Merleau-Ponty at the Limits of Art, Religion and Perception (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits of Art, Religion, and Perception

Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy Series Editor: James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin, USA Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy is a major monograph series from Continuum. The series features first-class scholarly research monographs across the field of Continental philosophy. Each work makes a major contribution to the field of philosophical research. Adorno’s Concept of Life, Alastair Morgan Badiou, Marion and St Paul, Adam Miller Being and Number in Heidegger’s Thought, Michael Roubach Deleuze and Guattari, Fadi Abou-Rihan Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation, Joe Hughes Deleuze and the Unconscious, Christian Kerslake Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New, edited by Simon O’Sullivan and Stephen Zepke Derrida, Simon Morgan Wortham Derrida and Disinterest, Sean Gaston The Domestication of Derrida, Lorenzo Fabbri Encountering Derrida, edited by Simon Morgan Wortham and Allison Weiner Foucault’s Heidegger, Timothy Rayner Gadamer and the Question of the Divine, Walter Lammi Heidegger and a Metaphysics of Feeling, Sharin N. Elkholy Heidegger and Aristotle, Michael Bowler Heidegger and Logic, Greg Shirley Heidegger and Philosophical Atheology, Peter S. Dillard Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction, Michael Lewis Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change, Ruth Irwin Heidegger’s Early Philosophy, James Luchte Levinas and Camus, Tal Sessler Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology, Kirk M. Besmer Nietzsche, Nihilism and the Philosophy of the Future, edited by Jeffrey Metzger Nietzsche’s Ethical Theory, Craig Dove Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, edited by James Luchte The Philosophy of Exaggeration, Alexander Garcia Düttmann Sartre’s Phenomenology, David Reisman Time and Becoming in Nietzsche’s Thought, Robin Small Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? Gregg Lambert Žižek and Heidegger, Thomas Brockelman

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits of Art, Religion, and Perception

Edited by Kascha Semonovitch and Neal DeRoo

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Kascha Snavely and Neal DeRoo, 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN:

HB: 978-1-4411-1976-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group

Contents

Acknowledgements Notes on Editors and Contributors Introduction Kascha Semonovitch and Neal DeRoo

vii viii 1

Part I: Limits of Art 1. Freeing the Line John Sallis 2. Merleau-Ponty and Cézanne on Painting Günter Figal 3. Merleau-Ponty and Kant’s Third Critique: The Beautiful and the Sublime Galen A. Johnson

21 30

41

Part II: Limits of Perception 4. Skill and the Critique of Descartes in Gilbert Ryle and Maurice Merleau-Ponty Gabrielle Bennet Jackson 5. Phantom Limbs and Phantom Worlds: Being Responsive to the Present Susan Bredlau

63

79

Part III: Limits of Temporality and Phenomenology 6. L’écart: Merleau-Ponty’s Separation from Husserl; Or, Absolute Time Constituting Consciousness Michael R. Kelly 7. Time at the Depth of the World Glen A. Mazis

95 120

Part IV: Limits of Faith and Sacramentality 8. Merleau-Ponty and the Sacramentality of the Flesh Richard Kearney

147

vi

Contents

9. Merleau-Ponty and Modernist Sacrificial Poetics: A Response to Richard Kearney Joseph S. O’Leary 10. ‘Faith is in things not seen’: Merleau-Ponty on Faith, Virtù, and the Perception of Style Darian Meacham Bibliography of Works by Merleau-Ponty Index

167

185

208 211

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Rosengart Collection Museum Lucerne for allowing us to reproduce the image of Paul Klee’s ‘Dance, you monster, to my gentle song,’ 1922, p. 55 included in John Sallis’s essay, and Henry Carrigan Jr. and Northwestern University Press for permission to reprint Galen A. Johnson’s essay, ‘Merleau-Ponty and Kant’s Third Critique: The Beautiful and the Sublime.’ We would also like to thank Sarah Campbell, Tom Crick, and everyone at Continuum for their considerable patience in bringing this project to fruition. Finally, Neal DeRoo would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for their support which was in part responsible for the completion of the volume, and which is herein gratefully acknowledged.

Notes on Editors and Contributors

Editors Neal DeRoo teaches philosophy at Brock University (St. Catharines, Canada). He is the co-editor of Phenomenology and Eschatology: Not Yet in the Now (2009), The Logic of Incarnation: James K. A. Smith’s Critique of Postmodern Religion (2008), and Cross and Khôra: Deconstruction and Christianity in the work of John D. Caputo (2009). Kascha Semonovitch is Lecturer in Philosophy at Seattle University. She received her doctorate from Boston College. Her work focuses on Merleau-Ponty’s courses on nature. She is co-editor of Phenomenologies of the Stranger (forthcoming).

Contributors Susan Bredlau is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northern Arizona University. Her current work focuses on the issue of perceptual development in the writings of Merleau-Ponty. Günter Figal is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. He has also taught in the United States, as a distinguished visiting professor at Boston College. He is the author of books on Socrates, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and hermeneutics as well as phenomenology. His works available in English include Objectivity: Hermeneutics and Philosophy (2010), For a Philosophy of Freedom and Strife: Politics, Aesthetics, Metaphysics (1998), and, as editor, The Heidegger Reader (2009). Gabrielle Bennet Jackson is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Harvard University. She is completing her dissertation on the works of Gilbert Ryle and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Notes on Editors and Contributors

ix

Galen A. Johnson is Honors Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rhode Island and past chairman of the Department of Philosophy. Currently he is Director of the University Center for the Humanities. He received his Ph.D. from Boston University in 1977, and has studied additionally in France, Switzerland, and Belgium. He is the author of Earth and Sky, History and Philosophy (1989), editor of Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty (1990, with Michael B. Smith) and The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (1993, 1996, 1998), and author of The Retrieval of the Beautiful: Thinking through Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics (forthcoming). Richard Kearney holds the Charles B. Seelig Chair in Philosophy at Boston College and is visiting professor at University College Dublin. His recent publications include Anatheism: God after God (2009), Navigations: Collected Irish Essays, 1976–2006 (2006), Strangers, Gods and Monsters (2002), and The God Who May Be (2001). Michael R. Kelly, Lecturer in Philosophy at Boston College, received his doctorate from Fordham University. His research interests and publications deal with Husserl’s reception in the phenomenological tradition, particularly with respect to time and intentionality, and Bergson’s relation to phenomenology. Glen A. Mazis is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Penn State Harrisburg. His books that apply Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy to a specific topic areas are Emotion and Embodiment: Fragile Ontology (1993), Earthbodies: Rediscovering Our Planetary Senses (2002), and Humans, Animals, Machines: Blurring Boundaries (2008). He has also published more than 25 essays in journals or book chapters on aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy in relation to interpersonal perception, time, film, emotion, imagination, dreams, poetry, artificial intelligence, technology, chaos theory, ecology, Husserl, Sartre, Levinas, Derrida, Jungian depth psychology, Buddhist emptiness, and so on. He is currently writing The Sensual Depth of the World’s Face: Merleau-Ponty and Embodying Time, Matter and Interanimality. Darian Meacham received his doctorate in 2008 from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and is currently an affiliated researcher at the Husserl Archives in Leuven, Belgium. He is the author of several recent articles on Merleau-Ponty, Jan Patocˇka, and political philosophy including, ‘Transgenerational Epigenetics or a Spectral History of the Flesh: A Merleau-Pontian Approach to Epigenetics’ and ‘The Body at the Front: Community and Corporeity in Jan Patocˇka’s Heretical Essays.’

x

Notes on Editors and Contributors

Joseph S. O’Leary, Professor of English Literature at Sophia University, Tokyo, was born in Cork in 1949 and studied literature and theology at Maynooth College (1976) and in Rome and Paris. Resident in Japan since 1983, he has worked on fundamental theology, drawing inspiration from Heidegger and Derrida, with an opening to Buddhism and to literature. His publications include Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth (1996). John Sallis is the Frederick J. Adelmann S. J. Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. He is the Founding Editor of the journal Research in Phenomenology, and General Editor of ‘Studies in Continental Thought’ (Indiana University Press). The author of over 16 books, his most recent publications include Transfigurements: On the True Sense of Art (2008), The Verge of Philosohpy (2007), and Topographies (2006).

Introduction Kascha Semonovitch and Neal DeRoo

1. Unlimiting Philosophy To take up the celebrated phrase again, philosophy’s center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere. Merleau-Ponty, 1964c, p. 128

When we ask the question, ‘What lies at the limit of philosophy?’ we might respond by describing other domains and disciplines so as to delimit philosophy negatively: what philosophy is not is the study of divinity and particular faith claims; it is not the study of the mental states of individuals; it is not that which is expressed artistically or poetically. By so doing, we begin to understand philosophy in contrast to what lies outside its limits, thereby enabling us to determine more closely what remains within its limits. But could we realistically perform such a via negativa? In modern academia, the increasing specialization required to publish in any scholarly field means that few authors dare to comment on, let alone critique, thinkers and practitioners outside of their own narrowly defined fields, for fear of being critiqued as uninformed or for overstepping boundaries established for good scholarly reasons. Philosophers often restrict themselves to single topics or authors (and sometimes even single topics within one author), cognitive scientists comment only on the work of other scientists, and literary and art critics respond to works from a particular period and genre. With such a rigorous intradisciplinary focus, it is difficult to determine precisely the relation between different disciplines, and hence to circumscribe the field of any particular discipline clearly and distinctly. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, by contrast, dared to reach beyond the comfortable confines of one particular discipline. His work engages with events and works in areas as diverse as politics, theology, painting, literature, the

2

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

history of mathematics and biology. Evidence of his interdisciplinary thought abounds: in Signs, he tackles Malraux’s art history, Saussure’s linguistics, Gilson and Maritain’s Christian philosophy, Sartre’s politics, and Claudel’s poetry; with Sartre, he published the polemically political journal, Les Temps Moderne, while at the same time educating himself on the latest research in child development and perception; in the recently published Nature Courses, he reflects on neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, alludes to Paul Valéry, and remarks on the work of the later Heidegger; and during the same years that he gave these courses on Nature, Merleau-Ponty also published his renowned essay ‘Eye and Mind’ with its sustained and well-respected reflections on Cézanne and the practice of painting.1 These allusions and forays across boundaries are far more than mere name-dropping or broadcasting by a liberally educated Parisian: they are in fact essential to Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. As Merleau-Ponty focuses more and more attentively on the fabric of the real, he finds there the same threads running through the materials of science, philosophy, and art. For him, all of these domains—indeed, all of experience—arise from the same prethetic or barbarous ground as philosophy. At the same time, Merleau-Ponty never conflates reflective practices with this ground nor with aesthetic or religious practices. We clearly sense, in Merleau-Ponty and also in our own lives, the difference between the natural attitude (of practicing art or religion, for example) and the reflective attitude of thinking philosophically. How are we to think this difference? Or, to return to the questions raised earlier: Does the limit of philosophy really lie in religion, psychology, art, or poetry? Or are these things merely the matter of study for philosophy? To each of these questions, Merleau-Ponty must reply, paradoxically, yes and no. Whether we think of this, as Mauro Carbone puts it, as an ‘a-philosophy’ which aims at some domain that philosophy itself can no longer access, or if we think of it as ‘non-philosophy,’ as Merleau-Ponty himself puts it, or as the ‘margin’ of philosophy, as Derrida might put it, we find that Merleau-Ponty’s method puts philosophy itself into question by placing it in conversation with its ‘other.’ Merleau-Ponty is, of course, not the only recent thinker to put philosophy into such a dialogue. Indeed, several recent philosophers (notably Derrida, Rorty, and Wittgenstein) have demonstrated the constant and necessary interruption of philosophy by that which lies outside its proper scope. This ‘other’ of philosophy has included the many domains already addressed— literature, religion, psychoanalysis, visual arts, sensual and kinesthetic experience, and prereflective life—but it can also include other thinkers,

Introduction

3

predecessors and schools of thought. But, as the chapters included here will demonstrate, there is something unique in Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with this issue. In the words of Renaud Barabaras, Merleau-Ponty establishes, especially in his later ontology, ‘a philosophy which feeds and limits the classical pretentions of philosophy—a philosophy of nonphilosophy’ (Barbaras, 2004, p. 70). If Merleau-Ponty manages to address these ‘others’ of philosophy in a way distinct from other scholars, it may be because he—more than his contemporaries—does not assume a privileged reflective distance for philosophy from other disciplines. He engages his various topics—from Cézanne’s painting to Marx’s politics—as subjects: as equal partners in an unfolding dialogue. He literally envisions politics and philosophy, for example, as two partners involved in a messy divorce over Marxism; he holds each partner responsible for the success or failure of this split (Merleau-Ponty, 1964c, p. 9). He cautiously approaches his subject—whether that subject is Nature itself or a particular painting—allowing the subject to speak for itself through his writing. This dialogical, dialectical emergence of his own thought echoes naturally his vision of the interrogative appearance of meaning (see Merleau-Ponty, 1968a). The ambition of this volume is twofold: first, to offer new insight into the work of Merleau-Ponty through a selection of recent essays emphasizing the connection of his work to other thinkers and disciplines; and second, to rethink the inter- and intradisciplinary boundaries of philosophy in light of these connections made possible by the method employed in his work. This book seeks, then, to answer the question of what constitutes the limit of philosophy from within Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre. It contains contributions from several important thinkers in phenomenology, philosophy, and psychology that trace the lines between art, aesthetic judgment, psychology, philosophy, sacramentality, and transcendence in Merleau-Ponty’s life and work. The result is an exploration, not just of Merleau-Ponty, but of the discipline of philosophy itself, and its constant interruption and redescription by art, perception, and religion. In this volume, we will witness Merleau-Ponty in conversation with other thinkers and other disciplines: with Husserl, with Kant, with visual art, with Christianity, with psychotherapy, and with politics, to name a few. It has been the task of the contributors—and it remains the task of all who read Merleau-Ponty—to try to distill, from these interactions, answers to some urgent questions that emerge out of the unique method that Merleau-Ponty has adopted: Why does Merleau-Ponty think through others? Why does Merleau-Ponty think philosophy through painting? Through poetry? What is this type of

4

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

thinking that unfolds dialogically? Why might thought appear interrogatively? And, ultimately, can we interrogate the ‘other’ of philosophy without preemptively reducing the subject to an object, without assuming that, from the outside, philosophy can fully grasp its interiority? Is it possible, in other words, to think philosophically about things that have traditionally been understood as other-than-philosophy? Is there a clue, in Merleau-Ponty’s dialogical and interrogative method, to establishing the relationship between philosophy and what lies outside it? Is there a clue, in MerleauPonty, to establishing the limits of truly philosophical discourse or will we find, rather, that such an enterprise is doomed from the start? These are the stakes, however high, that push us to examine Merleau-Ponty at the limits of art, religion, and perception.

2. Merleau-Ponty’s Style The risk in writing on or through another (discipline or author) is always that one might conflate this other’s thought with one’s own. Merleau-Ponty often reflects on the work of others and uses these works as a mouth-piece to express his own position. Those familiar with Merleau-Ponty are familiar with his ventriloquism: One can at times lose track of Merleau-Ponty’s thought in contrast to that of the author he interprets. His readings of Husserl, perhaps most famously, so generously give voice to his predecessor that the student of Merleau-Ponty must take great pains to untwine the threads of this French thinker from that of German. Merleau-Ponty himself is conscious of this problem and yet at the same time finds the struggle to speak with other thinkers to be the very task of philosophy: Between an ‘objective’ history of philosophy (which would rob the great philosophers of what they have given others to think about) and a meditation disguised as a dialogue (in which we would ask the questions and give the answers) there must be a middle-ground on which the philosopher we are speaking about and the philosopher who is speaking are present together, although it is not possible even in principle to decide at any given moment just what belongs to each. (Merleau-Ponty, 1964c, p. 159, cited in Barbaras, 2004, p. 69) Within philosophy, we must find a way to address our philosophical predecessors without uselessly repeating their words yet also without contorting them to our own meaning. How can we know when we, or Merleau-Ponty, has offered a true dialogue or a meditation disguised as such?

Introduction

5

This is a problem even within the boundaries of phenomenology; when we encounter other disciplines, we run even great risks. Rene Magritte, for example, levels a perhaps more damning charge at Merleau-Ponty. Of Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of painting in ‘Eye and Mind,’ Margritte said that ‘Merleau-Ponty’s very brilliant thesis is very pleasant to read, but it hardly makes one think of painting—which he nevertheless appears to be dealing with’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1993, p. 336). Magritte suggests that Merleau-Ponty goes beyond ventriloquism to something much more troubling: if Merleau-Ponty has failed to speak of painting per se, or at least to speak of painting from the painter’s perspective, then one may ask if he actually engages with the ‘other’ of philosophy at all. Perhaps, Merleau-Ponty’s—or any philosopher’s—engagement with the ‘other’ of philosophy is merely a metaphor for a theory of scientific or philosophical practice, and hence, we could be lead to believe, the philosopher always remains outside or above the actual ongoing activity of working in a laboratory, passing a brush across a canvas, or practicing a faith. If this were true, the philosopher would never be qualified to speak of artistic, scientific, or religious practices in the ‘natural attitude,’ for, as Merleau-Ponty himself remarks, there is a profound difference between, for example, ‘instituted Christianity, a mental horizon and matrix of culture, and the Christianity effectively lived and practiced in a positive faith’ (MerleauPonty, 1964c, p. 142). Merleau-Ponty’s engagements with other thinkers and disciplines leaves us to wonder whether the difference between philosophy and its other is a substantial, ‘real’ difference, in the Scholastic and Cartesian sense, or whether it is rather a différance, to be interrogated and addressed. One particularly troubling ‘other’ that Western philosophy has repeatedly faced throughout its history is Christianity. In ‘Everywhere and Nowhere,’ Merleau-Ponty broaches the question of how to treat this other. He outlines several possible attitudes to this issue taken by his contemporaries: we might define philosophy as a rigorous system and thus contrast it to the revelation and supernaturalness of Christianity, deciding that no philosophy as philosophy has ever been Christian; alternatively, we might understand philosophy as precisely the realization that thought cannot completely close itself off from ‘a reality whose source is not philosophical awareness’ (Ibid., p. 140). In the latter case, ‘faith can in fact provide food for thought’ so that ‘faith’s “things not seen” and reason’s evidence cannot be set apart as two domains’ (Ibid., p. 141). Merleau-Ponty’s ‘ventriloquism’ makes it difficult to determine which of these positions he adopts vis-à-vis Christianity.2 However, whether his position is theistic, atheistic, or something beyond either of those, he does

6

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

recognize a need for philosophy to go beyond its traditional subject matter and methods. A philosophy that would ignore the transcendent experience of faith approaches a ‘history which has been prepared and doctored in accordance with the idea of philosophical immanence’ (Ibid., p. 141). At least since the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty struggled to rethink the relation between immanence and transcendence, to show, as he puts it in the précis of his work, that transcendence and immanence paradoxically appear together (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a, p. 16). Since Husserl showed the impossibility of philosophy’s developing itself as a complete and rigorous science, philosophy must admit this other into it very heart. Yet this is not a simple return to unsubstantiated metaphysics: Merleau-Ponty cautiously limits any such claims, remarking that faith may be ‘only the opportunity for an awareness which is equally possible without faith’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964c, p. 141). Has Merleau-Ponty only used Christianity as a convenient and prevalent metaphor for perceptual faith, alluding to theologically significant incarnation only to refer to atheistic embodiment? Has he, in other words, truly opened philosophy onto its other, or does he merely play the role of philosophical imperialist, spreading the work of philosophy to other disciplines from a privileged place?

3. Learning from Merleau-Ponty Whether we find his work successfully open onto the other or not, we must ask ourselves what motivates him to this dialectical model. We might say that Merleau-Ponty speaks through other thinkers and through other disciplines because he has abandoned a classical model of interiority and exteriority. Not only must we see our own flesh as permeable by the world, but we must also see philosophy itself as permeable and permeating its exteriority. Likewise, philosophy must refuse to preemptively delimit and objectify other disciplines, such as visual art, and rather interrogate them from within: To learn what it is to paint, we attempt to see according to the style of Cézanne, thinking through the production of his work as he lived it, not studying painting as an object in the museum. The way to understand Husserl’s thought is not to witness it from the outside as a historical artifact—as an object—but to live within it, to think with Husserl as a subject. By so doing, we make that which seems to be ‘elsewhere’ into something effective here and now. If we are to follow Merleau-Ponty, then, we cannot merely mimic his words. Rather, we must, in some way, adopt his method, treating him as a

Introduction

7

subject with whom we speak and thereby letting him teach us to respond to our own times. To do so, we must appreciate Merleau-Ponty’s responsiveness to his own historical cultural environment. We must address Merleau-Ponty as he addresses Descartes. In ‘Everywhere and Nowhere,’ Merleau-Ponty writes: The reason why Descartes is present is that—surrounded by circumstances which today are abolished, and haunted by the concerns and some of the illusions of his times—he responded to these hazards in a way which teaches us to respond to our own, even though they are different and our response is different too. (Merleau-Ponty, 1964c, p. 128) Merleau-Ponty’s circumstances are similar and different to our own, as his were from Descartes. Merleau-Ponty’s cultural world centered on—to name a few—Proust, Claudel, Gide, Cézanne, and Monet; his political world on Marxism and new movements of leftists intellectuals; his intellectual world on Descartes, Kojève’s reading of Hegel, neo-Kantianism, and a rising interest in Gestalt theory and phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty’s diverse commentaries can serve merely as an intellectual and cultural barometer, as a tool to clarify any of these individuals, issues, or schools. But we can better read Merleau-Ponty as he suggests that one read Descartes: as a model of how to respond to the hazards of any cultural, historical situation. While we do not today worry over the development or failure of communism in Algeria as Merleau-Ponty did in the 1950s, we might well apply his theory of history to current conditions in Iran or Afghanistan. While we might not truly worry about Descartes’ malin genie, we may still face skepticism’s specter in the vision of an evil scientist who controls brains in a vat.3 Today, phenomenologists might not worry over the details of Piaget’s theories themselves, but we can consider how research in phenomenology coincides with or diverges from more recent studies in child development. Biology may have left behind Pavlovian behaviorism, but life science faces new struggles to avoid reductionism in evolutionary biology. In each of these cases, Merleau-Ponty provides us with a model of responsiveness and receptivity to scientific and intellectual movements. He shows that the philosopher’s task is not only to respond to a historical, cultural situation in general, but also to the intradisciplinary conversation of academic philosophy. More importantly, that capacity to respond depends on an active-passive synthesis, a receptivity rather than a Sartrean absolute freedom, in relation to a situation. This inherent passivity does not limit our response to the world but enables our creative expression.

8

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

Rather than prophesying an end to philosophy, a là Hegel, Merleau-Ponty envisions philosophy’s endless beginning. Philosophy can begin endlessly because it is a creative act, an act of expression. So described, philosophy is allied with other expressive activities: artistic, poetic, spiritual, and scientific creativity. Merleau-Ponty not only sees a permeability between philosophical practice and other expressive practices, but he borrows methodologically from other sciences and the arts. Truly abandoning a representational account of cognition and adopting an embodied model of perception also entails rethinking the methods at work in philosophy. Instead of description of cognition, phenomenology becomes conscientious of its own productive and expressive activity. As Renaud Barbaras has shown, this shift toward rethinking the philosophical practice as expressive upsets even the vestiges of duality in Merleau-Ponty’s own thought (Barbaras, 2004, p. 49). This expressive project presents itself as ‘an endless task, but not a futile one’ (Hass, 2008, p. 10). Representational Cartesian thought has attempted to resolve the problems of cognition and expression rather than admitting that such reflective thought itself performs expression. Leaving behind the traditional representational model means that philosophy must also leave behind the expectation that philosophy can unambiguously resolve its problems. Merleau-Ponty puts it clearly: ‘Questions can indeed be total; but answers, in their positive significance, cannot’ (1964c, p. 3). Philosophy cannot provide complete, systematic answers. Rather than retreating from this intimidating range of possibility, philosophy should profit by this open-ended realm of significance.

4. Incarnation and Binocular Vision: A ‘Middle’ Way? The expressive practice of philosophy co-emerges with the perception of the incarnate subject. If we preemptively separate our philosophical vision from our everyday vision—if we have one eye on being and another on nothing—we can never successfully co-ordinate philosophy with our everyday practices. Nonetheless, this does not reduce philosophy to everyday, prereflective expression. As John Sallis has shown, Merleau-Ponty’s exhortation to return to beginnings does not entail a turn from logos or reflection, but a return to the very ground of logos and phusis themselves (2003, pp. 10–11). But how should philosophy proceed if its reflective thought truly arises from perception? Merleau-Ponty has gained a reputation as one of, if not the, most highly regarded twentieth-century Western thinkers of perception and embodiment. But what is it to think according to the body? What is the natural vision we would retrieve in our return?

Introduction

9

Merleau-Ponty suggests that we ought to see a philosophical vision akin to our natural, binocular vision. Rather than looking at the world through a dualistic strabismus, we aim for a binocular philosophy appropriate to the incarnate subject. Descartes instituted this strabismus or diplopia when he split mind from body, essence from existence (Merleau-Ponty, 2003a, p. 134). Having identified this pathological situation instituted by Descartes, MerleauPonty suggests that phenomenology should find a more co-ordinated, natural vision: phenomenology should attempt a ‘binocular philosophy’ (Ibid., p. 134). Human beings exercise binocular vision in concert with certain actions: upright posture, grasping hands, general motility. Vision and action co-develop. Binocular vision does not eliminate the problem of two eyes but assumes a prereflective co-ordination; likewise, a properly practiced philosophy would not eliminate the problems of mechanism and finality, being and non-being, but face them in a unified and co-ordinated way. Philosophy can take its cue from artists who practice binocular vision, allowing the circuit of eye and mind, hand and vision, to remain open. Critics have often described Merleau-Ponty’s method as navigating between intellectualism and empiricism. We might be tempted to think of Merleau-Ponty’s work as a ‘middle’ way in the sense of a compromising third path that walks between these two extremes. But binocular vision is not an a posteriori bringing together of or compromise between two separate visions. Rather, binocular vision assumes a radically different, prereflectively coordinated perception in which depth and movement co-emerge with vision. Viewing Merleau-Ponty’s work as a ‘middle’ way in this sense fails to give enough credence to the revolutionary shifts that Merleau-Ponty suggests that phenomenology, and indeed philosophy in general, ought to make. A compromise between existing philosophical terminologies does not always suffice to help us escape systemic problems, such as Cartesian mind-body dualism or Kantian sensation-understanding dualism. Attempting to mediate within a dualist structure does not help us out of inherent antinomies.4 Merleau-Ponty’s postdualistic thinking does not merely negotiate across an already established division. Rather than finding a compromised ‘middle way,’ Merleau-Ponty avoids the traps of intellectualism and empiricism by going to the limits of these two domains. To borrow a frequent metaphor, Merleau-Ponty avoids the Scylla of empiricism and the Charybdis of intellectualism, not by threading between them, but by choosing another passage altogether. Traditional efforts to navigate this passage have failed by starting from within a dualism, by assuming that one must choose either empiricism or intellectualism or some combination of each: that is, by assuming the preestablished, inherited limits of these schools of thought.

10

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

By contrast, Merleau-Ponty’s third way lies not in the ‘middle’ of philosophy but rather at its limits or margins. But these limits are not outside philosophy but within it: We can never step outside philosophy, nor find its ‘circumference.’ In the words of Barbaras, Merleau-Ponty shows that ‘the truth of phenomenology resides at the very place of its limit, in what motivates and stops simultaneously its enterprise of understanding’ (2004, p. 77). Merleau-Ponty redirects philosophical thought toward its prereflective ground in lived experience. It is thus that Merleau-Ponty finds that ‘philosophy’s center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere’ (MerleauPonty, 1964c, p. 128). Yet he can only make this declaration after having truly stepped beyond traditional delimitations of philosophy; only after having thought according to Cézanne or Claudel or Marx as well as Descartes, can Merleau-Ponty claim that philosophy can also be oriented from a center in these disciplines.

5. Speaking with Merleau-Ponty We see, then, that exploring Merleau-Ponty as he interacts with the limits of philosophy enables us to understand his work as responding to a unique set of circumstances, and hence enables him to teach us something of how to respond to our own cultural and historical circumstances. For MerleauPonty, his response is that of interrogating the very ground of all experience, rather than merely interrogating some aspect of that experience. Merleau-Ponty’s explorations of the limits of philosophy, thus are an attempt to understand the prereflective ground of experience as it shapes our ability to think and to perceive. But what can we learn from Merleau-Ponty’s response to his circumstances? What can this ‘binocular’ vision teach us about our own circumstances? In seeking to understand the relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s thought for our own time, we have asked each commentator to react to—or, perhaps better, to interact with—Merleau-Ponty’s work, rather than to provide an ‘objective’ account of it. Following Merleau-Ponty himself in this regard, we hope to ‘find at this height of subjectivity a sort of convergence, and a kinship between the questions each of these contemporaries puts to his famous philosopher, face to face’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964c, p. 132). To compound this project, we have set our contributions up to respond also to each other as they respond primarily to Merleau-Ponty. As such, the chapters are arranged ‘conversationally’: Figal’s chapter speaks to Johnson’s and Sallis’ and vice versa; Kelly’s to Mazis’, O’Leary’s to Kearney’s, and so on.

Introduction

11

We invite you to imagine a room of commentators taking up conversation that Merleau-Ponty himself left off, mid-sentence. We hope that new thinking will dialogically and dialectically emerge between these ongoing creative responses to this phenomenologist and his interlocutors, thinking that will not only enlighten us to aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s thought itself but, perhaps more importantly, thinking that will engage with pressing, contemporary philosophical questions—including the question of what philosophy is—in a way that is informed by Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with the questions contemporary to his time. The point, then, is not merely to understand Merleau-Ponty better, but to better understand the world in which we live, that is, the world as we perceive it, express it, constitute it, and are shaped by it. To examine the world in this way is to push the limits of philosophy itself, and to find there, in this prereflective ground of experience, a convergence of the limits also of art, of religion, and of perception: in other words, the limit of all that we do and what we can say about it. This, perhaps more than anything else, is what Merleau-Ponty has to teach us today: the limits of one discipline or area of life converge, to a certain extent, with the limits of other disciplines and areas of life, because all find their ultimate limit in our ground of experience. Let us turn, then, to the limits, in order to make sense of our world. A. Limits of Art The book opens, then, by exploring the limits of art, which is to say, the limits of how we express the world uniquely as we encounter it. To set this exploration in motion, John Sallis examines the intricate relationship between Merleau-Ponty’s ‘Eye and Mind’ and the work of Paul Klee, in ‘Freeing the Line.’ In studying this relationship, Sallis shows clearly that Merleau-Ponty’s adoption of Klee’s views on painting lead Merleau-Ponty to examine the most fundamental aspects of art itself: visibility, light, and the line. By reinterrogating these fundamental aspects and limits, we are able to see that painting differs from mere appearance in that painting more genuinely shows the very foundation of appearance itself. Through such evidence winds a theme central to all of Merleau-Ponty’s thought: in painting—and especially in Klee’s painting—we see ‘signs of a shaking [ébranlement] of our “ground”’ (cf. Merleau-Ponty, 1996, pp. 55–61). If Merleau-Ponty receives this major theme from the work of Paul Klee, Günter Figal argues in ‘Merleau-Ponty and Cézanne on Painting’ that he misses the decisive importance of Cézanne. Merleau-Ponty seems to prefer to deal with art in general, rather than with individual works of art, even in

12

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

the essays focused on art, such as ‘Cézanne’s Doubt.’ This is because Merleau-Ponty generalizes in a phenomenological manner that necessarily seeks to tie appearances to their appearing, and therefore leads MerleauPonty to view painting as a sort of reduction, akin to Husserl’s phenomenological reduction. For Cézanne, however, painting is translation, nature translating itself, requiring the artist to silence his will; nature, therefore, is a text, one that cannot be understood conceptually, but can only manifest itself. Painting is this text understood as texture, the depth of embedded relations. As such, painting is the exteriorization of the primordial appearance of nature, a nature which cannot merely be perceived but requires this exteriorization. Only in the exteriorization of painting can we understand that nature is, primarily, texture, and not a (conceptual) schema. This section concludes with Galen A. Johnson’s ‘Merleau-Ponty and Kant’s Third Critique: The Beautiful and the Sublime,’ which examines the similarities and differences between Merleau-Ponty’s key aesthetic ideas and Kant’s analyses of beauty and sublimity. Johnson explores how MerleauPonty’s rejection of Kantian theories of the a priori, form, and disinterestedness yield a deeper understanding of the Kantian notion of ‘subjective universality,’ a term that takes its place in Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the sensible idea. This, in turn, affects the role of sublimity in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, such that Johnson can find in Merleau-Ponty, not just an aesthetic conception of the sublime, but a phenomenological (in terms of perception), an historical (in terms of the late encounters with Husserl and the philosophy of wild being and of brute mind), and an ontological (in terms of the il y a as the (non-)origin of the event) conception of sublimity as well.

B. Limits of Perception If we find in Merleau-Ponty an ambiguous relationship with the history of art and art criticism, we can see in Merleau-Ponty’s theories of perception a fairly strident critique of the very foundations of Cartesian dualism and the accounts of perception that it engenders. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology seeks to overturn Cartesian dualism in favor of an embodied theory of perception. But what is this perception like? What is it to be a perceiving being in a world? Gabrielle Bennet Jackson’s ‘Skill and the Critique of Descartes in Gilbert Ryle and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’ returns to the Cartesian model of the corps méchanique that Merleau-Ponty rejects. By comparing Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological method of overcoming Cartesianism

Introduction

13

to Gilbert Ryles’ method, Jackson uncovers fruitful new ground for conversation between philosophy of mind and phenomenology. Ryle, she shows, implicitly employs phenomenological examples to illustrate his adverbialism, and Merleau-Ponty shares many of Ryle’s presuppositions about the errors of the Cartesian model. Through phenomenological examples, both authors find in bodily performance a unity of expression and intention, action and modality. Susan Bredlau builds on Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception to explore what it is like to have a world and to retain it in the face of change in her ‘Phantom Limbs and Phantom Worlds: Being Responsive to the Present.’ Bredlau argues that we may suffer personally and even collectively and politically when we refuse to accommodate ourselves to changes in world. Where some amputees literally suffer the experience of a phantom limb, we may metaphorically suffer the experience of a phantom world. Drawing on the specific scenario of recent immigrants to California, Bredlau sketches a generalizable vision of how we adapt—or fail to adapt— to world-scale shifts in our experience. Perhaps most importantly, Bredlau’s chapter implicitly inquires into the possibility of a conversation between phenomenology and psychotherapy, between theory and therapeutic practices, broadly construed.

C. Limits of Temporality and Phenomenology Continuing the interrogation of the limits and borders between phenomenology and its others, Michael R. Kelly explores a possible shift within Merleau-Ponty’s own thought from phenomenology to ontology in his chapter, ‘L’écart: Merleau-Ponty’s Separation from Husserl; Or, Absolute Time Constituting Consciousness.’ In this chapter, Kelly discusses the separation or space that opens up between Merleau-Ponty’s early thoughts on time (e.g., in Phenomenology of Perception) and his later thoughts on the same topic (e.g., in The Visible and the Invisible). This difference Kelly attributes to a difference between the thought of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, respectively, and hence to a difference between a pure phenomenology and ontology. At stake in this in-depth exploration of temporality, which leads also to questions of constitution, intentionality, and the reduction, is the very limit of phenomenology and the phenomenological method, and hence the possibility of conceiving philosophy as a ‘rigorous science.’ Glen A. Mazis, on the other hand, in his ‘Time at the Depth of the World,’ argues that already in the Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty had

14

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

undermined the Husserlian notion of time by describing time as depth. Although not yet fully developed, Merleau-Ponty had embarked on a philosophy of depth that he will make a central focus of the later writings, particularly The Visible and the Invisible in which the radical notion of the flesh encompasses the gaps within the perceiver and between perceiver and world. Mazis describes how, for Merleau-Ponty, meaning and contingency torque, enjamb and tear gaps in human time; God, by contrast, enjoys perfect, undisrupted access to the whole of time, but cannot see depth. This is due to the thickness of the body, a phenomena missed by Husserl, according to Mazis.

D. Limits of Faith and Sacramentality So far, we have explored the implications of Merleau-Ponty’s questioning of the limits of art, perception, and phenomenology. In the final section of the book, however, we seek to learn from Merleau-Ponty in domains not normally associated with his thought: religion and faith. The penultimate two chapters of the book will provide one of the first sustained accounts of Merleau-Ponty’s relation to religion or sacramentality from his work. Finally, we conclude with an account of political, rather than only perceptual faith. At stake in all these chapters is a tension identified between MerleauPonty’s personal and practical commitments—to religion, to politics—and his theoretical reflections on and allusions to these practices. Building on the interrogation of the state of contemporary phenomenology begun in Part III, Richard Kearney argues in his ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Sacramentality of the Flesh’ that phenomenology, especially that of Merleau-Ponty, provides a sacramental paradigm of sensibility that opens the door to a new conception of the divine. Building on some of Merleau-Ponty’s remarks that relate sensibility to the sacrament of the Eucharist, Kearney argues for a certain sacramentalization of ‘profane perception’ that opens up the possibility of encountering divinity in our everyday experiences. This new conception of divinity—drawn from modern literature and classical mysticism, as well as from Merleau-Ponty— is then used to challenge the dualistic conception of theism and atheism, opening the door for a new possible understanding of religion, one rooted in an ‘ana-theistic’return of God after the God of classical theism has been done away with. In ‘Merleau-Ponty and Modernist Sacrificial Poetics: A Response to Richard Kearney,’ Joseph S. O’Leary draws on Merleau-Ponty’s conceptions of

Introduction

15

perception and art—discussed at length in Parts I and II of this volume—to reexamine the relationship between Modernist literature and theology invoked by Kearney. Discussing the Modernist literary themes concerning the sacrifice of self, world, and God, O’Leary suggests that the sacrificial ‘sacramental’ sensibility of Merleau-Ponty is more closely aligned with Modernist literature than it is with theology or religion. However, further exploring the ‘consumption’ of the city, and ultimately of the reader or viewer itself, undertaken in Modernist literature, O’Leary ends with a call to theology to reinvigorate itself by accepting the challenge posed to it by Merleau-Ponty’s explorations of art and perception, namely, the challenge to abandon old presuppositions and inquire again into the very ground of experience. By so doing, O’Leary hopes to show that both theology and the arts have something to gain by opening up a dialogue with each other, a dialogue that has begun in O’Leary’s response to Kearney. Finally, Darian Meacham explores the possibility of a distinctly political conception of ‘faith’ in ‘“Faith is in things not seen”: Merleau-Ponty on Faith, Virtù, and the Perception of Style.’ Merleau-Ponty, Meacham shows, manages to develop a subtle view of political commitment as it unfolds at the level of intimate interpersonal interaction. Meacham develops his thesis through Merleau-Ponty’s early notion of faith combined with his later ideas of clairvoyance and virtù. Meacham thus argues for a continuity in Merleau-Ponty’s thought: he sees not only a thread running through the early and later political writings, but through the political writings into the late ontological work. Without assuming a Sartrean absolute subject and the capacity for complete sincerity, Meacham asks, ‘How can we commit to a political party or project?’ Like Johnson, Meacham finds that the term ‘clairvoyance’—seeing through the present into the past—ramifies throughout Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. This seeing through the present, seeing through others’ present styles to their pasts and futures, represents the general act of seeing the invisible in the visible discussed in Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of art and perception. The final part of the volume, then, shows not only the convergence of the several disciplinary limits discussed by Merleau-Ponty, but also how these lines of convergence point toward the fundamental ground of our human condition. Merleau-Ponty’s interactions with his cultural, historical, and political climate, motivate us toward renewed engagement with our own cultural, historical, and political climate. Our political climate, for example, is concerned with the ‘return of the religious’; whether or not we personally take that turn or return toward the religious, we find ourselves not only capable of but also responsible for responding to this turn.

16

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

Further, the fruits of what we have learned from Merleau-Ponty show us the desirability of reexamining the very ground of our experience— the very ‘rules of the road’ for our twenty-first-century Western climate. Methodologically, we find that we best move forward insofar as we turn back to examine this most basic of starting points. Contentwise, we have learned that we cannot merely parrot Merleau-Ponty’s words and ideas back to our age, as if repeating our heritage were enough to help us in the present. Rather, we have seen that, if we are willing to interrogate the tradition and learn from its interactions, we will find ourselves able to understand anew our own situation, and discover new ways of acting in it. We must find un sens in our situation: both receiving meaning and taking our orientation from our context. In this vein, Kearney suggests a new approach to religion, one that goes beyond the theism-atheism, religionreason oppositions of last century’s ‘culture wars.’ Similarly, Meacham and Bredlau provide the possibility of a new conception of political association and involvement, and Jackson suggests the possibility of a new dialogue between cognitive science and philosophy of mind. We hope this volume not only offers a record of engagement with limits but motivates other readers and thinkers to stretch themselves toward limits, limits which must be interrogated again in an ongoing process that is called, by some, ‘philosophy.’ When we examine Merleau-Ponty at the limits of art, religion, and perception, we see not only a newly vital, still-relevant Merleau-Ponty, but also, and more importantly, a new vision of our world, new possibilities of acting within it: as Merleau-Ponty has shown best, vision and action co-emerge.

Notes 1

2 3

4

Although it might seem that Merleau-Ponty only made a ‘turn’ toward art and literature in his later work, this is a slightly misleading assumption. Merleau-Ponty refers to artists and writers throughout his career—from significant conclusions drawn from El Greco’s work and life as early as the Structure of Behavior to passages on Stendhal in the Visible and the Invisible—and thus, if there is a shift, it is not in the novelty of making these allusions (on his work with Sartre, see Cohen-Solal, 2005). As Kearney and O’Leary will show later in this volume; cf. pp. 147–183. As Gabrielle Jackson shows in this volume (pp. 63–77), Merleau-Ponty’s thought, like Gilbert Ryles’, can still provide valuable critiques to latent models in philosophy of mind. For example, as Johnson elegantly shows in this volume, Merleau-Ponty saw Kant’s Third Critique as profoundly significant precisely because it disrupted the dualism

Introduction

17

of the first two critiques. Like Schelling before him, Merleau-Ponty attempted to carry on the movement of the later Kant, a movement that could no longer retain the dualistic division between sensation and understanding, thought and feeling (For notable exceptional precedents, see Burke, 2005, and Madison, 1981.).

References Barbaras, R. (2004), The Being of the Phenomenon. Trans. T. Toadvine and L. Lawlor. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Burke, P. (2005), ‘Creativity and the Unconscious in Merleau-Ponty and Schelling,’ in J. J. Wirth (ed.), Schelling Now. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 194–206. Cohen-Solal, A. (2005), Jean-Paul Sartre: A Life. New York: New Press. Hass, L. (2008), Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Madison, G. B. (1981), The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. Athens: Ohio University Press. Sallis, J. (2003), Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings. Pittsburgh: Dusquene University Press.

This page intentionally left blank

Part I

Limits of Art

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 1

Freeing the Line John Sallis

It is remarkable how thoroughly Klee’s work is woven into the fabric of Merleau-Ponty’s essay ‘Eye and Mind.’ Even if Klee’s name were not repeatedly mentioned, even if Merleau-Ponty had not again and again cited from Klee’s writings or from the book on his work by Klee’s friend Will Grohmann, which Merleau-Ponty read in the late 1950s, there would still be unmistakable evidence that in the essay it is preeminently Klee who represents the prototypical contemporary painter. Furthermore, it is primarily Klee’s work—both his artistic works and his theoretical texts—that guides Merleau-Ponty’s efforts in ‘Eye and Mind’ to develop an ontological conception of painting as such. Thus when, near the end of the essay, Merleau-Ponty ventures to give what he calls ‘the ontological formula of painting,’ he does so by citing the words of Klee. In ‘Eye and Mind’ there is a series of four passages in which MerleauPonty explicitly invokes Klee. These passages deal, respectively, with visibility, with line, and with the role played by the titles of paintings. A final passage returns to the question of visibility and culminates in the so-called ontological formula of painting. The first passage1 is centered around a declaration that Merleau-Ponty puts forth as true for painting in all forms whatsoever and for all times from Lascaux to the present. The declaration is ‘painting celebrates no other enigma but that of visibility.’ In celebrating visibility, however, painting celebrates it precisely as enigmatic, that is, as reaching beyond to moments or aspects that ordinary vision regards as invisible. How, then, does painting carry out its celebration of the visible? It does so by giving ‘visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible.’ Later in the essay MerleauPonty says that painting ‘renders visible’ (rend visible), and he marks this expression as a citation from Klee. He can only have had in mind the oft-cited opening sentence of Klee’s text ‘Creative Confession’: ‘Art does not reproduce the visible but makes [or renders] visible [Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sodern macht sichtbar]’ (Klee, 1987, p. 60).

22

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

Yet what is this invisible that painting, in its celebration of enigmatic visibility, renders visible? In the Working Notes to The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty calls it ‘the invisible of the visible’ and explains that this ‘invisible is not the contradictory of the visible,’ that ‘the visible itself has an invisible inner framework,’ that ‘the invisible is the secret counterpart of the visible,’ that ‘it appears only within it’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a, pp. 269, 274). The text of The Visible and the Invisible is still more explicit: ‘It is therefore not a de facto invisible, like an object hidden behind another, and not an absolute invisible, which would have nothing to do with the visible; rather, it is the invisible of this world, that which inhabits this world, sustains it, and renders it visible, its proper and interior possibility, the Being of this being [l’Être de cet étant]’ (Ibid., p. 198). Thus, the invisible that painting renders visible is what already will have rendered visible the visible itself; it is what will have made the visible visible, what will, even while remaining invisible, have constituted the very visibility of the visible. Extending Merleau-Ponty’s allusion to Heidegger, one could say that the invisible is what grants to visible things their truth, their possibility of coming forth into unconcealment. Yet the initial passage on which we have focused in ‘Eye and Mind’ does not yet venture so far into the ontology of the invisible. Rather, the discourse begins at a more properly phenomenological level where it is a matter of the virtually unseen that informs—and so renders visible—the things seen in ordinary vision. Merleau-Ponty mentions light, lighting, shadows, reflections, color—that is, all those moments that are open to vision without being visible things, all that haunts these things like ghosts. For the most part, we do not see as such the configuration of lighting, of light and shadow, that not only enframes appearing things but also guides vision as it retraces the very lines that such configurations have already installed. These specters that haunt the scene of the visible ‘exist only at the threshold of profane vision.’ It is the genius of the painter not only to be able to see them as such but also, in a distinctively painterly way, to interrogate them concerning their capacity to render things visible, to expose just how it is that they grant to things a proper visibility. These virtually invisible moments conceal themselves in rendering the object visible. And yet, while not seen as the object is seen, they belong to ‘a total visibility’ (une visibilité entière) in which they are freed, released into the spectacle in order that it be a spectacle. Like a horizon they are both seen and not seen, present and not present; they belong to the spectacle without being part of it. Presumably it is because they have this peculiarly ambivalent character that Merleau-Ponty broaches in this context the question of the imaginary

Freeing the Line

23

(l’imaginaire). What these moments offer to vision he characterizes as ‘the inward tapestry, the imaginary texture of the real.’ This reference to the imaginary is striking by contrast to the very brief treatment in the Phenomenology of Perception, which largely reproduces—and in fact references— the reductive analyses put forth in Sartre’s texts on this theme. Here in ‘Eye and Mind’ he appears to take up—if all too briefly—the task to which he alluded in the discussion following his lecture ‘The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences.’ For in that discussion he granted that ‘we also live in the imaginary’ and acknowledged that his treatment of the creative capacity that perception shares with imagination had remained incomplete.2 Although the reference to the imaginary and hence to imagination remains largely undeveloped in ‘Eye and Mind,’ the fact that Merleau-Ponty mentions it and—if all too briefly—discusses it along lines quite contrary to his earlier, Sartrean view is perhaps not unrelated to the guiding role that Klee and his work play in the essay. For, of all modern painters, there is none whose work engages the imagination more readily than Klee’s. Almost any of Klee’s works will suffice to confirm this engagement, but a work such as the pen and ink drawing titled Dance, you monster, to my gentle song is especially enticing to the imagination. Extending what MerleauPonty came to grant about our living in the imaginary, one could say that few artists have lived so actively and productively in the imaginary as did Klee. The second passage in ‘Eye and Mind’ concerns line (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, pp. 72–4). Merleau-Ponty begins with what he calls the prosaic conception of the line. According to this conception the line belongs to things; it is a property or attribute of objects themselves, the outer contour of the apple, for instance, or the border between the plowed field and the meadow. The task of the artist would be, then, simply to take over the line present in the world, to reproduce it on the surface of the work. And yet, it is precisely this conception of the line that painting puts in question, indeed suspends. Merleau-Ponty says, ‘This line is contested by all modern painting, probably by all painting.’ Why is it contested? Because painters—above all, modern painters such as Klee and Matisse—recognize ‘that there are no lines visible in themselves [il n’y a pas de lignes visibles en soi],’ that neither the contour of the apple nor the border between the field and the meadow is here or there, that they are always on the near or far side of the point where one looks. In other words, one sees the line and yet does not see it. One sees the contour of the apple and yet sees nothing other than the apple contoured against the background. One sees the border between the field and the meadow, and yet whatever one sees is either field or meadow, not the border

24

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

Paul Klee, ‘Dance you monster, to my gentle song’

itself, not the border as something in itself. Lines are, in Merleau-Ponty’s words ‘indicated, implicated, and even very imperatively required by the things, but they are not themselves things.’ Seen yet not seen, there yet not there, present yet not present, the line is ambivalent. Even in its purely mathematical form, the line is enigmatic: it can outline and thus determine

Freeing the Line

25

a geometric shape, and yet, since it has no breadth, since it has only the one dimension of length, it is, in the strictest sense, invisible. In outlining the things of the perceptual world, the line is similarly ambivalent; its character, its very mode of visibility, of presence, wavers indecisively between opposites, and yet it is decisive, indeed imperative, for the appearing of things. The line belongs to the visible spectacle, is engaged in the very granting of its visibility, yet is not itself a part of the spectacle. Clearly, then, contesting the line, as painting does, does not entail its exclusion. Rather, as Merleau-Ponty says, ‘it is a matter of freeing the line, of reviving its constituting power.’ It is at this point, in reference to this freeing of the line, that Merleau-Ponty cites that most telling phrase from Klee. Here is the citation: ‘For henceforth, as Klee says, the line no longer imitates the visible; it “renders visible”; it is the diagram [l’épure] of a genesis of things.’ Thus, painting—especially modern painting—frees the line from the imitation function, from the mimetic operation based on the prosaic conception of the line. At the same time, painting frees the line for the constituting operation to which it is suited. The conclusion is evident, though in the essay Merleau-Ponty leaves it somewhat implicit: because the line displays the same ambivalent character as do all moments of the invisible, it is especially suited to render these moments visible on the surface of the work, be it a drawing or a painting and whatever materials are used in its composition. Because, no matter how it is inscribed, the line renders visible the invisible of the visible, it offers a diagram of the genesis of things; it renders visible on the surface of the work the way in which things come forth into their visibility, their unconcealment; it renders visible the moments by which the total visibility of visible things comes to be constituted. The third passage concerns the entitlement of paintings (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, p. 75). Proceeding from the conception of painting just outlined, Merleau-Ponty draws out what he takes to be Klee’s response to the question of the title, going on then to mention another alternative taken up by Matisse. In the case of Klee there is, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, a decision to ‘hold rigorously to the principle of the genesis of the visible, the principle of fundamental, indirect, or—as Klee said—absolute painting, leaving it up to the title to designate by its prosaic name the being thus constituted, in order to let the painting function more purely as painting.’ Merleau-Ponty draws a contrast with Matisse, who puts both the prosaic and the hidden into his drawings. Thus, according to Merleau-Ponty, Klee adheres to the character of painting as rendering visible the invisible moments that belong to the total

26

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

visibility of the thing. Such painting is fundamental or absolute in that it is geared to the genesis by which things come forth as visible; it is painting oriented to the invisible inner framework that lets things appear, that constitutes their very Being. Thus oriented to the invisible of the visible rather than to visible things themselves, such painting is also indirect— indirect in the sense that it bypasses the things visible before our eyes in order to render visible what lies beyond, or is concealedly interior to, these things. While such painting thus renders the invisible visible, it is left to the title to name the visible being that requires, for its very visibility, this invisible inner armature. Taken together, the painting and its title would present—that is, render identifiably visible—the total visibility constitutive of the pertinent spectacle. While Merleau-Ponty’s characterization of Klee’s absolute painting is no doubt largely confirmed by the works themselves, further elaborations and precautions would be necessary in order to avoid oversimplifying both the character of Klee’s titles and consequently the interplay between titles and works. For Klee’s titles are anything but prosaic: not only are many of them highly poetic, associated in some cases with Klee’s poetry, even, as his friend Grohmann attested, a direct outgrowth of his poetry, but also in many cases they simply do not name a being, not even poetically, much less prosaically.32 While a title such as Park near Lucerne might be taken as such a name, while one might then even suppose that everything poetic about the work falls on the side of the painting itself, such is clearly not the case with a work such as Ad Marginem; what the title here names is not any particular being at all, nor any sort of beings in general, but rather the place from which beings are drawn forth in their genesis. Drawn forth by the sun near the center of the work, various beings come forth at the margin, all around the edge of the picture: plants of various shapes and sizes, some of them flowering, some bearing leaves; intersecting geometrical planes; birds, one quite distinct, another merging with other forms; a spiral, as of a snail, a common figure in Klee’s works; three letters of the alphabet (l, u, and r), so a bit of writing mixed in with the images; and numerous other, hardly identifiable forms. Here, then, it is the work, not the title, that presents the various visible things that come forth from the virtually invisible margin that is named by the title. In the case of the drawing titled To Make (or Render) Visible (Sichtbar Machen), what is named is the very operation that painting itself carries out—thus anything but a mere being. Clearly, then, a more nuanced conception of Klee’s titles and of the interplay between titles and works is required.

