of existence as
“being-toward-the-world”—a pre-objective orientation
toward a vital situation that is explicable neither in terms of
third-person causal interactions nor by explicit judgments or
representations. The body’s orientation toward the world is
essentially temporal, involving a dialectic between the present body
(characterized, after Husserl, as an “I can”) and the
habit body, the sedimentations of past activities that take on a
general, anonymous, and autonomous character. While the body’s
relation to the world serves as the essential background for the
experience of any particular thing, the body itself is experienced in
ways that distinguish it in kind from all other things: it is a
permanent part of one’s perceptual field, even though one cannot
in principle experience all of it directly; it has “double
sensations”, such as when one hand touches another, that enact a
form of reflexivity; it has affective experiences that are not merely
representations; and its kinesthetic sense of its own movements is
given directly.
This kinesthetic awareness is made possible by a pre-conscious system
of bodily movements and spatial equivalences that Merleau-Ponty terms
the “body schema”. In contrast with the “positional
spatiality” of things, the body has a “situational
spatiality” that is oriented toward actual or possible tasks
(PP: 129/102). The body’s existence as
“being-toward-the-world”, as a projection toward lived
goals, is therefore expressed through its spatiality, which forms the
background against which objective space is constituted. Merleau-Ponty
introduces here the famous case of Schneider, whose reliance on
pathological substitutions for normal spatial abilities helps to
bring the body’s typical relationship with lived space to
light. Schneider lacks the ability to “project” into
virtual space; more generally, his injury has disrupted the
“intentional arc” that
projects around us our past, our future, our human milieu, our
physical situation, our ideological situation, and our moral
situation, or rather, that ensures that we are situated within all of
these relationships. (PP: 170/137)
The body’s relationship with space is therefore intentional,
although as an “I can” rather than an “I
think”; bodily space is a multi-layered manner of relating to
things, so that the body is not “in” space but lives or
inhabits it.
Just as bodily space reflects an originary form of
intentionality—a pre-cognitive encounter with the world as
meaningfully structured—the same is shown to be the case for
sexuality and for language. Sexuality takes on a special significance
because it essentially expresses the metaphysical drama of the human
condition while infusing the atmosphere of our lives with sexual
significance. Like space and sexuality, speech is also a form of
bodily expression. Language does not initially encode ready-made
thoughts but rather expresses through its style or physiognomy as a
bodily gesture. We mistake language for a determined code by taking
habitual or sedimented language as our model, thereby missing
“authentic” or creative speech. Since language, like
perception, hides its own operations in carrying us toward its
meaning, it offers an ideal of truth as its presumptive limit,
inspiring our traditional privileging of thought or reason as
detachable from all materiality. But, at a fundamental level, language
is comparable to music in the way that it remains tied to its material
embodiment; each language is a distinct and ultimately untranslatable
manner of “singing the world”, of extracting and
expressing the “emotional essence” of our surroundings and
relationships (PP: 228/193).
Having rediscovered the body as expressive and intentional,
Merleau-Ponty turns in Part Two of Phenomenology to the
perceived world, with the aim of showing how the pre-reflective unity
of co-existence that characterizes the body has as its correlate the
synthesis of things and the world; “One’s own body is in
the world just as the heart is in the organism” (PP: 245/209), and
its expressive unity therefore also extends to the sensible world.
Merleau-Ponty develops this interpretation of the sensible through
detailed studies of sensing, space, and the natural and social worlds.
Sensing takes place as the “co-existence” or
“communion” of the body with the world that Merleau-Ponty
describes as a reciprocal exchange of question and answer:
a sensible that is about to be sensed poses to my body a sort of
confused problem. I must find the attitude that will provide it with
the means to become determinate … I must find the response to a
poorly formulated question. And yet I only do this in response to its
solicitation… . The sensible gives back to me what I had lent
to it, but I received it from the sensible in the first place. (PP:
259/222)
As co-existence, sensing is characterized by an intentionality that
sympathetically attunes itself to the sensed according to a dialectic
in which both terms—the perceiving body and the perceived
thing—are equally active and receptive: the thing invites the
body to adopt the attitude that will lead to its disclosure. Since the
subject of this perception is not the idealist’s “for
itself”, neither is the object of perception the realist’s
“in itself”; rather, the agent of perception is the
pre-reflective and anonymous subjectivity of the body, which remains
enmeshed in and “connatural” with the world that it
perceives. The senses are unified without losing their distinctness in
a fashion comparable to the binocular synthesis of vision, and their
anonymity is a consequence of the “historical thickness”
of perception as a tradition that operates beneath the level of
reflective consciousness (PP: 285/248). For first-person awareness,
one’s anonymous perceptual engagement with the world operates as
a kind of “original past, a past that has never been
present” (PP: 252/252).
