Transforming the Problem of the Other: Rethinking Merleau‐Ponty's Itinerary

This essay offers a new understanding of Merleau‐Ponty's notion of the Other, the problem that revolves around it, and its far‐reaching repercussions by shedding light on aspects that usually go unnoticed in the interpretation of his late thought in these regards. I show how Merleau‐Ponty's emerging ontology in his late writings opens anew, in a complex manner, the problem of the Other, transforming it in a way that dismantles, to begin with, traditional epistemological questions regarding the Other, as well as principal difficulties regarding the Other's appearance within the realm of phenomena which have occupied phenomenology from its very beginning. I demonstrate how Merleau‐Ponty's late writings in fact bind the problem of the Other with the question regarding the very limits of phenomenology and the realm of meaning as a whole.     

Feminism and Phenomenology: A Reply to Silvia Stoller

Responding to Silvia Stoller's comments on “Domination and Dialogue in Merleau‐Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception” ( Sullivan 1997 ), I argue that while phenomenology has much to offer feminism, feminists should be wary of Merleau‐Ponty's notion of projective intentionality because of the ethical solipsism that it tends to involve. I also take the opportunity to clarify the concept of hypothetical construction introduced in the earlier paper, in particular the transformative relationship that it has to pre‐reflective experience.     

Merleau‐Ponty on abstract thought in mathematics and natural science

In this paper, I argue that in spite of suggestions to the contrary, Merleau‐Ponty defends a positive account of the kind of abstract thought involved in mathematics and natural science. More specifically, drawing on both the Phenomenology of Perception and his later writings, I show that, for Merleau‐Ponty, abstract thought and perception stand in the two‐way relation of “foundation,” according to which abstract thought makes what we perceive explicit and determinate, and what we perceive is made to appear by abstract thought. I claim that, on Merleau‐Ponty's view, although this process can sometimes lead to falsification, it can also be carried out in such a manner that allows mathematics and natural science to articulate what we perceive in a way that is non‐distortive and in keeping with the demands of perception itself.     

Merleau‐Ponty and the Phenomenological Reduction

It is commonly believed that Merleau‐Ponty rejected Husserl's phenomenological reduction in favour of his existentialist account of être au monde. I show that whilst Merleau‐Ponty rejected what he saw as the transcendental idealist context in which Husserl presents the reduction, he nevertheless accepts the heart of it, the epoché, as a methodological principle. Contrary to a number of Merleau‐Ponty scholars, être au monde is perfectly compatible with the epoché, and Merleau‐Ponty endorses both. I also argue that it is a mistake to think that Merleau‐Ponty's liberal use of the results of empirical psychology signifies a rejection of the epoché. A proper understanding of his views on the relation between phenomenology and psychology is that, at least in Merleau‐Ponty's eyes, the methods of phenomenology and the empirical sciences are largely similar. I conclude that we have every reason to think that Merleau‐Ponty accepted Husserl's demand that the phenomenologist place the world in brackets.     

Does the Reversibility Thesis Deliver All That Merleau‐Ponty Claims It Can?

Merleau‐Ponty's reversibility thesis argues that self, other and world are inherently relational, interdependent at the level of ontology. What is at stake in the reversibility thesis is whether it overcomes skeptical objections in both assuring real communication and avoiding solipsism in assuring real difference; the Other must be a genuine, irreducible Other. It is objected that across the domains of reversibility, symmetry and reciprocity are not guaranteed. I argue that this is a non‐problem; rather the potentialities for asymmetry and non reciprocity in fact guarantee the irreducibility of the Other; reversibility needs to be appreciated as dialectical or aesthetic, not as a literal or ‘mechanistic’ reversal. A further criticism targets the viability of ontology itself, whether alterity is ever compatible with ontology. This paper considers these objections from two of Merleau‐Ponty's contemporaries—Claude Lefort and Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas developed a philosophy which while intersecting with Merleau‐Ponty's at important junctures, nonetheless arrived at an entirely different destination. I argue alongside Martin Dillon against the objections of Lefort, and alongside Dan Zahavi against the objections of Levinas. Both of these interpreters, I propose remain faithful to the core directions and spirit of Merleau‐Ponty's endeavours without becoming diverted by the less significant inconsistencies.     

Crossing Lovers: Luce Irigaray's Elemental Passions

Luce Irigaray's Elemental Passions could be read as a response to Merleau‐Ponty's article “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” in The Visible and the Invisible. Like Merleau‐Ponty, Irigaray describes corporeal intertwining or vision and touch. Counteracting the narcissistic strain in Merleau‐Ponty's chiasm, she assumes that sexual difference must precede the intertwining. The subject is marked by the alterity or the “more than one” and encoded as a historically contingent gendered conflict.     

