Insight Editions · No. 80
Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts
Rosalyn Diprose and Jack Reynolds (eds.)
This collection introduces Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology through its concepts of embodiment, perception, expression, and flesh, and examines their applications in politics, art, feminism, and cognitive science.
A study guide to Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts by Rosalyn Diprose and Jack Reynolds (eds.). Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
The argument in brief
From life and method through inventions to extensions outside philosophy.
The volume has twenty-one authored chapters in four parts. Part I supplies biography and a user's guide. Part II situates Merleau-Ponty against Husserl, Sartre, Freud, Hegel/Marx, political practice and painting. Part III unpacks the inventions for which he is known: body, perception, ambiguity, others, expression, affect, nature and the late ontology of flesh. Part IV tracks uptake since the 1990s in feminism and race theory, cognitive science, health studies and sociology. Contributors are instructed to inspire further reading, not close the archive.
Four-part architecture of the companion and what each part does.
| Ch | Title | Author | In one line |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Life and works | Jack Reynolds | Unknown man of French philosophy; Zaza tragedy; Collège de France; break with Sartre; unfinished VI. |
| 2 | Guide to Key Concepts | Rosalyn Diprose | Philosophy as creative looking; four-part map; generosity toward Descartes and rivals. |
| 3 | Phenomenology and hyper-reflection | Ted Toadvine | Phenomenology between realism and idealism; incomplete reduction; late hyper-reflection. |
| 4 | Existentialism | Thomas Busch | Defence of Sartre that quietly revises embodiment, meaning, alterity and freedom. |
| 5 | Empiricism and intellectualism | Taylor Carman | Twin misdescriptions of perception that the bodily account displaces. |
| 6 | Psychoanalysis | Beata Stawarska | Sexuality as pervasive affective structure; mirror stage and corporeal schema. |
| 7 | Philosophy of history | Sonia Kruks | Institution between relativism and determinism; responsibility without total freedom. |
| 8 | Politics and the political | Diana Coole | Left public intellectual; HT and AD; intercorporeal political ontology. |
| 9 | Art and aesthetics | Hugh J. Silverman | Painting, Cézanne, Eye and Mind as philosophy by other means. |
| 10 | Body | David Morris | One is one's body; motor intentionality and postural schema. |
| 11 | Perception | David R. Cerbone | Primacy of perception against empiricist and intellectualist errors. |
| 12 | Ambiguity | Gail Weiss | Ambiguity as answer to dualisms; dialogue with de Beauvoir. |
| 13 | Intersubjectivity and alterity | Michael Sanders | Husserlian inheritance under Levinas/Derrida pressure. |
| 14 | Expression | Harry Adams | Expression as creative, bodily, not transfer of ready-made thoughts. |
| 15 | Affect and sensibility | Suzanne L. Cataldi | Affectivity intertwined with sense-perception even without a treatise on emotion. |
| 16 | Nature and animality | Scott Churchill | Structure of Behavior to Nature lectures; animal Umwelt and human world. |
| 17 | Chiasm and flesh | Fred Evans | Late ontology of reversibility; from body-subject to flesh of the world. |
| 18 | Feminism and race theory | Ann Murphy | Uses and limits of Merleau-Ponty for difference, gender and race. |
| 19 | Cognitive science | Shaun Gallagher | Posthumous alliance with embodied, enactive and phenomenological cognitive science. |
| 20 | Living well and health | Philipa Rothfield | Illness as lived; Körper vs Leib in the clinic. |
| 21 | Sociology | Nick Crossley | Habit, the social body and late-modern reflexivity. |
Reading tips
- Start with Reynolds and Diprose. Dates, abbreviations (PP, VI, SB, HT, AD) and the four-part map prevent later chapters from floating free.
- Pair Interventions with Inventions. Toadvine/Carman prepare Morris/Cerbone; Busch prepares Weiss/Sanders; Kruks/Coole prepare Murphy/Crossley.
- Read Evans last among the inventions. Flesh and chiasm revise the early body-subject; Gallagher and Murphy show what that revision enables and resists.
- Watch critical lenses. Source OCR and dating slips (e.g.
Chapter map
| Ch | Author | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Reynolds | Life, works, unfinished VI |
| 2 | Diprose / Reynolds | How to read; four-part map |
| 3 | Toadvine | Phenomenology remade; hyper-reflection |
| 4 | Busch | Existentialism revised |
| 5 | Carman | Empiricism and intellectualism |
| 6 | Stawarska | Psychoanalysis to flesh |
| 7 | Kruks | History as institution |
| 8 | Coole | Politics: HT to AD; virtù |
| 9 | Silverman | Aesthetics; Cézanne |
| 10 | Morris | Body; I can; Schneider |
| 11 | Cerbone | Perception; primacy |
| 12 | Weiss | Ambiguity |
| 13 | Sanders | Intersubjectivity |
| 14 | Adams | Expression; paradox |
| 15 | Cataldi | Affectivity |
| 16 | Churchill | Nature; animality |
| 17 | Evans | Flesh; chiasm; reversibility |
| 18 | Murphy | Feminism and race |
| 19 | Gallagher | Cognitive science |
| 20 | Rothfield | Health studies |
| 21 | Crossley | Sociology |
Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Life and Works
Jack Reynolds
Basic chronology
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was born 14 March 1908 at Rochefort-sur-Mer, Charente-Maritime. The man he took for his father was killed in the First World War when Maurice was three; accounts of a happy childhood with mother and sister, first in the country then in Paris, are unanimous. He told Sartre he never got over that childhood contentment. Sartre later used the confession, in the eulogy, to imply that Merleau-Ponty's theory nostalgically sought a return to pre-reflective innocence; Levinas and Derrida later made related criticisms without Sartre's ad hominem edge.
Education ran through the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the École Normale Supérieure from 1926, alongside Sartre, de Beauvoir, Simone Weil and others. Sartre recounts that Merleau-Ponty hated obscene songs and brutality; when ENS students sang crude anti-military songs, Merleau-Ponty and Maurice de Gandillac hissed, were set upon, and Sartre intervened. The friendship that followed lasted about twenty-five years.
Life arc from Rochefort childhood to the unfinished Visible and Invisible.
Zaza and the family secret
Early at the ENS, Merleau-Ponty and de Beauvoir were close. The friendship cooled after Merleau-Ponty's tragic relation with Beauvoir's friend Elisabeth Le Coin ("Zaza"). They secretly agreed to marry after his agrégation and military service. Beauvoir's early account claimed Zaza's parents had arranged another marriage and forbade contact with both Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir; Beauvoir thought Merleau-Ponty vacillated for fear of upsetting his ill mother. Zaza died of encephalitis in 1929; Beauvoir partly blamed Merleau-Ponty. Only thirty years later did she learn the fuller story: Zaza's parents had favoured the match until they discovered that Merleau-Ponty's biological father was an adulterous professor, not his mother's husband, a fact Merleau-Ponty himself learned from Zaza's father.
Career, war, marriage, politics
He completed the agrégation in 1930, taught at lycées in Beauvais and Chartres, and from 1935 as a junior ENS member. He worked on the Catholic journal Esprit and soon renounced Catholicism. In WWII he served as an infantry second lieutenant (Sartre, by contrast, took pride in being an ordinary soldier). Under Occupation he was active in the Resistance and returned to teaching. At Liberation in 1945 he joined the University of Lyon and became founding co-editor of Les Temps modernes from October 1945, refusing to put his name beside Sartre's as editor while serving as political editor behind the scenes.
He married Suzon, a physician and psychiatrist; they had a daughter, Marianne. Accounts call the marriage happy though not monogamous. An affair with Sonia Brownell (later Sonia Orwell) ended with her devastation; she called him the love of her life. Her later marriage to the bedridden George Orwell lasted fourteen weeks; Spurling (2003) treats the break with Merleau-Ponty as a factor in her accepting Orwell's second proposal.
With two dissertations, The Structure of Behavior (1942) and Phenomenology of Perception (1945), he became a leading postwar French philosopher: Professor at Lyon 1948, Chair of Child Psychology and Pedagogy at the Sorbonne 1949-52, and in 1952 the youngest ever Chair of Philosophy at the Collège de France, a post he held until his death.
- 1942 Structure of Behavior
- 1945 Phenomenology of Perception; Les Temps modernes
- 1947 Humanism and Terror
- 1948 Sense and Non-Sense; Lyon professorship
- 1949-52 Sorbonne child psychology Chair
- 1952 Collège de France; break with Sartre (December)
- 1953 In Praise of Philosophy (inaugural lecture)
- 1955 Adventures of the Dialectic
- 1960 Signs
- 1961 death; 1964 The Visible and the Invisible (ed. Lefort)
- 2003 English Nature course notes
Structuralism, Marxism, death
From 1948 to 1953 he was among the first to relate Saussurean structural linguistics to phenomenology and existentialism. Claude Lévi-Strauss later dedicated The Savage Mind to his memory. Essay collections of lasting weight include HT, SNS, AD and Signs. Merleau-Ponty was initially more Marxist than Sartre; Sartre's continued support for the Soviet Union forced a break in December 1952. Merleau-Ponty quit Les Temps modernes and published Adventures of the Dialectic. The fallout was acrimonious, though less vicious than the Camus-Sartre clash. Politics attenuated, he returned to ontology and the unfinished Visible and the Invisible. Course notes, especially Nature (2003 Eng.), keep expanding the corpus. Influence now spans continental philosophy and analytic work on mind-body, perception, developmental psychology and cognitive science.
Life timeline: formation to unfinished VI.
- Jean-Paul Sartre: friend ~25 years; co-founder Temps modernes; break Dec 1952 over Soviet line.
- Simone de Beauvoir: early close friend; Zaza triangle; later retrospective correction.
- Elisabeth "Zaza" Le Coin: secret fiancée; d. encephalitis 1929.
- Suzon / Marianne: wife (physician-psychiatrist) and daughter.
- Sonia Brownell / Orwell: affair; later brief Orwell marriage.
- Claude Lévi-Strauss: structuralist friend; Savage Mind dedication.
A Guide to Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts
Rosalyn Diprose
Creative philosophy and generous reading
Those definitions encode an ontology: self and world are inextricably entwined; to express oneself is to express a world already historical and natural; expression in philosophy, history or science is fundamentally creative. Because Merleau-Ponty completes an "unfinished world" (PP: xx), tradition and innovation blur. He almost always presents ideas inside expositions of others and rarely marks departures confrontationally. Even Descartes, the obvious foil to a bodily ground of experience, is treated as a resource: VI applauds Cartesian restoration of perceptual faith and says Cartesianism, intended or not, inspired a science of the human body that needs rectifying rather than abandoning (VI: 26).
Readers should therefore approach Merleau-Ponty as he characterizes phenomenology: with "the same kind of attentiveness and wonder, the same demand for awareness, the same will to seize the meaning of the world or of history as that meaning comes into being" (PP: xxi). The volume aims to aid that "renewed image," not to finish it.
Diprose's four-part map of the companion.
Part II in miniature
Toadvine (ch. 3): phenomenology supplies method and an alternative to realism/idealism; Merleau-Ponty revises Husserl by shifting from consciousness to latent content and later calling for hyper-reflection that measures consciousness's incompleteness.
