Philosophy of existence 3Merleau-PontyBernard Cullen à Henri GodinLIFE AND WORKSMaurice Merleau-Ponty was born on 14 March 1908 into a petty bourgeois Catholicfamily in Rochefort-sur-Mer on the west coast of France. When he died suddenly, at hisdesk, on 3 May 1961, he was widely regarded as France’s most brilliant and mostprofound philosopher.After his father, an artillery officer, died in 1913, the young Maurice grew up in Paris,in the company of his mother, a brother and a sister. He told Jean-Paul Sartre, in 1947,that he had never recovered from an incomparably happy childhood ([4.99], 230).Schooled, as were all philosophy students of his generation, in a distinctively Frenchphilosophical tradition dominated by Cartesianism, he entered the most eliteestablishment for the study of philosophy in France, the Ecole Normale Supérieure inParis, in 1926. It was there he first made the acquaintance of Sartre, in circumstances hewas to recount twenty years later in the course of an affectionate defence of that‘scandalous author’ against his detractors on the right and on the left: ‘the Ecole Normaleunleashed its fury against one of my schoolmates and myself for having hissed thetraditional songs, too vulgar to suit us. He slipped between us and our persecutors andcontrived a way for us to get out of our heroic and ridiculous situation withoutconcessions or damages’ ([4.22], 41). Simone de Beauvoir describes in herautobiographical novel
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, under the fictitious namePradelle, her friend and fellow student Merleau-Ponty, a rather serious but optimisticyoung searcher after truth who still attended mass.At the Ecole Normale, Merleau-Ponty’s main teacher was the idealist LéonBrunschvicg. In the academic year 1928–9, he prepared a dissertation on Plotinus, underthe supervision of Emile Bréhier.Between 1928 and 1930, he attended a series of lecturesgiven at the Sorbonne by Georges Gurvitch on contemporary German phenomenology,especially the writings of Husserl, Scheler and Heidegger; and in February 1929, heattended the lectures given at the Sorbonne by Husserl himself, which were revised andpublished two years later as the
Cartesian Meditations. One phrase from those lecturesrecurs as a leitmotiv throughout Merleau-Ponty’s work: ‘It is “pure and, in a way, stillmute experience which it is a question of bringing to the pure expression of its ownsignificance”’ ([4.18], 219; cf. [4.24], 129 and [4.21], 188). The growing interest inGerman philosophy within Parisian philosophical circles was not confined tophenomenology. The year 1929 also saw the publication of Jean Wahl’s pioneering book
Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (The Unhappy Consciousnessin the Philosophy of Hegel).After graduating in second place in the 1930 examinations for the
agrégation enphilosophie (the qualification required to prepare candidates for the
baccalauréat) andcarrying out a year’s compulsory military service, Merleau-Ponty taught philosophy in
lycées in Beauvais and Chartres. He taught himself German. (For his own account of hisresearches at this time into the nature of perception, together with a list of the works heread in 1933–4, see [4.60], 188–99.) In 1935, he was appointed as a tutor at the EcoleNormale, where he remained until mobilization in 1939. His first two published works, inthe Catholic journal
La Vie intellectuelle, were sympathetic critical notices of the Frenchtranslation of Max Scheler’s book on
‘ressentiment’ (1935) and
Etre et avoir by GabrielMarcel (1936). (For a summary of these articles, see [4.60], 13–24.)In the mid-1930s, he began to deepen his study of Marx, especially the writings of theyoung Marx. From 1935, he attended the influential lectures by Alexandre Kojève at theEcole Pratique des Hautes Etudes on Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit—a reading ofHegel deeply influenced by the writings of the young Marx, subsequently publishedunder the title
Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. But around this time (and until the endof 1937), he was still closely associated with the left-leaning Catholic journals
Esprit and
Sept. The closure of
Sept, on instructions from the Vatican, was probably the final blowto his religious faith. In the same way, the publication in 1939 of the reports of theMoscow trials of Bukharin and twenty others the previous year must have influenced hisdecision not to commit himself to membership of the French Communist Party.His minor doctoral thesis,