Reflections on Feminist Merleau‐Ponty Skepticism

Shannon Sullivan's critique of Merleau‐Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception is based on the argument that, due to his concept of the “anonymous body,” his theory of intersubjectivity omits the particularities of bodies, such as gender. 1 argue that Merleau‐Ponty's “anonymous body” (le corps phénoménal) is not in fact “neutral” as Sullivan suggests, and moreover that he does not ignore differences but rather provides us with the idea of difference as a process of differentiation. Additionally, I argue that Sullivan's concept of “hypothetical construction,” which is introduced as an alternative to Merleau‐Ponty, turns out to be a conscious construction, not reflecting upon its very conditions. Thus, Sullivan's account fails by presupposing what in fact needs to be explained: the particularities.     

Merleau‐Ponty and the significance of style

A distinctive feature of Merleau‐Ponty's thought is the central role he assigns style in generally characterizing embodied agents' perceptual and cognitive functioning. Despite this, he says little to explain how he conceives style itself. This article therefore aims to clarify Merleau‐Ponty's notion of style and its significance within and beyond his work. It begins by surveying his broad application of the term and using his discussions of painting to reconstruct his conception of style, identifying two major roles Merleau‐Ponty attributes it in unifying intentional structures and founding conceptual meaning. His view is related to several competing philosophical conceptions of style to highlight its distinctiveness and some conceptual difficulties in adequately defining style. I then argue that Merleau‐Ponty succeeds in coherently distinguishing style from rules by recognizing that style conceives pattern formation, especially the relation of general and particular, in a way contrasting with the identity‐based thinking inherent in the functioning of rules. With this distinction, I conclude that, although Merleau‐Ponty overgeneralizes its role, his conception of style has broader philosophical significance in accurately capturing the nonmechanical cohesion of certain embodied intelligent activities (such as painting) and enabling better understanding of the variety of forms such activities can take.     

Phenomenological reduction in Merleau‐Ponty's The Structure of Behavior: An alternative approach to the naturalization of phenomenology

Approaches to the naturalization of phenomenology usually understand naturalization as a matter of rendering continuous the methods, epistemologies, and ontologies of phenomenological and natural scientific inquiry. Presupposed in this statement of the problematic, however, is that there is an original discontinuity, a rupture between phenomenology and the natural sciences that must be remedied. I propose that this way of thinking about the issue is rooted in a simplistic understanding of the phenomenological reduction that entails certain assumptions about the subject matter of phenomenology and its relationship to the natural sciences. By contrast, Merleau‐Ponty's first work, The Structure of Behavior, presents a radically different approach to the phenomenological reduction, one that traverses the natural sciences and integrates them into phenomenology from the outset. I outline the argument for this position in The Structure of Behavior and then discuss consequences for current methodological issues surrounding the naturalization of phenomenology, focusing on the relationship between empirical sciences of mind, phenomenological psychology, and transcendental phenomenology. This novel exegesis of Merleau‐Ponty's view on the reduction offers new insight into his oft‐quoted remark that the phenomenological reduction is impossible to complete.     

Institute report: The annual summer program in phenomenology

Abstract

This article presents Merleau‐Ponty's concept of “flesh” as a possible factor in the (re)defining of the Rogerian theory in terms of its concept (perspective) of man and the world. It describes Merleau‐Ponty's study of phenomena, emphasizing those aspects which are most closely related to his concept of man, on the course which brings one to his concept of “flesh.” It will include some cases of therapeutic treatment from the view point of “man in the world,” which is proposed by the philosopher.     

The Phenomenology of Rheumatology: Disability,Merleau‐Ponty,and the Fallacy of Maximal Grip

This paper charts the concepts of grip and the bodily auxiliary in Maurice Merleau‐Ponty to consider how they find expression in disability narratives. Arguing against the notion of “maximal grip” that some commentators have used to explicate intentionality in Merleau‐Ponty, I argue that grip in his texts functions instead as a compensatory effort to stave off uncertainty, lack of mastery, and ambiguity. Nearly without exception in Phenomenology of Perception, the mobilization of “grip” is a signal of impending loss, and is offered as a strategy for managing failure rather than as an example of sure‐footed mastery. I read Merleau‐Ponty alongside Mary Felstiner's Out of Joint: A Public and Private Story of Arthritis to explore these other, attenuated dimensions of grip. Finally, the paper turns to Harriet McBryde Johnson's memoir Too Late to Die Young as an example of a way of thinking disabled embodiment otherwise.     