Freeing the Line

27

The final passage in Merleau-Ponty’s essay (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, pp. 85–7) returns to the theme of visibility and gestures toward the analyses in The Visible and the Invisible, on which Merleau-Ponty was working at the time he wrote ‘Eye and Mind.’ Now Merleau-Ponty formulates with remarkable precision the primary ontological theme: ‘What is proper to the visible [le propre du visible] is to have a layer of an invisible in the strict sense, which it renders present as a certain absence.’ It is this occult, secluded layer of invisibility that painting renders visible, that—in the words of Klee that Merleau-Ponty pieces together—painting annexes to the visible. It is because of painting’s engagement with this invisibility, which, while of the visible, also lies outside the realm of visible things, that Merleau-Ponty is led finally to what he calls the ontological formula of painting. The formula consists of words, written by Klee in 1916, that were inscribed on his tomb. They bespeak painting’s engagement beyond the here and now of visible things. Merleau-Ponty cites them in French translation: ‘Je suis insaisissable dan l’immanence.’ In Klee’s German the formula reads, ‘Diesseitig bin ich gar nicht fassbar’ (‘I cannot be at all grasped on this side, in the here and now’). In his courses at the Collège de France from 1958 until his death in 1961, Merleau-Ponty spoke repeatedly of Klee. Many of his remarks are parallel to those in ‘Eye and Mind.’ For example, in the 1960–1961 course titled ‘Cartesian Ontology and the Ontology of Today,’ he takes up the question of the line in painting (Merleau-Ponty, 1996, p. 171). He declares that the line is not excluded by color; the result is that it can have a constitutive role in painting and not only in drawing. What is excluded, according to Merleau-Ponty, is ‘the prosaic line, the line of the thing (the contour of the apple).’ He concludes: ‘The line does not imitate the visible; it “renders visible.”’ This expression, ‘renders visible,’ he identifies as a citation from Klee. The discussion of Klee is more extensive in the course of 1958–1959 titled ‘Philosophy Today.’ What is most remarkable about this course is that it is largely devoted to discussions of Husserl and especially of the later thought of Heidegger. Yet before launching into these discussions, Merleau-Ponty addresses, as he puts it, ‘our state of non-philosophy.’ It is in this preliminary discussion that he takes up the question of painting in general and of Klee in particular (Ibid., pp. 55–61). The question on which Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Klee turns is that of the difference between painting and appearance, between that which is presented on the surface of a painting and that which is presented when

28

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

things come before our senses. Merleau-Ponty puts the question directly: ‘Then why is painting so different from appearances?’ His answer comes immediately: ‘Precisely because it is nature, not appearances, not the “skin of things”; because it is nature naturing.’ Behind what Merleau-Ponty here says, one is to hear a reference not only to Spinoza’s natura naturans but, even more importantly, to Schelling’s later thought in which the secluded ground of things is distinguished from—and taken as anterior to—the existence of things. Painting does not, then, present the skin of things, their mere outline; it does not present them simply as they appear, but rather in their being brought forth through the workings of nature itself. The further answer given to the question of why painting is so different from appearances says in different terms much the same as the first. The answer: ‘Because it offers what nature wants to say [or: what nature means—ce que la nature veut dire] and does not say.’ Merleau-Ponty proceeds to enumerate what it is that painting offers; he does so by stringing together several phrases from Klee that he presumably mined from the book by Klee’s friend Grohmann, which Merleau-Ponty had read in French translation in the late 1950s. Here is what painting is said to offer: ‘the “generative principle” that makes things and the world be [or: that brings it about that things and the world are], “first cause[,]” “brain or heart of creation[,]” “absolute knowing.”’ Merleau-Ponty continues: ‘[It is] a principle older than God himself’—adding then in parentheses the name Schelling, before then concluding with a phrase from his own ontological idiom, namely, ‘brute Being.’ The entire discussion concludes self-reflectively. Merleau-Ponty asks: ‘Why the insistence on Klee?’ His elliptical answer: ‘Sign of a shaking [ébranlement] of our “ground.”’ He adds that though ‘the everyday world [is] always shaken by painting,’ it is imperative today that painting recover the logos of the visible, that it open its eyes to ‘preobjective Being.’ MerleauPonty’s insistence that it is, above all, Klee who has taken up this imperative resonates quite remarkably with what Heidegger wrote in a letter to Petzet written at virtually the same time. Referring to Klee’s work, Heidegger says: ‘There something has come about that none of us as yet catches sight of.’4

Notes 1 2

Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, pp. 24–30. See my discussion in Sallis, 2000, p. 12.

Freeing the Line 3

4

29

It is not insignificant that in the volume of Klee’s poetry edited by his son Felix there is a section titled ‘Bildtitel’ (cf. Klee, 1996, pp. 96–100). ‘Es ist da etwas eingetroffen, was wir alle noch nicht erblicken’ (cf. Petzet, 1983, p. 158).

References Klee, P. (1987), ‘Schöpferische Konfession,’ in Kunst-Lehre. Leipzig: Reclam. —. (1996), Gedichte. Ed. F. Klee. Zürich-Hamburg: Arche Verlag [first published 1960 by Arche Press]. Petzet, H. W. (1983), Auf einen Stern zu gehen. Frankfurt am Main: Societäts-Verlag. Sallis, J. (2000), Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Chapter 2

Merleau-Ponty and Cézanne on Painting Günter Figal For A.M.E.S.—beloved contemplator

1 There is a mountain, only one mountain; its shape is clearly to be seen. The mountain rises to the sky, surmounting a plain. In the plain, trees can be discerned. There are also some houses, most of them partly hidden so that only the roofs are exposed to sight. Just below the mountain the trees and also the houses form a mass, which can be understood as a counterbalance to the mass of the mountain—as if the mountain were mirrored. Some spotlights, but no sunshine, clouds in the grayish sky; the weather is indefinite. There is a landscape but there are also colors. The colors are obviously painted. There are traces of brushstrokes, which are easily to be recognized as such, not the least by some free space between them; the painter has not covered the entire canvas. As it seems, he has not tried to conceal the paint, in order to give it the appearance of color as it could be experienced in the real world. The painting is not illusionary; it could not be used as a trompe l’œuil. The landscape does not have the spatial depth that it could be expected to have in order to represent the space of the real world. The mountain is not so far away as it would be in reality or in a realistically painted landscape. Rather it is as close for the spectator as the plain. There is no foreground and no background. Thus the impression of the painting is twofold; it is ambivalent. Contemplating the painting one can concentrate on the landscape—on the mountain and on the plain with its trees and houses. But one can also concentrate on the paint and the pattern of colors as realized in it. This pattern covers the painting all over; the free spots of uncovered canvas belong to it. As soon as one has become attentive to the pattern, the landscape appears differently. The sky is not airy but as dense as the mountain and the plain. The mountain is not, as it would be in a real or in a realistically painted

Merleau-Ponty and Cézanne on Painting

31

landscape, far behind, but it is as close to the contemplator as the plain. There is no foreground and no background, but rather an all over surface of painted color. The painting is obvious as the two-dimensional surface that it is. Because of this, the ambivalence of the painting is obvious too. There is a landscape, even one, which can be identified. What is to be seen is the Montagne Saint Victoire, as it can be discerned from a place close to the Chemin des Lauves, where the painter, Paul Cézanne, had his studio. Cézanne choose the mountain as a motif again and again. So the mountain can easily be identified after one has seen one of these pictures and read its title. It can also be identified, if one has visited the landscape or seen a photograph of it. What is recognized and identified in such a way can be called a schema. The schema is not the mountain as such but its shape, or, as one could also say, its characteristic form. The schema of something must not be given with the thing, the schema of which it is itself. It can be a single line, drawn with a pencil. The schema of something can be found in reality, but also in many different representations. If the subject of a representation is recognized, one does not understand the representation as an imitation of something but as the presentation of a schema, which is primarily given with something in its reality, and thus, as it seems, with something itself. Cézanne’s painting is a representation of this kind, but it exceeds representation. The pattern of the paint and thereby of the color is so dominant that it cannot be just a means for representing a schema. It is ‘more.’ But what it is, exceeding representation, is difficult to say. This however is the decisive question in order to understand the very nature of this painting. One may contemplate it for hours, again and again; then one does not just recognize it but devotes one’s concentration and attention to it. The reason why cannot be its representational character. The schema of the mountain is not so interesting that it would demand continuous attention. Other representations of the mountain may even be better—more precise, more easily recognized. But in contemplating the painting one seems to understand something, which could not be understood in reference to any other representation. What is to be understood here is no enigmatic sense; it is no hidden meaning, which has to be decoded. There is a landscape, and there is a pattern of color, nothing else. There is nothing ‘behind’ the picture; everything which is essential for it is to be seen. So the demanding nature of the picture can only be obvious in its visibility. Its visibility, then, can be the key to its demanding nature. The very nature of the painting, it seems,

32

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

can be clarified by examining its visibility. To do this conceptually includes the discussion of vision and of visibility as such. In this sense, Cézanne’s paintings have been a challenge for MerleauPonty. In 1945, the same year in which his Phenomenology of Perception was published, Merleau-Ponty published his essay ‘Cézanne’s Doubt.’1 The essay has crucial importance for Merleau-Ponty’s early philosophy. It can be regarded as a detailed examination of the theory of perception, as developed in the Phenomenology of Perception. Although in that book many allusions to art are made, Merleau-Ponty did not there apply his concepts to a particular work. Yet such an application is required if art is to be paradigmatic for philosophical considerations: art is never ‘in general’; the very nature of art is only in the particular work. This particular character of art is even more challenging for phenomenological philosophy. Phenomenology is essentially descriptive, and the description of art must be devoted to particular works. Because of this, Merleau-Ponty’s essay is especially illuminating: as an extensive and intense discussion of Cézanne’s art, it allows or even provokes the critical question whether the concepts, and especially the key concepts of the essay, are applied to Cézanne’s paintings in a convincing way. Such a critical discussion can be regarded as a case study concerning the relation between art and phenomenology.

2 The phenomenological character of Merleau-Ponty’s essay can easily be recognized. Merleau-Ponty discusses the character of Cézanne’s art in reconstructing his artistic view. His descriptions refer to the way in which something is given; appearances are examined in the very process of their appearing. This corresponds to the ‘canonical’ (cf. Marion, 2005, p. 33) definition of a phenomenon as Husserl gives it in The Idea of Phenomenology: ‘The word “phenomenon” is ambiguous in virtue of the essential correlation between appearance and that which appears. Φαινóµενον (phenomenon) in its proper sense means that which appears, and yet it is by preference used for the appearing itself, for the subjective phenomena (if one may use this expression which is apt to be misunderstood in the vulgar psychological sense)’ (Husserl, 1964, p. 11; Hua II, p. 14). After some introductory remarks on Cézanne’s development as an artist, especially on his attempts to overcome impressionism in order to rediscover reality behind the ‘sensuous surface’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, p. 12), Merleau-Ponty turns to Cézanne’s

Merleau-Ponty and Cézanne on Painting

33

‘optics.’ He stresses that Cézanne could only realize ‘the true meaning of (his) painting’ in avoiding common alternatives like the one between ‘sensation’ and ‘understanding’ or the one between ‘order’ and ‘chaos’ (Ibid., p. 13). According to Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne did make a ‘basic distinction not between “the senses” and “the understanding,” but rather between the spontaneous organization of the things we perceive and the human organization of ideas and sciences’ (Ibid.). As a conclusive explication of this statement Merleau-Ponty adds, ‘We see things; we agree about them; we are anchored in them; and it is with “nature” as our base that we construct our sciences. Cézanne wanted to paint the primordial world, and his pictures therefore seem to show nature pure, while photographs of the same landscapes suggest man’s works, conveniences, and imminent presence’ (Ibid., pp. 15–16). In realizing this program Cézanne created pictures, in which ‘an unfamiliar world’ is presented; it is a world ‘in which one is uncomfortable and which forbids all human effusiveness’ (Ibid., p. 16). One phrase in these explications indicates clearly the model according to which they are conceived. Speaking of a ‘primordial world,’ MerleauPonty alludes to the fifth of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations. In section 44 of this book, Husserl makes an attempt to clarify what remains if ‘all constitutional effects of intentionality relating immediately or mediately to other subjectivity’ are disregarded (Husserl, 1960, p. 93; Hua I, p. 124). In this ‘reduction to my transcendental sphere of peculiar ownness or to my transcendental concrete I-myself’ (Ibid.; Hua I, p. 125) the world is no longer ‘the surrounding world,’ which is ‘there’ and ‘accessible to everyone’ (Ibid., pp. 95–6; Hua I, p. 127). What remains after such purification ‘from every sense’ is ‘mere Nature’ (Ibid., p. 96; Hua I, p. 128). Despite their obvious similarity, Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s characterizations of the primordial differ remarkably. This holds not at least true for their understanding of ‘nature.’ When Husserl speaks of ‘mere Nature’ he refers to the realm of ‘animate organisms’ (Ibid.; Hua I, p. 128), to which I, as an animate organism, belong. Accordingly, the primordial, which is discovered by reduction, is my own natural particularity, my being an animated body. In distinction from this Merleau-Ponty speaks of the ‘primordial world,’ and he characterizes it as something ‘inhuman.’ As it seems, his reduction does not lead to ‘peculiar ownness’ of a human being, but rather to the world, which is beyond human beings, at least, as he says, beyond ‘human ideas and sciences.’ But considered more closely, Merleau-Ponty’s characterization of the primordial remains in the vicinity of Husserl’s. The ‘primordial world’ as Merleau-Ponty conceives it is the visible world, and as revealed by

34

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

perception, this world cannot be really inhuman. Merleau-Ponty admits this, perhaps involuntarily. In correspondence to the primordial world he speaks of ‘primordial perception’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, p. 15). This perception reveals the ‘lived object’ (Ibid.), that is, something that is not a stable and self-evident result of conceptual or scientific thinking but is rather something appearing. In primordial perception the ‘spontaneous organization of the things we perceive’ comes to the surface. Accordingly, the artist, who attempts to go beyond the common world of human ideas and sciences, has to devote himself to the spontaneity of his visual experience. He ‘returns to the source of silent and solitary experience on which culture and the exchange of ideas have been built.’ His work is not so much a work but a spontaneous gesture. As Merleau-Ponty says, the artist ‘launches his work just as a man once launched the first word, not knowing whether it will be anything more than a shout, whether it can detach itself from the flow of individual life in which it originates’ (Ibid., p. 19). To conclude, for Merleau-Ponty the primordial is not the ‘inhuman’ world. Rather it is the original process of human life as the source of all cultural conceptions and institutions. This source is only accessible in the ‘peculiar ownness’ of perception. In consequence, art does not reveal nature as exceeding human life, but rather human life in its original nature. Understood in this way, art is a reduction, which leads to the same result as the reduction described by Husserl. It is, to quote Husserl again, a ‘reduction to my transcendental sphere of peculiar ownness.’

3 This result is important in order to understand Merleau-Ponty’s approach to Cézanne’s art. Insofar as Merleau-Ponty conceives art as a reduction in Husserl’s sense, his considerations cannot be descriptions of Cézanne’s paintings. The paintings, like the one discussed above, presenting the Montagne Saint Victoire are no spontaneous gestures. Merleau-Ponty himself mentions that Cézanne often ‘pondered for hours at a time before putting down a certain stroke,’ because ‘each brushstroke must satisfy an infinite number of conditions’ (Ibid., p. 15). Brushstrokes are not traces of the artist’s original life. Rather they form, as already described, a pattern of high complexity. It is a pattern that cannot be reconstructed, because it has not been constructed at all. There was no plan for this pattern, and accordingly it is only accessible in the painting; the painting is this pattern, even if the painting cannot be reduced to it. If nevertheless the pattern is

Merleau-Ponty and Cézanne on Painting

35

the main result of the process of painting, then this process must be understood in respect to the pattern of paint and colors. Cézanne himself has described the process of painting in a comparable way. In his conversations with Émile Bernard and Joachim Gasquet, from which Merleau-Ponty quotes extensively, Cézanne has made unmistakably clear that for him painting is not a ‘flow,’ the manifestations of which sometimes became works of art. For Cézanne, painting is rather an exercise in extreme attentiveness. It is the attempt to be attentive to something, which as such shall become visible in the picture, but which the artist cannot intend. As Cézanne says, the artist has to be a mere ‘receptacle of sensations’ (Gasquet, 1978, p. 110).2 Only then the landscape will reflect itself in the artist; it will become human, and conceive itself in the artist (Ibid.).3 Therefore the artist has to avoid every ‘intervention’ (Ibid., p. 109),4 every voluntary activity; otherwise his work will not be a true work of art, and art will not have been what it is supposed to be: translation (Ibid.).5 In order to translate, the painter’s will must come to silence. All voices of prejudice have to become tacit; the painter has to forget, to be silent in order to be nothing but an echo. Only then the landscape will inscribe itself on the photographic plate of the painter. Of course, for translating the sensations to the canvas and thereby for bringing it to exteriority, and objectifying it, technical skills are required. But according to Cézanne, these technical skills have to be respectful and obedient (Ibid.).6 They have to be a pure medium for translation. Cézanne has concentrated the essence of his considerations in a famous phrase: Art is a harmony, which is parallel to nature (Ibid.).7 Nature, as Cézanne conceives it, is not animated bodily existence. Nevertheless it is not ‘inhuman.’ Rather, it may become human, and this happens when human life is no longer dominated by self-conscious intentions, but rather becomes ‘translation.’ Accordingly, nature can become visible as landscape, but essentially it has the character of a text. How else should it be possible to translate it? The text of nature however is not accessible to human understanding. Only as to this, Merleau-Ponty is right in stressing the ‘inhuman’ character of nature as it can be experienced in the contemplation of Cézannes paintings. Nature as such is not immanent in human understanding. But nature is also not alien. It is not even alien, so that its text could be regarded as an enigmatic writing. This text is no ‘“cipher” [Chiffreschrift] through which nature speaks to us figuratively in its beautiful form’ (Kant, 1987, p. 301). The text of nature cannot be deciphered; if one understands its character, one will not have made any attempts to do this. The text of nature cannot

36

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

be grasped or conceived; it can only manifest itself, namely in translation. But it can only be translated if it translates itself. According to Cézanne, this takes place by way of a physical process. Nature inscribes itself in the artist’s mind in a way like that in which light acts on the surface of a photographic plate. And like the light on a photographic plate, nature draws or writes a pattern—a pattern of light and dark, but not, like on a photographic plate, only in black and white and tones of gray, but in colors. The origin of art is like a physical process. It is something the artist has to undergo. As to this process, he can do nothing but purify his attentiveness. The artist’s active contribution to this manifestation of nature is to paint. Painting is primarily and essentially contemplation; it is mere devotion to the subject matter, which is contemplated—the attempt to become a medium for its manifestation. But painting is also the faculty to translate the impression or inscription of nature to the canvas. Painting, understood as an activity, is led by contemplation. It takes place in the interplay of eye and hand, of hand and brush, of brush and paint, and paint and canvas. The canvas is contemplated as well as the landscape. Paint is visible; its application on the canvas with a brush is surveyed and controlled in contemplation. What emerges on the canvas is a translation. The text, which has been translated, had been inscribed in the artist’s mind. The artist has achieved his work, dominated by this inscription. But the inscription itself is inaccessible for everyone except for the artist. Even if the painter would be present, no one else could see with his eyes; no one else could know how he has experienced the inscription. What is accessible is only the painting. It is a translation, which has to stand for the translated text as it has been experienced by the translator. As a translation, the painting is revealing. It shows itself as a text, which cannot be simply read. The text is too complex; its elements are no distinct signs, which in their distinctness have a meaning. The pattern of colors as Cézanne himself describes is ‘dense and fluid at the same time’ (Gasquet, 1978, p. 113). Each element of the pattern has its place. It is situated in such a way that it can be related to every other element. In this respect, the elements are ‘fluid.’ They are not fixed in particular relations, but rather their relationship is manifold. Therefore in a contemplation of the painting many different relations can be discovered. In order to realize this manifold, ‘each brushstroke must satisfy an infinite number of conditions.’ Because of the infinity of this number of conditions, the relations of the elements can never be exhausted. As relations they are embedded in

Merleau-Ponty and Cézanne on Painting

37

each other. The same holds true for the elements of the pattern, which also are not clearly articulated. Like their relations they are ‘dense’ (cf. Goodman, 1976). The text of the painting is a dense pattern, the elements of which are at the same time ‘fluid,’ that is, not determined in their position. The text of the painting is rather a texture.8 A texture is a dense pattern; a pattern that is not applied to some ground—like the pattern of cloth printed on woven texture: rather, the pattern is the texture. Its distinctive elements are embedded in the texture, and at the same time they stand out in it. They belong to the ground of the texture, and in standing out in this ground they have at the same time their place. These considerations lead back to the question of translation. If the painting is essentially textural then it must be translation as texture. What has been translated, nature, then, is accessible in the texture of the painting. But why is it nature? The reason cannot be merely because of the landscape painting. In his remarks on painting, Cézanne speaks about landscape only in a general way; otherwise, he could not understand art as such as a ‘harmony, which is parallel to nature.’ Nature, in turn, cannot be restricted to landscape; portraits, presenting natural beings, and stilllives are also related to nature; this becomes obvious with the French word for a still-life: nature morte. But the question how art is to be understood as a translation of nature cannot immediately be answered in general. Every artwork is individual; it is a unique realization of the possibility of art. In order to answer the question, one has to concentrate on particular works. Only if they prove to have something in common, which can be understood as a translating relation to nature, can this reference be stated in a general way. As to Cézanne, the relation is clear—first from his paintings, but also from his remarks, which refer to his paintings. His paintings are translations of nature insofar as they have a textural character. Cézanne himself explains this very clearly. According to him, the inscription of nature in the artist’s mind is only possible if the artist’s will and his prejudices are brought to silence. The artist no longer pretends to know what he has before his eyes, but rather contemplates without judging. If this may be taken in a radical sense, Merleau-Ponty’s description is convincing; then, human ideas and sciences are no longer of any importance. But their judgments are not replaced by spontaneity. They are replaced by mere contemplation and, going along with it, mere evidence (cf. Husserl, 1960, § 4; Hua I, p. 51). According to Cézanne, this evidence is the evidence of colors. To paint a picture is basically nothing else but to compose colors. In painting, the

38

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

artist applies colors to the canvas—‘on the right, on the left, here, there, everywhere’ all over the canvas. The colors, their tones and nuances, form lines; they become things, rocks, trees, without the artist’s intention (Gasquet, 1978, p. 109). The artist does not compose the painting in orientation to a schema. Although there are trees and rocks before his eye, he does not contemplate them in their determinate being, but rather in the totality of visual appearance. In translating this appearance to his canvas, he lets the trees and rocks and the other things appear. They appear in their primordial appearance. Visual appearance is basically color. Everything that appears for vision is primordially embedded in the texture of color and stands out in it. The primordial appearance is nature, or to be more precise, it belongs to nature, being its visual unconcealment. It is exterior to the realm of human conceptions and interpretations. But it is also exterior to human perception. Of course, the primordial appearance affects this perception; otherwise it could not be experienced at all. But it cannot be understood in orientation to the process of perception as such. It is not embedded in the ‘flow of individual life’ as in the primordial ‘ownness,’ which exceeds the systems of meaning and sense that constitute culture. The primordial appearance can only be understood in devotion to its essential exteriority. In consequence, the primordial appearance or, as one can also say, nature as appearance, cannot just be perceived. As long as it is only ‘inscribed’ in a human mind, it remains immanent and thus invisible. Only in the immanence of vision could it be taken as essentially belonging to the ‘flow of individual life’ itself. In order to reveal its exteriority its inscription has to become something exterior. The translation or the primary inscription to a canvas is no expression of individual life. It is no secondary gesture by which the artist communicates his experience to other human beings. Rather this translation is the realization of exteriority. To speak with Cézanne, art is essentially ‘exteriorizing’ (extérioriser). In exteriorizing the inscription in his mind, the painter repeats and thereby confirms the exteriority of nature. This can only be achieved in ‘objectivation.’ There must be a painting, something, which is there and which, in its particular mode of being-there, can stand over there for the contemplator. In contemplating a picture, one experiences exteriority—at least if one does not only refer to the schema that a picture presents. The mere recognition of a schema is no contemplation of a picture at all. Contemplation must be devoted to the textural character of the picture. Then one may understand how every correlate of perception, which is schematically understood, stands out in texture.

Merleau-Ponty and Cézanne on Painting

39

Understanding the essential exteriority of pictures, one will also understand that texture originally is the character of nature itself.

4 In his essay on Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty gives an impressive description of the character of art, as revealed in Cézanne’s paintings and, because they are an adequate commentary on these paintings, also as revealed in Cézanne’s remarks. But Merleau-Ponty misses the decisive point. He does not sufficiently pay attention to the paintings as such. In his considerations the exteriority and the objective character of art is forgotten. This may be found puzzling, because paintings are so obviously over there for the contemplator. Paintings cannot be learned by heart like a poem or a piece of music. There is no notation for a painting, so that it could be accessible in a way without its sensual presence. The reason for Merleau-Ponty’s forgetfulness is his phenomenological approach to painting. In the footsteps of Husserl’s, Merleau-Ponty is convinced that appearances, phenomena, have to be understood in orientation to their appearing, and just like Husserl, he understands this appearing as appearing in the ‘flow of life.’ As to visual art—at least to visual art— this phenomenological approach is a misleading prejudice. Cézanne’s paintings show how primordial appearance opens up appearance as such. If the experience of visual art is paradigmatic for phenomenology, then phenomenology requires a turn to the appearances. One could also call this an objectivistic turn. Of course, the objectivity of primordial appearances must not be confused with the givenness of particular objects. But this will not happen if works of art are not confused with ordinary things. This, however, should be difficult for everyone who at least once has made a genuine experience of art.

Notes 1

2 3

4 5

English translation found in Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, and reprinted in MerleauPonty, 1993; originally published in French as ‘Le doute de Cézanne’; cf. Merleau-Ponty, 1945b. réceptacle de sensations. Le paysage se reflète, s’humanise, se pense en moi. Je l’objective, le projette, le fixe sur ma toile . . . intervention. traduction.

40 6

7 8

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

Toute sa volonté doit letre de silence. Il doit faire taire en lui toutes les voix des préjugés, oublier, faire silence, être un écho parfait. Alors, sur sa plaque sensible, tout le paysage s’inscrira. Pour la fixer sur la toile, l’extérioriser, le métier interviendra ensuite, mais le métier respectueux, qui, lui aussi, n’est prêt qu’à obéir . . . l’art est une harmonie parallèle à la nature. Cf. the ‘textural’ metaphors in Merleau-Ponty, 1964e.

References Gasquet, J. (1978), ‘Ce qu’il m’a dit . . .,’ in P. M. Doran (ed.), Conversations avec Cézanne (édition critique). Paris: Macula, pp. 106–61. Goodman, N. (1976), Languages of Art. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Husserl, E. (1960), Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology. Trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. This work is a translation of Husserliana (Hua) Volume I. —. (1964), The Idea of Phenomenology. Trans. William P. Alston and George Nakhnikian. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. This work is a translation of Husserliana Volume II. Kant, I. (1987), Critique of Judgment. Translated with an Introduction by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Marion, J.-L. (2005), Étant donné. Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation, 4th edition. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Chapter 3

Merleau-Ponty and Kant’s Third Critique : The Beautiful and the Sublime1 Galen A. Johnson

It is my contention that Merleau-Ponty is a philosopher of the beautiful and the sublime, though he rarely used those words. In the recently published lecture notes from 1956–1960, Nature, we find Merleau-Ponty fully engaged with Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The Third Critique had also been cited in the Preface to Phenomenology of Perception from 1945 when Merleau-Ponty concurred with Kant that ‘in experiencing the beautiful, I am aware of a harmony between sensation and concept, between myself and others, which is itself without any concept’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. xvii; 1945a, p. xii). That passage goes on to speak of imagination and aesthetic judgment as themselves conditions for the categorial activity of knowledge.2 Since Phenomenology of Perception came near the beginning of Merleau-Ponty’s career and the Nature lecture courses near the end, we may hazard the thought that Merleau-Ponty was engaged in a nearly lifelong project of coming to terms with Kant’s ‘Transcendental Aesthetic.’3 Thus, this chapter seeks an engagement of Merleau-Ponty’s key aesthetic ideas with Kant’s doctrines of the beautiful and sublime. This will lead us from Kant’s humanist conception of beauty to a more ontological conception in which the beautiful is the depth, rhythm, and radiance of Being itself. This is a strong beauty. Moreover, we will be led toward thinking through three aspects of the Merleau-Pontean sublime: phenomenological, historical, and ontological.

1. Kant: Contagion and the Beautiful Intrinsic to the experience of aesthetic pleasures is something that we might call ‘contagion.’ Part and parcel of an experience of the beautiful is the desire to share the experience with others, to pass it on for the sake of mutual enjoyment and discussion, be it a beautiful book, poem, film, dance,

42

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

or musical work. We are even ready to discuss, debate, and defend our aesthetic views in the attempt to persuade others to share in our enjoyment. Our efforts may or may not succeed, but the feeling of contagion witnesses against the complete subjectivity of aesthetic experience, that idea which claims that beauty is entirely in the eye of the beholder. For example, if I am with friends in a forest setting and refer to a majestic oak as beautiful, I expect the others to ‘see what I mean,’ and if they do not, I expect of myself some ability to evoke their aesthetic sensitivity even though there is no concept, model, or formula to which we can appeal. I cannot say, for example, that this particular oak is a pin oak, a rare species seldom found in this region, for this simply classifies the oak intellectually as a member of a species and remains within the sphere of knowledge or information. Perhaps the quality of rarity might add a sense of ‘preciousness’ that would influence aesthetic feeling but not the mere species classification.4 In general, the claim that something is beautiful is not a cognitive judgment, but still at the same time speaks in a voice that is plural and not merely personal. Therefore, one needs to speak about the features of the tree that evoke pleasure and delight—the shape of the tree and its sensuality, its vanilla-nutty aroma, the texture of its bark, the symmetry and asymmetry of its crossing branches, or the colors and patterns of its leaves. There is a paradox here inasmuch as the experience of the beautiful is a personal feeling, yet nevertheless results in a contagion that is the irresistible demand of sharing that experience. This paradox—that aesthetic judgment is rooted in subjective feeling yet makes a claim to universality—is what Kant called the ‘remarkable feature’ of aesthetic judgment. He wrote, ‘This special characteristic of an aesthetic judgment [of reflection], the universality to be found in judgments of taste, is a remarkable feature, not indeed for the logician but certainly for the transcendental philosopher’ (Kant, 1987, § 8, p. 57). Kant speaks of an imperative or ‘ought’ with respect to aesthetic experience, but it is not the same ‘ought’ of moral experience which is governed by a rule. He writes, ‘whoever declares something to be beautiful holds that everyone ought to give his approval to the object at hand and that he too should declare it beautiful’ (Ibid., § 19, p. 86). The ‘ought’ involved here is ‘solicitation’ or invitation, and Kant makes it clear that this ‘ought’ does not say that everyone will agree with our aesthetic judgment. Ultimately, he argues that there must be an a priori ‘common sense’ as transcendental ground of the universality of aesthetic judgment, yet he concedes that this common aesthetic sense remains a ‘mere ideal standard’ (Ibid., § 22, p. 89). Aesthetic judgments remain outside the domain of the faculty of the understanding

Merleau-Ponty and Kant’s Third Critique

43

and determinate concepts. Therefore, there is no concept to which one can appeal and be assured of universal agreement. With Kant’s notion of the universality and necessity of taste, we have begun at an advanced point in the ‘Analytic of the Beautiful,’ in fact in the ‘Third Moment of the Judgment of Taste,’ and we need to retreat somewhat and proceed more patiently in clarifying how Kant understands aesthetic judgment and the relation among aesthetic and cognitive judgments. Kant delineates four moments of the beautiful falling under four headings derived from the Critique of Pure Reason: quantity, quality, relation, and modality. These have to do with the logical properties of judgments, including judgments of taste, even though judgments of taste are aesthetic judgments (aisthesis = ‘to sense’) and not cognitive judgments. As the result of all four moments of the beautiful, Kant argues, in sum, that when we judge something to be beautiful we are making a genuine judgment of taste that has at least four components: it involves no empirical, theoretical, or practical interest; it is a singular judgment, rather than universal, which means it is about some one single instance of beauty, yet its content requires everyone else to agree with the judgment; it involves a feeling of pleasure or delight without any concept of the pleasure’s purpose; and it bears a necessity that Kant calls ‘exemplary,’ meaning a ‘subjective universality’ (Ibid., § 22, p. 89).5 Thus, in a sense, Kant offers an hedonic theory of beauty grounded in our feeling of pleasure or delight, but the hedonic theory becomes increasingly qualified such that the pleasure involved is contemplative only and has to do with the disinterested contemplation of form (Ibid., § 5, p. 51). Each of these terms—pleasure, interest, and form—is at the center of controversy in explicating Kant’s aesthetic of the beautiful, so let us move through them one at a time. The pleasure involved in the experience of the beautiful is, for Kant, one of three different kinds of liking that must be distinguished carefully. Aesthetic judgment rests upon a special and distinctive kind of pleasure or ‘liking’ different both from ‘agreeableness’ and from ‘goodness’ or ‘endorsement.’ Agreeableness is a kind of pleasantness that gratifies us, or as Kant says, ‘what the senses like in sensation’ (Ibid., § 3, p. 47), and this kind of pleasantness or gratification is shared with non-human animals, for example, the pleasure of eating when hungry. Agreeableness in this sense is a subjective sensation linked with a particular organ of sense, the ‘taste’ of food on the tongue, for example, which is not what Kant means by ‘aesthetic taste.’ A liking for goodness is a moral liking that requires knowing the determinate concept of the thing or object and recognizing the object as an instance of the concept. Thus, the object comes under the

44

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

judgment of practical reason and pure duty. Moral pleasure is a liking for the existence of the object, and thus is interested in Kant’s sense. The distinctive pleasantness involved in the experience of beauty, therefore, is divorced both from the pleasure of sensation and that of a determinate concept that endorses the existence of something. Kant summarizes, ‘We call agreeable what GRATIFIES us, beautiful what we just LIKE, good what we ESTEEM or endorse [billigen], i.e., that to which we attribute objective value’ (Ibid., § 5, p. 52). The pure or disinterested form of liking peculiar to the beautiful does not arise from desires or needs and is, therefore, a judgment of ‘free beauty.’ It is ‘a non-conceptual awareness of a harmony,’ Kant says, ‘between imagination and understanding; in an aesthetic judgment of reflection we hold, for comparison, a given form up to the form of that harmony’ (Ibid., § 5, p. 51 n. 19). Kant conceives the perceptual form of an object as the spatio-temporal relations among its elements or parts, and therefore the pleasure in the beautiful arises from the object’s spatio-temporal structure. This form is to be differentiated from both charms, by which Kant understands what he regards as mere ornamental features of an object such as matter or color, and emotions: ‘Any taste remains barbaric if its liking requires that charms and emotions be mingled in, let alone if it makes these the standard of its approval’ (Ibid., § 13, p. 69). Beautiful forms are those that the imagination would produce if at play under no constraint, that it would delight in producing for no other aim or purpose than to please itself, and certainly for no desire or need. Kant’s concept of form means that the senses of smell, taste, and touch are too formless and amorphous to play a proper role in aesthetic judgment; only vision and hearing are properly formed. Thus, the smell of a rose, the taste of food or wine, and the texture of fine wool, for example, are excluded from aesthetic experience. The visual arts and music are at the center of aesthetic experience, as are natural objects of vision and sound: a landscape or a sunset, birdsong, or the rhythm of waves lapping the shore. Before we begin with an analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s response to all of this we should pause to remember the historical context with which MerleauPonty was engaged, and that was the neo-Kantianism of 1930s and 1940s Paris, particularly that of Léon Brunschwicg (1869–1944), the most influential professor at the Sorbonne while Merleau-Ponty was a student there from 1926–1930, and Brunschwicg’s presence, as well as that of Émile Bréhier, loomed very large while Merleau-Ponty did his postgraduate research on perception at the École Normale Supérieure from 1935–1939. Brunschwicg lectured on Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and Pascal, but it

Merleau-Ponty and Kant’s Third Critique

45

was the mathematical Pascal he liked and not the existential Pascal of the famous wager.6 Although Brunschwicg’s book and lectures on the history of consciousness7 were influenced by Hegel’s doctrine that thought and ideas occur in an historical development, there were no courses on Hegel and, of course, no courses on Marx, such that Merleau-Ponty attended Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, given from 1933–1939. Kant was a persistent presence throughout Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and Brunschwicg was a presence in the footnotes. In the first Nature course of 1956–1957, Merleau-Ponty devotes an entire section to Brunschwicg’s ideas of space and time and treats them as a transition from Kant to the Romanticism of Schelling. To paint with a very broad brush regarding Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty’s book moves from a rather sympathetic stance toward Kant in the Preface, where, in addition to agreeing with Kant’s Critique that beauty is an experience without a concept, he says that Kant had already discovered the notion of intentionality prior to Husserl and phenomenology, to a firm resistance against Kant as part of Cartesian intellectualism in the book’s main dialectic between empiricism and intellectualism. Thus, though we are bringing Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic into a dialogue with Kant’s, we should remember this context and these resistances. Thus, to proceed: regarding Kant’s account of the subjective universality of aesthetic judgment, we have already noted Merleau-Ponty’s firm agreement with this position from the Preface to Phenomenology of Perception. In experiencing the beautiful, we are aware of a harmony between sensation and concept, between myself and others, which is itself without any concept. Kant shows, Merleau-Ponty states in the first Nature course of 1956– 1957, ‘that the understanding is at the service of the imagination’ in aesthetic judgment and ‘art consists in the reconciliation of passivity and activity’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2003a, p. 24; 1995, p. 46). The predominant role of the imagination over the understanding renders the experience of the beautiful a kind of pleasure that is without a concept, which Merleau-Ponty takes the opportunity to point out means the reconciliation of passivity and activity, a kind of dispossession or taking hold of the self by the outside. However, Merleau-Ponty argues against Kant’s attempt to ground this ‘happy accident’ of universal aesthetic judgment transcendentally. Kant’s defense of a transcendental a priori ‘common sense’ of aesthetic judgment, Merleau-Ponty says, turns into a humanist idea of nature that is implicitly supported in its background by theism or even polytheism. Merleau-Ponty says Kant’s account is a ‘demonology’ of supranatural forces or a ‘polytheism,’ because for Kant, the beauty found in nature renders beauty part

46

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

of the ultimate aim or final goal of the natural order, an order, therefore, that cannot be limited to a purposeless mechanism. Kant’s doctrine of an aesthetic common sense posits Nature as a system whose principle we do not find anywhere in the categories of the understanding, the principle of purposiveness. Kant wrote, ‘Under this principle, appearances must be judged as belonging not merely to nature as governed by its purposeless mechanism, but also to [nature considered by] analogy with art’ (Kant, 1987, § 23, p. 99). Merleau-Ponty’s own philosophical account of the subjective universality of aesthetic experience breaks with transcendental philosophy. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty states that phenomenology is involved with achieving a ‘new definition of the a priori’ (1962, p. 220; 1945a, 255) involving two aspects. The starting point of a new genealogy of the a priori is our affective experience, which means the lived structures of embodiment. In short, there is too little body in Kant’s a priori. Kant’s conclusion, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘that I am a consciousness which embraces and constitutes the world . . . caused him to overlook the phenomenon of the body and that of the thing’ (1962, p. 303; 1945a, pp. 349–50). Furthermore, the turn to embodied affection and auto-affection means that ‘the a priori is not knowable in advance of experience’ and ‘there can be no question of distinguishing two elements of knowledge: one a priori and the other a posteriori ’ (1962, p. 220; 1945a, p. 255). Merleau-Ponty argues that a priori truths are experience understood, reflected upon, made explicit. For example, it indeed would be contradictory to assert that the sense of touch is devoid of spatiality, and it is a priori impossible to touch without touching in space, but this is due to our bodily experience of a world. This does not represent any necessity external to touch but comes about spontaneously in the experience of touching itself (1962, p. 221; 1945a, p. 256). By the time of The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty’s new genealogy of the a priori, becomes the notion of the ‘sensible idea,’ and to explicate it Merleau-Ponty turns to color and melody. The meaning of the melody is inseparable from its expression, for melody is a sensible idea, in which essence and existence are inseparable. With the notion of ‘sensible idea’ we touch what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘the most difficult point, that is, the bond between the flesh and the idea, between the visible and the interior armature [l’armature intérieure] which it manifests and which it conceals’ (1968a, p. 149; 1964d, p. 193). What is true of the musical idea is also true of the logic of color, namely, that these exist ‘without equivalents’ intellectually, yet manifest ‘their logic, their coherence, their points of intersection, their concordances’ (1968a, p. 149; 1964d, p. 194). It is essential to these sensible

Merleau-Ponty and Kant’s Third Critique

47

ideas that they are known in and through the aesthesiological body and, in fact, would be entirely inaccessible if we were ‘pure mind,’ disembodied. Then they would truly be unknowable to us. In the sensible idea, body and mind, visible and invisible, are necessarily commingled and sensibility and particularity are necessary to this kind of knowing. Merleau-Ponty puts it this way: ‘they could not be given to us as ideas except in a carnal experience . . . it is that they owe their authority, their fascinating, indestructible power, precisely to the fact that they are in transparency behind the sensible, or in its heart’ (1968a, p. 150; 1964d, p. 194). This is a kind of ‘knowing by sentiment,’ Merleau-Ponty says (1968a, p. 249; 1964d, p. 297; working note of May, 1960). The French phrase here, ‘connaissance par sentiment’ and the term sentiment itself, indicate that Merleau-Ponty is conjoining perception or sensibility with ‘feeling’ in coming to know sensible ideas, and the relevant meaning is more like ‘having a feel for’ something than the mere state of pleasure or pain. We have a feel for a relationship or personality or for a particular artist and style, which means a specially acquired sensitivity become sedimented in our bodily being. Speaking conceptually, this is preintellectual knowing but nevertheless it is intelligent knowing. Sensible knowing is less precise conceptually than intellectual ideas of ‘pure ideality’ and necessarily is somewhat ‘veiled with shadows’ (1968a, p. 150; 1964d, p. 195), yet for all that, sensible ideas are far from an empty nothingness. In Ideas I, Husserl himself had stated that essences retain a quality of vagueness or inexactness, or better, ‘anexactness,’ meaning the notion of precision does not apply. Since Merleau-Ponty’s account stresses melody together with color, his reworking of the a priori in terms of sensible ideas broadens Kant’s limitation of aesthetic experience to form and includes color as something crucial within the beautiful, much more than mere ornamentation or ‘charm.’ The essence of a certain color of red, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘is a Wesen that in principle is accessible only through the seeing, and is accessible as soon as the seeing is given, has then no more need to be thought: seeing is this sort of thought that has no need to think in order to possess the Wesen’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968a, p. 247; 1964d, pp. 295–6). He immediately appends a Proustian example—the essence is in the red like the memory of the high school building is in its odor. Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics had already offered the high school example in consideration of the problem of essence: ‘You can, as it were, smell the being of this building in your nostrils. The smell communicates the being of this essent far more immediately and truly than any description or inspection could ever do’ (1961, pp. 27–8). ‘Essent’ is the English translator’s effort to render

48

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

Heidegger’s philosophical invention of the word ‘seiend’ which Heidegger himself says is alien to everyday speech and is his approximate equivalent to Merleau-Ponty’s ‘sensible idea,’ that idea of an essence that can be known only through the particularity of sensible contact. Heidegger’s invention and the English translation are intended to combine the meanings of essence and existence. In addition to the high school that is known immediately through its odor, Heidegger offers as examples of the ‘essent’ the swarming crowd of people in a busy street, the Japanese, Bach’s fugues, the Strasbourg cathedral, and Hölderlin’s hymns. Already in the Preface to Phenomenology of Perception long before he began to use the language of ‘sensible ideas,’ Merleau-Ponty had commented regarding Husserl’s phenomenology that essence and existence cannot be separated, that ‘Husserl’s essences are destined to bring back all the living relationships of experience, as the fisherman’s net draws up from the depths of the ocean quivering fish and seaweed’ (1962, p. xv; 1945a, p. x). This is why MerleauPonty could write in Eye and Mind that ‘the return to color has the virtue of getting us closer to the heart of things,’ and, of the strict logic of colors in the works of Paul Klee, that ‘Klee’s colors seem to have been born slowly upon the canvas, to have emanated from some primordial ground, exhaled at the right spot’ (1993, p. 141; 1964e, pp. 69–70). The word ‘feeling’ [sentiment], or having a ‘feel for’ a musical idea or color juxtaposition, brings us to Kant’s severance of beauty from the emotions. Kant requires that the appreciation of beauty not only pertains to form rather than charms, such as color, but also that beauty be dissociated from emotions: ‘Emotion,’ he wrote, ‘does not belong to beauty at all’ (1987, p. 72). Yet for Merleau-Ponty beauty has many registers and intensities in different media from painting to music to poetry, and in different objects from artworks to human bodies to the things of nature. Some feelings awakened by beauty are very close to perception itself and seem almost purified of desire as Kant prescribed, as we enjoy the experience free of any longings or demands other than the simple ‘again’ as we experience the serene pleasures of repetition and variation. Much less serene, much more intense feelings extend to joy and rapture. Rapture is ‘ascent beyond oneself’ that risks the self, such that in reaching out toward the beautiful, Heidegger has written, we are ‘reaching out toward what we believe we can but barely overcome, barely survive’ (1991, p. 116). Speaking of desire and love, Merleau-Ponty wrote, ‘Realization is not what was expected, but still that which was wanted: we move forward backwards, we do not choose directly, but in an oblique way, and yet we do what we want: love is a clairvoyance: it leads us just to what can tear us [ce qui peut nous

Merleau-Ponty and Kant’s Third Critique

49

déchirer]’ (2003b, p. 75).8 Other experiences of the beautiful—these have to do with suffering and brokenness—arouse in us feelings of turbulence and sorrow that are linked to desires for succor and healing. Music, above all—with ‘its ebb and flow, its growth, its upheavals, its turbulence’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1993, p. 123; 1964e, p. 14), in Merleau-Ponty’s phrase, most powerfully creates an expanse of emotions that can scarcely be contained,9 and together with the sounds of poetry give us the sonics, metrics, and rhythms that map the human soul. The work of art is a light, a radiance and a rhythm, Merleau-Ponty says, that illuminates aspects of the real, and its feelings deliver us over to a whole affective sense of the world. In his radio lectures of 1948 now published as Causeries and translated as The World of Perception, Merleau-Ponty stated, Beauty lies not in the story . . . nor indeed does it lie in tics, mannerisms and devices . . . The viewer will experience the unity and necessity in a work of beauty without ever forming a clear idea of it. Then, as now, this viewer will be left not with a store of recipes but a radiant image, a particular rhythm. (2004, pp. 98–9; 2002b, p. 58) Reality itself is made in the revelations emerging from the creation and appreciation of the beautiful. It is the beautiful that also gives us the feeling for the mystery of the world; it gives us the world as idea and feeling, but also as a question and interrogative power. We recall that Rodin has said, ‘Every masterpiece has this mysterious characteristic. One always finds in it a little bewilderment. Remember the question mark that hovers over all the paintings of Leonardo’ (1984, p. 83). Challenge, risk, self-tearing, turbulence, interrogation, mystery: some—Burke, Kant—have said that beauty is a weak, even effeminate, notion in comparison with the sublime. Not Merleau-Ponty: his is a strong beauty. Ultimately, Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic places desire at the very heart of the beautiful, for in the fourth chapter of The Visible and the Invisible, he tells us that movement, touch, and vision all find ‘their source in the patient and silent labor of desire’ and here, in the labor of desire, ‘begins the paradox of expression’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968a, p. 144; 1964d, 189). In desiring the beautiful, one is not experiencing a void or lack within oneself, but being interrogated by the world. One’s universe is being put in question by the outside, being challenged by the luminous alterity of an Other. Within this openness which I am, Merleau-Ponty says, ‘the Other is a question mark opposite the solipsist sphere, it is the possibility of a divergence [écart] between the nothing that I am and being’ (1968a, p. 58; 1964d, p. 86). With

50

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

this argument, Merleau-Ponty introduces the shift from the philosophy of negation to a philosophy of interrogation, and the shift from a HegelianSartrean negative philosophy of desire to desire as a productive shape and opening onto the world. Thus, desire is that perceptual power of ‘sort of knowing’ but not being able to say or name that which we know. This kind of perceiving-desiring envisages and regulates through a withholding that is not able to name things ‘by their names.’ We might say, paradoxically, that the desire at the origin of all expression is a kind of knowing that is also a not knowing. This is exactly the very last formulation of the meaning of the unconscious that Merleau-Ponty gives us in the résumé of his 1959– 1960 course titled ‘Nature and Logos: The Human Body.’ He writes that ‘the double formula of the unconscious (“I did not know” and “I have always known it”) corresponds to two aspects of the flesh, its poetic and its oneiric power’ (1963b, p. 198; 1968b, p. 179). We recall what Rilke wrote in his second essay on Rodin: ‘No thing can move you if you do not allow for it to surprise you with an unimaginable beauty. Beauty is always something we come to, but we don’t know what this something is’ (2004, p. 69). The desire for the beautiful is thus more elemental and ontological than Kant’s humanist conception could allow. The beautiful is the depth, repetition, variation, rhythm, and radiance of Being itself. In sum, Merleau-Ponty contests against Kant on the a priori, on form (color), and on disinterestedness (emotion and desire). But Kant is to be praised for his conception of beauty as a subjective universality, for what follows from ontological, deep beauty is an imperative of ‘contagion’: this beauty ‘ought’ to be for everyone.

2. Merleau-Ponty and the Kantian Sublime From the Kantian bifurcation between disinterested contemplative pleasure on the one hand and desire and emotion on the other, there follows a tumult of Kantian polarities between the beautiful and the sublime. On my reading there are six such differences: the beautiful concerns the form of the object, therefore is bounded, but the sublime consists in an unboundedness, even formlessness; the beautiful is connected with the presentation of quality, the sublime with quantity; the beautiful carries a feeling of life’s being furthered, the sublime a momentary inhibition of vital forces; the sublime is an emotion of seriousness rather than play in the imagination, as is beauty; the beautiful is a positive pleasure while the sublime is a negative pleasure that both attracts and repels the mind as admiration

Merleau-Ponty and Kant’s Third Critique

51

and respect; natural beauty carries purposiveness in its form (a ‘purposiveness without purpose,’ in Kant’s phrase), whereas a feeling of the sublime may appear contra-purposive and even violent to our imagination. These differences culminate in a final mark of differentiation: we may quite correctly call nature itself beautiful, but all we are entitled to say of a natural object is that ‘the object is suitable for exhibiting a sublimity that can be found in the mind’ (Kant, 1987, § 23, p. 99). Kant gives the image of the stormy ocean as his first instance: the ocean heaved up by storms cannot be called sublime since ‘the sight of it is horrible; and one must already have filled one’s mind with all sorts of ideas if such an intuition is to attune it to a feeling that is itself sublime’ (Ibid.). Thus, Kant concludes that for the beautiful in nature we must seek an explanation outside ourselves, but for the sublime a basis merely within ourselves ‘in the way of thinking that introduces sublimity into our presentation of nature’ (Ibid., § 23, p. 100). As we know, Kant further divides the natural sublime into the mathematically and the dynamically sublime. In place of the restful contemplation found in the beautiful, the sublime carries with it a mental ‘agitation,’ the first kind of which is mathematical, the second a dynamic agitation or unrest. Jean-François Lyotard has urged us not to construe this as meaning that there are two different kinds of sublime, mathematical and dynamical, but rather sublimity is an emotional ‘nexus’ that may be viewed under the category of the mathematical and the category of the dynamical (1994, pp. 90–3). The mathematical sublime pertains to what is absolutely large, by which Kant means ‘what is large beyond all comparison.’ This is the feeling that the imagination is inadequate for comprehending the whole of an object, and this faltering before magnitude occurs in the apprehension, not of a work of art or of a natural thing such an animal with a determinate concept, but rather in the apprehension of ‘crude nature.’ Kant gives the examples of mountain masses piled on one another in wild disarray with their pyramids of ice, or the gloomy raging sea. As well, he suggests that we consider the earth’s diameter or the immense multitude of nebulous stars that comprise the Milky Way system. This is the place to draw the connection between the ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ and the conclusion of the Second Critique, which speaks famously of the ‘increasing admiration and awe’ inspired by ‘the starry heavens above’ (Kant, 2004, p. 170). An object is colossal, Kant tells us, if its concept is ‘too large for any exhibition.’ An object is monstrous ‘if by its magnitude it nullifies the purpose that constitutes its concept’ (1987, § 26, p. 109). The colossal ‘borders on the relatively monstrous’ (Ibid.). Kant does not explain further what he means by a

52

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

‘magnitude that nullifies the purpose that constitutes its concept’ nor does he give any examples of the monstrous, but clearly he understands this term in relation to magnitude in nature and not deformity, ugliness, or cruelty. Perhaps, a raging forest wildfire spread over a vast geographical region that destroys the very meaning of a forest or a hurricane that menaces the very meaning of an ocean ecology and its life forms would qualify as suitable examples of Kantian monstrosity. For all of these, the feeling or emotion evoked in us is a feeling of respect, Kant tells us, and the feeling is a displeasure, because it arises from the imagination’s inadequacy, but is at the same time a feeling of pleasure for it is in harmony with the rational idea of striving to estimate the magnitude of any sense object. We find a similar torsion that combines pleasure and displeasure also at work in the dynamical sublime, which pertains to nature as a might and as arousing fear, including instances such as threatening rocks, thunderclouds accompanied by lightning and thunderclaps, volcanoes, hurricanes, the high waterfall of a mighty river, and more. The sight of such natural forces carries the oddly paradoxical feelings of both attraction and repulsion. Provided we are in a safe place, we take a strange pleasure in these inasmuch as they allow us to discover in ourselves an ability to resist ‘which gives us the courage to believe that we could be a match for nature’s seeming omnipotence’ (Ibid., § 28, p. 120).10 Clearly, there are ways in which we must distance the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty from the Kantian sublime, before we seek to bring out threads of relation. For one thing, Kant’s account locates the sublime as an emotion experienced in inner consciousness and, as well, this sublime feeling is restricted to nature rather than artworks, for the purposiveness of an artwork is too determinate, Kant would say. I would say that Kant was ‘imprisoned by eighteenth-century art’ as is most evident by this limitation of the sublime to nature, even on the cusp of the coming of Beethoven and Goethe whose music and poetry vindicated the sublime as an artistic reality long before the appropriation of the sublime by Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollack. For a second thing, Kant’s account is a humanist or anthropological one in what seems a self-congratulatory sense; on the one hand, the sublime is an evocation of respect for the might and magnitude of nature, yet, on the other hand, Kant turns this into a contention for the superiority of humans over non-human nature due to the human rational faculty. He ends section 28, ‘on nature as a might’ by remarking that we can become conscious of our superiority to nature within us, and thereby also to nature outside us . . . by the ability, with which we have

Merleau-Ponty and Kant’s Third Critique

53

been endowed, to judge nature without fear and to think of our vocation as being sublimely above nature. (Ibid., § 28, p. 123) This Enlightenment bent leads on to a third caution. The rational faculty that calms our fear of nature’s might is also continuous, in Kant’s text, with a surprising linkage of the sublime emotion with a technological sublime. What is it, he asks, that is of highest admiration? He answers, ‘It is a person who is not terrified, not afraid, and hence does not yield to danger but promptly sets to work with vigor and full deliberation.’ This, Kant continues, explains our ‘superior esteem for the warrior’ whose mind cannot be subdued by danger: ‘Even war has something sublime about it if it is carried on in an orderly way and with respect for the sanctity of the citizens’ rights’ (Ibid., § 28, pp. 121–2).11 In Kant, the natural sublime is continuous with the technological sublime.12 Yet it seems to me critical, with these cautions clearly in view, that Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic of the beautiful, be given its other side as an aesthetic of the sublime. There is in Merleau-Ponty the ‘happy Spring and generous beauty,’ as Bernard Sichère has said (Sichère, 1991, p. 8), but there is also the inhuman, wild meaning, and silence. Merleau-Ponty himself spoke of the sublime in his defense of Sartre against the charges that Sartre was a ‘scandalous author.’ Sartre was not interested in a cult or ‘religion of the beautiful’ wherein lies ‘the beauty of the Greek god,’ but rather wrote ‘the violence of the sublime.’ This, Merleau-Ponty says, is a ‘minor sublimity, a sublimity without eloquence or illusions which is, I believe, an invention of our time’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, p. 43; 1966, pp. 76–7). I want to develop here, all too briefly, three aspects of this philosophical figure of the Merleau-Pontean sublime: phenomenological, historical, and ontological. The phenomenological has to do with MerleauPonty’s philosophy of perception; the historical with his late engagement with Husserl and the philosophy of wild being (l’être sauvage) and brute mind (l’esprit brut); and the ontological with the primordial source, the il y a, the origin and non-origin of the event. Merleau-Ponty’s account of an inhuman element in perception and the paintings of Cézanne is our first point of embarkment. Already in The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty had said that it was certain painters, especially Cézanne, who ‘have taught us . . . to regard faces as stones’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1963a, p. 167; 1942, p. 181). ‘Cezanne’s Doubt’ extended this thought: ‘Cézanne’s people,’ Merleau-Ponty wrote, ‘are strange, as if viewed by a creature of another species. Nature itself is stripped . . . there is no wind in the landscape, no movement on the Lac d’Annecy; the frozen objects hesitate as at the beginning of the world’ (1993, p. 66; 1966, p. 28).

