Insight Editions · No. 93
Reading Merleau-Ponty
On Phenomenology of Perception
Thomas Baldwin (ed.) · Edited by Thomas Baldwin
This collection examines Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception through essays on embodied perception, intentionality, speech, social life, freedom, and the relation between phenomenology and philosophy.
A study guide to Reading Merleau-Ponty by Thomas Baldwin (ed.), edited by Thomas Baldwin. 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
Ten essays from Husserlian flesh to philosophy as non-philosophy.
Baldwin and Eran Dorfman sketched the Paris meeting in 2003; Ian Hacking helped secure Collège de France support. The volume's stated aim was to show French audiences the esteem British philosophers hold for Merleau-Ponty, and to acquaint British readers with recent French work. Stereotypes of "critical analytic" versus "faithful elucidation" are admitted and then softened by the papers themselves. Hubert Dreyfus joined and asked that former students Sean Kelly and Mark Wrathall be included.
Two traditions in play at the 2005 colloquium.
| Ch | Title | Author | In one line |
|---|---|---|---|
| P | Preface | Thomas Baldwin | 2005 Collège colloquium; Lefort; Madame Merleau-Ponty; Anglo-French bridge. |
| 1 | The flesh of perception | A. D. Smith | Vs caricature Husserl: little radically new, but body-schema, motility, synaesthesia develop the shared terrain. |
| 2 | What do we see (when we do)? | Sean D. Kelly | Intentional reading of seeing; empiricist and cognitivist constancy theories both fail phenomenologically. |
| 3 | Power to reckon with the possible | Komarine Romdenh-Romluc | Completes Dreyfus's absorbed coping with Merleau-Ponty's power to reckon with the possible. |
| 4 | Reply to Romdenh-Romluc | Hubert L. Dreyfus | Task-switch while absorbed; horizon vs mere possibility; Todes on spectatorial attitude. |
| 5 | Phenomenology of social rules | Mark A. Wrathall | Rule-governed vs rule-following vs rule-according; motivation, not Searle-style background causation. |
| 6 | Speaking and spoken speech | Thomas Baldwin | Speaking speech as creative gesture; spoken as sediment; late intertwining revises existential subjectivism. |
| 7 | The genius of man | Simon Glendinning | Having a body/language; gesture; critique of human/animal world-environment binary. |
| 8 | Consciousness and communication | Naomi Eilan | "Child's Relations with Others"; communication-theoretic self-consciousness; joint attention. |
| 9 | Freedom, perception, radical reflection | Eran Dorfman | Closing silence of PhP; freedom vs Sartre; radical reflection that remembers its unreflective origin. |
| 10 | Philosophy and non-philosophy | Françoise Dastur | Last Collège lectures; Hegel/Marx; philosophy that destroys itself as separate subject. |
Abbreviations (volume list)
| Abbrev | Work |
|---|---|
| SB | The Structure of Behaviour |
| PhP | Phenomenology of Perception (Smith 1962 / 2002 as x/y) |
| SNS | Sense and Non-Sense |
| VI | The Visible and the Invisible |
| PofP | The Primacy of Perception |
| PW | The Prose of the World |
| IPP | In Praise of Philosophy |
| T&D | Texts and Dialogues |
| NC | Notes de Cours (no English) |
| HLP | Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology |
Debate map (quick)
Two explicit debates inside the volume.
How the essays answer each other
Smith's Husserl debt claim sets a bar: later originality talk must be specific. Kelly's constancy failures show what "the body perceives" must deliver as description. Romdenh-Romluc and Dreyfus fight over whether coping needs an extra power or already has horizon flexibility. Wrathall generalizes motivation beyond individual skill to social rules. Baldwin and Glendinning take expression from speech into anthropology. Eilan pushes sociality into self-consciousness. Dorfman and Dastur close the book by asking what freedom and philosophy become when reflection cannot complete itself.
Dependency spine across the volume.
Reading tips
- Pair Smith with Kelly. Husserl comparison and constancy phenomenology set the perceptual baseline before action essays.
- Read Romdenh-Romluc then Dreyfus as one debate. Absorbed coping, Schneider, "reckon with the possible," and horizon summons.
- Baldwin then Glendinning. Speech as gesture, then the human/animal and "genius" problem.
- Close with Dorfman and Dastur. Freedom, radical reflection, and philosophy that is also non-philosophy.
Source detail pass: volume architecture
Routledge 2007 volume from the 17-18 June 2005 Collège de France colloquium celebrating sixty years of Phenomenology of Perception. Editor Thomas Baldwin; ten essays after the preface. Dual page refs (x/y) track Colin Smith translation. Contributors span British analytic phenomenology and the US Dreyfus line on coping and AI.
Four reading passes through the volume.
The 2005 College de France Colloquium
Origin of the colloquium
In 2003, Baldwin and Eran Dorfman sketched a joint meeting. Ian Hacking helped secure Collège de France support. The institutional choice mattered: Merleau-Ponty held the Chair of Philosophy there from 1952 until his death in 1961, so the anniversary returned PhP to the house of his late teaching.
How the 2005 Colloque was assembled.
Two stereotypes, one room
Baldwin names the caricatures he wanted to unsettle:
| Stereotype | Assigned to | Risk |
|---|---|---|
| Critical, argumentative | British / analytic | Misses textual fidelity and metaphilosophy |
| Faithful elucidation | French | Misses hard counters and psychology |
The papers, he says, soften both pictures. British contributors press Husserl comparison, constancy, rules, speech, and self-consciousness with argument and case material. French and French-trained voices (Dastur, Dorfman) push metaphilosophy and radical reflection. The room was not two tribes talking past each other.
Why Hubert Dreyfus, Kelly, Wrathall
Hubert Dreyfus agreed to join and asked that former students Sean Kelly and Mark Wrathall be included. That choice imports the US line in which Merleau-Ponty underwrites critiques of cognitivism and AI: absorbed coping, soliciting affordances, and social rules as motivation rather than Searle-style Background causation. Romdenh-Romluc's essay then answers Dreyfus from inside PhP; Dreyfus replies in Chapter 4. The volume therefore contains an explicit debate, not only parallel papers.
Three national strands Baldwin assembled.
What the Preface does not do
Baldwin does not summarize PhP chapter by chapter. He does not resolve whether Merleau-Ponty is a Husserlian or a post-Husserlian. He sets the scene, the aim, and the cast. Exhaustive argument begins with Smith's flesh essay.
What readers should expect next
The volume does not offer a single school line. Smith pressures originality claims; Kelly pressure-tests psychology; Romdenh-Romluc and Dreyfus stage an internal debate; Wrathall, Baldwin, and Glendinning widen to norms and language; Eilan brings developmental psychology; Dorfman and Dastur close on freedom and metaphilosophy. Treat the order as an argument arc, not a random anthology.
Preface promises an Anglo-French-American room.
Volume contents at a glance
Baldwin includes "most of the papers" from the colloquium, plus Kelly and Wrathall at Dreyfus's suggestion. The written volume is therefore both a record and an expansion of the Paris room. Contributors' Notes in the book list 2007-era affiliations; treat them as historical.
Takeaway
| Point | Detail |
|---|---|
| Event | 17-18 June 2005, Collège de France; 100+; hot Saturday |
| Editors / organizers | Baldwin; Dorfman co-sketch; Hacking aid; Lefort opens |
| Aim | Anglo-French mutual recognition of PhP's standing |
| US addition | Dreyfus + Kelly + Wrathall at Dreyfus's request |
| Tone | Stereotypes admitted; papers meant to complicate them |
The Flesh of Perception: Merleau-Ponty and Husserl
Occasion, scope, method
The colloquium celebrates PhP's 1945 publication. Smith's reason for celebration must be something philosophically new. He limits himself to perception and world-relation, not PhP's full range (culture, history, art, freedom). The comparative question: what is in PhP that is not already in Husserl?
Admirers often expound Merleau-Ponty by contrasting him with Husserl. Too often that yields a caricature or one-sided Husserl. Smith asks how matters stand when the real Husserl is taken into account.
Smith's comparative question.
Empiricism, intellectualism, and the third path
Merleau-Ponty situates himself against empiricism (also realism/objectivism) and intellectualism (also idealism). The two seem opposed, yet they agree on a notional separation of physical and mental, then privilege one side. Realism starts from world-objects and models the mental on physical causality (association laws). Intellectualism starts from the mental and explicates the physical via forms of intuition and categories. Merleau-Ponty's third path starts from an irreducible involvement of subject and world. Slogan: the body perceives. Perception (mentalistic) and body (physical) are unified as subject and predicate of one assertion.
Smith focuses on the relation to intellectualism, because Husserl is commonly classed there. Intellectualism places perception in a constituting consciousness that contains the world's a priori structure. Merleau-Ponty's objection: that overlooks the opacity of the world and of our relation to it. "If a universal constituting consciousness were possible, the opacity of the fact would disappear" (PhP 61/70-1). We do not "possess" the world (PhP xvii/xix). Even basic structures have no "ideal model" (PhP 53/61). Form arrives with the world (PhP 61/70). We carry structures with us because we are of the world (PhP 326/380).
Third path against the shared split.
Substituting existence or being-in-the-world through a body for consciousness as subject of perception (PhP 309 n1/360 n22) enshrines opacity. Basic intentionality is not a thought: it "takes for granted all the latent knowledge of itself that my body possesses" (PhP 233/270). The body operates pre-personally. There is another subject beneath me for whom a world exists before I am here (PhP). Its logic is wordless, its language silent (PhP 48-9/56). That density is part of what Smith's title "flesh" names. The body here is not the realist's objective body already on one side of the divide. The body is "better informed than we are about the world" (PhP 238/277).
Husserl already had the lived body
Smith's blunt answer to "what is new?": essentially nothing at the level of essential points; language differs. Husserl's Leib (lived body), not Körper (objective body), is necessary in all perception (Hua IV 56; cf. Hua IX 107). Constitution of nature is "from the start indissolubly interwoven with the constitution of a body" (C 17 II, 45). The body is co-constituted whenever anything is perceived (Hua XI 298). Husserl can call the perceiving subject Ichleib (I-body). Constitution is not a "supramundane" ego making an external world.