The Temporality of Life: Merleau‐Ponty,Bergson, and the Immemorial Past

Borrowing conceptual tools from Bergson, this essay asks after the shift in the temporality of life from Merleau‐Ponty's Phénoménologie de la perception to his later works. Although the Phénoménologie conceives life in terms of the field of presence of bodily action, later texts point to a life of invisible and immemorial dimensionality. By reconsidering Bergson, but also thereby revising his reading of Husserl, Merleau‐Ponty develops a nonserial theory of time in the later works, one that acknowledges the verticality and irreducibility of the past. Life in the flesh relies on unconsciousness or forgetting, on an invisibility that structures its passage.     

Beauvoir,the Scandal of Science,and Skepticism as Method

In The Ethics of Ambiguity (herein the Ethics), Simone de Beauvoir declares that science condemns itself to failure if it takes as its task the total disclosure of being (Beauvoir 1948/1976, 130). I suggest that the Ethics actually parallels the spirit of some scientific programs, specifically those that utilize positive skepticism as method. I draw out connections among the Ethics, Maurice Merleau‐Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau‐Ponty 1945/1962) to which Beauvoir's works show much likeness, and Francis Bacon's The New Organon (Bacon 1620/2000), the latter being at once a scientific and a positive skeptical program. Underscoring the ways in which Beauvoir's method of interrogating the being of beings and reality is compatible with some scientific pictures is important. It complicates the usual thought that existentialism is antiscience, problematizes Beauvoir's overly simplistic depiction of science, and nuances her analysis of the existent's experience of itself.     

THE THOUGHT SPACE OF GOD: THE HAUNTING BELOW THE I‐THOU RELATION

This essay attempts a phenomenological analysis of Descartes' statement, ‘my perception of God is prior to my perception of myself,’ and Buber's claim that God ‘is also the mystery of the self‐evident, nearer to me than my I.’ I radicalize the implications of Descartes' and Buber's claims by drawing on the thought of Husserl and Levinas, and couching the analysis in terms of Merleau‐Ponty's experiential notions of haunting and reversibility. This forces us to interrogate the subjective space in which we think God qua recognize the other, and shows us a kind of necessity that underlies the I‐Thou relation. My conclusion leaves us in a place of powerless subjective inwardness and awe.     

Sexuality and meaning in Freud and Merleau‐Ponty

This article analyzes the links between the conception of the body and of sexuality found in Freud and Merleau‐Ponty. The French philosopher refers to Freud in various of his works, and performs a reading of Freud through which he rescues the meaning that the latter gives to sexuality as he integrates it into the totality of the person, without making it into a blind or merely instinctive force. As a consequence of this integration, the notions of the unconscious and of instinct or drive are interpreted in the light of the meaning or signification that they have in the person's behavior. Merleau‐Ponty's notion of pre‐reflective knowledge plays a decisive role in this understanding of meaning. In the same way, it allows important contemporary analysts to use these studies in their therapeutic work and also in psychological studies.     

Learning and the Development of Meaning: Husserl and Merleau‐Ponty on the Temporality of Perception and Habit

In this paper, I argue that the temporal openness of perceptual experience provides insight into the basic structure of learning. I draw on Husserl's account of the mutability of the retained past in Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, and Merleau‐Ponty's account of the perceptual field, as well as his remarks on habit, in Phenomenology of Perception, in order to elucidate the relation between the perceptual past and the future it portends. More specifically, I argue that retention and habituation in perceptual experience open dimensions of meaning that transform the initial, initiating, experiences in which meaning is first established. As a result, our experience of meaning is always subject to further development that we cannot anticipate. This temporal openness has consequences for our learning to navigate a perceptual field, but also, I argue, for our developing more complex ways of engaging with the world. Specifically, I show how learning requires that we commit ourselves to an object or task before we are in a position to recognize the implications or significance of our commitment. I further consider the role that others play in the inherent openness of learning to the development of new meaning.     

A Phenomenology for Homi Bhabha's Postcolonial Metropolitan Subject

Homi Bhabha attends to the figure of the postcolonial metropolitan subject — a racialized subject who is not representative of the first world, yet a symbol of the metropolitan sphere. Bhabha describes their daily lives as inextricably split or doubled. His analysis cannot account for the agonistic moments when one is caught in not knowing, in focusing attention, and in developing understanding. Maurice Merleau‐Ponty's phenomenology with the openness in the horizon of the gestaltian framework better accounts for such splits as moments on the horizon for becoming and grasping something new.