Busch (ch. 4): existentialism puts existence before essence: existence is "the movement through which man is in the world and involves himself in a physical and social situation which then becomes his point of view on the world" (SNS: 72). Phenomenology studies essences but "puts essences back into existence" via facticity (PP: vii). Busch tracks debts and departures from Sartre on embodiment, meaning, otherness and freedom.
Carman (ch. 5): Merleau-Ponty's preferred names for the rejected poles are empiricism and intellectualism; critiques of both build the bodily basis of perception.
Stawarska (ch. 6): psychoanalysis thickens existence beyond the subject-act-object structure of pure consciousness; sexuality as affective/erotic perception pervades existence without reducing to sex acts; Wallon's mirror stage (1949), via Lacan, refines the corporeal schema ("The Child's Relations with Others," PrP).
Kruks (ch. 7): temporality shapes selves and "public history" (TL: 39-45); between Hegel/Marx and liberal humanism, history is neither random nor predetermined; responsibility remains even without total power to rewrite the future.
Coole (ch. 8): philosophy is political in a wide sense (transforming modern experience) and a narrow sense (teaching how to negotiate ambiguity without the violence of many modern regimes). The target prejudice is Cartesian/Kantian rationalism with mind/body and subject/object oppositions (p. 85); the alternative is an interworld of intercorporeal relations.
Silverman (ch. 9): engagement with art, especially painting, is central to philosophical practice throughout.
Parts III and IV in miniature
Part III details inventions: Morris on motor intentionality and postural schema; Cerbone on perception against empiricism/intellectualism; Weiss on ambiguity (with de Beauvoir); Sanders on intersubjectivity under Levinas/Derrida critique; Adams on creative expression; Cataldi on affect intertwined with sense-perception; Churchill on nature and animality after the Nature notes; Evans on flesh, reversibility and chiasm as a shift from body-subject to a more dispersed ontology.
Part IV tracks extensions: Murphy feminism and race; Gallagher cognitive science; Rothfield living well and health; Crossley sociology. Diprose lets these essays "speak for themselves" as evidence that reading and applying Merleau-Ponty remain unfinished.
- Expect creative appropriation. Merleau-Ponty remakes interlocutors; contributors remake Merleau-Ponty.
- Do not hunt for a last word. Chapters guide and open disputes (alterity, flesh vs body-subject, feminist uses).
- Keep abbreviations handy. PP 1962 pagination (not 2002); VI, SB, HT, AD, SNS, EP/TL, PrP, S, N, CAL, PW.
- Pair method chapters with concept chapters. Toadvine+Carman with Morris+Cerbone; Busch with Weiss+Sanders; Kruks+Coole with Murphy+Crossley.
- 21 authored chapters; 4 parts
- Core dates: SB 1942, PP 1945, HT 1947, SNS 1948, Collège Chair 1952, AD 1955, Signs 1960, death 1961, VI 1964
- Editors: Diprose (UNSW), Reynolds (La Trobe) at time of publication (2008)
Four-part architecture of the companion.
Phenomenology and "Hyper-Reflection"
Ted Toadvine
Phenomenology against realism and idealism
Whether the late incomplete Visible and the Invisible breaks with phenomenology is debated; Toadvine reads continuity: Merleau-Ponty continues Husserl by articulating Husserl's unthought. The 1934 grant application "The Nature of Perception" already seeks an account that is neither scientific naturalism's causal mechanisms nor Brunschvicgian critical idealism's activity of consciousness. Husserl is "doubly interesting": a "new philosophy" distinct from empirical psychology and critical thought (TD: 74-84, 77).
Structure of Behavior (1942) makes that thesis guiding. Gestalt psychology plus phenomenology reframe consciousness-nature. Critical thought reduces nature to an object of consciousness; naturalistic science juxtaposes two realities in causal interaction (SB: 3-4). Behaviour as organism-environment relation forms a Gestalt: a holistic structure unified by common signification, located neither in outer world nor inner consciousness, and thus challenging realism (SB: 182). The needed philosophy is transcendental but not critical idealism's transcendentalism (SB: 206). The phenomenological reduction rediscovers significative subject-world relations of intentionality rather than causality (SB: 220). The book's unfinished task is to redefine transcendental philosophy so as to "integrate it with the very phenomenon of the real" (SB: 224), which requires clarifying perceptual versus intellectual consciousness.
Phenomenology as third path between naturalism and critical idealism.
In PP, after Louvain manuscripts, the body's "expressive unity" extends across the perceived world, including social and historical dimensions (PP: 206). The perceived world becomes Merleau-Ponty's Lebenswelt (PP: 365n). Perception's paradox: the real is experienced and thus "for me," yet presents itself as "in itself," preceding and exceeding experience. Idealism privileges immanence, realism transcendence; only phenomenology describes their contradictory interconnection without dissolving it. That stance is radical reflection: reflection that knows its contingency and dependence on the world's pre-reflective givenness (PP: 61-63).
Four features of method (PP preface)
Phenomenology existed as "a manner or style of thinking" before full self-awareness as a philosophy; "We shall find in ourselves, and nowhere else, the unity and true meaning of phenomenology" (PP: viii). Unfinishedness is essential to revealing "the mystery of the world and of reason" (PP: xxi).
1. Description over explanation and reconstruction. Sciences explain by causes among determinate entities; phenomenology discloses the original experience those explanations presuppose. Reflection, like the perceiver who forgets her role in an object's distance and angle, tends to replace indeterminate experiential objects with reified abstractions. Phenomenology first sets scientific explanations aside, then restores science as a useful map of a terrain already perceived (PP: ix). It also refuses critical idealism's reconstruction of experience from conditions in conscious activity: the world exists prior to analysis; reflective analysis is naive when it forgets pre-reflective experience (PP: x). Husserl's noematic analysis accesses the perceptual level without retreating into subjectivity.
2. Phenomenological reduction as wonder, not purification. Husserl often presents reduction as reaching pure transcendental consciousness. Consistent transcendental idealism, Merleau-Ponty says, would erase determinable self/other difference (PP: xi-xii). Husserl's own paradoxes of world and others show openness involves embodied, visible situation and an "internal weakness" in pure self-consciousness (PP: xii-xiii). Reduction suspends practical involvements to bring them and their perceptual correlate to light (WP: 39). Fink's phrase: reduction as "wonder in the face of the world" (PP: xiii). One glimpses the "unmotivated upsurge of the world" (PP: xiv). Most important lesson: "the impossibility of a complete reduction" (PP: xiv). Philosophy becomes an "ever-renewed experiment in making its own beginnings." Reduction is existential, not idealist: the questioner is involved in what is questioned. Phenomenology thus shares existential thought's four marks: incarnation, mystery, the other, history (TD: 132-4).
3. Eidetic reduction as phenomenological positivism. Essences are needed for claims beyond brute fact, but in service of the world's existence, not logical-positivist linguistic dissolution of problems. Meanings of words function from perceptual experience, not vice versa. "Phenomenological positivism": perception is "not presumed true, but defined as access to the truth"; "the world is what we perceive" (PP: xvi). "The eidetic method is the method of a phenomenological positivism which bases the possible on the real" (PP: xvii).
4. Intentionality as operative before act. "All consciousness is consciousness of something," but the world's unity is first "lived as ready-made or already there" (PP: xvii). Distinguish Husserlian act intentionality (explicit judgements) from operative intentionality that "produces the natural and antepredicative unity of the world and our life" (PP: xviii). Philosophy takes in a thing's, event's or theory's "total intention," its unique mode of existing. Ideology, politics, religion, economics and psychology must be sought "from all these angles simultaneously" (PP: xix). Reason emerges as "perspectives blend, perceptions confirm each other, a meaning emerges"; its only foundation is the "pre-existent Logos [of] the world itself" (PP: xix-xx).
Reflecting is "a violent act which is validated by being performed" (PP: xxxv): like art and political action, expression brings truth into being without guarantees. Later Socratic irony (EP: 38-41, 60-64) and a humanism that acknowledges contingency (S: 239-43) rest on this finite rationality.
Four methodological pillars in the PP preface and Merleau-Ponty's twist on each.
Limits, shadow, hyper-reflection
Later writings scrutinize the early method. VI criticizes PP's reliance on consciousness (VI: 183, 200). Merleau-Ponty rejects the eidetic reduction as a source of Husserlian intellectualism (RNAG: 173-93). Translating the world into essences yields pure correlation and retrospective reconstruction; transcendence is openness of consciousness, not consciousness of an essence of transcendence. He rejects earlier phenomenological positivism: the world is no longer "an object that is what it is, exactly adjusted to acts of consciousness" (PhF: 70).
Interest shifts to residues not adjusted to consciousness: phenomenology's "latent content" or "unconscious" (PhF: 71). In "The Philosopher and his Shadow" (1959; S: 159-81), "the ultimate task of phenomenology as philosophy of consciousness is to understand its relationship to non-phenomenology." What resists phenomenology, Schelling's "barbarous" source, "cannot remain outside phenomenology and should have its place within it. The philosopher must bear his shadow" (S: 178; cf. N: 38). Hyper-reflection (VI: 38, 46) measures the distance between reflection and the pre-reflective situation it expresses: the same second-order structure already in PP. Lacan's remark that rigorous phenomenology of hallucination exceeds a philosophy of consciousness "retrac[es] the steps of a phenomenology which is deepening itself" (PhF: 71). VI's working notes remain steeped in Husserl; reversibility of touch is already in PP (93); "flesh" traces to Nature lectures (N: 73) and "Philosopher and his Shadow" (S: 167). True philosophy is the equivalence of "leaving oneself" and "retiring into oneself" (VI: 49, 199).
From Husserlian reduction to hyper-reflection.
Preface method in four moves.
Existentialism: The "New Philosophy"
Thomas Busch
Embodied subjectivity
Merleau-Ponty refuses Sartre's stark binary of being-for-itself (self-conscious subject) versus being-in-itself (thing). Subjectivity is existence: consciousness integrated with physical, physiological and biological process. Closing one's eyes, one can sink into anonymous existence that subtends personal life; the same body that can shut itself off also opens onto the world (PP: 164-5). Both philosophers reject essentialism ("Existence precedes essence"; "Man is a historical idea and not a natural species," PP: 170), but Merleau-Ponty nuances: everything in man is necessity (functions unified in one synthesis) and everything is contingency (no birth-essence; manner of existence must be constantly reforged). Sexuality and economy are givens we must take up; how we take them up is not determined. Sartre's free acts are ex nihilo; Merleau-Ponty's key verb is transform, never unconditioned freedom (PP: 170-71).
Sartre vs Merleau-Ponty on the subject of the new philosophy.