Husserl on self and world: every ego "must build up a real world"; it is inconceivable that in reflection I do not discover myself experiencing a world. How then the epoché? Husserl allows thinkable dissolution into a non-harmonious tumult with no world - but that dissolution would be dissolution of the I (K IV 3, 57); with only tumult, "there is no I" (Hua VI 289). So Husserl's transcendental I is not Merleau-Ponty's intellectualist all-constituting consciousness. Smith stresses: the transcendental I is perpetually constituted as an identical pole; the standing-streaming present is temporalized into pre-time; the ego's life is a founded intentional accomplishment. Passive synthesis, including inner-time synthesis, is accomplished behind the back of everyday consciousness. Gallagher-style claims that the body schema is "impenetrable to phenomenological reflection" seriously misrepresent Husserl once unconscious constitution and passive synthesis are counted.
| Theme | Husserl (Smith) | PhP echo |
|---|---|---|
| Lived body necessary | Hua IV; Ichleib | Body perceives |
| Kinaesthesis | Motivates adumbrations | Motility / I can |
| Touching-touched | Double sensation | Reversibility / flesh |
| Passive synthesis | Pre-given to the ego | Pre-personal subject |
| No world, no I | Tumult dissolves the I | Opacity; of the world |
Smith's debt map (shared before difference).
Motility as original meaning-giving
Where Merleau-Ponty presses beyond a simple Husserl reprise: motility. "Already motility, in its pure state, possesses the basic power of giving a meaning (Sinngebung)" (PhP 142/164). Motility gives "a new meaning of the word 'meaning'" (PhP 146/170). Not only active movement (central in Husserl too) but action on or towards objects - grasping as paradigm. Merleau-Ponty writes of motor intentions and motor intentionality (PhP 110/127, 317/370). Motility is "basic intentionality." Consciousness is first "I can," not "I think that" (PhP 137/159). He praises Grünbaum for making motility an original intentionality: conceiving man not longer as a consciousness constructing the world.
Body schema and synaesthesia
Body schema (practical layout of possible movements) organizes space as ability, not as measured coordinates. Pathologies (phantom limb, anosognosia, Schneider) show schema disruption without mere sensory loss. Smith treats schema talk as continuous with Husserlian kinaesthesis once misreadings of "consciousness" are cleared, while still allowing Merleau-Ponty's clinical and existential intensification.
Synaesthesia is developed "in a way that is absent from the thought of Husserl." "There is a sense in saying that I see sounds or hear colours" (PhP 234/272). Content of perception is existential (PhP 53/62). Articulations of an object are "those of our very existence" (PhP 320/373). A thing adumbrates a mode of existence; to understand it is to take that mode up (PhP 319/372). Sensory experience is "the assumption of a form of existence" (PhP 221/257). Activity expends energy to degrees; tasks call for degrees of engagement - sensory qualities carry that existential weight (a colour's "weight," a sound's demand).
Three developments Smith isolates.
Flesh as title-word
"Flesh" (chair) is late (The Visible and the Invisible), but Smith uses it for the dense intertwining of sensing and sensed already latent in PhP: the hand that touches is touchable; the seer is visible. Reversibility undercuts subject-object dualism without collapsing into materialist identity. Pre-personal bodily familiarity makes existence-as-involvement possible.
Counterarguments
- "Husserl never meant the body that way." Answer with Ideen II, kinaesthetic manuscripts, Hua IV/IX/XI, not slogans.
- "The epoché proves Husserl's spectator ego." Dissolution of world = dissolution of I; transcendental ego is founded and passively synthesized.
- "Originality is existential-political." Smith stays on perceptual analysis where flesh of perception is argued.
- "Gallagher: schema beyond phenomenology." Misreads Husserl once unconscious constitution counts as phenomenological theme.
Evidence and cases
| Case / phenomenon | Shows |
|---|---|
| Phantom limb | Schema persistence after objective loss |
| Anosognosia | Deficit refusal as bodily attitude |
| Schneider (Gelb & Goldstein) | Abstract movement failure; concrete coping intact |
| Synaesthetic reports | Cross-modal unity prior to judgment |
| Football field / organist | Motor intentional space, not mapped coordinates |
The transcendental ego is not the intellectualist subject
Smith piles textual evidence that Husserl's transcendental I is constituted and founded, not a supramundane spectator. It is an identical pole of acts, temporalized through the standing-streaming present into pre-time. Passive syntheses - above all inner time - are accomplished without ego involvement and constitute what is pre-given to the ego. States Husserl discusses include reservoirs of the unconscious in a phenomenological sense. Once that is granted, Merleau-Ponty's pre-personal bodily subject looks less like a rupture and more like a re-description of terrain Husserl already opened.
Husserl ego layers Smith mobilizes against the caricature.
Does the epoché still threaten opacity? Only if dissolution of harmonious world-experience left an intact constituting subject. Husserl denies that: tumult without world is tumult without I. Merleau-Ponty's insistence that we are opaque to ourselves and of the world therefore lands inside a generously read Husserl, not only against him.
Originality restated without school loyalty
Smith's final comparative balance is severe on break-narratives and generous on development. Language differs; essential points of bodily perception are already Husserlian; motility as original Sinngebung, existential synaesthesia, and the clinical-existential intensification of schema are where celebration should focus. Readers who need Merleau-Ponty to be anti-Husserlian will resist; readers who need a precise debt map will find the chapter's severity clarifying.
Opacity, possession, and "I think" versus "I am"
Merleau-Ponty denies that we possess the world. His "I think" is not an "I am" unless thought can equal the world's concrete richness and re-absorb facticity (PhP 376 n1/437 n16). Basic intentionality "does not come into being through the transparency of any consciousness" (PhP 233/270). Smith reads these lines as anti-intellectualist without requiring anti-Husserlianism, once Husserl's ego is understood as founded and passively synthesized. The rhetorical heat of PhP's anti-constituting-consciousness passages targets a school position, not every sentence in the Husserliana.
Opacity as anti-intellectualist commitment.
Source detail pass: Husserl texts Smith uses
Smith works from Husserl's published and manuscript treatments of the Leib (lived body), not from Merleau-Ponty's caricature of a pure constituting ego. Key moves he attributes to the real Husserl:
- Ichleib: the I-body is necessary in all perception; there is no I without world.
- Constitution is interwoven with bodily capacity; motility is not a late add-on.
- Passive synthesis and genetic phenomenology place sense-formation "behind the back" of the ego.
- The transcendental I is constituted, founded, not a free-floating sovereign.
Merleau-Ponty's novelty, on Smith's reading, intensifies these themes (especially synaesthesia and existential sensory unity) more than it invents a third path unknown to Husserl. The "body perceives" slogan refuses the mind/world split shared by empiricism and intellectualism, yet the refusal was already Husserl's in substance.
Smith: shared core vs Merleau-Ponty intensification.
Empiricism and intellectualism as shared enemy
Empiricism: world first; mind patterned on causal imprint. Intellectualism: constituting consciousness that would erase the opacity of fact. Both leave no room for a body that is subject of perception. Merleau-Ponty's third path enshrines that opacity. Smith's verdict: celebrate the intensifications; do not overclaim radical break at the shared core with Husserl on Leib.
Arguments in sequence (Smith)
- Occasion vs reason. Anniversary is occasion; reason must be philosophical novelty in PhP.
- Scope limit. Only perception and world-relation, not culture/history/art/freedom chapters.
- Third path. Empiricism and intellectualism share a mind/world split; "the body perceives" refuses the split.
- Anti-intellectualism. Constituting consciousness would erase opacity; we do not possess the world.
- Husserl agreement. Leib necessary; Ichleib; constitution interwoven with body; no I without world.
- Ego not caricature. Transcendental I constituted, founded, passively synthesized.
- Motility. Original Sinngebung; I can before I think; motor intentionality.
- Synaesthesia. Existential sensory unity largely absent from Husserl.
- Verdict. Essentially nothing radically new at the shared core; celebrate the intensifications.
Takeaway
| Claim | Smith's stance |
|---|---|
| Caricature Husserl | Reject |
| PhP radically new vs Husserl on perception | Essentially no |
| Shared Leib / kinaesthesis / passivity | Yes, extensive |
| Motility as Sinngebung; synaesthesia | Distinctive intensifications |
| Flesh | Late name for early intertwining |
| Method | Comparative phenomenology, not school loyalty |
What Do We See (When We Do)?
Three interpretations of the question
Three ways to hear 'What do we see?'
- Epistemological. Challenges whether we see external things at all. Kelly sets this aside via "when we do."
- Metaphysical. Berkeley: we see ideas. Naive realism: we see objects. Lockean indirect realism: we see internal sensations yet thereby perceive everyday objects. Wide variety of other options exist; none is Kelly's focus.
- Intentional / phenomenological. Preferred reading. Clues from Heidegger and above all Merleau-Ponty.
Whether a metaphysical assumption is true will not affect the intentional position he defends.
Why constancy is the battleground
Perceptual constancy (size, shape, colour, and more): an object looks to keep its property across changing proximal stimuli. A man walking away does not look to shrink with his retinal image. A white wall in shadow is not seen as a grey wall under normal light would be, yet lighting is somehow taken into account.
Different descriptions of this experience underwrite different psychological theories. Following Merleau-Ponty, Kelly holds that two classic theories rest on inaccurate descriptions of the phenomena.
| Property | Stimulus varies | Look (roughly) holds |
|---|---|---|
| Size | Retinal image shrinks with distance | Person keeps looking the same size |
| Shape | Ellipse on retina for a tilted circle | Plate looks circular |
| Colour | Illumination changes | Object keeps its colour-in-context |
Empiricist account: Russell denial and Hering memory colour
Early sense-data views such as Russell in chapter 1 of The Problems of Philosophy are less explanations of constancy than denials of it. Russell admits we speak as if colours, sizes, and shapes stay the same; he explains that speech by something like the empiricist correction story.
The standard empiricist account, associated with Ewald Hering (late nineteenth century), explains colour constancy by preservation of an experience of the object's colour in normal lighting - a memory colour that corrects present sensation.
Kelly's Merleau-Pontyan objection: empiricism fails to recognize dependence of a perceived property on the context in which it is perceived. Merleau-Ponty: alleged colour constancy does not prevent "an indubitable modification during which we continue to receive in our vision the fundamental quality" (PhP 305/355, quoting Gelb). What we see is that the object is a certain colour, and this colour will look different depending upon the light. The empiricist who needs an unchanged sensation plus a correction cannot accept that description without abandoning the explanation.
Empiricist constancy and its phenomenological failure.
One can still follow Russell and deny constancy. Kelly sees no knock-down proof against that denial, but the cost to ordinary language and ordinary understanding of experience is drastic.