54

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

The chapter of Phenomenology of Perception on ‘The Thing and the Natural World’ says that ordinarily we do not notice the ‘non-human element’ in things because our perception in the context of our everyday concerns ‘alights on things’ only ‘sufficiently attentively to discover their familiar presence.’ Primary perception exports us out of everyday secondary perception into a world beyond the safety of personal history and subjectivity, into a world that is a stranger, ‘alien, no longer an interlocutor, but a resolutely silent Other.’ This is why the paintings of Cézanne are ‘those of a pre-world in which as yet no men existed’ (1962, p. 322; 1945a, p. 372). So this is a perceptual sublime and it links us with the inhuman, awe and respect, yet risk and threat to personal safety and everyday preoccupations. Second, in Merleau-Ponty’s last writings, he speaks of wild being (l’être sauvage) and brute mind (l’esprit brut). The next to last sentence of The Visible and the Invisible says that ‘the whole of philosophy, as Husserl says, consists in restoring a power to signify, a birth of meaning, or a wild meaning [un sens sauvage],’ and, following Valéry, calls this ‘the voice of no one . . . the very voice of the things, the waves, and the forests’ (MerleauPonty, 1968a, p. 155; 1964d, pp. 203–4). The analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of wildness would take some time. It has to do with the anonymous body of Phenomenology of Perception, with passivity, with the unconscious and dispossession in the late courses at Collège de France, in short, with all the ways in which Nature, Life, Death, and Being exceed our personal, subjective grasp on things. The analysis of wildness would go through Schelling’s ‘barbarous principle’ that is ‘the source of all grandeur and beauty’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964c, p. 178; 1960, p. 225; 2003a, p. 38) to Husserl to Valéry. Nevertheless, it is crucial to stress that this wild meaning in Merleau-Ponty must always be interpreted within the frame of history, multiples, and instituting at least from the time of the Institution course in 1954–1955 and forward. This is what I will call Merleau-Ponty’s discovery of an historical sublime and it is found in the conceptual neighborhood of prospect and risk. Merleau-Ponty’s French word is hasard, which as well as meaning risk, peril, danger, or literally hazard, also bears the sense of chance or accident. Thus, an historically sublime moment stands within a heritage but opens it up to a kind of ‘budding,’ what Husserl calls ‘the power to forget origins’ in giving those origins new life, ‘which is the noble form of memory’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1993, p. 96; 1964c, p. 59; 1960, p. 74). This is advent as ‘transfiguration’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1993, p. 97; 1964 c, p. 60; 1960, p. 75) and wild meaning within culture itself, an unconquered and untamed excess or surplus that is capable of renewing culture. There are many questions to be raised and discussed about this historical

Merleau-Ponty and Kant’s Third Critique

55

sublime: where exactly to situate it in history, if in the participants or the observers; whether it can be experienced in prospect or only in retrospect; and how strongly the analogies between the aesthetic sublime and historical sublime ought to be pursued. I think that such questions carry us somewhat beyond Merleau-Ponty toward Lyotard, but for our purposes we want to leave those questions in play and move to the third thread of a MerleauPontean sublime, namely that of the event. Within history, there is the serial order that Merleau-Ponty calls the order of ‘mere events.’ Nevertheless, there is another sense of ‘event’ in Merleau-Ponty that occupies a proximity and spacing of resonance with what Heidegger has meant by Ereignis and brings into view an ontological sublime. Again, we find a crossing between Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, for ‘advent-event’ involves a profound silence or stillness that nevertheless calls for expression, which is the task of philosophy as it is of art. MerleauPonty and Heidegger share this ‘logic’ of stillness right down to the shared use of the Greek term sige-. ‘How does be-ing hold sway,’ Heidegger asks in Contributions to Philosophy. He answers, ‘Reticence in silence means mindful lawfulness of being reticent and silent [sige-]. Reticence in silence is the “logic” of philosophy’ (Heidegger, 1999, p. 54). Nature, as well as Klee’s touches of color, Merleau-Ponty says in the Working Notes of The Visible and the Invisible, are ‘simultaneously older than everything and “of the first day”’ (1968a, p. 211, 267; 1964d, p. 264, p. 320). This is the radical irruption of the ‘event’ that is both ‘once and for all’ and also ever new. This paradoxical newness found in the repetitions of nature and the event puts the flow of time out of joint and introduces an exteriority that splits past from future and establishes time as dislocation. A poignant case of such an event would be death, though our own death is a stoppage of time, thus death as event is especially the death of others whom we love and without whom life must somehow go on after the mourning, but it is life transformed as irreversibly and immemorially out of joint. The first such great event of life, and the event par excellence for Merleau-Ponty, is the event of birth. As Françoise Dastur has written, ‘we are not at the origin of our own existence. To be born means that we are conditioned by a past that was never present to us’ (2000, p. 186).13 In each new event that is to come there is a repetition of the ‘proto-event’ of birth; in the new, there is repetition of the origin, which is a non-origin, and this is why activity is always conditioned by a passivity. Merleau-Ponty wrote that ‘philosophy has never spoken . . . of the passivity of our activity, as Valéry spoke of a body of the spirit: new as our initiatives may be, they come to birth at the heart of being’ (1968a, p. 221; 1964d, p. 274). And a few lines later he added, ‘I am

56

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

not even the author of that hollow that forms within me by the passage from the present to the retention, it is not I who makes myself think any more than it is I who makes my heart beat’ (1968a, p. 221; 1964d, p. 275). This signifies: of the event of birth, what is most our own is a past we never possess; of the event of death, what is most our own is a future that we have lost already; of the event of love, we love in part what is not known to us. The event is the invisibility of time as the birth and non-origin, but an invisibility that does not transcend the visible, but is the genesis of the visible itself. The invisibilities of event, birth, and death are not invisibilities of another world, they are invisibilities of this world, for the dimension of invisibility is implied in the visible itself. This is the irruption or dehiscence of time that Merleau-Ponty designated as ‘vertical time’ which is the repetition of deep time in the new. Openness to the event as repetition and birth marks the contingency of existence; it bestows both destiny and expectancy as that paradox, the ‘impossible possible,’ the ‘expected unexpected’ (Dastur, 2000, p. 183). The aesthetic field, both as the field of perception and the field of artistic production, the field of the beautiful and now especially the sublime, becomes the field of desire and loss, desire and distance, desire and dispossession. This philosophy of Being and philosophy of time opens us to the pleasures and joys of the beautiful, but also to the confrontations of the perceptual and historical multiples of the sublime and the desire for the event. Barnett Newman proclaimed that ‘the sublime is now’; nevertheless, the experiences of the sublime do not require the death of beauty but its celebration, for the beautiful and the sublime are hinged together into a monogram of the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, a philosophy of the generosity of birth, genesis, and event.

Notes 1

2

3

Editors’ Note: This article first appeared in Johnson, 2009, and is reprinted here with the kind permission of Henry L. Carrigan Jr. and Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘If [as Kant contends] the subject has a nature, then the hidden art of the imagination must condition the categorial activity. It is no longer merely the aesthetic judgment, but knowledge too which rests upon this art, an art which forms the basis of the unity of consciousness and of consciousnesses’ (1962, p. xvii; 1945a, p. xii). Stephen Watson has similarly written that ‘surely Kant’s retrieval of the symbolics of the beautiful always hovers nearby Phenomenology of Perception’s attempts to articulate a new transcendental aesthetic.’ Cf. Watson, 2003, p. 203.

Merleau-Ponty and Kant’s Third Critique 4

5

6 7

8

9

10

11

12

13

57

We are aware that in contemporary aesthetics of nature there is a literature discussing and debating this point, namely, whether scientific knowledge and information regarding a forest or other landscape or seascape enhances or detracts from our aesthetic experience. Cf. Rolston III, 2004, and Foster, 2004. Also cf. Kemal and Gaskell (eds.), 1993. In enumerating these four constituents of a judgment of taste, I am following the analysis of Jean-François Lyotard; cf. Lyotard, 1988, pp. 29–30; see also Lyotard, 1994. Cf. Schrift, 2006, pp. 166–9, 107–8. Also cf. Kritzman (ed.), 2006, pp. 459–60. Cf. Brunschwicg, 1927. This is one of two books by Brunschwicg cited by MerleauPonty throughout Phenomenology of Perception, the other being Brunschwicg, 1922. This is my translation of the following: ‘En échange de ce qu’on avait imaginé, la vie vous donne autre chose, et autre chose qui était secrètement voulu, non fortuit. Réalisation n’est pas ce qui était prévu, mais tout de même ce qui était voulu: on avance à reculons, on ne choisit pas directement, mais obliquement, mais on fait tout de même ce qu’on veut: l’amour est clairvoyant, il nous addresse justment à ce qui peut nous déchirer.’ Cf. Dufrenne, 1973, pp. 516–22. On the intelligence of music, also cf. Nussbaum, 2001, chapter 5: ‘Music and Emotion.’ ‘If a thing is excessive for the imagination and the imagination is driven to such excess as it apprehends the thing in intuition, then the thing is, as it were, an abyss in which the imagination is afraid to lose itself. Yet, at the same time, for reason’s idea of the supersensible this same thing is not excessive but conforms to reason’s law to give rise to such striving by the imagination. Hence the thing is now attractive to the same degree to which formerly it was repulsive to mere sensibility.’ I do not know how to square this view of the possibility of war as included within the sublime with Kant’s 1795 project of perpetual peace, federalism, and a league of peace among nations. Cf. Kant, 1983, especially Second Article, pp. 115–18. Some have recently extended the Kantian sublime toward a particularly ‘American’ version of the technological sublime. Cf. Nye, 1994, chapters 1 and 2. Be that as it may, this aspect of Kant’s philosophy of the sublime remains unaware of the alienation in the modern sublime feeling discussed later in Walter Benjamin’s analysis of Facism and Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto declaring that ‘war is beautiful.’ ‘The logical result of Facism,’ Benjamin wrote, ‘is the introduction of aesthetics into politics.’ ‘Mankind has reached such a degree of self-alienation that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.’ Cf. Benjamin, 1968, pp. 241–2. Lyotard, too, has written of a particular aesthetics of the political linked with the sublime: ‘The aesthetics of the sublime, thus neutralized and converted into a politics of myth,’ he writes, ‘was able to come and build its architectures of human “formations” on the Zeppelin Field in Nürnberg,’ the planned party rally grounds for the military maneuvers and parades of the Nazi Party designed by Alfred Speer. Cf. Lyotard, 1989, p. 209. This discussion of the ‘event’ is very much indebted to this work by Prof. Dastur, and I express my thanks.

58

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

References Benjamin, W. (1968), ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ in Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 217–52. Bernard Sichère, Unpublished manuscript of a talk at the University of Essex, England, “Merleau-Ponty on Painting,” April 26, 1991. Brunschwicg, L. (1922), Le experience humaine et la causalité physique. Paris: Alcan. —. (1927), Le Progrès de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale. Paris: Alcan. Dastur, F. (2000), ‘Phenomenology of the Event: Waiting and Surprise,’ Hypatia, 15, (4), Autumn, 178–89. Dufrenne, M. (1973), The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience. Trans. Edward S. Casey. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Foster, C. (2004), ‘The Narrative and the Ambient in Environmental Aesthetics,’ in A. Carlson and A. Berleant (eds.), The Aesthetics of Natural Environments. Toronto: Broadview Press, pp. 197–213. Heidegger, M. (1961), Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. —. (1991), Nietzsche, Volume I: The Will to Power as Art. Trans. David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: Harper Collins. —. (1999), Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). Trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Johnson, G. (2009), The Retrieval of the Beautiful: Thinking through Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Kant, I. (1983), ‘To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,’ in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays. Trans. Ted Humphrey. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. —. (1987), Critique of Judgment. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. —. (2004), Critique of Practical Reason. Trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott. Mineola, NY: Dover. Kemal, S. and I. Gaskell (eds.) (1993), Landscape, Natural Beauty, and the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kritzman, L. D. (ed.) (2006), The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought. New York: Columbia University Press. Lyotard, J.-F. (1988), Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. —. (1989), ‘The sublime and the avant-garde,’ in A. Benjamin (ed.), The Lyotard Reader. Cambridge: Blackwell. —. (1994), Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime: Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Sections 23–29. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nussbaum, M. (2001), Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of the Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nye, D. E. (1994), American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rilke, R. M. (2004), Auguste Rodin. Trans. Daniel Slager. New York: Archipelago Books. Rodin, A. (1984), Art: Conversations with Paul Gsell. Trans. Jacques De Caso and Patricia B. Sanders. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Merleau-Ponty and Kant’s Third Critique

59

Rolston III, H. (2004), ‘The Aesthetic Experience of Forests,’ in A. Carlson and A. Berleant (eds.), The Aesthetics of Natural Environments. Toronto: Broadview Press, pp. 182–96. Schrift, A. D. (2006), Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers. Oxford: Blackwell. Watson, S. (2003), ‘On the Withdrawal of the Beautiful: Adorno and Merleau-Ponty’s Readings of Paul Klee,’ Chiasmi International, 5.

This page intentionally left blank

Part II

Limits of Perception

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 4

Skill and the Critique of Descartes in Gilbert Ryle and Maurice Merleau-Ponty Gabrielle Bennet Jackson

Introduction The mechanistic concept of the body, as inherited from René Descartes, has generated considerable trouble in philosophy—including, at least in part, the mind-body problem itself. Still, the corps mécanique remains perhaps the most prevalent though least examined assumption in recent philosophy of mind. There are, however, at least two notable exceptions. Gilbert Ryle and Maurice Merleau-Ponty rejected this assumption for surprisingly similar reasons. Writing at about the same time, though in different languages and in very different circles, they each attempted to articulate a non-mechanistic concept of the body by stressing the importance of skill: skillful behavior constituting cognition in Ryle’s case, and the skill body constituting perception in Merleau-Ponty’s case. In what follows, I turn to their cautions and insights. By drawing out the relation between these two seemingly unrelated theorists, I hope to show that together Ryle and Merleau-Ponty have much to offer philosophy today—perhaps even toward resolving the yet unsolved problem of how the mind is related to the body.

1. Descartes’ Corps Mécanique It is commonplace to believe that we inherited dualism from Descartes. Much paper and ink has been devoted to escaping Descartes’ dualism by rejecting the Cartesian concept of mind—a non-physical entity operating outside the laws of mechanical causation. On the other hand, almost no explicit effort has been made to dispose of the other essential constituent of his dualism: the Cartesian concept of the body—a physical entity operating

64

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

within the laws of mechanical causation. But what exactly is the Cartesian concept of the body? In the Meditations, Descartes only goes so far as to define the body negatively, as what the mind is not—namely, ‘an extended, non-thinking thing’ (1984b, p. 54). In the Treatise on Man, however, Descartes provides a positive account of the body. Descartes begins by inviting us to imagine a grotto with moving parts, hydraulically powered by the pressure of visitors’ footsteps. Deep within the grotto, we are to imagine a fountain-keeper, who monitors the hydraulics, altering them when he sees fit. The grotto and the fountain-keeper together are a metaphor for the body and the soul. Visitors—who step on tiles, opening valves that cause a Diana figure to hide in the reeds or a sun ornament to spew water—are just like external objects, stimulating the body’s sense organs and causing them to move in many different ways (Descartes, 1984a, pp. 100–101). And just as movement in the grotto depends on ‘the various arrangements of the pipes through which the water is conducted,’ movement of the body depends on ‘the arrangement of our limbs and on the route which the spirits . . . follow naturally in the brain, nerves and muscles’ (Ibid., pp. 100, 335). Descartes asks us to compare the nerves of the machine I am describing with the pipes in the works of these fountains, its muscles and tendons with the various devices and springs which serve to set them in motion, its animal spirits with the water which drives them, the heart with the source of the water, and the cavities of the brain with the storage tanks. (Ibid., p. 100) And, of course, the fountain-keeper situated within the grotto is situated like the soul within the body, preventing or generating behavior when needed. The metaphor was not intended as an argument for the separation of the body and the soul. Its main purpose seems to have been to describe the mechanization of the body—whether a hydraulic statue or in the flesh.1 According to this metaphor, the body is a complex system of working parts, moving relative to one another in such a way as is determined by causal law. And the body’s behaviors ‘follow from the mere arrangement of the machine’s organs every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automata follow from the arrangement of its counter-weights and wheels’ (Descartes, 1984a, p. 108). The body, insofar as Descartes took it to follow this mechanistic causal model, is the corps mécanique.

Skill in Ryle and Merleau-Ponty

65

According to Descartes, the corps mécanique includes the digestion of food, the beating of the heart and arteries, the nourishment and growth of the limbs, respiration, waking and sleeping, the reception by external sense organs of light, sounds, smells, tastes, heat and other such qualities, the imprinting of the ideas of these qualities in the organ of the ‘common’ sense and the imagination, the retention and stamping of these ideas in the memory, the internal movements of the appetites and passions, and finally the external movement of all the limbs. (Ibid.) Famously, rationality and language were exclusively within the province of the soul. Everything else—all of the body’s activities from internal organic functions to external behavioral profiles, from sense experience to imprinting of the idea of qualities in the common sense, from passions like joy and pleasure to pain and pale anger—was characterized mechanistically (Ibid., pp. 368–369). Since the seventeenth century, there have been changes in our understanding of the body. For the most part, these changes have been only in degree, not in kind. The corps mécanique—whose complexities continue to be revealed by scientific inquiry—is still with us. In fact, the corps mécanique has survived through the flip-flopping of those traits considered constitutive of mentality. Rationality and language now fall under the category of things that can (or could, theoretically) be explained mechanistically, while qualitative experience now falls under the category of things that cannot (ever, in principle) be explained mechanistically. In other words, whereas Descartes once believed that rationality and language (not qualia) necessarily required a soul, and whereas we now believe that qualia (not rationality or language) necessarily require consciousness, the concept of the body inhabited by these capacities has remained more or less the same. The body has retained its metaphysical status of a highly complex machine.

2. Gilbert Ryle’s Skillful Behavior Gilbert Ryle is credited with identifying and opposing ‘the Dogma of the Ghost in the Machine’ (Ryle, 1949, pp. 11, 15–16). But Ryle was not just interested in exorcising the Ghost. He was also occupied in dismantling the Machine. So however much philosophers today wish to place Ryle in the positivist tradition, his work marked a significant break from philosophical

66

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

behaviorism. Ryle simply was not interested in defending the claim that all statements about the mind are translatable into statements about mechanical bodily behavior. Indeed, he rejected this claim outright. ‘If my argument is successful,’ he wrote, ‘the hallowed contrast between Mind and Matter will be dissipated, but dissipated not by either of the equally hallowed absorptions of Mind by Matter or of Matter by Mind, but in quite a different way’ (Ibid., p. 22). Ryle wished to rearrange the logical geography in theories of mind. He did this in two moves. First, Ryle argued that the mind and bodily behavior are not of the same logical type; they are of different logical types, and so they cannot be equated or opposed to one another. This, Ryle’s dreaded ‘category mistake,’ generated a ‘great logical muddle’ in the form of two regresses (Ibid., pp. 16, 85). I call these the ‘duplication regress’ and the ‘transmission regress.’ The duplication regress is identified by Ryle as involving a tendency in both dualist and physicalist theories of mind to explain something overt in terms of some para- or quasi- or semi-overt thing, which itself must be explained; and then to explain that semi-overt thing in terms of some semi-semi-overt thing, which itself again must be explained; and so on, ad infinitum (Ibid., pp. 294, 295; 1979, pp. 31, 81). Thus, some essential aspect of the thing to be explained is duplicated in the explanation, such that no real (non-regressive) explanation is ever proffered. For example, suppose we begin by asking, ‘Why is this clown’s tripping clever rather than clumsy?’ Further suppose we answer that, ‘The tripping was clever because the clown intended to trip and successfully executed that intention.’ We then may ask, ‘But why is this a bit of clever intending and executing, rather than a bit of cunning intending and executing?’ We then may answer, ‘The clown’s intending and executing are clever because of some other more basic internal process.’ We may ask again, however, ‘Yes, but what makes these more basic internal processes clever—why is this a schema for clever thinking, why does cleverness emanate from this neural network?’ And so on, ad infinitum. Therefore, the clown’s tripping never gets its cleverness. As Ryle said about intelligence, ‘if, for any operation to be intelligently executed, a prior theoretical operation had first to be performed and performed intelligently, it would be a logical impossibility for anyone ever to break into the circle’ (Ibid., p. 30). The transmission regress is identified by Ryle as involving a structural tendency in both dualist and physicalist theories of mind to offer an explanation whose structure mimics the structure of the thing it is meant to explain. This tendency establishes an embedded structure that itself requires explanation; so another explanation is offered whose structure

Skill in Ryle and Merleau-Ponty

67

mimics the structure of that embedded structure, which in turn establishes an even deeper embedded structure that itself requires explanation. And so on, ad infinitum (Ryle, 1971a, p. 213). Thus, the bridge from explanans to explanandum is never completed, and no real (non-regressive) explanation is given. For example, suppose we say that the answer the student gives to his teacher is intelligent because, prior to his response, he reasoned his way to the right choice. That is, the logical reasoning gives rise to the intelligent answer. But we have yet to be told in what does this ‘giving rise’ consist. Why does logical reasoning give rise to any answer at all—intelligent or otherwise? And if it does give rise to an intelligent answer, then how does this transfer from theory to practice work? Taking an investigative look into the nature of this transfer, we see that it must be subdivided into three parts: ‘one bit which contemplates but does not execute, one which executes but does not contemplate and a third which reconciles these irreconcilables’ (Ibid.). So we may ask, what is the internal structure of this third bit? How can a part that contemplates be reconciled with a part that executes? And where, on this bridge from reason to response, is intelligence transferred? Whatever answer we provide, at that exact location, we again find a theoretical part, a practical part, and a third part where the two meet. The question of the internal structure of ‘this schizophrenic broker’ reemerges (Ibid.). And so on, ad infinitum. Therefore, the student’s answer never gets its intelligence. Second, Ryle argued that cognition and the manner in which a behavior is performed are of the same logical type, and so they can be equated to one another, thereby averting a category mistake and its subsequent logical muddle.2 The manner in which a behavior is performed, however, is not supplied by a mental or physical state preceding or occurrent with that behavior. Rather, it is the ‘style, method or modus operandi’ of that behavior (Ibid., p. 19, Ryle, 1971b, p. 214). If a clown trips cleverly, then it is because he trips ‘after much rehearsal and at the golden moment and where the children can see him and so as not to hurt himself’ (Ryle, 1949, p. 33). And if a student answers intelligently, then it is because he moves from acknowledging some facts to acknowledging other facts, while avoiding mistakes, answering aloud when called upon by the teacher. What distinguishes clever from clumsy charades, intelligent from unintelligent replies, ‘is not their parentage, but their procedure’ (Ibid., p. 32). Cognition is not a single episode or event or state. Cognition is the manner in which we do a lot of things (Ibid., p. 118). This was Ryle’s adverbialism.

68

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

Ryle motivated his view by using the examples of people who behave inspirationally, stiltedly, carelessly, boringly, imaginatively, furiously, agitatedly, moodily—to name a few. He occasionally concocted neologisms when ordinary language was wanting: people act ‘cancelingly, rehearsingly, recapitulatingly,’ ‘self-coachingly,’ and (my personal favorite) ‘gramophonically’ (Ryle, 1979, pp. 25, 26, 38). When I hurried through breakfast this morning, I did not do two things, namely, hurrying and eating breakfast; I did one thing in a certain way, I ‘breakfasted hurriedly’ (Ryle, 1949, p. 28). When I am on a diet, I do not do two things, namely, eating and dieting; I immerse myself in an attitude toward eating, consuming a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, counting grams of fat (Ryle, 1979, p. 115). These examples and neologisms mark Ryle’s adverbial attempt to demonstrate the presence of cognition in our everyday performances. Ryle’s favorite topic of discussion, however, was skillful behavior. This is because, in Ryle’s own words, my long-range objective is to find out how to talk sense about the thinking that Le Penseur is occupied in doing without committing (1) the Category-howler of Behaviourism or (2) the Category-howler of Cartesianism—that is, (1) without trying to Reduce thinking to what it isn’t, for example, to audible soliloquizing; and (2) without trying to evaluate it by Duplicating it with some bits of inaudible because ‘mental’ soliloquizing. (Ibid., p. 17) That is, Ryle took himself to be showing that the sacred operation of thinking (and its progeny—intelligence, cleverness, heedfulness, wit, etc.) belongs neither to the inner chambers of the mind nor to the exterior states of the body. What Le Penseur is occupied in doing, Ryle argued, is a special exercise of skill. Skill involves a series of progressively modified performances—a sequence in which each act is adjusted in light of the success or failure of its predecessors (Ryle, 1949, p. 42; 1979, p. 129).3 And thinking is progressive modification as applied to a new situation. ‘Thinking,’ Ryle declares, ‘is, at the least, the engaging of partly trained wits in a partly fresh situation. It is the pitting of an acquired competence or skill against unprogrammed opportunity, obstacle or hazard’ (1979, p. 129). This explanation lies in opposition to what Ryle referred to as ‘The Official Doctrine’ concerning ‘the nature and place of minds,’—or the doctrine that the workings of the mind are non-mechanical, that the workings of the body are mechanical, and that the former controls the latter (1949, p. 11). Ryle traced the doctrine back to Descartes, writing that,

Skill in Ryle and Merleau-Ponty

69

‘instead of asking by what criteria intelligent behavior is actually distinguished from non-intelligent behavior, [Descartes] asked, “Given that the principle of mechanical causation does not tell us the difference, what other causal principle will tell it us?”’ (Ibid., p. 21). Because Descartes could not distinguish the thoughtful and the thoughtless based on the principles of mechanical causation, he figured that the distinction must be made in some other way. Descartes posited a principle of non-mechanical causation. As such, the thoughtful and the thoughtless were distinguishable because the soul was responsible for intelligent behavior via the principle of nonmechanical causation, and the body was responsible for non-intelligent behavior via the principle of mechanical causation. Thus, for Descartes, the soul and the body became distinct substances joined via causal interaction. Ryle’s adverbialism, in contrast, unified the mind and the body under the manner of bodily behavior.

3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Skill Body Merleau-Ponty put to himself a surprisingly similar task. In the Phenomenology of Perception, he wrote, We cannot relate certain movements to bodily mechanism and others to consciousness. The body and consciousness are not mutually limiting, they can be only parallel. Any physiological explanation becomes generalized into mechanistic physiology, any achievement of self-awareness into intellectualistic psychology, and mechanistic physiology or intellectualist psychology bring behavior down to the same uniform level and wipe out the distinction between abstract and concrete movement, between Zeigen and Greifen. (2002a, p. 142) This was Ryle’s critique of Descartes as well. It seems both Ryle and Merleau-Ponty thought that if the only way to distinguish between different bodily behaviors was by their causes, then important distinctions between bodily behaviors, like those between pointing (abstract movement or Zeigen) and grasping (concrete movement or Greifen), could not be made. The overlap between Ryle and Merleau-Ponty on these points is no coincidence. By the time Ryle became an Oxford don, he was reading works by Brentano, Bolzano, Husserl, and Meinong.4 He also participated in a symposium on Husserl’s phenomenology in 1932, and throughout his career reviewed such books as Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit and Marvin

70

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

Farber’s The Foundations of Phenomenology.5 This was all while Ryle was writing his 1949 opus Concept of Mind, about which Ryle himself said, ‘the book could be described as a sustained essay in phenomenology, if you are at home with that label’ (1971b, p. 188). Though he often criticized the phenomenologists, Ryle should have seen that he shared with them a common goal—to reject the dichotomy between Mind and Matter in favor of a middle term that captured both. Ryle concluded that skillful behavior provided an alternative to the dichotomy between mind and matter based in part on the duplication regress and the transmission regress arguments. However, in addition to these arguments, Ryle’s work is filled with shrewd descriptions of skillful behavior. These examples are often overlooked as mere examples, rather than as ways of illuminating his subject. The opposite might be true of Merleau-Ponty. He argued for the conclusion that the skill body provided an alternative to the dichotomy between bodily mechanism and consciousness because of errors he saw in the traditional explanations of perception. Throughout his work, Merleau-Ponty provided arguments against these traditional explanations. His arguments, however, often are treated as of secondary importance to his phenomenological reflections. Of course, I do not mean to diminish the central role that description plays in MerleauPonty’s work. But I do mean to suggest that, in the way that Ryle’s arguments always involve some degree of phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology always involves some degree of argument. Merleau-Ponty distinguished between two separate traditions in philosophy, each aimed at answering a basic question about perceptual experience, namely, ‘How does perceptual experience come to be meaningful?’ In other words, we know that sensory stimulations are ‘registered, then deciphered’ so as to produce perceptual experiences (Merleau-Ponty, 2002a, p. 8). But how does this transformation occur? Merleau-Ponty distinguished between two answers supplied by the two separate traditions in philosophy that he calls ‘empiricism’ and ‘intellectualism.’6 Merleau-Ponty described empiricism as a theory of perception that posits a chain of events ‘from the stimulus to the state of consciousness’ (Ibid., p. 391). Very simply, the empiricist believes that we are the passive recipients of sensations. These sense data have qualitative properties that, as they are processed by our perceptual machinery, become meaningful perceptual experiences. For example, to hear a foghorn sound in the distance is first to receive some raw sense data that are not properly horn-like or distant (though their qualitative properties do correspond to horns and distances in some way), to then process that raw sense data, and finally

Skill in Ryle and Merleau-Ponty

71

to have an auditory perceptual experience as of a distant foghorn. Thus, the empiricist claims that we transform meaningless sensations from the external world into meaningful perceptual experience about the external world sometime after sensation, but before perception. The problem for the empiricist, however, is that the only way for meaningless sensations to become meaningful perceptual experiences is for there to be some sort of inference or rule-bound of transformation performed by the perceiving subject. This inference turns out to be problematic. For instance, in Sartre’s Nausea, there is a famous scene in a park in which the protagonist, Roquentin, ceases to see the tree trunk before him as a tree trunk, and instead sees it as a ‘black knotty mass, entirely beastly’ (Sartre, 1964, p. 127). If the raw sense data remain constant, then is Roquentin making a bad inference or failing to make an inference altogether? The empiricist cannot answer this question because he lacks the resources to claim that one inference is right and another inference (or lack thereof) is wrong. Why? Because the empiricist would be required to posit an ‘internal connection’ between sense data and the perception they trigger—an internal connection which guarantees that sensations give rise to the proper perception (Merleau-Ponty, 2002a, pp. 31, 32).7 Now suppose the empiricist gives this internal connection the name ‘attention’ (Ibid., p. 31). Attention assures the right inference by focusing its spotlight only on the sense data that give rise to the proper perception. But then what is the structure of attention, what is the interior structure of that internal connection? As Merleau-Ponty wrote, ‘consciousness is no less intimately linked with objects of which it is unheeding than with those which interest it, and the additional clearness brought by the act of attention does not herald any new relationship’ (Ibid., p. 32). In other words, attention cannot distinguish among sense data, heeding only the ones that trigger the appropriate perception, because with attention on one side and the sense data it heeds on the other side, the empiricist still must conjoin the two, which would require yet another internal connection between attention and the sensations it heeds. And so on, it seems, forever. In the end, the inference required remains elusive, functioning more like a magical transformation than a proper explanation. Thus, the empiricist cannot account for how perception acquires its meaning. Or, to put it another way, the empiricist is unable to bridge the realm of meaningless sensation with the realm of meaningful perception.8 Merleau-Ponty described intellectualism as a theory of perception that posits a deduction from ‘a certain idea of consciousness’ (Ibid., p. 391). The intellectualist, again very simply, believes that there are no mere

72

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

sensations—there are no raw sense data to be transformed into meaningful perceptual experience. This is because perceptual experience, for the intellectualist, primarily involves concept application or judgment. The meaningfulness of perceptual experience then stems from the meaningfulness of the concepts applied to sensation. For instance, to see a green tree, we must first possess the concepts ‘green’ and ‘tree,’ which we then fit to green and tree sensations, in order finally to have a perceptual experience as of a green tree. Thus, the intellectualist claims that we deploy our concepts onto sensations from the external world in order to generate meaningful perceptual experience about the external world. The problem for the intellectualist, however, is that concept application, too, must rest on a groundwork (Ibid., p. 143). As Merleau-Ponty observes, concept application would proceed haphazardly (or not at all) unless the sensations themselves bespoke the appropriate concept (Ibid., p. 31).9 Roquentin’s nausea on the park bench would be commonplace if, in perceptual experience, concepts were applied to sensations on an indiscriminate basis. In Roquentin’s case, supposing concepts are operative at all (which they may not be), the concept ‘tree trunk’ applies just as well as the concept ‘black knotty mass.’ So how can the intellectualist guarantee that the sensations accommodate the right concepts and resist the wrong concepts? The answer is that sensations must be determinately meaningful from the start. Therefore, the determinant meaning of the sensations assures the application of the appropriate concepts. But what then establishes the determinate meaning of the sensations? At some point, the intellectualist must settle on a final term that provides its own groundwork. And this final term must be outside the realm of significance. This is because an explanation of how perceptual experience has the meaning it does—to be a genuine explanation and not a regress—must at minimum extend someplace beyond meaning. For the intellectualist, however, nothing is meaningless (Ibid., p. 32). ‘Judgment is everywhere and pure sensation is not’ (Ibid., p. 39). In this way, the intellectualist fails to account for how perceptual experience has the meaning it does by making meaning inescapable.10 Merleau-Ponty recognized that, in order to avoid the problems faced by the empiricist and the intellectualist, a new idea of a sensation was needed. He wrote, There are two ways of being mistaken about quality: one is to make it into an element of consciousness, when in fact it is an object for consciousness, to treat it as an incommunicable impression, whereas it always

Skill in Ryle and Merleau-Ponty

73

has a meaning . . . the other is to think that this meaning and this object, at the level of quality, are fully developed and determinate. (Ibid., p. 6) In other words, the empiricist has an idea of a sensation as a meaningless sense datum—an ‘incommunicable impression,’ while the intellectualist has an idea of sensation as being completely significant—as ‘fully developed and determinate’; both ideas, however, are defective. Therefore, MerleauPonty proposed an idea of a sensation that is not wholly meaningless—it has positive meaning—and is not fully meaningful—it has indeterminate meaning. In this way, we have our first approximation of the famous ‘indeterminate as a positive phenomena’ (Ibid., p. 7). To give an example of positive indeterminacy, Merleau-Ponty described the experience of a walk along the beach (Ibid., p. 20). He saw a funnel, some masts, pieces of wood, dunes, and the forest. As he drew even nearer, some of the unconnected objects suddenly fused, forming a ship run aground. In Merleau-Ponty’s own words: As I approached, I did not perceive resemblances or proximities which finally came together to form a continuous picture of the upper part of the ship. I merely felt that the look of the object was on the point of altering, that something was imminent in this tension . . . Suddenly the sight before me was recast in a manner satisfying my vague expectation. (Ibid., p. 20) If he had continued walking along the beach, we can imagine that the sight before him might have been recast again, satisfying yet another vague expectation. It could be multiple ships run aground, or a trompe l’œil of a ship run aground. So what would be the best way to characterize what Merleau-Ponty sees? To be clear: the sight before him was not chaotic, vague, or unassembled; however, it also was not ordered, clear, or assembled. It is a sight containing objects perceived (the funnel, masts, wood, dunes, and forest) and objects about-to-be perceived (the ship). There is what is given in the scene, and there is what is anticipated in the scene. But the content of that anticipation is uncertain.11 It is ‘an indeterminate vision’ or ‘a vision of something or other’ or, better yet, ‘a vision of I do not know what’ (Ibid., p. 6; Kelly, 2005, p. 81).12 Thus, we recognize the positive indeterminacy of sensation. For Merleau-Ponty, in meaningful perceptual experience, two things are united: a demand placed by an object onto the body and the body’s reply to the object’s demand. As Merleau-Ponty claimed, there are ‘certain

74

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

ways the outside has of invading us and certain ways we have of meeting this invasion’ (2002a, p. 370).13 Positive indeterminacy is the demand placed by an object onto the body, and motor-intentionality is the body’s reply to the object’s demand. With regard to positive indeterminacy, or the demand placed on the body, Merleau-Ponty argued that every object has optimal conditions under which it is to be perceived. The more optimal the conditions under which an object is perceived, the less indeterminate the perception of that object. That is, optimality is inversely proportional to indeterminacy. For instance, a sculpture has ‘an optimum distance from which it requires to be seen, a direction viewed from which it vouchsafes most of itself,’ as well as an optimum lighting under which it requires to be seen and a viewing duration in which it reveals most of itself (Ibid., p. 352). With touch, there is a most favorable pressure; with sound, there is a most favorable volume; and so on. These optimal conditions strike a balance between the competing demands of maximum clarity and maximum richness (Ibid., p. 371). For instance, standing up-close to a sculpture provides a view of its detailed carvings, even though the overall shape of the sculpture itself cannot be seen. Conversely, standing far-off from a sculpture provides a view of its overall shape, even though the carving detail of the sculpture cannot be seen. Somewhere in between is the optimal viewing distance—offering the least overall indeterminacy. As Merleau-Ponty wrote, ‘the distance from me to the object is not a size which increases or decreases, but a tension which fluctuates round a norm’ (Ibid., p. 352, my italics). The norm Merleau-Ponty is referring to is the optimal distance between him and the object. But what is the tension that fluctuates around this norm? Recall that notion of ‘tension’ first was introduced in the example of the ship run aground. ‘I merely felt that the look of the object was on the point of altering, that something was imminent in this tension . . . Suddenly the sight before me was recast in a manner satisfying my vague expectation’ (Ibid., p. 20). Merleau-Ponty describes, in the scene before him, a mounting tension followed by a diminution of that tension. He was not merely a passive recipient of those feelings, however, he was also an active participant with them. When the sight before him was on the point of altering, when the tension was high, he approached the object. When the sight before him was finally recast, when the tension low, he beheld the object. In other words, the tension Merleau-Ponty felt directed his movements in such a way as to bring him into more an optimal, less indeterminate viewing relation with the object.14 The tension that Merleau-Ponty felt is a motor-intention or the body’s reply to the object’s demand, but it is not like an ordinary intention in the

Skill in Ryle and Merleau-Ponty

75

sense of a reflective aim toward which an action is directed. This becomes clear in Merleau-Ponty’s description of a situation in which he unsuccessfully beckons his friend to come nearer: ‘When I motion my friend to come nearer, my intention is not a thought prepared within me and I do not perceive the signal in my body’ (Ibid., p. 127). When he sees his friend’s subsequent unwillingness to advance, ‘my gesture of impatience emerges from this situation without any intervening thought’ (Ibid.). Merleau-Ponty does not think about his action beforehand, nor does his reaction involve intervening thought. He does not form the intentions, ‘I will wave to my friend,’ followed by, ‘I will demonstrate my frustration.’ But it would be wrong to say that his gestures were unintentional. Merleau-Ponty’s intentions are manifest in the manner of his movements—he waves warmly at first, then he waves impatiently. His intentions are motor-intentions. So perceptual experience unites positive indeterminacy and motorintentionality. But in what kind of medium does this unification occur? Merleau-Ponty introduced different concepts of the body throughout his work. For example, he discusses the thought body: ‘I know that objects have several facets because I could make a tour of inspection of them, and in that sense I am conscious of the world through the medium of my body’ (Ibid., p. 94). In other words, the thought body is a tool of the intellect, and bodily behavior is the evidence of that instrumental relation. Merleau-Ponty also discuses the objective body: ‘it exists partes extra partes, and . . . consequently it acknowledges between its parts, or between itself and other objects only external and mechanical relationships’ (Ibid., p. 84). In other words, the objective body is a machine, and bodily behavior is the effect of its mechanical workings. Neither concept of the body, however, is capable of housing a motor-intention. What is needed is a ‘common middle term’ positioned between the thought body and the objective body, capable of embodying an intention in the manner of its bodily behavior (Ibid., p. 89). Merleau-Ponty posits the skill body as this common middle term (Ibid., pp. 94, 95, 164, 166, 167, 175).15 That is, the skill body is the vehicle in which perceptual experience is made actual; it is ‘our general medium for having a world’ (Ibid., p. 169).

Conclusion Ryle and Merleau-Ponty established the inadequacy of traditional explanations of cognition and perception, respectively, with a pair of regress arguments, parallel ones at that. They wished to explain aspects of mentality in terms of movement. But Ryle and Merleau-Ponty determined that the

76

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

prevailing corps mécanique obscured distinctions among importantly different kinds of bodily behavior. Ryle claimed that mechanistic causation does not distinguish between intelligent behavior and non-intelligent behavior. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty claimed that concrete and abstract movement cannot be distinguished on the basis of mechanism. Both Ryle and Merleau-Ponty recognized that skill, instead, does permit for such distinctions. Therefore, they posited the development and exercise of skill as constitutive of the aspects of mentality they hoped to explain.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

See Beyssade, 2003, pp. 129–52; Des Chene, 2001; Hatfield, 1992, pp. 335–70; Hatfield, 2007, pp. 413–40. Instead of the term ‘cognition,’ Ryle often used the more general term ‘mentality.’ Today we understand ‘mentality’ to mean both cognition and perception. Ryle’s interest, however, seemed to lie or primarily in cognition, not perception. Ryle wrote, ‘it is of the essence of intelligent practices that one performance is modified by its predecessors’ and, conversely, ‘it is of the essence of merely habitual practices that one performance is a replica of its predecessors’ (1949, p. 42). Brentano, Bolzano, Husserl, and Meinong together constituted Ryle’s ‘three Austrian railway stations and one Chinese game of chance,’ as he self-referentially put it (Ryle, 1970, p. 8). Ryle, 1932, pp. 68–115; 1929, pp. 255–70; 1946, pp. 263–9. Husserl, 1970, pp. 14–15. I am using the term ‘sensation’ similarly to Merleau-Ponty’s use of the terms ‘ stimulus’ and ‘impression’ and ‘quality’; I am using the term ‘perception’ similarly to Merleau-Ponty’s use of the terms ‘consciousness’ and ‘being.’ Merleau-Ponty wrote, ‘in order to relate it to the life of consciousness, one [empiricist] would have to show how a perception awakens attention, then how attention develops and enriches it. Some internal connection would have to be described, and empiricism has at its disposal only external ones, and can do no more than juxtapose states of consciousness’ (1962, p. 31). Therefore, he concludes, ‘where empiricism was deficient was in any internal connection between the object and the act which it triggers off’ (Ibid., p. 32). For Merleau-Ponty’s other critiques of empiricism, see pages 7, 25, 29, 31, 32, 35, 61, 143, 166, 355, and 391 in Phenomenology of Perception. For instance, Merleau-Ponty argued that association and memory fail to bridge sensation and perception in the same way that attention does. See also Carman, 2008 and Kelly, 2007, pp. 23–43. Merleau-Ponty wrote, ‘intellectualism, on the other hand, starts with the fruitfulness of attention: since I am conscious that through attention I shall come by the truth of the object, the succession of pictures called up by attention is not a haphazard one’ (1962, p. 31). But since the role of concept application usurps the function of attention, he concludes, ‘in a consciousness which constitutes

Skill in Ryle and Merleau-Ponty

10

11

12

13

14

15

77

everything, or rather which eternally possesses the intelligible structure of all its objects . . . attention remains an abstract and ineffective power, because it has no work to perform’ (Ibid., p. 32). For Merleau-Ponty’s other critiques of intellectualism, see Merleau-Ponty, 1962, pp. 31, 32, 35, 39, 54, 143, 170, 355, and 391. For instance, Merleau-Ponty argued that attention and memory fail to ground sensation and perception in the same way that concept application does. And, again, see also Carman, 2008 and Kelly, 2007. It is uncertain not because he does not know it is a ship run aground (he might know that there is a ship run aground exactly where he is looking) but because he does not see the scene before him as containing a ship run aground. Sean Kelly suggests this alternate translation—‘a vision of I do not know what’—of Merleau-Ponty’s phrase ‘vision de je ne sais quoi’ (2005, p. 81). This is because Kelly believes the thing itself is indeterminate (contrast this with there being a fully determinate thing that the perceiver has not yet determined for herself). Along similar lines, ‘because my body is permanently stationed before things in order to perceive them and, conversely, appearances are always enveloped for me in a certain bodily attitude’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 352). Merleau-Ponty regularly uses terms like ‘style,’ ‘ways,’ ‘attitudes,’ and ‘manners’ when discussing the bodily behaviors constitutive of motor-intentions. For instance, ‘my hands rediscover a certain style which is part of their motor potentiality’ (1962, p. 369); and ‘a form of behavior outlines a certain manner of treating the world’ (Ibid., p. 372). The French phrase ‘le corps habituel’ used by Merleau-Ponty is translated as ‘the habit body’ throughout the English text. The words ‘habit’ and ‘habitual’ have the connotations of habitat and inhabit, which fit with Merleau-Ponty’s sentiment. However, the words ‘habit’ and ‘habitual’ also signify something we do unintentionally, mindlessly, and automatically (as in, ‘he did it out of blind habit’)—which is the exact opposite of what Merleau-Ponty meant. For this reason, I have translated ‘le corps habituel’ as ‘the skill body’ and other variations of ‘habitude’ as ‘skill.’

References Beyssade, J. M. (2003), ‘On Sensory-Motor Mechanisms in Descartes: Wonder Versus Reflex,’ in B. Williston and A. Gombay (eds.), Passion and Virtue in Descartes. New York: Humanity Books, pp. 129–52. Carman, T. (2008), Merleau-Ponty. New York: Routledge. Descartes, R. (1984a), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume I. Trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. London: Cambridge University Press. —. (1984b), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume II. Trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. London: Cambridge University Press. Descartes, R. (1989), The Passions of the Soul. Trans. Stephen H. Voss. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.

78

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

Des Chene, D. (2001), Spirits and Clocks: Machine and Organism in Descartes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hatfield, G. (1992), ‘Descartes’ Physiology and Its Relation to His Psychology,’ in J. Cottingham (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Descartes. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 335–70. —. (2007), ‘Did Descartes Have a Jamesian Theory of the Emotions?,’ Philosophical Psychology, 20, (4), 413–40. Husserl, E. (1970), ‘Husserl on Ryle’s Review of Sein und Zeit,’ Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 1, (3), October, 14–15. Kelly, S. (2005), ‘Seeing Things in Merleau-Ponty,’ in Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 74–110. —. (2007), ‘What Do We See (When We Do)?,’ in T. Baldwin (ed.), Reading MerleauPonty. New York: Routledge, pp. 23–43. Ryle, G. (1929), ‘Review of Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit,’ Mind, 38, (151), July, 355–70. —. (1932), ‘Symposium: Phenomenology, Goodness, and Beauty,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 11, 68–115. —. (1946), ‘Review of Marvin Farber’s The Foundations of Phenomenology,’ Mind, 21, (80), November, 263–69. —. (1949), The Concept of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. (1970), ‘Autobiographical,’ in O. Wood and G. Pitcher (eds.), Ryle: A Collection of Critical Essays. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books Doubleday, pp. 1–16. —. (1971a), ‘Knowing How and Knowing That,’ in Collected Papers: Volume II, Critical Essays. London, UK: Hutchinson, pp. 212–25. —. (1971b), ‘Phenomenology versus “The Concept of Mind”,’ in Collected Papers: Volume I, Critical Essays. London, UK: Hutchinson, pp. 179–96. —. (1979), On Thinking. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell. Sartre, J. (1964), Nausea. Trans. Lloyd Alexander. New York: New Directions.

Chapter 5

Phantom Limbs and Phantom Worlds: Being Responsive to the Present Susan Bredlau

We often assume that the world that appears to us is merely a reflection of a world that exists independently of us. Yet, as Merleau-Ponty argues in the Phenomenology of Perception, this assumption is untenable. We are intimately and inextricably involved in the way the world appears to us. Our bodies’ interactions with the world, rather than reproducing an already given world, actually accomplish the world that we experience. Yet beyond asserting that we are always involved in the way that the world appears, his work also suggests that these involvements are not equally successful. The world, though never predetermined, is also not simply our creation. We must interact with the world, and both our bodies, as specific attitudes, and the world, as particular environments, should exert influence over the precise form of these interactions. We can, in other words, do a better or worse job of answering to the world, even as the answers we give help to achieve this world. In this chapter, I will explore what it means to be responsive to the world and successfully place our bodies ‘at the service of the spectacle.’ I will argue that this task is as much a temporal as a spatial endeavor; we can only answer to the world if we acknowledge when our present is different than our past. Because Merleau-Ponty offers an account of experience that challenges our very conception of what it means to account for experience, I think it is important to make sense of the Phenomenology of Perception in its own terms. I construct my own argument, therefore, within the framework provided by this text. Yet following Merleau-Ponty, who often incorporates research from other disciplines into his work, I also turn to psychoanalysis and urban studies for examples of the phenomenon under discussion. My motivation in doing so is twofold. First, drawing examples from these other disciplines allows for a richer description of an experience, that of a ‘phantom world,’ which is implied in Merleau-Ponty’s

80

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

discussion of sense experience but not explicitly developed. Second, drawing examples from these other disciplines reveals the experience of a phantom world as a prevailing possibility in all experience, regardless of whether this experience involves the social world or the natural world. While the understanding of experience that emerges from these examples may very well have implications for the disciplines from which they are drawn, developing these implications will not be my focus.1 Instead, I will concentrate on describing the temporal dynamics of everyday experience such that we may be responsive, or unresponsive, to the demands of a unique present. I will begin by reviewing Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of sense experience in the Phenomenology of Perception to illustrate the co-creative character of our interactions with the world. The body and world are not determinate prior to their interaction with one another; answering to the world, therefore, entails discovering the specific attitude that allows both to become determinate. Next, I will turn to Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of phantom limbs to understand why we may sometimes fail to respond to the present world. Our identification with particular environments and specific attitudes achieved in the past, I will argue, means that we may ignore changes that prevent these environments and attitudes from still being achieved. Moreover, just as ignoring a change in the body can result in a phantom limb, ignoring a change in the world, I will argue, can result in a phantom world. After discussing two cases, the first ecological, the second interpersonal, in which a change in the world results in a phantom world, I will conclude with a brief consideration of how other people can be affected when we do not respond to them successfully.