The pre-historical pact between the body and the world informs our
encounters with space, revealing a synthesis of space that is neither
“spatialized” (as a pre-given container in which things
are arranged) nor “spatializing” (like the homogenous and
interchangeable relations of geometrical space). Drawing on
psychological experiments concerning bodily orientation, depth, and
movement, Merleau-Ponty argues that empiricist and intellectualist
accounts of space must give way to a conception of space as
co-existence or mutual implication characterized by existential
“levels”: our orientation toward up and down, or toward
what is in motion or stationary, is a function of the body’s
adoption of a certain level within a revisable field of possibilities.
Lived inherence in space contrasts with the abstract space of the
analytical attitude, revindicating the existential space of night,
dreams, or myths in relation to the abstract space of the
“objective” world.
The properties of things that we take to be “real” and
“objective” also tacitly assume a reference to the
body’s norms and its adoption of levels. An object’s
“true” qualities depend on the body’s privileging of
orientations that yield maximum clarity and richness. This is possible
because the body serves as a template for the style or logic of the
world, the concordant system of relations that links the qualities of
an object, the configuration of the perceptual field, and background
levels such as lighting or movement. In this symbiosis or
call-and-response between the body and the world, things have sense as
the correlates of my body, and reality therefore always involves a
reference to perception. Yet, to be real, things cannot be reducible
to correlates of the body or perception; they retain a depth and
resistance that provides their existential index. While each thing has
its individual style, the world is the ultimate horizon or background
style against which any particular thing can appear. The perspectival
limitations of perception, both spatially and temporally, are the
obverse of this world’s depth and inexhaustibility. Through an
examination of hallucination and illusions, Merleau-Ponty argues that
skepticism about the existence of the world makes a category mistake.
While we can doubt any particular perception, illusions can appear
only against the background of the world and our primordial faith in
it. While we never coincide with the world or grasp it with absolute
certainty, we are also never entirely cut off from it; perception
essentially aims toward truth, but any truth that it reveals is
contingent and revisable.
Rejecting analogical explanations for the experience of other people,
Merleau-Ponty proposes that the rediscovery of the body as a
“third genre of being between the pure subject and the
object” makes possible encounters with embodied others (PP:
407/366). We perceive others directly as pre-personal and embodied living
beings engaged with a world that we share in common. This encounter at
the level of anonymous and pre-personal lives does not, however,
present us with another person in the full sense, since our situations
are never entirely congruent. The perception of others involves an
alterity, a resistance, and a plenitude that are never reducible to
what is presented, which is the truth of solipsism. Our common
corporeality nevertheless opens us onto a shared social world, a
permanent dimension of our being in the mode of the anonymous and
general “someone”. The perception of others is therefore a
privileged example of the paradox of transcendence running through our
encounter with the world as perceived:
Whether it is a question of my body, the natural world, the past,
birth or death, the question is always to know how I can be open to
phenomena that transcend me and that, nevertheless, only exist to the
extent that I take them up and live them. (PP: 422/381)
This “fundamental contradiction” defines our encounters
with every form of transcendence and requires new conceptions of
consciousness, time, and freedom.
The fourth and final section of Phenomenology explores these
three themes, starting with a revision of the concept of the cogito
that avoids reducing it to merely episodic psychological fact or
elevating it to a universal certainty of myself and my
cogitationes. Merleau-Ponty argues that we cannot separate
the certainty of our thoughts from that of our perceptions, since to
truly perceive is to have confidence in the veracity of one’s
perceptions. Furthermore, we are not transparent to ourselves, since
our “inner states” are available to us only in a situated
and ambiguous way. The genuine cogito, Merleau-Ponty argues, is a
cogito “in action”: we do not deduce “I am”
from “I think”, but rather the certainty of “I
think” rests on the “I am” of existential
engagement. More basic than explicit self-consciousness and
presupposed by it is an ambiguous mode of self-experience that
Merleau-Ponty terms the silent or “tacit” cogito—our
pre-reflective and inarticulate grasp on the world and ourselves that
becomes explicit and determinate only when it finds expression for
itself. The illusions of pure self-possession and
transparency—like all apparently “eternal”
truths—are the results of acquired or sedimented language and
concepts.