Cognitivist account: Helmholtz and unconscious inference
A popular cognitivist explanation reads "taking the context into account" as unconscious inference, originating with Helmholtz in the late nineteenth century. The mind computes true size, shape, or colour from cues.
Kelly's objection: this neglects dependence of a perceived property on the object it is perceived to be a property of. The sense of belonging of the property to the object is central to any proper phenomenological account of what we see. We do not first see a free-floating quality and then infer an owner; we see the blue of the carpet.
Two theories, two missed dependencies.
Positive thesis: aspects appropriate to the object-in-context
What we see, throughout contextual variation, is an object having the aspects appropriate to it, given that it is an object that ought to be seen in a given perceptual context. Seeds appear in Peacocke's argument that perceptual content is non-conceptual; the view is incomplete until supplemented with object-belonging.
Kelly links this to Frege: a concept is unsaturated and needs an object for completion; likewise a perceptual aspect depends on its object so deeply it cannot, as such, be named alone. That points toward a connection between perceptual content and linguistic content - a problem from early phenomenology through Strawson, Evans, Peacocke, and McDowell. Adequate study will need analysis and phenomenology together.
Counterarguments and limits
| Pushback | Kelly's stance |
|---|---|
| Deny constancy (Russell) | Possible but costly; not the target once phenomenology is granted |
| Inference is only subpersonal | Even then the theory misdescribes what is given as belonging |
| Context is just lighting physics | Physics may correlate; it does not replace intentional description |
| Frege analogy overreaches | Offered as a bridge, not as the chapter's main proof |
Colour in context: what the empiricist cannot say
Kelly presses the Merleau-Pontyan description: we continue to receive the fundamental quality through an indubitable modification. The white wall in shadow is not seen as a grey sample under a lamp would be, yet it does not look the same as the sunlit white either. Constancy and modification are co-given. Empiricism that needs an invariant sensation plus a correction factor cannot accept that co-givenness without ceasing to be the explanation it was.
Cognitivism that computes true colour via unconscious inference equally misplaces belonging. The woolly blue is not a hue chip plus a texture inference; the aspect is of the carpet. Frege's unsaturated concept is Kelly's bridge to say why the aspect cannot be named alone without loss.
Constancy as co-given modification and belonging.
Limits Kelly accepts
He does not claim a knock-down refutation of Russellian denial. He does claim that once one grants ordinary seeing, the two classic psychological theories fail as accounts of that seeing. The chapter is a phenomenological corrective to theory choice, not a psychology experiment.
Size and shape alongside colour
Although colour supplies the longest empiricist discussion (Hering, memory colour), Kelly's dual-dependence thesis is meant for size and shape constancy too. A distant person keeps looking the same size; a tilted plate keeps looking circular. Empiricist sensation-plus-correction and cognitivist inference both threaten to pry the aspect from context or from the object. Optimal grip motor intentionality (cross-reference Dreyfus/Kelly on constancy) is a later ally: the body tends toward a view that resolves size/shape, not toward an inferred metric proposition.
Source detail pass: metaphysics Kelly brackets
Kelly sketches three metaphysical packages only to set them aside for the intentional project.
| Package | What we supposedly see | Relation to world |
|---|---|---|
| Naive / direct realism | Austin's "moderate-sized specimens of dry goods" | Direct, largely trustworthy |
| Berkeley | Ideas about which one cannot be mistaken | Idealism: physical objects as collections of sensible ideas |
| Lockean indirect realism | Internal sensations / ideas | Thereby perceive everyday objects |
He sides dogmatically with naive realism for this paper: direct relation, everyday objects. Phenomenologists are said to be sympathetic. Heidegger (Being and Time): when I experience an object I have "in view the entity itself and not... a mere 'representation' of it." Merleau-Ponty: "I aim at and perceive a world... the world is what we perceive" (PhP xvi/xvii). J. J. Valberg: looking carefully at experience finds nothing that defines it as separate from what it is of; one finds the ordinary world.
Coal, chalk, and Russell's habit of seeing
Classic colour constancy: coal looks black in sunlight; chalk looks white in shadow, even when the eye may receive stronger light from the coal. Size: a man walking away keeps looking the same size as his retinal image shrinks.
Russell insists the table's colour we see changes with lighting; we only believe it is the same brown. Bright parts look white from reflection. "There is no colour which pre-eminently appears to be the colour of the table." Ordinary speech needs a learned "habit of seeing things as they appear" in a detached attitude. Kelly treats this as denial of constancy as a strictly perceptual phenomenon, close cousin to the empiricist correction story.
Hering-style memory colour preserves an experience of the object's colour in normal lighting and uses it to correct present sensation. Merleau-Ponty, via Gelb (PhP 305/355), refuses the invariant-quality premise: modification is indubitable while the fundamental quality continues to be received.
Cognitivism and belonging
Helmholtzian unconscious inference reads "taking context into account" as a subpersonal computation of true size, shape, or colour from cues. Kelly's Merleau-Pontyan reply: we see the blue of the carpet, not a free-floating quality later assigned. Constancy is the object maintaining its colour, shape, size, not a property maintained in abstraction from its owner. Peacocke (1989) on non-conceptual content is an analytic ally that still needs belonging filled in. The Fregean bridge (unsaturated aspect) then ties perception research to Strawson, Evans, McDowell.
Kelly's path from question to dual failure.
Arguments in sequence (Kelly)
- Three questions. Epistemological, metaphysical, intentional - choose intentional.
- "When we do." Bracket skepticism for this paper.
- Constancy as test. Size, shape, colour across changing stimuli.
- Empiricism. Hering memory colour; Russell denial; misses context-dependence.
- Cognitivism. Helmholtz unconscious inference; misses object-belonging.
- Positive. Aspects appropriate to the object-in-context.
- Frege bridge. Unsaturated aspects akin to unsaturated concepts.
- Outlook. Perception-language problem needs analysis plus phenomenology.
Takeaway
| Item | Content |
|---|---|
| Question type | Intentional / phenomenological |
| Test case | Perceptual constancy |
| Empiricism (Hering / Russell) | Misses context-dependence |
| Cognitivism (Helmholtz) | Misses object-dependence |
| Positive view | Aspects appropriate to the object-in-context |
| Bridge | Fregean unsaturatedness; perception-language research |
Merleau-Ponty and the Power to Reckon with the Possible
Absorbed coping as Dreyfus reads PhP
Dreyfus highlights Merleau-Ponty on unreflective skilled behaviour. Making tea: kettle as for-boiling, mug as for-holding, teabag as for-brewing - perceptions that pull forth tea-making while one thinks of other things. Formal talk with a vice-chancellor: a sense of formality regulates language so one does not swear. Martial arts: opponent's fist as opportunity to duck, unguarded chest as opportunity to kick. Dreyfus names action immediately brought about by such perception absorbed coping.
Merleau-Ponty ties coping to motor skills - physical abilities from scratching a nose to driving - acquired by practice. One launches into attempts and keeps practising until proficient. Skills also shape what opportunities one can perceive. Learning to do x is partly learning to see occasions for x. What a subject perceives depends on current task, environment, and skills possessed. A skill cannot be exercised in just any environment.
Absorbed coping as motor-skill loop.
Dreyfus on intention: when flow stops
Romdenh-Romluc finds Dreyfus illuminating yet incomplete on how intention initiates action. Dreyfus reads Merleau-Ponty as holding that intention initiates absorbed coping when behaviour's flow has come to a standstill (Dreyfus 2000, 300-1). Two options for standstill:
- Subject is not perceiving (sleep / unconsciousness - controversial, since sleep still retains some sensitivity).
- Perception is sometimes insufficient to bring about behaviour; intention must "nudge" the agent.
Either way, thought generates action only when coping has stopped or stalled. That mismatches ordinary agency: we form intentions and carry them out while still perceiving.
One might think the coping analysis already explains intention: taking on a task by intending x reshapes perception, which then guides coping. But agents do not always take on tasks by forming intentions, and some thought-driven cases cannot be read as perception reshaped by a new actual task.
The mime case (Juan)
Sitting in a chair is itself a basic motor skill (upright posture, balance). Even such basics show that "actual environment" talk is already skill-relative. The mime shows the sharper gap: thought wants behaviour the present poles of action do not solicit.
Reckoning with the actual and the possible
In absorbed coping the agent reckons with the actual: actual environment and actual project, with skills, shape perceptual content that initiates and controls coping. Correlatively, the possible covers possible projects and/or possible environments. Merleau-Ponty: the normal person "reckons with the possible, which thus, without shifting from its position as a possibility, acquires a sort of actuality" (PhP 109/125).
Actual versus possible reckoning.
To perceive is to exercise motor skills. An agent who has a skill can perform the movements and recognize suitable environments. When the world invites action, skills are already in play. Surroundings and current task bring relevant skills online. Reckoning with the possible enables the agent to summon demands for action independently of the present environment - projecting a situation that calls for behaviour lined up with a represented possibility. The representation gains bodily significance and can initiate and guide action.
Schneider as contrast class
Schneider (Gelb and Goldstein) copes with concrete poles - bench, scissors, leather for wallet-making - but lacks normal access to abstract movement and to possibilities unanchored in present solicitations. If normal agents were Schneider-locked into whatever currently grips them, free task-switching and thought-driven mime would be mysterious. The power to reckon with the possible is what the pathology lacks in the relevant sense.
Two routes from thought to action
| Route | How it works | Limits |
|---|---|---|
| Task choice reshapes perception | Intention sets a new actual task; solicitations change | Fails when the scene cannot solicit the needed skills (mime) |
| Summon relative to the possible | Skills accessed against a merely possible environment | Needs the normal power Schneider lacks |
Romdenh-Romluc's completion of the Dreyfus story.
Romdenh-Romluc does not claim to have defended Merleau-Ponty's full action theory. She claims the model has resources beyond the stoppage story and deserves investigation as an alternative to orthodox intention-belief-desire psychology.
Motor skills online: perception as exercise of skill
Romdenh-Romluc stresses a Merleau-Pontyan identity: to perceive inviting opportunities is to exercise motor skills. Skills are not stored programs waiting for a separate perceptual module. Environment and task make skills available; perception and action are one circuit. That is why reshaping the task can reshape what is seen - and why a merely possible environment must be summonable if thought is to guide mime-like action.
How the possible enters the motor circuit.
Orthodoxy contrasted
Orthodox action theory: belief, desire, intention cause bodily movement via practical reasoning. Merleau-Ponty's model, completed by the possible, offers an alternative worth investigating: thought initiates by giving representations motor meaning, not only by issuing executive commands after coping stops. Romdenh-Romluc leaves full defence open; she clears the resource objection.