The Structure of Behavior, was completed in 1938 (thoughnot published in book form until 1942). In early 1939, Merleau-Ponty became acquaintedwith a special issue of the
Revue internationale de philosophie devoted to Husserl (whohad died in April 1938). The references therein, especially by Eugen Fink, to Husserl’slast book,
The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,whetted his appetite to learn more about this work, only the first part of which had beenpublished. At the beginning of April, he was the very first visitor to the Husserl Archiveat Louvain in Belgium (whence the Husserl papers had been hurriedly moved), where heread the entirety of
The Crisis, Ideas II, and a number of other unpublished pieces. (See[4.110].) These brief encounters undoubtedly had a decisive influence on the way inwhich Merleau-Ponty appropriated the later thought of Husserl and incorporated it intothe heart of his own philosophy.The outbreak of war forced Merleau-Ponty to interrupt his research. After a year as asecond lieutenant, he was appointed to a post in the Lycée Carnot, where he remaineduntil 1944, when he took over from Sartre as senior philosophy teacher at the LycéeCondorcet. In the meantime, in 1941, he had encountered Sartre again, when he joinedSocialism and Liberty, one of the many groups, as Sartre put it, ‘which claimed to beresisting the conquering enemy’ ([4.99], 231). As Sartre tells it in his remarkably movingextended obituary, the two men immediately recognized their common interests: ‘Thekey words were spoken: phenomenology, existentialism. We discovered our real concern.Too individualist to ever pool our research, we became reciprocal while remainingseparate…. Husserl became our bond and our division, at one and the same time’ ([4.99],231).Throughout this period, Merleau-Ponty continued to work on his principal doctoralthesis and philosophical masterpiece, the
Phenomenology of Perception, which wasaccepted and published in 1945. Appointed lecturer in philosophy at the University ofLyons, he was made professor in 1948. He combined these duties with editing the leftwing,anti-colonialist journal
Les Temps modernes, which with Sartre and Simone deBeauvoir he had founded shortly after the Liberation. (See [4.99], 247–53.) He was thejournal’s (anonymous) political editor and editor-in-chief, writing most of the editorials(unsigned) and many lengthy articles (signed), several of them later gathered in his book
Humanism and Terror: an Essay on the Communist Problem, published in 1947. Otherswere gathered in the collection
Sense and Non-Sense, published in 1948. According toSartre’s reminiscences, ‘the review belonged to him. He had defined its politicalorientation, and I had followed him’ ([4.99], 283). From 1949 to 1952, he occupied thechair of child psychology and pedagogy at the Sorbonne; and in 1952, at the unusuallyearly age of 44, he was appointed to the most prestigious position for an academicphilosopher in France, the chair of philosophy at the Collège de France. He gave hisinaugural lecture, entitled
In Praise of Philosophy, at the Collège on 15 January 1953.Relations with Sartre had been cooling for some time: they disagreed deeply over therole of the Communist Party and the actions of the Soviet Union before and during theKorean War, and Merleau-Ponty resigned as editor-in-chief of
Les Temps modernes in1952. Almost half of the book in which, in 1955, Merleau-Ponty renounced his adherenceto Marxism,
Adventures of the Dialectic, was devoted to a merciless critique of ‘Sartreand ultrabolshevism’. A further collection of essays was published under the title
Signs in1960. His last published work,
Eye and Mind, had just appeared in the journal
Art deFrance when Merleau-Ponty died suddenly on 3 May 1961, from a stroke, aged 53. Thedivisions between him and Sartre had been gradually healing. Merleau-Ponty had takenthe opportunity of his Introduction to
Signs to record in print his affectionate admirationfor Sartre. He counters Sartre’s harsh self-criticism (in his Preface to
Aden Arabie, bytheir mutual friend Paul Nizan) with the observation that ‘his accursed lucidity, inlighting up the labyrinths of rebellion and revolution, has recorded in spite of himself allwe need to absolve him’ ([4.23], 24). Sartre, for his part, records his surprise and delightwhen Merleau-Ponty unexpectedly turned up, shortly before his death, at a lecture Sartregave at the Ecole Normale. Among his many posthumous publications, the two mostimportant are
The Prose of the World (notes dating from 1950–2) and the unfinishedmanuscript of the book on which he was working at the time of his death,
The Visible andthe Invisible.