Rejecting classic approaches to time that treat it either as an
objective property of things, as a psychological content, or as the
product of transcendental consciousness, Merleau-Ponty returns to the
“field of presence” as our foundational experience of
time. This field is a network of intentional relations, of
“protentions” and “retentions”, in a single
movement of dehiscence or self-differentiation, such that “each
present reaffirms the presence of the entire past that it drives away,
and anticipates the presence of the entire future or the
‘to-come’” (PP: 483/444). Time in this sense is
“ultimate subjectivity”, understood not as an eternal
consciousness, but rather as the very act of temporalization. As with
the tacit cogito, the auto-affection of time as ultimate subjectivity
is not a static self-identity but involves a dynamic opening toward
alterity. In this conception of time as field of presence, which
“reveals the subject and the object as two abstract moments of a
unique structure, namely, presence” (PP: 494/454–55),
Merleau-Ponty sees the resolution to all problems of transcendence as
well as the foundation for human freedom. Against the Sartrean
position that freedom is either total or null, Merleau-Ponty holds
that freedom emerges only against the background of our
“universal engagement in a world”, which involves us in
meanings and values that are not of our choosing. We must recognize,
first, an “authochthonous sense of the world that is constituted
in the exchange between the world and our embodied existence”
(PP: 504/466), and, second, that the acquired habits and the sedimented
choices of our lives have their own inertia. This situation does not
eliminate freedom but is precisely the field in which it can be
achieved. Taking class consciousness as his example, Merleau-Ponty
proposes that this dialectic of freedom and acquisition provides the
terms for an account of history, according to which history can
develop a meaning and a direction that are neither determined by
events nor necessarily transparent to those who live through it.
The Preface to Phenomenology of Perception, completed after
the main text, offers Merleau-Ponty’s most detailed and
systematic exposition of the phenomenological method. His account is
organized around four themes: the privileging of description over
scientific explanation or idealist reconstruction, the
phenomenological reduction, the eidetic reduction, and intentionality.
Phenomenology sets aside all scientific or naturalistic explanations
of phenomena in order to describe faithfully the pre-scientific
experience that such explanations take for granted. Similarly, since
the world exists prior to reflective analysis or judgment,
phenomenology avoids reconstructing actual experience in terms of its
conditions of possibility or the activity of consciousness. The
phenomenological reduction, on his interpretation, is not an
idealistic method but an existential one, namely, the reflective
effort to disclose our pre-reflective engagement with the world.
Through the process of the reduction, we discover the inherence of the
one who reflects in the world that is reflected on, and consequently,
the essentially incomplete character of every act of reflection, which
is why Merleau-Ponty claims that the “most important lesson of
the reduction is the impossibility of a complete reduction” (PP:
14/lxxvii). Similarly, the “eidetic reduction”, described by
Husserl as the intuition of essential relations within the flux of
conscious experience, is necessary if phenomenology is to make any
descriptive claims that go beyond the brute facts of a particular
experience. But this does not found the actual world on consciousness
as the condition of the world’s possibility; instead, “the
eidetic method is that of a phenomenological positivism grounding the
possible upon the real” (PP: 17/lxxxi). Lastly, Merleau-Ponty
reinterprets the phenomenological concept of intentionality,
traditionally understood as the recognition that all consciousness is
consciousness of something. Following Husserl, he
distinguishes the “act intentionality” of judgments and
voluntary decisions from the “operative intentionality”
that “establishes the natural and pre-predicative unity of the
world and of our life” (PP: 18/lxxxii). Guided by this broader
concept of intentionality, philosophy’s task is to take in the
“total intention” of a sensible thing, a philosophical
theory, or an historical event, which is its “unique manner of
existing” or its “existential structure” (PP:
19–20/lxxxii–lxxxiii). Phenomenology thereby expresses the emergence of
reason and meaning in a contingent world, a creative task comparable
to that of the artist or the political activist, which requires an
ongoing “radical” or self-referential reflection on its
own possibilities. On Merleau-Ponty’s presentation, the tensions
of phenomenology’s method therefore reflect the nature of its
task:
The unfinished nature of phenomenology and the inchoative style in
which it proceeds are not the sign of failure, they were inevitable
because phenomenology’s task was to reveal the mystery of the
world and the mystery of reason. (PP: 21–22/lxxxv)
4. Expression, Language, and Art
The concepts of expression and style are central to
Merleau-Ponty’s thought and already play a key role in his first
two books, where they characterize the perceptual exchange between an
organism and its milieu, the body’s sensible dialogue with the
world, and even the act of philosophical reflection (see Landes 2013).
In both works, Merleau-Ponty draws on a range of literary and artistic
examples to describe the creative and expressive dimensions of
perception and reflection, emphasizing in particular the parallels
between the task of the artist and that of the thinker: as the
concluding lines of the Preface to Phenomenology of
Perception note,
Phenomenology is as painstaking as the works of Balzac, Proust,
Valéry, or Cézanne—through the same kind of
attention and wonder, the same demand for awareness, the same will to
grasp the sense of the world or of history in its nascent state. (PP:
22/lxxxv)
Expression, particularly in language and the arts, plays an
increasingly central role in Merleau-Ponty’s thought in the
years following Phenomenology, when he aimed to formulate a
general theory of expression as the grounding for a philosophy of
history and
culture.[5]
This interest is first reflected in a series of essays addressing
painting, literature, and film published in the years immediately
following Phenomenology (in Merleau-Ponty 1996b/1964). These
include Merleau-Ponty’s first essay on painting,
“Cézanne’s Doubt”, which finds in
Cézanne a proto-phenomenological effort to capture the birth of
perception through painting. Cézanne epitomizes the paradoxical
struggle of creative expression, which necessarily relies on the
idiosyncracies of the artist’s individual history and
psychology, as well as the resources of the tradition of painting, but
can succeed only by risking a creative appropriation of these
acquisitions in the service of teaching its audience to see the world
anew. Similarly, Leonardo da Vinci’s artistic productivity is
explicable neither in terms of his intellectual freedom
(Valéry) nor his childhood (Freud) but as the dialectic of
spontaneity and sedimentation by which Merleau-Ponty had formerly
defined history.