1. Sense Experience and Synchronization In the chapter ‘Sense Experience’ of the Phenomenology of Perception, MerleauPonty argues that sense experience is not an effect of a determinate world acting on a determinate body. Instead, sense experience is the achievement of a determinate world and body. We first encounter the world, MerleauPonty writes, not as an already given thing, but rather, as an indefinite call to action; ‘Apart from the probing of my eye or my hand, and before my body synchronizes with it, the sensible is nothing but a vague beckoning’ (1962, p. 214). The present world and body only start to become a particular environment and a specific attitude with the body’s response; prior to this response, both are indeterminate. A surface, for example, only

Phantom Limbs and Phantom Worlds

81

becomes a particular color once my eyes have adopted the specific gaze that allows it to be this color; Merleau-Ponty writes, Thus a sensible datum which is on the point of being felt sets a kind of muddled problem for my body to solve. I must find the attitude which will provide it with the means of becoming determinate, of showing up as blue; I must find the reply to a question which is obscurely expressed. (Ibid., p. 214) Because the world and the body are not determinate before their interaction with each other, their relation cannot be understood in terms of cause and effect. The color blue, for example, cannot be understood as the cause of my eyes’ specific gaze, since this particular color only emerges as my eyes adopted their specific gaze.2 Although the world’s action initiates the body’s action, it does not dictate the body’s action. In responding to the world, the body is, in part, responsible for this world.3 Yet although the body’s response is not caused by the present world, it also cannot be completely arbitrary. Just as the world does not dictate actions to the body, the body also does not dictate actions to the world. Merleau-Ponty asserts, ‘my attitude is never sufficient to make me really see blue or really touch a hard surface’ (Ibid., p. 214); I only see blue or touch a hard surface ‘when I am invited by it’ (Ibid.). While the body first encounters the world as an indefinite call to action, the body’s first response can, nonetheless, fail to answer this call. Of all the actions that the body is capable of performing, only a few will actually answer to the world. Moreover, the body cannot continue past the first movements of its present response unless this response does, in fact, answer to the world. My eyes, for example, must begin the series of movements that comprise seeing the color blue in order to see blue. My eyes can only progress beyond the first movements in this series, however, if there is actually blue to be seen. If the surface I encounter is red rather than blue, I will see neither red nor blue; quoting a study by the psychologist Heinz Werner, Merleau-Ponty writes, If a subject tries to experience a specific colour, blue for example, while trying to take up the bodily attitude appropriate to red, an inner conflict results, a sort of spasm which stops as soon as he adopts the bodily attitude corresponding to blue. (Ibid.) Similarly, my legs must begin the series of movements that comprise walking on a dirt path in order to walk on a dirt path. My legs can only progress

82

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

beyond the first movements of this series, however, if they are actually encountering a dirt path. If the surface I encounter is an icy pond rather than a dirt path, rather than walking, I will instead slip and fall. The body’s first response to the world, then, is a first attempt at making both determinate. With its response, the body begins a series of actions that would determine the body as a specific attitude and the world as a particular environment. The success of this attempt depends on the world’s subsequent response to the body. The present world accepts the body’s response by supporting the body’s initial actions and allowing the series to continue. In this case, the world begins to emerge as a particular environment and the body begins to emerge as a specific attitude. The present world rejects the body’s response by undermining the body’s initial actions and preventing the series from continuing. In this case, both the body and the world will remain indeterminate until the body responds in a way that the world does accept. Even when the world supports the body’s initial actions, these initial actions do not totally resolve the world’s indefinite call to action. While the world and the body, rather than being indeterminate, are now a particular environment and a specific attitude, this environment and this attitude are still relatively undefined. Sense experience is a temporal, as well as a spatial, achievement, and the initial actions of the body are only a starting point. When my leg’s initial movements, for example, are supported by the world, the world emerges as a dirt path and my body as walking; further determination of both my body and the world are, however, possible. As this interaction continues, my body may, for example, emerge as walking downhill and the world may emerge as a trail into a canyon. Merleau-Ponty refers to this process of mutual solicitation and confirmation through which the body and world become increasingly determinate as synchronization (Ibid., pp. 211, 214, 216). Synchronization is not the result of conscious thought; the body partners itself with world. Like a couple dancing, the actions of the body and the world resonate with and reinforce each other;4 Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘my gaze pairs off with colour . . . and in this transaction between the subject of sensation and the sensible it cannot be held that one acts while the other suffers action, or that one confers significance on the other’ (Ibid., p. 214). With synchronization, the actions of the body and world define both simultaneously and are irreducible to either one alone. Furthermore, just as each of the body’s and world’s later actions in the present synchronization are only possible on the basis of their earlier actions, the present synchronization is only possible on the basis of past synchronizations. Sense experience is also a temporal achievement in that

Phantom Limbs and Phantom Worlds

83

the present synchronization does not occur in a vacuum, isolated from all past synchronizations. Neither the body nor the world is born anew with each interaction; as Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘sensation is a reconstitution, it presupposes in me sediments left behind by some previous constitution so that I am, as a sentient subject, a repository stacked with natural powers’ (Ibid., p. 215). The specific attitudes and the particular environments achieved through past synchronizations do not need to be rediscovered each time the body encounters the world. The determinate world and body achieved in past synchronizations are remembered by the body in its habits.5 By developing habits, the body is able to maintain, in the present, a determinate world and body first achieved in the past. As a result, the body can begin its present synchronization with the world where past synchronizations left off, and the present world and body can become determinate in a way that would otherwise be unachievable. In his discussion of sense experience, Merleau-Ponty is largely focused on how the habits developed at the level of sense experience allow us to achieve more personally meaningful experiences. Merleau-Ponty describes my relation to the world at the level of sense experience as not precisely my relation to the world. That is, the self involved in sense experience does not have the unique characteristics that distinguish one person from another. Rather, the self involved in sense experience is a prepersonal, anonymous self (Ibid., p. 215). As Merleau-Ponty writes, in sense experience, [The body’s action] is not a personal act enabling me to give a fresh significance to my life. The person . . . in sensory exploration . . . is not myself as an autonomous subject, but myself in so far as I have a body and am able to ‘look.’ Rather than being a genuine history, perception ratifies and renews in us a ‘prehistory.’ (Ibid., p. 240) The determinate world and body achieved in sense experience, MerleauPonty argues, are expressive of a human body but not of an individual body. The synchronizations established in sense experience, however, serve as a foundation for synchronizations that are more expressive of a specific individual.

2. Unsuccessful Synchronization and Phantom Limbs Given Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of sense experience, it might seem that synchronization is always established relatively unproblematically. When the body’s first response to the present world does not, in fact, answer to the

84

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

world, the body replaces this response with another response. Thus while the body may not answer to the world on its first try, while synchronization may not be established immediately, the body works to correct this initial failure. Yet while this description may be true at the level of sense experience, Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of phantom limbs reveals that at the level of more personal experience, the body is not so reliably self-correcting. As Merleau-Ponty notes in the Phenomenology of Perception, a person who has had a limb amputated may nonetheless continue to feel this limb and continue to act as if it were still present; ‘the subject . . . relies on his imaginary limb as he would on a real one, since he tries to walk with his phantom leg and is not discouraged even by a fall’ (Ibid., p. 81). In these cases, even though the person’s initial response to the world is rejected by the world, the person persists with this initial response. Although, for example, the subject described by Merleau-Ponty falls each time he begins to move his legs, he nonetheless continues to move his legs in the same way. Rather than correcting for his first, mistaken attempt at answering to the world by replacing his first response with another response, he simply repeats his first response. Merleau-Ponty argues that phantom limbs must be understood existentially. When a person has had a limb amputated, she can no longer respond to the world in the same way she did before the amputation; the actions her body once performed cannot now be performed. All of the particular attitudes and the specific environments that involved the now amputated limb, therefore, cannot presently be achieved. Someone who has had a leg amputated, for example, ceases, at least for the immediate future, to be a jogger and the world ceases to be her running track. A person who has had a limb amputated, in other words, does not just lose a specific part of her body; she also loses the determinate world and body that this limb’s actions helped to achieve. We become accustomed, however, to achieving particular environments and specific attitudes in our more personal interactions with the world, and we identify ourselves with them. This identification need not be conscious; I may not think of my ability to run or to drive as central to my identity. Nonetheless, if I become incapable of running and driving, I will not feel like the same person; rather than feeling competent and graceful, for example, I may feel incompetent and clumsy. My body may attempt, therefore, to maintain in the present a determinate world and body first achieved in the past, even when the present does not call for them. That is, although the present response to the world does not lead to synchronization, the body may not necessarily change this response; to do so would be

Phantom Limbs and Phantom Worlds

85

to admit that it is not, and, indeed, cannot be, achieving the determinate world and body it previously achieved. As a result, the present body never establishes synchronization with the present world and both remain indeterminate. Present experience is thus not of the present body with its missing limb but, rather, of a phantom limb. The person described by Merleau-Ponty who has had a leg amputated, for example, does not experience his present body with its missing arm; instead, he experiences a phantom arm. Cases of phantom limbs, in other words, reflect our body’s attempt to keep present a determinate world and body that can no longer be present; as Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘To have a phantom arm is to remain open to all the actions of which the arm alone is capable; it is to retain the practical field which one enjoyed before mutilation’ (Ibid., p. 82). By acting as if the present response will eventually lead to the synchronization from which a particular environment and specific attitude emerged in the past, someone who has had a limb amputated does not have to really acknowledge the loss of this environment and attitude with which she identifies herself.

3. Phantom Worlds Phantom limbs are, of course, quite rare, and very few of us are ever subject to changes in our body as dramatic as the amputation of an arm or leg. We are frequently subject, however, to fairly dramatic changes in our world. We often travel to new places, for example, and we often meet new people. What I would like to suggest, then, is that these changes in our world may often lead to a phenomenon that one can think of the converse of the phantom limb: the phenomenon of a phantom world. As with changes to the body, changes in our world may be ignored because they signal the end of a determinate world and body with which we have come to identify. Mike Davis, for example, in his book, Ecology of Fear, explores the often unnoticed attitudes that have informed development in California. He notes that when California began to experience major population growth in the late 1800s, most of the people moving to California had originally lived on the east coast of the United States. On the east coast, the weather follows a fairly stable yearly cycle; Davis explains as follows: In these temperate and forested lands, energy flows through the environment in a seasonal pattern that varies little from year to year. Geology is

86

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

generally quiescent and it’s easy to perceive natural powers as orderly and incremental, rarely catastrophic. Frequent rainfall of low and moderate intensity is the principal geomorphic agency, and the landscape seems generally in equilibrium with the vector of the forces acting upon it. (1998, p. 15) In California, however, the weather is very different; Davis writes, ‘nothing is less likely to occur than “average rainfall” . . . The actual norm turns out to be seven- to twelve-year swings between dry and wet spells’ (Ibid., p. 16). Furthermore, in contrast to the ‘low-intensity, high frequency events’ characteristic of the east coast, in California, ‘high-intensity, low-frequency events . . . are the ordinary agents of landscape and ecological change’ (Ibid., p. 18). Despite these significant differences between the weather of California and that of the east coast, those who moved to California, Davis argues, never experienced the weather of California as such. Rather than responding to times during which the weather of California differs from that of the east coast as normal, these Californians responded instead to these times as aberrations. Periods of low rainfall or heavy rainfall, for example, were treated as unexpected disasters rather than as completely average occurrences (Ibid., p. 18). Yet, although these Californians’ first response to the weather did not, in fact, answer to this weather, they persisted with this response. To this day, Davis writes, ‘the weather is ceaselessly berated for its perversity, as in “We have had an unusually dry/wet season” or “The weather isn’t like it used to be”’ (Ibid., p. 16). While Davis describes a case in which people remain, to use MerleauPonty’s term, unsynchronized with their natural environment, Sigmund Freud, in his discussion of transference, describes cases in which people remain unsynchronized with their social environment. In his Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis, Freud notes that it is quite common for a patient who has previously been friendly toward the analyst and enthusiastic about treatment to suddenly become hostile toward both. This change in the patient’s attitude, however, does not respond to any change in the analyst’s attitude; as Freud writes, [W]e do not believe that the situation in the treatment could justify the development of such feelings. We suspect, on the contrary, that the whole readiness for these feelings is derived from elsewhere, that they were already prepared in the patient and . . . are transferred on to the person of the doctor. (1965, p. 550)

Phantom Limbs and Phantom Worlds

87

Although it initially appeared as if the patient were answering to the analyst, the abrupt change in the patient’s attitude reveals that the patient has actually been answering to someone else; while the person with whom the patient is dealing is new, her attitude toward him is not. Yet while the patient’s hostile attitude toward the analyst does not answer to the analyst, the patient maintains this attitude. Moreover, it is quite likely that the patient frequently maintains an attitude that does not really respond to the person she is with; indeed, it is probably just such a lack of synchronization with others that leads her to seek treatment. In the cases described by Davis and Freud, people continue to repeat a certain response to their present world even as the present world rejects this response. As a result, these people never establish synchronization with their present world and, rather than experiencing their present world, they experience only a phantom world. These people’s failure to establish synchronization with the present world, like that of the amputees discussed in the previous section, can be attributed to their identification with a determinate world and body achieved in past synchronizations. While the bodies of people of the people described by Davis and Freud have not changed, their world has, and the determinate world and body they previously achieved are no longer achievable. Nonetheless, these people continue trying to make this determinate world and body present even as the present no longer calls for them. The Californians described by Davis, for example, are unresponsive to California because of their identification with the specific attitude and particular environment achieved on the east coast.6 Consequently, they perceive the year-long cycles of a phantom world rather than the decades-long weather cycles of their present world. Similarly, Freud’s patients are unresponsive to the analyst because of their identification with the specific attitude and particular environment achieved with some other person; as Freud writes, the patient’s feelings ‘do not arise from the present situation and do not apply to the person of the doctor, but that they are repeating something that happened to him earlier’ (Ibid., p. 552). Thus rather than experiencing, for example, the genuine concern of the doctor, they experience the meddling of phantom person from their past. Of course, our identification with a determinate world and body achieved by past synchronizations does not always make us less responsive to the present world. So long as the world with which we presently interact calls for the same response as the world with which we have interacted in the past, our identification with the determinate world and body achieved in past synchronizations allows us to better realize and develop the unique

88

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

possibilities offered by the present world. For example, my identification with a body that emerged as ‘skating’ and a world that emerged as ‘ice’ in a past synchronization allows my body to emerge as ‘spinning’ and the world to emerge as a ‘skating rink’ in the present synchronization. This unique possibility, a possibility that cannot be realized elsewhere, could not have been realized had I been unable to preserve, in the present, the determinate world and body achieved in past synchronizations. If I had to relearn how to skate each time I encountered ice, I could never become an accomplished skater. Yet our identification with the determinate world and body achieved in past synchronizations does not always increase our responsiveness to the present world. At least at the level of more personal experience, our identification with a specific environment and particular attitude achieved by past synchronizations can mean that our body does not correct itself when its first response does not answer to the present world. Rather than acknowledging that the determinate world and body achieved in past synchronizations can no longer be present, we may continue trying to make them present, and thus fail to establish any synchronization with the present world. Yet while this attempt is understandable, it is ultimately destructive; as Merleau-Ponty writes with respect to the phantom limb, ‘One present among all presents thus acquires an exceptional value; it displaces the others and deprives them of their value as authentic presents’ (1962, p. 83). In refusing to recognize that our first response does not lead to synchronization, we effectively drown out the indefinite call of our present world. For example, my body could only emerge as skating and the world as ice because I did not persist in my attempt to walk. So long as I tried to walk, these movements were undermined by the ice, and I neither walked nor skated but, instead, slipped and fell. In seeking to keep present the determinate world and body achieved by a past synchronization, I failed to achieve synchronization with my present world. Once, however, I adopted a new response to my present world, I was able to establish synchronization with it, and both the world and my body became determinate in a way that they did not, and, indeed, could not, in the past. When we are unresponsive to the present world and, therefore, unable to synchronize with it, the present world remains indeterminate. We thus deprive ourselves of the distinctive opportunities offered by our present world, and our own existence, rather than developing, becomes stagnant. While those moving to a new place, for example, will not truly be truly to reproduce the lives they previously led, their new place does not simply prevent them from achieving the particular habitat and specific way of life

Phantom Limbs and Phantom Worlds

89

they enjoyed in the past. Their present place also enables them to achieve a new habitat and way of life that they can enjoy in the present. That is, just as their old home allowed them to realize possibilities that they cannot realize in their new home, their new home allows them to realize possibilities that they could not have realized in their old home. Moreover, as Freud’s discussion of transference reveals, the determinate world and body we identify ourselves with may not always be that desirable; we can identify ourselves with destructive and painful experiences. By persisting in our attempts to keep a particular environment and a specific attitude present, therefore, we may miss the chance to achieve a new, more constructive and fulfilling environment and attitude. At any given moment, the particular environment and the specific attitude that comprise our experience reflect both the present and the past interactions of the body and the world. In many cases, our identification with the determinate world and body achieved in past synchronizations makes us more capable of answering to the present world; when our present world is truly like our past world, our attempt to keep present a determinate world and body first achieved in the past allows us to become more responsive to the present. In other cases, however, our identification with the determinate world and body achieved in past synchronizations actually diminishes our responsiveness to the present world. In persistently trying to keep present a determinate world and body achieved in the past even when our present world is different than our past world, we fail to establish synchronization with the present world. As a result, unique possibilities that could be realized in our interaction with the present world go unrealized, and rather than experiencing the present world, we experience only a phantom. I will conclude by briefly considering one of the consequences of experiencing a phantom world, particularly when this world involves other people. At least when dealing with other people, when we fail to truly respond to the person who is present and persist with our attempts keep present some person from our past, we risk having the present person become like the person in our past. That is, while the present person may at first reject our initial response to her and respond to us uniquely, as we continue to repeat our initial response, she may come to accept this response and respond to us in exactly the same way as the other people with whom we have interacted. In other words, there is a way that a phantom world can become a present world. Other people may begin to synchronize themselves with one’s inadequate solicitations and actually confirm responses that were originally mistaken. Paulo Freire, for example, notices

90

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

that when people are repeatedly treated as if they are inferior, they will begin to feel and act as inferior. Describing peasants participating in an educational project, Freire writes, So often do they hear that they are good for nothing, know nothing and are incapable of learning anything—that they are sick, lazy, and unproductive—that in the end they become convinced of their own unfitness. (1995, p. 45) As a result, Freire continues, these peasants often ‘begin to discuss a generative theme in a lively manner, then stop suddenly and say to the educator: “Excuse us, we ought to keep quiet and let you talk. You are the one who knows, we don’t know anything”’ (Ibid). Yet when synchronization is founded on an initial misunderstanding, the specific attitudes and particular environment that are achieved under these circumstances do not reflect a co-creative realization of new possibilities; instead, they reflect a non-reciprocal imposition of previously realized possibilities. Our interactions with the world can achieve a world in which the mutual solicitation and confirmation that grounds the achievement of a determinate world and body is denied or even ended. Cut off, then, from the source of our experience we lose the opportunity to transform our lives and to have a future that is truly different than our past. In our interpersonal relations, therefore, both in everyday life and in more specific educational or psychotherapeutic context, it is particularly imperative that we be responsive to the present.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

For a discussion of the implications the phenomenological description of experience has for therapeutic practice, see Russon, 2003, pp. 127–43. For an account of color perception that builds on Merleau-Ponty’s insights, see Thompson, 1995. In The Structure of Behavior Merleau-Ponty refers to this relationship between the body and the world as ‘circular causality’; see, for example, Merleau-Ponty, 1963a, p. 15. My use of this example is indebted to the discussion of a similar example in Maclaren, 2002. In other words, one must distinguish explicit memory, in which past experience is the content of present experience (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 83), from implicit memory, in which past experience is a condition for the determinations of present experience.

Phantom Limbs and Phantom Worlds 6

91

As Davis also points out, many of the first colonists to the east coast of the United States immigrated from northern Europe, where the weather is quite similar to that of the east coast. In other words, the attitude and environment some Californians identify with is not even the world of their immediate past but, instead, of a past before their immediate past.

References Davis, M. (1998), Ecology of Fear. New York: Henry Holt. Freire, P. (1995), The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum. Freud, S. (1965), Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton. Maclaren, K. (2002), ‘Intercorporeity, Intersubjectivity and the Problem of “Letting Others Be”,’ Chiasmi International, 4187–210. Russon, J. (2003), Human Experience. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Thompson, E. (1995), Colour Vision: A Study in Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Perception. New York: Routledge.

This page intentionally left blank

Part III

Limits of Temporality and Phenomenology

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 6

L’écart: Merleau-Ponty’s Separation from Husserl; Or, Absolute Time Constituting Consciousness Michael R. Kelly

In 1945, Merleau-Ponty still endorsed a Husserlian notion of the ‘truly transcendental’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, pp. 364–5)1 or absolute timeconstituting consciousness, which he termed ‘ultimate subjectivity’ (Ibid., p. 422) and characterized by its operative intentionality (fungierende Intentionalität) (Ibid., p. xviii). Yet, he had already started to read Husserl’s phenomenology in an ontological way, describing absolute consciousness as a ‘time-being’ that ‘discloses subject and object as two abstract “moments” of a unique structure which is presence,’ one unique structure that founds intentional consciousness and the objects of which it is aware (Ibid., p. 430). Such a description of the relation between time and consciousness suggests a Heideggerian hue in Merleau-Ponty’s 1945 rendering of Husserl’s unthought (cf. Heidegger, 1990, p. 130). And by the late 1950s the Husserlian tones of ultimate subjectivity and operative intentionality had faded from Merleau-Ponty’s style.2 The 15-year interim between the Phenomenology and The Visible and the Invisible brought Merleau-Ponty to the insight that ‘the truth of the transcendental analysis’ reveals not an absolute time-constituting consciousness but a separation (écart) characterizing the ‘time-being,’(Merleau-Ponty, 1968a, p. 184) ‘the model of . . . openness upon being’ (Ibid.). Paramount to this shift from ‘philosophy to the absolute, to the transcendental field, to the wild and “vertical” being’ (Ibid., p. 178)3 was Merleau-Ponty’s belief that time constitutes consciousness—and not consciousness time—because [I]t is indeed the past that adheres to the present and not the consciousness of the past that adheres to the consciousness of the present: the ‘vertical’ past contains in itself the exigency to have been perceived, far from the consciousness of having perceived bearing that of the past. (Ibid., p. 244)

96

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

A new notion of intentionality was needed to capture this ‘vertical’ past—or wild being or transcendental field—one that would show his readers that ‘what one might consider to be “psychology” (Phenomenology of Perception) is in fact ontology’ (Ibid., p. 200). One may state that Merleau-Ponty’s transition rests on a new theory of time and intentionality in the phenomenological tradition, a theory according to which the ‘time-being’ ‘constitutes itself,’ consciousness and its intentional objects by a separation (écart) between the past and the present (Ibid., p. 200). And one may state that through this separation inherent to time’s being Merleau-Ponty marked a separation between his ontological thought and Husserl’s phenomenology. Indeed, this chapter tries to explain why Merleau-Ponty came to conclude that his early attempt to articulate the ‘truly transcendental’ failed to account for this wild being, this ‘vertical’ past, because it remained too tied to Husserl’s notions of operative intentionality and absolute time-constituting consciousness (Ibid., p. 183). But I also will ask, Does this reappraisal carry forward Husserl’s spirit?4 Or, does it set the self adrift in an ontological reservoir of time and abandon phenomenology as stipulated by Husserl’s ‘principle of all principles’? It remains difficult to address such matters, of course, since MerleauPonty, unfortunately, only could partially reveal this separation. One is left to approach the working notes in Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible as a medieval philosopher approached God. In a silence beyond this text’s revealed notes, Merleau-Ponty’s thought thinks this shift from phenomenology to ontology, from ‘philosophy to the absolute, to the transcendental field, to the wild and “vertical” being.’ But just as Merleau-Ponty maintained that one ‘cannot make a direct ontology,’ which is ‘by definition progressive [and] incomplete . . . but not as imperfection,’ we find ourselves impelled to follow Merleau-Ponty’s ‘indirect method . . . —“negative philosophy” like “negative theology”’ (Ibid., p. 179). And just as Merleau-Ponty’s approach to the mysteries of the visible and the invisible adopted a medieval hermeneutic, so we shall reason from what is first in the order of knowing (and most revealed) to what is last in that order because it is first in the order of being (and least revealed). That is, we must examine Merleau-Ponty’s early and fully presented Husserlian understanding of the ‘truly transcendental’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, pp. 364–5) in order to detect signs therein that point to, but differ from, his later and incompletely presented ‘ontological’ understanding of ‘the absolute, the transcendental field’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968a, p. 178). And since Merleau-Ponty characterizes the transcendental field of wild being as ‘the time-thing, time-being’ (Ibid., p. 200), we may better understand this notion of the ‘transcendental field’ by measuring

L’écart: Merleau-Ponty’s Separation from Husserl

97

the divergence (écart) Merleau-Ponty articulates between his later and earlier theories of time in light of his views of Husserl.

1. Domesticated Being, 1945: Reduction, Time and the Truly Transcendental When, in the winter of 1959, Merleau-Ponty came to see that the path outside of phenomenology resided in ‘an Ursprungsklärung’ (Ibid., p. 166)—an attempt to clarify the origin of ‘the transcendental field . . . the wild and “vertical” being’ (Ibid., p. 178)—he began harvesting the seed of an ontological philosophy that he planted in 1945. This Ursprungsklärung, which he contends ‘rectifies [his] first two books,’ still departs from the incompleteness of the reduction understood, not as an ‘obstacle,’ but as ‘the rediscovery of vertical being’ (Ibid., p. 178) by which ‘“wild” or “brute” being is introduced, [the] serial time . . . of “acts” and decisions . . . is overcome, [and] mythical time reintroduced’ (Ibid., p. 168). This rethinking of the reduction is intriguing because it echoes, yet swiftly overturns, the lesson thought to be learned from Merleau-Ponty’s early understanding of the reduction. In his Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty believed that Husserl’s genius was to have brought to our attention the incompleteness of the reduction by introducing a ‘broadened notion of intentionality.’ Comprised of a form of passivity rooted in Husserl’s theory of absolute time-constituting consciousness, this broadened intentionality revealed a clearing to the ‘truly transcendental . . . [the] Ursprung’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, pp. xv, 364–5). To understand Merleau-Ponty’s 1959 call for ‘an Ursprungsklärung,’ a ‘reduction’ to clarify intentionality and the (truly) transcendental field beyond ‘the serial time of acts,’ we must first grasp his 1945 understanding of the Ursprung that he later realizes requires clarification. Let us go backward, then, so we can pursue this intrigue further.

A. The Lesson of the Reduction: Operative Intentionality and the Subject as Time Anyone who has read Merleau-Ponty’s Preface to his Phenomenology will recall his words that go right to the heart of Husserl’s phenomenological method: [T]he most important lesson that the reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction. If we were absolute mind, the reduction

98

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

would present no problem. But since . . . we are in the world, since . . . our reflections are carried out in the temporal flux onto which we are trying to seize, . . . there is no thought which embraces all our thought. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. xiv) If the reader keeps these words in mind when she arrives at the Temporality chapter, she cannot help but realize—perhaps surprisingly—that time marks the central issue in a work lauded for its theory of embodiment.5 For Merleau-Ponty, ‘the ambiguity of being in the world is translated by that of the body, and this is understood through that of time’ (Ibid., p. 45), ‘the essence of [which is] to be in [a] process of self-production [and] . . . never [to be] . . . completely constituted’ (Ibid., p. 415). The lesson of the reduction is thus the lesson of time: No thought embraces all thought; our being is time, and time scatters us. The lesson we learn from the Preface, in turn, is that the reduction, not intentionality, marks ‘the main discovery of phenomenology’ (Ibid., p. xvii). Husserl’s reduction proves germane to the phenomenological enterprise because it suspends those philosophical and scientific prejudices and dogmas that foreclose the distinction between two modes of intentionality: operative intentionality and categorial- or act-intentionality (Ibid., pp. 418, 425; 1968a, pp. 173, 245). As Merleau-Ponty notes, Husserl distinguishes between intentionality of act, which is that of our judgments and of those occasions when we voluntarily take up a position—the only intentionality discussed in Critique of Pure Reason—and operative intentionality [fungierende Intentionalität] or that which produces the natural and antepredicative unity of the world and of our life. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. xviii) The more traditional philosophical form of categorial- or act-intentionality denotes the intentionality tied to the objectifying act of judgments. Categorial intentionality always denotes, for Merleau-Ponty, the reflective, objectifying act of consciousness where a knower from on high examines experience as constituted, as an object for a subject in theoretical regard abstracted from natural, antepredicative experience. Inherited from Descartes, the primary limitation of this act- or object-intentionality model is that it construes all awareness as a dyadic relation between a knowing subject and a known object. As Husserl had shown, by limiting ourselves to this model of awareness (which reduces all awareness to objective and reflective

L’écart: Merleau-Ponty’s Separation from Husserl

99

knowledge) we preclude the lived subject’s appearance. If all awareness amounts to a relation between a constituting subject and a constituted object, then consciousness can become self-consciousness only if it represents itself to itself in the same way that it represents an object to itself (cf. Husserl, 1966 and 1991, Appendix IX). Such a model of consciousness invites a game of epistemic tail chasing that leaves hidden the self that does the reflecting and generates an infinite regress (Carr, 1999, p. 22; cf. also Zahavi, 1999). More importantly, it leaves hidden the self’s prereflective, non-objectifying, and ‘constituting’ encounter with the world, that ‘antepredicative unity’ of subject and object, immanence and transcendence, the truly transcendental upon which constituted experience remains parasitic. Operative intentionality, on the other hand, functions beneath ‘the intentionality of the act, which is the thetic consciousness of an object’ (MerleauPonty, 1962, p. 418). It denotes, for Merleau-Ponty, the non-objectifying activity of conscious life that perpetually transcends itself toward the world without objectifying its activity and thus without possessing the world in mental acts. Operative intentionality thus expands the model of awareness found in act-intentionality. It recognizes, for example, that as I write this chapter, my self-awareness in my primary task (of writing) non-objectively accompanies my awareness of my focal or primary object (the tool on which I write), and the marginal or secondary objects (the rumblings from the street). Debunking the ‘hegemony’ of the object-intentionality model, Merleau-Ponty thinks Husserl’s unthought ambition to lead ‘that as yet dumb experience . . . to the pure expression of its own meaning’ (MerleauPonty, 1962, p. xv), to give voice to that previously muted intentionality characteristic of a ‘consciousness . . . meant for a world which it [does not] possess but toward which it is perpetually directed’ (Ibid., p. xvii). The merit of the distinction between two modes of intentionality, the reader realizes while nearing the end of the Phenomenology, is that through it We have discovered . . . the truly transcendental, which is not the totality of constituting operations whereby a transparent world, free from obscurity . . . spread out before an impartial spectator, but that ambiguous life in which the forms of transcendence have their Ursprung, and which . . . puts me in communication with [the natural and social world] and . . . makes knowledge possible. (Ibid., pp. 364–5) The truly transcendental does not withdraw from the world but ‘conceives the subject as a process of transcendence toward the world’—an operative

100

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

intentionality characterized by a prereflective, non-objectifying, constituting self-awareness that accompanies awareness of the world. Returning to the Preface, then, the reader comes to appreciate that Husserl’s notion of operative intentionality, which functions ‘beneath the intentionality of acts . . . [and] makes [them] possible’ (Ibid., p. 419), marks the form of transcendence, the truly transcendental, that ‘furnishes the text which our knowledge tries to translate into more precise language’ (Ibid., p. xviii). The reduction thus reveals an accessible formula for the problem of intentionality. The truly transcendental—or life—is not the totality of constituting operations, can never be fully completed or constituted; this is the lesson of the reduction. Time, by Merleau-Ponty’s definition, is that which can never be fully constituted because it is of its essence a process. Hence, time—or the time of life—is the truly transcendental understood as operative intentionality, ‘which produces the natural and antepredicative unity of world and of our life’ (Ibid., pp. xviii, xiii). It is not merely that the reduction makes speak that dumb experience upon which philosophy and science reflect. Rather, the reduction reveals that, beneath the level of acts, operative intentionality—the ambiguous form of life—constitutes the self’s consciousness such that it is not absolute. This origin of the self’s transcendence or intentionality is intimated. To clarify this new form of operative intentionality, Merleau-Ponty maintains that ‘time is thought by us before its parts and temporal relations make possible events in time, [and] . . . constituted time . . . is not time itself but the ultimate recording of time’ (Ibid., pp. 414–5, 473). Since we cannot think time as an intellectual act of synthesis, that is, as an act-intentionality, the ‘true time [is the time] in which I learn the nature of flux and transience itself,’ not constituted time but constituting time, not the events made possible by temporal relations but the ‘eventing’ itself that makes possible temporal events according to which we break time’s relation into discrete parts (Ibid., pp. 415, 474). Conceptions of time in realism, idealism, and Kantian transcendentalism could not capture this ‘true time’ because they remained, to their detriment, object-directed or tied to act-intentionality (Cf. Sallis, 1971, and Kelly, forthcoming). The Kantian kind of transcendental argument, for example, is not ‘truly transcendental’ because its restriction to the model of act-intentionality provides successive multiplicity without interconnectedness. Kant’s epistemology forced him to deduce the synthesis of reproduction, which represents the self’s past states in the present, in order to explain the flow of time (cf. Kant, 1927, pp. A 99ff.). But this approach overlooks the importance of an account of the consciousness of succession that characterizes the lived

L’écart: Merleau-Ponty’s Separation from Husserl

101

time of my prereflective relation to the world, that ‘field of presence’ wherein the self relates to the world such that ‘the paper, my fountain-pen, are indeed there for me but I do not explicitly perceive them’ (MerleauPonty, 1962, p. 416). That I do not ‘explicitly perceive’ means that I do not grasp these things in an objectifying, reflective, synthetic regard. Rather, as I write this chapter I am absorbed in the world, with these objects and with others, and I do not objectively synthesize these passing moments in reproduction as if somehow, like a young child who has yet to develop a sense of object-permanence, I had to go back in my mind to check that I were there at the beginning of this writing. Indeed, for there to be objective, constituted, synthetic time—the recorded unification of the succession of perceptions grasped in an objectifying act-intentionality—there first must be, as Husserl puts it, a perception or consciousness of succession in its constituting. And this requires a new model of awareness beyond act-intentionality. To avoid the falsifying abstractions found in Kant, Merleau-Ponty leans on Husserl’s insight that absolute consciousness constitutes itself and is not itself ‘arrayed out in time’ (MerleauPonty, 1962, p. 422). That consciousness is not itself temporal means only that consciousness is not ‘in time because it . . . lives time and merges with the cohesion of life’ (Ibid.). What Husserl does that is so philosophically interesting to Merleau-Ponty is that he turns his attention to the nonobjectifying, prereflective consciousness of succession that characterizes the operative intentionality of the constituting self and makes possible the apprehension of a succession of consciousnesses and therefore time and temporal objects. To provide this account of the consciousness of succession, Husserl argues, we must describe absolute consciousness’ mode of self-givenness that accompanies its awareness of temporal objects. Concerning absolute consciousness’ mode of self-givenness, Husserl writes, ‘to perceive in [the] case [of self-apprehension] does not mean to grasp something’ objectively and ‘be turned toward it in an act of meaning’ (1991, Appendix IX). The broadened notion of operative intentionality thus rests on this broadened notion of awareness wherein the life of absolute consciousness, as Husserl noted, non-objectively ‘constitutes itself’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, pp. 426; 1945a, p. 487) through its distinguishable though inseparable (i.e., nonatomistic) moments of ‘primal impression,’ ‘retention,’ and ‘protention’ (Brough, 1999, p. 276). Whereas memory, as we have seen in the Kantian account, actively represents a consciousness of the self as past and changes the temporal index of the experience, retention passively provides a consciousness of the past of the self in this experience and thereby of the self

102

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

and its experiences as past. Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology thus appreciates Husserl’s discovery that retention does not, like memory, ‘transmute what is absent into something present [but] presents the absent in its absence’ (Ibid.). Were absolute consciousness in its moment of retention thought otherwise than this passive transition—that is, were it thought as an introspective mode of object-awareness achieved by the reproduction of some past state—it would be no different from the act-intentionality of memory and there would be neither self-apprehension nor the perception of time and temporal objects. Merleau-Ponty thus claims that Husserl’s ‘ultimate subjectivity’ constitutes a ‘primary flow [that] does not confine itself to being . . . [but] . . . must necessarily provide itself with a “manifestation of itself”’ (MerleauPonty, 1962, p. 426). And while Husserl described this life of absolute consciousness as a non-temporal temporalizing (Husserl, 1991, pp. 333–4; 1966, pp. 345–6), that is not itself arrayed out in time, Merleau-Ponty makes the point with more rhetorical felicity: Time exists for me only because I am situated in it . . . because the whole of being is not given to me incarnate, and finally because one sector of being is so close to me that . . . I cannot see it. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 423) Just as in operative intentionality consciousness does not ‘explicitly perceive’ the things in the world with which it engages, its operating or functioning life is so intimate that it cannot see itself. This ‘blindness,’ of course, means only that the self does not objectify itself ‘in an act of meaning’ at each moment but lives in its perception. It thus seems that Merleau-Ponty understands this blind-spot in absolute time-constituting consciousness’ operative intentionality strips consciousness of its absolute standing or renders it a moment of that ambiguous form of life, that Ursprung. This is why Merleau-Ponty writes that ‘time’s synthesis is a transition synthesis, an action of life which unfolds, and there is no way of bringing [time] about other than by living that life’ (Ibid., p. 423, my italics). The intentional mode of absolute time-constituting consciousness’ operative intentionality, the ‘ultimate subject,’ is neither an object in the world graspable only according to an object-intentionality model of awareness, nor ‘an eternal subject perceiving itself in absolute transparency’; for Merleau-Ponty, ‘on the contrary perception is opaque . . . beneath what I know,’ beneath an object of knowledge, beneath what I ‘see’ and ‘explicitly perceive,’ beneath ‘the intentionality of the act, which is the

L’écart: Merleau-Ponty’s Separation from Husserl

103

thetic consciousness of an object’ (Ibid., p. 418). Or, in Husserl’s words, the self’s self-apprehension is not grasped or objectified ‘in an act of meaning.’ On Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl, then, this absolute timeconstituting consciousness that perceives under certain conditions of opacity equates to the truly transcendental, ‘which is not the totality of constituting operations whereby a transparent world, free from obscurity . . . is spread out before an impartial spectator, but that ambiguous life in which the forms of transcendence have their Ursprung’ (Ibid., pp. 364–5). B. Lesson Not Grasped: Time as the Subject in Operative Intentionality If Merleau-Ponty continues to follow Husserl, he does so not only by making the latter’s language more colorful, but also by highlighting the opacity characteristic of this operative, absolute time-constituting consciousness that (i) one cannot see (itself) while (ii) disclosing objects themselves not explicitly (thetically) perceived. This is not to say that Merleau-Ponty posits a life lived in ignorance or blindness; rather, he posits a life lived before the reflective objectifying introduced by act-intentionality. Offering an obvious rephrasing of Husserl’s notion of retention, he writes, [W]e feel [the past] behind us as an incontestable acquisition. In order to have a past . . . we do not have to bring together, by means of an intellectual act, a series of [moments], for they possess a natural and primordial unity . . . Such is the paradox of what might be termed with Husserl the ‘passive synthesis’ of time . . . (Ibid., p. 419, my italics)6 But an ambivalence characterizes Merleau-Ponty’s 1945 account of the ‘truly transcendental.’ On the one hand, the operative intentionality rooted in absolute time-constituting consciousness seems to ‘found’ psychological and world time. On the other hand, ‘the subject is identified with temporality’ (Ibid., p. 425) in a strong sense, for ‘time’s synthesis is a transition synthesis,’ not consciousness’ (Ibid., p. 423). Put differently, Merleau-Ponty retains both the phenomenological view of ‘time as [constituted by] the subject’ and anticipates an ontological view of ‘the subject as [constituted by] time’ (Ibid., p. 422). A bad ambiguity thus pervades his understanding of the passivity characteristic of the ultimate subject’s operative intentionality. He writes, I am not the creator of time anymore than of my heart-beats. I am not the initiator of the process of temporalization . . . Nevertheless, this ceaseless

104

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

welling up of time is not a simple fact to which I am passively subjected, for I can make a remedy against it . . ., as happens in a decision which binds me . . . What is called passivity is . . . being encompassed, being in a situation—prior to which we do not exist—which we are perpetually resuming and which is constitutive of us. (Ibid., p. 427, my italics) Indeed, as Merleau-Ponty himself admits while recapitulating Husserl’s phenomenology of absolute time-constituting consciousness’ non-objectifying self-awareness, the passivity characteristic of operative intentionality ‘is clearly not the solution but merely a pointer to the problem’ of articulating the Ursprung, the truly transcendental (Ibid., p. 419). If one is not the initiator of time but is rather constituted by it, then it makes sense to say, as Merleau-Ponty does in some places in his Phenomenology, (i) that ‘no one of time’s dimensions can be deduced from the rest’ (Ibid., p. 424) and so (ii) we must admit ‘a past which never has been a present’ (Ibid., p. 242)—a mythical time of wild being (Merleau-Ponty, 1968a, p. 243)—if we hope to reach the Ursprung. But, if passivity ultimately denotes the sedimentation of past acts ‘passively’ informing our present and future, then the past depends on a present processed by consciousness. And this would mean that one of time’s dimensions (the past) is deduced from another (the present), which, in turn, means that we will not have escaped ‘the serial time, that of “acts and decision”’ (Ibid., p. 168). Consciousness would thus remain the master taming and domesticating the wild-being.

2. Wild Being, 1960: Reduction, Time, and the Transcendental Field In February of 1959, Merleau-Ponty attributes the bad ambiguity plaguing his 1945 account ‘to the fact that [his Phenomenology] in part retained the philosophy of “consciousness”’ (1968a, p. 183). Despite promoting operative intentionality as one of Husserl’s salient achievements and the key to the truly transcendental (i.e., the Ursprung), grounding operative intentionality in absolute time-constituting consciousness led Merleau-Ponty to posit an ambiguous notion of passivity and fail to sufficiently secure a subject that neither ‘sees’ (itself) nor ‘explicitly perceives’ its objects beyond the transparency of its meaning-bestowal acts of categorial intentionality. In that same year and month, Merleau-Ponty notes that he must disambiguate his thought concerning time, passivity, and intentionality so that his readers might see that ‘what one might consider to be “psychology” (Phenomenology

L’écart: Merleau-Ponty’s Separation from Husserl

105

of Perception) is in fact ontology’ (Ibid., p. 176). And in April of 1960 he states more specifically that ‘it is necessary to take up again and develop the fungierende or latent intentionality which is the intentionality within being. That is not compatible with “phenomenology” . . .’ (Ibid., p. 244). No position seems less Husserlian or, one might say, with Merleau-Ponty, phenomenological. Two important terminological shifts occur here indicating this new path of thinking toward ontology. First, fungierende intentionality shifts from operative intentionality to latent intentionality; second and correlatively, the foundation of intentionality shifts from absolute time-constituting consciousness to ‘the intentionality within being’ (Carbone, 2002, p. 164).7 As we shall see, this intentionality within ‘or model of openness upon being’ is the ‘time-thing, time-being,’ which ‘constitute[s] itself’ (Ibid., p. 184). And to establish this new view of intentional being as an auto-constituting time-thing, Merleau-Ponty must establish (i) that ‘no one of time’s dimensions can be deduced from the rest’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 424) because time does not depend on consciousness and (ii) that time’s self-constituting being is characterized by a separation (écart), ‘a past which never has been a present’ (Ibid., p. 242),8 a mythical time characterized by ‘depth,’ ‘verticality,’ and ‘simultaneity,’ a time ‘where certain events “in the beginning” maintain their continued efficacity’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968a, p. 173, 243).9 That is, he must further wrest being from consciousness’ act-intentionality and meaning-bestowal—‘an Ursprungsklärung is needed’ (Ibid., p. 166).

A. Latent Intentionality and Time: ‘I once could see but now am blind’ Merleau-Ponty forecasts this project in 1959 when he advances the hypothesis of a ‘peculiar case of sedimentation,’ a passivity that he terms ‘latent intentionality’ (Ibid., p. 173). Almost mimicking the Preface to his Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘[through?] this latent intentionality, intentionality ceases to be what it is in Kant’ (Ibid.). The coincidence between this 1959 material and the Phenomenology’s Preface is striking. In both cases, Merleau-Ponty presents a novel notion of intentionality whereby ‘intentionality . . . ceases to be a property of consciousness . . . of its acts’ (Ibid.). The difference in the newer notion of intentionality is that it ceases not only to be a property of consciousness’ acts, but also to be a property of consciousness at all so that it may ‘become intentional life . . . the thread that binds . . . my present to my past in its temporal place, such as it was (and not such as I reconquered it by an act of evocation)’ (Ibid.).

106

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

This pithy, crucial note outlines the needed Ursprungsklärung (Ibid., p. 166), and it is a complicated text for three reasons. First, latent intentionality, like operative intentionality, goes beyond the intentionality of acts in the Kantian sense. Second, latent and operative intentionality differ insofar as the latter remains a property of consciousness—its nonobjectifying, prereflective self-awareness—while the former becomes a property of life, being. And, third, the latent intentionality of life proceeds independently of consciousness’ attempts through its ‘acts of evocation’ and decisions to ‘make a remedy against’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 427) the thread that binds consciousness’ temporality. To comprehend precisely how acts of consciousness, of evocation, differ from, and thus are founded upon, the latent intentionality of life with its own ‘temporality,’ we must press Merleau-Ponty’s contrast of ‘the possibility of this act of evocation’ to ‘intentional life.’ Beyond his earlier opposition of operative intentionality to categorial- or act-intentionality, Merleau-Ponty maintains that ‘an act of evocation,’ which sediments or ‘reconquers’ a moment of time in the life of consciousness, ‘rests on the primordial structure of retention’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968a, p. 173). Since acts of evocation belong to consciousness and differ from the latent intentionality of life, and since these acts of evocation belong to consciousness and are tied to ‘ultimate subjectivity’s’ non-objectifying, prereflective self-awareness characterized by its tripartite structure of retention, and so on, it appears that absolute time-constituting consciousness differs from the time or latent intentionality of life. And in a note titled, ‘Husserl Zeitbewusstsein,’ Merleau-Ponty expresses a desire to ‘look in a completely different direction’ from the self’s self-givenness in retention, and so on (Ibid., pp. 190–1). Hence, we should insist, I think, on distinguishing operative from latent intentionality. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty not only maintains that the acts of evocation stem from retention, but he also claims that Husserl failed to capture anything like this new sense of latent intentionality because he ‘described the interlocking [of past and present] starting from a Präsensfeld [field of presence] considered as without thickness, as immanent consciousness’ (Ibid., p. 173). Maruo Carbone has suggestively read this metaphorical critique on the grounds that Husserl’s abstracted version of ultimate subjectivity starts ‘from the perspective of this “place of absolute contemplation” . . . from which consciousness, across a series of its intentional acts, supports the continuity of temporal dimensions . . . [and] finishes . . . by revealing itself still subordinate to the serial order of time’ (2002, p. 163).

L’écart: Merleau-Ponty’s Separation from Husserl

107

Carbone is surely right in his assessment of the charge Merleau-Ponty brings against Husserl’s ultimate subjectivity. His exposition concludes too quickly, however, for Merleau-Ponty holds that ‘Husserl . . . does not conceive of time as serial and as a succession of punctual events’ even if the time-diagram’s ‘representation of the phenomenon of the flow is faulty’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968a, p. 195). On this score, Merleau-Ponty seems correct, for Husserl maintains that the life of consciousness is a non-temporal temporalizing that is not itself a process.10 What we must understand, then, is why Husserl’s ‘ultimate subject’ still supports or constitutes time and thus reveals ‘itself still subordinate to the serial order of time’ despite what Merleau-Ponty thinks were Husserl’s better wishes. However intent Husserl was to overcome and complement the objectintentionality model of acts and meaning-bestowal, the reification of consciousness as receptive and abstracted from the present, from time, traps Husserl in this narrowing model that lacks ‘thickness.’ We must make two moves here, it seems, if we want to understand Merleau-Ponty’s reversed reading of Husserl. First, this metaphorical critique of Husserl—based as it is upon Merleau-Ponty’s connection of absolute time-constituting consciousness’ structure of retention, and so on, with acts of evocation—certainly targets time-constituting consciousness as a type of act-intentionality that rendered even his ‘Husserlian’ conception of the ‘ultimate subject’ badly ambiguous: that is, both passive and active. Second, the deeper and more esoteric critique implies that Husserl never fully escaped the notion of meaning-bestowal acts and this undermined his move to operative intentionality. Let us consider these in order. Recall, one half of the bad ambiguity plaguing Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology, held that consciousness could ‘make a remedy against’ time and passivity due to its ‘decisions’ and acts (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 427). Such an act or decision mitigated precisely the thoroughgoing passivity that characterizes consciousness insofar as it is ‘not the creator of time anymore than of [its] heart-beats’ (Ibid.). The move to latent intentionality, conversely, seems to push aside this active element of absolute consciousness in order to revitalize the radical passivity that underlies all of consciousness’ acts. Prioritizing the radical passivity of the time of intentional life that binds one’s past and present, Merleau-Ponty deems ‘time . . . the model of these symbolic matrices, which are openness upon being’ (1968a, p. 173). The symbolic matrices that are conscious acts, decisions, conclusions, commitments, institutions, and so on, and which Husserl believed constituted sedimented meanings in the life of absolute consciousness and in turn passively

108

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

informed consciousness’ life, now appear ‘derived’ according to the later Merleau-Ponty’s reading (Ibid., p. 191). Juxtaposing the badly ambiguous view of passivity from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology to the conception of passivity expressed in the ‘working notes’ to his The Visible and the Invisible, we can infer that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘latent intentionality’ understood as ‘intentional life’ contends that Husserl’s notion of operative intentionality rooted in absolute time-constituting consciousness did not take him as far beyond Kant as Merleau-Ponty first thought. Merleau-Ponty thus maintains that Husserl’s analysis, like ‘every analysis of time that views it from above[,] is insufficient’ (Ibid., p. 184). And although this charge applies superficially to Husserl’s time diagrams (Ibid., p. 195), I think Merleau-Ponty takes these diagrams as merely symptomatic of a deeper theoretical problem, namely, ‘the ‘receptive’ element of absolute consciousness,’ which ‘evokes a Self distinct from the present and who receives it’ (Ibid., p. 190). Merleau-Ponty detects ‘in Husserl . . . the idea of a time of Empfindung [sensing] which is not good’ (Ibid., p. 192). Husserl’s ‘ultimate subject’ in its self-sensing constitutes being and time in an active passivity termed receptivity rather than living the time of intentional life (or latent intentionality). Abstracted from ‘the upsurge of time’ (Ibid., p. 184), the form of ‘ultimate subjectivity’ that founds consciousness’ operative intentionality now appears precisely as it did not in 1945: ‘an eternal subject perceiving itself in absolute transparency’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 418). And this position led to ‘Husserl’s error’ of describing ‘the interlocking [of the moments of time] from a Prasensfeld considered as without thickness, as immanent consciousness’ (Ibid., p. 173).11 The problem is that receptive consciousness remains an activity in passivity still thought to receive, schematize and give meaning to being. As such, Merleau-Ponty comes to think that Husserl’s notion of operative intentionality lacks the necessary radicality to return to the Ursprung, ‘the absolute . . . the transcendental field . . . the wild and “vertical” being’ (Ibid., p. 178). What I am suggesting, then, is that Merleau-Ponty reverses his thinking about the radical effect Husserl’s theory of time-consciousness has on his theory of intentionality. If, in 1945, Merleau-Ponty appreciated Husserl’s advance beyond Kant’s restriction of intentionality to act-intentionality, it was because Merleau-Ponty identified an important maturation in Husserl’s thought. But as Merleau-Ponty’s own thought matures, the significance of Husserl’s maturation will minimize. In his Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty explicitly and rightly noted that the discoveries of time-consciousness marked a distinct point of transition and development in Husserl’s phenomenology. While we cannot record the

L’écart: Merleau-Ponty’s Separation from Husserl

109

details of that shift here (only Merleau-Ponty’s appraisal)12 we can say of what we might call Husserl’s ‘immature’ period of thought13 that ‘Husserl . . . for a long time defined consciousness or the imposition of a sense in terms of the Auffassung-Inhalt framework’ (Ibid., p. 152).14 On this model, consciousness receives ‘neutral’ contents of experience and animates them according to a schema of time-constituting meaning-bestowals (in this case). Husserl’s schema-apprehension model contends that the instants (or contents) of a temporal object are temporally neutral and that intentional rays in the momentary phase of consciousness ‘animate’ or ‘temporalize’ these contents in a present in which, however bloated it became, all was now, immanent, ‘and nothing could overcome that fact’ (Brough, 1991, p. xlvii).15 As Merleau-Ponty realizes, had Husserl remained within this apprehension-content schema, he would have collapsed the spread of absolute time-constituting consciousness into an abstracted present and reduced all intentionality to object-intentionality, thereby losing any ‘depth’ or ‘thickness’ in his account. Concerning what we might call Husserl’s mature period of thought, however, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘he takes a decisive step forward in recognizing, from the time of his Lectures on Time, that this orientation presupposes another deeper one whereby the content is itself made ready for apprehension’ (1962, p. 152). As we have seen, Husserl noted that ‘to perceive in [the] case [of self-apprehension] does not mean to grasp something’ objectively and ‘be turned toward it in an act of meaning’ (1991, Appendix IX). With the realization that ‘not every constitution has the schema: apprehension—content—apprehension,’ Merleau-Ponty continues, Husserl’s thought matures such that the notion of operative intentionality appears on the philosophical horizon in an original way (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 152; cf. also Husserl, 1991, p. 7 n. 7). Indeed, he claimed in 1945 of ‘ultimate subjectivity’ that ‘all consciousness as a comprehensive project is . . . made manifest to itself in those acts, experiences and psychic facts in which it is recognized’ (Ibid., p. 425). Lived experience comes ready made, as it were, and Husserl’s unthought insight realizes that ‘constituting consciousness is the philosopher’s professional imposter’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964c, p. 180; as cited in Carbone, 2002, p. 165). And yet it is precisely with respect to a tension that Merleau-Ponty articulates between Husserl’s early, schematic theory of perception and his revised model that Merleau-Ponty becomes more critical of Husserl. That absolute consciousness’ element of receptivity brought it to a position outside of time reinstates the very model of act-intentionality that the theory of absolute time-constituting consciousness was meant to correct.