Meaning: condemned to meaning
Sartre often attributes constitution of meaning to subjectivity (anguish as total freedom). Merleau-Ponty: "because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning" (PP: xix). Figure on a background is already meaningful; each part "arouses the expectation of more than it contains" (PP: 4). Perception is never fully determinate; hidden sides and things "behind us" are conditions of a front (PP: 277). All consciousness is in some measure perceptual; evidence is irresistible only on a background of acquired experience (PP: 396). Against both absurdism (everything nonsense) and rationalism (everything has significance): "there is significance" (PP: 296). The body is interlocutor in a "sort of dialogue" with nature (PP: 373); a thing's "true" size, weight and colour are defined by the body's grip (prise). The lived body is pre-personal momentum toward the world; the "new" or "existential cogito" is not absolute transparency but the blind act of taking up one's destiny as a thinking nature in time (PP: 374). Certainty yields to the risk of existing: one is assured of willing or loving only by actually doing so (PP: 382). Thought and action are inseparable; reflection is founded on the unreflected without absorbing it. Tacit self-awareness ("myself experienced by myself") is the silence preceding speech.
Language and expression
"Thought is no 'internal' thing, and does not exist independently of the world and of words" (PP: 183). Speech is like a sonata's meaning in its performance. Sedimented words form a silent background; original speech bends available meanings toward new contexts, then becomes public deposit (PP: 389). "Inside and outside are inseparable. The world is wholly inside and I am wholly outside myself" (PP: 407). Ideality never escapes inscription: "Every truth of fact is a truth of reason, and vice versa" (PP: 394). Founding is necessary but not sufficient for the founded; art, mathematics and institutions transform bodily rootedness without reducing to it. Versus Sartre's speaker who nihilates the given toward total independence (Sartre 1993: 515, 520), Merleau-Ponty keeps intentionality but stresses dependence on available categories: dialectic of give and take.
Others and freedom
The body of the other is "vehicle of a form of behavior," a "third genus of being" (PP: 348, 350). A fifteen-month baby opens its mouth when one playfully bites its finger: biting has intersubjective significance before mirror self-recognition (PP: 352). Bodies overlap "as if my body and the other person's are one whole" (PP: 354). Dialogue is "consummate reciprocity," an I-thou of address and response. Sartre's look makes conflict "the original meaning of being-for-others" (Sartre 1993: 364). Merleau-Ponty: struggle of consciousnesses begins only on common ground from childhood coexistence (PP: 355). Objectifying gaze is unbearable because it replaces possible communication; a dog's gaze does not embarrass; refusal to communicate is still communication (PP: 361). SNS already notes BN lacks a social theory of class and coexistence (SNS: 81); Merleau-Ponty gradually led Sartre toward political activism.
Sartrean freedom is ontological negation: consciousness as pure action, "impossible to act upon" (Sartre 1993: 422). Merleau-Ponty calls this too abstract: if freedom is the structure of consciousness, all conscious acts are free by definition. Concrete freedom needs a field of special possibilities (PP: 438); there are degrees of freedom; sedimentation gives life "momentum" and probabilities. Sartre's touching/touched are incommunicable levels (Sartre 1993: 304); tools lose technique into free surpassing. Merleau-Ponty: habitual hammering callouses the hand; the body is "both an object for others and a subject for myself" (PP: 167), a fold of reversible experience. SNS asks Sartre for a "theory of passivity" (SNS: 77). Busch closes: Sartre later took a dialectical turn resembling Merleau-Ponty, "but that is another story."
- Embodiment: existence, not for-itself/in-itself binary; transform givens.
- Meaning: condemned to meaning; dialogue with world; grip, not ex nihilo.
- Alterity: third genus; interworld before conflictual look.
- Freedom: field, degrees, sedimentation, passivity; body as exchange point.
Existentialism: four revision sites.
Freedom with a field.
Between Empiricism and Intellectualism
Taylor Carman
Empiricism: wrong and incoherent
Empiricism conceives perception as based on non-intentional qualitative sensory content: sensations, sense data, "raw feels," qualia. First critique: descriptively wrong. Ordinary awareness is of people, situations, events, gaps, and Gibsonian affordances (paths, obstacles, barriers, brinks, steps, slopes, shelters, tools; Gibson 1979: 36-41). The concept of sensation "corresponds to nothing in our experience" (PP: 3). Intentional "of" (awareness of fire) is not the "of" in "sensation of pain." Empiricism collapses perceiving and perceived.
The error is not arbitrary: the "experience error" reads features of things back into sensory states when we reflect: "We make perception out of things perceived" (PP: 5).
Second critique: incoherent, not merely false. Language of sensation is parasitic on language of genuine objects: "red patch" draws meaning from prior use of "patch" (PP: 14). Humean association (resemblance, contiguity, causality) presupposes the perceptual coherence it should explain. We associate baseballs and basketballs, socks and shoes, fire and burn, not atomic reds and hots. "It is, on the contrary, because we perceive a grouping as a thing that the analytical attitude can then discern resemblances or continuities" (PP: 16). "The unity of the thing in perception is not constructed by association, but is a condition of association" (PP: 17). Sensation is enlisted for incompatible jobs: capture phenomenal content, and explain stimulation of sensory surfaces. When it describes, it fails to explain; when it explains with association and memory, it no longer describes.
Empiricism's descriptive error and explanatory reversal.
Intellectualism: judgement everywhere
Intellectualism conceives perception as essentially thought or judgement: Cartesian/rationalist (judgement constitutes) or Kantian (categories schematize sensory content). James: sensations "combined by the activity of the Thinking Principle" (1950: II: 27). Descartes: what seemed seen with eyes is grasped by judgement (AT VII 32). Kant: categories conditions of possible experience (B161).
Empiricism cannot see that we need to know what we seek; intellectualism fails to see that we need to be ignorant of what we seek, or we would not be searching (PP: 28). Intellectualism lacks "contingency in the occasions of thought." Cognitivist heirs such as Dennett's "first-person operationalism" (1991: 132) equate seeming with believing that one seems: seeing is believing. Borderline cases (faces as gendered or moody; hate of anchovies as taste vs idea) tempt judgemental readings of all intentionality, but gradual difference is not identity. Ordinary experience distinguishes sensing (le sentir) from judgement: judgement takes a position valid across a life and for other minds; sensing gives itself over to appearance without trying to possess its truth (PP: 34). Intellectualism puts judgement everywhere sensation is not, i.e. everywhere, and impugns the testimony of phenomena. Irony: materialists like Dennett reinstate Cartesian incorrigibility: if consciousness and beliefs about it coincide, beliefs cannot be wrong about experience. Then how distinguish true from false perception, seeing from thinking one sees (PP: 34-5)?
Intellectualism reduces perception to "thought about perceiving"; incarnation becomes mere ignorance of itself (PP: 38). Spinoza's "conclusions without premises" and inherence in a point of view reduce to negative power of not reflecting, yet that ignorance remains unexplained. Supposedly constitutive judgements turn out to be disguised descriptions of receptivity. Descartes's "nature" and Malebranche's "natural judgment" name perception's receptive aspect. Upside-down scenes, faces, handwriting: objective structure constant, qualitative aspect transforms; perception is not an act of understanding (PP: 46).
Twin errors and the bodily path between them.
Shared assumptions and the bodily alternative
Both doctrines share bad assumptions about phenomenal character and bodily basis. Empiricism cannot bridge pure quality to intentional attitudes; intellectualism builds judgement into perceptual objectivity from the start. Carman's chapter (continuing beyond the opening) develops Merleau-Ponty's alternative: perception as the body's being at grips with a world of solicitations, neither a mosaic of sensations nor a silent judgement. (Morris and Cerbone in chs 10-11 carry the positive account; Carman supplies the negative clearing.)
Between Scylla and Charybdis.
Twin prejudices dismantled.
Psychoanalysis
Beata Stawarska
Hesnard preface and early critique
Late in life Merleau-Ponty prefaced Angelo Louis Hesnard's L'Oeuvre de Freud. Hesnard (president, French Society for Psychoanalysis) held Freud's discoveries neighboring phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty agrees on convergence but, with Hesnard, insists psychoanalysis be separated "from a scientistic or objectivist ideology" (PhF: 67), a separation he claims was present in his work from the start.
In SB (1942), comments on Freud are largely critical. Freud's metapsychology aims to "transform metaphysics into metapsychology" (Freud 1975: 322): psychical apparatus (Ucs/Pcs/Cs; later id/ego/superego), drive antagonisms, and especially the economic view (quotas of libido measurable in principle). Merleau-Ponty objects to dream interpretation's "energic action" of latent forces versus censor (SB: 177): "explanations in the third person" (SB: 178) that shift from the dreamer's interpretive experience to a non-participant observer of energy fluctuations. Causal stories (trauma causes complex; childhood memory causes dream) cannot show how unknown determinants organize meaning from within; complexes are also "conditioned by the whole attitude of the consciousness which avoids thinking about it" (SB: 178). Prefer "degrees of integration": pathology as fragmentation and rigid semi-independent attitudes locked in repetition. Echoing Sartre, we need an "existential psychoanalysis" that recasts Freud in terms of personal existence.
From Freudian economics to existential integration.
Mirror stage, sexuality, pervasive unconscious
Sorbonne lectures "Child's Relations with Others" (PrP) note Freud's ambiguous libido (physiological in Three Essays; more refined in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and The Ego and the Id). Merleau-Ponty prefers Lacan's mirror stage (ages six to eighteen months) over Wallon's cognitive account because Lacan stresses affective significance (PrP: 137): fascination and captivation by a Gestalt promising domination, not mere understanding that the mirror indicates the real body. That fascination can persist in adult doubles and interpersonal life (PrP: 138-9).
In PP, specific psychoanalytic citations are sparse; the unconscious is occasionally named, Husserlian consciousness seems dominant. Yet primacy of perception introduces passivity, receptivity and facticity compatible with Freud's unconscious. If the unconscious is rarely named, it is because it describes perceptual consciousness itself: ambiguity, opacity, multiplicity of meanings. Freud insisted the unconscious is not a second consciousness minus awareness but processes with "characteristics and peculiarities which seem alien" (Freud 1984: 172): rejection of contradiction, indifference to chronological order. Later topology (id-ego-superego) treats the unconscious as pervasive seepage, blurring rational/non-rational, sanity/madness, perception/fantasy. Merleau-Ponty anchors this pervasive element in the sensible, desiring body.
Sexuality (PP ch. 5) must not be third-person physiological-psychological facts. It expresses freedom and existence; it pervades without reducing existence to sex acts or aims. Affective or erotic perception is a way the world solicits; sexuality and existence each exceed the other while remaining inseparable (as Diprose's guide already flagged at PP: 166). Pathologies of Schneider-type cases (detailed further in Morris/Cerbone) show how erotic perception can be disrupted when motor-perceptual being-in-the-world fragments.
- Psychoanalysis → phenomenology: thickens existence beyond subject-act-object.
- Phenomenology → psychoanalysis: replaces economic causality with lived meaning and degrees of integration.
- Shared zone: opacity, passivity, desire, temporal disorder of symptom and dream.
- Merleau-Ponty's stamp: unconscious as embodied perceptual life, not inner machinery.
- Freud: metapsychology; economic view criticized; later sexuality appropriated.
- Hesnard: senior Freudian; requested the PhF preface.
- Lacan: mirror stage; affective captivation preferred to Wallon.
- Henri Wallon: 1949 mirror-stage psychology; cognitive foil.
