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Was Merleau-Ponty a ‘transcendental’ phenomenologist?

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Abstract

Whether or not Merleau-Ponty’s version of phenomenology should be considered a form of ‘transcendental’ philosophy is open to debate. Although the Phenomenology of Perception presents his position as a transcendental one, many of its features—such as its exploitation of empirical science—might lead to doubt that it can be. This paper considers whether Merleau-Ponty meets what I call the ‘transcendentalist challenge’ of defining and grounding claims of a distinctive transcendental kind. It begins by highlighting three features—the absolute ego, the pure phenomenal field, and the reduction—that Husserl had used to justify claims of a specifically transcendental kind within a phenomenological framework. It then examines how Merleau-Ponty modifies each of these features to focus on the lived body and a factically conditioned phenomenal field, while remaining ambivalent about the reduction. Finally, it assesses whether Merleau-Ponty’s modified position can still legitimately be considered transcendental. I argue that—despite his own rhetoric—this modified position shapes the modality of Merleau-Ponty’s claims in such a way that his phenomenology cannot meet the transcendentalist challenge and therefore should not be considered ‘transcendental.’

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Notes

  1. See Brentano (1995, p. 139).

  2. Husserl (1987, p. 56).

  3. Somewhat confusingly, Husserl (1968, p. 288) further distinguishes ‘pure phenomenological psychology’ that ‘parallels’ transcendental phenomenology in method and content. One might suspect, with Derrida (1993, pp. 11–12), that such ‘parallelism’ undermines the intended distinction. In investigating the counterfactual, however, transcendental phenomenology is attributed an extended field of enquiry that secures necessity, so that its claims differ in their underlying justification and modality (see below).

  4. Zahavi (2002) has argued persuasively that many of Merleau-Ponty’s views are found in Husserl’s later and unpublished work. For my purposes here, however, what matters is how differences between Merleau-Ponty’s and the early Husserl’s views affect the former’s ability to make transcendental claims.

  5. Husserl (1950, p. 60 [§8]). ‘Geltung’ is sometimes, somewhat misleadingly, rendered in English as ‘acceptance’.

  6. Husserl (1976, p. 20 f. [§7]).

  7. Husserl (1976, pp. 16–7 [§4]). A fact that Sartre (1966, pp. 17–18) appears to have misunderstood.

  8. Husserl (1950, pp. 103, 66 [§34, §12]). Empirical and eidetic description together yield ‘universal description’ (Husserl 1950, p. 75 [§15]).

  9. Husserl (1950, p. 105 [§34]).

  10. Husserl (1950, p. 106 [§34]).

  11. Husserl (1976, p. 198 [§86]); cf. also Husserl (1950, p. 114 f. [§40]).

  12. For Kant transcendental knowledge is concerned with ‘our way of knowing objects in so far as this is to be possible apriori’ (Kant 1983, p. 63 [B 25]). On the necessity of synthetic apriori judgements see ibid., p. 201 [B 197].

  13. Although sometimes criticized for its supposed obscurity (e.g. Bell 1990, p. 162)—a view some of his own comments encourage (e.g. Husserl 1976, p. 201 [§87]; 1954, p. 140 [§35])—the attitude Husserl’s method requires is thus a well-defined stance of theoretically motivated abstraction and imaginative exploration of possibilities of a kind typical of mathematical thinking.

  14. See Husserl (1954, pp. 154–9 [§§41–44]), where the discussion of the lifeworld leads on to the epoché. What is new in Husserl’s late writings is not a rejection of transcendental phenomenology, but the identification of different starting points or ways into it (as emphasized by Kern 1977).

  15. Cf. Husserl’s argument that without the reduction phenomenology would collapse into philosophical anthropology. For Husserl (1989, p. 172), to miss ‘the meaning of the reduction, which is the only gateway to the new realm [of pure phenomena]’ is to miss ‘everything’.

  16. Occasionally footnotes will signal parallel passages or commitments in the Visible and Invisible.

  17. Merleau-Ponty (1976, pp. 51, 240 f. and passim).

  18. That is, an ‘absolute constituting consciousness’ which is ‘subject neither to time nor to any limitation’ (Merleau-Ponty 1976, pp. 51, 426).

  19. Merleau-Ponty (1976, p. 117).

  20. Baldwin (2004, 2013), for example, holds that for Merleau-Ponty ‘our embodiment functions as a kind of transcendental subjectivity’ (Baldwin 2013, p. 201).