In 1951, Merleau-Ponty summarizes his research after
Phenomenology as focused on a “theory of truth”
exploring how knowledge and communication with others are
“original formations with respect to perceptual life, but
… also preserve and continue our perceptual life even while
transforming it” (UMP: 41–42/287). Expression, language, and symbolism are the key to
this theory of truth and provide the foundation for a philosophy of
history and of “transcendental” humanity. Whereas the
study of perception could only provide a “bad ambiguity”
that mixes “finitude and universality”, Merleau-Ponty sees
in the phenomenon of expression a “good ambiguity” that
“gathers together the plurality of monads, the past and the
present, nature and culture, into a single whole” (UMP: 48/290). Many of
Merleau-Ponty’s courses from 1947 through 1953 at the University
of Lyon, the Sorbonne, and the Collège de France focus on
language, expression, and
literature.[6]
The manuscript partially completed during these years and published
posthumously as The Prose of the World (1969/1973) pursues
these themes through a phenomenological investigation of literary
language and its relationship with scientific language and painting.
Critiquing our commonsense ideal of a pure language that would
transparently encode pre-existing thoughts, Merleau-Ponty argues that
instituted language—the conventional system of language as an
established set of meanings and rules—is derivative from a more
primordial function of language as genuinely creative, expressive, and
communicative. Here he draws two insights from Saussurian linguistics:
First, signs function diacritically, through their lateral relations
and differentiations, rather than through a one-to-one correspondence
with a conventionally established meaning. Ultimately, signification
happens through the differences between terms in a referential system
that lacks any fixed or positive terms. This insight into diacritical
difference will later prove important to Merleau-Ponty’s
understanding of perception and ontology as well (see Alloa 2013a).
Second, the ultimate context for the operation of language is
effective communication with others, by which new thoughts can be
expressed and meanings shared. Expression accomplishes itself through
a coherent reorganization of the relationships between acquired signs
that must teach itself to the reader or listener, and which may
afterwards again sediment into a taken-for-granted institutional
structure.
In a long extract from the manuscript that was revised and published
in 1952 as “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence”
(in Merleau-Ponty 1960/1964), Merleau-Ponty brings this understanding
of language into conversation with Sartre’s What is
Literature? and André Malraux’s The Voices of
Silence. Sharing Malraux’s criticisms of the museum’s
role in framing the reception of painting, but rejecting his
interpretation of modern painting as subjectivist, Merleau-Ponty
offers an alternative understanding of “institution” (from
Husserl’s Stiftung) as the creative establishment of a
new field of meaning that opens an historical development. The style
of an artist is not merely subjective but lived as a historical
trajectory of expression that begins with perception itself and
effects a “coherent deformation” in inherited traditions.
Rather than opposed as silent and speaking, painting and language are
both continuations of the expressivity of a perceptual style into more
malleable mediums. The unfinished character of modern painting is
therefore not a turn from the objectivity of representation toward
subjective creation but rather a more authentic testament to the
paradoxical logic of all expression.
Merleau-Ponty returns to the analysis of painting in his final essay,
“Eye and Mind” (1964a OEE), where he accords it an
ontological priority—between the linguistic arts and
music—for revealing the “there is” of the world that
the operationalism of contemporary science has occluded. It is by
“lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world
into paintings” (OEE: 16/353), and this presupposes that the
artist’s body is immersed in and made of the same stuff as the
world: to touch, one must be tangible, and to see, visible.
Merleau-Ponty describes this as an “intertwining” or
“overlapping”, in which the artist’s situated
embodiment is the other side of its opening to the world. There is as
yet no sharp division between the sensing and the sensed, between body
and things as one common “flesh”, and painting arises as
the expression of this relation: it is a “visible to the second
power, a carnal essence or icon” of embodied vision (OEE: 22/355).
Descartes’s efforts, in the Optics, to reconstruct
vision from thought leads him to focus on the “envelope”
or form of the object, as presented in engraved lines, and to treat
depth as a third dimension modeled after height and width. This
idealization of space has its necessity, yet, once elevated to a
metaphysical status by contemporary science, it culminates in an
understanding of being as purely positive and absolutely determinate.