When intention seems to initiate without stoppage
Romdenh-Romluc lists ordinary cases: forming an intention and carrying it out while still perceiving; taking on tasks without a prior standstill; miming and rehearsing. Dreyfus's published line (2000) that intention initiates when flow stops cannot cover them without strain. Even the friendly reading on which intending x reshapes the actual task fails for Juan's mime: the actual room will not solicit fight affordances. Only summoning relative to the possible imbues the thought with bodily significance sufficient to guide movement.
Source detail pass: Dreyfus package granted
Romdenh-Romluc grants the Dreyfus reading of Merleau-Ponty on everyday skill: practice builds motor skills; environments solicit skilled responses; absorbed coping is the primary form of intentionality. Skills are not rule applications. The body is geared into a world of opportunities for action. Learning to do x includes learning to see opportunities for x.
Where she parts company: Dreyfus treats intention (and related "thought") as something that appears when coping stops or stalls. That cannot be the whole story of agency. Agents form intentions and act on them while still skilled. The puzzle is how thought can generate action without reducing to a breakdown narrative.
Mime, Juan, and the possible fight
The mime case and the fighter who must prepare for a possible bout (not the actual present fight) show skills coming online relative to a scene that is not yet actual. A mere "new actual task" patch helps only when the present scene can solicit the needed skills. When it cannot, reckoning with the possible (PhP 109/125) is the resource: the agent summons demands that the actual environment does not yet offer.
Schneider lacks this power in the relevant sense. Pathology clarifies by contrast what normals do: they can give thought bodily significance and bring skills online for projects that are not presently solicited.
From granted coping to the power to reckon.
Arguments in sequence (Romdenh-Romluc)
- Grant coping. Dreyfus right on solicitations and motor skills.
- Skills shape seeing. Learning x includes learning to see opportunities for x.
- Intention gap. Dreyfus ties intention to standstill; ordinary agency disagrees.
- Task-reshape limit. New actual task helps only when the scene can solicit.
- Mime. Juan needs skills online relative to a merely possible fight.
- Actual vs possible. Coping reckons with actual; normals also reckon with possible (PhP 109/125).
- Summoning. Project demands; give thought bodily significance.
- Schneider contrast. Pathology lacks the power in the relevant sense.
- Modest aim. Resources exist; full defence left open.
Takeaway
| Claim | Content |
|---|---|
| Grant | Dreyfus on absorbed coping and motor skills |
| Gap | Task switch and thought-driven action without standstill |
| Resource | Power to reckon with the possible |
| Pathology | Schneider locked to concrete poles |
| Mechanism | Summon demands; imbue thought with bodily significance |
Reply to Romdenh-Romluc
The questions and Gurwitsch's absorption
- If our basic relation to the world is totally absorbed coping, how do we switch tasks?
- Given that basic being-in-the-world is involvement, how is detached reflection possible?
- How can one be fully absorbed and yet remain open to other tasks?
Aron Gurwitsch, who saw the kinship of Gestalt psychology and Heideggerian everyday coping and passed the insight to Merleau-Ponty, describes absorption: what we must do is prescribed by the situation's structure; we do justice by immersing and subordinating ourselves - we are interwoven, encompassed, absorbed (Gurwitsch 1979, 67).
Football flow and the Schneider worry
Romdenh-Romluc uses Merleau-Ponty's football player: in flow, the field is full of opportunities and threats that pull forth bodily responses without intervening reflection or sense of agency. If absorption were Schneider-total, we could not break free. If Schneider is on another errand, he cannot recognize Goldstein's house. Romdenh-Romluc thinks Dreyfus requires a total lessening - that only impossibility of the current task frees one. Dreyfus denies he ever claimed that. With Dewey, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty: while succeeding, one has no motive to interrupt; normally a disturbance stops flow.
Three ways to switch involved activity.
Heidegger's carpenter: unreadiness without exit
While hammering, the carpenter can notice the hammer is too heavy. Mode of being shifts from readiness-to-hand to unreadiness-to-hand. She may reach for a lighter hammer without stopping to reflect (Heidegger 1962, 102-3). In a more serious case she may shift to gluing, changing the with-which while retaining the towards-which - still fully engaged. Letting attention be drawn to a marginal alternative is already making a "choice" without stepping back. Only when neither lighter hammer nor glue pot solicits does activity stop; the hammer becomes present-at-hand with detachable properties (weight); deliberation and decision follow (buy a one-pound hammer). That last case is Dreyfus's "coping stops."
Scare quotes, summoning, and the possible
Romdenh-Romluc quotes: the normal person reckons with the possible, which acquires a "sort of actuality" (PhP 109/125). She reads this as Merleau-Ponty's solution for being involved yet open, unlike Schneider. Dreyfus argues Merleau-Ponty often uses scare quotes when expounding Goldstein's concrete/abstract distinction rather than stating his own final view. "Projection" or "summoning" (as a medium summons an absent person) makes abstract movement possible (PhP 112/129) - but as Goldstein exposition.
Schneider is directly summoned by equipment: bench, scissors, leather offer themselves as poles of action. Distinguish:
- Being summoned, while involved with one affordance, to respond to an alternative affordance or situation
- Projecting an abstract possibility and deciding among options from outside
Horizon summons versus abstract projection.
Motor intentionality, optimal grip, two Schneiders
Motor intentionality is the body's tending toward an optimal grip on its object (also underwriting size/shape constancy; see Kelly 2004). Without some minimal motor intentionality Schneider could not make wallets or perceive stable sizes and shapes. He can switch cutting and sewing within wallet-making. What he lacks is shifting from absorption in one motor-intentional situation to absorption in another. There is a normal and a pathological motor intentionality. Gelb/Goldstein groped toward adaptive intentionality but dichotomized concrete vs abstract; Merleau-Ponty reads them sympathetically while claiming the dichotomy leads to an impasse (PhP 122 n1/140 n55).
Detached reflection and Todes
When no task on the horizon solicits, absorption can break into spectatorial observation. Dreyfus draws on Samuel Todes (Body and World) for how bodily needs and capacities structure the move from engaged perception to detached reflection - a reorientation when solicitations fail, not a leap from nowhere.
A closer look
Why Romdenh-Romluc's early critique misfires (on Dreyfus's view)
Because she misses that motor intentionality allows shifting tasks while staying absorbed, she spends early pages criticizing Dreyfus's involvement story as if it required total lock-in. Dreyfus's carpenter and glue-pot cases are meant to show involved flexibility. Schneider's wallet-making shows pathological motor intentionality that can switch subprocesses inside one situation yet fail across situations - for example, recognizing Goldstein's house when absorbed in another errand.
Normal versus pathological motor intentionality.
Present-at-hand as last resort
Detached reflection is not the default explanation of every pause. It is what happens when the horizon offers no soliciting alternative. Todes helps describe the bodily conditions of that spectatorial turn. The reply thus preserves primacy of absorption without denying reflection's possibility.
Gurwitsch to Merleau-Ponty to Dreyfus
The reply's lineage matters: Gurwitsch joins Gestalt and Heideggerian coping; Merleau-Ponty receives that join; Dreyfus reads PhP through skillful coping against cognitivist AI. Romdenh-Romluc's challenge is internal to that lineage. Dreyfus's answer keeps absorption primary, adds horizon flexibility, and relocates "the possible" away from abstract projection. Readers should treat Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 as one debate unit.
Source detail pass: Gurwitsch, carpenter, scare quotes
Dreyfus opens from Gurwitsch: absorption as immersion in the structure of a situation. The two questions are (1) how a skilled agent switches tasks while still absorbed, and (2) how detached reflection is possible at all.
Against a "total lessening of intensity" thesis that would make every switch require a prior interrupt motive: successful absorbed activity needs no such motive. Disturbance normally stops flow; that is not the only way attention moves. The carpenter case (unreadiness-to-hand) can shift tools and tasks while the agent remains engaged.
Three switches: 1. Horizon already draws toward another task. 2. A new situation solicits and leads involvement. 3. Full breakdown with no horizon task forces deliberation.
Much of Merleau-Ponty's language that looks like endorsing total lessening is scare-quoted Goldstein exposition, not Merleau-Ponty's last word. Summoning from the margins differs from abstract projection among mere possibilities. Two motor intentionalities: normal agents shift absorption across situations via horizon; Schneider can cut then sew within one wallet-situation but fails to recognize his house when on another errand.
Samuel Todes supplies bodily conditions for the spectatorial attitude: when solicitations fail, a detached stance becomes available.
Three ways attention moves.
Arguments in sequence (Dreyfus)
- Two questions. Task switch under absorption; possibility of detached reflection.
- Gurwitsch. Absorption as immersion in situation structure.
- Deny total-lessening thesis. Success needs no interrupt motive; disturbance normally stops flow.
- Carpenter. Unreadiness-to-hand can shift tools/tasks while engaged.
- Three switches. Horizon draw; new situation leads; full breakdown to deliberation.
- Scare quotes. Often Goldstein exposition, not Merleau-Ponty's last word.
- Summon vs project. Margins already act; abstract possibility is different.
- Two motor intentionalities. Normal across situations; Schneider within one.
- Todes. Spectatorial attitude has bodily conditions when solicitations fail.
Takeaway
| Worry | Reply |
|---|---|
| Absorption locks like Schneider | Horizon summons allow switch while absorbed |
| Only impossibility breaks flow | Denied; disturbance / alternative solicitation |
| Reckon with possible = abstract projection | Often Goldstein's idiom; summoning differs |
| How reflection? | Breakdown to present-at-hand; Todes on spectatorial body |
| Schneider can switch sewing/cutting | Within one situation; not across situations |
The Phenomenology of Social Rules
Why the literature deadlocks
Rules appear in philosophy of language, jurisprudence, political science, economics, anthropology, sociology, and even cognition and perception. Two oversights:
- Little careful reflection on what a rule is.
- Near absence of phenomenology of following or being governed by a rule.
Each field repeats: do rules govern because we intentionally follow them (internal), or because observers can describe regularities (external)? Deadlock is inevitable because both alternatives are inadequate to the phenomena.
The internal/external deadlock Wrathall rejects.
Legal illustration: Hart and the rule of recognition
Much lawful behaviour is automatic; people comply without knowing the legal rule. A rule can govern without being tried-for. Modern systems also contain rules about what counts as a rule (e.g. legislation by Congress plus presidential signature). Rules of recognition tell when something is recognized as binding. Why is the Constitution the ultimate recognition rule? Eventually regress stops: legal actors use the Constitution as recognition rule without a deeper rule they follow in doing so. At the deepest level they are not following a rule - yet their behaviour is law-governed. External description alone strips obligation; internal following alone cannot ground the ultimate rule.