THE PRIMACY OF PERCEPTIONIn a paper he wrote in 1952 to support his candidacy for the chair of philosophy at theCollège de France, Merleau-Ponty offers a brief summary of the themes of his work thusfar, before proceeding to outline his plans for future research. He begins by referring to‘the perceived world which is simply there before us, beneath the level of the verifiedtrue and the false’. His first two works, he goes on, ‘sought to restore the world ofperception’ ([4.21], 3). Beginning with the insight that the mind that perceives is anincarnated mind, his writings have tried to establish and illustrate the inadequacy of bothbehaviourism and idealism and to overcome this dualism by recourse to the fundamentalreality of the perceiving body-subject.He had already announced this programme of work in the opening sentence of hisIntroduction to
The Structure of Behavior: ‘Our goal is to understand the relationsbetween consciousness and nature.’ Rejecting philosophical approaches that emphasizeeither the ‘pure exteriority’ of the objects of perception or the ‘pure interiority’ of theperceiving subject, Merleau-Ponty insists that the world as perceived is not a sum ofobjects of our perception; and our relation to the world is not that of a disembodiedthinker to an object of thought. What must not be forgotten is ‘the insertion of the mind incorporeality, the ambiguous relation which we entertain with our body and, correlatively,with perceived things’ ([4.21], 4).This means that the classical Aristotelian/Kantian distinction between form and matteris misleading. We cannot conceptualize the world to be perceived as disordered ‘matter’on which the perceiving mind (or consciousness), through the use of reason, imposes‘form’ or in which it deciphers ‘meaning’. ‘Matter is “pregnant” with its form, which isto say that in the final analysis every perception takes place within a certain horizon andultimately in the “world”’([4.21], 12). Perception, for Merleau-Ponty, is not a consciousactivity of the mind: perception is the mode of existence of the body-subject at apreconscious level, the dialogue between the body-subject and its world at a level that ispresupposed by consciousness. At the same time, ‘the perceived world is the alwayspresupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence’ ([4.21], 13).In
The Structure of Behavior, his first published book, Merleau-Ponty considers thistheme of the relations between perceiving persons and the world in which they live andperceive through an examination of certain physiological and psychological theories,principally behaviourism and
Gestalt psychology. He exposes the inadequacy ofbehaviourism by showing that we cannot explain the facts of perceptual life byconceptualizing the relation between the perceiving organism and its milieu in terms ofan automatic machine whose pre-established mechanisms are brought to life by reactionto external stimuli. ‘The true stimulus is not the one defined by physics and chemistry;the reaction is not this or that particular series of movements; and the connection betweenthe two is not the simple coincidence of two successive events’ ([4.20], 99).Behaviourism, in other words, is false as a model of perceptual behaviour.So is idealism. It is not a question of superimposing a pure, thinking consciousness ona brute, thinglike body. Within the realms of physics or mechanics, a body canlegitimately be seen as a thing among things. But the scientific point of view is itself anabstraction. ‘In the conditions of life…the organism is less sensitive to certain isolatedphysical and chemical agents than to the constellation which they form and to the wholesituation which they define’ ([4.21], 4). Furthermore, the behaving organism displays akind of ‘prospective activity’, as if it were oriented towards the meaning of certainelemen-tary situations, ‘as if it entertained familiar relations with them, as if there were“an
a, priori of the organism”, privileged conducts and laws of internal equilibriumwhich predisposed the organism to certain relations with its milieu’ ([4.21], 4). Higherorderbehaviours bring out new forms or shapes of the milieu, in correlation with themeaning-conferring activity of the behaving subject. Perceptual behaviour emerges fromthese relations to a situation and to an environment which are not the working of a pure,knowing subject.In the
Phenomenology of Perception, his major published work, Merleau-Ponty takesfor granted the emergence of perceptual behaviour and installs himself in it ‘in order topursue the analysis of this exceptional relation between the subject and its body and itsworld’. The book seeks to illustrate how the body is not ‘an object in the world, under thepurview of a separated spirit…. It is our point of view on the world, the place where thespirit takes on a certain physical and historical situation’ ([4.21], 4–5). Although spacedoes not permit any more than a cursory glance at this long and densely textured treatise,it is worth lingering on its Preface, one of the classic texts in the history ofphenomenology.This is Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological manifesto, one that is clearly indebted tothe unpublished works of Husserl which he had first inspected in 1939 in Louvain. This isthe Husserl who emphasized the