- Sartre: "existential psychoanalysis" as parallel demand.
From economic Freud to ontological unconscious.
Sexuality as current of existence
PP ch. 5: sexuality is not third-person physiological-psychological facts. It expresses freedom (PP: 167) yet is not a cogitatio aiming at a cogitatum (PP: 157); it is body-to-body intentionality, a source of energy. Coextensive with existence as "current of existence," yet not tautological: "the sexual life is a sector of our life bearing a special relation to the existence of sex" (PP: 159). Diffuse atmosphere like odour or sound (PP: 168-9); celibacy still takes up a sexual situation as escapism/solitude. Credits psychoanalysis: led to discover in sexuality relations previously held to reside in consciousness; significance is "to reintegrate sexuality into the human being" (PP: 157-8). Frigidity/impotence as existential stance; forgetting spouse's gift as avoidance strategy (PP: 162). Sexual ≠ genital; libido ≠ instinct (Trieb vs Instinkt). Polymorphous erogenous zones vs genital synthesis; Freud's bisexual birth claim still teleologically steers toward heterosexual "normal." Feminist critique (forward to Murphy): expansiveness limited by naturalized heterosexuality. Merleau-Ponty differs: expands consciousness to obscure motivations rather than external drive machinery; erotic perception pervades body-world relation.
Sexuality between Freud and flesh ontology.
Passivity lectures and Klein
1954-55 Collège: "Problem of Passivity: Sleep, the Unconscious, Memory"; "Nature and Logos." Moves from incarnated consciousness toward carnality of which body proper is one instance. Sleep cluttered with "debris of past and present" (TL: 48); unconscious as type of perceiving consciousness (TL: 50), against Sartrean nothingness. Later: "think of the human body (and not consciousness) as that which perceives nature which it also inhabits" (TL: 128); esthesiology. Body proper: sensible and sensing, two faces. Logic of implication and promiscuity (Ineinander) (TL: 50). Unconscious becomes ontological. Melanie Klein preferred to Freud for corporeality as "global and universal power of incorporation" (TL: 129-30). VI's flesh ontology is partly creative response to limits of Freudian unconscious: foundations of an ontological psychology.
Philosophy of History
Sonia Kruks
Context: Kojève, socialism, terror
French Hegel interest surged in the 1930s via Alexandre Kojève's seminars (some attended by Merleau-Ponty). "Interpreting Hegel means taking a stand on all the great philosophical, political, and religious problems of our century" (SNS: 64). Politically, as a 1940s socialist offering "critical support" to the French Communist Party in HT (1947), he measured philosophy of history against the Russian Revolution's slide into Stalinist terror.
Readings of Hegel are deliberately equivocal. Textbook Hegel subordinates living flux to Idea, reduces history to spirit, finds final synthesis in his own consciousness (SNS: 81). Early Hegel yields an existential dialectic of lived ambiguity. Marx is likewise split: Soviet-affinity textbook Hegelianism versus a young Marx informing Merleau-Ponty's existential history.
Two Hegels, two Marxes, and Merleau-Ponty's path between progress and rupture.
Idealist Hegel vs existential Hegel
Inaugural Collège address: Hegel fails to see philosophy and history as practices; the philosopher cannot view history objectively. Absolute knowledge makes history "fully comprehended, finished, dead" (EP: 48); the philosopher finds only sense already placed there (EP: 49-50). Human existence is transcendence and negation, projecting futures in dialectic with constraint; textbook Hegel destroys negativity by final synthesis. Men become victims of the cunning of reason; epochs are mere stages. Example: History of Philosophy treats Oriental thought only as a "moment," asserting Western absolute superiority (S: 137).
"Hegel's Existentialism" (SNS: 63-70) reads the Phenomenology of Mind as origin of existential phenomenology: not connecting concepts but revealing "immanent logic of human experience in all its sectors" (SNS: 65); bringing each doctrine and era back to life. Life as responsibility and project; dialectic of subjective self-certainty and objective truth must stay open. If certainty equals truth and history ends, man becomes animal-like; man is Unruhe, unrest refusing limitation to one determination (SNS: 66). Absolute knowledge is a "way of life," not end of history (SNS: 64): reason acknowledging the irrational; history as sens et non-sens. Existential Hegel invents "Reason broader than the understanding" that respects singularity yet tries to guide contingencies to their truth (SNS: 63).
Marx, institution, after Marxism
Following young Marx (1840s Manuscripts, Theses on Feuerbach), praxis is engaged reason producing the world, making individuals "the subject of history" (SNS: 80). Open history restores individual control: meaning history will have depends on meaning seen in it (SNS: 79). Not all attributed meanings enable engagement. Against Sartre's either wholly free or determined: "generality and probability are real phenomena" (PP: 442). Institution: events endowing experience with durable dimensions so later experiences form an intelligible series; sedimentation as "invitation to a sequel, the demand for a future" (TL: 40-41).
Public history likewise carries probable outlines without inevitability. Liberal humanism's progress of freedom becomes "an ideology of war" when abstract principles ignore concrete ambiguities, justifying colonial and anti-communist violence (HT: xxiv). By the 1950s Merleau-Ponty grows pessimistic about determining history's sens under orthodox Marxism in action, yet never wholly abandons the project. By 1960 he regards Hegel and Marx as still to be rethought rather than simply discarded.
- Durable events that give experience dimensions
- Later experiences acquire meaning as series/history
- Sedimentation invites a sequel, not mere residue
- Personal and public levels share this structure
- Grounds probable judgement without teleology
History between Idea and rupture.
Institution without determinism.
Politics and the Political
Diana Coole
Political experience
Postwar Europe: Occupation memories (he was in the Resistance); liberal France's impotence before fascism; cold-war Manichean closure; modernization reproducing class injustice; Algeria and decolonization. Beauvoir's Force of Circumstance (1963) shows him in a narrative of commitment and quarrels. Never a Party member, he revitalized Marxism via Hegel, young Marx, Husserl and Heidegger. Dialectics and existentialism are the century's two essential themes (S: 155); later he names the approach hyperdialectics (VI: 89-95). Already anticipating anti-humanist critiques, he can look poststructuralist avant la lettre. Influenced by Nietzschean/Husserlian/Weberian pessimism and Frankfurt-School-adjacent gloom without total paralysis.
After the Korean War (blamed on Soviet aggression), quarrel with Sartre; provisional shift to parliamentary non-communist Left and "Weberian" liberalism; resignation from Les Temps modernes. Sometimes silence is fitting when discussion is closed (Goehr 2005; Stewart 1998). Hope remains that existentialism and phenomenology grow appreciation of contingency. Modern regimes' limits trace to rationalist presuppositions; overcoming violence requires return to ontology (VI: 165). Main prejudice: Cartesian/Kantian rationalism, mind/body and subject/object dualisms translating into violent strategies.
From cold-war interventions to ontology of the political.
Critiques in HT and AD
HT (1947) and AD (1955) interweave event analysis and political philosophy. Shift from unequivocal condemnation of liberal capitalism toward more circumspect liberalism and harder Marxism has been read as conservatism (Madison 1988; Cooper 1979); Coole sees consistent existential judgement by lived "human bond," not self-professed values. Truer coexistence enriches relationships through communication, differentiation, complexity and experimental questioning. Fascination with the USSR as unfinished sociological form; early 1950s clear the lived meaning of communist regimes.
AD analyzes dialectical misadventurers from Marx via Lukács (sometimes proxy for younger Merleau-Ponty), Lenin, Trotsky, to Sartre: oscillations between realist and idealist assumptions anathema to dialectics. HT already targets means/ends and intentions/consequences splits. Liberalism (Kantian, pre-war French) assumes men of good will; "violence will not be expelled by locking ourselves within the judicial dream of liberalism" (HT: 34). It switches from quietism to moralism and excessive violence (HT: 119, 149): "Machiavelli is worth more than Kant" (HT: 104). Liberal nature is violent; racism, exploitation, colonial violence endemic; humanism as alibi (HT: xxiv, 175). Even after losing hope in communist reform: disgraces of both systems enter a probabilistic balance sheet; critique of one cannot alone ground choice of the other (AD: 181).
Communist actors focusing only on outcomes, imposing preconceived meaning, answer adversity by terror or opportunism (AD: 95). By 1950 "The U.S.S.R. and the Camps" (S): ten million inmates, new hierarchies, Weberian bureaucratization undermine socialist label (S: 265). Objectivist practice treats society as second nature for an engineer building a bridge (AD: 63, 95). Marxism remains a useful interpretive perspective, not "true as such" (AD: 180, 225). (TD: 9f).
Political ontology and virtù
Acknowledge the non-rational as consequence of embodiment: perception primary; reason inseparable from corporeal provenance. Domain of the political = intercorporeal milieu of coexistence. Intentional body: pre-personal opacity plus rich non-cognitive and symbolic communications. Agency is not property of a rational individual or Marxist collective subject but emergent capacities (meaning, reflexivity, expression, improvisation, communication) within generative flesh (Coole 2005). Flesh is worldly: "system of perspectives"; "intermundane spaces," "pell-mell ensemble of bodies and minds" (VI: 84). Foucault's force field is anticipated; Merleau-Ponty seeks guidance for agency within it.
Political practice affinities: Machiavelli, Marx, Weber. Machiavelli introduces the milieu proper to politics (S: 214); power is neither naked force nor honest delegation of wills; virtù is "a means of living with others" (S: 214, 219). Astute actors perceive significance within situations (HT: 63); history teaches errors to avoid. Best Marxism is "reading of ongoing history," non-teleological: human perspectives, however relative, are absolute because there is nothing else (HT: 18, 53, 58). Great Marxists of 1917 deciphered history while it took place.
- Judge by lived relationships actually supported, not slogans
- Enrichment via communication, differentiation, complexity
- Material conditions belong inside the criterion
- Probabilistic balance sheet across systems
- Contingency blocks both quietism and terror
Political books and turning points.
Political judgement without pure hands.
Art and Aesthetics
Hugh J. Silverman
Lyon courses and "Cézanne's Doubt"
At Lyon (1945-48), about one-third of his teaching treated aesthetics and psychology of communication. Courses: "Aesthetics and Modern Painting" (Cézanne, cinema, cubism, Malraux, psychology of art); "Aesthetics" on Symbolists (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé) against Sartre's Baudelaire and Valéry on Mallarmé. Before the 1948 Sorbonne appointment, polished studies of Cézanne, Beauvoir/Sartre novels and New Cinema appear in SNS (1948).
"Cézanne's Doubt" opens with Cézanne's 1906 letter (age 67, one month before death): fear for his "weak reason," slow learning from nature (SNS: 9). He worked alone, without students, family admiration or critical encouragement. Close attention to nature and colour, "inhuman" faces painted as objects, devotion to the visible, might seem flight from the human world; yet "the meaning of his work cannot be determined from his life" (SNS: 10). Palette, colour over outline, light emanating from objects: he "abandoned himself to the chaos of sensations" (SNS: 13). He refused the choice between feeling and thought, order and chaos; the real distinction is between spontaneous organization of perceived things and human organization of ideas and sciences (SNS: 13), the central/human order distinction already in SB.