What a rule is (why paradigms fail)
Without agreement on paradigm instances of rule-following - given scepticism that rule-following governs the social domain - there is no uncontentious definition to draw from paradigms. Wrathall therefore turns to how rules show up in experience: as structuring the practical field so that some actions are called for and others out of line, before deliberation about "the rule." Normativity is felt as solicitation and constraint, and rules justify and support critique, not only explain.
Three relations: governed, following, according
Three phenomenological relations to rules.
| Relation | Experience | Intentionality toward the rule |
|---|---|---|
| Rule-governed | No sorting/mapping experience | Need not have intentional states about the rule |
| Rule-following | Sorting and/or mapping | Rule in view as guide |
| Rule-according | Observer's | Irrelevant to the description |
Motivation and the furniture of the world
If the world is organized by the rule so that it embodies the rule, we understand the rule whenever we are motivated by it to act in a rule-governed fashion - even if we cannot state the rule. Ability to be governed is a non-rule-following skill. That does not drop us into a rule-free world: rules help make up the world's furniture; the world opens partly in terms of rules. (Whether there could be cultures without such rules is left open.)
Payoffs for legal and social theory.
Merleau-Ponty versus Searle-style Background
Wrathall's third way sits nearer Merleau-Pontyan motivation and skillful worldhood than to John Searle's Background as causal enablement beneath intentionality. The phenomenology is of solicitation by a rule-organized field, not of subpersonal causes that make intentional states possible.
Counterarguments
| Objection | Reply shape |
|---|---|
| Motivation is still Background causation | Solicitation phenomenology is not a subpersonal enablement story |
| Without intentional following, no real norms | Normativity shows in critique/justification tied to the organized world |
| Vague what "embodies" means | Point is experiential: the field is already sorted for action |
| Cultures without rules? | Explicitly left open |
Normativity without constant consultation
Wrathall's legal examples show automatic compliance and justification working together. A rule explains and also licenses critique. External regularities alone cannot underwrite "you ought"; constant intentional following is phenomenologically false for most compliance. Rule-governed motivation sits between: the field is already sorted, so action can be justified by the rule even when the actor never entertains the rule as a proposition.
From deadlock to motivated governance.
Open question
Could there be cultures without such rules? Wrathall leaves it open. The phenomenology is offered for domains that do have them - law, language, institutions - not as a universal anthropology proof.
Formal specification: sorting and mapping
Without agreed paradigms, Wrathall begins with a broad formal specification common to following and mere accordance. A rule does two jobs:
- Sorts entities into types.
- Maps those types onto one another.
Chess example: "the bishop moves on the diagonal" sorts pieces (bishops vs others) and sorts moves (diagonal vs rank/file/knight), then maps bishop-type onto diagonal-move-type. Even simple prohibitions ("do not steal") sort agents and acts and map them onto forbidden/permitted. Necessary conditions of rulehood may not be sufficient; theorists will disagree. The formal core still lets phenomenology ask how sorting and mapping show up in experience.
Rulehood as sort-then-map.
Expert chess: same moves, different experience
The expert rule-governed player moves pieces as the beginner rule-following player does when successful. Experts also know when to violate strategic rules (sacrifice queen for bishop) while still bound by constitutive rules (cannot move bishop on a rank and still be playing chess) and regulative rules (on pain of forfeit). If forced to choose only reasons or only causes for competent play, theorists reach for unconscious rule application or pure external description - both of which Wrathall's third way is meant to avoid. The rule is present in how the world comes sorted and mapped, without requiring representation of the rule as basis.
Source detail pass: Hart regress and chess
Wrathall diagnoses two oversights in rule talk across philosophy of language, law, politics, economics, anthropology, sociology, and even cognition: what a rule is, and what governance feels like.
Deadlock: intentional following (too rare) versus mere external description (too thin for normativity). H. L. A. Hart-style regress: ultimate recognition of a rule cannot itself be another following-rule all the way down.
Formal core of a rule: sort entities into types; sort acts/moves; map types onto types (chess: bishop -> diagonal). Three relations then diverge:
| Relation | Experience | Need to entertain the rule? |
|---|---|---|
| Rule-governed | World embodies the rule; motivates | No |
| Rule-following | Sorting / mapping to a rule as such | Yes |
| According to a rule | External match | Not as lived |
Expert chess: same successful moves as the rule-sayer; different experience. Constitutive rules (what counts as a bishop move) versus strategic rules (what wins) can both be embodied. Motivation: the board situation solicits; no need to run the rule as an inner script. Payoff: governed without following; no infinite meta-rule; normativity kept. Whether every culture has such rules is left open.
From deadlock to motivated governance.
Arguments in sequence (Wrathall)
- Oversights. What a rule is; what governance feels like.
- Deadlock. Internal following vs external description.
- Hart regress. Ultimate recognition without deeper following.
- Formal core. Rules sort types and map types to types (chess bishop).
- Three relations. Governed / following / according.
- Expert chess. Same successful moves; different experience; constitutive vs strategic.
- Motivation. World embodies rule; no need to entertain the rule.
- Payoff. Governed without following; no infinite meta-rule; normativity kept.
Takeaway
| Item | Content |
|---|---|
| Problem | Internal vs external deadlock |
| Method | Phenomenology of governed / following / according |
| Third way | Rule-governed motivation via embodied world |
| Legal payoff | Ultimate recognition without regress of following |
| PhP link | Motivation and skill, not only decision |
Speaking and Spoken Speech
Speech as the body's expression
Understanding speech is a chance "to leave behind us, once and for all, the traditional subject-object dichotomy" (PhP 174/202). There cannot be pure thought with no matter; speech provides the bodily matter of thought. Speech does not "clothe" a naked thought; it accomplishes it (PhP 178/207). A thinker is necessarily a speaker and thus an embodied agent in the world.
Baldwin's critical thesis: although Merleau-Ponty leaves behind the rational-subject / causal-object dichotomy, as he elaborates the position in PhP he reinserts a different subject-object contrast under the labels speaking vs spoken speech.
From dichotomy rejected to contrast reinstalled.
Speaking speech versus spoken speech
Favoured description near the end of the speech chapter: speaking speech vs spoken speech. Later (Prose of the World) the contrast applies to language (langage), not only speech.
| Speaking speech | Spoken speech |
|---|---|
| First-hand, transcendental, constitutive | Second-hand, empirical, constituted |
| Authentic creativity; literature as paradigm | Institution; commonplace utterances |
| Ready-made meanings left behind | Ready-made meanings taken over |
| Transcendence also in everyday speech | General run of empirical language |
"Second" does not mean metalanguage. Spoken speech is second-hand: dependent on more creative uses that established an idiom now merely followed. Poetry is paradigmatic speaking speech, but Merleau-Ponty does not restrict creativity to literature. The same transcendence appears in everyday language - and, Baldwin adds, in scientific paradigm shifts (Kuhn).
Pure language as derivative ideal
Merleau-Ponty sketches a Cartesian-Leibnizian ideal of pure scientific language, then argues it can only be derivative. Even scientific creativity is speaking speech; the ideal of transparent signification depends on creative investigation that the ideal itself conceals.
Dependence between the two speeches.
Sedimentation and interdependence
Sedimentation (from Husserl): past speaking becomes the taken-for-granted spoken. Spoken depends on speaking - what is spoken once involved speaking. The harder thesis, which PhP's honorific language ("authentic" speaking vs implied inauthentic spoken) underplays: speaking is impossible without spoken speech as background. Merleau-Ponty's freedom chapter already holds that creative freedom is impossible without motivations not freely chosen in a Sartrean original choice - we exist both ways at once (à la fois). Applied to language: speech is both speaking and spoken at once.
Late intertwining and Derrida
Late idiom of touching/touched (touchante/touchée) matches speaking/spoken (parlante/parlée). Can we say speaking is "phenomenal" and spoken "objective"? Baldwin warns against a simple mapping. In late writings Merleau-Ponty rejects priority of subject over object; body and language are that strange being in which subjective and objective, speaking and spoken, are intertwined.
Derrida (Of Grammatology) criticizes priority of speech (presence) over writing (absence/system). Merleau-Ponty's PhP priority of speaking over spoken looks, to Derrida, like another instance of that traditional priority. Baldwin's point: Merleau-Ponty did not need to wait for Derrida - the late intertwining thesis already anticipates the critique by refusing the one-way priority.
Counterarguments
| Objection | Baldwin's pressure |
|---|---|
| Speaking/spoken is only descriptive typology | Honorific and transcendental/empirical idiom loads ontology |
| Late Merleau-Ponty abandons PhP | Intertwining revises priority, keeps the phenomena |
| Derrida comparison is anachronistic | Used as clarifying parallel, not as Merleau-Ponty's source |
Everyday transcendence and scientific speaking
Baldwin refuses to ghettoize speaking speech in poetry. Everyday language can transcend ready-made meanings; scientific revolutions (Kuhnian paradigms) are further candidates. The scientist establishing a new idiom is engaged in speaking speech even if textbooks later present the result as pure notation. Pure language is a derivative ideal that conceals its creative debt.
Where speaking speech shows up.
Subjectivism risk named
If speaking is transcendental and spoken empirical, the contrast recapitulates subject/object under new labels. Merleau-Ponty's freedom chapter already has the corrective (a la fois). Late intertwining makes the corrective ontological. Baldwin's chapter is as much a warning about PhP's idiom as an exposition of its insight.
Sedimentation in detail
Sedimentation (from Husserl) names how a new movement or activity, once repeated, becomes habitual. In language, a new linguistic gesture - a new idiom or a new way of expressing feeling - becomes routine through repetition: it loses first-use spontaneity and gains the unthinking transparency of a familiar phrase. Jonathan Bennett's evolution of linguistic meaning (regularity of gesture and communicative intention into convention and Gricean non-natural meaning) can develop the thought.
Creative writers take apart established idioms of spoken speech, with ready-made thoughts, to express something new that transcends those thoughts - without replacing the language with a closed, self-sufficient idiom. Speaking needs the spoken as material to dismantle; spoken needs prior speaking as source. PhP's honorific hierarchy obscures the symmetry that the freedom chapter's a la fois already implies.
Sedimentation cycle in language.