Lebenswelt, the life-world in which all thinking,perceiving and acting takes place. According to Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology isa philosophy which puts essences back into existence, and does not expect toarrive at an understanding of man and the world from any starting point otherthan that of their ‘facticity’…. It is also a philosophy for which the world isalways ‘already there’ before reflection begins—as an unalienable presence; andall its efforts are concentrated upon re-achieving a direct and primitive contactwith the world, and endowing that contact with a philosophical status.([4.18], vii)The first feature of this phenomenology is that it is a rejection of science: ‘I am not theoutcome or the meeting-point of numerous causal agencies which determine my bodily orpsychological make-up.’ I cannot conceive of myself as ‘a mere object of biological,psychological or sociological investigation…. The whole universe of science is builtupon the world as directly experienced, and if we want to subject science itself torigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we mustbegin by reawakening the basic experience of the world of which science is the secondorderexpression’ ([4.18], viii). If the world as understood by phenomenology is ‘alwaysalready there’, it is not the ‘objective’ world of zoology, social anatomy or inductivepsychology, since ‘I am the absolute source, my existence does not stem from myantecedents, from my physical and social environment; instead it moves out towardsthem and sustains them, for I alone bring into being for myself…the tradition which Ielect to carry on’ ([4.18], ix). To return ‘to the things themselves’ (an earlier rallying cryof Husserlian phenomenology) is to return to ‘the world that precedes knowledge’, theworld of which science always speaks. In relation to this primordial world, science is anabstract and derivative sign-language, as is geography in relation to the countryside inwhich we already recognize a forest, a meadow or a river. The purpose ofphenomenology is to analyse these perceptual foundations which precede knowledge andupon which our knowledge is built ([4.18], ix).Also in the Preface to the
Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty offers arevised version of Husserl’s ‘phenomenological reduction’, a way of looking at the worldwhich enables us to see just how embedded in it we actually are. ‘It is because we arethrough and through compounded of relationships with the world that for us the only wayto become aware of the fact is to suspend the resultant activity, to refuse it ourcomplicity.’ It is because the certainties of common sense and the ‘natural attitude’ tothings are the presupposed basis of any thought that they are taken for granted and gounnoticed. Only by applying the phenomenological reduction, by suspending for the timebeing our recognition of them, can we bring them into view. Reflection ‘steps back [fromthe world] to watch the forms of transcendence fly up like sparks from a fire; it slackensthe intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice; italone is consciousness of the world because it reveals that world as strange andparadoxical’. Not only is the philosopher a perpetual beginner, but ‘philosophy consistswholly in the description of its own beginning’. It is in this sense that phenomenology‘belongs to existential philosophy’, the philosophy that interrogates Heidegger’s ‘beingin-the-world’ ([4.18], xiii).In the course of this personal restatement of phenomenological principles, Merleau-Ponty considers the notion of intentionality, at the same time sketching out his ownunderstanding of history. Unlike the Kantian relation to a possible object,phenomenological intentionality assumes that the unified world that is already there is theworld that is ‘lived’ by me. What Husserl calls ‘operative intentionality’ is the way inwhich consciousness knows itself to be a project of the world, ‘meant for a world whichit neither embraces nor possesses, but towards which it is perpetually directed’. Operativeintentionality ‘produces the natural and antepredicative unity of the world and of our life,being apparent in our desires, our evaluations, and in the landscape we see, more clearlythan in objective knowledge, and furnishing the text which our knowledge tries totranslate into precise language’ ([4.18], xviii).These are the dimensions of history, the events that are never without meaning. Inseeking to understand a doctrine, it must be examined from the point of view of ideology,politics, religion, economics and psychology—all at the same time! ‘All these views aretrue provided that they are not isolated, that we delve deeply into history and reach theunique core of existential meaning which emerges in each perspective. It is true, as Marxsays, that history does not walk on its head, but it is also true that it does not think withits feet.’ Neither head nor feet are paramount, of course: all aspects of a life are capturedin ‘the body’. In an obvious reference to Sartre’s famous claim that ‘we are condemned tofreedom’, Merleau-Ponty concludes this discussion of intentionality and history with thethought that ‘because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannotdo or say anything without its acquiring a name in history’ ([4.18], xix).The above discussion leads naturally into a discussion of the individual’s relations withother people. To the extent that phenomenology unites extreme subjectivism and extremeobjectivism in its notion of rationality, it discloses the way in which ‘perspectives blend,perceptions confirm each other, a meaning emerges’. Phenomenological rationality existsneither in an ideal world proper to absolute spirit nor in the real world of scientificinvestigation and knowledge. The phenomenological world is the sense or meaning
(sens)revealed where the paths of the individual’s various experiences intersect; and also‘where my own and other people’s intersect and engage each other like gears’. With thisimage of the meshing of gears
(l’engrenage), Merleau-Ponty seeks to capture bothsubjectivity and intersubjectivity, ‘which find their unity when I either take up my pastexperiences in those of the present, or other people’s in my own’ ([4.18], xx).
THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPEECH, LANGUAGE AND ARTThe
Phenomenology of Perception largely consists of a series of studies on the role of thebody and perception in various aspects of social and cultural experience: speech andlanguage, expression, sexuality, art and literature, time, freedom and history. Spacelimitations preclude here more than a few cursory glances in this direction. When Iperceive in my world cultural artefacts as varied as roads and churches, or implementssuch as a bell, a spoon or a pipe, ‘I feel the close presence of others beneath a veil ofanonymity’. The challenge is: how can the word ‘I’ be put into the plural? When it comesto ‘other selves’, contact is established through my perception of other bodies. ‘It isprecisely my body which perceives the body of another, and discovers in that other bodya miraculous prolongation of my own intentions, a familiar way of dealing with theworld. Henceforth, as the parts of my body together comprise a system, so my body andthe other’s are one whole, two sides of one and the same phenomenon’ ([4.18], 354).But bodies only establish initial (mostly visual) contacts. The most important culturalphenomenon in the perception of other people as people (as distinct from simply livingbeings) is language
(le langage). In the experience of dialogue, a common ground isconstituted between the other person and myself. ‘My thought and the thought of theother are interwoven into a single fabric.’ Neither my interlocuter nor I invented thelanguage that enables us to communicate: ‘our words are inserted into a shared operationof which neither of us is the creator…. Our perspectives merge into each other, and wecoexist through a common world’ ([4.18], 354). Coexistence does not remove the fact ofsolitude, but solitude and communication are ‘two “moments” of one phenomenon, sincein fact other people do exist for me’ ([4.18], 359). Indeed, I would not even be in aposition to speak of solitude, much less declare others inaccessible to me, if I did nothave the experience of other people.Language, then, is discovered by me in my phenomenal field and used by me forexpression and communication with others in that shared antepredicative world. One ofthe uses to which language is put, of course, is literature; and literature, for Merleau-Ponty, is firmly embedded in the lived world of politics and economics. In a long note onthe existential interpretation of historical materialism, tagged on to the end of the chapterof the
Phenomenology of Perception devoted to ‘the body in its sexual being’ ([4.18],171–3), Merleau-Ponty writes that ‘the existential conception of history’ rejects the ideathat our actions are
determined by socio-economic factors in our situation. It does not,however, deny that our actions are
motivated by such factors. ‘If existence is thepermanent act by which man takes up, for his own purposes, and makes his own a certain
de facto situation, none of his thoughts will be able to be quite detached from thehistorical context in which he lives, and particularly from his economic situation.’This applies to the philosopher, to the revolutionary and to the artist. It would beridiculous, writes Merleau-Ponty, to see Paul Valéry’s poetry as simply the product of hiseconomic circumstances. But it would not be absurd ‘to seek, in the social and economicdrama, in the world of our
Mitsein, the motive of this coming to awareness’. The act ofthe artist (or the philosopher) is a free act, but it is not motiveless. The freedom of theartist is not exercised in a vacuum, completely divorced from the world of sharedexperience; ‘it consists in appropriating a
de facto situation by endowing it with afigurative meaning beyond its real one’.Every aspect of our life ‘breathes a sexual atmosphere’ (as Freud showed), without ourever being able to identify a single content of consciousness that is either ‘purely sexual’or without any sexual content whatsoever. In the same way, all our lives are suffusedwith ‘the social and economic drama’ which provides each one of us (the artists as wellas everyone else) with an inescapable element of the stuff of our existence, which we setabout deciphering and reappropriating in our own distinctive way.Thus does Valéry transmute into pure poetry a disquiet and solitude of whichothers would have made nothing. Thought is the life of human relationships as itunderstands and interprets itself. In this voluntary act of carrying forward, thispassing from objective to subjective, it is impossible to say just where historicalforces end and ours begin, and strictly speaking the question is meaningless,since there is history only for a subject who lives through it, and there is asubject only in so far as he is historically situated.([4.18], 172–3)We have barely touched on Merleau-Ponty’s impressive, but scattered, phenomenologyof expression. Most of his more important studies on language, literature, culture andart—which he defined as ‘the progressive awareness of our multiple relations with otherpeople and the world’ ([4.22], 152)—are gathered in the collections
Sense and Non-Senseand (especially)
Signs, which he prefaced with an Introduction (1960) that helps to situatethese studies within his evolving philosophical project.