  21. Merleau-Ponty (1976, p. 404).

  22. Merleau-Ponty (2002, p. 217).

  23. Merleau-Ponty (1976, p. 272, cf. p. 171 f.).

  24. Merleau-Ponty (1976, p. 117).

  25. It is tempting to talk of a ‘condition of possibility’, but this term—I argue below—is problematic in the context of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking.

  26. Merleau-Ponty (1976, p. 306; cf. also pp. iv, 320n, 490): ‘What do we have, then, at the beginning? Not a multiple given with a synthetic apperception […] but a certain perceptual field against the background of the world’ (Merleau-Ponty 1976, p. 279).

  27. Merleau-Ponty (1976, p. 404).

  28. Merleau-Ponty (1976, p. 247 f.). In Merleau-Ponty’s (1976, p. 245) words, ‘The subject of perception […] is a power that co-emerges with, and synchronizes itself with, a certain environment of existence’.

  29. Merleau-Ponty (1976, p. 377).

  30. Merleau-Ponty (1976, p. 123; cf. similarly pp. 60, 73).

  31. Merleau-Ponty (1976, p. 492).

  32. Merleau-Ponty (1976, pp. 431 ff.). See also his characterizations of embodied agents as having an ‘eccentric’ constitution (Merleau-Ponty 1976, pp. 405, 512).

  33. This follows Husserl’s definition of immanence and transcendence in §42 of Ideas I. Perception is an ‘open field’, human experience an ‘open totality whose synthesis cannot be achieved’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, p. 12; Merleau-Ponty 1976, p. 254). As a ‘third genre of being between the pure subject and the object, the [embodied] subject loses its purity and transparency’ (Merleau-Ponty 1976, p. 402).

  34. Recall Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis that the ‘most important acquisition of phenomenology is no doubt to have combined the extreme of subjectivism and the extreme of objectivism in its notion of the world’ (Merleau-Ponty 1976, p. xv).

  35. Gardner (2015) suggests that proposing such an overall picture—a metaphysics—is part of what distinguishes Merleau-Ponty’s position from psychology and contemporary philosophy of mind, insightfully highlighting parallels between some of Merleau-Ponty’s arguments and those of traditional transcendental idealists, particularly Kant’s treatment of the antinomies. My concern here is whether Merleau-Ponty succeeds in identifying conditions that are—as Gardner (2015, p. 300) puts it—‘in the true and genuine sense transcendental, i.e. a priori and necessary, and non-identical with empirical, contingent or mundane states of affairs’.

  36. E.g. Clark (1998).

  37. Each structure serves as an entry point in studying the transcendental field in which they are embedded. As Zahavi (2003, p. 76) puts it, it ‘does not matter which of the three one takes as a starting point, for one will still be inevitably led to the other two’.

  38. Merleau-Ponty (1976, p. i).

  39. Merleau-Ponty (1976, p. viii). Cf. Merleau-Ponty (1964, pp. 142, 154). He also claims the reduction is best characterized as a sense of ‘surprise’ (étonnement) before the world once we step back from our usual immersion and engagement in it (Merleau-Ponty 1976, p. viii).—Despite resonating with Aristotle’s or Plato’s suggestion that philosophy starts with wonder, and its suspension of everyday concerns, this formulation bears no resemblance to most of Husserl’s pronouncements about the reduction. For one interpretation of this as an affective attitude, see Heinämaa (1999).

  40. Romdenh-Romluc (2011, pp. 28–35) suggests that Merleau-Ponty’s method is broadly empirical and scientific while requiring the ‘transcendental phenomenological reduction’ (p. 21). In Husserl’s terms this is impossible.

  41. Naturally this invites the charge of ‘equivocation’. However, although Merleau-Ponty might have explained his differences with Husserl more clearly, his approach coheres with his conception of authentic speech—as taking up and reinterpreting sedimented past language—and the productive ambiguity of a philosopher’s intellectual legacy (cf. Merleau-Ponty 1960, pp. 198–202).