Source detail pass: speaking / spoken and sedimentation
Baldwin treats the speech chapter as central: the body as expression lets Merleau-Ponty leave the subject-object stalemate. Speech does not clothe a finished thought; it accomplishes thought.
Contrast: speaking speech (parole parlante) versus spoken speech (parole parlee). The English "second" can mislead: not metalanguage, but second-hand / sedimented. Creativity sites include poetry, everyday transcendence of the ready phrase, and scientific paradigm shifts. Pure language as textbook ideal is a derivative that conceals its debt to speaking.
Sedimentation (Husserlian habit): a once-new gesture becomes a familiar phrase. Freedom chapter's a la fois ("both at once") applies to language: spoken depends on speaking; speaking needs spoken as background of motivations and idiom. Late Merleau-Ponty on intertwining anticipates a Derrida-style critique of one-way priority.
Speaking and spoken as mutual dependence.
Arguments in sequence (Baldwin)
- Speech chapter matters. Body as expression; leave subject-object behind.
- Accomplishment. Speech does not clothe thought; it accomplishes it.
- Contrast. Speaking vs spoken speech (later: language).
- "Second" misread. Not metalanguage; second-hand / sedimented.
- Creativity sites. Poetry, everyday transcendence, scientific paradigms.
- Pure language. Derivative ideal that conceals speaking debt.
- Sedimentation. Husserlian habit from new gesture to familiar phrase.
- Both ways. Freedom chapter a la fois applied to language.
- Late intertwining. Anticipates Derrida-style critique of one-way priority.
Takeaway
| Item | Content |
|---|---|
| Speech in PhP | Bodily accomplishment of thought |
| Contrast | Speaking vs spoken (parole parlante/parlée) |
| Risk | Reinstalled subject-object under new names |
| Sedimentation | Spoken from past speaking |
| Repair | Both at once; late intertwining |
| Parallel | Derrida on speech/writing priority |
The Genius of Man
Having a language, having a body
Glendinning starts from having a language. Possession here is not external ownership of a tool. A different sense of possession remains: Merleau-Ponty's "having" as an internal relation. Naturalistic reductions that treat sound emission as a non-intentional event miss the "who" whose sayings are telling about who they are. Empirical research can also speak against bald naturalism when it shows structure that pure mechanism does not predict.
Intellectualism fares little better: it posits a subject with intrinsically meaningful thoughts who utters words that are not themselves intrinsically meaningful. Merleau-Ponty's classic gesture: find the kinship of the two standard positions, dismount the see-saw, move to a distinctive phenomenology. "As far as speech is concerned, intellectualism is hardly any different from empiricism" (PhP 177/205-6).
Dismounting the empiricism/intellectualism see-saw on speech.
Speech as gesture
Counter-proposal: language use in speech is essentially a form of gesture. "The spoken word is a genuine gesture, and it contains its meaning in the same way as the gesture contains its" (PhP). Speech in the speaker does not translate ready-made thought; it accomplishes it (PhP 178/207). There is "thought in speech" unsuspected by intellectualism and foreign to empiricism (PhP 179/209). Levinas credits Merleau-Ponty with an account of the solidarity of thought with speech "better than others."
This line challenges Husserl's launching distinction between expression and indication: for Husserl, some signs only indicate and do not express (Husserl 1973a, 275). Merleau-Ponty relocates speech within intrinsically significant bodily expression, opening a coherent conception of the living human being as speaker.
Phenomenology with the sciences
Phenomenology is descriptive inquiry that can work with scientific studies yet remains free of the assumption that scientific status protects against confusions. Philosophical anthropology would benefit from deeper engagement with ethology - and ethology, Merleau-Ponty knows, is itself swarming with philosophy, so there is no question of ethology alone.
Critique: world, environment, and the human difference
Despite advances over inflexible dualisms, Merleau-Ponty's contrast of human world with animal environment remains problematic. Pushing the paradox one stage back (a more "German" than "French" move) does not resolve it. Merleau-Ponty already acknowledges gesture in animals; Glendinning adds that there is already culture and history too. Objective species differences are not decisive for the significance we attach to the human difference.
Glendinning's pressure on the human/animal split.
Darwin himself contrasted such unconstrained inventive processes with forces that produce objective natural differences (Wiggins 1998, 124). The "genius of man" names that constructed significance, not a discovery of an ontological gap visible from nowhere.
Counterarguments
| Objection | Reply shape |
|---|---|
| Denies human uniqueness | Denies sideways-on natural justification, not lived significance |
| Ethology already settles continuity | Ethology is philosophy-laden; still needed |
| Speech-as-gesture flattens language | Keeps distinctiveness while placing speech in expressive field |
Against sideways-on justification
Glendinning's Wiggins ending blocks a familiar move: derive human specialness from objective biological traits visible from nowhere. Significance of the human difference is gradual, unconscious, communal invention - our history. Darwin distinguished such inventive processes from forces producing objective natural differences. Phenomenology here is not anti-science; it refuses a category mistake about what would count as justification.
Genius of man as construct, not find.
Speech field widened
By placing speech in the general field of intrinsically significant bodily expression, Merleau-Ponty makes the living human speaker intelligible without intellectualist inner translation or empiricist noise. Glendinning keeps that gain while refusing a brittle human/animal ontological fence.
Both traditional views hold that the word has no significance
Merleau-Ponty's kinship claim is textual: empiricism and intellectualism are "at one in holding that the word has no significance" (PhP 176/205). Mechanistic psychology: stimuli or states of mind call up the word by neurological or association laws; the word is not bearer of its own meaning, merely a psychic, physiological, or physical phenomenon under objective causality. Intellectualist psychology: the word is only the external sign of an internal recognition that could take place without it. Either way the word lacks effectiveness of its own. Speech-as-gesture restores inner power to the utterance as expressive act.
World versus environment
Glendinning links Merleau-Ponty to a wider contrast, familiar from Heidegger, Gadamer, and McDowell, between animal Umwelt (environment/setting) and human Welt (world). Merleau-Ponty usually resists binary oppositions, yet this one still structures parts of his anthropology. Glendinning's ethological pressure - gesture, culture, history already on the animal side - and the Wiggins constructivism about human significance are meant to keep phenomenology without the brittle fence.
Source detail pass: having, gesture, ethology
Glendinning does philosophy through empirical cases. Having a body or a language is internal possession, not external tool ownership. Empiricism and intellectualism are kin in denying word significance (PhP 176/205). The spoken word contains meaning as a gesture does.
Husserl's expression/indication split comes under pressure. Sciences: work with ethology, but ethology is already philosophy-laden. Human Welt versus animal Umwelt remains problematic; animals already gesture, already have culture and history in a relevant sense. Wiggins on genius: a historical construct, not a sideways-on natural find. The "genius of man" is not a species trait read off from outside.
Glendinning: from having to genius as construct.
Arguments in sequence (Glendinning)
- Method. Philosophy through empirical cases.
- Having. Internal possession of body/language, not external tool ownership.
- Kinship. Empiricism and intellectualism both deny word significance (PhP 176/205).
- Gesture. Spoken word contains meaning as gesture does.
- Husserl challenge. Expression/indication split under pressure.
- Sciences. Work with ethology; ethology is philosophy-laden.
- World/environment. Human Welt vs animal Umwelt still problematic.
- Animals. Already gesture; culture and history too.
- Genius. Wiggins: historical construct, not sideways-on natural find.
Takeaway
| Item | Content |
|---|---|
| Method | Philosophy via empirical cases |
| Speech | Gesture that accomplishes thought |
| Shared foe | Empiricism and intellectualism on utterance |
| Husserl target | Expression / indication split |
| Critique | World/environment binary; animal gesture |
| Genius of man | Historical construct (Wiggins), not natural find |
Consciousness, Self-Consciousness and Communication
Starting from the child
Merleau-Ponty asks how relations with others are possible from the day of birth (PofP 113). He rejects the picture on which the child must infer others' feelings by analogy from its own case - a Wittgensteinian echo: the "complicated task" of mapping smile to benevolent feeling cannot be what the infant does. Something more primitive is already social.
Eilan's aim is less to argue Merleau-Ponty's full theory than to draw out claims that need development for a communication-theoretic account of self-consciousness - and to challenge recent debates with what Merleau-Ponty adds.
From infant sociality to the Communication Claim.
Three extractable claims
- Ontology of early experience. Some early experiences have more than one subject - multiple- or dually owned.
- Development of mental concepts. Including the capacity for "I" thoughts, tied to this social field.
- Shared experience as more than co-presence. Many note mutual affect regulation; alone that does not warrant dual ownership. Peter Hobson's account of exchanges begins to yield the needed claim: in mutual affect regulation the experience consists in a relation between two subjects, and phenomenal properties are properties of that relation.
Merleau-Ponty himself rejects reading too much conceptual sophistication into early exchanges - rightly, Eilan says. The interest of dual ownership lies in the theoretical use to which it is put.
Communication Claim and Shared Experience Claim
- Communication Claim: self-consciousness is tied to communication with others in a strong constitutive sense.
- Shared Experience Claim: early shared, dually owned affective experiences play a role in making that possible.
Making good the Communication Claim needs a phenomenon that exhibits co-emergence of communication, self-consciousness, and consciousness of others. Making good Shared Experience needs showing that we must appeal to shared experience to explain that emergence.
Declarative pointing and joint attention
The gesture of pointing emerges spontaneously as early as three months (Franco 2005; Woodward 2005 on later perceptual detection). Most psychologists agree that only around twelve months it begins to be used with deliberative intent. Explanations of pointing's communicative use yield versions of the Communication Claim; explanations of its experiential basis yield versions of the Shared Experience Claim.
Joint attention, as developmental psychologists use the term, requires more than two parties attending to the same object, and more than one noticing the other's attention. Openness - mutual awareness that attention is shared - is needed. How openness is explained decides whether the Communication Claim stands.
Two theory families for joint attention.
Gricean vs intersubjectivity routes
A primitive Gricean story: the pointing child has intentions about the other's attendings, and recognizes adults' intentions about her lookings. Eilan argues this kind of account of openness is too weak to support the Communication Claim (echoing problems John Campbell raised for Donald Davidson on communication and objectivity).
Intersubjectivity theories (collecting several approaches) try to put flesh on Bates et al. by explaining joint attention as the co-emergence of communication and awareness of self/other. One articulation: the first-person / second-person distinction is not derivative on the first-person / third-person distinction.