Eye and Mind ([4.21], 159–90) ishis important late essay on painting. The unfinished manuscript abandoned in 1952 andpublished posthumously as
The Prose of the World was conceived, in inspiration at least,as a response to Sartre’s
What is Literature? It could be said that the phenomenon oflanguage became, in one way or another, the main focus for all of Merleau-Ponty’ssubsequent work. In this respect, he is at one with the other great philosophers of thetwentieth century, in both the continental and analytic traditions—one thinks of figuressuch as Heidegger and Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Austin and Searle. In Merleau-Ponty’s case, language is the entry point for a more profound understanding of humaninterrelations—which, he writes in 1952, ‘will be the major topic of my laterstudies’ ([4.21], 9). The meaning of language consists in ‘the common intention’ of itsconstituent elements; ‘and the spoken phrase is understood only if the hearer, followingthe “verbal chain”, goes beyond each of its links in the direction that they all designatetogether’ ([4.21], 8). In that direction (as we shall see below) lies Being. (For an excellentsummary of Merleau-Ponty’s views on these topics, see [4.74], 78–86. For a moreextended discussion of his theory of existential expression and communication, see[4.82].)
EXISTENTIAL FREEDOM, HISTORY AND POLITICSIn the immediate aftermath of the Liberation, taking stock of what had been learned in theexperience of the war and the occupation, Merleau-Ponty declared that in the course ofthe war ‘we have learned history, and we claim that it must not be forgotten’ ([4.22],150). Not surprisingly, his conception of history, and the role of the individual in history,was forged in the crucible of his wartime experience. The final chapter of the
Phenomenology of Perception (written at this time) is devoted to a dialectical encounterwith Sartre’s notorious theory of ‘absolute freedom’ (with its obvious implications forour understanding of history and historical
praxis), as presented to the world only a yearor two earlier in
Being and Nothingness.The first three pages of this final chapter outline, roughly, the Sartrean position.However, Merleau-Ponty points out that the problem with Sartre’s radical oppositionbetween the determinism of the brute in-itself (‘scientism’s conception of causality’) andthe absolute freedom of the conscious for-itself (‘divorced from the outside’) is that itwould appear to rule out the possibility of freedom altogether. If it is true that ourfreedom is the same in everything we do, if the slave who continues to live in fear is asfree as the one who breaks his or her chains (or anyone else, indeed), then there can be nofree action, since freedom obviously, as in this example, has nothing to do with actions.Furthermore, ‘free action, in order to be discernible, has to stand out against abackground of life from which it is entirely, or almost entirely, absent’ ([4.18], 437). Iffreedom is everywhere (since it is simply the mark of human being, or being for-itself),then, says Merleau-Ponty, it is nowhere. The very idea of action, the very idea of choice,disappears, ‘for to choose is to choose
something in which freedom sees, at least for amoment, a symbol of itself. Freedom implies a struggle, freedom must be striven for;freedom must make a decision. If freedom is already achieved without free actions, as itwould be in a Sartrean world, then free actions become redundant (ibid.). What isrequired instead is a theory of freedom that ‘allows it something without giving iteverything’ ([4.22], 77).Merleau-Ponty works out what this ‘something’ is by resuming his analysis of
Sinngebung: that is, interpretation, or, literally, the bestowal of significance on situations.If we accept that there is ‘no freedom without a field’, and if we reject as nonphenomenologicalthe Kantian idea (which Sartre often seems to adopt) of aconsciousness which ‘finds in things only what it has put into them’, then ourunderstanding of
Sinngebung must involve the intermeshing of both the conditions ofpossibility of perception (the body-subject) and the conditions of reality of perception(the world of situations in which I find myself).To say that a particular rock is unclimbable makes sense only if I entertain the projectof climbing it; the attribute ‘unclimbable’ (like all attributes) can be conferred upon therock only by ‘a human presence’. ‘It is therefore freedom which brings into being theobstacle to freedom, so that the latter can be set over against it as its bounds’ ([4.18],439). But given that I have the project to get from A to B, not every rock will appear tome as unclimbable. My freedom does not contrive it that this way there is an obstacle tomy progress and that way there is a way through, but it does arrange it for there to beobstacles and ways through in general. Without my ‘human presence’ there would beneither obstacles nor ways through. But it is crucially important to distinguish: myfreedom ‘does not draw the particular outline of the world, but merely lays down itsgeneral structures’ (ibid.).The