  42. Husserl (1976, p. 65 [§32]).

  43. As Husserl (1954, p. 153 [§40]) highlights in the Crisis.

  44. Merleau-Ponty (1976, p. vi).

  45. Merleau-Ponty (1976, pp. vi-viii). Cf. Merleau-Ponty (1964, p. 21).

  46. Merleau-Ponty (1976, pp. 379, 397, cf. p. 413 f.).

  47. Merleau-Ponty (1976, pp. 381, 468, 371 f.).

  48. The ‘certitudes of common sense and of the natural attitude’ are ‘presupposed by all thinking’ (Merleau-Ponty 1976, p. viii); ‘it is at least certain for us that there are things, i.e. a world. To ask whether the world is real is not to understand what one is saying’ (Merleau-Ponty 1976, pp. viii, 396; cf. similarly Merleau-Ponty 1960, p. 206 f.).

  49. Against this, Joel Smith argues that the epoché is a second-order act performed on first-order judgement, ruling out conflict with the ‘noncognitive’ notion of être au monde, and that Merleau-Ponty ‘accepts and puts into practice […] the epoché’ (Smith 2005, pp. 559, 554). However, it is difficult to see Merleau-Ponty accepting a cognitive/noncognitive dichotomy, given his general opposition to dualisms and over-intellectualization, together with the foundational role he assigns the prepredicative realm. It is also difficult to see him seeking to salvage the epoché at the level of judgement, given his general determination to shift focus away from this level.—I explain below in what sense Merleau-Ponty can be seen, as Smith discerns, as accepting and practicing a (revised) form of the epoché.

  50. Merleau-Ponty (1976, pp. 58, 60). The ‘constancy hypothesis’ is the assumption of a 1:1 correspondence between the functioning of sense organs and the objective world (ibid., p. 14).

  51. As Carman (2008, p. 39) observes, despite considering them ‘strictly speaking impossible’, Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to ‘find something valuable’ in the transcendental and eidetic reductions ‘leads him to characterize them in ways that depart widely from Husserl’s account’.

  52. Merleau-Ponty (1976, p. 66).

  53. Merleau-Ponty (1976, p. 71n).

  54. Merleau-Ponty (1976, pp. 72, 73). Merleau-Ponty’s commitment to the term ‘transcendental’ is not initially obvious, and the above passage might seem to be resisting a ‘transcendental’ idealist interpretation of gestalt psychology (cf. Langer 1989, p. 19). Although Merleau-Ponty often uses the term in relation to transcendental idealism or a transcendental Ego, both of which he clearly opposes, he also claims the ‘descriptive method’ is legitimate only ‘from the transcendental point of view’ (Merleau-Ponty 1976, p. 13n) and later clearly applies the term to his own view of the transcendental field (cf. Merleau-Ponty 1976, pp. 413, 418, 466).

  55. Merleau-Ponty (1976, p. 73).

  56. Husserl (1950, p. 66).

  57. Merleau-Ponty (1976, p. 74).

  58. Cf. Merleau-Ponty (1976, pp. 382–5 and 81–86).

  59. As he ingeniously describes it, the temporalization of presence combines ‘a principled immanence’ and ‘a factual transcendence’: ‘in this transcendental field […], I have in principle a sort of ubiquity and eternity’ (Merleau-Ponty 1976, p. 418).

  60. Merleau-Ponty (1976, p. 74).

  61. Merleau-Ponty (1976, p. 451). Similarly Merleau-Ponty (1964, p. 159). Thus Merleau-Ponty rejects a traditional strategy for delimiting philosophical truths from other modes of enquiry. See, for example, Leibniz’s ‘truths […] of reasoning and those of fact’ (Leibniz 1982, p. 40), Hume’s ‘relations of ideas’ and ‘matters of fact’ (Hume 1999, p. 108), or the more recent contrasting of conceptual and empirical truths.

  62. Merleau-Ponty (1976, pp. 150, 147). Similarly, ‘The Philosopher and his Shadow’ claims that a transcendental attitude cannot be radically distinguished from the natural attitude due to our original unbracketable faith in the world’s existence (Merleau-Ponty 1960, p. 207). Perhaps this is why Merleau-Ponty (1976, p. 76) at one point simply glosses ‘transcendental’ as ‘radical’.—Incidentally, it is not obvious how to understand this proposal, as empirical and transcendental claims presumably have mutually exclusive modalities (necessary/apriori and contingent/aposteriori).

  63. Merleau-Ponty (1976, p. 255).

  64. Merleau-Ponty (1976, p. 256).

  65. Merleau-Ponty (1976, p. 199).

  66. Merleau-Ponty (1976, p. 198). Such as, for example, Kant’s distinction of contingent sensibility from the necessities of the understanding.