Conceptual Thesis and knowledge
Eilan links the discussion to a Conceptual Thesis about mental concepts and to debates on whether joint attention is primarily a "tool for doing" (agency-first, Tomasello-like) or tied to objectivity and knowledge (triangulation; declarative pointing as first "theoretical" take). She stages shared experience as providing for knowledge. She also notes: nothing suggests Merleau-Ponty would have been sympathetic to tying perceptual consciousness to objective thought that way - for him objective thought arrives with science. He might have favoured an agency-first approach. A virtue of the paper under discussion is that it throws into relief whether epistemological concerns should constrain explanations of consciousness.
Openness that can support the Communication Claim
Joint attention requires mutual awareness that attention is shared. Thin accounts that only track intentions about intentions may describe coordination without yielding co-owned experience or a non-derivative second person. Intersubjectivity theories aim higher: the first/second person distinction emerges with communication rather than being inferred from a private first person plus a third-person other.
What Eilan needs from joint attention.
Ages as landmarks, not magic numbers
Pointing from about three months; deliberative communicative use around twelve months. These figures from the developmental literature Eilan cites are landmarks for theory choice, not Merleau-Ponty's own numbers. Use them as bridges between PofP and contemporary research, with the closer look that Merleau-Ponty may not follow the knowledge-centred moral.
Mutual affect regulation and Hobson
Eilan uses Peter Hobson to move from metaphor to theory: in mutual affect regulation, experience consists in a particular relation between two subjects, and phenomenal properties are properties of that relation. That is stronger than noting that two infants smile at once. It is still not Merleau-Ponty's own full account - he rejects reading adult conceptual structure into early exchanges. The Shared Experience Claim needs this stronger relational ontology if it is to do explanatory work for later self-consciousness.
From co-presence to dual ownership.
Agency-first versus knowledge-first
Tomasello-like approaches treat early pointing as a tool for doing; triangulation approaches (Davidson echoes) treat it as opening objectivity. Eilan stages shared experience as providing for knowledge and notes Merleau-Ponty likely would not.
Source detail pass: pointing, Hobson, Grice
Eilan reads Merleau-Ponty's child psychology essay ("The Child's Relations with Others") as claiming that relations with others are present from birth. The analogy argument (I infer other minds from my case) is rejected as too complex for the infant.
Extracted claims: dual ownership of early mutual affect; mental concepts arising in shared practice; use of shared experience. Hobson supplies a relational phenomenology of mutual affect: properties of the relation, not only of each pole.
Two claims organize the chapter: 1. Communication Claim: self and other co-emerge in communication. 2. Shared Experience Claim: openness that attention is shared, beyond mere co-looking.
Pointing: roughly 3 months for gesture onset; roughly 12 months for deliberative / declarative use. Joint attention needs mutual awareness that attention is shared. Thin Gricean stories (intentions about intentions) are too weak for the Communication Claim. Intersubjectivity theories (fleshing out Bates and others) do better on co-emergence.
Fork at the end: a knowledge/objectivity path versus an agency-first path. Merleau-Ponty may not follow the knowledge path that some developmentalists prefer.
Eilan: from infant relations to the fork.
Arguments in sequence (Eilan)
- PofP child essay. Relations with others from birth.
- Reject analogy. Infant cannot run the complicated inference.
- Extract claims. Dual ownership; mental concepts; shared experience use.
- Hobson. Relational phenomenology of mutual affect.
- Two claims. Communication Claim; Shared Experience Claim.
- Pointing. ~3 months gesture; ~12 months deliberative use.
- Joint attention. Needs openness beyond co-looking.
- Gricean vs intersubjectivity. Intentions-about-intentions too weak for the Claim.
- Fork. Knowledge/objectivity vs agency-first; Merleau-Ponty may not follow knowledge path.
Takeaway
| Item | Content |
|---|---|
| Source text | "Child's Relations with Others" (PofP) |
| Target | Individualism about consciousness / self-consciousness |
| Dual ownership | Early mutual affect as relational experience |
| Test phenomena | Declarative pointing (~12 months intent); joint attention |
| Claims | Communication Claim; Shared Experience Claim |
| Tension | Knowledge/objectivity vs Merleau-Ponty's own priorities |
Freedom, Perception and Radical Reflection
Closing silence and the heroic fiction
PhP ends under tension: meaning seems simply there, then risks proving a fiction. The Freedom chapter closes with an imposed, urgent situation - no time for deliberation - the son in danger, drawn from Saint-Exupéry. Freedom appears as the appearance (invention) of the meaning of act and self. Yet Merleau-Ponty marks the situation as fiction, a citation. What freedom do we have outside the heroic scene?
We take our fate in our hands through reflection and through a decision on which we stake our life; in both cases a violent act validated by being performed. Philosophical reflection is no longer detached vision; it becomes an act in the world with the same stakes as personal decision. Can the treatise help us not only understand freedom but acquire it concretely?
Freedom as invention of meaning.
Radical reflection versus intellectualist reflection
Dorfman distinguishes radical reflection from intellectualist or Cartesian reflection. Only by understanding radical reflection as freedom - invention and appropriation of meaning - can one resolve the contradiction and recover phenomenology's force where it seemed weak.
The unreflected we go back to is not simply prior to philosophy. It is the unreflected understood and conquered by reflection. Reflection must not be carried away with itself or pretend ignorance of its origins (PofP 16, modified). Philosophy as radical reflection reminds perception of what it tends to forget: its own accomplishments. Perception needs reflection, yet not as a detached aftermath - rather as perception aware of itself as event and creation. It must neither overestimate its power (intellectualism) nor forget its constitutive power (empiricism).
Three reflection stances.
Reduction, upsurge, primary I
Radical reflection already makes up part of perception. It grasps the unreflective only by perceiving it - which already means constituting, inventing, creating it to an extent (PhP 276 n1/322 n47). Freedom for the "primary I" can look like destiny - is it still worthy of the name freedom? "Primary" is not merely chronological; the origin is itself created by reflection. The violent act of reflection discovers, perceives, and invents this destiny; presumed passivity proves appearance. We meet again the unmotivated upsurge (jaillissement) of the world's meaning, discovered by reduction as radical reflection (PhP 403-4/469-70). What existence would this upsurge have without the revealing act?
Pre-objective body and limited freedom
Underlying the thinking subject who can place himself on Sirius or on earth is a bodily pre-objective experience meant to surmount the freedom/determinism dichotomy. Freedom to perceive, judge, and act is limited by incarnate dealings. Dealings seem to happen as if by themselves - "as if, on the hither side of our judgement and our freedom, someone were assigning" significances. What freedom does such a quasi-tyrannical subject leave? Discovery of the pre-objective is the means to weigh anchor - to free ourselves from decisions made against our will and from circumstances that feel fated. Silence of the pre-objective needs fresh meaning by speech and reflection to become primordial as primary.
Revolution and the thrust of freedom
Revolution is conquest of freedom par excellence, yet what freedom do its figures have to free themselves? Revolution is motivated by a spontaneous "thrust of freedom" neither explicit nor chosen (PhP 444/516). Still, to feel one is on the march toward freedom, must one not decide to move by a concrete act? Dorfman keeps the tension alive rather than dissolving it.
Freedom between destiny and invention.
Philosophy destroying itself as separate
Just before the heroic appeal, Merleau-Ponty writes that whether of things or historical situations, philosophy's function is to teach us to see them clearly once more, and it comes into being by destroying itself as separate philosophy (PhP 456/530). Radical reflection is no longer equivalent to "philosophy" as detached subject; it is already perception of and in the world. As such it can become the long, infinite way toward freedom - open to the philosopher and to every perceiving subject.
Perception that knows itself as creation
Dorfman's radical reflection is perception aware of itself as event and creation. It blocks two forgettings at once: forgetting the unreflective origin (intellectualism) and forgetting constitutive power (empiricism). The primordial layer, when touched, is already re-constituted - so the work begins again. That loop is not a defect to eliminate; it is freedom's reminder of distance.
The unfinished loop of radical reflection.
Philosophy for every perceiver
Because radical reflection is already of and in the world, the way toward freedom is not reserved for professional philosophers. PhP's closing gesture democratizes the practice even as it destroys philosophy as a separate subject.
Fiction, citation, and concrete acquisition
Dorfman dwells on the oddity that PhP's freest moment is a cited novelistic situation. Freedom's paradigm is literary and extreme, then philosophy is said to share the structure of violent validation. The pedagogical hope - that the treatise helps us acquire freedom - depends on radical reflection being livable, not only readable. Revolution's unchosen thrust plus the need for a concrete step restates the same both-at-once structure Baldwin finds in speech and Dastur finds in aphilosophy.
Source detail pass: Saint-Exupery and two forgettings
Dorfman closes PhP's tension: meaning is present, yet may be fiction. Saint-Exupery supplies urgent fiction: no time to deliberate; the violent act of decision (and of reflection) is validated by being performed. Meaning of act and self is invented / appropriated in the deed.
Radical reflection remembers its origin and still constitutes what it finds. Two forgettings blocked at once: 1. Intellectualist: reflection pretends to survey a ready-made world from nowhere. 2. Empiricist: experience pretends to be mere imprint without upsurge.
The world's meaning is revealed/invented in the reduction. The pre-objective both limits freedom and is the means to weigh anchor. Revolution needs unchosen thrust plus a concrete step. Philosophy as separate ends: destroyed as it teaches us to see; the way opens to every perceiver.
Dorfman: freedom as radical reflection.
Arguments in sequence (Dorfman)
- Closing tension. Meaning present yet possibly fiction.
- Saint-Exupery. Urgent fiction as freedom's scene.
- Violent act. Reflection and life-staking decision share structure.
- Radical reflection. Remembers origin; still constitutes what it finds.
- Two forgettings. Intellectualist and empiricist.
- Upsurge. World's meaning revealed/invented in reduction.
- Pre-objective. Limits freedom; also the means to weigh anchor.
- Revolution. Unchosen thrust plus need for concrete step.
- Separate philosophy ends. Destroyed as it teaches us to see; way open to every perceiver.
Takeaway
| Item | Content |
|---|---|
| Closing scene | Saint-Exupéry fiction; son in danger |
| Freedom | Invention / appropriation of meaning |
| Reflection | Violent act; radical vs intellectualist |
| Unreflected | Conquered by reflection; not left untouched |
| Revolution | Thrust of freedom + need for concrete act |
| End of PhP | Philosophy destroys itself as separate |
Philosophy and Non-Philosophy according to Merleau-Ponty
Reflection and an original past
Reflection, the movement by which thought returns to itself, must recognize in the unthought depths an "original past, a past which has never been present" (PhP 242/282) with which there is no possible correspondence of coincidence. Philosophy cannot simply repossess its ground.