(SNS: 15). (SNS: 15). Each brushstroke must satisfy an infinite number of conditions; expressing what exists is an endless task (SNS: 15). Phenomenology coincides with Cézanne's process of expressing.
Leonardo via Valéry and Freud: psychoanalytic "hermeneutic musings" (vulture-breast in Virgin and Child with St Anne) do not cancel freedom; psychoanalysis teaches freedom as "creative repetition of ourselves, always, in retrospect, faithful to ourselves" (SNS: 25). Freedom realized "with colors upon a canvas," matching postwar freedom themes and Sartre's free writer/reader in What Is Literature? (1947).
Aesthetic phases from Lyon teaching to Eye and Mind.
Literature, film, metaphysics
"Metaphysics and the Novel" reads Beauvoir's L'Invitée (1943): Pierre-Françoise-Xavière triad; machine of language that keeps freedom in union (SNS: 31). "Man is metaphysical in his very being" (SNS: 28). "The tasks of literature and philosophy can no longer be separated" (SNS: 28): world expressible only in "stories"; hybrid modes; novel and theatre become metaphysical without philosophical vocabulary. "A Scandalous Author": Sartre's plays and novels enact expression and freedom; Merleau-Ponty hears Sartre identifying with a transparency "not of the world" that makes freedom "mortal" (SNS: 47).
"The Film and the New Psychology": a movie is not thought but perceived. Gestalt psychology (Köhler, Koffka, Gelb, Goldstein): wholes grasped spontaneously; film is "not a sum total of images but a temporal Gestalt" (SNS: 54). Temporality as prospection in retrospection (PP: 414); shared theatre coexistence; philosopher and movie-maker belong to a common generation (SNS: 59).
Indirect language and Eye and Mind
After Sorbonne years on child language and others, election to Collège (1951-52) launches a new phase: indirect language (non-formulaic, non-thetic) versus the algorithm (scientific, quantitative). Prose of the World and PP's "Body as Expression, and Speech": speaking subject does not express ready-made thought; speaking speech (parole) is expressive thought (PP: 180). Style is how painter or writer inhabits and renews an already speaking world. Course "The Problem of Speech" (1954) continues sedimentation versus original expression.
"Eye and Mind" (PrP; late essay, 1961 publication): the painter's eye opens onto visibility pure reflection misses. Aesthetic visibility as non-philosophy philosophy must learn from: latent content reflection forgets. Silverman thus binds aesthetics to expression (Adams) and flesh (Evans).
| Work | Art focus | Philosophical payload |
|---|---|---|
| PP Preface | Balzac, Proust, Cézanne | Phenomenology = modern wonder |
| SNS "Cézanne's Doubt" | Colour, synaesthesia | Expressing world's birth |
| SNS film essay | Temporal Gestalt | Perception over thought |
| ILVS / Prose | Style, speech | Indirect language |
| Eye and Mind | Painter's vision | Flesh; non-philosophy |
SNS aesthetic essays at a glance.
Body
David Morris
Beyond subject/object; inborn complex
PP Pt 1 chs 1-2: body escapes subject/object and first/third-person divisions. Phantom limbs, illness, disruption testify: illness is not mere absence of objective function but change in access to the world, hopes and projects. Outlook differs if modification is new "normal" versus hobbling of past habits; conversely, undermined existential projects can feel as bodily inability to eat or move. "I am my body" (PP: 150): not objective body but lived body (corps vécu) with "momentum of existence" exceeding any biomedically objectified "body at this moment" (PP: 82).
Inborn complex: Freudian-complex-like meaning born at an organic pre-personal level, then modulated through intersubjective engagement (PP: 82-5). Locus of being in the world (être au monde, PP: 78-81), adapting Heidegger's In-der-Welt-sein. "The ambiguity of being in the world is translated by that of the body, and this is understood through [the ambiguity] of time" (PP: 85). Body is not merely in space or time but inhabits them (habite, PP: 139): New Yorker lives routes, not coordinates.
Motor intentionality and body schema
Central discovery: motor intentionality. Beneath representational intentionality Husserl elaborates "a deeper intentionality which others have called existence" (PP: 121 n.5). Existence is bodily: (1) movement laden with meaning; (2) intentionality lies in movement. Pathologies: grasp tool for use yet cannot point to same location without use → practical space versus geometrical space. Driver's hand relates to turn signal as to-be-moved in turning, not as inches from wheel. "Consciousness is in the first place not a matter of 'I think that' but of 'I can'" (PP: 137).
Body schema (Smith translation often blurs schema vs image): reaching for sponge, fingers prepare to squash from the start; for tap, to grasp and turn; misjudged light box causes clumsy jerk because movement was geared to expected weight. Schema is pre-reflective organization of powers enabling habit, tool incorporation, spatial orientation. Habit is knowledge in the hands. Being has meaning in virtue of the body; SB and PP insist structures of behaviour are significative wholes. Innovation: anonymity and personal existence intertwine so "I" emerge from and return to a pre-personal power of existing.
- Körper / Leib (corps vécu): object-body vs lived body
- Inborn complex: organic meaning modulated intersubjectively
- Motor intentionality: meaning in movement; I can
- Body schema: pre-reflective geared organization (≠ body image)
- Practical vs geometrical space: use-space vs abstract location
- Habit / momentum of existence: sedimented projects in posture
- Descartes: cogito foil; body as object/vehicle
- Heidegger: being-in-the-world adapted to body locus
- Goldstein/Gelb / Schneider: pathology evidence for practical space
- Smith (tr.): English PP obscures schema/image distinction (Morris)
Practical vs geometrical space.
Body schema versus image.
Perception
David R. Cerbone
Empiricism's four ideas and Berkeley
Empiricism involves four main ideas: (1) receipt of simple sensory atoms (light, colour, retinal stimuli) less than ordinary things; (2) independent sensory channels so seen ≠ touched; (3) ordinary things as products of combining units observed to "go together"; (4) affect as addition excited by but not part of perception. Berkeley's Principles §1 summarizes: ideas by sight, touch, smell, palate, hearing "observed to accompany each other" become one apple; passions excited thereafter. The picture "physicalizes" easily by replacing ideas with stimuli.
Immediate experience shows no such atoms: we see a red-and-white coffee cup on a desk, figure on ground. "The perceptual 'something' is always in the middle of something else, it always forms part of a 'field'" (PP: 4). Empiricism claims building blocks underlie the built-up; Cerbone's stronger claim: start with atoms and you could never recover ordinary experience. Figure/ground: edges belong to shape not background; background continues underneath where no sensory atom is present. Association and memory appeals are circular: they presuppose arranged experience. "An impression can never by itself be associated with another impression" (PP: 17). Woolly red carpet: red would not be this red without woolliness; features internally related. "Synaesthetic perception is the rule" (PP: 229); science makes us unlearn feeling. Integrity of perception: whole prior to parts; "a whole already pregnant with an irreducible meaning, not sensations with gaps between them" (PP: 21-2).
Integrity of perception against twin prejudices.
Intellectualism and lived activity
Empiricism renders experience passive and quasi-mechanical; overlooks that perception is lived by someone. Active vocabulary: looking, watching, scanning, searching, noticing, finding, attending, investigating, focusing, glancing, peeking, gazing, peering. Intellectualism rightly stresses the active subject but overshoots into judgement-constituting-objects (Cartesian/Kantian heirs). As Carman argued, it puts judgement everywhere sensing is not. Positive Merleau-Ponty: perception as bodily being at grips; things as solicitations; horizons of indeterminacy inviting further determination.
Perceptual faith
Perceptual faith: world's givenness as real before proof. Philosophy neither validates nor replaces that faith; it interrogates how reflection arises from it (Toadvine's radical/hyper-reflection). Merleau-Ponty avoids naive realism and constructivist idealism: perceived world is transcendent and immanent. Cerbone pairs with Morris: perception is body-subject's openness.
| Prejudice | Core move | Merleau-Ponty rebuttal |
|---|---|---|
| Empiricism | Build from atoms | Integrity; internal relations; figure-ground |
| Intellectualism | Judgement constitutes | Sensing ≠ judging; contingency of search |
| Both | Ignore lived body | Motor-perceptual grip; I can |
Berkeley's apple vs figure-ground field.
Primacy of perception cascade.
Ambiguity
Gail Weiss
Multiple ambiguities in PP
Famous nature/culture passage: "Everything is both manufactured and natural in man... a genius for ambiguity which might serve to define man" (PP: 189). Shouting in anger or kissing in love is "no more natural, and no less conventional" than calling a table a table. Linguistic and non-linguistic gestures alike are embodied responses calling forth others' responses.
"The experience of our own body... reveals to us an ambiguous mode of existing" (PP: 198): lived in the first person yet outrunning subjective awareness into impersonal generality. "I am my body... and yet at the same time my body is as it were a 'natural' subject, a provisional sketch of my total being" (PP: 198). Hands, feet, body sustain intentions not dependent on decisions: mountain high/upright correlates with tree small/sloping; intentions are general, shared by similarly organized psychophysical subjects (PP: 440).
Weiss enumerates simultaneous, non-reducible aspects: (1) nature and culture intertwined; (2) subjective body pervaded by "atmosphere of generality"; (3) conscious plus pre-reflective bodily intentions; (4) natural expressivity outstripping awareness; (5) shared vertical posture, five senses, gestural capacities; (6) subjective/intersubjective interplay from infant imitation (PrP: 141-51).
Freedom chapter deconstructs Sartre's for-itself/for-others: "I must apprehend myself from the onset as centred in a way outside myself"; For-Themselves against background of For-Others; "each one of us must be both anonymous in the sense of absolutely individual, and anonymous in the sense of absolutely general. Our being in the world, is the concrete bearer of this double anonymity" (PP: 448). Reciprocity missing in Sartre: I for other and other for me concurrently. "I am an intersubjective field... by being this body and this situation" (PP: 452). Temporal ambiguity: living present opens on past no longer lived and future not yet lived (PP: 433).
Ambiguity layers from nature/culture to flesh.
Beauvoir's ethics of ambiguity
The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948) titles the theme; Beauvoir roots existentialism in Kierkegaard vs Hegel and Sartre's BN, without citing Merleau-Ponty there. Yet her 1945 PP review (Heinämaa 2004: 156) praises his ontology as fruitful alternative to Sartre. Ambiguity separated from experience is no longer ambiguity (Weiss). Ethical demand: freedom real only as situated; bad faith denies ambiguity by choosing pure facticity or pure transcendence.
Anonymity, reversibility, flesh
Transition from body-subject terminology to flesh of the world is prepared by early ambiguity. Senses and own body present mystery of touching hands reversing roles; every visible cut from same cloth as seer. Weiss resists reducing Beauvoir to mere application of Merleau-Ponty.
Double anonymity.
Sites of productive ambiguity.
Ambiguity as method, not mush
Weiss insists ambiguity is structural: nature/culture, subject/object, for-itself/for-others, freedom/facticity. Beauvoir's ethics of ambiguity politicizes the same structure. Anonymous body is absolutely individual and absolutely general at once (double anonymity). Misreading ambiguity as vagueness licenses both quietism and decisionism; productive ambiguity demands taking up a situation without pretending to survey it from nowhere.
