‘There is no brute world,only an elaborated world’: Merleau-Ponty on the intersubjective constitution of the world

In his later works, Merleau-Ponty proposes the notion of ‘the flesh’ (la chair) as a new ‘element’, as he put it, in his ontological monism designed to overcome the legacy of Cartesian dualism with its bifurcation of all things into matter or spirit. Most Merleau-Ponty commentators recognise that Merleau-Ponty's notion of ‘flesh’ is inspired by Edmund Husserl's conceptions of ‘lived body’ (Leib) and ‘vivacity’ or ‘liveliness’ (Leiblichkeit). But it is not always recognised that, for Merleau-Ponty, the constitution of the world of perception, the problem of embodiment or incarnation, is at the very same time one with the problem of the experience of others in what Husserl called Einfühlung or Fremderfahung and indeed one with the problem of the constitution of the commonly shared world ‘for all’. As Merleau-Ponty put it in his late essay ‘The Philosopher and His Shadow’ in Signs, ‘the problem of Einfühlung, like that of my incarnation, opens on the meditation of sensible being, or, if you prefer, it betakes itself there’. In other words, the problem of the apprehension of the other is part of the overall apprehension of the transcendent world. In this paper I want to meditate on the relations between embodiment, experience of others, and experience of the world in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. I will take particular note, as in the title of this presentation, of the claim made by Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible that ‘there is no brute world, only an elaborated world’ (il n'y a pas de monde brut, il n'y a qu'un monde élaboré).     

The indexicality of ‘knowledge’

Epistemic contextualism—the view that the content of the predicate ‘know’ can change with the context of utterance—has fallen into considerable disrepute recently. Many theorists have raised doubts as to whether ‘know’ is context-sensitive, typically basing their arguments on data suggesting that ‘know’ behaves semantically and syntactically in a way quite different from recognised indexicals such as ‘I’ and ‘here’ or ‘flat’ and ‘empty’. This paper takes a closer look at three pertinent objections of this kind, viz. at what I call the Error-Theory Objection, the Gradability Objection and the Clarification-Technique Objection. The paper concludes that none of these objections can provide decisive evidence against contextualism.     

The deliberate university: Remarks on the ‘Idea of the University’ from a perspective of knowledge

The current discussion on the role of the (European) universities often starts off with a perspective on the university as a scientific and/or pedagogical institution and consequently runs into a conflict between both logics in which each element is somehow devalued from the other perspective. Therefore, it may be productive to analyse the university from a standpoint in between, a perspective of knowledge as such. In order to conceptualise such a third perspective of knowledge, the history of the European university is reconstructed and interpreted as a process of reflection on the ‘spiral of knowledge’. Before this background the idea of the university is renewed in terms of knowledge and summarised in the idea of a ‘deliberate university’.

A note on ‘scepticism and absurdity’

In ‘Scepticism and Absurdity’ (Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 2) Ingemund Gullvag concludes that recent attempts to counter scepticism have failed. It is suggested that where the attempts Gullvåg investigates are complex theories of a sociological and linguistic‐psychological nature, we need only refer to a simple and inspectable fact of language to counter scepticism.     

God’s omnipresence in the world: on possible meanings of ‘en’ in panentheism

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion - Panenetheism is the claim that God and the cosmos are intimately inter-related, with the cosmos being in God and God being in the cosmos. What...     

On the aims of medicine: Comments on ‘philosophy of medicine as the source for medical ethics’

Health defined as the psychophysiological capacity to act or respond appropriately in a wide variety of situations, is enhanced by many means other than preventing and treating disease and injury. Therefore no choice of a particular medical intervention is likely to maximize health for all people with (or at risk for) a given disease. As a result, if medical practitioners are to be fully competent in the sense of knowing not only how to perform procedures but when and when not to do so, they must be able to support patients (and those who know and care about them) in weighing all of the many factors which bear upon the decision as to which, if any, medical interventions are likely to improve the person's health.     

A note on ‘knowledge,certainty, and probability'∗

In ‘Knowledge, Certainty and Probability’, Dr. Heidelberger claims to have shown ‘that it is a mistake to assimilate probability and rational belief to knowledge’. The conclusion may be true but his argument is faulty.     

‘Now I can go on:’ Wittgenstein and our embodied embeddedness in the ‘Hurly-Burly’ of life

Wittgenstein is not primarily concerned with anything mysterious going on inside people's heads, but with us simply going on with each other; that is, with us being able to inter-relate our everyday, bodily activities in unproblematic ways in with those of others, in practice. Learning to communicate with clear and unequivocal meanings; to send messages; to fully understand each other; to be able to reach out, so to speak, from within language-game entwined forms of life, and to talk in theoretical terms of the contacts one has made., as an individual, with what is out there; and so on — all these abilities are, or can be, later developments. Wittgenstein's investigations into our pre-individual, pre-theoretical, embodied, compulsive activities are utterly revolutionary. They open up a vast new realm for empirical study to do with the detailed and subtle nature of the bodily activities in the background to everything that we do. The relational character of such pre-theoretical, Ur-linguistic, spontaneous bodily activities—and the way in which they display us as seeing connections from within a synopsis of trivialities — is explored through the paradigm of currently fashionable 3–13 random dot autostereograms.     

The paradox of ‘freedom’ and the social function of psychiatry

This paper considers the concept of ‘freedom’ in behavioural terms, defining it in relation to ‘freedom of action’. This notion is applied to psychiatric abnormalities, and it is suggested that this new way of looking at the problem may go some way to surmount the philosophical difficulties normally attaching to the notion of ‘freedom’.     

Sharing the ‘now’: Heidegger and the temporal co-constitution of world

In this paper I respond to the view that Heidegger is unable to account for the possibility of immediately experiencing others in their concrete particularity. Critics have argued that since Mitsein characterizes Dasein’s mode of being regardless of the presence or absence of others, Heidegger has essentially granted it the status of an a priori category. In doing so, they argue, Heidegger reduces the other to a mere interchangeable token whose uniqueness is subsumed under the generality of the established category. In contrast, I argue that the Heideggerian ‘a priori’ must be understood as a living responsiveness to particularity, not a top-down imposition of abstract categoriality. The argument further shows that this responsiveness must be understood in terms of temporal particularity. The bulk of the paper then demonstrates the nature of such responsiveness when it is the temporal particularity of the other Dasein that is being encountered. I show that such encounters are a necessary condition for the possibility of world time and the worldly space of shared significance. Because my encounter with the other Dasein is a direct experience of her originary temporality—the fundamental expression of her concrete care-defined way of being—such encounters are not simple subsumptions of the other to an a priori category. They are, rather, a temporal responsiveness to the unique mode of intuitive givenness characterizing other Dasein.