110

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

Such prioritization of the life of consciousness, consequently, again renders transcendence in opposition to immanence, living in opposition to meaning (or it collapses the former into the latter). With respect to the wild, brute, vertical being that is the transcendental field, intentional analysis seems to have little to offer: ‘the intentional analysis . . . gives us: every past basically [sinngemäss] has been present, i.e., its past being has been formed in a presence . . . It is the order of the “consciousness” of significations’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968a, p. 243).16 While Merleau-Ponty in 1945 distinguished ‘acts’ from the mode of absolute consciousness’ intentionality— with its moments of retention, and so on—we must recall that he equates these moments with ‘acts of evocation’ around 1960. And having collapsed absolute time-constituting consciousness’ tripartite structure with ‘acts of evocation’ on the grounds that absolute time-constituting consciousness’ receptivity abstracts it from the flow of time, Merleau-Ponty makes his ultimate critique of Husserl, for whom he believes ‘intentional reference is . . . that from a Sinngebung [meaning-bestowal] to a Sinngebung that motivates it’ (Ibid., p. 244). Later Merleau-Ponty’s reading seemingly suggests that Husserl never realizes—or methodologically cannot avail himself of—his insight into a form of intentionality beyond the Auffassung-Inhalt schema, the model of meaning-bestowal, which Husserl introduced in his Logical Investigations, retained through his early lectures on time-consciousness, and regrettably did not warn adequately against in Ideas I (even if in a show of charity or hospitality to his readers; cf. Husserl, 1983, pp. 193–4; 1950, p. 163). Merleau-Ponty’s doubtlessly is a controversial reading of Husserl. But, insofar as he holds that all intentional reference according to Husserl moves from a Sinngebung to Sinngebung, Husserl’s absolute consciousness still faces a world of neutral contents that require animation, sense, or meaning-bestowal (noematic sense).17 It remains ‘consciousness facing a noema’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968a, p. 244). That Merleau-Ponty’s critique attempts to identify the residue of the schema-apprehension model even in Husserl’s theory of absolute timeconstituting consciousness helps us understand more profoundly a passage that is often (yet superficially) cited as Merleau-Ponty’s definitive criticism of Husserl: [T]he whole Husserlian analysis is blocked by a framework of acts which imposes upon it the philosophy of consciousness . . . that obliges whatever is not nothing to present itself to consciousness across adumbrations

L’écart: Merleau-Ponty’s Separation from Husserl

111

[Abschattungen] and as deriving from an originating donation which is an act, i.e., one lived-experience [Erlebnis] among others. (Ibid.) There is too much ‘seeing’ going on here. There is too much schematizing and judging. And what is ‘overlooked’ in all this transparency is the intentionality of life operating ‘beneath what I know’ and ‘explicitly perceive.’ Merleau-Ponty thus concludes the famous working note with which we are concerned here by claiming that [We must] take as primary, not the consciousness and its phenomenon of flow [Ablausfphänomenon] with its distinct intentional threads, but the vortex which this Ablausfphänomenon schematizes . . . which is flesh and not consciousness facing a noema. (Ibid.) If phenomenology hopes to articulate the truly transcendental field without the corrupting interjections of a consciousness facing a noema, it must maintain of consciousness and its Ablausfphänomenon that ‘to be conscious is itself to be conceived as transcendence, as to be surpassed by [. . .] and hence as ignorance’ (Ibid., p. 197, my italics). Only once we construe consciousness as part of this ‘vortex’ will we catch a glimpse—however oblique, peripheral, or opaque—of this wild, vertical being, ‘that in one another [Ineinander] which nobody sees, and which is not a group soul either, neither object nor subject, but their connective tissue’ (Ibid., p. 173, my italics).

B. Untimely Meditations: L’écart and Merleau-Ponty’s Last Words on Husserl The connective tissues that Merleau-Ponty seeks to articulate ‘are emanations and idealizations of one fabric, differentiations of one fabric’ (1968a, p. 231) that is ‘intentional life . . . the thread that binds . . . my present to my past in its temporal place, such as it was (and not such as I reconquer it by an act of evocation)’ (Ibid., pp. 173–4). The connective tissues are emanations from ‘the absolute, the transcendental field, wild and “vertical” being’ (Ibid., p. 178). That we’re following the scent of wild being by invoking the connective tissue of intentional life—the ‘common tissue of which we are made, the wild being’ (Ibid., p. 203)—as opposed to the ‘acts of evocation’ that would constitute being, seems clear from Merleau-Ponty’s claim that

112

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

‘we encounter this Ineinander each time the intentional reference is no longer that from a Sinngebung to a Sinngebung that motivates it’ (Ibid., p. 244). Indeed, this very shift concerns a shift in thought about the intentional being of time, for ‘past and present are Ineinander, each envelopingenveloped’ (Ibid., p. 268). Moving from the schema-apprehension model of meaning-bestowal moves us as well from a view of time’s moments as aside one another (Nacheinander) to a view of time’s moments as in one another (Ineinander) where past and present do not follow one another in a serial order but exist ‘simultaneously.’ The very mode of sedimentation criticized above as a form of active-passivity rooted in absolute time-constituting consciousness Merleau-Ponty exchanges for ‘“simultaneity” in depth . . . this difficult temporal structure of life’ (Al-Saji, 2007, p. 187). Indeed, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘precisely there is something that the intentional analytic cannot grasp, for it cannot raise (Husserl) to this “simultaneity” which is meta-intentional’ (1968a, p. 243). To articulate, however roughly, this meta-intentionality is to execute the Urpsrungsklärung that can never be completed—‘negative philosophy like negative theology’ (Ibid., pp. 166, 179). The root of this meta-intentionality is time newly conceived. The ‘simultaneous’ denotes the relation between the past as an ‘“indestructible” past’ (Ibid., p. 243) that co-exists, as it were, with the present. In his 1945 claim that ‘no one of time’s dimensions can be deduced from the rest’ (MerleauPonty, 1962, p. 424), Merleau-Ponty anticipated this move toward the ‘simultaneity’ of the past and present that ‘makes possible’ the serial order and ordering of time constituted (1968a, p. 184). Were we to hold that the past is derived from the present, comes after the present, as a ‘consciousness of the past’ (Ibid., p. 244), ‘the upsurge of time would be incomprehensible’ (Ibid., p. 184). To think each present as ‘a supplement of time that would push the whole preceding series back into the past’ (Ibid.) necessarily calls for a constituting consciousness to unify an identity across the different moments of time because, as Merleau-Ponty contends, a past derived from a present is not a past at all but a present differing in degree or distance from the immediate present. Defining the past as an aftereffect of the present, moreover, means that ‘what at once grounds the present and makes it pass remains unthought’ (Al-Saji, 2007, 182). The converse of the claim that the past is derived from the present is the claim that the present never really passes but ever reiterates itself in the past. A time constituted by consciousness thus seems to ‘freeze’ time. If the present is to truly pass, it must have something into which it passes— some separation (écart) from itself that nevertheless is ‘equivalence’—and

L’écart: Merleau-Ponty’s Separation from Husserl

113

this is the depth of time or time’s vertical being. To get beyond the notion of serial time, then, we must posit ‘a past which never has been a present’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 242) or an indestructible past (1968a, p. 243). The depth of time, the time that underlies our experience of time and ourselves, appears to be wild being, ‘the absolute, the transcendental field’ (Ibid., p. 178) or the intentionality of life. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty writes of this latent intentionality of life, whether we ‘see’ this time or not, whether we even see ourselves as part of this time or not, ‘the Bewusstsein von, the having perceived . . . is borne by the past as Massive Being’ (Ibid., p. 244). We’ve arrived at Merleau-Ponty’s mature formula for the truly transcendental, the Ursprung, beyond the one he presented in 1945. All consciousness is consciousness of something and consciousness is conscious itself. All consciousness of, including consciousness itself, is constituted by the past as Massive Being. Hence, ‘time must constitute itself,’ for ‘the acceptance of the truth of the transcendental analysis [is that] time is not an absolute series of events . . . it is . . . a system of equivalences’ (Ibid., p. 184). The present is not privileged over the past; the past is not privileged over the present; immanence is not privileged over transcendence. They co-exist in simultaneity as a system of equivalences, the truly transcendental or transcendental field. Perhaps thinking a thought that Husserl never would have thought, Merleau-Ponty maintains that the ‘Urerlebnis,’ is not only ‘an incontestable’ element of being, but also ‘derived’ (Ibid., p. 191) as ‘emanations and idealizations of one fabric, differentiations of one fabric’ (Ibid., p. 231). While it is clear that consciousness’ lived experience is not ‘an act or Auffassung’ but derived instead from the latent intentionality of life, this does not mean for Merleau-Ponty that consciousness’ lived experience ‘is coincidence, fusion with’ but rather ‘is a separation [écart]’ (Ibid., p. 191). This ‘time-thing, time-being’ that ‘constitutes itself’ (Ibid., p. 184) ‘discloses subject and object as two abstract “moments” of a unique structure which is presence’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 430). Absolute time constitutes consciousness. Functioning beneath what I know, the truly transcendental or Ursprung of perception, even in the case of self-apprehension, is a ‘perceptionimperception [and] (this is at bottom what Husserl means when he considers retention to be fundamental: that means that the absolute present which I am is as if it were not)’ (Ibid., p. 191). And to capture this radical passivity of intentional life, the absolute and transcendental field, as opposed to a serial notion of time rooted in acts of evocation, a time that is ‘not conceivable’ (Ibid., p. 184), Merleau-Ponty returns to the heart

114

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

[of the matter] to state his point about how absolute time constitutes consciousness. In 1945, recall, Merleau-Ponty claimed that while ‘I am not the initiator of the process of temporalization’ anymore than I am ‘the creator of my heart-beats,’ ‘I can make a remedy against’ this time to which I seem ‘passively subjected’ (Ibid., p. 427). Fifteen years later, the position is reversed in another striking coincidence of terms between his Phenomenology and the working notes to The Visible and the Invisible: I would say of the passivity of our activity . . . [that] new as our initiatives may be, they come to birth at the heart of being, they are connected onto the time that streams forth in us . . . This is not an activity of the soul . . . and I am not even the author of that hollow that forms within me by the passage from the present to retention, it is not I who makes myself think any more than it is I who makes my heart beat. From there leave the philosophy of Erlebnisse. (1968a, p. 221) Enmeshed in the heart of being—the absolute and transcendental field characterized by the latent intentionality of life—consciousness becomes ontologically secondary to, or ‘derived’ from, the separation (écart) that is characteristic of ‘brute or wild being which, ontologically, is primary’ (Ibid., p. 200). The separation, at once the separation of the past from the present and the separation of Merleau-Ponty’s thought from Husserl’s, of ontology from phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty saw as essential when drafting his last work: ‘to describe the vertical or wild being as that pre-spiritual milieu without which nothing is thinkable, not even the spirit, and by which we pass into one another and ourselves into ourselves in order to have our own time’ (Ibid., p. 204). It is precisely here that Merleau-Ponty has made a border crossing. Not only past and present conceived as Ineinander, but also subject and object, immanent and transcendent, each ‘enveloping-enveloped.’ Yet where do we find the self, the dative of manifestation, within this ‘vortex’ of ‘massive being’? How do these emanations emerge from the one fabric to differentiate themselves? If these differentiations are but emanations from the one fabric, then it seems reasonable to infer that the self—as one of these idealized emanations—has as its primordial situation participation in this fabric. The self is ‘a tacit, silent Being-at, which returns from the [perceived] thing itself blindly identified, which is only a separation [écart] with respect to it—the self of perception as “nobody” . . . the anonymous one buried in the world . . . a non-possession . . . Anonymity and generality . . . a “lake of

L’écart: Merleau-Ponty’s Separation from Husserl

115

non-being,” . . . sunken into a local and temporal openness’ (Ibid., p. 201). Merleau-Ponty, as suggested in the introduction, appears to have lost the self in an ontological reservoir of time. He has at least made it difficult to provide a phenomenological explanation beyond a statement or implication of emergentism: When the embryo’s organism starts to perceive, there is not a creation of a For-itself by the body in-itself, and there is not a descent into the body of a pre-established soul, . . . the vortex of the embryogenesis suddenly centers itself upon the interior hollow it was preparing—A certain fundamental divergence, a certain constitutive dissonance emerges . . . It is in the universal structure ‘world’—encroachment of everything upon everything, a being by promiscuity—that is found the reservoir whence proceeds this new absolute life. All verticality comes from the vertical Being. (Ibid., pp. 233–4) Merleau-Ponty’s is a complex, difficult and subtle analysis. But if we claim to be engaged in phenomenology, we must ask where this philosophy stands in relation to phenomenology’s ‘principle of all principles.’18 The principle conveys phenomenology’s methodological demand that it examines the correlation between the matters (Sache) of the world as intuitively given. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of an original past that ‘constitutes’ the present into which it passes and thus ‘constitutes’ consciousness may be original, but one wonders whether or not it is offered to us in intuition. Indeed it seems that we cannot even distinguish the self from the non-self in Merleau-Ponty’s view of the self as a ‘nobody,’ a ‘nonpossession,’ that proceeds from absolute life ‘borne by the past as Massive Being’ (1968a, p. 244). In this case, what will appear to whom or who will appear to what seems irresolvable. Unlike ‘negative theology,’ which proceeds from a creature/Creator distinction, in Merleau-Ponty’s ‘negative philosophy’ the perceiving subject perceives in ‘ignorance,’ enmeshed in ‘that Ineinander which nobody sees . . . [and] is not . . . subject nor object’ (Ibid., pp. 268, 197, 174). To what phenomenon are we pointing to—unless it is that of the mystic, the yogi? To suggest that one cannot answer these questions by applying phenomenological methods according to the principle of all principles, however, may not constitute a critique of Merleau-Ponty’s position. But it nevertheless forces phenomenologically minded readers to consider the limits of the phenomenological method. That is, such questions serve to remind us of the limits of phenomenology and force us to acknowledge when we

116

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

are pushing those limits to their breaking point. Technical and methodological concerns may miss the point of a philosopher who admits of his reading of Husserl that ‘we can only . . . formulate—at our own risk—the unthought we think we discern there’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964c, pp. 165–6). But when we must shift from textual and historical exegesis to a philosophical examination of the merits and demerits of the relative positions— when we must face the most fundamental and ‘important . . . of all phenomenological problems’ (Husserl, 1991, pp. 334, 276; 1966, pp. 346, 286)—the issue remains: Absolute time-constituting consciousness, or absolute time constituting consciousness?19

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

All following citations refer to the English edition. For the French original, see Merleau-Ponty, 1945a. I explore this theme further in Kelly, forthcoming. Carbone also makes this connection but does not pursue it, for it is not his interest there; cf. Carbone, 2002, p. 164. There is much good and interesting work detailing Merleau-Ponty’s difference from and relation to Husserl across the former’s thought; cf. Madison, 1981; Dillon, 1997; and Barbaras, 2004. This question is pursued also in Lawlor, 2002. On page 223 of that work, he writes, ‘[E]ven in their most non-phenomenological positions, Derrida and MerleauPonty are still trying to think through Husserl’s discovery of intentionality.’ Lawlor’s essay presents a sustained, provocative and persuasive reading of Husserl’s legacy, however transformed, in the later Merleau-Ponty’s work. Dan Zahavi, by contrast, has recently produced fine work detailing just how indebted Merleau-Ponty is to Husserl; cf. Zahavi, 2002. In The Being of the Phenomenon, Barbaras claims that the ‘reflection on time’ in Phenomenology of Perception ‘is, incontestably, a primordial axis of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy’ (2004, p. 217) and ‘the entire structure of Phenomenology of Perception rests on the chapter devoted to temporality’ (Ibid., p. 218). Perhaps the best exposition of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of time that focuses exclusively on this chapter’s place in the Phenomenology is Sallis, 1971. That there is no active ‘synthesis’ of disparate pieces of conscious life at the level of absolute time-constituting consciousness means that there is no categorial intentionality or act of meaning required for the life of consciousness to unify itself and its experiences. For Merleau-Ponty, it is the case that ‘time as an indivisible . . . transition can alone make possible time as successive multiplicity, and what we place at the origin of intratemporality is a constituting time’ (1992, p. 423; 1945a, p. 483). The shift with which we are concerned here, Carbone makes clear, ‘refers not to the intentional activity of consciousness, but “the fungierende or latent intentionality which is the intentionality within being.”’ Carbone presents a compelling

L’écart: Merleau-Ponty’s Separation from Husserl

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

117

case for this shift in fine and careful exegetical detail. But his text leaves open the possibility to evaluate further Merleau-Ponty’s juxtaposition of operative to latent intentionality, which Carbone’s text suggests we should consider the same; cf. Carbone, 2002, p. 165. Lawlor interestingly draws on the shared focus in Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty on this past that never was present; cf. Lawlor, 1998. Here, I am grateful for Carbone’s chapter, which formulated for me a working definition of this complex notion of mythical time; cf. Carbone, 2002, p. 158. Husserl states clearly that this ‘flow of the modes of consciousness is not a process’ (1991, p. 333; 1966, p. 345) or a thread that run horizontally between successive instants of time. Specifically, the primal impression, ‘the consciousness of the now[,] is not itself now,’ neither as primal impression nor retention (Ibid.). Moreover, the mode of retention that apprehends the past ‘[does] not endure . . . and is not [a] temporal object’ grasped reflectively (Husserl, 1991, pp. 333–4; 1966, pp. 345–6). Barbaras, 2004, pp. 21–2. He writes, ‘Merleau-Ponty’s orientation consists then in finding fault with the philosophy of consciousness on the basis . . . that . . . retention represents not so much an originary intentionality as the calling into question of the intentional analysis.’ My reflections, here broadly in agreement with Barbaras’ careful reading, seek to add a complement by developing Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Husserl along the lines of ‘Sinngebung.’ On this point, I refer the reader to J. Brough’s definitive account presented in Brough, 1991. See also Brough, 1972, p. 314. For a reading that explains Merleau-Ponty’s appreciation for Husserl’s shift in thought, see Barbaras, 2004, pp. 217–26. I borrow this manner of describing the evolution of Husserl’s thought on timeconsciousness and thus on his broad phenomenology of perception from Brough, 1991 and 1972. The notion of Auffassung-Inhalt refers to Husserl’s early, schematic theory of intentionality: apprehension—contents (of apprehension). To summarize Brough’s fine and definitive account of Husserl’s immature model, ‘primary perception’ animates the presently inhering content appearing ‘in person’ as an ‘apprehension of the now,’ while ‘primary memory’ provides an ‘apprehension of the past’ content still apprehended as not-now (Husserl, 1991, p. 40; 1966, p. 41). For example, tone one was ‘animated’ as present by the ‘originary impression’ in the momentary phase of consciousness, but when tone two emerged ‘primary memory’ ‘now’ animates tone one as ‘past’ in the momentary phase of consciousness although these contents all remain immanent to consciousness. Perhaps it might not be too clever by half if one were to suggest that ‘sinn’ of this sinngemäss (this ‘basically’) might function at the same time as a double-entendre if the reader were to hear in it a call to think the thought of the problem of giving meaning (Sinngebung) to the past only from the point of view of the present. Perhaps we even can say that Merleau-Ponty italicized ‘motivates’ in order to remind himself to develop this point by exposing the many places where consciousness schematizes and gives sense in Husserl’s thought. Indeed, Husserl noted in his ‘First Logical Investigation’ discussion of indication that something

118

18

19

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

indicates only when it appears for someone, to the dative of manifestation; cf. Husserl, 2001, volume 1, p. 184. What Husserl took to be a distinguishable but inseparable relation between the objective indication-relation and the subjective belief-relation, I am suggesting Merleau-Ponty charges as a residual methodological commitment that limits or ‘thins’ his conception of operative intentionality rooted in absolute time-constituting consciousness—reduces transcendence to immanence, living to meaning. My reading of Husserl concerning this point in Logical Investigations is indebted to the teachings of Robert Sokolowski. The ‘principle of principles’ reads: ‘Every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, . . . everything originally . . . offered to us in “intuition” is to be accepted as what it is presented as being, but also within the limits in which it is presented there’; cf. Husserl, 1983, pp. 44, 43–4. I would like to thank Neal DeRoo and Kascha Semonovitch for their help in revising this piece.

References Al-Saji, A. (2007), ‘The Temporality of Life: Merleau-Ponty, Bergson and the Immemorial Past,’ The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 45, 177–206. Barbaras, R. (2004), The Being of the Phenomenon. Trans. T. Toadvine and L. Lawlor. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Brough, J. (1972), ‘The Emergence of Absolute Consciousness in Husserl’s Early Writings on Time-Consciousness,’ Man and World, 5, 298–326. —. (1991), ‘Translator’s Introduction,’ in E. Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. Trans J. Brough. Dordrecht: Kluwer. —. (1999), ‘Husserl’s Phenomenology of Time-Consciousness,’ in J. N. Mohanty and W. R. McKenna (eds.), Husserl’s Phenomenology: A Textbook. Washington, DC: The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America. Carbone, M. (2002), ‘The Time of Half-Sleep: Merleau-Ponty between Husserl and Proust,’ in T. Toadvine and L. Embree (eds.), Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 149–72. Carr, D. (1999), The Paradox of Subjectivity. New York: Oxford University Press. Dillon, M. (1997), Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Heidegger, M. (1990), Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Trans R. Taft. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Husserl, E. (1950), Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. Ed. W. Biemel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. —. (1966), Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins (1893–1917). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. —. (1983), Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Pure Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Trans. F. Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

L’écart: Merleau-Ponty’s Separation from Husserl

119

—. (1991), On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917). Trans. J. Brough. Dordrecht: Kluwer. —. (2001), Logical Investigations. 2 volumes. Trans. J. N. Findlay. New York and London: Routledge. Kant, I. (1927), Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. N. Kemp-Smith. New York: St. Martin Press. Kelly, M. (forthcoming), ‘The Subject as Time: Merleau-Ponty’s Transition from Phenomenology to Ontology,’ in Self, Time, Memory in Merleau-Ponty. Ed. K. McClaren and D. Morris. Lawlor, L. (1998), ‘The End of phenomenology: Expressionism in Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty,’ Continental Philosophy Review, 31, 15–34. —. (2002), ‘The Legacy of Husserl’s “Ursprung der Geometrie”,’ in T. Toadvine and L. Embree (eds.), Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 201–25. Madison, G. B. (1981), The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. Athens: Ohio University Press. Sallis, J. (1971), ‘Time, Subjectivity and the Phenomenology of Perception,’ The Modern Schoolman, 48, May, 343–57. Zahavi, D. (1999), Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. —. (2002), ‘Merleau-Ponty on Husserl: A Reappraisal,’ in T. Toadvine and L. Embree (eds.), Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 3–30.

Chapter 7

Time at the Depth of the World Glen A. Mazis

1. The Depth of Time Reconfigures Philosophical Expression and Fissures Subjectivity When in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty declares that ‘there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself’ (1962, p. xi) as the starting point for an analysis of embodiment and perception that will lead him to conclude by the last chapters that ‘time is someone . . . the subject is time’ (Ibid., p. 422) he has already taken the first steps toward an articulation of time that will lead him beyond Husserl. This is true despite the fact that Merleau-Ponty still clings to the Husserlian presentation of time even when right before this declaration, he presents as accurate Husserl’s diagrammatic representation of time consciousness (Ibid., p. 417). However, what may not be noticed unless one looks closely at Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of depth throughout the Phenomenology is that in many ways the book has already undermined the Husserlian notion of time, since it is at odds with other core notions of the work. It is Merleau-Ponty’s notion of depth that is at the heart of his notion of time and ultimately, when he overcomes the still dualistic language of the Phenomenology of Perception, at the heart of his notion of the flesh. The differing logic of the flesh and chiasm that ultimately leads to his rejection of that same Husserlian diagram and its notion of time in The Visible and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty, 1968a, p. 231) is a logic of ‘going together despite not going together logically’ or of ‘compossible incompossibles’ that was most fully described as the vital element of depth in the Phenomenology of Perception. Already in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty shows not only that he will fundamentally rethink human being in terms of temporality and depth, but also demonstrates that the dynamism of time undermines the way that phenomenology might be taken to proceed. He begins with the declaration that ‘the phenomenological world is not the

Time at the Depth of the World

121

bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the expression of a pre-existing truth, but like art, the act of bringing truth into being’ (1962, p. xx). His reason for declaring this shift in the sense of phenomenological articulation or the articulation in general of philosophy is our implication in time and time’s much more radical sense of becoming that he will come to detail in looking at the perception. There is no seeing of essences as Husserl sought, since ‘reflection does not withdraw from the world toward the unity of consciousness as the world’s basis’ (Ibid., p. xiii), but only comes back to itself from its interwovenness with the world as time itself, an ongoing transforming or movement of expression that makes resound a ‘past that has never been’ instead of a simply retained past (Ibid., p. 242) and also emerges from a depth of the world as both continuous and discontinuous, as will be further explained in this chapter. In other words, there is no retrievable truth to be articulated, since time does not allow us to ‘step outside’ of its unfolding of which we are integral. There is only ongoing unfolding as displacement. Even in this declaration in the Preface, there are only evolving meanings to bring something forth as beyond ourselves. Although he has not yet developed it fully, this is the beginning of an insistence on a philosophy of expression that brings forward depths of sense, of a temporal unfolding and a spatial dispersal that must tirelessly gather itself together but never catches up to itself since it is always other to itself. The same sort of slippage and dispersal that he will make a central focus of the later writings and causes him to say at the beginning of The Visible and the Invisible that ‘Nothing is more difficult than to know what we see’ (Ibid., p. 58) is already at the heart of his reformulation of phenomenology in the Phenomenology of Perception. In this chapter, we will see how the original fissure of the perceiver is contained in Merleau-Ponty’s description of depth, that this depth is fundamentally temporal, that time’s depth is the dynamism of the flesh as time itself emerges chiasmatically and explosively, and that time emerges in the chiasm of perceiver and the world in such a way that the world’s depth is itself a chiasm of time and space—a kind of being not nameable before in Western philosophy. Although Merleau-Ponty’s famous criticism of the Phenomenology of Perception in the working notes of The Visible and the Invisible declares that the problems posed in that work ‘are insoluble because I start there from the “consciousness”-“object” distinction’ (1968a, p. 200) and the dualism expressed by those notions, Merleau-Ponty ends the same note by discussing how this new ontology must express the ‘unity by transgression’ within self, between self and world, and within ‘time-being’ that still hearkens back

122

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

to his original articulation of depth in the Phenomenology. Similarly, the more radicalized articulation afforded by the notion of the flesh of the later works seems especially marked by incorporating into its description the gaps within the perceiver and between perceiver and world, which is ultimately about the fissures within time as being at the depth of the world, especially when The Visible and the Invisible begins by Merleau-Ponty’s insistence that once we become awakened to the world, it is as ‘though the access to the world were but the other face of withdrawal’ and ‘even that which seems in the greatest proximity at the same time “becomes inexplicably, irremediable distance”’ (Ibid., p. 8). This sense of being proximate as distant and distant as proximate is about a temporality of envelopment at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh that he describes as both distinctness and distance temporally and spatially, yet also the way ‘they slip into one another’ such that ‘It is hence because of depth that things have a flesh’ (Ibid., p. 219). When in ‘Eye and Mind,’ Merleau-Ponty declares that depth is the primary dimension of experience to be interrogated, the ‘dimension of dimensions’ (1964a, p. 185), he is still carrying out the work started in the Phenomenology of Perception to demonstrate depth is the key to seeing embodiment and perception in a new way, and that this can ultimately be understood as seeing time as the heart of depth. The published version of The Visible and Invisible, the appended ‘Working Notes,’ and his last published essay, ‘Eye and Mind,’ incessantly return to depth as held within the time of the world as primary sense of the ontology he is articulating. This claim seems to contradict the reading of Merleau-Ponty’s work offered by Renaud Barbaras in The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology when he correctly points out that in Merleau-Ponty’s work ‘what is at issue is to conceive a subject that has access to itself only by being other than itself, that possesses itself only by being dispossessed, a belonging of the subject to the world that is just as much a belonging of the world to the subject,’ but also that for Barbaras ‘the world remains in Phenomenology of Perception, a transcendence in immanence’ (2004, p. 39). I agree that in many ways this is true of the Phenomenology insofar as Merleau-Ponty rightly says it does not get beyond myriad references to ‘consciousness’ and uses the term ‘subject’ throughout. Although there are moments that crop up which prefigure how Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of embodiment will move beyond subjectivity to the flesh of the world, as will be explored later in this chapter, the descriptions do not move us far enough into the world. As Barbaras adds in the next part of his statement, what is needed is an articulation of ‘a transcendence that requires a depth of the world that the description of Phenomenology of Perception does not manage to restore’ (Ibid.). Although

Time at the Depth of the World

123

the major point made here is true, it is interesting that Barbaras points to depth as what is needed to be articulated to a greater degree in moving outside immanence. Merleau-Ponty’s thought needs to progress further in this direction, but what I am hoping can be seen is that in his articulation of the notion of depth in the Phenomenology, he has already started to break from Husserl’s transcendental approach, moving beyond subjectivity and a sense of time identified by Husserl’s rational and positivist syntheses, notion of presence, and successively unfolding thrust. In this perspective, I agree more with Mauro Carbone’s position in his The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Ponty’s A-Philosophy, when he states that ‘subjectivity as “fissure” already appeared in the Phenomenology of Perception without being deepened’ (Carbone, 2004, p. 11). Depth itself was to lead Merleau-Ponty into articulating the chiasmatic nature of time and the further displacement of the human into the world’s play of becoming.

2. The Phenomenology’s Move beyond Traditional Spatial Depth to Time’s Depth In order to appreciate the originality of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking through of depth as the ‘dimension of dimensions’ and as the heart of time, it is helpful to contrast it with traditional philosophical notions of depth— notions which ontologically discount depth as resulting from the subjective experience of space. Depth has been regarded throughout the Western cultural history as the ‘third dimension,’ as a derivative phenomenon resulting from the accidental location of the subject, and not as part of the ‘real furniture’ of existence. In other words, it is not an ‘objective’ feature of the world made of objects ‘in themselves.’ Depth is conceived of in this way if one believes that the real and the knowable are to be found through rational analysis, that is to say, by breaking things into their most simple constituents. From within this perspective, the most simple spatial given is the point, a location on a Cartesian grid of locations. When one connects two of these points, there is a line, the emergence of extension in space. Projecting a set of these lines to form a plane, there is a length and a width to an object, such as a piece of paper. However, it is only when there is another axis of extension put into relationship with the first two that depth is born or when there is a spanning of juxtaposition along another axis of extension. If this juxtaposition of planes could be seen from a vantage that was ‘outside’ of space as traditional notions of objectivity project and in order to occupy a vantage that is not in any particular relationship to these

124

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

locations, there could be seen to be a measurable distance that could be drawn among all points within space. This neutral array of spatial locations would lack any emotional and existential significance to space, which for Merleau-Ponty are its primary significance. For the tradition, from this absolute ‘vantage,’ all points could be reduced to a network of linear relationships and depth would not appear. In his lengthy discussion in the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty expresses the traditional attempt of objectively defining depth this way: ‘What I call depth is in reality a juxtaposition of points, making it comparable to breadth. I am simply badly placed to see it’ (1962, p. 255). Seen in this way, we are all ‘badly placed’ as being caught within space and also time. It is because of our facticity, our being embodied and located within a situation, within space, that there is depth. As rooted within the specific objects, people and events of my particular phenomenal field, I am always first ‘here’ and drawn into depths of that into which I plunge through perception: ‘thus thought can’t be understood as belonging to the thought of an acosmic subject, but as a possibility of a subject involved with a world’ (Ibid., p. 232). If we were floating in a continuous aerial perspective, or actually in a non-perspective, as a ubiquitous presence, able to see all and coincide with all, located nowhere, outside the system of space-time, self-subsistent and un-formed by these relationships—in other words, if we were like God, or at least occupying a ‘god’s eye perspective’—depth would evanesce. Merleau-Ponty recognizes that the traditional philosophical perspectives of intellectualism and empiricism in aspiring to this notion of objectivity as a God’s eye perspective have no way to appreciate the primacy of depth: In order to treat depth as breadth viewed in profile, in order to arrive at a uniform space, the subject must leave his place, abandon his point of view, and think himself into a sort of ubiquity. For God, who is everywhere, breadth is immediately equivalent to depth. Intellectualism and empiricism do not give us an account of the human experience of the world, they tell us what God might think about it. (Ibid., p. 255) God as eternal, self-transparent and omnipresent would not be a being of depth. He or She would be infinite, and for that reason would be shallow, infinitely shallow! To base a philosophical description of experience and the phenomenon of the world on what it might be like from the nonperspective of God, from the world as utterly objective in that sense, is not only to not achieve a phenomenology of perception, but also to mystify

Time at the Depth of the World

125

vital dimensions of the way the world has significance. God’s vision is simply inaccurate to the world that human beings inhabit, the one we are trying to fathom, certainly phenomenologically and otherwise. For example, God can’t locate Himself or Herself at the window and strain to see that man emerging from the distance. He or She is that man walking and also all points of Creation. There is no straining, no coming to make something out in the distance, no reaching into the depths. This is the curse of coincidence and of the utter clarity of absolute knowing, such that the phenomenon of depth disappears. Of course, the human being sitting at the window is also beyond itself in the expanse of creation, too, as Merleau-Ponty points out in the sentence after invalidating God’s vision as relevant to describing our experience. This is the other aspect of depth. If I am that person at the window, then I am also that man in the distance in some way, too. I synaesthetically feel the dirt under his feet as I see his legs, feel the sweat trickling down his back as he climbs the hill in the bright sun, and smell the aroma of honeysuckle that I note he is passing. Not only that, but I am above his head from the perspective of the birds aloft, or the towering trees, or even the high-flying clouds, as well as seeing him from behind through the hill, its waving grasses, the stump behind him. This is the fabric of the ‘phenomenal field’ as Merleau-Ponty has articulated it in previous chapters in the Phenomenology before arriving at his extending discussion of depth, when after stating that to perceive an object is to plunge into it, he describes how this is also to inhabit the world from its perspective, and how ‘every object is the mirror of all the others’ (Ibid., p. 68). This means that although the perceiver is anchored ‘here’ from their particular vantage they are also ‘there’ and ‘there’ and ‘there.’ ‘When I look at the lamp on my table, I attribute to it not only the qualities visible from where I am, but also those which the chimney, the walls, the table can “see”: the back of the lamp is nothing but the face of which it “shows” to the chimney. I can therefore see an object in so far as objects form a system or a world’ (Ibid.). The inhabitation of the object is as well the inhabitation of all the objects, events, and dimensions which are knitted together within the fabric of the phenomenal field. However, the phenomenal field does not comprise the universe but surrounds us with the objects with whom we have a history, that appear in the narratives of our culture, that are open to the dimensions of our perception, that have been conceptualized by our science and fall within the concern of our personal and collective interests and cares. Even though all these aspects are ‘co-given’ in the perspective that I occupy, there remains a greater and heavier weight to my position on this side of the lamp or at

126

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

the same level as the man approaching and not the bird’s or clouds’ or treetops’ spatial plane of existence. Yet, even from this anchorage— our ‘here’—we feel the uplift of the other movements, the tissue of the relatedness of that which comprises the context of perception even in the descriptions of the Phenomenology of Perception as a dilation of our being into the world around us that returns to us from all the reaches of the field as the sense we inhabit.1 Even though in the Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty had not yet the language of the ‘flesh of the world,’ depth, as he articulated it, opens up a tidal relation—that is, one that moves eccentrically between perceiver and world: ‘It announces a certain indissoluble link between myself and things by which I am placed in front of them, whereas breadth can, at first sight, be taken, as a relationship between things themselves, in which the perceiving subject is not implied’ (Ibid., p. 256). Depth is the dimension of ‘the indissoluble link’ between embodiment and world, perceiver and perceived and will move us from the plane of consciousness to another plane not identified in the traditional concepts of philosophy. Depth is that dimension of perception which announces that I exist as returning to myself from being embedded within my surroundings or as emerging from those vectors of motility inscribed within what Merleau-Ponty had called the phenomenal field. Although Barbaras states that it is only after the Phenomenology that Merleau-Ponty will face the ‘need to understand sensibility as the very beginning of knowledge rather than as its other’ (2004, p. 48), Merleau-Ponty has shifted away from consciousness as our basic knowing of the world toward a depth of being in the world—a depth that comes from embodiment’s primordial ‘understanding’ of the world in perception, in sensibility. Depth is the dimension of becoming mirrored back to myself through an embodied interweaving with the thickness of materiality in perception within the vision of all things, people, creatures, and events that are mirrors of each other and any vision of them (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 68). If depth only emerges with appreciating ‘that being is synonymous with being situated’ (Ibid., p. 252), then as Merleau-Ponty states in describing space, ‘space always precedes itself,’ in the sense that it is inscribed already in trajectories and vantages points from a prior experiencing that betokens further unfolding. The spatial attributes of depth are references to the temporality of existence. This is not to say that time is derived from our sense of space, but rather that time itself is lodged within the landscape and its resounding within space is a primordial depth. The locatedness of the perceiver is to be understood by realizing that ‘we must understand

Time at the Depth of the World

127

time as the subject and the subject as time’ (Ibid., p. 422). In this decentered sense of subjectivity, Merleau-Ponty declares ‘I am myself time’ and ‘this primordial temporality is not a juxtaposition of external events’ (Ibid., pp. 421–2). Humans cannot be ‘in’ time, in the sense that we cannot be in a succession of moments that would need something then to synthesize them, such as the Kantian mental apparatus, but rather ‘time’s synthesis is a transitional synthesis, the action of a life which unfolds, and there is no way of bringing it about other than by living that life’ (Ibid., p. 423). Perception occurs within an unfolding of the world as manifest where there is no time beneath, behind or ahead of it, but rather ‘temporal dimensions, insofar as they perpetually overlap and bear each other out and confine themselves to making explicit what was implicit in each, being collectively expressive of that one single explosion [un seul éclatement] or thrust [ou une seule poussée] which is subjectivity itself’ (Ibid., p. 422). Merleau-Ponty, in this late passage of the Phenomenology, has put in the place of subjectivity a description of the ‘explosion’ from whose depths the world emerges continually. The term used here in this passage of the Phenomenology of Perception in focusing on time and depth is one of those precursors we can find if we look very carefully of Merleau-Ponty’s last writings, when in ‘Eye and Mind’ he turns to the word ‘deflagration’ in place of any possible sense of a selfsubsistent subjectivity in describing depth as the ‘dimension of dimensions.’ Similarly to how he describes in this last published essay how the painter and what he paints both emerge from the deflagration lit when each person comes into the world, so here in the culminating pages of the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty also casts what is experienced within the world as an ongoing explosion. At this point in the work, ‘the subject’ has been volatized as well as ‘states of consciousness’ denied. This ‘explosion’ in the site where what had been taken as subjectivity is now articulated as another face of time, which we are able to recognize when we have arrived at ‘recognizing that time and significance are but one thing’ (Ibid., p. 426). The trajectory from the end of the Phenomenology of Perception is moving beyond subjectivity toward a becoming or process view of embodying as the unfolding within time at the depths of the world.

3. Depth as Temporal Unfolding and Fracturing, Placing and Displacing We could say that for Merleau-Ponty, depth is temporal and not primarily spatial. In a very real way, depth is more about the temporal unfolding of

128

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

the phenomena than about the relationships among the array of beings in space. Once we have abandoned the idea of an objective world, what we have really abandoned is the sense of an atemporal world. The Cartesian world of subjects and objects is a world of time ‘instants,’ abstracted away from their being as the temporally unfolding of the world. Given this distortion of the world as lived, within any such clip of abstracted time, the boundaries between subjects and objects, between persons, between humans and animals, and all sorts of divisions and certainties seem more plausible. Yet, as the correlate of what we said previously about Absolute Consciousness having no sense of depth or access to the texture of reality as experienced by humans, so, too, Merleau-Ponty states the world itself would evaporate if it were really to be given in this fashion: [I]f the thing and the world could be defined once and for all, if the spatio-temporal horizons could even theoretically, be made explicit and the world conceived from such a point of view, then nothing would exist; I should hover above the world, so that all times and places, far from being simultaneously real would become unreal, because I should live in none of them and would be involved nowhere. (1962, p. 332) The spatio-temporal horizons are not accessible in a bounded, arrayed side-by-side, or in a discretely successive manner, but are primarily given in the labyrinthine ways of discovery so well articulated by Proust in the Recherche de Temps Perdu and used by Merleau-Ponty as an ongoing instantiation of temporal depth in the Phenomenology of Perception. In the Phenomenology, the longest quote from a literary work is the quotation of Proust’s passage describing how within the momentary sense of any one time and place are a myriad of other times and incidents packed within the moment, but unnoticed until the strands of sense are slackened within the labile moments between sleep and waking, between night and day (Ibid., p. 181). Within experience, the envelopment of the things of the field in each other’s vantages, the way in which the perceiver only perceives from within the phenomenal field, the way in which we are only intersubjectively able to grasp ourselves and other beings is from within the unfolding of time’s depth: The synthesis of horizons is essentially a temporal process, which means, not that it is not subject to time, nor that it is passive in relation to time, nor that it has to prevail over time, but that it merges with the very movement whereby time passes. Through my perceptual field, with its

Time at the Depth of the World

129

spatial horizons, I am present to my surroundings, I co-exist with all the other landscapes which stretch out beyond it, and all the perspectives together form a single temporal wave, one of the world’s instants. (Ibid., pp. 330–1) Each aspect of the world about us is part of that depth of time which stretches back and forward indefinitely with many eddies and vortices: ‘Through my perceptual field with its temporal horizons I am present to my present, to all the preceding past and to a future’ (Ibid., p. 331). Yet, Merleau-Ponty qualifies, this ‘ubiquity is not strictly real’ for it is my personal history, my cultural legacy, my desires, my particular involvements, and so on, that give this temporal depth its shape and the zones of greater meaning that then slide off into obscure zones. This ‘involvement in a field of presence’ means that ‘my life is slipping away from me on all sides and is circumscribed by impersonal zones’ (Ibid., p. 331). This ‘contradiction’ between being placed and displaced within time and space is the depth of the world from which our lives emerge. This temporal topography is the deeper sense of the indeterminacy of the spatial horizons around us and is announced through these concrete things we encounter, as when we walk through a field but are continually given the sense that ‘hidden behind that hill . . . there are meadows and perhaps over there woods’ (Ibid., p. 331) as like other places we have been in the recent or remote past or perhaps have actually been in this particular case or could be in the future if we walked in that direction. In this way Merleau-Ponty explains ‘though I may state that I am enclosed in my present,’ everything around me and within me, the prospect over there, the ease of my step given my history of hiking, for example, my calm at rejoining the countryside, are all ways ‘the transcendence of remote experiences encroach upon my present’ (Ibid., p. 331). For Merleau-Ponty, we can never merely coincide with a present, as Bergson seemed to indicate, despite his articulation of duration, nor is there a point of presence or a circumscribed present as Husserl seems to still believe despite the duration of retention-protention. It is this temporal depth that opens up space such that we can never be just at a point, because ‘Though I am here and now, yet I am not here and now’ (Ibid., p. 331). In all these differing temporal ecstaces within the unfolding now of time, there are differing places embedded within what surrounds and layers our current emplacement. However, as part of that ‘single temporal wave,’ our dispersal in the many times that are unfolding within this time is manifest as an irreconcilable tension within our temporal and spatial being. This

130

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

sense of temporal and spatial ‘wave’ is also an interesting precursor to the chiasmatic relationship of time and space in the late writings. As time, the perceiver is ‘caught up’ in the ‘immanent meaning which is not clear to itself,’ and is the motive for moving ahead into greater apprehension. We are beckoned by the world such that ‘the result of attention is not to be found in its beginning’ (Ibid., p. 31) but only as the emergence of a present sense that we have been seeking as the haunting meaning of the past. Merleau-Ponty states that in my perceiving the table, I enter ‘the thickness of duration which has elapsed while I have been looking at it’ and as its perceptual sense emerges ‘I therefore bring together in one operation concordant but discrete experiences which occupy several points of time and several temporalities’ (Ibid., p. 40). There may at first seem to be aspects of what is to be perceived that are at odds in time or space in such that there is a jostling among them that summons us to resolve what it is that might be in process of coming to be perceived: ‘depth is born beneath my gaze because the latter tries to see something’ (Ibid., p. 262). The perceiver seeks to solve the initially muddled perceptual situation through that motivated push ahead in what Merleau-Ponty called ‘perceptual faith,’ which here might be deemed as the movement into the depths of time. The move in perception to enter an unfolding of time is often a shift into rhythms of unfolding at odds with those I have been inhabiting. So, as I try to see the man approaching me, I enter the rhythm of the steps he has taken to come over the hill and that are carrying him toward me, that is, I enter the transitions of the temporal unfolding of his walk, which would not be a walk without a temporal being ‘spanned’ from the past through the anticipated future. However, to focus on the spanned quality of the temporal unfolding is to peruse the surface of the temporal depth of what we perceive, for it is not just the momentary unfolding whose meaning we enter, but rather as with entering a spatial locality that is also the co-givenness of all these other vantage points, there are so many other temporal unfoldings that are part of this depth of what is to be perceived. The man can only be grasped as a being who once was a child and is moving toward the future time when he will only be able to hobble over that hill, as well as the perceiver who saw such things in era long ago that is also still part of the upsurge of time. However, even these aspects of the thickness of temporal experience, its long expansiveness, do not take us to the true depth of the temporal unity of the field. There are also all the temporalities lodged within each aspect of the phenomenal field he traverses, whether the prehistoric past of the rocks he climbed in molten eras or ice ages or the lives of differing creatures of different ages now part of the dirt upon which he walk and so on indefinitely about him. All these temporalities are

Time at the Depth of the World

131

impacted into the coming to be of the unfolding of time and become more of a focus for Merleau-Ponty in the late lectures on nature. Yet, even so, what is here brought to attention is the layering in the depths of the span of the existence of the perceiver, the community of perceivers, and the history of the perceived—all three within a lived unity. There is also to be explored within the ambiguity of time’s unfolding, the disunity of time in the displacements of the perceiver and the abysses of the perceived within the night of time. This disunity is the other side of time’s unity as the night is ‘the other side’ of day. In order to highlight the disunity and the non-being of the unfolding of time at the heart of its appearing, let’s again imagine how the Absolute Mind of objectivity or the God’s eye experience would experience time differently. For an Absolute Mind, the man moving over the hill, past the brush, toward the perceiver in the shade after the hot plain would move in a Zenoian universe of fully occupied points in time. Their unity would be that of instantaneous and complete coincidence and identity within omniscience. For the human perceiver watching the man walk forward in space, in time, there may well be echoes of myriad sorts in observing him cut his hand on the brambles as he passes them by waving his arms and in noticing a trickle of blood down his palm. For the human observer, this present moment might become displaced and yet incorporated into a scene of pain and torment and possible redemption thousands of years ago at Calvary, or for a certain other person, in a more personal way it may be a gap or hole in time containing the time at the seaside when their spouse cut a hand. God in the sense of Absolute Mind, however, can’t be ‘pulled outside’ Himself by the depth of time to Calvary or displaced in a jumbled mosaic with gaps and flashings within time, since he is fully and equally in all times. When this absolute gaze would focus upon any time, it would be the pure present as absolutely effulgent there in itself. By contrast, to use the word ‘displacement’ for the human sense of time is not quite correct, since this being pulled back and forth, this being at the future, in the past, at the future, at another time in the past, and so on, is the now that is a human time. Our being absent from ourselves pulled within the vortices of time is the human sense of the present. Events and objects teeter on the abyss of what they are not in the unfolding of time, since they are continually undermined in their selfsameness. This spinning around a void is their way of being present, something Merleau-Ponty will come to describe in the latest writings, yet implied by his notion of depth. The presence of the world in the present is the continual flashing forth of myriad times and even temporalities within the ongoing ‘explosion’ of time. As having depth, time is layered, fractured, a kaleidoscope of jostling interwoven moments that are eddies in the never-ending temporal flow that pushes ahead only as

132

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

slipping continually into myriad reversals, echoes, burstings, bending back upon itself, ephemeral offshoots, and lateral conjoinings.

4. Depth as the Temporal Transformation of Incompossibility To fathom the ‘piling up’ of moments inside each other requires a reexamination of Merleau-Ponty’s articulation of the details of the phenomenon of depth, first introduced in explicating how the vision of the sides of the road as they sweep before me toward the horizon are given to me as neither parallel nor as convergent. In the next sentences, Merleau-Ponty describes how the sides of a cube are neither given to me as six equal squares facing each other at six equal right angles nor as obliquely skewed parallelograms trailing off from the side directly facing me. In each case, to see the road or the cube in the manner of either of these two alternative representations is not to capture the phenomenon of depth. To switch back and forth between the two alternatives would also mean that the perceiver would lose the phenomenon of depth. Instead what is the case within perception is that both possible distinct moments are ‘enjambed,’ piled into each other as one moment. They are distinctly registered but only within the seemingly logically impossible ‘co-givenness’ of a single percept which is not one or the other but rather is the manifestation of depth. Each conflicting aspect of the phenomenon lacks the sense of the overall experience which can emerge only by the temporal unfolding of the sensed unity in disunity within the tension of what can’t go logically together but does. Far from being successive and rationally progressive as the traditional notion builds up depth, this notion embraces a logic in which space and time are enfolding, transgressing into themselves as their very way of being themselves: This being simultaneously present in experiences which are nevertheless mutually exclusive, this implication of one in the other, this contraction in one perceptual act of a whole possible process, constitutes the originality of depth. It is the dimension in which things or elements of things envelop each other, whereas breadth and height are dimensions in which they are juxtaposed. (Ibid., p. 265) As manifesting depth, the fact is that the sides of the square are neither equal nor unequal and the sides of the road are neither parallel nor convergent. They are both at once as having depth. Depth is this phenomenon of experiencing the going together of what should otherwise be

Time at the Depth of the World

133

incompossible, whether right angled squares as also being parallelograms or non-convergent lines also being convergent lines. It seems that rationally, within the traditional sense of temporal unfolding, these things should be successive as logically discrete moments, yet they are ‘contracted’ in the depth of temporality. However, this is not just the case in the more straightforward sense of what is perceived of basic geometrical shapes, but is also the case for complex significances. So, for example, the moment of seeing the man’s hand bleed should be past, as should be what happened at Calvary thousands of years ago, as well as the shock of seeing one’s buddies’ blood suddenly leaking onto the ground after a grenade exploded decades ago. These moments are now in the sense that what is present would not be what it is without their ‘flashing’ conjoining; and, they are still now, too, as becoming what they were to be but couldn’t have been in the same way as now. These events enjamb in a depth of what is now here and now not here. The truth is that the moment is not one or the other, and it is not both either as ‘added up.’ A time and a place does not become non-sensical because it has more incompossible meanings identifying it, but rather it gains depth. Not any two incompossibles can be brought together, but within these cultural or historical or personal contexts, sometimes there is an exigency of greater meaning that emerges within their enjambment. Time is not the successive laying out of moments, but is rather the enveloping of enjambed senses of time as manifest within the human world (as it is for other creatures in their own ways, as we will see later). From these lines of force and reverberation emerge the timeful sense of things. The world in this temporal and spatial depth takes us into a labyrinth whose deeper passages we glance away from in our daily need to get done with things. The whole may speak to us in an overall sense, but yet within it are myriad elements with temporal depths that might be further fathomed, and in doing so, alter and enrich the sense of everything to which they are related. The body dispersed in the depths of perception is the body called to dispersal in time: ‘to sum up, the ambiguity of being in the world is translated by that of the body, and this is understood through that of time’ (Ibid., p. 45). This dispersal within time, this body of the past with its innumerable futures called forth from the phenomenal field to be further enfolded in the depth of time is what Merleau-Ponty called the ‘memory of the World’ into which we are inserted in perception: And that again is the essence of time: there would be no present, that is to say, no sensible world with its thickness and inexhaustible richness,

134

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

if perception . . . did not retain a past in the depth of the present, and did not contract that past into that depth. (Ibid., p. 240) Contraction, juxtaposition, and displacement are of the depth of time. The continuity of time-consciousness detailed by Husserl is found in perception as presumptive: it is a trajectory of perceptual faith as a pathway within a horizon that is besieged by conflicting claims, splinters, discontinuities, and gaps which form a whole within their disarray.