The ontological significance of modern painting and the plastic
arts—e.g., Klee, de Staël, Cézanne, Matisse,
Rodin—lies in the alternative philosophy that they embody, as
revealed through their treatment of depth, color, line, and movement.
Ultimately, such works teach us anew what it means to see:
Vision is not a certain mode of thought or presence to self; it is the
means given me for being absent from myself, for being present from
the inside at the fission of Being only at the end of which do I close
up into myself. (OEE: 81/374)
5. Political Philosophy
From the first issue of Les Temps Modernes in October 1945
until his death, Merleau-Ponty wrote regularly on politics, including
reflections on contemporary events as well as explorations of their
philosophical underpinnings and the broader political significance of
his times. During his eight-year tenure as unofficial managing editor
of Les Temps Modernes, he charted the review’s
political direction and penned many of its political editorials. After
leaving Les Temps Modernes in 1953, Merleau-Ponty found new
outlets for his political writings, including
L’Express, a weekly newspaper devoted to the
non-communist left. Both of the essay collections that he published
during his lifetime, Sense and Non-Sense and Signs,
devote significant space to his political writings. He also published
two volumes devoted entirely to political philosophy, Humanism and
Terror (HT) and Adventures of the Dialectic (1955 AdD).
Always writing from the left, Merleau-Ponty’s position gradually
shifted from a qualified Marxism, maintaining a critical distance from
liberal democracy as well as from Soviet communism, to the rejection
of revolutionary politics in favor of a “new liberalism”.
His political writings have received relatively scant attention
compared with other aspects of his philosophy, perhaps because of
their close engagement with the political situations and events of his
day. Nevertheless, scholars of his political thought emphasize its
continuity with his theoretical writings and ongoing relevance for
political philosophy (see Coole 2007; Whiteside 1998).
The 1947 publication of Humanism and Terror responded to
growing anti-communist sentiment in France fueled in part by the
fictional account of the Moscow trials in Arthur Koestler’s
popular novel Darkness at Noon. Merleau-Ponty sought to
articulate an alternative to the choice Europe apparently faced in the
solidifying opposition between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Humanism and Terror criticizes Koestler’s portrayal of
the fictional Rubochov, modeled on Nikolai Bukharin, for replacing the
“mutual praxis” of genuine Marxism (HT: 102/18) with
an opposition between pure freedom and determined history, the
“yogi” who withdraws into spiritual ideals or the
“commissar” who acts by any means necessary. Turning to an
examination of Bukharin’s 1938 trial, Merleau-Ponty finds there
an example of “revolutionary justice” that “judges
in the name of the Truth that the Revolution is about to make
true” (HT: 114/28), even though the historical contingency that this
entails is denied by the procedures of the trials themselves. On the
other hand, Trotsky’s condemnation of Stalinism as
counter-revolutionary similarly misses the ambiguity of genuine
history. Ultimately, the dimension of terror that history harbors is a
consequence of our unavoidable responsibility in the face of its
essential contingency and ambiguity.
Although violence is a consequence of the human condition and
therefore the starting point for politics, Merleau-Ponty finds hope in
the theory of the proletariat for a fundamental transformation in the
terms of human recognition:
The proletariat is universal de facto, or manifestly in its
very condition of life…. [I]t is the sole authentic
intersubjectivity because it alone lives simultaneously the separation
and union of individuals. (HT: 221/116–17)
A genuinely historical Marxism must recognize that nothing guarantees
progress toward a classless society, but also that this end cannot be
brought about by non-proletarian means, which is what Soviet communism
had apparently forgotten. Despite the failures of the Soviet
experiment, Merleau-Ponty remains committed to a humanist Marxism:
Marxism is not just any hypothesis that might be replaced tomorrow by
some other. It is the simple statement of those conditions without
which there would be neither any humanism, in the sense of a mutual
relation between men, nor any rationality in history. In this sense
Marxism is not a philosophy of history; it is the philosophy
of history and to renounce it is to dig the grave of Reason in
history. (HT: 266/153)
Even if the proletariat is not presently leading world history, its
time may yet come. Merleau-Ponty therefore concludes with a
“wait-and-see” Marxism that cautions against
decontextualized criticisms of Soviet communism as well as apologetics
for liberal democracies that whitewash their racist and colonial
violence.