Four ambiguities kept in play.
Intersubjectivity and Alterity
Michael Sanders
Husserl: appresentation and pairing
Public lifeworld poses the problem for constituting phenomenology: constitutional acts are internal/private; how is experience of others possible? Fifth Cartesian Meditation (1929 Sorbonne lectures): secondary constitution "oversteps itself" so "not all my own modes of consciousness are modes of my self-consciousness" (Husserl 1967: 135). Appresentation: direct presentation (front of house) mediates inaccessible aspects (rear). Other involves Körper and Leib: via apperceptive transfer I recognize the presented body as animate organism like mine. Pairing: regular co-presentation associates my animate organism with my ego; encountering similar organism, I pair it with an ego. Result: transcendental intersubjectivity, "community of monads," ground of objective lifeworld and science (Husserl 1967: 158).
Early Merleau-Ponty and Levinas
PP (xi-xiv, 346-65) follows Husserl but shifts from subjective awareness to reciprocity of shared corporeal existence. "I must be the exterior that I present to others, and the body of the other must be the other himself" (PP: xii). Distinction self/other must not dissolve: only as distinct does the other have a history of its own, ensuring world is not mere "thought about the world" (PP: xiii). Other's body is "the very first of all cultural objects" (PP: 348). Pre-objective elements inaccessible to me provide analogical means: "The other can be evident to me because I am not transparent for myself" (PP: 352). Internal relation completes a system; in "absolute presence of origins," self and other are "collaborators... in consummate reciprocity" (PP: 354).
Levinas ("On Intersubjectivity," "Meaning and Sense"): rooted in perception, Merleau-Ponty never gets beyond Being to ethical transcendence. Praises uniting perceiving subjectivity and expressing objectivity but denies "unique sense" of ethical demand. Exposure to radically Other must be prior to Being; Merleau-Ponty falls back on reconstituting pre-objective world: knowledge relation, even if pretheoretical. Self "immediately coincides with whatever might have been foreign" (Levinas 1993: 102).
From Husserlian pairing to fleshly reversibility.
Later account: interrogation, flesh, reversibility
Levinas often cites "The Philosopher and His Shadow" where separating Merleau-Ponty from Husserl is hard ("I borrow myself from others; I create others from my own thoughts," S: 159). In VI, no strong coincidence: at best "partial coincidence... always past or always future... not a coincidence, [not] a real fusion" (VI: 122-3). Philosophy of interrogation does not reconstitute primordial intersubjectivity from pre-existing transcendental subjectivity. No absolute subject anterior to perceived. "What do I know?" does not resolve into knower/known (VI: 128-9); questions call for disclosure of Being silently behind affirmations.
Living present as compresence: a scene has past "inside itself" not side by side in time (VI: 267); overlapping/encroachment. Flesh: general thing, "element" of Being, nourishment of thought; produces sense like musical sonority without concept; "possesses us" (VI: 151). Reversibility is not early reciprocity: it is interval, rupture, break, with spatial as well as temporal thickness; I and Other temporally proximal across infinition of space without reduction to the Same.
Sanders's ethical payoff: not all contemporary ethics can be Levinasian univocal responsibility outside time; conflicting responsibilities in pluralist life need an ethics broader than that. Corporeal reversibility motivates altering bodily styles of practice in institutions and relations where discourse alone fails.
Intersubjectivity itinerary.
From pairing to reversibility.
Levinas and the limits of reciprocity
Early PP reciprocity risks reducing the Other to a partner in dialogue. Levinas presses alterity as ethical interruption that cannot be symmetrized. Sanders tracks Merleau-Ponty's later shift: reversibility is not fusion; écart keeps otherness. Pairing (Husserl) and conflict (Sartrean look) are both insufficient; flesh ontology supplies thickness of time and space so that I and Other remain proximal without collapse into the Same. Child's relations with others (Sorbonne): syncretic sociability precedes clear self/other cut (ties Cataldi).
Alterity without fusion.
Expression
Harry Adams
Body-subject as medium
"Our body is comparable to a work of art [and] is a nexus of living meanings" (PP: 150-51). Bodies are not vessels; flick of wrist, gesture, nod already are the message, not preconceived then translated. Children communicate through bodies until about age twelve, when Cartesian disengagement appears (PP: 355; CAL). Body as "essentially expressive space" (PP: 144-6): seat of Ausdruck; visual and auditory pregnant with each other; ground of antipredicative unity and then of Darstellung and Bedeutung. "My body is the fabric into which all objects are woven" and "uses its own parts as a general system of symbols for the world" (PP: 235).
Between intellectualism (centrifugal: impose meaning) and empiricism (centripetal: passively receive), expression is both. World already "has a meaning" (PP: 177); we take it up into corporeal style by inhabiting and communal life (PP: 182, 179); body opens to new conduct as powers are "decentralized, broken up and reorganized" (PP: 194). Later: flesh of the world; "whole wild world" speaks through us (VI: 155); nature as interlocutor (PP: 320); one being on the horizon like distant roar of a city (PP: 328).
Paradox of expression between sediment and creation.
Paradox of expression; speech; Saussure
Secondary/empirical language results from creative language (S: 44). Waldenfels: paradox = tension between drawing on sedimented meanings and creating new ones. Pure faithful transmission = mere repetition; wholly new private meaning = mute utterance. Ontological paradox cannot be eradicated by careful listening.
Dialogue: common ground; thoughts interwoven; "collaborators... in consummate reciprocity"; interlocutor's objection draws thoughts "I had no idea that I possessed" (PP: 354). Excess of meaning always insinuated.
From 1947, idiosyncratic Saussure: signifier/signified; arbitrary bond; meaning via system of differences: "each [sign] does not so much express a meaning as mark a divergence of meaning between itself and other signs" (S: 39). German wissen/kennen/können clarify by difference. Langue vs parole; Merleau-Ponty privileges diachronic creativity over Saussure's synchronic focus. "Speech in the speaker does not translate ready-made thought, but accomplishes it" (PP: 178). Arrangement of available signs "alters and then transfigures" so "a new signification is secreted" (PW: 13). Double task (S: 86-7): (a) language as moving equilibrium; (b) synchrony as cross-section always involving latent changes. Late: chiasm as tornado-like nexus (VI: 215); Valéry: language "voice of the things, the waves, and the forests" (VI: 155).
- Must use already-expressed sedimented meanings
- Must generate genuinely new significance
- Pure repetition ≠ expression; pure novelty ≠ expression
- Operates in the between: old/new, text/interpreter, spoken/speaking
- Applies to art, politics, science, not only linguistics
Expression: body, speech, flesh.
Paradox of expression positions.
From mute gesture to instituted speech
Adams: expression spans bodily gesture, painting, and speech. The paradox: meaning must use sedimented forms yet cannot be reduced to them. New parole reshapes langue. Political speech and artistic invention are paradigmatic. Later VI: language as less heavy body of the invisible; words overrun the scene until they speak as the voice of things. Against intellectualist translation model and empiricist association of signs with ideas.
Expression stack.
Affect and Sensibility
Suzanne L. Cataldi
Terminology and middle path
Cataldi's working distinctions: affectivity (generic felt fluctuating experiences); emotions (outward, sometimes turbulent, diminishing control); moods (durable atmospheric tones); passions (intensified moods polarized by an object); feelings (short-lived inward bodily states). Neither pure cognitivism (fear = belief of danger) nor pure behaviourism (fear = raw feel triggering flight). Fleeing a threat is sensible behaviour incomprehensible apart from situation. Meaning of threatening gesture "is not perceived as the colour of the carpet"; sense is "recaptured by an act on the spectator's part" without being a cognitive operation (PP: 184-5).
Emotion as structure of behaviour
SB: middle between Freudian consciousness-facts and Watson's psychology without consciousness. Behaviour as Gestalt: stimulus-response as sign to signified, not cause. Emotions as adaptive movements seeking equilibrium (SB: 36-7). Preferred responses become emotional habits/styles (dressing revealing modesty or rebellion, SB: 174). Disorders: stereotyped attitudes, Freudian complexes reinterpreted as rigid attachment (jealous child stuck as "latest born," PrP: 110). Janet: emotion as "disorganizing reaction... whenever we are stuck" (SNS: 53); Dewey: "conscious sign of a break." Grief: weeping signifies struggle to adapt to loss; mourning reorients future sens. Emotions not private psychic facts: "Anger, shame, hate and love... exist on this face or in those gestures, not hidden behind them" (SNS: 52-3); for the other they are lived, for me displayed (PP: 356). Stendhal's Julien: desire to kill "not in the words at all... between them, in the hollows" (S: 76). Melody as image of behaviour; nascent perception is "emotional contact" more than disinterested cognition (SB: 176).
Affect from behavioural structure to fleshly écart.
Emotional body language and later ontology
PP: look to affective life "if we want to bring to life the birth of being for us" (PP: 154). Existence = taking up and transforming a de facto situation so the hitherto meaningless takes on meaning (PP: 167). Later: affective/aesthetic ideas as circumscribed absences, open vortexes; l'écart as between-space holding incompletely reversible sides of flesh in "distant-contact." Performer "at the service of the sonata" (VI: 151) still linked as directed melody (SB: 173). Affectivity conditions perception: originary intention binding sensing subjects to sensible worlds.
- Affectivity → Emotions → Moods → Passions → Feelings
- Neither belief-identity nor raw-feel mechanism
- Structure: sign-signified circulation seeking equilibrium
- Disorder: rigid semi-independent emotional attitudes
- Expression: visible in gesture; also in silences between words
Affectivity spectrum (Cataldi).
Emotion as visible structure.
Depth of feeling; Sartre and Heidegger contrasts
Emotions are existential significations we live rather than know. Love: "not... a thing hidden in my unconscious, nor... an object before my consciousness, but the impulse carrying me towards someone" (PP: 381). Erotic comprehension models emotional significance: "desire comprehends blindly by linking body to body" (PP: 157). Later ontology: these blind links reappear as chiasms where passive and active sides of flesh cross; a sight that has me frightened may itself appear frightening (VI: 264-5).
(PP: 378-81). Against Sartre's magic-transform thesis (Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions): Merleau-Ponty grants active/voluntary aspect and affinity with imaginary, but "decisions do not arise ex nihilo" (PP: 447); faults Sartre for missing "sedimentation of our life" (PP: 441). Body cannot shed emotional baggage. Against Heidegger: agrees we always find ourselves in a mood, but refuses privileging dread/anxiety; more interested in beginnings than endings; less individualistic/nihilistic.
Carnal / living meanings: quasi-perceptible affective and aesthetic meanings that cannot be abstracted from bodily sensibility; invisible "lining" of the sensible (VI); grasped through reciprocity of intentions and gestures. Cliff example: cautionary gait "joins" the spectacle as falling-off place (PP: 185). Between persons: "as if the other person's intention inhabited my body and mine his" (PP: 185). Contempt met by tears or tongue; generosity by embrace. Experience is transitive: "What happens in me can pass over into the other." Early sympathetic sociability via mimesis (PrP: 121); childhood indistinction never fully eliminated; grounds jealousy ("I would not covet what others have if I did not sympathize," PrP: 143) and analysis of prejudice as projecting unwanted traits (PrP: 104). Diprose (2002): affectivity via ambiguity and generosity of intercorporeality opens ethical-political accounts of different bodies.