5. The Flesh of Time Merleau-Ponty’s earlier sense of depth as the ‘going together’ of incompossibles in mutual envelopment despite differences in time and space still informs his later notions of the flesh of the world. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty has come to see the perceiver as perceiving ‘by dehiscence or fission of its own mass’ (1968a, p. 146) and the perceived ‘is not a chunk of absolutely hard, indivisible being . . . but is rather a sort of straits between exterior horizons and interior horizons ever gaping open’ (Ibid., p. 132). The perceiver and perceived are ‘two vortexes . . . the one slightly decentered with respect to the other’ (Ibid., p. 138). Rather than being destructive to sense, this dispersion of perceiver and perceived as open and enveloping is sense’s depth as reversible and chiasmatic. Like the strands of a chromosome that constitute its being in their encircling chiasm, their folding over one another, the decentering of the perceiver within the world and the world within the perceiver leaves both as a ‘turning about one another’ (Ibid., p. 264). This depth of perception in which perceiver and perceived are both gaping open, not totalizable, means one is seen in seeing and the seen comes to see. Depth, for Merleau-Ponty, arises within dehiscence, contralogically across gaps, and these jostlings are primordially temporal. In Merleau-Ponty’s notes of the fall of 1960, where he understands ‘time as chiasm’ (Ibid., p. 267), he comes to see time as having a depth in which it ‘leaps’ gaps in order to be one flow: ‘a point of time can be transmitted to the others without “continuity” without “conservation”’ (Ibid., p. 267). These flashings of time in which one moment comes to others ‘without continuity’ suggests how moments of time can transform a past across gaps, as ‘sudden reversibilities.’ In addition to a temporality of reversibility in which the past keeps becoming itself through unfoldings which transform it, the temporal flow takes on an even greater depth in its own chiasmatic

Time at the Depth of the World

135

reversals, foldings back, which are of a more wild or brute sort. Husserl’s sense of a flow of time consciousness that unfolds in its unity of protentional and retentional syntheses is rejected for a time more chiasmatic, more brute, more ‘tufted.’ When time is seen to be found within the unfolding of the body’s perceptual explorations, one sees the ways in which held within the landscapes are depths which cause the perceiver’s time to burst, to reverse, to be released into the ‘straits gaping open’ within things, landscapes, that hold us in holding them. Merleau-Ponty has moved from Husserl’s analysis of progressive time to one ‘without fictitious “support” in the psyche’ (Ibid., p. 267), to a time lodged within the world in its savage or brute being. Merleau-Ponty, in opening the depth dimension of time, points to part of the phenomenon of time in which its overall flow is transfixed and transformed, irradiated from within by leaps and lateralizing flashes of sens which emerge at that moment in a manner different than the development which emerges from the conserved retentional significance in its continual unfolding. This jolting point of institution of a new meaning is one which transforms the entire previous developmental unfolding until this point is a chiasmatic one, in which time not only leaps up in transformation, but also reverses its flow. This is the temporality that Merleau-Ponty has sought throughout his work, inspired by Bergson but surpassing him, a temporality that functions according to what he now calls the ‘barbaric Principle’: It is a question of finding in the present, the flesh of the world (and not in the past) an ‘ever new’ and an ‘always the same’—A sort of time of sleep (which is Bergson’s nascent duration, ever new and always the same). The sensible, Nature, transcend the past present distinction, realize from within a passage from one into the other. (Ibid., p. 267) At this point in his thought, Merleau-Ponty realized that there were differing dimensionalities within the upsurge of time. Time, itself, was not unitary in its internal structurations, but rather its unity was seen to be the presumptive unity of ‘perceptual faith.’ This is the ‘unity in depth’ of incompossibles which nevertheless ‘go together.’ The past is itself present, not just through the latter’s (i.e., the present’s) retentional reverberations or the former’s (the past’s) protentional reach, but also as a bursting of the world in tufts (en touffe) outside the realm of intentionalities and acts. The present itself could be seen to be located within a past of lateralizing, flashing reversals that are part of the verticality of Being, the ‘passages from

136

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

one into the other’ between temporal ecstaces that are leaps, ‘barbaric,’ and aside from the eidetic laws of unfolding phenomena. For Merleau-Ponty, part of the understanding of how the seeing-seen, touching-touched, perceiving-perceived, dichotomies had to be overcome in an autochthony in which ‘activity = passivity’ (Ibid., p. 265) is to see that the reversibility of the flesh is the reversibility of past and present: ‘Then past and present are Ineinander, each enveloping-enveloped—and that itself is the flesh’ (Ibid., p. 268). Although the sequential unfolding and resonating of time as articulated by earlier phenomenologies expressed part of the sense of the perceptual world as temporal, these characteristics were not exhaustive. Time, as the unfolding within one another of the perceiverperceived, itself folds back across itself, both in sudden enfoldings, conflagrating ‘reversals,’ and within larger temporal rhythms of the becoming of becoming. It is not surprising that Merleau-Ponty abandoned the Husserlian analysis of temporality for several reasons central to his notion of flesh and its reversibility. Merleau-Ponty noted that ‘Husserl’s error is to have described the [temporal] interlocking starting from a Prasenfeld considered without thickness, as immanent consciousness’ (Ibid., p. 173). Husserl failed to articulate the ‘time of the body.’ For Merleau-Ponty, the missing ‘thickness’ of Husserl’s understanding of time is inseparable from his retreat into immanence and his sense of the ‘interlocking’ nature of time-consciousness. As Merleau-Ponty puts it: ‘Mythology of a self-consciousness to which the word “consciousness” would refer—There are only differences between significations’ (Ibid., p. 171). We will not get beyond the traditional dichotomies, nor articulate the worldly character of the phenomena until we cease to think of consciousness and its ‘acts,’ reject the notion of subject, and think the ‘promiscuity with Being and the world’ (Ibid., p. 239). For Merleau-Ponty, humans are decentered in the emergence of significance within a fluctuating world and the correlative notion of time is equally abyssal. Within the world seen in its verticality, there is not an exhaustive space or a time that is spread out before us and behind us, but rather we find things which speak to us, which touch us, which strain to become visible just as we are seen within an interplay of divergences and dehiscences, joinings and couplings, which always pulls us into the depths of what the things in our world have come to mean. The recognition of the perceptual field, as this jostling, bustling summons to see, touch, perceive the sens of one’s life, as the voices of these many things, seducing one’s body into their vortices of significances, coming together in the midst of their difference, is itself

Time at the Depth of the World

137

the becoming of the play of time, and leads Merleau-Ponty to replace Husserl’s diagram of temporality: The structure of the visual field, with its near-bys, its far-offs, its horizon, is indispensable for there to be transcendence, the model of every transcendence. Apply to the perception of space what I said about the perception of time (in Husserl): Husserl’s diagram as a positivist projection of the vortex of temporal differentiation. And the intentional analysis that tries to compose the field with intentional threads does not see that the threads are emanations and idealizations of one fabric differentiations of the fabric. (Ibid., p. 231) We are in the world in which both myself and world are at depths, at interplays, which come together in their incompossibility in the enlacement of time. I come back to myself from the world, whether from the river outside my window, the blue sofa, the Bach violin concerto filling the space of the room: ‘That is, that the things have us, and that it is not we who have the things’ (Ibid., p. 194). As held within the depths of things, one finds one’s past in jolts and foldings, weavings and tears, that render time a tufted, chiasmatic implosion and interlacing, as well as an unfolding. It is in thinking of how radically one is within the field of Being ‘dotted with lacunae and the imaginary’ instead of within a flux of unfolding experiences that Merleau-Ponty takes up Husserl’s notion of ‘rays of time and of the world’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968a, p. 240) and expands upon it. Merleau-Ponty states, ‘The ray of the world does not admit of a noemanoesis analysis’ (Ibid., p. 242). As it is that moment of the passivity of our activity, that way in which the world inserts new vectors into our sense of the world that are also vortices. We are toward a world of things that can shift and jostle, explode or implode dehiscently, yet still be fated to burrow into the marrow of their sense. For Merleau-Ponty, there is no present in time, as we have commonly represented it. [T]he new present is itself transcendent: one knows that it is not there, that it was just there, one never coincides with it—It is not a segment of time with defined contours that would come and set itself in place. It is a cycle defined by a central and dominant region and with indecisive contours. (Ibid., p. 184) Despite the sense of the present in which we are enmeshed, there are cycles, circularities turning toward themselves in the rhythm of perception within

138

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

time. My body is in things, at their depths and ultimately at the depth of the world. Things do not rend themselves open as unfurling announcements of sense. They do not transform themselves as frictionless, weightless, diaphanous meanings. They hold me, haunt me, hunt me, as the one who may slowly yield parts of their meaning always heard in echo and endlessly improvising on their origins and futures. For this reason, Merleau-Ponty must recast Husserl’s sense of the present: [T]he present, also is ungraspable from close-up, in the forceps of attention, it is an encompassing. Study exactly the Erfullung of the present: the danger of the metaphor: it makes me think that there is a certain void that has its own dimensions and that is filled by a defined quantity of the present. (Ibid., pp. 196–7) The present never fills what was somehow ‘missing’ but impending in time. The past was always there as itself indeterminable, as cyclic, and as a haunting of what might become. The present isn’t necessarily held to a debt of time; it is not enslaved to past promises; it renders not the past’s due, but gives the past the present of itself, allowing the past to become itself, in new depths.

6. The Depth of the World’s Memory in the Late Notes and Nature Lectures Merleau-Ponty is seeking an ‘architectonic’ of the past in April, 1960, in his working note in The Visible and Invisible in seeking another sort of time within time that is ‘the past as “indestructible,” as “intemporal”’ as he seeks the ‘elimination of the common idea of time as a series of “Erlebnisse”’ (Ibid., p. 243). This ‘common idea of time’ as a series of experiences, the propulsive movement of ‘inner time-consciousness’ had been both the common sense of Western culture of how time is straightforwardly lived and the basis of phenomenology’s sense of the flow of the unfolding of being-in-the-world, especially as laid out in Husserl’s Phenomenology of Inner Time-Consciousness. In this 1960 note, Merleau-Ponty is exploring the generativity of sense outside the life of the ego, but also outside the structurations of ‘interiority,’ in a way that ‘the intentional analytic cannot grasp’ (Ibid., p. 243). There is a fissure, or actually fissures, within time itself in its massiveness, such that there is an ‘intemporality within temporality itself,’ since the depth of the world as the depth of time has layerings and encompasses rhythms

Time at the Depth of the World

139

and acquisitions at odds with the cultural round of projects; fissures that go beyond, or rather subtend the life of the individual. Merleau-Ponty right after discussing how ‘the ray of the world doesn’t admit of a noemanoesis analysis’ explains that the bursting forth of vectors and assemblages of sense cannot be traced to a generation in consciousness or even to a bodily intentionality. At this moment Merleau-Ponty says, we need a ‘philosophy of transcendence’ (Ibid., p. 244). There are senses within time that adhere to each other not through our consciousness or though intentionality, but are borne within the time of the world into which we are enfolded. We might say, there are moments when we are ‘timed’ by the world. Since we are reversibly within the world as flesh, there is a ‘spatializingtemporalizing vortex (which is flesh and not a consciousness facing a noema)’ (Ibid.). Merleau-Ponty calls for philosophy to ‘restore this life without Erlebnisse’ (Ibid., p. 243), where generativity is not solely of an interiority and sense is grounded in a dimension within time which is not about our specific individual life and history, but is deeper, is of a ‘time before time, to the prior life’ which is akin to ‘a mythical time’ (Ibid., p. 242). Merleau-Ponty states that time akin to mythical time goes beyond the sense of phenomenology as looking at intended meanings, as describing that successive horizon or thrust of unfolding that Husserl has articulated where the present draws upon the past in projecting a future. This other time is outside the unity of lived time, the time of significations. There is this other time within the time of rock and sky, of rhythms in differing animals’ blood, and within shifting continents, which is another order of time in which there is a ‘past-present “simultaneity”’ (Ibid., p. 243). This simultaneity is not one of a depth of experiences which might pile upon each other, which as we have seen already introduces a disjunctive element and indicates a kind of a depth of time within the living through of experiences. Here is a ‘vertical’ time, which is the way in some real sense we are intended by the world, as much as we intend it (Ibid., p. 244). The world as it encroaches upon us has a much wider horizon than that of personal or even collective experience. Here, Merleau-Ponty says, we have entered a philosophy of transcendence by way of an indirect ontology. For Merleau-Ponty, this is to enter a time of vortices, a level of sense of embodiment’s life within flesh of the ‘spatializing-temporalizing vortex’ that Barbaras calls ‘neither present nor past but passage itself, vertical being, dimensionality’ (Barbaras, 2004, p. 225) and ‘a height of time itself, [that] while not spatial, is not strictly temporal’ (Ibid., p. 227). Certainly, with these articulations of a time within the depth of the world, MerleauPonty is not returning to some sort of naturalistic ontology, but rather to the full implications, as he says here, of the Ineinander, that there is no ‘inside’

140

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

of humanity nor ‘outside’ of the world, but only a vortex in which inside and outside revolve or wind about each other—are both and yet disjunct. Human being temporalizes itself as within the history of its unfolding toward its projects’ possible realizations in a way that its being of the earth, of the history of the natural world and even aspects of the cultural world, exerts a countervailing pull into the past impacted within the world’s surround. The formulation of ‘winding’ (serpentement) as ‘a common nucleus’ which is ‘beyond the “point of view of the object” and “the point of view of the subject”’ (Ibid., p. 195) had arisen in Merleau-Ponty’s note of May 20, 1959, when he was criticizing Husserl’s notion of time as not radical enough to approach the ‘night of forgetting’ (Ibid., p. 197). Here, Merleau-Ponty writes the declaration that ‘the things have us and that it is not we who have the things’ (Ibid., p. 194) in a formulation which is not just another statement of the ‘reversibility’ within perception, but is specifically evoked in an attempt to ‘make clear what it means’ that within time there is a dimension of retentions that are ‘of the rhythm of the event of the world’ (Ibid., p. 196). It is also here that Merleau-Ponty uses once again, decades later, the formulation that seemed to have undertones even as they were written at that time that went beyond the context of the Phenomenology of Perception. Decades later, Merleau-Ponty again declares that what he seeks in this note is of the ‘Memory of the World’ (Ibid., p. 194). We are held by the world in such a way that its time enlaces our own as differing and the same, and is voiced indirectly in our way about the world. So, to offer a brief example, one may intend that mountain as a being that resists one’s effort to climb it and as an obstacle to be surmounted, as in Sartre’s example in Being and Nothingness of how intentionality shapes the world as it appears to us through our actions in our projects. However, whatever sense it may have for me within this context of desires, the mountain, too, ‘intends’ me as a fellow being engaged in a dialogue of muscles and bones with rocks whose legs reverberate to the stone that gives the mountain its massive solidity and gives my legs their own stability and power to surmount the climb with their inner mineral core. The climber leans into the mountain with a body that burns with its own inner heat that can’t help but be an echo and reverberation of the eons of molten flow present at the birth of the mountain that cooled and shifted within the earth that still burns mightily at its core. There is a longer time frame than human drama, exhaled by the perdurance of the mountain, by the splashing flow of the rivers, and the angling of the sun lowering in the afternoon. Science may give us more details through a dialogue with these beings about the details of these pasts, but their weight, age, density, and long rhythms were always felt

Time at the Depth of the World

141

by humans as unfathomable whisperings and resonances on this planet echoing within time—a deeper time that Merleau-Ponty calls ‘geological’ in the nature lectures (2003a, pp. 262–3). Merleau-Ponty ends this note of May 1959 by reminding us that the structure of perception takes in figures against a background, but some backgrounds are too vast, they outstrip human being, and have disappeared within a disarticulation that is ‘the night of forgetting’ (1968a, p. 197). There is a discontinuity in this time (Ibid., p. 196) that is not directly available. One might think to locate in this night of time the gaps between what has been articulated, but the vertical dimension of time is not about articulation, being deeper than what can be articulated. Rather, the vertical dimension of time and being is accessible only within perception, by entering into the depth of perception (Ibid., p. 236). In the ‘Chiasm’ chapter of The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty’s unpacking of the percept of ‘the red’ of a dress has demonstrated how differing times are impacted within perception, and are part of the invisibility of the visible, differing times which as a whole are within the unfolding of historical time, but also other times of the imaginal, the geological, the impersonal anonymous time from ‘the first day’ of a life and our shared life of perception, dreams, and so on. This ‘intemporality’ within temporality, this dimension of a ‘past-present “simultaneity”’ (Ibid., p. 243) is not a simultaneity of experiences that have become enjambed within each other, but rather is the sense of ‘“Nature is at the first day”: it is there today’ (Ibid., p. 267). Again, returning to this theme of the natural world and time in the notes of November 1960, Merleau-Ponty uses a metaphor of the night in referring to this time within time as ‘a sort of time of sleep’ (Ibid.), that which is an ‘“ever new” and an “always the same”’ (Ibid.). The time of the first day and other past times that will never be directly accessible are nevertheless within time and within the inexhaustibility of perception as much as night is part of our days even if it is not visible or present in the same way. The planet has a long unfolding in time and materiality as it is within the flesh of the world that holds time, exhales time within the perceptual layerings of our becoming enlaced with the world in ‘lateral relations’— where one thing is inseparable from its being bound up with the other being. As creatures like other creatures emergent from the surroundings, we find ourselves claimed and located within this depth of time: In what sense the visible landscape under my eyes is not exterior to, and bound synthetically to . . . other moments of time and past, but has

142

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

them really behind itself in simultaneity, inside itself and not it and they side by side ‘in’ time. (Ibid.) When Merleau-Ponty lectured at the Sorbonne on nature in 1956–1958 and 1959–1960, unlike most thinkers of that time or of the past few decades, he told his students that there was a unique sense or meaning beyond cultural constructs to nature that could be interrogated. There was a primordiality to nature that outstrips its institution in language and thought, a primordiality, although enigmatic, because we are of it, instead of before it, and that can be expressed, although indirectly (Merleau-Ponty, 2003a, pp. 19–20). In this note of November 1960 he juxtaposes, our sensible insertion in the surroundings of the natural world and how part of this intertwining is of a different temporal order, ‘The sensible, Nature, transcend the past present distinction, realize from within a passage from one into the other . . . Existential eternity. The indestructible, the barbaric Principle [le Principe barbare]’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968a, p. 267, n. 321). MerleauPonty is at the edge of language here, in trying to express, to almost gesture forth, the way in which the advent of events within the natural world is still occurring and yet also has at the same time the sense of being at a fundament or at a stasis of that which is the heart of the world. It is ‘outside the bounds’ or barbaric and is of an order that is existentially eternal, like the mountains which predate and postdate humanity and its cultures. These notes in the Visible and the Invisible echo the thoughts offered near the end of the lectures on nature, in which Merleau-Ponty is circling around similar considerations of the sense of time lodged within the natural world in terms of its differing levels which both outstrip human beings and yet hold us. In a passage that proceeds from a consideration of ‘worked over time’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2003a, p. 262),2 Merleau-Ponty is exploring how the differing dimensionalities of time in evolution and personal existence, or the pace of change genetically and in the lives of creatures are of differing orders that cannot be synthesized. The properties of each time are not deducible from the other (Ibid., p. 263). Similarly, there are geological shifts and transformations, which are on a differing temporal order than that of these objects in daily life. Merleau-Ponty says that we need to think of ‘temporal spatial levels’ that are within time and space as its vertical dimensionality, but cannot be assimilated to each other. These times ‘complement’ one another, but there is no ‘simultaneous fixing on the micro and the macro’ (Ibid.). All of the living beings within this temporal field can be seen to be a ‘sum of instabilities’ (Ibid.). There is in one’s breath the first gasp of creatures up from the water into air, a gasp repeated by

Time at the Depth of the World

143

each human not only at birth but in some sense with each intake of the world’s atmosphere. Like the night, first characterized by Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology as ‘pure depth’ (1962, p. 283), these depths of time engulf us in another sort of pure depth which is not accessible, but is a larger theater to the small drama of our personal or historically collective lives. We creatures have running through us and beneath our own time differing times on other levels of who we are that reverberate within our perceptions of the world, often unnoticed. This has a spiritual significance in that the depths of the meaning of our existence are found at the depths of the time of the planet as a shared life sense. Merleau-Ponty’s thought leads us toward a spirituality that is an affirmation of the space/time depth of the Earth—an ‘ecospirituality’—and not from a spirituality of a transcendence of the planet in a realm of detached spirit. This deepest ‘phenomenological stratum’ of the temporal which is wound into human time as we are wound around the natural world and its past as within a chiasm or helix. As Merleau-Ponty states, ‘we cannot understand the human organism without its external circuit, its planetarization’ (2003a, p. 265). I think it is particularly on this global level that Merleau-Ponty is reflecting, when in the notes of November 1960 in The Visible and the Invisible, he writes that the institution (Stiftung) ‘of a point of time can be transmitted to the others without “continuity” without “conservation,” without fictitious “support” in the psyche the moment one understands time as chiasm’ (1968a, p. 267). It is not in the psyche, but in the depth of the mountain, in the path of the sun across the sky, the rhythms of tides, the blue of the sky, that transmit temporal senses of events that can surface for moments or instants from the depths of time like strange creatures from the sea, but are always felt on the fringes to be living there. I think in this articulation of time culminating in a vertical time emergent from the interwoven human and world, MerleauPonty has retrieved humanity from a more superficial and practically driven sense of time to a time that takes us to the depths of the world and ourselves as interlocutors and potential co-celebrants.

Notes 1

This inscription in the surroundings of our embodiment and the tracing of its motility and its reverberations with the motility of other beings renders to humans a sense of a trajectory that takes us far beyond my position as an object located on a Cartesian grid of discrete locations. We live in that tension. This dilation can easily carry us in our fantasies to the presumption that we might conceive and occupy as the birthright of a truer reality the place from which we could see

144

2

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

everything from everywhere. This presumption to a God’s eye perspective follows the inherent trajectory of embodied perception to its absolute culmination, a tug that pulls at us from within the sense of perception itself, even though it would undermine the ways of perception if it ever were to be achieved. The strength of Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions are that they allow us to see the way in which other philosophies of existence—here, the equation of reality with pure objectivity— have also a ground in perceptual experience. A phrase that seems to reverberate with the phrase that was the last one included by the editors of Merleau-Ponty’s notes (a note from March, 1961) in The Visible and the Invisible, that of ‘worked-over-matter—men = chiasm.’

References Barbaras, R. (2004), The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology. Trans. Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Carbone, M. (2004), The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Ponty’s A-Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Part IV

Limits of Faith and Sacramentality

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 8

Merleau-Ponty and the Sacramentality of the Flesh Richard Kearney

Only through singularities can we find the divine. Spinoza

What can contemporary phenomenology tell us about sacramental incarnation? What light, if any, can it cast on the everyday marvel of word becoming flesh? In what follows I will trace a certain sacramental paradigm of sensibility explored by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I will be suggesting in this chapter a notion of sacramental return that presupposes a certain ‘negative capability’ which keeps us vigilant toward strange signs of the divine beyond the dichotomy between theism and atheism. This calls for a special attentiveness to infinity embodying itself in daily acts of eucharistic love and sharing: the word made everyday flesh. In the phenomenological analyses that follow, I focus on figures of sacrament, Eucharist, transubstantiation, and epiphany. Thus, I begin with some remarks on the Gospel tradition of incarnation and embodiment. So doing, however, I by no means wish to confine the application of these analyses to Christianity, but merely to note the importance of the Christian and indeed Catholic tradition to Merleau-Ponty’s work.

1. Situating a Phenomenology of the Flesh Western metaphysicians since Plato have largely ignored the theme of the ‘flesh.’ So prevalent has this omission been that we might accept it as inherent to the Western tradition. But perhaps this assumption itself fails to show how strange this omission is, given the influence of Christianity on that tradition. A significant portion of the history of that metaphysics is comprised by a ‘Christian’ synthesis of Greek and biblical thought, and

148

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

ought, therefore, to have been amenable to the idea of incarnation and flesh. But scholastic metaphysics (with some notable exceptions like Duns Scotus before scholasticism or Thomas before Thomism) managed to take the flesh and blood out of Christian incarnation leaving us with abstract conceptual and categorical equivalents. There were the mystics, of course, whose lives and confessions testified, as I suggest elsewhere (see Kearney, 2009), to the mystery of transcendent-immanence, but these were invariably sidelined or threatened with Inquisition or the Index (e.g., Eckhart and the Beguines, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Margaret Porete). The Citadel of scholasticism was not breached by their heart-felt heresies. Or, if it was, it remained in proud and sovereign denial. It resisted all such infiltrations of the flesh-invested spirit from without and from within. Even poor Aquinas had the mystical harm taken out of him, his initial nerve and brio reduced to a caricature of itself: Aquinas’ original doctrine of analogy and his concept of divine simplicity in the Summa Theologica (1.1, 3) ruled out any of the purchase on a divine essence that would be implied in reducing God to a principle of sufficient reason (Leibniz) or a metaphysical necessity (second-hand scholasticism). In this sense Aquinas, and Bonaventura too, could be said to stand firm against theodicy. By contrast, the closed edifice of Onto-Theology—which enabled subtle thinkers like Aquinas to be submitted to a systematic caricature—admitted of no gaps, no risks, no wagers. Immune to the daring of quotidian incarnation— the daily coming into flesh of the divine (ensarkosis, as Scotus called it)— mainstream metaphysics stood firm, indubitable, intactus. In the Western tradition, it would take Edmund Husserl and the phenomenological revolution to bring philosophy back to the experience of ‘sacramental flesh,’ that is, the possibility of acknowledging Spirit in our prereflective lived experience. Husserl blazed a path toward a phenomenology of the flesh when he broached the crucial theme of the living body (Leib).1 In order to open up a space where neglected notions of embodiment might be revisited in a fresh experiential light, Husserl considered it essential to operate his famous ‘epoché.’ This involved the bracketing of all previous presuppositions—in this instance, everything we thought we knew about the flesh. This suspension of received opinions ran all the way down from the heights of metaphysics to the most basic prejudices of common sense, a whole gamut of assumptions that Husserl lumped together under the label of the ‘natural attitude.’ The acquired mind which Husserl’s phenomenology sought to put out of play covered a wide variety of views about what the ‘flesh’ actually is, ranging from those of speculative systems (realist or idealist) to those of positive sciences like biology, physics, and

Merleau-Ponty and the Sacramentality of the Flesh

149

chemistry, or any number of cultural, social, and ideological attitudes. The suspension also included all religious doctrines and dogmas about the body, sex, desire, and sin. Once all such presumptions were provisionally bracketed, Husserl wagered that the phenomena themselves would be allowed to speak for themselves in their simple, ordinary everydayness. The hypothesis was that after the ‘epoché’ of accredited conventions, the things of experience would be invited, without censure, to show themselves forth from themselves as they are in themselves, that is, in all their multilayered thereness—sensible, affective, intelligible, spiritual. In this manner, experiences of the flesh, all too often neglected by Western metaphysics or ideology, would be redescribed in a new and unprejudiced light.2 Husserl himself, however, only pointed in this direction. He blazed the trail and took some steps along the path, but he did not enter or occupy the terrain. His own work, however pioneering, remained a matter of promissory notes, missionary manifestos, half-finished charts, logs, and maps. For all his talk of returning to the ‘things themselves,’ Husserl remained caught in the nets of transcendental idealism and never quite escaped the limits of theoretical cognition. It would be for his followers to drop anchor and bring the expeditionary flotilla to shore. Heidegger certainly advanced the project of a phenomenology of flesh with his existential analytic of ‘moods’ and ‘facticity,’ but the fact remains that Heideggerian Dasein has no real sense of a living body: Dasein does not eat, sleep, or have sex. It too remains, despite all the talk of ‘being-in-the-world,’ captive of the transcendental lure. Other disciples of Husserl went further, but while Max Scheler and Edith Stein made sorties into a phenomenology of sympathy and Sartre offered fine insights into shame and desire, it is, I believe, only with Merleau-Ponty that we witness a fully fledged phenomenology of flesh. Here at last the body is no longer treated as a mere project, cipher or icon, but as flesh itself in all its ontological depth. The ghost of metaphysical idealism is laid to rest. We return to the body in its unfathomable thisness.

2. Merleau-Ponty’s Sacramental Vision A. A Eucharistics of Profane Perception It is significant, I think, that Merleau-Ponty chose to describe his phenomenology of the sensible body in sacramental language. Other commentators have remarked on this language,3 yet I wish to develop the implications here in relation to the sacramental imagination. This terminological option

150

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

amounts to what I would call a eucharistics of profane perception. Let me take some examples. In the Phenomenology of Perception we read, Just as the sacrament not only symbolizes, in sensible species, an operation of Grace, but is also the real presence of God, which it causes to occupy a fragment of space and communicates to those who eat of the consecrated bread, provided that they are inwardly prepared, in the same way the sensible has not only a motor and vital significance, but is nothing other than a certain way of being in the world suggested to us from some point in space, and seized and acted upon by our body, provided that it is capable of doing so, so that sensation is literally a form of communion. (Merleau-Ponty, 2002a, p. 246)4 What we have here is a basic analogy of proper proportionality: A is to B what C is to D. Namely, the sacrament of transubstantiation is to the responsive communicant what the sensible is to the capable perceiver.5 But Merleau-Ponty’s eucharistic vision is not confined to a single passing allusion. He goes on to delineate this eucharistic power of the sensible as follows: I am brought into relation with an external being, whether it be in order to open myself to it or to shut myself off from it. If the qualities radiate around them a certain mode of existence, if they have the power to cast a spell and what we called just now a sacramental value, this is because the sentient subject does not posit them as objects, but enters into a sympathetic relation with them, makes them his own and finds in them his momentary law. (Ibid., p. 248) In other words, each sensory encounter with the strangeness of the world is an invitation to a ‘natal pact’ where, through sympathy, the human self and the strange world give birth to one another. Sacramental sensation is a reversible rapport between myself and things, wherein the sensible gives birth to itself through me. It is a curious paradox that when Merleau-Ponty traces the ‘phenomenological return’ all the way down to the lowest rung of experience (in the old metaphysical ladder, the sensible), he discovers the most sacramental act of communion. ‘Communion’ here is no ‘mere’ metaphor: Merleau-Ponty requires this specific eucharistic act to present the complex intertwining of the finite and infinite, as ‘communion’ is intimately related to MerleauPonty’s notion of a chiasmatic crossing of ostensible contraries, the cognitive

Merleau-Ponty and the Sacramentality of the Flesh

151

in the carnal, the outer in the inner, the invisible in the visible. Here we have a reversal of Platonism and Idealism: a return to flesh as our most intimate ‘element,’ namely, that which enfolds us in the systole and diastole of being, the seeing and being-seen of vision. Phenomenology thus marks the surpassing of traditional dualisms between body and mind, real and ideal, subject and object. Unable to express this new model of existence in traditional philosophical language, phenomenology eclipses dualism specifically by adopting the religious language of the Eucharist and communion. Rather than merely appropriating these terms for its own purposes, phenomenology yields to the subtlety of this terminology. To speak of communion is not to speak of one mind ‘interacting’ with another mind, but to speak of a new, intersubjective mode of experience. This is how Merleau-Ponty describes the enigma of flesh as mutual crossingover in his posthumously published work, The Visible and the Invisible: The seer is caught up in what he sees . . . the vision he exercises, he also undergoes from the things, such that, as many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by the things, my activity is passivity . . . the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen. It is this Visibility, this anonymity innate to Myself that we have called flesh, and one knows there is no name in traditional philosophy to designate it. (1968a, as cited in Kearney, 1986, pp. 88–9) It is here, I suggest, that Merleau-Ponty gets to the heart of this ‘nameless’ matter and descends, in a final return, a last reduction that suspends all previous reductions, to the incarnate region of the ‘element’: The flesh is not matter, in the sense of corpuscles of Being which would add up or continue on one another to form beings. Nor is the visible (the thing as well as my body) some ‘psychic’ material that would be—God knows how—brought into being by the things factually existing and acting on my factual body. In general, it is not a fact or a sum of facts ‘material’ or ‘spiritual.’ No, insists Merleau-Ponty, the matter is quite otherwise: The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we would need the ancient term ‘element,’ in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate

152

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

principle that brings a style of Being wherever there is a fragment of Being. The flesh is in this sense an ‘element’ of Being. (Ibid., 89)6 Again, Merleau-Ponty finds traditional philosophical terminology insufficient to the phenomenon. The element of the flesh, in short, is the medial entre-deux between the whole of Being and each individual fragment. It signals, in pre-Socratic terms, the embodiment of ‘nascent logos’ in everyday mundane things. B. The Profane Sacramentality of Art To improve on the language of philosophy of mind, traditionally understood, Merleau-Ponty uses both the language of Christian incarnation and the language of art and poetry. The connection between these two domains—religion and art—is not arbitrary. The artist enacts a eucharistic transformation of this world into another world in this one, to use the words of Paul Éluard. Returning to examples of painting—Cézanne and Klee—in Eye and Mind (1993), Merleau-Ponty expounds on the chiasmic model as a mutual transubstantiation of seer and seen in a ‘miracle’ of flesh. He articulates his position in these ontological terms: There really is inspiration and expiration of Being, action and passion so slightly discernible that it becomes impossible to distinguish between what sees and what is seen, what paints and what is painted . . . There is no break at all in this circuit; it is impossible to say that nature ends here and that man or expression starts here. It is mute Being which itself comes to show forth its own meaning. (Merleau-Ponty, 1993, p. 129) Already in Signs (1964c), Merleau-Ponty had explored the claim that the flesh of art is invariably indebted to the bread of life. There is nothing so insignificant in the life of the artist, he holds, that is ineligible for ‘consecration’ in the painting or poem. But the ‘style’ of the artist converts his/her corporeal situation into sacramental witness at a higher level of ‘repetition’ and ‘recreation.’ The art work still refers to the lifeworld from which it springs, but opens up a second order reference of creative possibility and freedom. Speaking specifically of Leonardo de Vinci, he writes, If we take the painter’s point of view in order to be present at that decisive moment when what has been given to him to live as corporeal destiny, personal adventures or historical events, crystallizes into ‘the motive’

Merleau-Ponty and the Sacramentality of the Flesh

153

(i.e. the style), we will recognize that his work, which is never an effect, is always a response to these data and that the body, the life, the landscapes, the schools, the mistresses, the creditors, the police and the revolutions which might suffocate painting are also the bread his work consecrates. To live in painting is still to breathe the air of this world. (Merleau-Ponty, 1964c, pp. 70–1) Through the circuit of eye and mind, vision and flesh, the painter’s vision miraculously transforms the bread of the world of perception into the sacrament of art. But Merleau-Ponty sees the transformation of the quotidian into the sacred not only in visual art but also in the art of fiction. Particularly exemplary of the transfiguration by fiction is the work of Marcel Proust. In Proust, Merleau-Ponty shows how we witness the consecration of ordinary moments of flesh and blood thisness as something strange and enduring. Sacramental idioms are central to Proust’s work, as they are in MerleauPonty’s eucharistic vision. Tropes of ‘transubstantiation,’ ‘resurrection,’ and ‘revelation’ occur in several key passages of In Search of Lost Time. They generally signal a grammar for recovering the timeless in time, as in the famous Madeleine episode. But they also refer to a process of artistic transformation, as in Marcel’s final disquisition on the writing process in Time Regained. If food and taste are sensible idioms which produce the quintessential epiphany of the first kind, I would suggest it is another kind of epiphany, at the end of the labyrinthine narrative, which amplifies the second aspect of Proust’s sacramental vision. I am thinking of the penultimate scene chez les Guermantes when Marcel is left waiting in the library as a preprandial music recital is being performed. Having arrived late, Marcel experiences a cluster of epiphanies just before entering the Guermantes’ salon. In this antechamber of remaindered time certain achronic moments return to him. Marcel’s first involuntary memory is of entering the San Marco Cathedral in Venice. This is a site of eucharistic celebration par excellence. The flash of memory is triggered by Marcel’s stumbling on some uneven cobblestones as he traverses the Guermantes’ courtyard in Paris. Though he had been unable to take in the sacramental quality of the experience at the time (when he first visited Venice with his mother), he relives it now many years later here in Paris. The former ‘unexperienced’ experience is finally reexperienced across the gap of time. This ‘miracle of the courtyard’ is followed by another involuntary memory brought on by the sound of a spoon striking a plate as a waiter in

154

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

the dining room prepares the banquet table (for the feast to come). Then we have a third quasi-eucharistic epiphany as Marcel wipes his lips with a starched table napkin, the sensation suddenly recalling a luminous moment in his childhood when he sat in the dining room of the Grand Hotel at Balbec. And, lastly, Marcel experiences a very formative (if forgotten) moment in his childhood: fetching a volume of George Sand’s novel, François le Champi, from the Guermantes’ library shelves, he suddenly relives an evening when Maman read this same book to him at bedtime in Combray. And it was this nocturnal reading which coincided, as we know from the opening scene of the book, with the inaugural moment when his mother left the dinner table with Marcel’s father and Swann to come kiss her son, Marcel, goodnight. Reading and feasting are thus intimately associated with the maternal kiss—the kiss which set Marcel on his search for lost time, eventually culminating in the novel of that name.7 Proust himself describes the coming together of different time scenes as ‘metaphor’ and ‘resurrection.’ And for Proust these terms are curiously allied, if not identical. Both involve the translation of one thing in terms of another. True art, Marcel comes to realize, is not a matter of progressively depicting a series of objects or events (‘describing one after another the innumerable objects which at a given moment were present at a particular place’); it occurs only when the writer ‘takes two different objects’ and ‘states the connection between them’ (Proust, 1999, p. 290). And here we return to Merleau-Ponty’s logic of sacramental perception. For it is the identification of ‘unique connections’ and hidden liaisons between one thing and another that enables the writer to translate the book of life (that ‘exists already in each one of us’) into the book of art (Ibid., p. 291) (or, to return to Merleau-Ponty’s terminology, into the ‘bread’ that the artist’s work consecrates). This is how Marcel puts it— [T]ruth—and life too—can be attained by us only when, by comparing a quality common to two sensations, we succeed in extracting their common essence and in reuniting them to each other, liberated from the contingencies of time, with a metaphor. (Ibid., p. 290)8 That Marcel privileges figures of resurrection and transubstantiation in this work of metaphor is once again a confirmation of what I am calling— in Proust no less than in Joyce—Merleau-Ponty’s sacramental aesthetic. And in both cases, the textual deployment of metaphor as sacramental act articulates an artistic imagination that has lived through the agnostic ‘disenchantment of modernity’ before daring to recover anew the sacred in the secular.

Merleau-Ponty and the Sacramentality of the Flesh

155

In sum, the bread of the world is the very stuff consecrated in the body of the work: the work of art or the work of fiction. Once again we see how Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological accounts serve to revitalize theological and sacramental idioms in a postmetaphysical language. C. Profane and Eucharistic Sacramentality Though Merleau-Ponty revitalizes certain theological and sacramental idioms, let us be quite clear in stating that Merleau-Ponty is no theologian, and he is certainly no Christian apologist. My point is that, from a philosophically agnostic viewpoint, he offers an intriguing phenomenological interpretation of eucharistic embodiment as recovery of the divine within the flesh, a kenotic emptying out of transcendence into the heart of the world’s body, becoming a God beneath us rather than a God beyond us. This brings us to the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s sacramental vision. MerleauPonty himself connects his language of eucharist and sacrifice with the Christian incarnation. These are his words, and while ostensibly agnostic, they are not I think neutral: [T]he Christian God wants nothing to do with a vertical relation of subordination. He is not simply a principle of which we are the consequence, a will whose instruments we are, or even a model of which human values are the only reflection. There is a sort of impotence of God without us, and Christ attests that God would not be fully God without becoming fully man. Claudel goes so far as to say that God is not above but beneath us—meaning that we do not find Him as a suprasensible idea, but as another ourself which dwells in and authenticates our darkness. Transcendence no longer hangs over man; he becomes, strangely, its privileged bearer. (Merleau-Ponty, 1964c, p. 71) When it comes to expressing love for another human being, Merleau-Ponty sees the presence of this ‘transcendence’ in the promise we make to another beyond what we can know or realize in the present moment. The absolute which the lover looks for beyond our experience is implied within it. Just as I grasp time by being present, I perceive others through my individual life, ‘in the tension of an experience which transcends itself.’ There is thus, Merleau-Ponty suggests, no destruction of the absolute . . . only of the absolute separated from existence. To tell the truth, Christianity consists in replacing the separated absolute by the absolute in men. Nietzsche’s idea that God is dead

156

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

is already contained in the Christian idea of the death of God. God ceases to be an external object in order to mingle in human life, and this life is not simply a return to a non-temporal conclusion. (1964a, p. 27) And he adds, ‘God needs human history. As Malebranche said, the world is unfinished.’ Merleau-Ponty realizes that most official Christian churches of his day would not endorse this, but he suggests that ‘some Christians might agree that the other side of things must already be visible in the environment in which we live’ (Ibid.).9 And he knows that writing as a philosopher, not a theologian, he is free to experiment with phenomenological reappraisals of otherwise sacrosanct or congealed ideas. He needs no nihil obstat. Finally, in his Lectures on Nature delivered at the Collège de France between 1956 and 1960, Merleau-Ponty explores the possibility of rethinking God through Nature. He objects to any theism which takes God out of the world, a move he associates with a certain Christian ‘acosmism’—or anti-worldliness—epitomized in the metaphysical equation of total being with a God beyond the world. Such a removal of divinity from the natural and human world threatens to plunge nature into a state of non-being or nothingness. Merleau-Ponty links this to a special ‘malaise of JudeoChristian ontology’ which he defines thus: Such a monotheism carries along with it in all rigor the consequence that the world is not. ‘[F]rom the moment when we say that God is Being, it is clear that in a certain sense God alone is’ [quoting Étienne Gilson]. Judeo-Christian thinking is haunted by the threat of acosmism. (2003a, p. 133) But this acosmic expression of Judeo-Christian belief is, of course, historically specific; it is a particular metaphysical account of the divine, and its relationship to nature, which became dominant in Western philosophy and theology. Like Nietzsche before him, Merleau-Ponty identifies this orthodox account with a disguised nihilism. And I think he is right. For to equate God with a timeless, otherworldly Being, which is sovereign cause of itself and has no desire for nature or humanity—as Descartes and the rationalists did—is to reject the sanctity of the flesh. ‘To posit God as Being [in the metaphysical sense] is to bring about a negation of the world’ (Ibid., p. 137). And it is also, Merleau-Ponty hastens to add, a betrayal of the original message of incarnation—the logos becoming flesh and entering into the heart of suffering and acting humanity.

Merleau-Ponty and the Sacramentality of the Flesh

157

In reaction to this version of metaphysical theism, Merleau-Ponty calls for the recognition of a genuinely atheistic moment in the Christian story of incarnation and crucifixion where Christ experiences a radical abandonment before the father: ‘My God My God why have you forsaken me?’ Merleau-Ponty concludes by contrasting acosmic theism with a certain, albeit oft-neglected, Christian alternative which he identifies with the sacramental engagement with the world—an engagement epitomized by the Worker-Priest movement in France in the 1950s which later found expression in liberation theology and in the attention to what he calls ‘minorities,’ namely, the marginalized and rejected ones. This is his critical diagnosis of acosmic theism: God is beyond all Creation. Theism comes from this position, and moves towards that of no longer distinguishing the critique of false Gods . . . And as Kierkegaard said, no one can be called Christian; faith must become unfaith. There is an atheism in Christianity, religion of God made man, where Christ dies, abandoned by God. (Ibid., pp. 137–8) Merleau-Ponty unhesitatingly admits a moment of atheism into the heart of Christianity. But Merleau-Ponty does not end there. He appends the following summary prognosis: It may be, says a hymn, that the passion of Christ is not in vain . . . See the adventure of the priest-workers, as awareness that we cannot place God apart from humanity suffering in history; hence, so that God may be realized, [we need] the sorting out of humans who are the furthest from God . . . because minorities are the salt of the Earth! (Ibid., p. 138) Merleau-Ponty appears to be implying here that we need a new, nondogmatic relation to Nature (and to God) that opens on the minor, the different, the embodied. Recognizing the radical consequences of incarnation for our understanding of both God and Nature is, for Merleau-Ponty, an anatheist alternative to the endless doctrinal disputes between theism and atheism. In this sense, we might say that Merleau-Ponty would have agreed with the proposal by Bonhoeffer and Ricoeur that we move beyond religious forms disfigured by otherworldly metaphysics to a faith in the divine potential inherent in the everyday secular life of action and suffering, of attention and service to others.10 But where Merleau-Ponty seems to differ from Bonhoeffer and Ricoeur is in supplementing their ‘prophetic’ voice of protest (informed by their war experience of imprisonment) with

158

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

a ‘sacramental’ acoustic of natural existence. In this he might be said to add a more ‘Catholic’ style to the ‘protestant’ iconoclasm of Bonhoeffer and Ricoeur; though in both cases we are speaking of a postreligious expression of these confessional cultures. By relocating the moment of sacred transcendence in the immanence of nature, Merleau-Ponty is restoring logos to the flesh of the world. Deus sive natura.

3. Sartre’s Valediction Merleau-Ponty’s efforts to grapple with the mysteries of incarnation were not lost on his contemporaries. I think that Sartre captures the transcendence-immanence paradox of his friend’s thought accurately in his obituary essay, ‘Merleau-Ponty Vivant.’ Sartre acknowledges that Merleau-Ponty had been drawn to the Catholic community in his youth but had left the Church at the age of 20 while ‘refusing to be considered an atheist in his last years’ (Sartre, 1998, p. 611). Merleau-Ponty remained intrigued, says Sartre, by a certain ‘miracle’ of existence, whereby ‘being invents man in order to make itself manifest through him’ (Ibid., p. 616). Though his friend’s ideas on this subject are very alien to Sartre, he offers a startling description of the anonymous Stranger who incarnates the summons of transcendence in the most destitute beggar before us. One passage—penned by the atheist Sartre confronted with a resonant MerleauPonty ‘metaphor’—is remarkable for its echoes of Christian kenosis and the identification of the divine with the hungry, homeless hospes (Mt. 25). I quote it in full: Didn’t Merleau, from time to time, think he perceived some sort of transcendent mandate ‘hidden in immanence’ within us? In one of his articles, he congratulates a mystic for having written that God is below us, and Merleau added, in so many words, ‘why not?’ He dreamed of this Almighty who would need men, who would still be called into question in each one’s heart, and yet would remain total being, unceasingly, infinitely instituted by intersubjectivity, the only one who we shall lead to the fount of our being, and who will share with us the insecurity of the human adventure. Here we are obviously dealing only with a metaphorical indication. But the fact that he chose this metaphor is not without significance. Everything is there: the discovery and the risk of being is below us, a gigantic beggar-woman clad in rags, we need only an imperceptible change for her to become our task. God, the task of man? . . . Nothing

Merleau-Ponty and the Sacramentality of the Flesh

159

says that he may not, at times, have dreamed it . . . He worked without haste. He was waiting. (Sartre, 1998, p. 617) But this is not all. Merleau-Ponty resisted the Hegelian temptation to choose closure over divine fragility. Sartre’s supplementary invocation of the kenotic trope in Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology is as apt here as it is arresting. Merleau had sought envelopment within immanence, and had collided against the transcendent. More than ever avoiding any recourse to Hegelian synthesis . . . he lets transcendence flow into immanence, there to be dissolved at the same time as it is protected against annihilation by its very impalpability. It will be only absence and supplication, deriving its all-encompassing power from its infinite weakness. (Ibid., pp. 617–18)11 But Merleau-Ponty, I repeat, is neither an apologist nor an historian of religion. He is a philosopher who deploys a specific phenomenological method to articulate the ‘nameless’ phenomenon of sacramental flesh. And it is to be noted that a number of recent phenomenologists have implicitly followed Merleau-Ponty’s lead when seeking to inventory the sacred dimensions of the sensible and erotic, especially, Jean-Luc Marion in his writings on the ‘flesh’ as a saturated phenomenon or Jean-Louis Chrétien in his account of embodiment in sacred art.12 But Merleau-Ponty differs from the theological hermeneutics of Marion and Chrétien in observing a methodological agnosticism with regard to the theistic/atheistic implications of sacramental sensation.13

4. Anatheism and a Phenomenology of the Flesh The insight of ‘immanent transcendence’ which characterizes sacramental aesthetics is not of course unique to Merleau-Ponty, or the artists, novelists, and poets whom we cite to illustrate such an aesthetics. Down through the ages many Christian mystics—from John of the Cross to Hildegard of Bingen and Meister Eckhart—articulated similar things. Nor is this insight restricted only to thinkers in the Christian tradition: Jewish sages like Rabbi Luria and Franz Rosenzweig or Sufi masters like Rumi and Ibn’Arabi also allude to this phenomena. Indeed I am also reminded here of the bold claim by Teilhard de Chardin that God does not direct the universe from above but underlies it and ‘prolongs himself’ into it.

160

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

But it is true that Merleau-Ponty himself, as an estranged Catholic in France, did have a particular affiliation with the Christian perspective. But the tradition of Christianity is much broader than an extreme doctrine of otherworldly orientation. Instead, it is a diverse practice that includes many thinkers who express a eucharistic perspective similar to MerleauPonty’s own. Merleau-Ponty is in a long history of authors writing from inside or the near outside of the Christian faith while disrupting a certain dominant hierarchy within that faith. Consider, for example, Francis of Assisi’s sacramental vision of the natural world. St. Francis’ vision represented a profound ‘heresy of the heart’ which broke from previous metaphysical doctrines of Christianity as acosmic denial of the body. Max Scheler provides a vital reading of Franciscan embodiment that is of special relevance here, given his close links with phenomenology; his work helps us to situate Merleau-Ponty’s vision in relation to this historical precedent in St. Francis. Scheler argues that the sacrament of the Eucharist shows how Christian love may ‘acquire a footing in the living and organic, through its “magical” identification with the body and blood of our Lord under the forms of bread and wine’ (Scheler, 1954, p. 85).14 And he suggests that these came to be virtually the only natural substances, in a very ritualized setting of Holy Communion, which permitted a union with the cosmos—until, that is, mystics like Francis and Claire of Assisi came to embody this communion in their everyday lives, restoring sacramentality to the living universe of nature, animals, and humans. Francis’ bold heresy, in Scheler’s view, was to have challenged the gulf between humans and nature introduced by ‘traditional Christian doctrine,’ addressing—as Francis did—both fire and water, sun and moon, animals and plants, as ‘brothers and sisters.’ Against the acosmic tendencies of mainstream metaphysical Christianity, Francis’ intrepid achievement was to combine love of God with a sense of ‘union with the life and being of Nature’ (Ibid., p. 87). His greatness was to have expanded the specifically Christian emotion of love for God the Father to embrace ‘all the lower orders of nature,’ while at the same time uplifting Nature into the glory of the divine (Ibid.). Some of Francis’ contemporaries thought him unconventional. Others thought him mad. For here, after all, was a mystic who dared conjoin transcendence and immanence, the sacred and the secular, by calling all creatures his brothers, and by looking with the heart’s keen insight into the inmost being of every creature, just as though he had already entered into the freedom of glory of the children of God. (Ibid., p. 88)15

Merleau-Ponty and the Sacramentality of the Flesh

161

This mystical panentheism—the view that God is in all beings—was condemned as atheistic blasphemy by many orthodox Christians before and after Francis. But for Francis, as Scheler recognizes, it was a way of restoring God to the world, of rediscovering a living God amidst the ashes of a dead one. Though Merleau-Ponty does not invoke the mystical Francis in any explicit sense, his vision of sensible incarnation is, I believe, deeply Franciscan—or should I say ana-Franciscan?—in spirit. Like St. Francis, Merleau-Ponty expands the range of natural objects that can represent God manifest in this world. In his Nature Courses, he shows that Descartes alienated God from this world and Nature from the incarnation of God. For Descartes, nature is only ‘the exterior realization of a rationality that is in God’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2003a, p. 10). God is complete, perfect, and otherworldly; this world is merely a by-product. Lost is the Franciscan sense of the presence of God in nature, the ongoing participatory transformation of divinity in the natural world. In overturning the Cartesian ontology, Merleau-Ponty effectively returns God to this world, a transcendence in immanence. The eucharistic imagination, described by MerleauPonty, is no longer the exclusive preserve of High Church liturgies but is generously extended to acts of quotidian experience where the infinite traverses the infinitesimal. But not only quotidian experience but artistic experience effects sacramental transformation. As we have seen, Merleau-Ponty attends to the eucharistic transformation in visual art, poetry, and Proust’s vision. MerleauPonty follows Francis in acknowledging a sacramentality to all of Nature, but perhaps goes even farther in admitting the transformative sacramental practice of art, poetry, and fiction. Whether this mutual traversal of the sacred and secular in art and literature is a matter of sacramentalizing the secular or of secularizing the sacred is, of course, central to our discussion. What I am wagering here is that the anatheist paradigm may allow it be both at once. Religion as art and art as religion. Not one or the other. Though I am well aware that the relationship between faith and fiction remains, here again, a complex one. These words from Matisse perhaps best encapsulate Merleau-Ponty’s eucharistic vision of the transformative act of art: In art, truth and reality begin when one no longer understands what one is doing or what one knows, and when there remains an energy that is all the stronger for being constrained, controlled and compressed. It is therefore necessary to present oneself with the greatest humility: white,

162

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

pure and candid with a mind as if empty, in a spiritual state analogous to that of a communicant approaching the Lord’s Table. (Matisse, 1983, p. 238) No crypto-evangelist then, Merleau-Ponty follows Husserl in suspending confessional truth-claims. And this amounts, I think, to the philosophical equivalent of the poetic license enjoyed by artists and writers when it comes to the marvel of transubstantiation in word, sound, or image. In this respect, we could say that the phenomenological method—which brackets given attitudes—is analogous to the literary suspending of belief and disbelief for the sake of inclusive entry to the ‘kingdom of as-if.’ This suspension, as I develop in Anatheism (Kearney, 2009), allows for a specific ‘negative capability’ regarding questions of doubt, proof, dogma, or doctrine, so as to better appreciate the ‘thing itself,’ the holy thisness and thereness of our flesh and blood existence. The attitude of pure attention that follows from such exposure to a ‘free variation of imagination’ (the phrase is Husserl’s) is not far removed, I believe, from what certain mystics have recognized to be a crucial preparatory moment for sacramental vision: a moment they have called by such various names as ‘the cloud of unknowing,’ the ‘docta ignorantia,’ or in Eastern mysticism the ‘neti/neti’(neither this nor that)— experiences which pave the way for the deepest wisdom of reality.16 True belief crosses non-belief. In the free traversal of the imaginary, indispensable to the phenomenological method, everything is permissible. Nothing is excluded except exclusion. By allowing us to attend to the sacramental miracle of the everyday, without the constraints of exclusivist or absolutist truth-claims, Merleau-Ponty offers fresh insights into the eucharistic character of the sensible. This is not a last word. It is a cleared space to begin again.

