Merleau‐Ponty’s Reading of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism

The aim of this paper is to explore Merleau‐Ponty’s ambivalent relationship with Kant’s transcendental philosophy. I begin by looking at several points of convergence between Kant and Merleau‐Ponty, focusing on the affinities between Kant’s account of transcendental realism and Merleau‐Ponty’s notion of objective thought. I then show how Merleau‐Ponty’s analysis of Kant’s paradox of asymmetrical objects points to a parallel in Kant’s thought to Merleau‐Ponty’s thesis of the primacy of perception. In the second part of the paper, I show why Merleau‐Ponty believes that, despite the promise of Kant’s thought, he fails to adequately escape from objective thought. After presenting the central claims of the transcendental deduction, I piece together Merleau‐Ponty’s criticism of it by answering three questions: For Merleau‐Ponty, how do we encounter the world prior to reflection? How is experience constituted? And what leads Kant to mischaracterise experience in his own transcendental philosophy?     

Merleau‐Ponty on painting and the problem of reflection

The challenge of “catching experience in the act” is commonly recognized as a problem for phenomenological reflection. After tracing this “problem of reflection” to its origin in Natorp's Allgemeine Psychologie and discussing Husserl's critical response, I argue that Merleau‐Ponty recognizes that a version of it poses a genuine problem for phenomenology in the form of what he calls “objective thought.” Seen in light of his concern for the distortion of objective thought, his attention to indeterminacy and distortion in the portraits and still lifes of Cézanne takes on philosophical significance. I analyze how Merleau‐Ponty sees phenomenological concepts such as style, horizons, and coherent deformation at work in a number of paintings and suggest how such features remedy objective thought by resisting the tendency for reflection on ordinary perception to mistake objective properties of objects for properties of the experience in which they are given.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

WHEN THINKING HESITATES: PHILOSOPHY AS PROSTHESIS AND TRANSFORMATIVE VISION

In this essay, I draw on Henri Bergson and Maurice Merleau‐Ponty to interrogate what philosophy is and how it can continue to think. Though my answer is not reducible to the views of either philosopher, what joins them is an attempt to elaborate philosophy as a different way of seeing. In this light, I propose a view of philosophy as prosthesis—as a means and a way for seeing differently. Rather than a simple tool, philosophy as prosthesis is a transformative supplement, one that our bodily perception calls for and wherein that perception is recast. Rather than a fixed or assured view, this prosthesis holds open the interval in which thinking can take place. Philosophy, I argue, must wait. It sees and thinks hesitatingly, for the temporality it inscribes is not a foreseeable development but the unfolding of life as tendency, as that which creates its own possibility as it comes into existence.     

Experiencing Gendered Seeing

This paper explores the concept of “gendered seeing”: the capacity to visually perceive another person's gender and the role that one's own gender plays in that perception. Assuming that gendered properties are actually perceptible, my goal is to provide some support from the philosophy of perception on how gendered visual experiences are possible. I begin by exploring the ways in which sociologists and psychologists study how we perceive one's sex and the implications of these studies for the sex/gender distinction. I then discuss feminist philosopher Linda Alcoff's concept of “interpretative horizons,” which highlights the role that one's social and political identities play in how we understand the world around us. I also discuss Elizabeth Grosz's notion (borrowed from Merleau‐Ponty) of double sensation. I then apply some work in the philosophy of perception on perceptual learning and the cognitive penetration of perception to gendered seeing. My hypothesis is that we can explain how one's interpretative horizons are acquired through some notion of perceptual learning. I conclude by suggesting some of the epistemic and ethical implications of gendered seeing.     

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.     

Freedom as (Self‐)Expression: Natality and the Temporality of Action in Merleau‐Ponty and Arendt

This paper draws on the philosophies of Maurice Merleau‐Ponty and Hannah Arendt in order to explore the nature of free action. Part one outlines three familiar ways in which we often understand the nature of freedom. Part two argues that these common understandings of freedom are rooted in impoverished conceptions of time and subjectivity. Part three engages with Arendt’s conception of natality alongside Merleau‐Ponty’s conception of expression in order to argue that the freely acting self draws in improvisational manners on the resources of a shared past in order to open unprecedented spaces of meaning for the future, and in so doing at once discovers and institutes herself as the self that she is. Part four draws on an example of anti‐oppressive political action in order to argue that free action not only has the power to inaugurate new spaces of shared meaning for the future, but also to change the sens of the shared past. By the same token, free action is vulnerable in its ontological status and ethical meanings to the events and judgments of the future. Part five argues with both Merleau‐Ponty and Arendt that ethical‐political actors can do no better than to cultivate a political virtù while facing up to the inherently transgressive dimensions of free action in a shared historical world.     