Revelations about the Gulag camps and the outbreak of the Korean War
forced Merleau-Ponty to revise his position on Marxism and
revolutionary politics, culminating in the 1955 Adventures of the
Dialectic (AdD). The book begins with the formulation of a
general theory of history in conversation with Max Weber. Historians
necessarily approach the past through their own perspectives, but,
since they are themselves a part of history’s movement, this
need not compromise their objectivity. The historical events and
periods within which the historian traces a particular style or
meaning emerge in conjunction with historical agents, political actors
or classes, who exercise a creative action parallel to the expressive
gesture of the artist or the writer. History may eliminate false
paths, but it guarantees no particular direction, leaving to
historical agents the responsibility for the continuation or
transformation of what is inherited from the past through a genius for
inventing what the times demand: “In politics, truth is perhaps
only this art of inventing what will later appear to have been
required by the time” (AdD: 42/29). Merleau-Ponty finds a similar
position articulated by the young Georg Lukacs, for whom “There
is only one knowledge, which is the knowledge of our world in a state
of becoming, and this becoming embraces knowledge itself” (AdD:
46/32). History forms a third order, beyond subjects and objects, of
interhuman relations inscribed in cultural objects and institutions,
and with its own logic of sedimentation and spontaneity. The
self-consciousness that emerges within this third order is precisely
the proletariat, whose consciousness is not that of an “I
think” but rather the praxis of their common situation and
system of action. Historical truth emerges from the movement of
creative expression whereby the Party brings the life of the
proletariat to explicit awareness, which requires, in return, that the
working class recognize and understand itself in the Party’s
formulations.
With this understanding, Lukacs aims to preserve the dialectic of
history, to prevent it from slipping into a simple materialism, and
thereby to discover the absolute in the relative. But Lukacs
backtracks on this position after its official rejection by the
communist establishment in favor of a metaphysical materialism, and
Merleau-Ponty finds a parallel in Marx’s own turn away from
genuine dialectic toward a simple naturalism that justifies any action
in the name of a historical necessity inscribed in things. For the
lack of a genuine concept of institution that can recognize dialectic
in embodied form, Marxist materialism repeatedly abandons its
dialectical aspirations, as Merleau-Ponty further illustrates through
the example of Trostky’s career.
In the final chapter of Adventures, Merleau-Ponty turns his
sights toward Sartre’s endorsement of communism in The
Communists and Peace. On Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation,
Sartre’s ontological commitment to a dualism of being and
nothingness, where the full positivity of determinate things
juxtaposes with the negating freedom of consciousness, eliminates any
middle ground for history or praxis. Since consciousness is
unconstrained by any sedimentation or by the autonomous life of
cultural acquisitions, it can recognize no inertia or spontaneity at
the level of institutions, and therefore no genuine historical
becoming. More centrally, by interpreting the relation between the
Party and the proletariat through his own conception of consciousness
as pure freedom, Sartre rules out in principle any possibility for
their divergence. This leads Sartre to an
“ultrabolshevism” according to which the Party’s
position is identified with the revolutionary agenda, any opposition
to which must be suppressed.
In the Epilogue that summarizes Merleau-Ponty’s own position, he
explains his rejection of revolutionary action, understood as
proletarian praxis, for remaining equivocal rather than truly
dialectical. The illusion that has brought dialectic to a halt is
precisely the investment of history’s total meaning in the
proletariat, ultimately equating the proletariat with dialectic as
such, which leads to the conviction that revolution would liquidate
history itself. But it is essential to the very structure of
revolutions that, when successful, they betray their own revolutionary
character by sedimenting into institutions. Drawing on the extended
example of the French revolution, Merleau-Ponty argues that every
revolution mistakes the structure of history for its contents,
believing that eliminating the latter will absolutely transform the
former. Thus, “The very nature of revolution is to believe
itself absolute and to not be absolute precisely because it believes
itself to be so” (AdD: 298/222). While Soviet communism may continue
to justify itself in absolute terms, it is concretely a progressivism
that tacitly recognizes the relativity of revolution and the gradual
nature of progress. The alternative that Merleau-Ponty endorses is the
development of a “noncommunist left”, an
“a-communism”, or a “new liberalism”, the
first commitment of which would be to reject the description of the
rivalry between the two powers as one between “free
enterprise” and Marxism (AdD: 302–3/225). This noncommunist left would
occupy a “double position”, “posing social problems
in terms of [class] struggle” while also “refusing the
dictatorship of the proletariat” (AdD: 304/226). This pursuit must
welcome the resources of parliamentary debate, in clear recognition of
their limitations, since Parliament is “the only known
institution that guarantees a minimum of opposition and of
truth” (AdD: 304/226). By exercising “methodical doubt”
toward the established powers and denying that they exhaust political
and economic options, the possibility opens for a genuine dialectic
that advances social justice while respecting political freedom.
6. The Visible and the Invisible
The manuscript and working notes published posthumously as The
Visible and the Invisible (1964 V&I), extracted from a larger
work underway at the time of Merleau-Ponty’s death, is
considered by many to be the best presentation of his later ontology.