Notes 1

See in particular Husserl, 1989, and Husserl, 1970. See the excellent commentary in Franck, 1981 as well as in Marion, 2002, 2003, 2006, and Chrétien, 2003. William Desmond also has interesting philosophical points to make about the sacredness of the flesh in his recent essays on ‘consecration’ (Desmond, 2005). One might also note here the way in which a thinker like Paul Ricoeur has attempted hermeneutic retrievals of classic thinkers like Spinoza on singularities and conatus or Leibniz on dynamis in light of a phenomenological awakening to the living body, and the work of feminist thinkers (e.g., Keller, 2003, and Irigaray, 1985). Nor should we omit reference to Gabriel Marcel’s intriguing philosophical

Merleau-Ponty and the Sacramentality of the Flesh

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

163

reflections on incarnation and embodiment, which exerted a considerable influence on the ‘religious’ phenomenological writings of Ricoeur and Levinas (Marcel, 1949). See finally Schloesser on painting (especially Rouault) and what he calls ‘mystic modernism,’ in Schloesser, 2005. See Morley, 2008, pp. 144–63. See also Husserl’s statements on God, transcendence and the absolute cited in Kearney, 2005, p. 220. Patricke Burke argues that for Merleau-Ponty, as for Schelling, artistic creation depends on receptivity to a divine grace or gift. Cf. Burke, 2005, p. 191. See also Gary Brent Madison, 1973. I am grateful to John Manoussakis for this reference; for an extended discussion of this theme, see Manoussakis, 2007. This is a bold analogy for an existentialist writing in France in the 1940s, a time when close colleagues like Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus considered militant atheism de rigueur; cf. Cohen-Solal, 2005, and Bair, 1990. Merleau-Ponty is influenced here by Gaston Bachelard’s ‘phenomenology of the elemental,’ already developed in the years 1938–1948, and brought to fruition in later works like Poetics of Reverie (Bachelard, 1971). Bachelard also explored the notion of reversible seeing and reversible speaking in the context of a passiveactive acoustic. Merleau-Ponty explicitly acknowledges his debt to Bachelard in The Visible and the Invisible at page 267 and elsewhere. See also Rizo-Patron, 2008. Contrast this inaugural—and ultimately lost—kiss of maternal ‘fusion’ with the disastrous kiss of ‘diffusion’ which Marcel experiences with Albertine later in the novel. The closest Marcel may be said to achieve a eucharistic kiss, beyond these two extremes, might be the brushing of his lips on the table napkin chez les Guermantes which recalls the meal at the Grand Hotel in Balbec, or perhaps more emblematically, the image of the ‘star-shaped’ cross-roads where the two diverging paths of his youth—le chemin de Méséglise and le chemin de Swann— converge almost mystically, chiasmically, ‘transversally,’ in the figure of Ghilberte’s daughter, Mlle de St Loup, at the final party. But this final kiss is a kiss deferred for others, in the future, just as the final meal chez les Guermantes is a feast postponed: his lips touch the napkin but he does not eat. Gilles Deleuze makes the point in Proust and Signs that Proust’s experience of ‘essences’ requires the ‘style’ of art and literature to be brought to expression. Proust speaks here of ‘a qualitative difference in the way that the world looks to us, a difference that, if there were no such thing as art, would remain the eternal secret of each man’ (see Proust, 2000, p. 895). In Time Regained Proust famously describes the move from the inner secret essence within each life to the style of literary art an act of ‘translation.’ Deleuze refers to a ‘final quality at the heart of the subject’ due to the fact that the essence ‘implicates, envelops, wraps itself up in the subject’ (Deleuze, 2000, p. 43) and in so doing constitutes the unique subjectivity of the individual. In short, essences may be said to individualize by being caught or inscribed in subjects in what Proust referred to as a ‘divine capture’ (Proust, volume I, p. 350). The epiphanic translation of essence is also described by Proust as a ‘perpetual recreation of the primordial elements

164

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

of nature’ (Ibid., p. 906), implying that the essence retrieves the birth of time itself at the beginning of time. Invoking the Neoplatonic idea of complicatio— referring to an original enveloping of the many in the One prior to the unfolding of time (explicatio), Deleuze suggests that it is to this original timeless time, complicated within essence and revealed to the artist, that Proust points when he writes of ‘time regained.’ And, one might add, it also has echoes of Leibniz’ view that each created monad represents the whole created world. Is this not close to what Proust is getting at when he writes of ‘Combray and its surrounding world taking shape and solidity out of a cup of tea’ (Ibid., p. 51)? But in Deleuze’s reading of Proust, essence can only recapture this original birth of the world through the ‘style’ of art—expressing that ‘continuous and refracted birth,’ that ‘birth regained’ in a substance (words, colors, sound) rendered adequate (Deleuze, 2000, p. 46). Though Merleau-Ponty refers only to ‘some Christians’ in this context, I do not think that there is any reason the same principle could not be extended to adherents of other religions as well. I discuss the proposals of Bonhoeffer and Ricoeur at greater length in chapter three of Kearney, 2009. See also Bonhoeffer, 1971; and Ricoeur, 1974, 1978, and 2009. In his autobiography, The Words, Sartre admits that he himself replaced religion with a mysticism of literature: ‘I have been writing for exactly half a century, and for forty years I have lived in a glass prison . . . I realize that literature is a substitute for religion . . . I felt the mysticism of words . . . little by little, atheism has devoured everything. I have disinvested and secularized writing: One could say that my metamorphosis started with the transformation of my relationship with language. I have passed from terrorism to rhetoric: in my most mystical years, words were sacrificed to things; as an unbeliever, I returned to words, needing to know what speech meant’ (as cited in Cohen-Solal, 2005, pp. 357–8). Later, Sartre would replace literature with politics which then became ‘everything,’ the second substitute religion. As described by Sartre, Merleau-Ponty’s refusal of atheism and continued fascination with a certain mysticism of invisible flesh suggests that their attitudes to the sacred were far from identical. Merleau-Ponty did not, it seems, unambiguously replace religion with literature and politics in the same way as Sartre. See Marion, 2006, and Chrétien, 2006. See also the pioneering writings on sacramental aesthetics, as a traversal of the secular by the sacred, of flesh by transcendence, in MacKendrick, 2008, and Schwartz, 2008. An agnosticism which, I suggest elsewhere, opens onto an anatheist option; cf. Kearney, 2009. For a more contemporary account of the relation between the sacramental, the symbolical and the liturgical, see Hederman, 2007. Scheler’s work was informed by Husserl’s phenomenological investigations but lacked the rigor of he phenomenological method, opting instead for a more romantic, eclectic and holistic view of the subject in his writings on feeling and sympathy, see Scheler, 1992. Scheler differs from both Merleau-Ponty and Kristeva, however, in that his reading of Francis’ notion of the sacramental is

Merleau-Ponty and the Sacramentality of the Flesh

16

165

a form of Christian apologetics closer to the contemporary Catholic phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion (see, for example, Marion, 2009). See O’Leary, 2008, pp. 356–7.

References Bachelard, G. (1971), Poetics of Reverie. Boston: Beacon Press. Bair, D. (1990), Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography. New York: Touchstone Books. Bonhoeffer, D. (1971), Letters and Papers from Prison, Enlarged Edition. Ed. Eberhard Bethge. New York: Simon and Schuster. Burke, P. (2005), ‘Creativity and the Unconscious in Merleau-Ponty and Schelling,’ in J. Wirth (ed.), Schelling Now. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Cohen-Solal, A. (2005), Jean-Paul Sartre: A Life. Ed. Cornel West. Trans. Anna Cancogni. New York: New Press. Chrétien, J. (2003), Hand to Hand. Trans. Stephen Lewis. New York: Fordham University Press. Deleuze, G. (2000), Proust and Signs. London: Athlone Press. Desmond, W. (2005),’ Consecrated Love,’ INTAMS Review, 2, Spring, 4–17. Franck, D. (1981), Chair et Corps: Sur la Phénoménologie de Husserl. Paris: ed. De Minuit, Paris. Hederman, M. (2007), Symbolism. Dublin: Veritas. Husserl, E. (1970), The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. —. (1989), Ideas II. Trans. A. Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Irigaray, L. (1985), Speculum of the Other Woman. Cornell: Cornell University Press. Kearney, R. (1986), Modern Movements in European Philosophy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 88–9. —. (2005), ‘Hermeneutics of the Possible God,’ in Ian Leask and Eoin Cassidy (eds.), Givenness and God. New York: Fordham University Press. —. (2009), Anatheism. New York: Columbia University Press. Keller, C. (2003), Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming. London and New York: Routledge. MacKendrick, K. (2008), Fragmentation and Memory. New York: Fordham University Press. Madison, G. (1973), La Phenomenologie de Merleau-Ponty. Paris: Editions Klincksieck. Manoussakis, J. (2007), God after Metaphysics: A Theological Aesthetics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Marcel, G. (1949), Being and Having. Trans. Katherine Farrer. Westminster, UK: Dacre Press. Marion, J. (2002), Being Given. Trans. Jeffrey Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. —. (2003), In Excess. Trans. Robyn Horder and Vincent Berraud. New York: Fordham University Press. —. (2006), The Erotic Phenomenon. Trans. Stephen Lewis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

166

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

—. (2009), ‘The Phenomenality of the Sacrament—Being and Givenness,’ in Bruce Benson and Jeffrey Bloechl (eds.), French Phenomenology’s Theological Turn. New York: Fordham University Press. Matisse, H. (1983), Jazz. Trans. Riva Castleman, New York: George Braziller. Morley, J. (2008), ‘Embodied Consciousness in Tantric Yoga and the Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty,’ in R. Kearney (ed.), The Interreligious Imagination. Special issue of Religion and the Arts, 12 (1–3). Leiden: Brill, pp. 144–63. O’Leary, J. (2008), ‘Knowing the Heart Sutra by Heart,’ in R. Kearney (ed.), The Interreligious Imagination. Special issue of Religion and the Arts, 12 (1–3). Leiden: Brill, pp. 356–370. Proust, M. (1999), In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6. Trans. A. Mayor and T. Kilmartin. New York: Modern Library Paperback. —. (2000), In Search of Lost Time, Volume 3. Trans. C. K. Scott Montcrieff and Kilmartin. New York: Vintage. Ricoeur, P. (1974), ‘Religion, Atheism, Faith,’ in The Conflict of Interpretations. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. —. (1978), ‘The Critique of Religion,’ in C. Regan and D. Stuart (eds.), The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. Boston: Beacon. Ricoeur, P. (2009), ‘The Non-Religious Interpretation of Christianity in Bonhoeffer,’ in Gregor and J. Zimmerman (eds.), Bonhoeffer and Continental Thought: Cruciform Philosophy. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Rizo-Patron, E. (2008), ‘Regressus ad Uterum: Bachelard’s Alchemical Hermeneutics,’ Philosophy Today, 52, 21–30. Sartre, J. (1998), ‘Merleau-Ponty Vivant,’ in J. Stewart (ed.), The Debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Scheler, M. (1954), ‘The Sense of Unity with the Cosmos,’ in The Nature of Sympathy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. —. (1992), On Feeling, Knowing and Valuing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schloesser, S. (2005), Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris: 1919–1923. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Schwartz, R. (2008), Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Chapter 9

Merleau-Ponty and Modernist Sacrificial Poetics: A Response to Richard Kearney Joseph S. O’Leary

I should like to meditate from a Merleau-Pontean perspective on the processes of transformation at the heart of Modernist writing, as represented by Mallarmé, Rilke, Proust, and Joyce, and to assess the spiritual or religious bearing of these processes. These writers brought about a revolution in perception equal in importance to the revolution in physics that happened in the same years. Philosophers, theologians, and even literary critics, not to speak of people in general, are still far from having absorbed the full impact of this, least of all when they adopt a post-Modernist ideology that professes to have transcended Modernism. Merleau-Ponty’s sustained engagement with the art of painting, where a similar revolution occurred, is deeply grounded in his studies of perception, and has made him a major figure in aesthetics and art criticism. Though he did not develop an original theory of literature, his thinking on art and perception can be a valuable resource for the interpretation of literary Modernism. It may seem, initially, that literature, because of its irremediable disembodiment, would be a less serviceable ally in Merleau-Ponty’s struggle to overcome idealism, including the residual idealism of his phenomenological predecessors, than was painting. But upon reflection this is not so obviously the case, as even Cézanne created a world of essentialized things, things reduced to their elemental, vital thereness through a concentrated study of their textures, aspects, and relations. Conversely, the literary Modernists, as they aimed to ‘make it new’ (Ezra Pound), renewed acquaintance with perception and bodily experience in all their preinterpretive strangeness. The forging of new vision in both painters and writers is realized through what may be called a dynamic of sacrificial transformation. Scholars in theology, religious studies, and philosophers of religion will be quick to pick up the sacral overtones here, but they may learn more if they suspend their interpretive frameworks to let the phenomena of Modernist

168

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

art show themselves on their own terms, terms by no means making for an easy accommodation with inherited religious representations.

1. A Triple Sacrifice: Of Self, World, and God ‘It is by lending his body to the world that the painter changes the world into painting’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964e, p. 16). Merleau-Ponty refers to this as ‘these transubstantiations’ (Ibid.), by which he may mean not only the transformation of perceiver into painter, and perceived world into painting, but also a transferal of substance between the body of the painter and the flesh of the world. Perception and painting both constitute a bodily exchange or struggle between humans and the world. The sacrificial dynamics afoot here concern the artist, the material he or she works on, and the theme or motif of the work. The individual who creates a work of art dies to himself or herself and is reborn as an artist, defined by the work that is being created. MerleauPonty quotes Max Ernst: ‘Just as, since the famous letter of the seer [of Rimbaud] the role of the poet consists in writing under the dictation of that which is being thought, or is being articulated, in him, so the role of the painter is to outline and project that which is seen in him’ (Ibid., pp. 30–1). Equally famous is Mallarmé’s disparition élocutoire du poète (Mallarmé, 1945, p. 360), meaning that the poet as individual vanishes into the voice that utters the poem, or is transubstantiated into that voice.1 This death of the poet is associated with an experience of the death of God: Mallarmé speaks of ‘God, that wicked old plumage, happily overthrown’ (ce vieux et méchant plumage, terrassé heureusement, Dieu; cf. Mallarmé, 1995, p. 362). The crisis in self-identity and the break with conventional visions of the world characteristic of Modernist creators seems naturally to entail a crisis in their idea of God as well, and a sacrifice of inherited ideas of God. Rilke offers the most thorough demonstration of how an individual is transformed as he lives into his poetic identity, shedding earlier conceptions of self, world, and the divine. He was disturbed by Paula BeckerModersohn’s uncanny 1906 portrait of him, painted long before the sovereign breakthrough of the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus in 1922, for she caught his essential identity, the poet latent in the man, a somewhat frightening figure, dehumanized, an oracular mask (cf. Petzet, 1977). Like Merleau-Ponty, Rilke recognized in Cézanne the painter who best realizes and exemplifies the ‘sacramental’ rapport wherein things impress themselves on the perceiver in their vibrant life, indeed authoritatively

Merleau-Ponty and Modernist Sacrificial Poetics

169

claiming the perceiver’s participation or communion. Rilke found himself claimed and challenged by Cézanne in 1907, visiting the Salon d’Automne again and again and sometimes spending hours before a single painting. He saw that the turn or transformation [Wendung] effected by Cézanne was the same as lay at the heart of his own project as poet (Rilke, 1987, p. 193). In a genuine artwork, just as the human being who penned or painted it survives only as a poetic voice or a mode of seeing, the language or palette used is transmuted into a singular idiom, and the world itself emerges in an uncanny new light—‘The light that never was on sea or land’ (Wordsworth). The materials of stone, paint, language, or musical sound are transmuted in function of the style that is the very signature of the artist’s new being. Finally, the experienced world that is the theme of the work of art reemerges, in a scarcely recognizable form, in the vision that the work embodies, a vision taking actual shape only in the process of composition; this is one of the senses in which ‘the vision of the painter is a continued birth’ (MerleauPonty, 1964e, p. 32). The transformation or revelation effected by style replaces the substance of the things painted or the experiences narrated with the substance of the artwork, be it painting, poem, or novel, which simultaneously transcends the world by its singularity and perfection and lights up the world from within. The work would be spoilt by any untransformed residue of the artist’s everyday identity, or of everyday speech, or of an everyday vision of the world. It is easy to see why Merleau-Ponty and artists themselves use a religious or quasi-religious terminology of sacrifice, sacrament, metamorphosis, and resurrection to name these phenomena. Usually these are metaphors used without any theological intention, or even with the anti-theological intention of secularizing religious discourse by providing its purely thisworldly referent, though some Christian artists, such as Eliot in Four Quartets, attest to an intimate link between artistic creation and the religious quest. A phenomenologist would be well advised to bracket initially such religious associations, even practicing a ‘methodological atheism,’ so as to let the inherent dynamic of the work of art come into view. Only then can one go on to ask about its possible religious significance, which cannot simply be read off from the religious jargon Merleau-Ponty or artists themselves sometimes use. Merleau-Ponty avoids any subjection of painting to ideology, working instead to understand it on its own terms, in its silent resistance to philosophical concepts. For this purpose he develops an approach from below, seeking to show how painting is born from perception. He finds an analogy in ordinary perception for the interchange between artist, subject matter

170

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

and artwork, following the principle that ‘painterly expression reprises and surpasses the mise en forme of the world that began with perception’ (Merleau-Ponty. 1969, p. 86). As Kearney observes, ‘Each sensory encounter with the strangeness of the world is an invitation to a “natal pact” where, through sympathy, the human self and the strange world give birth to one another. Sacramental sensation is a reversible rapport between things and myself wherein the sensible gives birth to itself through me’ (p. 150, this volume). In a sense this would make nascent artists of all perceivers. The word ‘sacramental’ here seems to mean sensation charged with significance, or what, to adapt Jean-Luc Marion’s vocabulary, one might call ‘saturated sensation,’ sensation that one does not transcend toward something else, but that carries in it the full reality of worldhood. Cézanne created paintings that view their viewers, an effect MerleauPonty found in everyday perception: ‘The seer is caught up in what he sees . . . the vision he exercises, he also undergoes from the things, such that, as many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by the things, my activity is passivity’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968a; cited in p. 151, this volume). A similar experience pervades Rilke’s poetry, as it attempts to establish ‘the pure relation’ (der reine Bezug) or ‘the known figure’ (die gewusste Figur) that holds the world together, and that is something like the law that presides over Cézanne’s painting, the inner rhythm or secret harmony of things (cf. Allemann, 1962). Rilke speaks of the Weltinnenraum, the world as relived and reshaped in memory and imaginative recreation, so vivid to Rilke that he could speak of trees as growing in him. This is not merely a modern metaphysics of subjectivity, as Heidegger thought (cf. Heidegger, 1977), but is more like the breaking down of the opposition of self and world, subjective and objective, that Zen Buddhism aims at. Approximating to this realm as a philosopher, Merleau-Ponty ‘descends, in a final return, a last reduction that suspends all previous reductions, to the incarnate region of the “element”’ (p. 151, this volume). It is a reduction to where one always already is, as in Heidegger, but with a precise taking into account of the fleshly and visible world, seen as Cézanne teaches us to see it. In 1937 Fritz Novotny used the term ‘reduction,’ in opposition to the willful and distorting associations of ‘abstraction,’ to denote ‘a distillation of the essential or the elemental’ (Gosetti-Ferencei, 2007, p. 159). The essential is never a brute given, but has to be brought to light, just like the phenomena in phenomenology. Imagination is intrinsic to the perception of it, and technique is intrinsic to imagination. We are far from the extrinsicism of a mimesis that is mere copying, spiced up by imagination, and given polished packaging by technique.

Merleau-Ponty and Modernist Sacrificial Poetics

171

Given the intersection of Merleau-Ponty’s and Rilke’s readings of Cézanne, one might wonder if Merleau-Ponty saw the congruence of their readings or if he saw similar tendencies in Rilke’s poetry itself. Clearly he was more deeply read in the accessible Proust than in the arcane Rilke,2 and it is perhaps to be regretted that he did not resist the enchantments of the novelist to grapple more intently with the poet. He understood Proust so well that he could find in him ample nourishment for his meditation on the theme of ‘the visible and the invisible.’ Some have accused Merleau-Ponty of reading his own theories of perception into Proust and ignoring the fact that Proust was not interested in the ‘depth’ of the visual world but found the meaning of his perceptions only in an inner space of consciousness.3 It is true that Proust, though fascinated with perception and its transformations in memory and imagination, did not inherit as fully as Rilke Cézanne’s urge to ‘break through to the essence of things’ (Ibid., p. 151). Monet and Renoir merit three references each in Proust’s great novel, Cézanne none. Rilke prized Cézanne’s sense for reality or matter-of-factness (Sachlichkeit), and saw his world of perception as conveying a renewed, authentic grasp of Nature. One is not tempted to say of Proust what Rilke said of Cézanne: ‘Here all of reality [Wirklichkeit] is on his side’ (cited in Gosetti-Ferencei, 2007, p. 153). However, there are great moments of lyrical vision in Proust, connected with flowers and landscapes, which enact an effort to interrogate the being of Nature. Edmond Jaloux noted long ago that this contemplative dimension is likely to rise to the surface of Proust’s prose at any time, interrupting the intense novelistic study of human behavior and psychology (Jaloux, 1953, pp. 20–5).4 But direct contemplation of nature leaves the Proustian narrator unsatisfied; only when a natural object is charged with associations of memory can it be ‘in direct communication with my heart’ (Proust, 1988, volume I, p. 182). Merleau-Ponty is attracted by the Proustian idea that ‘reality is formed only in memory’ (Ibid.).5 ‘There is an architectonic past; cf. Proust: the real hawthorns are the hawthorns of the past . . . This past belongs to a mythic time, to a time before time’ (MerleauPonty, 1964d, p. 296). But Merleau-Ponty would not identify the real world as narrowly with the remembered one as Proust does, sacrificing the former to the latter.6 He would have been more at home with Rilke’s transformation of the world into the Weltinnenraum, which is an exhibition of the essence of the world, not its translation into a subjective sphere. But both writers effect a sacrificial transformation of the empirical (including the empirical ego) into the transcendental, a dimension that has its own undeniable presence and authority, independent of the representations of sacredness or transcendence found in any religion.

172

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

2. The City Consumed Implicit in the birth of Modernist artistic vision is another sacrifice—the sacrifice of past representations of reality and art. Like Husserl, Proust and Joyce perform a ‘bracketing of all previous presuppositions—in this instance, everything we thought we knew about the flesh’ (p. 148, this volume). This is not to say that they ignore previous tradition; indeed, they are steeped in intertextuality. Rather, their forte is the radical rewriting of that tradition, in an overcoming of the implicit metaphysics of Western literature that could be paralleled with Heidegger’s retelling of the history of Western philosophy. For the great Modernists intertextual allusion was never an idle game; it was a struggle to appropriate and surpass what humanity had allowed itself, up to that point, to see and to say. Harold Bloom’s theory of ‘the anxiety of influence’ does little justice to this; these artists were not concerned with their own originality but, in a Nietzschean spirit, with allowing the new to emerge from the husks of the old (cf. Bloom, 1997). Of them, as of Husserl, one might say that their ‘suspension of received opinions ran all the way down from the heights of metaphysics to the most basic prejudices of common sense’ (p. 148, this volume), and that they wrote at every step against the grain of the ‘natural attitude.’ As Kearney acutely notes, this natural attitude is in reality an ‘acquired mind,’ holding consciousness in thrall. Sacrificing traditional securities and conventions is not just a matter of shaking them off in order to see things plain. It may be that ‘Husserl wagered that the phenomena themselves would be allowed to speak for themselves in their simple, ordinary everydayness’ (p. 149, this volume).7 But when Proust and Joyce champion the everyday, they do so by denying that it can ever be simple and ordinary, or emerge in a transparent neutral language. The ‘epiphanies’ of Joyce and Proust are not simple data but elaborately staged phenomena; their experiential basis is thoroughly recreated as fiction, filtered through the medium of imagination, or carefully set in a context that confers maximum signifying power on them. In turn, Merleau-Ponty, whose insight into literary language nourishes and is nourished by his basic phenomenology of speech (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, pp. 174–99; 2002a, pp. 202–32), alerts phenomenology to the impossibility of rendering its linguistic medium innocuous and transparent. Language has inbuilt opacities, and is used with greatest clarity only when it becomes style. The phenomena at the core of Proust’s and Joyce’s art are not natural objects, but the spectacles of modern urban culture. These can be focused

Merleau-Ponty and Modernist Sacrificial Poetics

173

only in a vast play of reference matching the historical depth and cultural breadth of the city. The Modernist sacrificial dynamic comes into play in both novelists in their refusal of documentary naturalism. Both are martyrs of style, bent on transubstantiating their cities, without remainder, into linguistic monuments. Both evoke eucharistic symbolism, not only for the mutually nourishing relationships between the characters (the mother’s or Albertine’s kiss in Proust, the prostitute’s kiss in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), but for the way their art is nourished by the reality of experience and in turn nourishes its consumers. Proust, recalling devotions of his childhood, toyed with the title L’Adoration perpétuelle for the contemplation of the lost time immortalized in art (Proust, 1988, volume IV, pp. 798–832). Composition, in the immature imagination of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus and in the mature resolution of Proust’s narrator, becomes the confection of a sacred food of which the reader is welcomed to partake (one of Proust’s admiring readers compared his novel to a rich cake.) Where Cézanne, and Rilke in his wake, feed on natural things, birthing them anew in the idealized or primordial medium of art, Proust and Joyce are involved in an enterprise of transformation that works not on the secret rhythms of Nature but on the complexities of individual and group behavior. They have consumed their cities, having first been consumed by them, and after long digestion in memory they rebuild their cities, or embalm them, in the medium of style.8 The rhythm Proust and Joyce take up is not one of nature but of culture, namely, the voracious dynamism of consumption that keeps the modern city ticking—something Cézanne shunned. Their urban novels are peopled by consumers of all kinds: the snobs and culture-vultures, sexual prowlers and mercenary lovers in Proust, and the drinkers and commercial travelers in Joyce, are part of a vast capitalist machine. Capitalism reaches its tentacles even into the intimacy of perception in Proust’s dizzying analyses; for instance in the slow Wagnerian introduction of three personages, Madame de Villeparisis, Saint-Loup, and Charlus (at Balbec, where they can be observed at leisure), each of them is as it were x-rayed in capitalist terms; their clothes, behavior, accent are appraised; their social value and its signs are registered, with comic errors, by the hotel staff, Françoise and the Blochs (Proust, 1988, volume II, pp. 54–126). In both Proust and Joyce we are dealing with a remembered city, made malleable to poetic transfiguration. Like Musil’s Vienna or Kafka’s Prague, the pre-World War I city, viewed across the gulf of the Great War, becomes a precious relic as it glows in its novelistic shrine (cf. O’Leary, 2002). The transformation is tinged with a deathly hue, and the action of the novels proceeds as a memorial ritual. The author who writes À la

174

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

recherche du temps perdu is no longer the living fleshly Marcel but his ghost.9 The Dublin of Ulysses is dead and the book is its astral body. Merleau-Ponty does not seem to have read Ulysses, and this, too, is to be regretted. For Proust’s consumption of the city is still an essentialistic reduction, whereas Joyce shows that style does not constitute the essence of things, but sets up a pluralism of perceptions that can never be recalled to a unitary vision. Just as Rilke explores the ‘pure relation,’ Proust embarks on a quasi-scientific quest for hidden liaisons between one thing and another, which enable the writer to translate the book of life into the book of art. In so doing he transforms remembered time into the space of art, ‘Proustian space’ (l’espace proustien) (cf. Poulet, 1963), but not in the sense of the spatial flattening of time denounced by Bergson, for the space is structured by temporal relations, as in Rilke. In Joyce the relations that bind and order the experiences of city life are no longer pure laws, but are dictated arbitrarily, like the rules of a game, rules that change from chapter to chapter of Ulysses. Density of significance is not brought out of the depths of the object through the magic of style, but resides rather more in the free play of linguistic creation for its own sake. Joyce shows us Stephen in the act of willfully creating liaisons—notably in the library scene in Ulysses. The imposition of Homeric myth on a Dublin day is a formula for generating artificial relations rather than discovering natural ones. Joyce subverts essentialism by demonstrating that any harmonious and necessary connections between the realities of experience and the texture and structure of art are illusory. Thus the characters metamorphose before our eyes as the styles used to describe them whisk us through the whole history of English language and literature in the parodies of ‘Oxen of the Sun,’ while the frozen objective scientific language of ‘Ithaca’ shows that the effort to get beyond the arbitrariness of style and subjective perspective results in the strangest distortions of all. The ‘odyssey of style’ through the 18 episodes of Ulysses reveals an endless variety of ways in which the data of experience can be portrayed and processed (cf. Lawrence, 1981). The age of Cézanne has yielded to that of Picasso. The unitary conception of worldhood and being that presides over MerleauPonty’s meditations has yielded to an irrepressible pluralism. Devotion to deepening one style has changed into virtuosity in mastering many, and in forswearing any individual style of one’s own, as Joyce, more than any previous writer, succeeds in doing in the second half of Ulysses. This is not just the ventriloquism of the parodist, but the revelation that the world is what style makes of it.

Merleau-Ponty and Modernist Sacrificial Poetics

175

3. How the Work Consumes the Reader and Itself In Proust and Joyce, the web of motival connections is so thickly spun that the novel absorbs the reader’s energies, or consumes them, and thus lays claim to the reader as Cézanne lays claim to the viewer through the multitude of relations that he establishes within his paintings. ‘The relations of the reader with the book resemble those loves where first one of the two dominate, because he has more pride or petulance, but soon all this breaks down and it is the other, more taciturn and discreet, who rules’ (MerleauPonty, 1969, p. 20). Proust recruits our imaginations into the service of his labyrinthine rumination, and Joyce’s ever-multiplying enigmas grip the resources of our minds. Readers of Proust are likely to find that their everyday life takes on a dreamlike hue as if it were an extension of his novel, and readers of Joyce will find that the conventional continuities of their everyday life have been sapped and that their perception has become more pluralistic and relativized. Thus these novels take revenge on centuries of casual novel-readers, by being texts of which one cannot blithely say, ‘Oh, I’ve read that.’ Instead they are novels that read their readers, as Cézanne’s paintings view their viewers. This is done by hijacking the reader’s inner language, the constant murmur that precedes all our abstract thoughts or formed judgments (cf. Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 179; 2002a, p. 208), for both novelists supply a language for the most intimate movements of consciousness. If the first sentence of Proust’s novel is the most famous in fiction it is because of the way the readers are hypnotized—by its simplicity and familiarity, and also by the way it floats free of connection with any firm temporal or spatial co-ordinates—into making it their own: ‘Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure.’ And that is only the beginning. Similar insinuating arts are deployed by Joyce, not only in the stream of consciousness sections but also in the way he makes the reader an ally in the linguistic creation of the novel. The change these writers effect in the relation of art to its consumers is probably only bringing out something that was implicit in the great art of the past. The communing of the reader in the work goes hand in hand with a priestly self-effacement of the author, as in a sacrificial ritual. Merleau-Ponty sees artists as nourished by their own individual styles as they advance to further stages in exploring the vision that their style yields. Painting, like language, has a self-referential, monological character,10 and becomes an organ of vision only by cultivating itself: ‘Style is what makes any significance possible’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1969, p. 81). As the artist

176

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

perfects his style and lives totally in his style, it begins to feed on and nourish itself. Artists, feeling ‘the excess of what is to be said over their ordinary powers, are capable . . . of going “further” in the same direction, as if nourishing themselves from their own substance . . . as if every successful expression prescribed to the spiritual automaton another task’ (Ibid.). This idea applies rather literally to À la recherche du temps perdu and Ulysses, for both novels are self-nourished in the sense that later parts feed off the earlier ones, so greedily that readers may fear that not a crumb will remain for themselves. Dublin in 1904 offered Joyce an immense lump of material, a found object (objet trouvé) untouched by other artists. Dublin was his ‘motif,’ his Mont Sainte-Victoire. The barrage of techniques he brings into play are up to a certain point at the service of seeing this object and recreating it in the space of fiction, in which its inherent relations are clarified. Dublin is focused from the distance of exile, in the long perspective of memory. Perspective, triangulation, is also provided by the places and the traumatic historical caesura referred to in the last words of the text: ‘Trieste-Zürich-Paris, 1914–1921.’ But mid-way through the novel the rules of the game of mimesis have changed. The motif becomes subject to free variation, and its development is dependent less on considering the original, the historical Dublin, than on consulting the earlier pages of the novel, now become a self-consuming artifact, especially when earlier episodes are replayed, varied and inverted in the phantasmagoria of ‘Circe.’ The imaginative digestion of the city is complete when it is offered to the world as a self-contained city of words, when the realistic mimesis of its first half is redigested in the verbal fantasia of its second. The city is first transfigured by style, and then, more radically, sacrificed to style, to a pluralistic display of styles. Recall the observation of Claudel taken up by Merleau-Ponty: ‘Often in Dutch painting . . . an empty interior is “digested” by “the round eye of the mirror.” This pre-human gaze emblematizes that of the painter’ (1964e, p. 32; quoting Claudel, 1935). ‘Circe’ has a similar role in Ulysses, for the day just chronicled in various novelistic styles now looks at itself in the distorting but all the more revealing mirror of dream. But the verbal mirror represents not a pure seeing but release of the novel’s words from their bondage to things. As recycled here, they take on a new surreal life of their own, the humble task of the author being to facilitate their free play, while assuring the formal felicity of these acrobatics. The novel is dreaming itself or digesting itself.

Merleau-Ponty and Modernist Sacrificial Poetics

177

4. Art and Religion Is the high ontological and existential gravity, or better, the radical play, of Modernist art, so sensitively analyzed by Merleau-Ponty, aptly described as religious? The willingness of the artist to undergo a radical transformation at the service of poetic vision could of course be seen as fulfilling the Gospel imperative, ‘Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for the sake of the gospel will save it’ (Mk 8.35). The language of grace and rebirth fits their experiences well, especially in the sublime self-stagings of Rilke and Proust. These experiences are also laced with the terror of sacrifice, as the Eucharist is.11 Should we say, then, that Modernist artists offer ‘strange signs of the divine beyond the dichotomy between theism and atheism’ (p. 147, this volume)? If we choose to call their dedication religious, we stumble on the difficulty that it is often a religion without God. Rather analogously to science, Modernist art inspires a sense of wonder, yet in its foundation it seems to turn its back on God, of necessity. If the great Modernists brought about something like a phenomenological turn within literature, one hesitates to call it a sacramental turn, because their affirmation of the texture of worldhood is prima facie at the expense of God, whom they, like Nietzsche and like Merleau-Ponty, see as incompatible with fidelity to the phenomenological depths of the world. Proust, Joyce, and Merleau-Ponty use religious diction in a thoroughly secularized sense, disabling its original theistic reference. When Stephen Dedalus says that God is ‘a shout in the street’ (Ulysses 2.386) or ‘God: noise in the street’ (9.85–6), he is probably not working up a vision of God immanent in creation, but rather affirming worldly reality over against the phantasmal God. Kearney argues that Joyce has ‘an artistic imagination that has lived through the agnostic “disenchantment of modernity” before daring to recover anew the sacred in the secular’ (p. 154, this volume). I believe that this is a true perception, but one that is difficult to articulate in a satisfying way. The sense of wonder that art generates may put atheism to flight. Yet theism, with its confessional claims, finds little purchase in Modernist art either. How does a sacral effect emerge in Ulysses? The ‘mythic method,’ as T. S. Eliot christened it, lends depth and mystery to the three protagonists and to the city and the mass of its denizens. It might lead the reader to exclaim, ‘here too are gods!’ (Heraclitus), but it is calculated to discourage the response, ‘God is here!’ (Jacob in Gen. 28.16). It is the style, or styles, above all, that open up the streets of Dublin as a numinous landscape, and

178

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

eventually a mindscape, a constellation of mutually interacting motifs. The spectacle is enchanting, but it does not prompt paths of religious thought unless one brings a set of tactical (and tactful) theological questions to bear on it. Merleau-Ponty drew from art a new approach to ontology, but it seems to me that he drew no theological consequences at all. To say that he ‘offers an intriguing phenomenological interpretation of eucharistic embodiment as recovery of the divine within the flesh, a kenotic emptying out of transcendence into the heart of the world’s body, becoming a God beneath us rather than a God beyond us’ (p. 155, this volume), is precipitous. If advanced as an imaginative theological ‘take’ on Merleau-Ponty’s thought, this claim would need to be established by subtle argumentation. MerleauPonty’s obiter dicta on religion offer it only the most unreliable support. Merleau-Ponty does refer to a version of kenotic incarnationalism: ‘There is a sort of impotence of God without us, and Christ attests that God would not be fully God without becoming fully man . . . Transcendence no longer hangs over man; he becomes, strangely, its privileged bearer’ (quoted in p. 155, this volume). But it seems clear that the meaning of this is the replacement of God with an inner-worldly sacredness: ‘Christianity consists in replacing the separated absolute by the absolute in men’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a, p. 27). This is pure Feuerbach, as is the following passage: ‘There is an atheism in Christianity, the religion of God made man, where Christ dies abandoned by God . . . Thus the doctrines pass into their contrary’ (Ibid., pp. 184–5). The essence of Christianity is unmasked as humanism. Kearney sees Merleau-Ponty seeking to overcome metaphysical theology in the name of ‘the original message of incarnation—the logos becoming flesh and entering into the heart of suffering and acting humanity,’ recognizing ‘a genuinely a-theistic moment in the Christian story of incarnation and crucifixion where Christ experiences a radical abandonment before the father,’ and lauding ‘sacramental engagement with the world—an engagement epitomized by the Worker-Priest movement’ (p. 157, this volume). However, Kearney admits that Merleau-Ponty’s rather off-the-cuff remarks could also be seen as a skeptical view of Christianity as collapsing back into immanentist, this-worldly vision such as atheist thought explores. Merleau-Ponty seems to me to be a rather sturdy atheist, jealous of the reality and splendor of the world. If ‘he objects to any theism which takes God out of the world’ (p. 156, this volume), it is because of the deleterious effects of such ‘acosmism’ on this-worldly perception, its devaluation of Nature and earthly existence, and not because he yearns for a God more involved with the world. The mentality that thinks of sacrificing the world

Merleau-Ponty and Modernist Sacrificial Poetics

179

to God, well-attested in French spiritual traditions,12 is at the antipodes of the sacrifice implicit in art, and it goes hand in hand with a eucharistic theology stressing immolation rather than transformation. Merleau-Ponty salutes the corrections of this acosmism in the Christian tradition, for instance in Thomas Aquinas, for whom ‘the totality of the world is the first truth,’ starting from which one seeks to ascend to an invisible and uncertain God (Merleau-Ponty, 1995, p. 179). Again what this points to is not the kenosis or condescension of a gracious God, but a recuperation of ideas of divinity to designate the ontological depth of the perceived world. Theology, in Merleau-Ponty’s view, destroys the wonder of earthly being: ‘Theology makes use of philosophical wonder only for the purpose of motivating an affirmation that ends it’ (1963b, p. 44). Merleau-Ponty attacks Judeo-Christian ontology as a whole, not some later Cartesian rationalism. Kearney counters that this is just ‘a particular metaphysical account of the divine, and its relationship to nature, which became dominant in western philosophy and theology’ (p. 156, this volume). But the metaphysics in question goes back to the Alexandrian Bible, which translated Exodus 3.15 with the words, ‘I am the one who is’ (ego eimi ho ôn). Merleau-Ponty wants to rid this world of God, retaining at most a fragile perfume of transcendence. Kearney sees the ridding as a prophetic iconoclasm, overturning a false God, and finds in the philosopher’s resolute fidelity to the world as lit up by art not a resistance to the divine but the dawn of a new understanding of the divine. To defend such a picture, the Christian interpreter has to do most of the work, for Merleau-Ponty did not place at the forefront of his attention the potential religious overtones of his passion for art and for understanding art. Rather he foregrounds the atheistic: ‘When atheist thought causes to live anew the works that believed themselves to be in the service of a sacred or absolute . . . it restores them to themselves, confronting them with the questioning that gave them birth’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1969, p. 98). Here he does not speak even of a this-worldly ‘absolute’; instead the questioning of art is the primary reality. What he says about God negatively is rather jejune, and if he entertained at times an alternative kenotic image of God, the jejuneness has not gone away. Sartre deplored Merleau-Ponty’s ecumenical or diplomatic use of religious metaphors: ‘In one of his articles, he congratulates a mystic for having written that God is below us, and Merleau added, in so many words, “why not?” He dreamed of this Almighty who would need men’ (Sartre, 1998, p. 617). A delicate retrieval of a certain sense of the divine is neatly sketched by Sartre: ‘He lets transcendence flow into immanence, there to

180

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

be dissolved at the same time as it is protected against annihilation by its very impalpability. It will be only absence and supplication, deriving its all-encompassing power from its infinite weakness’ (Ibid., pp. 617–18). That might be a good characterization of the God of Rilke as well. But Sartre cites this as an idle dream, in which Merleau-Ponty foolishly would like to have been able to believe.13 Merleau-Ponty sees the philosopher as attentive to the ‘constant manifesting of religious phenomena through all the stages of human history . . . this continual rebirth of the divine,’ and as ‘well able to understand religion as one of the expressions of the central phenomenon of consciousness’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1963b, p. 45). The language is very immanentist, but he may have projected some dim divine horizon toward which the striving of the artist or the thinker tends or which lies beneath the grace of vision that the artist knows and shares. Less emphatically than Heidegger, he may have retained in his philosophy a residual notion of the divine, a divine whose ‘existence’ is not particularly urgent. He may have expected this to make itself clearer as he pursued his phenomenological path. But like Heidegger his primary concern is with being, with the texture of the world, to be defended against its obscuration by Descartes, rationalism and technology, but also, further back, by Platonism and classical Christian metaphysics, or even by biblical faith. He sympathizes with the iconoclastic side of Christianity, its overcoming of false gods, and sees the tenacious questioning of phenomenology as a continuation of this tradition, directed now against any god that overshadows the integrity of the world. To say that in ‘overturning the Cartesian ontology, Merleau-Ponty effectively returns God to this world, a transcendence in immanence’ (p. 161, this volume) is to prejudge the outcome of Merleau-Ponty’s questioning of being, almost making him a proof-text for a quite specific and elaborate theology, which underestimates how resistant to theological explication are the phenomena that absorb Merleau-Ponty’s attention. Merleau-Ponty warns that ‘it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it’ (1963b, p. 45), no doubt because when one understands religious representations of the world one sees how far they fall short of the splendor of worldhood revealed in art, and how they simplify its enigmas. Merleau-Ponty rejects religion as an explanation of the world, but there may be some other sense of religion that would be tempered by the texture of Modernist art and that would refrain from imposing any pregiven categories on the experienced world. Theologians today try to meet worldly reality on its own terms. They may take the humanity of Jesus rather than the being of God as their starting point, showing how the aspiration for the

Merleau-Ponty and Modernist Sacrificial Poetics

181

Kingdom of God emerges within human experience. They may see an alignment between artistic creation and the divine glory revealed in the universe, and affirm that Cézanne’s painting contributes to building up the Kingdom of God, and that Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of it is an auxiliary contribution. But Modernist artists do not fit neatly under any pregiven religious rubric and, as Kearney is aware, their work forces us to a revision of standard Christian ideas of divine transcendence and immanence. Rather than discuss Merleau-Ponty’s religious beliefs or unbelief, which are of little interest in themselves, the theologian or philosopher of religion will focus on this core concern of his thought, asking in what way it interacts with the concerns of religion. If one wishes to detect an aspiration to the Kingdom of God in Merleau-Ponty, one should look not to his general reflections on religion and politics, but to his musings on truth and on being, insofar as they express the conatus of the artist and of the phenomenologist, as they strive to dwell at the heart of perception—perhaps attaining by the same token a rather godlike sovereignty or freedom. This quest satisfied Merleau-Ponty, and he did not seek a revealed religion. It is in his most deeply reflected inquiries, where religion is not mentioned at all, that Merleau-Ponty awaits theological interpretation, and such interpretation will refrain from introducing the word ‘God’ for a long time. Apologetical positionings of Merleau-Ponty as a seeker after the unknown God would short-circuit the interpretive dialogue. Merleau-Ponty in his meditation on art is not moving in an agnostic ‘cloud of unknowing’ that ultimately demands a religious reading. Rather, his vision is assured and self-contained, even though its texture is one of endless exploration. Similarly, the vision of Proust, like that of Cézanne, is a masterful account of a world he knows intimately; there is no residual fringe of agnosticism at the end. Joyce plays with uncertainty, to be sure, but in order to open up room for experimental variation; reveling in the pluralism of experience and art he does not bend his efforts to seek an ultimate unitary sense of things. Kearney sees these writers, like Merleau-Ponty himself, as stepping beneath the level of confessions and truth-claims to a more primordial givenness of the world: ‘By allowing us to attend to the sacramental miracle of the everyday, without the constraints of exclusivist or absolutist truthclaims, Merleau-Ponty offers fresh insights into the eucharistic character of the sensible’ (p. 162, this volume). But ‘sacramental miracle’ and ‘eucharistic character’ are treacherous metaphors here, soliciting the phenomena toward a particular theology. Has then the sacrificial, transformative, and ‘eucharistic’ adventure of Modernist art and literature no clear religious upshot? I would say that, like

182

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

the world of modern science, it can instill a sense of wonder, a mute awe. But the more radically the arts and sciences develop, the less their ‘revelation’ allows itself to be retrieved and categorized in the terms of traditional theology, including biblical theology. They present to theology above all a challenge, calling on theology to match them, if it can, in the rigor and depth of its explorations. Theology must undergo a radical self-sacrifice in order to find the place where it can speak to modern experience in depth. Richard Kearney speaks of that place as incarnational and ‘ana-theistic,’ using both a very ancient and a very modern word to describe it. MerleauPonty’s transmutation of ancient artistic and philosophical values in the crucible of modern doubt—‘Cézanne’s doubt’—indicates the course that theology too must follow, the Modernist plunge it has so long feared to take. Merleau-Ponty might anticipate that theology, confronted with the texture of worldhood, would be struck dumb. But a theology that has stepped back to its own phenomenological bases might find the space in which a lively dialogue with the arts becomes possible again.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

Cf. also Mallarmé, 1995, p. 343: ‘I am now impersonal, and no longer Stéphane whom you have known,—but an aptitude that the Spiritual Universe has of seeing itself and developing itself, across that which was me.’ Merleau-Ponty did not write any essay on Proust, but the writer is a pervasive presence in his thought, in connection with the themes of perception, the body, temporality, and language; see Carbone, 2001. Angelo Caranfa writes, ‘Merleau-Ponty sees the image in its mystery, its hiddenness, its invisibility, its transcendence: and this image is perceived and preserved in its objective aspect. On the other hand, Proust demands that the image be revealed from the purely subjective consciousness, from the perceiver’s inner mind’s eye’ (1990, p. 52). My friend Hubert Durt relates how his grandfather, at an inn in Flanders, noted a diner with drooping moustache who complained that the oysters, contrary to his instructions, had been shaved. Asking the waiter who this eccentric whiner might be, he received the answer: ‘He’s completely bonkers. He sits at his window all afternoon, gazing at the canal!’ The texture of Proust’s contemplation of the canal may of course have been more ‘subjective’ than Cézanne’s would have been. Merleau-Ponty comments on this passage in Merleau-Ponty, 1996, pp. 197, 202; and 2000, pp. 314–16; see Carbone, 2008, pp. 76–80. Julia Kristeva notes how Proustian is Merleau-Ponty’s ‘assignation to memory of the intermediary role within perception’ (1994, p. 333). Somewhat sentimentally, she sees a ‘Christic inspiration’ behind Merleau-Ponty’s ‘Proustian itinerary,’ which saved him from ‘humanism and terror’ (Ibid., p. 336).

Merleau-Ponty and Modernist Sacrificial Poetics 6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

183

Another anecdote: Jean Beaufret recalled how Heidegger, having read some Proust in response to the pressure of French disciples, murmured: ‘Balzac is closer to the Greeks’—no doubt in virtue of a similar concern with the actuality of being. Had Heidegger come to Proust via Merleau-Ponty he might have registered more appreciatively the novelist’s ontological depth. I am not sure that Husserl really meant this; his exhibition of the phenomena of time-consciousness, for example, is hardly just a matter of letting the phenomena emerge and speak for themselves; rather, he seems to be actively constructing the phenomena, as a geometer constructs space. One writer finds in Merleau-Ponty the internalized sacrificial dynamic of Yoga, wherein one attains a full bodily awareness of a situation thus described: ‘we eat the world and the world eats us’; Sarukkai, 2002, p. 465. On this deathly aspect of writing, see Blanchot, 1955, a profound interrogation of the experience of Mallarmé, Rilke, and Kafka. ‘Gerade das Eigenthümliche der Sprache, daß sie sich bloß um sich selbst bekümmert, weiß keiner’ (No one realizes what is precisely the most characteristic thing about language, that it is concerned only with itself), wrote Novalis; quoted in Heidegger, 1985, p. 229. If we can think of art in eucharistic terms, the Eucharist itself can be thought of as a work of art. Jesus at the Last Supper is a creative artist, who takes an element of everyday experience—a meal—and transforms it into something rich and strange, just as a Van Gogh painting elevates the peasant shoes and makes of them an establishment of truth in the work (Ins-Werk-setzen der Wahrheit) (cf. Heidegger, 1977, p. 23), a durable epiphany of the unconcealedness of Being. In doing this, Jesus draws on a variety of Jewish ritual traditions and symbolic representations, reimagining them in light of the present eschatological situation and his own coming death as a key event within that situation; cf. O’Leary, 2008. In light of Modernist intertextual practice, we can reread the creative performance of Jesus with new insight. Such nihilistic acosmism is illustrated by a series of hair-raising statements that Vincent Carraud has exhumed from seventeenth-century religious classics: ‘In offering all to God, we protest that he is all; in destroying all before God, we protest that he is nothing of all that is in the universe, and that all is nothing of him’ (Condren, quoted in Carraud, 2008, p. 343). He also deplores some quasi-Heideggerian language in which he sees MerleauPonty’s humanism threatened by a piety of Being.

References Allemann, B. (1962), Zeit und Figur beim späten Rilke. Pfullingen: Neske. Blanchot, M. (1955), L’espace littéraire. Paris: Gallimard. Bloom, H. (1997), The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Caranfa, A. (1990), Proust: The Creative Silence. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.

184

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

Carbone, M. (2001), La visibilité de l’invisible: Merleau-Ponty entre Cézanne et Proust. Hildesheim: Olms. —. (2008), Proust et les idées sensibles. Paris: Vrin. Carraud, V. (2008), ‘De la destruction. Métaphysique et idée du sacrifice selon Condren,’ in Archivio di Filosofia, 76, 331–48. Claudel, P. (1935), Introduction à la peinture hollandaise. Paris: Gallimard. Gosetti-Ferencei, J. A. (2007), The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature. University Park, PA: Penn State Press. Heidegger, M. (1977), Holzwege. Gesamtausgabe Volume 5. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. —. (1985), Unterwegs zur Sprache. Gesamtausgabe Volume 12. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. Jaloux, E. (1953), Avec Marcel Proust. Paris, Geneva: La Palatine. Kristeva, J. (1994), Le temps sensible: Proust et l’expérience littéraire. Paris: Gallimard. Lawrence, K. (1981), The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mallarmé, S. (1945), ‘Crise de vers,’ in Œuvres complètes. Ed. H. Mondor. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.’ —. (1995), Correspondance: Lettres sur la poésie. Ed. B. Marchal. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Folio.’ O’Leary, J. S. (2002), ‘The Heightened Gaze of Exile: Dublin in Ulysses,’ English Literature and Language (Sophia University), 39, 3–24. —. (2008), ‘The Eucharist as a Work of Art,’ Archivio di Filosofia, 76, 169–76. Petzet, H. W. (1977), Das Bildnis des Dichters. Frankfurt am Main: Insel. Poulet, G. (1963), L’Espace proustien. Paris: Gallimard. Proust, M. (1988), À la recherche du temps perdu. 4 volumes. Ed. J.-Y. Tadié. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.’ Rilke, R. M. (1987), Briefe. Frankfurt am Main: Insel. Sartre, J.-P. (1998), ‘Merleau-Ponty Vivant,’ in J. Stewart (ed.), The Debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 567–626. Sarukkai, S. (2002), ‘Inside/Outside: Merleau-Ponty/Yoga,’ Philosophy East and West, 52, 459–78.

Chapter 10

‘Faith is in things not seen’: Merleau-Ponty on Faith, Virtù, and the Perception of Style Darian Meacham

Introduction The rather truncated paraphrasing of Hebrews 11.1 which forms the title of this contribution can also be found in Merleau-Ponty’s 1945 essay ‘Faith and Good Faith,’ where the French phenomenologist writes, ‘[M]an cannot be sincere, since sincerity supposes a definite nature which one can assess without ambiguity. It is not a matter of contemplating oneself but of constructing and going beyond oneself. “Faith is in things unseen”’ (MerleauPonty, 1964b, p. 176, my italics). In the midst of a critique of the idea of ‘sincerity,’ and the need for ‘certainty’ in politics,1 Merleau-Ponty thoroughly endorses this articulation of the idea of ‘faith’ as ‘an adherence that goes beyond the guarantees which one is given and therefore excludes an ever-present sincerity’ (Ibid). Hence, this idea of faith as a sort of commitment to the world and to others plays an important role in the normative sketch of political action that Merleau-Ponty provides at the end of ‘Faith and Good Faith,’ and in the equally preliminary conception of heroism in the essay ‘Man, the Hero,’ which follows in Sense and Non-Sense. Although this notion of faith comes up in the context of a critique of the Catholic Church’s politics, Merleau-Ponty does not intend a religious, but rather a political faith and commitment. It is this notion of political faith that I will try to address in this chapter. The notions of political action and heroism do not fade from MerleauPonty’s concerns in his later writings. He does, however, abandon some of the more eyebrow raising conclusions made in ‘Faith and Good Faith’ about political action and party loyalty.2 In a later collection of political essays— published in Signs—Merleau-Ponty chooses another term, virtù (virtue), to describe the proper understanding of political activity.3 In the ‘Introduction’ to Signs, written in 1960, he rather vaguely writes, ‘[t]he remedy we seek does not lie in rebellion, but in unremitting virtù’ (Merleau-Ponty,

186

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

1964c, p. 35). These two notions, faith and virtù, can in one sense be read as inhabiting opposite poles of the development of Merleau-Ponty’s political thought.4 Yet these two poles do not represent a turn or dramatic conversion in his thinking. Rather, what I wish to argue for here is a reading of the idea of virtù that is to a large extent continuous with the idea of faith presented in the earlier writing. We can point to a third essay, ‘A Note on Machiavelli’ (1949), which falls chronologically between the other two (1946 and 1960 respectively), to support this thesis. In an ironic manner, Merleau-Ponty writes of Machiavelli’s ‘nerve’ in speaking of ‘virtue while sorely wounding ordinary morality’ (1964c, p. 211).5 Nonetheless, MerleauPonty uses the term in a manner quite similar to that of Machiavelli. For both authors, it describes a ‘means of living with others’ (Ibid., p. 214)— precisely what the idea of faith does in Sense and Non-Sense, where he writes ‘is not faith [. . .] stripped of its illusions, itself the very movement which unites us with others’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, p. 186). The significance of the idea of virtù, in its relation to faith, goes beyond the confines of Merleau-Ponty’s oft-neglected later political thought. It is tied up, I will argue later in this chapter, with developments in his ontology that were occurring at the same time, and we can thus examine the ideas of ‘style’ and ‘clairvoyance,’ as they appear in The Visible and the Invisible, ‘Eye and Mind’ (1961), and the 1961 lecture course from the Collège de France, ‘L’ontologie cartésienne et l’ontologie aujourd’hui,’ in relation to the ideas of faith and virtù. While readings of Merleau-Ponty’s notions of ‘style’ and ‘clairvoyance’ have been more frequently associated with aesthetics than politics, I will try to show that virtù is the political analogue to the ontology of the perceptual world that Merleau-Ponty was in the process of developing in part through the ideas of ‘style’ and ‘clairvoyance,’ and thus that they are very much linked to the idea of ‘faith.’ I do not wish to neglect or ignore the fact that the concept of ‘faith’ in Merleau-Ponty is usually approached through the idea of ‘perceptual faith,’ the interrogation of which structures The Visible and the Invisible. However, by approaching the concept of ‘faith’ through the political writings of the 1940s, I will be following Merleau-Ponty’s own impulse to connect the perceptual and the political spheres:6 political faith is, I hope to show, ultimately and irrevocably tied up with the perceptual faith that Merleau-Ponty had set out to interrogate via a new ontology. The idea of faith in relation to politics (and to party politics in particular) marks an important point in Merleau-Ponty’s political thought. In ‘Faith and Good Faith,’ we find both a rejection of a certain strain of Scientific Marxism, associated with Engels and Lenin, and a nuanced endorsement of

Faith, Virtù, and the Perception of Style

187

Lenin’s democratic centralism as being in line with Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about faith in politics. Hence, this chapter not only squarely situates faith within the task of separating ‘the radical humanist philosophy of Marx from the Engels-Lenin orthodoxy of positivism and scientism,’ a task which occupied Merleau-Ponty until the end of his life (O’Neill, 1984, p. 277),7 but it also aligns faith with the later politics of virtù and some of the remarks concerning choice that Merleau-Ponty makes in the context of elaborating his new ontology (e.g., in Merleau-Ponty, 2003b, discussed in sections 3 and 4 below). The endorsement of democratic centralism that it suggests is, I think, an accurate conception of how party politics are generally carried out even today. In the following sections, I will first try to explain the idea of faith as it functions in Sense and Non-Sense (section 1). Following that, I will try to cash out some of the implication of this conception of faith in relation to political action (sections 2–4). Finally, I will link the notion of faith with the ideas of ‘virtù,’ ‘style,’ and ‘clairvoyance,’ all of which play an important role in Merleau-Ponty’s later writings (sections 5–6).