Merleau‐Ponty's Pragmatist Ethics

Utilizing a characterization of pragmatism drawn from Joseph Margolis, and with reference to the thought of C. S. Peirce and John Dewey, this paper first exposes a pragmatist conception of rationality within the French philosophy of Maurice Merleau‐Ponty. It then explores how this praxical, biologically rooted understanding of rationality leads Merleau‐Ponty to espouse the same broadly pragmatist conception of ethical life that we find in a recent work from Joseph Margolis: one that repudiates fixed principles and absolute ends in order to prompt us, under the pressing exigencies of life, to learn from radically different ways of thinking, thus committing us to negotiating peaceful solutions to our moral and political conflicts across diverse rational perspectives in a manner that, although taking us far from any form of objectivism, nevertheless refuses to renounce all claims to objectivity.     

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.     

A Phenomenology of Excorporation,Bodily Alienation,and Resistance: Rethinking Sexed and Racialized Embodiment

The article examines how some culturally shared and corporeally enacted beliefs and norms about sexed and racialized embodiment can form embodied agency, and this with the aid of the concepts of incorporation and excorporation. It discusses how the phenomenological concept of excorporation can help us examine painful experiences of how one's lived body breaks in the encounter with others. The article also examines how a continuous excorporation can result in bodily alienation, and what embodied resistance can mean when one has undergone or undergoes excorporation. Elaborating on the work of, among others, Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Drew Leder, and Sarah Ahmed, I discuss incorporation and excorporation of beliefs and norms regarding sexual difference, such as beliefs and norms regarding female and male embodiment, through a reading of Jeffrey Eugenides' novel Middlesex. I also suggest that it is useful to understand the postcolonial scholar Frantz Fanon's narrative of how he could not but attend to his own skin color while living in France in the 1940s and 1950s, in terms of excorporation. Whereas these are different narratives in many ways, I regard them as helpful for clarifying what excorporation implies and what analytic work this concept can enable.     

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.     

Mathematics,science and ontology

According to quasi-empiricism, mathematics is very like a branch of natural science. But if mathematics is like a branch of science, and science studies real objects, then mathematics should study real objects. Thus a quasi-empirical account of mathematics must answer the old epistemological question: How is knowledge of abstract objects possible? This paper attempts to show how it is possible. The second section examines the problem as it was posed by Benacerraf in ‘Mathematical Truth’ and the next section presents a way of looking at abstract objects that purports to demythologize them. In particular, it shows how we can have empirical knowledge of various abstract objects and even how we might causally interact with them. Finally, I argue that all objects are abstract objects. Abstract objects should be viewed as the most general class of objects. The arguments derive from Quine. If all objects are abstract, and if we can have knowledge of any objects, then we can have knowledge of abstract objects and the question of mathematical knowledge is solved. A strict adherence to Quine's philosophy leads to a curious combination of the Platonism of Frege with the empiricism of Mill.     

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.     

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.     

Merleau‐Ponty and Nagarjuna: relational social ontology and the ground of ethics

Through a comparative analysis of the key ontological notions in Merleau‐Ponty and Nagarjuna, I develop a relational social ontology that is grounded in their respective implicit and explicit ethics. Both thinkers take heed of our being‐in‐the‐world; this is evident in their views on intersubjective sociality and language. Recognizing the limitations in these views points us toward a greater understanding of the meaningfulness of our situated existences. In this vein, I propose a number of ideas to guide the work of comparative philosophy.     

Chronic pain as a posture towards the world

This article discusses what chronic pain is “about”, what the intentional object is of pain, and what is the intentional relation like? My approach is based on Maurice Merleau‐Ponty’s phenomenology, with an aim is to understand a two‐way relationship: how the sufferers bestow meaning on chronic pain, and how pain, on the other hand, signifies peoples’ life. In contrast to biomedical and cognitive‐behavioral theories, chronic pain is not only meaningful, but as an intentional emotion as well; it does not simply “happen” in the nervous system. I analyzed meanings assigned to pain through the narratives of three patients with chronic pain. Pain is described as creating a discontinuity in the patient’s Lebenswelt at the narrative level. When attempting to find meaning to their pain, patients point both to everyday life and biomedical referents. The structure of bestowing meaning is, metaphorically, like a necklace with everyday world and biomedical interpretations strung like beads, one after the other. The intentional object of pain, on the contrary, is constituted of the patients’ world in its wholeness. My results don’t confirm Drew Leder’s idea of disrupted intentionality, but underline directness as the basic relation of human experience also in case of pain and disease. Pain in itself is an e‐movere, an intense passionate movement, an intentional relation with and a bodily posture taken towards the world.     

Moral Perception

Abstract: In this paper, I defend the view that we can have perceptual moral knowledge. First, I motivate the moral perception view by drawing on some examples involving perceptual knowledge of complex non‐moral properties. I argue that we have little reason to think that perception of moral properties couldn't operate in much the same way that our perception of these complex non‐moral properties operates. I then defend the moral perception view from two challenging objections that have yet to be adequately addressed. The first objection is that the moral perception view has implausible commitments concerning the morally blind, people who would claim not to perceive wrongness. The second objection is that the moral perception view is not really compatible with a wide range of the main candidate moral theories. I argue that the moral empiricist has plausible responses to both of these objections. I then address three residual concerns that my defense raises.