Affect between Sartre, Heidegger and flesh.
Nature and Animality
Scott Churchill
SB: orders and structure
SB starts from scientific experience to show behaviourist and Gestalt materials contradict their own interpretive doctrines. Critique of behaviourist reduction to reinforcement; of Gestalt isomorphism (same structure in experience and physiology, Köhler 1947: 177) as naming without clarifying, and as intellectualist. Part III: physical, central, human orders. Higher founded on lower, contains it, yet integrates into new structures inexplicable by the lower (Wild, Foreword SB: xiii). Parallel to Husserl Ideas II (Material → Animal → Spiritual). Consciousness and nature in structural relation: order of knowing and order of being. "I am able, being connatural with the world, to discover a sense... without having myself endowed them with it" (PP: 217). Scientific knowledge of nature ultimately "knowledge by acquaintance."
Physical, central and human orders toward animal rehabilitation.
Collège lectures: interior of nature
1952-60 courses: nature as "an object from which we have arisen... continue to sustain and aliment" (TL: 64). Contingency of freedom: being-in-the-world delivers itself over to reflexes it also founds (PP: 86). Need more than PP's "common middle term" (PP: 77) for phantom-limb dualism; Heideggerian being-in-the-world as unifying concept still left dilemmas. Goal: avoid pure spiritualist nature; avoid reducing nature/man/spirit/history.
Cartesian nature: bare existence, no latent meanings (TL: 67-9). Kantian: nature-for-us under understanding (TL: 71). Both leave nature a mere object. Need nature's interior: "mode of liaison which is not... external causality... an 'interior' unlike the interior of consciousness" (TL: 71). Paths: Schelling (leben/erleben); von Uexküll (biology). Consciousness intertwined with body and world, not detached mirror (Low 2000). Humans develop consciousness within natural order yet distance from nature to learn about it (TL: 76). Animals "bring to light the movement by which all living things... endeavor to give shape to a world that has not been preordained" (WP: 73-4). Rehabilitation: see how living beings "trace in their environment... their very own vision of things" (WP: 75); ethical sense of restoring animal place.
- Köhler: isomorphism thesis critiqued
- Husserl Ideas II: level-constitution parallel
- Descartes / Kant: nature-as-object foils
- Schelling: lived intellectual intuition of nature
- Jakob von Uexküll: Umwelt biology
Orders of nature toward animality.
Connatural knowing of nature.
Esthesiology and interanimality
Churchill stresses connatural knowing: philosophy of nature is not spectator science but participation in an interior that science's objectivating gaze misses. Animal Umwelt (von Uexküll lineage via SB): organisms shape worlds of significance, not mere stimulus machines. Interanimality and later flesh kinship refuse both Cartesian animal-machine and sentimental anthropomorphism. Human order does not erase life-order and physical forms; it transforms and nests them. Nature lectures (Collège) and Nature course notes push beyond PP's still-anthropocentric framing toward an ontology in which the human body is one fold of sensible being among others (links Evans, Stawarska).
Science of nature vs philosophy of nature.
Chiasm and Flesh
Fred Evans
PP intertwining still consciousness-centred
PP's physiognomic perception: "subject-object dialogue" drawing meaning diffused through the object and subject's intentions; world "speaks to him of himself" (PP: 132). Bilateral, not unilateral: neither pure reaction nor pure constitution. Bodies as schemas symbolizing possible objects; hands as that which grasps, things as to-be-grasped. World immanent ("our" world to bodily size) and transcendent (horizon, presumptive unity, PP: 327). "The world is wholly inside [me] and I am wholly outside myself" (PP: 408). Yet meaning-granting role still leans to consciousness; hence VI's verdict.
From subject-object dialogue to flesh's dehiscence.
Flesh, narcissism, reversibility
Flesh: intimacy "as close as between the sea and the strand" (VI: 130-31); not blending that would erase seer or visible. "Fundamental narcissism of all vision" (VI: 139): couple more real than either; "Visibility in itself"; painters feel looked at by things; "we no longer know which sees and which is seen." Thickness of flesh constitutive of visibility and corporeity (VI: 135). Neither spiritual nor material: "element" like water, air, earth, fire (VI: 139, 147). Chiasm (rhetorical inversion; anatomical optic chiasm): formal mimic of seeing becoming being-seen.
Flesh "coils back upon itself," dividing into flesh of world and flesh of body, sensible and self-sensing (VI: 250). Perception = dehiscence of flesh (VI: 154). Cannot see itself seeing; coincidence always only imminent: "a reversibility always imminent and never realized in fact" (VI: 147). Hand-touching-hand exemplar: one hand becomes object under the other; directedness (être à) never goes "beyond a sort of imminence" (VI: 249).
Invisible, truth, other reversibilities
Invisible: intuitus mentis as "sublimation of the flesh"; "invisible of this world," Being of this being, a dimension/level situating every experience (VI: 145, 151). Bodies as "measurant" of things (VI: 152). Truth as continuous "crossing-out" of less exact visibles by fuller ones: not erased but crossed out toward greater exactitude; quasi-teleology never completable (no God or atoms as final end). PP already: optimal balance of richness and clarity (PP: 318, 251). Flesh "is not contingency, chaos, but a texture that returns to itself" (VI: 147). Debate: modernist convergence vs postmodern écart (Evans 1998; Evans & Lawlor 2000).
Further reversibilities: sense modalities (synaesthetic encroachment, imminent coincidence); intercorporeity (VI: 141): other bodies reverse side of our own, like two hands of one body; unification imminent only; richness of perspectives is gift not lack. Hearing/phonation; language and perception: invisible emigrates into "less heavy... body" of language; scene "overrun with words"; language "very voice of the things" (VI: 153-5). Horizontal reversibility (seer/seen) mediated by vertical (perception/language).
- Element: neither mind nor matter
- Narcissism of vision: couple of seer and visible
- Dehiscence: self-division into sensing and sensed
- Reversibility: always imminent, never fact
- Invisible: dimension that renders visible
- Crossing-out: quasi-teleology of more exact hold
- Intercorporeity / language: further chiasms
Forms of reversibility.
Crossing-out toward fuller visibles.
Feminism and Race Theory
Ann Murphy
Beauvoir, Irigaray, Young, Weiss
Beauvoir's "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" genders existential becoming. Merleau-Ponty: "body is solidified or generalized existence and existence a perpetual incarnation" (PP: 166). Both attack Cartesian cogito apart from flesh; both stress subject/object ambiguity. Beauvoir bends analysis to women's othering via identification with body.
Irigaray (Ethics of Sexual Difference, 1993): trepidation about reversibility accommodating two irreducible sexes; lived body always already male; privilege of sight over touch devalues feminine/tactile. Intrauterine life fully tactile before vision. Vasseleu (1998): Irigaray argues touch is conceived in terms of vision, seeking a tactile irreducible to the visible; still finds window to new sexual ontology.
Habit (PP: 453): world already and never completely constituted. Iris Marion Young, "Throwing Like a Girl": women often experience bodies as things, rooted in immanence, hesitant/confined comportment. Gail Weiss (Body Images, 1999): many feminist appropriations redeploy immanence/transcendence dualism; argues non-dual corporeal agency; anorexia as sexism-distorted body image. Corporeal feminism (1990s): Butler, Gatens, Grosz; anti-Cartesian; Merleau-Ponty as resource for sexed embodiment.
Feminist and race appropriations: with and against.
Performativity, Butler, race
Identity as becoming anticipates gender performativity. Diprose (Corporeal Generosity, 2002): identity open because performances change and are vulnerable to others' recognition/misrecognition; ethics of welcoming. Butler's early "Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description" (1989): PP sexuality chapter imports heterosexual norms; Schneider judged pathological for lacking arousal to "obscene images"; masculine subject as "disembodied voyeur." Later Butler still resonates with existential performativity despite critique.
Race section (Murphy continues): Merleau-Ponty and Fanon. Fanon's racial epidermal schema and lived experience of blackness under the white gaze both draw on and transform phenomenological resources (anonymous body shattered by racializing look). Philosophy of race uses Merleau-Ponty for embodied habit and intercorporeity while charging that anonymity masked white European default. Murphy's verdict: legacy is provocative, not simply rejectable or simply salvageable.
Critical engagements with the anonymous body.
Anonymous body: resource and problem.
Fanon: historico-racial schema
Influence on philosophy of race is smaller than on feminism, yet decisive. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1967 Eng.), ch. "The Lived Experience of the Black": largely critical engagement. Under colonialism a "historico-racial schema" replaces Merleau-Ponty's corporeal schema (pre-reflective location and possibility between body and world). "In the white world, the man of colour encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema" (Fanon 1967: 110). Racialized encounter with colonizer ruptures pre-reflective integrity; brute objectification; "I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the 'idea' that others have of me, but of my own appearance" (ibid.: 116). Body returned "sprawled out" and "distorted." Dialectic of body and world stalls; status reified as object. Implicit critique: Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is not anonymous/universal; assumes racial privilege. Still useful for describing what is "broken" under colonialism. Jeremy Weate (2001): Fanon's repair leads toward new humanism and corporeal "disalienation." Nigel Gibson (2003) and Linda Alcoff (2006): habit analysis shows racism damages at pre-reflective level, undermining the naive belief that all racism is explicit.
Performativity and expression
Butler Gender Trouble (1990): regulatory norms legitimate and undermine gender identities only by repeatability; no discrete truth of sex/gender; "There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted" (1990: 25). Not free volitional costume-change; norms coerce yet remain vulnerable to subversion via iteration. Anticipated by Beauvoir's becoming and Merleau-Ponty's temporal expressive identity; body maintains and disrupts habit. PP "Body as Expression, and Speech": thought does not exist prior to expression (PP: 183); speech accomplishes thought (PP: 178); corporeal style resources materiality/language without reducing either. Sexuality as "one more form of original intentionality" (PP: 157); "ambiguous atmosphere... coextensive with life" (PP: 169).
Fanon breaks and repairs the corporeal schema.
Cognitive Science
Shaun Gallagher
Critical resource against the mechanical mind
Early cognitive science: sub-personal symbol manipulation, syntactical procedures. Merleau-Ponty already: organism-milieu relations "are not those of an automatic machine" (PrP: 4); rejects superimposing "pure, contemplative consciousness on a thing-like body." Body "on the side of the subject; it is our point of view on the world" (PrP: 5), a claim functionalism could not make.
Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can't Do (1992): skill and object recognition bypass formal analyses; body as synergistic system of cross-modal equivalents (Dreyfus 1992: 249). Robots as computational machines will not match human performance. 2005: neither sophisticated rules nor case stores have produced intelligent behaviour (Dreyfus 2005: 130). Madison (1991) dismisses Cognitive Science and AI as logocentric disease; Gallagher notes AI moved on. Neural nets closer (intentional arc) but disembodied nets fail generalization; embodiment supplies world-gearing constraints.