The main text, drafted in 1959 and 1960, is contemporaneous with
“Eye and Mind” and the Preface to Signs,
Merleau-Ponty’s final collection of essays. The first three
chapters progressively develop an account of “philosophical
interrogation” in critical dialogue with scientism, the
philosophies of reflection (Descartes and Kant), Sartrean negation,
and the intuitionisms of Bergson and Husserl. These are followed by a
stand-alone chapter, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm”,
presenting Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of flesh. The published
volume also includes a brief abandoned section of the text as an
appendix and more than a hundred pages of selected working notes
composed between 1959 and
1961.[7]
Merleau-Ponty frames the investigation with a description of
“perceptual faith”, our shared pre-reflective conviction
that perception presents us with the world as it actually is, even
though this perception is mediated, for each of us, by our bodily
senses. This apparent paradox creates no difficulties in our everyday
lives, but it becomes incomprehensible when thematized by reflection:
The “natural” man holds on to both ends of the chain,
thinks at the same time that his perception enters into the
things and that it is formed this side of his body. Yet coexist as the
two convictions do without difficulty in the exercise of life, once
reduced to theses and to propositions they destroy one another and
leave us in confusion. (V&I: 23–24/8)
For Merleau-Ponty, this “unjustifiable certitude of a sensible
world” is the starting point for developing an alternative
account of perception, the world, intersubjective relations, and
ultimately being as such. Neither the natural sciences nor psychology
provide an adequate clarification of this perceptual faith, since they
rely on it without acknowledgment even as their theoretical
constructions rule out its possibility. Philosophies of reflection,
exemplified by Descartes and Kant, also fail in their account of
perception, since they reduce the perceived world to an idea, equate
the subject with thought, and undermine any understanding of
intersubjectivity or a world shared in common (V&I: 62/39, 67/43).
Sartre’s dialectic of being (in-itself) and nothingness
(for-itself) makes progress over philosophies of reflection insofar as
it recognizes the ecceity of the world, with which the subject engages
not as one being alongside others but rather as a nothingness, that
is, as a determinate negation of a concrete situation that can
co-exist alongside other determinate negations. Even so, for Sartre,
pure nothingness and pure being remain mutually exclusive,
ambivalently identical in their perfect opposition, which brings any
movement of their dialectic to a halt. The “philosophy of
negation” is therefore shown to be a totalizing or
“high-altitude” thought that remains abstract, missing the
true opening onto the world made possible by the fact that nothingness
is “sunken into being” (V&I: 121–122/88–89). This
“bad” dialectic must therefore give way to a
“hyperdialectic” that remains self-critical about its own
tendency to reify into fixed and opposed theses (V&I: 129/94).
The philosophy of intuition takes two forms: the Wesenschau
of Husserl, which converts lived experience into ideal essences before
a pure spectator, and Bergsonian intuition, which seeks to coincide
with its object by experiencing it from within. Against the first,
Merleau-Ponty argues that the world’s givenness is more
primordial than the ideal essence; the essence is a variant of the
real, not its condition of possibility. Essences are not ultimately
detachable from the sensible but are its “invisible” or
its latent structure of differentiation. Against a return to the
immediacy of coincidence or a nostalgia for the pre-reflective,
Merleau-Ponty holds that there is no self-identical presence to
rejoin; the “immediate” essentially involves distance and
non-coincidence. Consequently, truth must be redefined as “a
privative non-coinciding, a coinciding from afar, a divergence, and
something like a ‘good error’” (V&I:
166/124–25).
In the final chapter, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm”,
Merleau-Ponty turns directly to the positive project of describing his
ontology of “flesh”. Intertwining [entrelacs]
here translates Husserl’s Verflechtung, entanglement or
interweaving, like the woof and warp of a fabric. Chiasm has two
senses in French and English that are both relevant to
Merleau-Ponty’s project: a physiological sense that refers to
anatomical or genetic structures with a crossed arrangement (such as
the optic nerves), and a literary sense referring to figures of speech
that repeat structures in reverse order (AB:BA). For Merleau-Ponty,
the chiasm is a structure of mediation that combines the
unity-in-difference of its physiological sense with the reversal and
circularity of its literary usage (see Toadvine 2012; Saint Aubert
2005). A paradigmatic example of chiasmic structure is the
body’s doubling into sensible and sentient aspects during
self-touch. Elaborating on Husserl’s descriptions of this
phenomenon, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes three consequences: First, the
body as sensible-sentient is an “exemplar sensible” that
demonstrates the kinship or ontological continuity between subject and
object among sensible things in general. Second, this relationship is
reversible, like “obverse and reverse” or “two
segments of one sole circular course” (V&I: 182/138). Third, the
sentient and sensible never strictly coincide but are always separated
by a gap or divergence [écart] that defers their
unity.