general structures of the world, which dictate that some mountains are climbablewhile others are not, are to be found not out there, in an in-itself, but within me.Irrespective of my ‘express intentions’ (for example, my plan to climb those mountainsnext week), my ‘general intentions’ evaluate the potentialities of my environment: forexample, the fact that they exceed my body’s power to take them in its stride. This bringsus back to Merleau-Ponty’s fundamental insight involving the body-subject’s ‘insertionin the world’: underlying myself as a thinking and deciding subject there is ‘as it were anatural self which does not budge from its terrestrial situation’ ([4.18], 440). All the‘free’ choices in the world will not obviate this fundamental relationship: ‘in so far as Ihave hands, feet, a body, I sustain around me intentions which are not dependent uponmy decisions and which affect my surroundings in a way which I do not choose’ (ibid.).To use Merleau-Ponty’s terminology (borrowed from the
Gestalt psychologists), these‘general intentions’ are the ever-present ‘ground’ against which my decisions are‘figures’. This ground is ‘general’ in the sense that it constitutes a system in which allpossible objects are simultaneously included; and also in the sense that it is not simplymine but something I share with ‘all psycho-physical subjects organized as I am’. For weare all indeed ‘intermingled with things’. While it is true that none of those thingsconstitutes an obstacle unless we ordain it so,the self which qualifies them as such is not some acosmic subject…. There is anautochthonous significance of the world which is constituted in the dealingswhich our incarnate existence has with it, and which provides the ground ofevery deliberate
Sinngebung.([4.18], 441)In the same way as the mountain that constitutes an obstacle is ‘my obstacle’, the painthat makes me ‘say what I ought to have kept to myself is ‘my pain’, and the fatigue thatmakes me break my journey is ‘my fatigue’. According to Sartre, I am always free totransform my being in the world, including my chosen tolerance of pain or fatigue. ButMerleau-Ponty draws attention to the fact that this transforming for-itself does notoperate as if I had no yesterdays. Rejecting Sartre’s famous contention that ‘existenceprecedes essence’, he insists that a theory of freedom must recognize ‘a sort ofsedimentation of our life: an attitude towards the world, when it has received frequentconfirmation, acquires a favoured status for us’ (ibid.). While it’s all very well to claimthat the self is always free to change the habits of a lifetime, Merleau-Ponty insists that‘having built our life upon an inferiority complex which has been operative for twentyyears, it is
not probable that we shall change’ ([4.18], 442).To the objection of the rationalist (such as Sartre) that my freedom to change is eithertotal or non-existent, that just as there are no degrees of possibility there are no degrees offreedom, Merleau-Ponty retorts that ‘generality and probability are not fictions, butphenomena; we must therefore find a phenomenological basis for statisticalthought’ (ibid.). Statistical thought simply addresses the fact that I have a past which,‘though not a fate’ (since my past does not totally determine my future), ‘has at least aspecific weight and is not a set of events over there, at a distance from me, but theatmosphere of my present’. Drawing once again on the image of
l’engrenage, Merleau-Ponty concludes that ‘our freedom does not destroy our situation, but gears itself toit’ (ibid.). (Cf. Merleau-Ponty’s application of the Freudian concepts of repression andfixation to ‘personal time’ and ‘the ambiguity of being in the world’, [4.18], 83–5. For adiscussion, see [4.49].)The past, therefore, does not determine my future, but neither is my history irrelevant.History—my own personal history and the history of the wider community within whichI live—provides the context within which I make my choices. And Merleau-Pontyillustrates this conception of conditioned freedom by reference to the question of thedevelopment of class consciousness and the decision to be a revolutionary. He againseeks to discover a third way between the two traditional abstractions. Objective(Marxist) thought derives class consciousness from the objective material conditions; andidealist reflection reduces the condition of being a proletarian to the individual’sawareness of it. But ‘in each case we are in the realm of abstraction, because we remaintorn between the
in itself and the