Hegel: philosophy and history
Already in 1952, in In Praise of Philosophy (inaugural Collège speech), Merleau-Ponty questions Hegelian identification of philosophy and history. Hegel did not "succeed as he wished in linking philosophy and non-philosophy" (NC 318). Absolute knowledge fabricates an illusory power to be everything.
Failed links of philosophy to non-philosophy.
Marx: critique and relapse
As Merleau-Ponty explains in 1961, Marx decisively criticizes philosophy's claim "to contain and possess its own contradiction," which fabricates "an illusory power to be everything" under the name of knowledge (NC 341). Yet Marx, like Hegel, fails to keep faith with youthful intuitions. The needed thinking would be based in reversibility - Merleau-Ponty's "ultimate truth" (VI 155) - and in circularity or return to oneself termed flesh. Notions such as flesh or chiasmus are resting places internal to the movement of thought, not interruptions that stop it.
Neither theism nor simple atheism
To define philosophy as atheism misses the point of philosophy. Placing philosophy in dangerous negativity (word used as early as 1952, IPP 46-7), as if suspended in a strange void between heaven and earth, does not return us to a separate philosophical kingdom. Through reflection philosophy finds meaning instituted in history and brings it to its truth - without naively believing reflection can recreate the spontaneity of intentional life in totality. Reflection only ever gives a retrospective reconstruction.
Meta-reflection (surréflexion)
In texts of the last two years of his life Merleau-Ponty calls for a kind of meta-reflection (surréflexion) (VI 38) to overcome the naivety of the reflective operation - not to abandon reflection and philosophy, but to produce reflection on reflection that reveals its nature as retrospective reconstruction and destroys the illusion of absolute reflection.
Late methodological moves.
Wild being is not restored origin
It would be wrong to see in the description of brute or wild being a quest for ontological integrity lost in history. Mythology of restoring origins presupposes fusion with origins; the experience of rediscovered immediacy is essentially experience of a return. It is creation in a radical sense: creation that is at the same time the only way to obtain adequation with what is.
Philosophy's body and irony
Philosophy is at once on the side of the invisible and the visible, theory and practice, transcendental and empirical, ontological and ontic. There is no "absolutely pure philosophical speech"; philosophy, "like all literature," conveys meaning via words (VI 266) and hence via the sensuous. Paraphrasing Pascal in the last lecture series: true philosophy makes light of philosophy and is aphilosophy (NC 275). Even while caught in the "good" ambiguity of thought that sees the absolute as light of truth appearing in layers of experience like a watermark, philosophy cannot formulate that ambiguity without transforming it into something said, a positive fact, and so making it disappear (NC 320): such is the irony of philosophy.
Bridge to Dorfman
Dastur's metaphilosophy meets Dorfman's closing citation: philosophy comes into being by destroying itself as separate philosophy (PhP 456/530).
Watermark and irony
Dastur's Pascalian Merleau-Ponty: true philosophy makes light of philosophy. The absolute appears in layers of experience like a watermark. Formulating that ambiguity as a positive thesis makes the watermark a fact and loses it. Hence philosophical speech and writing must show reversibility rather than define it away. Flesh and chiasmus are internal resting places in a movement that continues.
Negative philosophy's double demand.
Pair with Chapter 9
Dorfman's citation that philosophy destroys itself as separate philosophy is the PhP anticipation of Dastur's late aphilosophy. Read them as one metaphilosophical close to the volume.
Collège chronology for the metaphilosophy
- 1952: In Praise of Philosophy - Hegel and the philosophy/non-philosophy link already questioned; negativity named.
- Last lecture series / NC: Hegel and Marx revisited; aphilosophy; irony of formulating ambiguity.
- VI (working notes, last years): flesh, reversibility as ultimate truth, surreflection.
Dastur's chapter is thus a late-Merleau-Ponty essay that still answers PhP's closing self-destruction of separate philosophy.
Source detail pass: Hegel, Marx, surreflection
Dastur tracks Merleau-Ponty's metaphilosophy. An original past was never present; no coincidence of reflection with its object. Hegel (1952 notes): failed link of philosophy and non-philosophy. Marx (1961): youthful critique of philosophy's self-possession later relapsed.
Positive late vocabulary: flesh, reversibility as ultimate truth with internal resting places. Not an atheism slogan: negativity without a separate kingdom. Surreflection: reflection on reflection; anti-absolute. Wild being: return, not fusion with a lost origin. Aphilosophy (Pascalian light-making): irony of saying the watermark. Philosophy has a body: sensuous and historical inscription of being.
Dastur: from failed links to aphilosophy.
Arguments in sequence (Dastur)
- Original past. Never present; no coincidence with reflection.
- Hegel 1952. Failed link of philosophy and non-philosophy.
- Marx 1961. Youthful critique; later relapse.
- Flesh / reversibility. Ultimate truth; internal resting places.
- Not atheism slogan. Negativity without separate kingdom.
- Surreflection. Reflection on reflection; anti-absolute.
- Wild being. Return, not fusion with lost origin.
- Aphilosophy. Pascalian light-making; irony of saying the watermark.
- Body of philosophy. Sensuous and historical inscription of being.
Takeaway
| Item | Content |
|---|---|
| Sources | IPP 1952; NC last lectures; VI |
| Hegel / Marx | Failed links of philosophy to non-philosophy |
| Flesh / reversibility | Ultimate truth; internal resting places |
| Surreflection | Reflection on reflection; anti-absolute |
| Aphilosophy | True philosophy makes light of philosophy |
| Irony | Saying ambiguity makes it a positive fact |
Main Points
Fifteen insights
- Celebrate by comparing. Smith's question - what is new versus the real Husserl - is the right anniversary question; caricature contrasts are not.
- The body perceives names a third path that empiricism and intellectualism cannot take because they share a mind/world split.
- Motility as Sinngebung and synaesthetic existential unity are where Smith finds Merleau-Ponty's intensifications.
- Constancy is a phenomenological test: context-dependence sinks Hering-style empiricism; object-belonging sinks Helmholtz-style inference.
- Absorbed coping is real and primary; it is not the whole story of action.
- Reckoning with the possible (PhP 109/125) is the hinge between Romdenh-Romluc and Dreyfus - summoning versus abstract projection.
- Horizon solicitations let agents switch tasks without leaving absorption; full breakdown is only one path.
- Rules can govern without intentional following; that breaks the Hart-style regress at recognition.
- Speaking speech / spoken speech must be read à la fois; late intertwining softens PhP's honorific priority.
- Speech as gesture relocates meaning in bodily expression and challenges Husserl's expression/indication split.
- The genius of man is a historical construct (Wiggins), not a sideways-on natural discovery - even if animals already gesture.
- Dual ownership and joint attention offer a path from infant sociality to self-consciousness without analogy inference.
- Freedom is invention of meaning through violent reflection/decision, not Sartrean absolute choice.
- Radical reflection constitutes what it finds; its principled failure guarantees freedom's distance.
- Philosophy as aphilosophy links to non-philosophy via flesh and irony, not via Hegelian absolute knowledge.
Frameworks and mental models
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Empiricism / intellectualism / third path | Shared split; body perceives | Any PhP topic opener |
| Constancy dual failure | Context + object dependence | Perception science debates |
| Absorbed coping + possible | Solicitations plus summoning | Action theory / AI skill |
| Horizon vs mere possibility | Margins already act on me | Task switch / presence |
| Governed / following / according | Three rule relations | Law, norms, institutions |
| Speaking / spoken (à la fois) | Creativity + sedimentation | Language, literature, science shifts |
| Speech as gesture | Meaning in expressive doing | Against thought-first semantics |
| Communication Claim | Self with other in communication | Developmental self-consciousness |
| Radical reflection as freedom | Invent meaning; remember origin | Metaphilosophy of PhP's end |
| Negative philosophy | Aphilosophy; irony of saying | Late Merleau-Ponty / NC |
Argument arc of the Baldwin volume.
A closer look
Who's who (volume cast)
| Person | Role in this book |
|---|---|
| Thomas Baldwin | Editor; Preface; speaking/spoken essay |
| Eran Dorfman | Co-sketched colloquium; freedom / radical reflection |
| Claude Lefort | Opened proceedings; friend and editor of Merleau-Ponty |
| Madame Merleau-Ponty | Attended much of the colloquium |
| Ian Hacking | Helped secure Collège de France support |
| A. D. Smith | Flesh / Husserl comparison |
| Sean D. Kelly | What we see; constancy |
| Komarine Romdenh-Romluc | Reckon with the possible |
| Hubert L. Dreyfus | Reply; absorbed coping line (d. 2017) |
| Mark A. Wrathall | Phenomenology of social rules |
| Simon Glendinning | Genius of man; speech as gesture |
| Naomi Eilan | Consciousness and communication |
| Françoise Dastur | Philosophy and non-philosophy |
| Maurice Merleau-Ponty | 1908-1961; PhP 1945; Collège chair 1952-61 |
Sixteen through twenty (extra)
- Pre-personal subject in PhP is not a ghost in the machine; it is latent bodily knowledge intellectualism cannot see.
- Scare quotes in Merleau-Ponty can signal Goldstein exposition - Dreyfus's reading lesson for citation practice.
- Constitutive vs strategic rules (chess) show experts violate strategy while still governed by constitution - Wrathall's competence phenomenology.
- Sedimentation is the linguistic name for how speaking becomes spoken without metalanguage.
Keep these cross-references open while reading.
Source detail pass: cross-chapter tensions to keep
| Tension | Poles | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Novelty vs continuity | Radical break vs Husserl intensification | Smith |
| Constancy description | Empiricist / cognitivist vs belonging+context | Kelly |
| Intention in flow | Standstill vs reckon with the possible / horizon | Romdenh-Romluc / Dreyfus |
| Rules | Following vs governed-without-following | Wrathall |
| Language priority | One-way vs a la fois intertwining | Baldwin |
| Human exceptionalism | Welt privilege vs animal gesture | Glendinning |
| Self emergence | Analogy vs communication co-emergence | Eilan |
| Freedom | Ready-made vs radical reflection / fiction | Dorfman |
| Philosophy | Absolute vs aphilosophy / surreflection | Dastur |
Volume tensions at a glance.
About this book
Reading Merleau-Ponty: On Phenomenology of Perception by Thomas Baldwin (ed.), 2007. 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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