Changing fortunes: positive resource
AI became more embodied: robotics (Rodney Brooks vs Marvin Minsky); social robotics. Merleau-Ponty shifts from GOFAI critic to supportive resource. Dynamical systems, emergence, renewed interest in consciousness. 1960 Royaumont: Merleau-Ponty to Ryle: distance "is one that he puts between us rather than one I find there" (TD: 65). Dennett entertains then rejects phenomenology; rarely cites Merleau-Ponty. Others do: Dreyfus, Andy Clark, Gallese, Varela, Meltzoff, Dautenhahn.
Embodied-ecological-enactive approach: cognition of agents in-the-world. Naturalizing phenomenology: minimal sense = "not being committed to a dualistic kind of ontology" (Roy et al. 2000: 19). Merleau-Ponty models non-strict-transcendental phenomenology in dialogue with neurology and psychology. Gallagher develops intercorporeity and primary intersubjectivity against pure theory-of-mind simulation/theory theories (links to Sanders, Morris).
Double movement: critique then appropriation.
Naturalizing phenomenology and intersubjectivity
Naturalizing phenomenology (Roy et al. 2000): minimal sense = "not being committed to a dualistic kind of ontology." Merleau-Ponty models a non-strict-transcendental phenomenology already in dialogue with neurology and psychology (Schneider, Gelb/Goldstein, Stratton). Gallagher develops intercorporeity and primary intersubjectivity against pure theory-of-mind simulation and theory theories: infants and adults grasp others via embodied interaction before theorizing hidden beliefs (links to Sanders, Morris). Embodied-ecological-enactive cognition: agents in-the-world, not minds in vats. Andy Clark, Gallese, Varela, Meltzoff, Dautenhahn cite or parallel Merleau-Ponty. Dennett entertains then rejects phenomenology; rarely cites him. The 1960 Royaumont exchange with Ryle remains a model of Anglo-Continental adjacency without collapse.
Cognitive science double movement.
Why disembodied AI stalls.
Living Well and Health Studies
Philipa Rothfield
Rethinking corporeality
Pre-objective subjectivity; incarnate subject (PP: 57). Dualism problems for health: (1) mechanistic physiology treats body as object; body-as-object is third-person achievement that forgets the medium of perception (PP: 55, 58-9); (2) intellectualist psychology turns lived experience into impersonal fact of the psyche (PP: 94-5). Union of soul and body "enacted at every instant in the movement of existence" (PP: 89). Leder (1992): medical body "modeled upon a lifeless machine."
The unwell body
Kay Toombs (Meaning of Illness): illness involves alien body sensation; body becomes object of reflection; "I have MS"; body as oppositional force/threat (Toombs 1992: 35, 71-3). Drew Leder: body typically absent (third term of figure/ground, PP: 101); in pain, dys-appearance: body surfaces as uncomfortable presence, "being-away within experience" (Leder 1990: 91). Merleau-Ponty: intentional arc "goes limp" in illness (PP: 136). Pathology is a complete form of existence; "impossible to deduce the normal from the pathological" (PP: 107). Schneider not normal-minus-capacity. Sacks's Christina and Gallagher's Ian Waterman: lost proprioception; move by visually tracking limbs; extraordinary modus operandi.
Illness between objectification and lived pathology.
Clinical ethics and difference
Phenomenological bioethics: patient's perspective as antidote to medical framework dominance (Toombs on MS; Sobchack on prosthesis). Ethics of clinical encounter: listen to lifeworld of illness. Rothfield also addresses difference and illness: how gendered, raced, disabled embodiments reshape "normal" and "pathological" (ties to Murphy). Living well is not mere absence of disease-object but reconfiguration of motor-perceptual possibilities.
Health phenomenology options.
From Körper to relearned I can.
Intentional arc and extraordinary bodies
"Intentional arc" (PP: 136) projects past, future, human setting, physical, ideological and moral situations; illness makes it "go limp." Pathology is a complete form of existence (PP: 107): Schneider is not normal-minus. Oliver Sacks's Christina (proprioceptive loss) and Ian Waterman (Gallagher's discussions): visual tracking substitutes for silent body schema; extraordinary effort discloses what usually withdraws. Leder's dys-appearance and Toombs's alien sensations are complementary, not rivals: one names attentional disruption, the other existential threat and objectification. Clinical ethics: refuse to treat Körper metrics as the whole story of living well.
Three bodies in the clinic.
Sociology
Nick Crossley
Phenomenology as being-in-the-world
Preface definition: reject external mechanical causes and transcendental idealism reducing world to ego. Dig to pre-reflective perception; world resists and surprises. Reduction for Merleau-Ponty reveals intentional bonds; "impossibility of a complete reduction" (PP: xiv). Slackens intentional threads "like sparks from a fire" (PP: xiii). Extends intentionality to operative motor intentionality (feet intend pedals). Sociology significance: situated subjects; relationality; "Man is but a network of relationships" (PP: 456); class consciousness, POW resistance from bonds not "within" (PP: 442-54).
Anger not inner antecedent of behaviour: "location of my anger... is in the space we both share" (WP: 84). Self-knowledge mediated by culture and language (WP: 86-7). No Husserlian primordial sphere of ownness; self and other via interworld. Clear sociological slant.
Merleau-Ponty and sociology: four clusters and dialogue.
Culture, collective consciousness, Marx beyond
Crossley develops culture and collective consciousness: sedimented meanings, institutions, class as lived. Concrete intersubjectivity (not abstract monad community). Marx and beyond: Merleau-Ponty's existential Marxism and later AD critique inform sociological theory without requiring Party orthodoxy. Habit and institution (link Kruks) supply micro-macro bridge Bourdieu also sought. Verdict: Merleau-Ponty is not a sociologist but a standing partner for sociology that refuses both mechanism and pure constitution.
Sociology uptake clusters.
Self as public network.
Collective phenomenology; concrete intersubjectivity
Beyond actor's point of view: call for phenomenology of collective life and history. Drawing on Husserl's Crisis: "transcendental subjectivity is intersubjectivity"; concepts crystallize as culture from interactions. Three sociological steps: (1) individual to collective; (2) intentional history (Hegelian plot lines agents do not fully see); (3) dialogue with sociologists, historians, anthropologists for data on collective mind as culture. Husserl's letter to Lévi-Bruhl: ethnographic variation exceeds philosophical imagination; social relativity of knowledge. Relativism in social science is self-undermining; philosophers must rethink truth as historical accomplishment without treating knowledge as a "thing" caused from outside.
Concrete intersubjectivity: web of meaningful relations "mediated by things," with interdependencies and inequalities generating power, alienation, exploitation. Hegelian recognition plus Marxist economic-political interdependence via means of production. Against stereotypical external-observer sociology that treats kinship as effect of thing-like forces: kinship is meaningful praxis woven with economic praxis.
Marx, Weber, structure
Marx's plot and materialism mattered, yet cautiously: history "does not walk on its head" but neither does it "think with its feet" (PP: xix). Rejects law-like economic primacy; everything affects everything; may grant practical priority if predictive (early HT/SNS). Abandoned Marxism mid-1950s after Gulag institutionalization. Post-Marxist: (1) Weber (AD): meaning from within, contingency, unintended consequences; interpreter inside history; plot lines fade. Overlaps undermine Merleau-Ponty's own sociology critique (Weber already practised the called-for type) yet build a bridge. (2) Structure via idiosyncratic Saussure: parole-like messy praxis and langue-like regularities agents reproduce without full recognition (EP; S: 114-25). Trajectory Durkheim → Mauss → Lévi-Strauss: social has two poles, significant from within and generalized/mediated by things (S: 114). Social facts neither Durkheimian things nor ideas but two-sided structures; exchange patterns are "society itself in act." Structure points beyond subject-object correlation: "we are in a sort of circuit with the socio-historical world" (S: 123). Sociological exploration of structures reveals "our insertion in being."
From Crisis intersubjectivity to two-sided structure.
Main Points
Fifteen insights
- Primacy of perception is not a preference for eyesight; it is the claim that all knowledge, science and reflection open within perceptual horizons they cannot fully survey (Cerbone, Toadvine).
- Body-subject / I can replaces the cogito as method: philosophy begins responsible to pre-philosophical being (Morris, Adams).
- Empiricism and intellectualism are twin prejudices: association cannot create internal relations; judgement cannot replace sensing (Carman, Cerbone).
- Ambiguity is positive structure (nature/culture, subject/object, for-itself/for-others), not muddle; Beauvoir turns it ethical (Weiss).
- Condemned to meaning and logic within contingence: history and politics between teleology and pure rupture (Busch, Kruks, Coole).
- Institution / sedimentation explain probability without determinism; freedom has degrees and a field (Kruks, Busch).
- Virtù over Kantian moralism: Machiavelli worth more than Kant when hands must be dirtied without terror (Coole).
- Cézanne / Eye and Mind: painting as non-philosophy that shows world's birth of meaning (Silverman).
- Paradox of expression: between sedimented langue and creative parole; speech accomplishes thought (Adams).
- Affect as structure of behaviour seeking equilibrium; emotions visible in gestures, not hidden psychic atoms (Cataldi).
- Nature's interior and animal Umwelt: connatural knowing; rehabilitate animal world-shaping (Churchill).
- Flesh / chiasm / reversibility: unity of difference; coincidence always imminent; intercorporeity as gift (Evans, Sanders).
- Anonymous body is politically charged: resource and problem for feminism and race theory (Murphy).
- Cognitive science reversibility: from GOFAI critique to enactive resource (Gallagher).
- Illness as complete existence whose intentional arc goes limp; clinical ethics needs lifeworld, not only Körper (Rothfield).
Frameworks table
| Framework | What it says | Use when |
|---|---|---|
| Empiricism vs intellectualism | Twin false maps of perception | Critiquing sensation or judgement theories |
| Motor intentionality / I can | Meaning in movement before representation | Action, habit, AI, rehab |
| Institution / sedimentation | Past invites sequel without necessity | History, habit, politics |
| Paradox of expression | Between repetition and mute novelty | Language, art, politics |
| Flesh / reversibility | Imminent coincidence of sensing/sensed | Ontology, ethics, intersubjectivity |
| Existential regime judgement | Judge by lived human bond | Comparing political systems |
| Dys-appearance / limp arc | Illness as lived reconfiguration | Clinical encounter, disability |
Who's who (selected)
| Figure | Role in this volume |
|---|---|
| Husserl | Intentionality, reduction, intersubjectivity; radicalized |
| Sartre | Ally and foil on freedom, look, politics |
| Beauvoir | Ambiguity ethics; Second Sex becoming |
| Levinas | Alterity critique of phenomenology |
| Saussure | Idiosyncratic resource for expression |
| Cézanne | Painter as phenomenological exemplar |
| Marx / Machiavelli / Weber | Political practice affinities |
| Dreyfus / Gallagher | Cognitive science bridge |
| Fanon / Butler / Irigaray / Young | Race and feminist transformations |
Companion parts as one itinerary.
About this book
Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts by Rosalyn Diprose and Jack Reynolds (eds.), 2008. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
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