  67. Merleau-Ponty (1976, pp. 255, 197).

  68. Or ‘conditions effectives’ (Merleau-Ponty 1976, p. 236). These reservations are anticipated in The Structure of Behaviour (Merleau-Ponty 2002, p. 239 f.) and reiterated in The Visible and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty 1964, p. 68).—Note, however, that Merleau-Ponty is not completely consistent in this respect and himself sometimes apparently addresses questions of the form ‘how is … possible?’ and talks in his own voice of ‘conditions of possibility’ (e.g. Merleau-Ponty 1976, p. 490).

  69. Merleau-Ponty (1976, p. 48).

  70. Merleau-Ponty (1976, p. 501).

  71. Merleau-Ponty (1976, p. 74).

  72. The Phenomenology of Perception is surely intended to meet the need identified at the end of The Structure of Behaviour to ‘redefine transcendental philosophy’ while integrating it with the ‘phenomenon of the real’ (Merleau-Ponty 2002, p. 241).

  73. Cf. his comment that the fact we can reflectively find geometric relations in spatial awareness does not mean they were ‘already there’ (Merleau-Ponty 1976, p. 337).

  74. Since ‘thought itself’ is the ‘passage from the undetermined to the determined’ (Merleau-Ponty 1976, p. 39).

  75. Indeed, one of the faults Merleau-Ponty attributes to the intellectualist is claiming to infer what is the case from what they believe is necessary (cf. Merleau-Ponty 1976, p. 74).

  76. In this respect, Merleau-Ponty shares the convictions that Rorty (1991, p. 55) sees as basic to naturalism that ‘anything might have been otherwise, that there can be no conditionless conditions […] and that there is no such thing as a noncausal condition of possibility’.

  77. Husserl (1950, p. 106 [§34]).—See also his claim that the ‘old ontological doctrine that knowledge of “possibilities” must precede that of actual realities [Wirklichkeiten], is in my view, as long as it is correctly understood and made use of in the right way, a prodigious truth’ (Husserl 1976, p. 178 [§79]).

  78. Merleau-Ponty (1976, pp. 129, 126). This is the general capacity that the Phenomenology suggests Schneider lacks. According to The Structure of Behaviour animal behaviour also lacks this ability, while the ‘capacity to orient oneself in relation to the possible’ is characteristic of the human dialectic with its surroundings (Merleau-Ponty 2002, pp. 128 f., 190). The significance of this general capacity is nicely highlighted by Romdenh-Romluc (2007).

  79. As the world’s ‘ontological contingency’ is ‘radical’, Merleau-Ponty explains, the ‘world is the real, of which the necessary and the possible are merely provinces’ (Merleau-Ponty 1976, p. 456; cf. similarly Merleau-Ponty 1964, p. 148). Hence, the ‘eidetic method is that of a phenomenological positivism that founds the possible on the real’ (Merleau-Ponty 1976, p. xii).

  80. For an illustration of this variety see Chase and Reynolds (2010, p. 37 f.).

  81. The absence of such a modal gap underlies the possibility—emphasized by Zahavi (2004, pp. 338–340; 2013, pp. 24 ff.) and Gallagher (2012)—of constructive dialogue between science and Husserl’s ‘phenomenological psychology’.

  82. I think a strength of his view is to preserve the distinctness of phenomenological claims, as noninferentially verified descriptions of lived experience (Inkpin 2016, pp. 6–11). Despite agreeing generally about the complementarity—e.g. mutual constraint and results continuity—between phenomenology and science, it seems to me that Reynolds (2016) goes a little too far in seeing phenomenological claims as differing in ‘degree’ from science and (qua phenomenological claims) being open to scientific challenge.

  83. On the ability of nontranscendental phenomenology to do this in the case of language see Inkpin (2016, pp. 9–11 and 308–313).

  84. I would like to thank Jack Reynolds and Marguerite La Caze for comments on an earlier version of this paper. I am also particularly grateful to Sebastian Gardner and Sarah Richmond for detailed comments, robust criticism, and discussion of the views developed here.

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Inkpin, A. Was Merleau-Ponty a ‘transcendental’ phenomenologist?. Cont Philos Rev 50, 27–47 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-016-9394-0

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