Chiasm is therefore a crisscrossing or a bi-directional becoming or
exchange between the body and things that justifies speaking of a
“flesh” of things, a kinship between the sensing body and
sensed things that makes their communication possible. Flesh in this
sense is a “general thing” between the individual and the
idea that does not correspond to any traditional philosophical
concept, but is closest to the notion of an “element” in
the classical sense (V&I: 184/139). Merleau-Ponty denies that this is
a subjective or anthropocentric projection:
carnal being, as a being of depths, of several leaves or several
faces, a being in latency, and a presentation of a certain absence, is
a prototype of Being, of which our body, the sensible sentient, is a
very remarkable variant, but whose constitutive paradox already lies
in every visible. (V&I: 179/136)
The generality of flesh embraces an intercorporeity, an anonymous
sensibility shared out among distinct bodies: just as my two hands
communicate across the lateral synergy of my body, I can touch the
sensibility of another: “The handshake too is reversible”
(V&I: 187/142).
Sensible flesh—what Merleau-Ponty calls the
“visible”—is not all there is to flesh, since flesh
also “sublimates” itself into an “invisible”
dimension: the “rarified” or “glorified” flesh
of ideas. Taking as his example the “little phrase” from
Vinteuil’s sonata (in Swann’s Way), Merleau-Ponty
describes literature, music, and the passions as “the
exploration of an invisible and the disclosure of a universe of
ideas”, although in such cases these ideas “cannot be
detached from the sensible appearance and be erected into a second
positivity” (V&I: 196/149). Creative language necessarily
carries its meaning in a similarly embodied fashion, while the
sediments of such expression result in language as a system of
formalized relations. What we treat as “pure ideas” are
nothing more than a certain divergence and ongoing process of
differentiation, now occurring within language rather than sensible
things. Ultimately we find a relation of reversibility within language
like that holding within sensibility: just as, in order to see, my
body must be part of the visible and capable of being seen, so, by
speaking, I make myself one who can be spoken to (allocutary) and one
who can be spoken about (delocutary). While all of the possibilities
of language are already outlined or promised within the sensible
world, reciprocally the sensible world itself is unavoidably inscribed
with language.
This final chapter of The Visible and the Invisible
illustrates chiasmic mediation across a range of relations, including
sentient and sensed, touch and vision, body and world, self and other,
fact and essence, perception and language. There is not one chiasm but
rather various chiasmic structures at different levels. As Renaud
Barbaras notes,
It is necessary … to picture the universe as intuited by
Merleau-Ponty as a proliferation of chiasms that integrate themselves
according to different levels of generality. (1991, 352/2004, 307)
The ultimate ontological chiasm, that between the sensible and the
intelligible, is matched by an ultimate epistemological chiasm, that
of philosophy itself. As Merleau-Ponty writes in a working note from
November 1960,
the idea of chiasm, that is: every relation with being is
simultaneously a taking and a being held, the hold is held, it is
inscribed and inscribed in the same being that it takes hold of.
Starting from there, elaborate an idea of philosophy… . It is
the simultaneous experience of the holding and the held in all orders.
(V&I: 319/266; see also Saint Aubert 2005: 162–64)
7. Influence and Current Scholarship
While the generation of French post-structuralist thinkers who
succeeded Merleau-Ponty, including Deleuze, Derrida, Irigaray, and
Foucault, typically distanced themselves from his work, lines of
influence are often recognizable (see Lawlor 2006, 2003; Reynolds
2004). Irigaray (1993) suggests that Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of
flesh tacitly relies on feminine and maternal metaphors while
rendering sexual difference invisible. Derrida’s most detailed
engagement with Merleau-Ponty, in Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy
(On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, 2000/2005), criticizes the
latter’s account of touch and ontology of flesh for its tendency
to privilege immediacy, continuity, and coincidence over rupture,
distance, and untouchability. Nevertheless, Derrida ultimately
suspends judgment over the relation between these two tendencies in
Merleau-Ponty’s final writings. The legacy of
Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodiment and ontology of flesh
is also apparent in the work of subsequent French phenomenologists,
including Françoise Dastur, Michel Henry, Henri Maldiney,
Jean-Louis Chrétien, and Jacob Rogozinski.
Recent English-language scholarship on Merleau-Ponty, inspired by the
availability of new materials from his course notes and unpublished
writings, has focused on his concept of subjectivity (Morris and
Maclaren 2015; Welsh 2013; Marratto 2012),
his relationship to literature,
architecture, and the arts (Carbone 2015; Locke & McCann 2015;
Wiskus 2014; Kaushik 2013; Johnson 2010), and his later ontology and
philosophy of nature (Foti 2013; Toadvine 2009). His work has also
made important contributions to debates in cognitive science (Thompson
2007; Gallagher 2005), feminism (Olkowski and Weiss 2006;
Heinämaa 2003), animal studies (Westling 2014; Buchanan 2009;
Oliver 2009), and environmental philosophy (Cataldi & Hamrick
2007; Abram 1996).
Bibliography
Cited Works by Merleau-Ponty
Citations of these texts list the French pagination first followed by
that of the English translation.