1. ‘Faith’ and ‘Sincerity’ The political sincerity that Merleau-Ponty attacks in ‘Faith and Good Faith’ entails a demand for certainty. But if, as Merleau-Ponty repeatedly claims, perception always affirms more than we strictly know (1964b, p. 179), then certainty can be both de facto and de jure precluded from the appearances of the natural world, where political and personal life are played out. Merleau-Ponty is adamant on this point, writing, ‘If sincerity is one’s highest value, one will never become fully committed to anything, not to a Church or to a party, not to a love or a friendship, not even to a particular task [. . .]’ (Ibid). It is somewhat difficult to know exactly what Merleau-Ponty has in mind when he tells us that perception always already affirms more than we strictly know, but we can point in two related directions. Our perception of objects is always run-through with empty or unfilled apperceptions, which are co-presented with what is given in the flesh, for example, the backside of a table or coffee cup. These co-presentations can be made fully present or can be fulfilled if I move around the table or turn the cup on my desk. In this sense, my apperception of the backside of an object affirms the object’s givenness as such and such a thing without me being able to strictly claim certainty with regard to the things in my perceptual field.8

188

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

This may not however be the most fruitful way to interpret MerleauPonty’s claim, as it does not especially illuminate the political position that is being taken in this chapter vis-à-vis the idea of faith. We might do better to remind ourselves that for Merleau-Ponty the perceptual field is always imbued with a temporal-historical depth. In the working notes of The Visible and the Invisible, for example, Merleau-Ponty writes that perception is always cultural.9 What he means by this is that the meaning formations that structure our cultural world are not an ideal layer projected by a constituting subject over the perceptual field, but are through and through in the perceptual world itself, in the things themselves. We can illustrate this with an example pertaining to our perceptions of others’ emotional states. In the series of radio lectures published as The World of Perception, Merleau-Ponty speaks of the anger on his friend’s face. This anger, he writes, is not an interior mental state that he can apperceive on the basis of perceptions of the friend’s lived body (as Husserl’s analysis in Cartesian Meditations would suggest), but it is rather in the world, in the space between him and his friend, in the redness of the cheeks and the tension of the body.10 Faith, in relation to this example, would entail his adherence or prereflective commitment to the appearance of the anger on the friend’s face. Faith, in this sense, is what originarily commits him to that anger insofar as he prereflectively reacts to it with his own body and expression. One could object that, if faith is in things unseen, then this is not an adequate example, as the anger on the face of the friend is most surely seen. But other examples demonstrate the invisible sense that lines and gives depth to the perceptual field, and that is already being hinted at with the notion of political faith. In Richard Avedon’s famous photograph of William Casby, ‘Born a Slave,’ for example, the haggard and worn face of the old man speaks of an entire history of slavery, a history that from the perspective of the photo and the spectator is past.11 Yet, this history—for those with even a faint idea, provided by the title, of what they are looking at—is immediately present in the singularity of man’s face. The photo captures a movement in the perceptual field of the individuation of sense in the singular thing or visible being of the face, and its dispersal or generalization as the visible thing is immediately expressive of a history; ‘history’ as Merleau-Ponty says, ‘is the very flesh of man’ (1998, p. 78).12 Our perception of the face commits us to, and involves us in, this history. But what is important is that there is a visibility of the invisible sense of history; in this case, of its pain and anguish. This commitment to a historical sense that appears as the depth of the visible is, in the sense described by

Faith, Virtù, and the Perception of Style

189

Merleau-Ponty, our faith in things unseen. This perceptual givenness of sense applies to cultural formations as well. A demonstration by workers may, in a certain sense, be the simultaneous appearance of a historical depth that accompanies their songs and slogans, that is, the history of the workers movement. Likewise for any political movement or party, faith is a mode of co-givenness in the perceptual field, the paradoxical appearance of the invisible sense that lines the visible world. But beyond its appearance, it is a commitment to and responsibility for this sense, that we can only separate ourselves from through a kind of abstraction. Sincerity, in the sense that Merleau-Ponty describes in ‘Faith and Good Faith,’ is a refusal, on the grounds of a lack of certainty, of this originary perceptual and corporeal commitment to the historical depth of the perceptual field. One refuses the appearance of the history of slavery in the old man’s face because perhaps he or she is not certain of all the facts of that history, or even that the man was once a slave. But in refusing our implication through perception in this history, we are also able to refuse responsibility for it. We choose, as Merleau-Ponty says, a pleasant life under the guise of a vocation, or of a commitment, not to the history and the others who inhabit the perceptual field, but to a principle of sincerity that prohibits action unless we can be certain, something which we rarely are, or only are after the fact (1964b, p. 179). I would like to call this appearance of history in the perceptual field, illustrated so well I think by Avedon’s photo, ‘style.’ When I say appearance of history, it does not mean the appearance in some sort of representational form of the events of an individual or collective past, but rather the intertwining of the visible with a sense—we might speak of a dynamic essence, a ‘verbal wesen,’ or ‘sensible idea’—of the development of the past and its movement into the future. This style is not something that we subjectively project upon the visible field; it is in the visible, as Merleau-Ponty often says, as its lining and depth.13 Faith then becomes not only a mode of appearance, but simultaneously our adherence or commitment to a ‘style,’ our originary implication in and hence responsibility (though not necessarily complicity or culpability) for a history. When Merleau-Ponty says that faith is in things unseen, I think that we must take it with more than a pinch of salt. We see according to a style; the historical development of sense fills the perceptual field at first glance with joy, pain, unease, anxiety, and struggle, and we commit ourselves bodily to that world, just as we commit ourselves bodily to the picture of William Casby as we shudder or cringe before the image. Thus our faith is in the invisible ideal lining of the perceptual field.14 But it is not enough to say that we see according to a style.

190

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

There is a visibility of style, in its movement, like the ‘sensible idea’ that Merleau-Ponty tries to describe at the end of The Visible and the Invisible: Their carnal texture presents to us what is absent from all flesh; it is a furrow that traces itself magically under our eyes without a tracer [. . .] we do not see, do not hear the ideas, and not even with the mind’s eye or the third ear: and yet they are there, behind the sounds or between them, behind the lights or between them. (1968a, pp. 150–1) Faith is thus through and through an integral aspect of our being in the natural attitude, an essential component of our originary corporeal being in the world. What is precisely unnatural is the ‘vocational’ attitude of the intellectual who refuses this originary commitment that our faith qua adherence to style entails. If we interpret faith in this way, it would seem that in ‘Faith and Good Faith,’ Merleau-Ponty is suggesting that we also adopt this natural attitude—to some degree—with regard to our politics. Initially, perception and politics seem to be quite distinct, and to treat them as equivalent would seem absurd; however, Merleau-Ponty wants to argue that we can, in a sense, do so. The question then becomes as follows: Is the ‘good faith’ that Merleau-Ponty demands of our politics merely what we find in the natural attitude or is it something beyond this originary faith? This is a question that we will have to tackle as we progress. We should try to clarify some of the more counterintuitive elements of the idea of faith that Merleau-Ponty sets out here. First, faith is opposed to certainty. We normally consider faith to be a form of certainty that is not founded upon evidence. But Merleau-Ponty’s notion of faith is more in line with an admittance of uncertainty and a commitment to both a course of action (or institution) of which we are, in a sense, unsure. Simultaneous with this commitment, I will argue further on, is a rigorous interrogation and calling into doubt of that course of action or historical development. Second, faith is also opposed to sincerity, but only insofar as sincerity necessitates an absolute certainty with regard to the actions or institutions that we commit ourselves to. In a paradoxical move, Merleau-Ponty is connecting sincerity to what we normally consider its opposite, cynicism and detachment. Faith, however, is not opposed to knowledge. Rather— again counterintuitively—knowledge is opposed to certainty. Knowledge is not considered in terms of a correspondence theory of true belief in relation to real facts and states of affairs in the world.15 Instead, knowledge must be considered globally as an ever-developing horizon of interrogation. This also puts faith firmly on the side of truth as Merleau-Ponty explains it in

Faith, Virtù, and the Perception of Style

191

Adventures of the Dialectic: an indefinite process of verification or praxis.16 This conception of truth is one of the treasures of Marx’s radical humanism that had been buried by the predominance of Scientific Marxism’s positivism and economic determinism within the Communist movement, and which Merleau-Ponty’s political thought, beginning with the idea of faith, tried to unearth.17

2. Siding with the Future Faith’s opposition to certainty and sincerity is only one element of its relation to style and perception. The futural element of faith in its relation to style is equally important. The appearance of ‘style’ in the perceptual field is not only the appearance or visibility of the sense of the past, but also of its developmental tendencies toward the future. The visibility of this tendency or potentiality that inhabits the perceptual field does not at all guarantee certainty. The future developments that we commit ourselves to, the schema of possibilities that can be understood either in terms of the lived body or of a political movement, can just as well be disappointed: the style—now in terms of future tendency and development—that we had committed ourselves to—even hoped for—may in fact take another unforeseen trajectory, leaving our projects futile, out of place, and embarrassed. For example, we don’t know for certain how our friend will react to any given conversation, show of emotion, or intimate gesture. We can only have faith that we have correctly perceived his or her style in its developmental trajectory from past to future. This ever present possibility of disappointment of faith—in terms of the appearance of a style—is what we might call the risk of perception. Or, consider Merleau-Ponty’s attack in ‘Faith and Good Faith,’ on ‘Catholic politics,’ this time for a refusal of this futural aspect of faith: ‘The Catholic as Catholic has no sense of the future: he must wait for that future to become part of the past before he can cast his lot with it’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, pp. 177–8). The Catholic fails to take a real risk on the future. Merleau-Ponty transfers this originary risk of perception to the normativity of politics. We have, for example, no certainty of how a political movement that we align ourselves with may develop, and yet nonetheless Merleau-Ponty counsels an adherence to political movements that is analogous to our ‘faith’ in our perception of a friend. We commit ourselves to a movement on the basis of an originary faith that is akin to the appearance of, and commitment to, what we can call a teleology without a telos.

192

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

This teleology without telos appears with the sense of the historical development and provides the futural dimension to the idea of style: it is a developmental trajectory or orientation that appears with the style of visible things. With the appearance of the style of another person or of a political institution or movement in perception is the simultaneous appearance of the potential future development of that person or institution.18 As it is without a telos or end, this developmental trajectory is continuously being undermined and reformed from within the field of perception itself. Faith, in the political sense, is not only the appearance and commitment to this teleology, but an openness to its reformulation and open-endedness. The perceptual field as a cultural field is haunted by its own style, not only in the appearance of the sense of the past, but also by the appearance of these developmental tendencies. It is important to emphasize that there is not a reflective act through which an idea or expectation about the future is formed: this commitment or faith that is involved in every perception, is part and parcel of a beingin-the-world that is always a being-toward-the-world in precisely this sense, and that characterizes the embodied human condition. We are always beingtoward-a-world that is not yet, being-toward-the-world in its potential pathways of development. What I put my faith in is a certain style that cannot be isolated within the consciousness of an individual (either my own that I project upon the world or another whom I perceive) but is always a matter of the unfolding of the world. Likewise the teleology that we perceive does not belong to the thing in isolation from its surroundings or to the political institution (a party or movement) in and of itself. Style, in terms of the appearance in the perceptual field of both historical sense and potential future development, always pertains to the movement or development of the diacritical whole of the world that Merleau-Ponty refers to many times: a ‘unity of coexistence like the sections of an arch that shoulder one another’ (1964c, p. 39). The futural being-toward-the-world of our commitment cum faith also comes with a component of responsibility. It is not a responsibility that we assume over something removed and foreign from us, but rather a responsibility that we are incapable of not assuming without succumbing to a sort of pathology analogous to conditions where our own limbs and their movements are experienced as alien and hostile.19 The apparent analogy between the responsibility that we assume over personal and even political relations and the way in which we might be said to assume responsibility over our perceptions points to an underlying identity. These are in fact the same

Faith, Virtù, and the Perception of Style

193

modes of responsibility. The styles through which we perceive the world are in the world, in the relations between things. The same can be said for the faith that we do not so much place in our relations with others, but that pulls us into those relations, the way vision pulls us toward the things. Likewise, the style of an object, in its relations with the gestalt whole that surrounds it, pulls us temporally forward in terms of its developmental orientations or trajectories, which are constantly being undermined and reformed in the movement of faith itself, insofar as it entails bringing itself into question, its own interrogation.

3. Naturalizing Politics But this naturalizing of politics—in the sense of the natural attitude not the naturalistic—through the idea of faith comes at a certain price. By bringing political action and judgment into this constellation of style, faith, commitment, and responsibility, Merleau-Ponty seems perfectly willing to admit certain limitations imposed by the structure of our faith upon what we might normally call political freedom or choice. He refers, in this context, to the scope for individual choice or autonomy within the institution of the political party, deferring to Lenin’s idea of ‘democratic centralism’: ‘The party must welcome discussion but must also maintain discipline. The decisions must express the will of the active members, and at the same time the members must consider themselves committed to party decisions even if those run contrary to their personal views’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, p. 180). There are two dimensions to this relation between democratic centralism and the idea of faith. First, the idea of democratic centralism that MerleauPonty seems to be endorsing here entails faith in the party—in terms of commitment, responsibility, and action—on the part of the individual, despite the possibility that party decisions will run contrary to personal views. This element of individual faith in the party seems to go beyond the ‘natural faith’ that we outlined above, in that it contains an active or voluntary component. However, it also remains in line with the conception of natural faith, in that democratic centralism (as Merleau-Ponty conceives it) entails a faith in the general historical style of the party, its developmental tendencies. This faith outweighs disagreements that individual members might have with particular party decisions. The second dimension entails precisely what we have just alluded to; the party, as an institution, like an individual, has both a style and also has faith in itself. The institution of the party commits itself to a certain historical

194

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

development in the world as a broader field of praxis. This faith in some sense mirrors that of the individual subject for the party. When we speak of a naturalizing of politics and of political commitment this is what we mean. As we are tied to the world that we perceive in its style of appearance, a style that has developed, and also manifests—in the present—a certain path of future development, so too are we tied to a party institution that the subject, by committing to, intertwines herself with. Like any institution, the party has a developmental momentum that, while dependent on its active members, is not reducible to their individual positions. In a rather paradoxical sense, I do not think it would run contrary to Merleau-Ponty’s argument here to say that the party’s decisions are in a sense our own. We are committed and bound to them by the relation of faith, even if we do not always agree with them. What is more, our responsibility for these positions, with which we ourselves may not entirely identify, is not something that we should abdicate. On the contrary, it is necessary for a responsible politics. However, this faith in the party’s decision-making structure must not be confused with a sort of blind loyalty or unquestioning attitude: ‘completely devoid of sincerity, faith becomes sheer obedience or madness’ (Ibid., p. 179). A questioning of the ties that bind one to the party is in order. But how can this questioning proceed? Again, we can profit by comparison to perception. The structures of perception which tie and commit us to the world are often interrogated by great painters and writers. These artists create an unnatural remove, alienation, or distance from the perceived world, but a distance that interrogates that world from within and examines its formation. Merleau-Ponty describes this in detail in relation to Cézanne’s painting in ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’ published in the same collection as ‘Faith and Good Faith.’20 In the 1954–1955 Collège de France lectures on institution and passivity, Merleau-Ponty returns to the theme of choice in relation to Matisse’s and Cézanne’s painting. These comments are also helpful in explaining the attitude toward democratic centralism and faith set out in Sense and NonSense. ‘The choice,’ he writes, ‘is always an attempt at overcoming that conserves [the style of the past] and not an over-simplified affirmation, closed in on itself’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2003b, p. 85). He is referring here to strokes of the brush upon a canvas, but we can render this idea in more political terms. Choice, or what Merleau-Ponty prefers to call ‘work’ (Ibid., p. 86), takes up an inherited style and interrogates it, transforming it. But this happens from within the movement of an institution, the oeuvre of a painter, or even the history of painting. Our choices are neither autonomous

Faith, Virtù, and the Perception of Style

195

nor entirely willful, but rather, as he says in relation to Cézanne again, ‘germination’ (Ibid). As Cézanne’s unnatural vision germinates within nature, within the perceptual field, and in the things themselves, the political work of the individual, the attitude of doubt and interrogation with which we must responsibly approach the decisions of the party occur within the framework of the style of the party and the individual’s faith in it. Political choice, in this sense, is the ‘germination’ of the party.

4. Faith and Good Faith: A Political Reduction? By moving between interrogation of political commitment and perceptual faith, we encounter a rather fruitful point of tension in Merleau-Ponty’s thought pertaining to the relation between the natural attitude and the phenomenological reduction. In the introduction to the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty famously describes the failure of the reduction in positive terms: it is the failure of achieving a complete bracketing of the natural attitude that opens the possibilities for phenomenology that are explored in the Phenomenology of Perception. And yet, Merleau-Ponty does not reject the method of the reduction in its entirety. In a beautiful passage from the Preface of this seminal work, he describes slackening our intentional bonds with the world, precisely so that they can be brought to our notice: ‘Reflection does not withdraw from the world toward the unity of consciousness as the world’s basis; it steps back to watch the forms of transcendence fly up like sparks from a fire; it slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice’ (MerleauPonty, 1962, p. xiii). This slackening allows the interrogation of the perceptual world carried out by a Cézanne, Proust, or Rimbaud. Cézanne’s desire to paint the formation of the world entailed his almost mad remove from the everyday familiarity of perceptual appearances and functions like something of an epoché.21 How does this tension concerning the status of the phenomenological epoché translate into the discussion on political faith? We might start by referring back to Merleau-Ponty’s comment that politics is not a vocation, or rather his criticism of certain intellectuals for treating it as one, and as such as a bound and limited sphere (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, p. 179). What Merleau-Ponty seems to object to in the idea of politics as a vocation is its isolation, or bracketing, from the other habitualities and accomplishments of the lifeworld. But, the idea that it would be possible to examine the social and political development of the lifeworld from a removed perspective is

196

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

not to be confused with the distance from within that characterizes, for example, Cézanne’s vision as he attempts ‘an exact study of appearances,’ ‘a piece of nature,’ ‘to depict matter as it takes on form, the birth of order through spontaneous organization,’ but with a distanced, ‘unfamiliar,’ ‘uncomfortable,’ even ‘inhuman eye’ (Ibid., pp. 12, 13, 16). This political remove (as opposed to Cézanne’s distance) would entail precisely what the principle of sincerity calls for and what Merleau-Ponty rejects: the pretense of the possibility of putting out of play the general movement and development of the lifeworld while political questions and problems are examined and an apodictic knowledge is arrived at about them. At the same time, the demand of a critical attitude—a modicum of sincerity—toward the decisions of the party can also be thought of in terms of the epoché as described by Merleau-Ponty in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Perception and even ‘Cézanne’s Doubt.’22 A certain distance is established without putting out of play our commitment to the perceived world or to the party. What this allows is the formation of the meaning structures which guide the party and (in)form its decisions to become visible. The proper attitude that faith demands toward the party is the same that Cézanne takes on in his painting: ‘he wanted to depict matter as it takes on form, the birth of order through spontaneous organization’ (Ibid., p. 13). Again we can refer back to the dimensions of the relation between the individual and the party. On the one hand, the role of the individual is to interrogate the party’s institutional development so as to render visible its style and sense. On the other hand, the role of the party itself is, at least in part, to render visible the development of historical sense within the general field of praxis, that is, the world. And, by rendering the movement visible, it commits itself to acting from within that movement, in the manner that Merleau-Ponty describes the work of the painter in the lectures on institution: ‘in the painter at work, there is history re-founded’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2003b, p. 86). The party is thus criticized and examined from within the movement of faith. The question of course is how to know when to ‘determine the moment when it is reasonable to take things on trust and the moment when questioning is in order’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, pp. 179–80). Merleau-Ponty does not give a satisfactory response to this, stating only that it depends on a ‘higher awareness.’23 This understanding of faith also allows us to avoid an overly MarxistHegelian interpretation of a remark that Merleau-Ponty makes toward the end of ‘Faith and Good Faith,’ where it is rather unclear whether the voice we hear is Lenin’s or Merleau-Ponty’s: ‘The revolution is both a reality

Faith, Virtù, and the Perception of Style

197

which the spontaneous course of events is preparing and an idea being worked out in the minds of those individuals who are most aware of what is happening’ (Ibid., p. 180). If we ascribe this position to Merleau-Ponty (as well as Lenin), we can assign to it, on the basis of our reading of the concept of faith, a sense that avoids the finality or logic of a Scientific Marxist philosophy of history.24 Rather, if we read the statement in terms of the descriptions of faith offered earlier in the chapter, we come to a position that is nearly the opposite of that held by Scientific Marxism. First, as we have seen, the idea of faith explicitly and emphatically precludes the kind of certainty—sincerity—that Scientific Marxism not only allows, but which, as it adheres to an economic determinism, necessitates. Second, working out the idea of the revolution ‘in the minds of those most aware of what is happening’ is not, as Engels argues, a matter of working out, the ‘details and relations’ of the objective laws of motion of society (1968, p. 50). This ‘scientific’ standpoint greatly diminishes the role and importance of that which Merleau-Ponty makes the focus of the essay (i.e., subjective faith and commitment), and which I have argued is an essential component of his conception of faith (i.e., the open-ended and indeterminate development of historical sense). At the least, it would seem to diminish the role of the political subject to the deciphering of the laws of motion. Such a diminishment would hold not only for the subject, but also for the party: the role of the party becomes the deciphering of the laws of the development of the dialectic, and the implementation of a program to bring about proletarian revolution. The party becomes the steward of the natural law rather than the guardian of an open, indeterminate, and historically contingent praxis—what Merleau-Ponty, in Adventures of the Dialectic, calls ‘truth.’25 In a seemingly odd manner, the party can be compared to Cézanne’s ‘endless’ task as a painter, which was to depict the movement and formation of the field of perception (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, p. 15). The role of the party in this strain of Marxist theory would then be to make manifest the sense of the movement of the field of praxis. As such, ‘revolutionary politics cannot bypass this moment when it steps into the unknown’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1973b, p. 52). If we consider the above quote on the coming revolution in light of our analysis of faith, we arrive at substantially different conclusions than those of the deterministic Scientific Marxism. ‘The spontaneous course of events’ that is preparing the revolution cannot be understood in terms of a logical or inevitable progression, but rather as a quasi-visible development

198

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

of sense in the perceptual field that Merleau-Ponty will later call, alternately, both the ‘landscape of praxis’ and ‘ontological landscape.’26 Such developments are decidedly intersubjective, resulting from interaction and communication between historical actors, and are ultimately contingent, without finality and not subject to laws of economic determinism.27 What is manifest in the spontaneous course of events is a style that contains within itself the appearance of potential pathways of sense development within an open and unending dialectic. From the liberal democratic standpoint adopted by the dominant Western political discourses today, Merleau-Ponty’s comments about the importance of retaining our faith in party orthodoxy, and in particular the orthodoxy of the Communist Party, seem to be either errors in his earlier thinking that should be corrected, and/or part of a wider strain of political myopia that infected the French left in the decades following World War II with regard to their attitudes toward the Soviet Union and the Communist Party. But, could we not say that the form, if not the specific content, of Merleau-Ponty’s call for faith in party orthodoxy to a large extent mirrors our own contemporary political and, specifically, electoral practice? When we vote for a party on Election Day it is not, I think, generally with an attitude of sincerity, in the sense that Merleau-Ponty describes. We rarely know exactly, policywise, what a party has to offer, and even less what they will do upon being elected. Contrary to Husserl, who, in the Crisis, speaks of the vocational time and epoché of the voting booth, I would say that while we may conduct a great deal of our political lives attempting to attain some distance from our natural faith and commitments, we vote in the natural attitude, often on the basis of a more general style of being, and of potential future development that we perceive in an institution such as a party. From the Merleau-Pontean perspective that we have tried to sketch here, that is not a failing of political judgment, but is rather an optimal realization of how politics should be done, since ‘it is beyond the competence of any citizen to analyze, unravel, and judge everything by himself in the complexity of world politics.’28 According to this view, the idea that there is a metaphorical free market of political choices represented by various parties from which we can pick and choose depending on our changing opinions would be little more than an undesirable illusion. Instead, since it is impossible to have such a comprehensive grasp on all the issues that we can always discern precisely our own position on every issue, never mind what party best represents that position, it would seem the case that voters very often support a party

Faith, Virtù, and the Perception of Style

199

on the basis of the general direction the party indicates that they want to take the political body, and to what degree voters believe the party orthodoxy and think that the vision is realizable. In other words, to a large extent, people vote on faith, on the style of the party in relation to the current landscape of praxis, and it is prudent—at least according to MerleauPonty’s conception of political faith—that they do so. In the lectures on institution, Merleau-Ponty speaks of the opening of an ideological field that sets on course a teleology: both this field and its teleology are visible, perceivable, and subjects are only formed and can only operate within these fields and their teleologies.29 The party is such an ideological field and, according to Merleau-Ponty, should remain so. The party takes up the sedimented sense that forms the field of perception as a field of praxis in its movement and tries to orient it according to its own style. In this sense it sets a teleology on course, opening limited horizons or pathways of future development, pathways that are in line with its (the party’s) style. In politics we look for situations where a party provides an expression of our own commitment and faith, and thus we combine our political enterprise with that of the party. We do so without the certainty or sincerity that ‘focus-group politics’ feigns. Our faith, rather than being an expression of certainty is a risk that we take, one that we commit ourselves to not only in the life of the mind, but also down to the level of our bodily comportment and the originary manner in which the world appears prereflectively as a horizon of possibilities. In representational, parliamentary democratic politics, which Merleau-Ponty only later came to directly endorse, this means lending support where the style of a party deems it rational. According to this view, the idea of total sincerity in politics is bad faith. We, as with any member of any party, do not fully grasp all the issues, what the future will hold or how we, or the party we vote for, will precisely react. What we must try to do is read the signs to discern the style of a party and treat it like a friend into who we put some faith, and intertwine our own identity and being-toward-the-world, so long as their commitment to the world remains in line with our own.30

5. Virtù and ‘intuitive flair’ I said above that Merleau-Ponty’s response to the question of how we know when to question and when to take things (the party’s decisions) on trust was inadequate. In ‘Faith and Good Faith’ he simply refers to a ‘higher

200

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

awareness’ that is ‘man’s value’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, p. 179). I think that we can say without difficulty that this ‘higher awareness’ is rendered in his later thought as virtù. This applies particularly well to the description that he provides in ‘A Note on Machiavelli’ (‘a means of living with others’), and also to the idea of heroism that is presented in ‘Man the Hero.’ Here, Merleau-Ponty carefully separates his idea of heroism from a Hegelian notion of a ‘steward of the world spirit’ who is certain that he is carrying out the ‘wishes of history,’ or a Marxist idea of the party as having a privileged—scientific—vantage point on the unfolding of the dialectic (Ibid., p. 184). Instead, he connects his conception of heroism with the idea of faith, particularly as it pertains to relations with others, defining heroism as ‘loyalty to the natural movement which flings us toward things and toward others,’ and then going on to say that faith is ‘the very movement which unites us with others, our present with our past, and by means of which we make everything have meaning’ (Ibid., pp. 186–7). Virtù, as a ‘means of living with others,’ is the later rendering of this heroic faith. We have connected the idea of faith with ‘style.’ The perception of style, which we can also call a sort of ‘clairvoyance’ or ‘preseeing,’ is the perception of a developmental history, with both past and future horizons. Significantly, faith entails committing ourselves to, and assuming responsibility for, this history with which we are originarily perceptually implicated and its future development. However, virtù as a ‘means of living with others,’ a form of ‘heroism’ and of comprehending a style, must also involve the higher awareness of knowing when to bring that style into question and attempting to recast its teleology. But exactly how we are to do this remains unanswered. We can find a helpful clue in Husserl’s idea of ‘intuitive flair,’ which appears in his brief discussion of personal style or character in Ideas II (cf. Husserl, 1989, p. 286). Husserl writes, One speaks of intuitive ‘flair,’ a term which very often signifies just the opposite of intuition, i.e., insight, and is instead a presentiment, a preseeing without seeing, an obscure, specifically symbolic, often ungraspably empty, premonition. The actual nexus is then but a goal grasped in anticipation, an empty intention, one which is so determined, however that we follow the tendency, with its determinate direction, and in fulfilment of it can acquire a chain of actual intuitions. (Ibid.) The actual motivational nexuses that we have the presentiment of are thus given in the other’s expression in their most empty form. The presentiment offers an indication or direction to be pursued in the empathic construction

Faith, Virtù, and the Perception of Style

201

of the intentional nexuses of the other. This promise of intuition given in the presentiment—what we most often associate with the term style in its everyday usage which here retains its value—can never in fact be fulfilled, with regard to the other, but only appresented in an incomplete manner. This typology of intersubjective relations bears a close resemblance to our understanding of political faith. Husserl remarks in these passages that a better apperception of the other’s style is possible if we are able to put ourselves in the place of the other, to follow ‘the sedimented meaning of all [their] voluntary and involuntary experiences,’ to use Merleau-Ponty’s words (Merleau-Ponty, 1968a, p. 180). The perception of the style of the other, manifest in these indices, is the preseeing, clairvoyance, or presentiment, of the sedimented nexuses.31 But a preseeing of what is de jure invisible. What is presentified in the ‘intuitive flair’ that we have of another is a horizon (or scope) of possible manifestations of latent intentional nexuses, based on a givenness of the relations of styles within a diacritical gestalt whole. ‘Intuitive flair’ would be the perceptual givenness of a developmental, or institutional, history. This perceptual givenness of style in the expression of the other is, however, only indexical; it points toward, or gives an indication of, what cannot be fully given. ‘Intuitive flair’ in this sense is always a mixture of presence and absence.32 Could we not take Merleau-Ponty’s notion of virtù as a presentiment or ‘intuitive flair’ for the style of the historical moment, which would of course include the style of others? This again fits very well with the last paragraph of the ‘Introduction’ to Signs, where, following the reference to the model for political action as an ‘unremitting virtù,’ Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘There is no universal clock, but local histories take form beneath our eyes, and begin to regulate themselves, and haltingly are linked to one another’ (1964c, p. 35). But while we have described faith as being originary and natural (i.e., taking place in the natural attitude), this idea of virtù involves a distancing from the originary or natural faith, which is also its interrogation. By interrogating our natural commitment to the other, or to an institution such as a party, in its historical development, the (invisible) style of that development becomes more readily visible. This interrogation is carried out by tracing the visible signs that serve to make manifest the invisible sense that lines the visible world. This brings us to the relation between the sort of ‘faith’ that MerleauPonty is describing here and the more Husserlian idea of ‘presentification’ as it relates to ‘intuitive flair’ in the passage above. We can understand ‘faith’ both in terms of style, as we have done, and in terms of an unfulfillable

202

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

promise of an intuition of something absent. Is it the same for ‘presentification’? What Husserl describes as ‘intuitive flair’ is precisely the promise of a presentation that will never be fulfilled, so that it becomes a form of faith. Yet, it is also a motivation for action along a certain ‘tendency,’ the axis of which is given in the ‘presentification.’ In this way, what we describe as ‘faith’ becomes a form of interrogation spurred on by the (necessarily) empty anticipation that demands fulfillment. The ‘presentification’ gives an indication—or a ‘determinate direction’—of symbolic indices to follow in our interrogation, the praxis Merleau-Ponty describes as virtù. There is a circular movement here: faith becomes its own interrogation.

6. ‘Everything comes down to this’ In a working note from May 1959 Merleau-Ponty writes, Everything comes down to this: form a theory of perception and of comprehension that shows that to comprehend is not to constitute in intellectual immanence, that to comprehend is to apprehend by co-existence, laterally, by the style, and thereby to attain at once the far-off reaches of this style and of this cultural apparatus. (1968a, p. 188) What this essay has endeavored to show is that the kernel of this thought, its institution, can be found in the earlier political writing. The concept of faith that we have tried to expound here still provides a key for understanding both Merleau-Ponty’s later political thought—embodied in the term virtù—and the relation between that thought and the ontology of the visible world that he was developing in his last notes and essays. The term voyance or ‘clairvoyance’ takes a central role in the development of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology in the 1960–1961 course, L’ontologie cartésienne et l’ontologie aujourd’hui. We also find several references to it in ‘Eye and Mind.’33 Here, we can only attempt an indication of how this term, along with the idea of style, relates to the idea of political faith from which we started. In these texts and notes, Merleau-Ponty describes ‘clairvoyance’ as a bond or conduit between the visible world and sedimented meaning; it is a seeing that ‘renders present to us what is absent’ or invisible, a vision that makes the invisible armature of sedimented sense that structures the perceptual world visible (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a, p. 171). Clairvoyance in this sense is both that faith which binds us to the world and to others, and a kind of seeing of faith, a manner of making visible or perceiving our faith in the world. Clairvoyance is thus what Merleau-Ponty

Faith, Virtù, and the Perception of Style

203

describes above as comprehending by the style. He is careful to separate this idea from a Cartesian idea of vision as the reading of signs by thought (Merleau-Ponty, 1996, pp. 182–3). Vision for Merleau-Ponty is this faith in the world and in others. Perception is always infused with the ‘intuitive flair’ that Husserl spoke of; it remains seeing according to corporeal indices, but what they point to is not relations in thought, but rather the relations between the styles of the things themselves. Thought, faith, commitment, and responsibility are on the outside, in the visible. Subjectivity is formed—instituted—in their bond with perception. Or we might even say that perception is a form, the originary form, of faith, commitment, and responsibility. In this way the idea of political faith that Merleau-Ponty wrote of, if somewhat vaguely, in the essays of the 1940s remains central to the ontology that he was developing at the end of his life. The ‘clairvoyance’ that he describes in these last writings, the seeing of style in its movement and development, thus becomes key to understanding the idea of virtù. But central to all this remains the faith that pulls us forward into our commitments and relations with others and with political institutions, forming our world as one that is constantly infused with hope, love, fear, disappointment, and ultimately the renewal of commitment and resolution that our faith calls for down to its primordial perceptual being.

Notes 1

2

3

4

Specifically, the politics of the Catholic Church, whose refusal to fully back the workers’ struggle Merleau-Ponty vehemently attacks. I emphasize ‘some’ because, though he abandoned the support for the Communist Party, he still retained some of the idea of democratic centralism. Neither Merleau-Ponty nor his translators were particularly consistent with the spelling of vertu or virtue. In the ‘Introduction’ to Signs the word is spelled virtù. However, in ‘A Note on Machiavelli,’ the normal French and English spellings are used, vertu and virtue respectively. I will use the spelling from the ‘Introduction,’ virtù, in order to indicate the rather unorthodox meaning of the term that I hope to set out. Indeed, in the earlier essay, he still seems to counsel the sort of wait and see attitude toward Communist politics that he defended in Humanism and Terror. By contrast, the introduction to Signs, represents the other Merleau-Ponty: the more cautious and prudent thinker, who rejected the politics and tactics of both Soviet Communism and the Parti Communiste in France, endorsing social democracy and with it liberal parliamentarianism—a ‘Weberian militant liberalism’—as the only guarantee of ‘opposition’ and ‘truth’ (cf. Merleau-Ponty, 1973b, p. 226).

204 5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

‘How could he have been understood? He writes against good feeling in politics, but is also against violence. Since he has the nerve to speak of virtue at the very moment he is sorely wounding ordinary morality, he disconcerts the believers in Law as he does those who believe that the state is the Law’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964c, p. 211). For example, when he suggests that both perception and politics—precisely in being acts of faith—involve a ‘commitment which is never completely justified’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, p. 179). In this chapter O’Neill defines what he calls ‘the context of Marxist scientism’ as ‘once Marxism became Party knowledge and a tool for the industrialization of Soviet society, Marxism identified with economic determinism and the values of scientific naturalism at the expense of its own radical humanism’ (p. 276). There are also apperceptions—co-givennesses—which cannot be made present by simply changing my perspective on the object. Most famously and importantly those, described by Husserl in his Fifth Cartesian Meditation, that I have of another person’s inner states (emotions, thoughts, etc.) on the basis of the perception of the expressiveness of the lived body. Cf., for example, ‘[m]oreover the distinction between the two planes (natural and cultural) is abstract: everything is cultural in us (our Lebenswelt is ‘subjective’) (our perception is cultural historical) and everything is natural in us (even the cultural rests on the polymorphism of the wild Being)’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968a, p. 253). ‘My interlocutor gets angry and I notice that he is expressing his anger by speaking aggressively, by gesticulating and shouting. But where is his anger? People will say that it is in the mind of my interlocutor. What this means is not entirely clear. For I could not imagine the malice and cruelty which I discern in my opponent’s looks separated from his gestures, speech and body. None of this takes place in an otherworldly realm, in some shrine located beyond the body of the angry man. It is really here in this room and in this part of the room that the anger breaks forth. It is in the space between him and me that it unfolds’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2004, p. 63). I am grateful to Jacques Rancière’s ‘Notes on the Photographic Image’ in Radical Philosophy 156 (July/August 2009) for bringing this photograph to my attention. I risk somewhat twisting the sense of Merleau-Ponty’s comment here, as the ‘flesh’ in this quote does not necessarily refer to the body. Nonetheless, MerleauPonty does point to corporeity as the guardian of the ‘indestructible past’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968a, p. 243). It is our corporeal intertwining with the things themselves that allows for the lining of the perceptual world with historical sense, for perception to always be cultural. Cf., for example, the description of ‘sensible ideas’ in the final chapter of The Visible and the Invisible: ‘no one has gone further than Proust [. . .] in describing an idea that the contrary of the sensible that is its lining and depth [. . .] this invisible, these ideas, unlike those of that science cannot be detached from the sensible appearances and erected into a second positivity’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968a, p. 149).

Faith, Virtù, and the Perception of Style 14

15

16

17

18

19 20

21

22

23

24

205

Cf., ‘Like the memory screen of the psychoanalysts, the present, the visible counts so much for me and has an absolute prestige for me only by reason of this immense latent content of the past, the future, and the elsewhere, which it announces and which it conceals’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968a, p. 114). Cf., ‘For a theory of praxis, knowledge itself is not the intellectual possession of a signification, of a mental object; and the proletarians are able to carry this meaning of history, even though this meaning is not in the form of an “I think”’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1973b, p. 50); and, ‘In what sense are we employing the word truth? It is not the truth of realism, the correspondence between the idea and external thing [. . .] Thus the truth of Marxism is not the truth one attributes to the natural sciences, the similarity of an idea and its external ideatum; it is rather non-falsity, the maximum guarantee against error that men may demand and get’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1973b, p. 52). ‘Truth itself is then conceived as a process of indefinite verification’ (MerleauPonty, 1973b, p. 53). Numerous passages in both Adventures of the Dialectic and the 1961 lectures on Marx in ‘Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel’ refer to the task of freeing Marxism from Engels’ and Lenin’s scientism (and sometimes from Marx himself): For example, ‘We must first show this in Marx [. . .] [t]he notion of praxis as inheritor of absolute knowledge,’ and in reference to certain passages in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts: ‘This is the face which communism turns toward a “beyond” (its side where negation of the negation is positive) [. . .] It implies a return to the positive by the Party and the dictatorship. This is certainly efficacy, but is it a realization of negativity?’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1998, pp. 58, 82–3). ‘The idea as a field does not contain what will develop there [in the field], and nonetheless it sets on course a teleology’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2003b, pp. 98–9). In alien limb syndrome, for example. Cf., the descriptions of Cézanne’s painting in ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, pp. 10–18). Indeed, Merleau-Ponty speculates in ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’ on the relation between Cézanne’s possible schizophrenia and his ability to enact (what I think we can call) a sort of phenomenological reduction in his work (1964b, pp. 20–1). Cf., for example, ‘We live in the midst of man-made objects, among tools, in houses, streets, cities, and most of the time we see them through the human actions which put them to use. We become used to thinking that all of this exists necessarily and unshakably. Cézanne’s painting suspends these habits of thought and reveals the base of inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, p. 16). In section 5 below, we will show that this ‘higher awareness’ can be equated with the notion of virtù found in Merleau-Ponty’s later writings. A cogent summary of the concept of Scientific Marxism can be found in John Holloway’s Change the World Without Taking Power. The Meaning of Revolution Today: ‘The notion of Marxism as scientific socialism has two aspects. In Engels’ account there is a double objectivity. Marxism is objective, certain, “scientific” knowledge of an objective, inevitable process. Marxism is understood as scientific in the

206

25

26

27

28

29

30 31

32

33

Merleau-Ponty at the Limits

sense that it has understood correctly the laws of motion of a historical process taking place independently of men’s will. All that is left for Marxists to do is to fill in the details, to apply the scientific understanding of history’ (2002, pp. 121–2). It was Lukács who, in History and Class Consciousness, perhaps most famously, pointed out the impoverishment of dialectical thought by this scientific account: ‘Dialectics, he [Engels] argues, is a continuous process of transition from one definition into the other. In consequence a one-sided and rigid causality must be replaced by interaction. But he does not even mention the most vital interaction, namely, the dialectical relation between subject and object in the historical process, let alone give it the prominence it deserves’ (1971, p. 3). Cf., Merleau-Ponty, 1968a, p. 101—‘ontological landscape’—and Merleau-Ponty, 1973b, p. 199—‘landscape of praxis.’ Cf., also, Waldenfels, 2000, p. 91. This is opposed to Engel’s interpretation of the dialectic: ‘An exact representation of the universe, of its evolution, of the development of mankind, and of the reflection of this evolution in the minds of men, can therefore be obtained by the methods of dialectics with its constant regard to the innumerable actions and reactions of life and death, of progressive and retrogressive changes’ (1968, p. 46). Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, p. 180. Merleau-Ponty is citing P. Hervé, La liberation trahie. Cf., ‘There is [. . .] in the order of the perceived, not only Dingwahrnemung, but Verhalten of which it is a particular case; not only a sensorial field, but ideological, imaginary, mythical, praxic, symbolic, fields—historical surroundings [entourage] and perception as the reading of this surrounding’; and ‘there is not an intelligible world, there is a culture. Which is to say, the apparatuses of knowledge (speech, books, works) open an ideological field [. . .] the idea as a field does not contain what will develop there, yet it sets on course a teleology’ (MerleauPonty, 2003b, pp. 175, 98–9). Merleau-Ponty in many places calls these ‘signs’ ‘existentials.’ It would seem that we are also able to have an apperception—sometimes wrong—of someone’s style while knowing very little about him or her. We can apperceive their actions as fitting into more general forms of style. The phrase, ‘I know your type,’ tells us something here. When we say such things we are not really saying anything about the person, about whom we may know very little, but rather about the world. We know or have experience of certain more general styles that are manifest in the world, and how certain general styles or possible nexuses of motivation will (or might) respond in the world in relation to others. In Merleau-Ponty’s course notes on Husserl’s ‘Origin of Geometry,’ we find a strikingly similar idea with regard to intersubjectivity. Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘Just as the only way to remember an idea is to begin the ideation over, the only way of yielding to intersubjective thought is to retrace the trace, to think anew by operating through an activity an exact coincidence with a passivity’ (MerleauPonty, 2002a, p. 56). Merleau-Ponty, 1964d, pp. 167, 171. A substantial and informative discussion of the idea can also be found in Carbone, 2004, pp. 31–5.

Faith, Virtù, and the Perception of Style

207

References Carbone, M. (2004), The Thinking of the Sensible. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Engels, F. (1968), Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Moscow: Progress. Holloway, J. (2002), Change the World Without Taking Power. The Meaning of Revolution Today. London: Pluto Press. Husserl, E. (1989), Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer, Collected Works III. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Lukács, G. (1971), History and Class Consciousness. Trans. R. Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. O’Neill, J. (1984), ‘Merleau-Ponty’s Critique of Marxist Scientism,’ in B. Waldenfels, J. M. Broekman, and A. Pazanin (eds.), Phenomenology and Marxism. London: Routledge. Waldenfels, B. (2000), ‘The Paradox of Expression,’ in Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of the Flesh. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Bibliography of Works by Merleau-Ponty

1942 1945a 1945b 1960 1962 1963a 1963b 1964a

1964b 1964c 1964d 1964e 1968a 1968b 1969 1973a 1973b 1993 1995 1996 1998

2000 2002a 2002b

La Structure du Comportement. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. La Phénomenologie de la Perception. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. ‘Le doute de Cézanne,’ in La revue Fontaine, 8, (47), December. Signes. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Structure of Behavior. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. John Wild, James M. Edie, and John O’Neill. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Ed. James M. Edie. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Sense and Non-Sense. Trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Signs. Trans. Richard C. McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Le Visible et l’invisible. Ed. C. Lefort. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. L’Oeil et l’Esprit. Paris: Gallimard. Visible and the Invisible. Ed. C. Lefort. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Résumés de cours (Collège de France, 1952–1960). Paris: Éditions Gallimard. La prose du monde. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. The Prose of the World. Trans. John O’Neill. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Adventures of the Dialectic. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader. Ed. G. Johnson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. La Nature: notes, cours du Collège de France. Ed. D. Séglard. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Notes de cours 1959–1961. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. ‘Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel,’ in Hugh J. Silverman (ed.), Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Merleau-Ponty. London: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty: Parcours Deux (1951–1961). Lagrasse: Verdier. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. New York: Routledge. Causeries, 1948. Établi et annotées par Stéphanie Ménasé. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Bibliography 2002c 2003a 2003b 2004

209

Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology. Trans. L. Lawlor and B. Bergo. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Nature: Course Notes. Ed. D. Séglard. Trans. Robert Vallier. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. L’Institution, La Passivité: Notes de cours au Collége de France (1954–1955). Ed. D. Darmaillacq, C. Lefort, and S. Ménasé. Paris: Éditions Belin. The World of Perception. Trans. Oliver Davis. London: Routledge.

This page intentionally left blank

Index

a priori 42–50 activity 45, 55, 108, 136–7 Ad Marginem (Klee) 26 aesthetic judgment 41–5 ambiguity 103–7 ambivalence, ambivalent 24–5, 30–1 appearance, appearing 23–8, 32–4, 38–9, 79, 187–99 Aquinas, Thomas 148, 179 Assisi, St. Francis 160 atheism 157, 177–8 background (vs. foreground) 23, 30–1, 141 barbaric Principle 135, 142 beauty, beautiful, beautiful forms 35, 41–56 becoming 121–7, 136–41 Beethoven, Ludwig 52 behavior 64–75, 173 being 26–8, 50, 113–16, 137, 152 Bloom, Harold 172 Brunschwicg, Léon 44–5 brushstroke, brushstrokes: pattern of 34–6 brute being 28, 97, 135 Carbone, Mauro 105–9, 116n.7, 123 Cartesian 8–9, 63–5, 128, 161 Cartesian Meditations (Husserl) 33, 188 category mistake see Ryle, Gilbert Catholic 158–60 Catholicism 158–60, 191 Cézanne, Paul 30–9, 53–4, 167–74, 194–7 ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’ (Merleau-Ponty) 32–3 Montagne Saint Victoire 31, 34

chiasm 120–3, 134–7, 150–2 Chrétien, Jean-Louis 159, 162n.1, 164n.12 Christianity 5–6, 153–7, 160, 178–80 cipher (Chiffreschrift) 35, 149 city, modern 173–6 clairvoyance (voyance) 48, 186–7, 200–3 cognition 67–75, 118n.38, 149 color 22, 27, 30–1, 38, 46–50, 80–1 communion 150–1, 160 Communism, Communist party 198, 205n.17 consciousness 65–72, 95–118, 120–7, 134–9 contagion 41–2, 50 contemplation 36–8, 171–3 corps mécanique 63–5 Critique of Judgment (Kant) 35, 41–51 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 43, 98, 100 Davis, Mike 85–7, 91n.6 dehiscence 56, 134 depth 9, 30, 109, 112–13, 124–43, 171–4, 182, 188–9 Descartes, René 7, 63–9, 161 see also Cartesian Meditations 64 Treatise on Man 64 desire 48–50 disinterest, disinterestedness 43–50 divergence 49, 97, 115, 136 see also écart dualism 9, 121, 151 écart 49, 95–7, 105, 112–14 see also divergence ecospirituality 143

212

Index

embodiment 46, 98, 120–2, 126, 139, 155–9 emotions 48–9 empiricism empiricist 70–3, 124 essence, essences, essential 47–8, 121, 133–4, 163n.8, 170–1, 189–90 Eucharist, Eucharistic 147–52, 160–1, 177–81, 183n.11 excess 54, 57n.10 experience 10–11, 39, 41–9, 79–80, 87–90, 122–30, 174 lived 109–13, 148–50, 161 perceptual 70–5, 143n.1 pre-predicative 98–101, 113 qualitative 65 sense experience 80–4, 149–50 visual 34 expression creative 7–8, 38, 121, 163n.8, 170, 199 linguistic 56 and meaning 46, 99 prereflective 8, 49–50, 188 faith perceptual 130, 134–5 political 185–202 religious 157, 160–1, 180 feeling 42–52, 164n.16 flair (intuitive) 199–203 freedom 152, 181, 193 Freire, Paulo 89–90 Freud, Sigmund Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis 86–9

horizon 5, 22, 128–39, 180, 190, 200–1 humanism, humanistic 45, 52, 187, 191 Husserl, Edmund 32–9, 47–8, 54, 95–118, 120–3, 134–40, 148–9, 183n.7, 198, 200–3 Lecture on Internal Time Consciousness 99, 102, 109, 116, 117n.10 idealism overcoming of 149, 167 imaginary 22–3, 137, 162 imagination 23, 43–5, 50–2, 149, 154, 161, 170–7 immanence 6, 38, 110, 122–3, 158–61, 179–81 incarnation 8–9, 147–61, 178 indeterminacy, indeterminant 73–5, 77n.12, 80–8, 129, 138, 197 inhuman 33–5, 53–4, 196 institution 190–3, 198–202 intentionality 33, 45, 139–40 fungierende as latent 105–14 as operative 95–109 motor 74–7 interiority 148–9 interrogation 49–50, 190–202 intersubjectivity 158, 206n.32 invisibility 27, 56, 141 invisible 21–5, 188–90, 201–2 Joyce, James 154, 172–81 judgment 72, 193 aesthetic 41–56

Gestalt 193, 201 God 28, 96, 124–31, 148–50, 155–62, 168, 177–81 ground, grounding 2, 10–11, 28, 37, 42–8, 72–4, 104–6, 139

Kant, Immanuel 3, 41–53, 100–1, 105, 108 kenosis 158, 179 Klee, Paul 21–8, 48, 152 Park near Lucerne 26

habit, habits 77n.15, 83, 89, 195 Hegel, G.W. F. 8, 45, 50, 159, 200 Heidegger, Martin 27–8, 55, 69, 95, 149, 170, 180 Introduction to Metaphysics 47–8

landscape 30–7, 57n.4, 126, 135, 198–9 language creative 169–75 philosophy of 65, 142, 164n.11, 183 n.10

Index line, linearity 21–8, 38, 123–4 love 48, 56, 155, 160, 203 Lyotard, Jean-François 51, 55 Mallarmé, Stéphane 167–8 Marion, Jean-Luc 159, 170 Marx, Karl 187, 205n.17 Marxism 197, 204–5 Matisse, Henri 23–5, 161, 194 melody 46–7 memory 101–2, 170–3 metaphysics 147–9, 157, 179 mind absolute mind 97, 131 and body 9, 47, 63–70, 146–53, 199 brute 53–4 modern city 172–3 painting 23, 25 modernity 154, 177 music, musical 44–9, 57n.9 nature 28, 33–9, 45–56, 135–6, 142, 158–61, 179, 195–6 Newman, Barnett 52, 56 ontology, ontological 21–8, 50–5, 95–7, 114–23, 177–80, 186–7 onto-theology 148 passivity 45, 55, 104–8, 194 in Husserl 97 perceiver, perceived 73–5, 121–36, 168–70, 206n.29 phenomenology and language 172 as method 39, 46, 80, 96–7, 111–15, 121, 139, 147–51 plate, photographic 35–6 pleasure 41–56, 57n.12 poetry 48–52 and Klee 26 presence 95, 101, 106, 129–31, 201 present (vs. past, future) 79–83, 104–15, 129–42, 194, 200

213

primordiality, primordial 33–4, 38–9, 114, 126–7, 142, 181 Proust, Marcel, Proustian 171–81, 195 In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) 128, 153–4 psychology 69, 104 reduction 33–4, 97–100, 151, 170, 195 responsibility, political 189–200 retention 101–7, 113–14, 117n.10 reversibility 134–46, 140 Rilke, Rainer Maria 50, 167–74, 178, 180 Rodin 49–50 Romanticism 45 Rothko, Mark 52 Ryle, Gilbert 63–70, 75–6 ‘category mistake’ 66–7 Concept of Mind 65–8, 70 ‘the Ghost in the Machine’ 65 sacrament 150, 160–1, 169 Sartre, Jean Paul 53, 149, 158–9, 164n.11, 179–80 Nausea 71 Scheler, Max 149, 160–1, 164n.16 Schelling, Friedrich 16n.4, 28, 45 schema 31, 38 in Husserl’s early work 109–12 Scholasticism 148 self 45–8, 83–4, 96–102, 108, 114–15, 121, 170 sensation 33, 41–5, 71–3, 170 sensible idea 46–8, 189–90 sincerity 185–99 skill, skillful behavior 68–70, 75–6, 77n.15 spectator 40, 99, 103, 188 Spinoza 147, 162n.1 still-life: nature morte 37 style 67, 77n.14, 152–3, 169–77, 186–203 subject, subjectivity 81–5, 95–115, 120–8, 163n.8, 188, 199 subjective universality 43–50 sublime, sublimity Kantian 52–3 mathematical and dynamical 51–2

214

Index

sublime, sublimity (Cont’d) Merleau-Pontean 53–6 synchronization 82–90

unconscious 50, 54 understanding 35, 42–6 urbanism see modern, city

teleology 191–200 telos 192 texture 174–82, 190 in painting 37–9 touch 46, 49, 74 transcendence 99–103, 111, 117n.17, 122, 155–61, 178–81 transcendental 33–4, 41–6 field 95–7, 108–13 truly 97–111 translation canvas as text of 35–8

verticality, vertical 56, 105–6, 108–15, 135–43 virtù 185–7, 199–203 visibility, visible 21–7, 31–2, 151, 188–91 vision 8–10, 21–3, 49, 73 sacramental 151–5, 160–2, 169–81, 202–3 world cultural 140, 188 natural 80, 140–3, 160–1