for itself. What is necessary is a return to thephenomena, ‘to the things themselves’: instead of abstractions, we must apply ‘agenuinely existential method’.A person’s objective position in the production process will never in itself issue inclass consciousness; rather, it is the decision of individuals to become revolutionaries thatprompts them to see themselves as proletarians. ‘What makes me a proletarian is not theeconomic system or society considered as systems of impersonal forces, but theseinstitutions as I carry them within me and experience them; nor is it an intellectualoperation devoid of motive, but my way of being in the world within this institutionalframework’ ([4.18], 443). The transition from individual self-description to classsolidarity with others takes place through a growing awareness that ‘all share a commonlot’ ([4.18], 444). ‘Social space begins to acquire a magnetic field, and a region of theexploited is seen to appear’ ([4.18], 445). Neither the status quo nor the freerevolutionary action that might overturn it is an abstraction; ‘they are lived through inambiguity’ (ibid.). To be a member of a social class is not only to be intellectually awareof the fact; it is to identify oneself with a group ‘through an implicit or existentialistproject which merges into our way of patterning the world and coexisting with otherpeople’ ([4.18], 447).This is not to say that one cannot at any moment amend one’s existential project. Whatone cannot do is pretend to be a nothingness
(néant) and choose oneself out of nothing.‘My actual freedom is not on the hither side of my being, but before me, in things.’ It ismisleading to say (as Sartre does) that I continually choose myself; and that to choose notto choose is still to choose. ‘Not to refuse is not the same thing as to choose’ ([4.18],452). In the lived world, there is never determinism and never absolute choice; I amnever either a ‘being’ or a ‘nothingness’. We are involved in the world and with others‘in an inextricable tangle’ ([4.18], 454). This significant life, this certain significance ofnature and history that makes me what I am, far from cutting me off from the rest of theworld, makes it possible for me to remain in communication with the rest of the world.Philosophy, which teaches us to see things in the world and in history in all their clarityand in all their ambiguity, best performs its role by ceasing to be (intellectualizing)philosophy. In the words of Saint-Exupéry with which Merleau-Ponty closes the
Phenomenology of Perception: ‘Man is but a network of relationships, and these alonematter to him’ ([4.18], 456).(Merleau-Ponty published a wide range of articles on the role of the individual inhistory and politics, varieties of Marxism, the role of the Communist Party, and theSoviet Union. Most of these were collected in
Sense and Non-Sense, Signs, Humanismand Terror (a polemical riposte to Arthur Koestler’s
Darkness at Noon), and
Adventuresof the Dialectic. For the best extended discussions of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophicalpolitics, see 4.119 and 4.130.)
THE HYPERDIALECTIC OF THE FLESHIn the prospectus of his future work written in 1952, Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘my first twoworks sought to restore the world of perception.’ As we have seen, all aspects of our lifeare underpinned by antepredicative perception, the specifically human mode of inherencein the world in which we all live. Looking to the future, he goes on: ‘my works inpreparation aim to show how communication with others, and thought, take up and gobeyond the realm of perception which initiated us to the truth’ ([4.21], 3). He wishes togo beyond the ‘bad ambiguity’ of his works already published and articulate a ‘goodambiguity’, ‘a spontaneity which gathers together the plurality of monads, the past andthe present, nature and culture into a single whole. To establish this wonder would bemetaphysics itself ([4.21], 11). He himself saw the enormous philosophical achievementrepresented by the works we have been examining thus far in this chapter as furnishingonly the groundwork for the ontology that was to be the work of his mature years. Hiselaboration of this ontology of ‘the flesh’ is contained in a number of works publishedposthumously, but especially in the incomplete manuscript entitled
The Visible and theInvisible.It is impossible to exaggerate just how ambitious Merleau-Ponty’s mature projectreally is. He proposed to go beyond (or below, for he frequently returns to the metaphorof archaeology) the traditional philosophical categories of realism and idealism, subjectand object, consciousness and world, in-itself and for-itself, being and nothingness, theknower and the known, and discover in that scarcely penetrable region what he called‘the flesh of the world’, the primordial stuff in which we all inhere and which is theultimate ground of all human experience. It is also impossible to give any more than aflavour of this dense and enigmatic text, available to us in the form of 160 pages of anapparently finished methodological introduction, followed by a remarkable chapterentitled ‘The intertwining—the chiasm’
(L’entrelacs—le chiasme) and about 110 pagesof working notes. I shall do no more here than draw attention to a few key termsintroduced by Merleau-Ponty in these pages: the notion of ‘hyperdialectic’, and therelated concepts of ‘the flesh’ and ‘the chiasm’.When Merleau-Ponty addresses the theory of dialectic in
The Visible and the Invisible,he has in his sights the dialectic of Sartre’s
Being and Nothingness. Sartre’s dialectic is a‘bad dialectic’. It is a fixed opposition, presented in terms of theses, where reflectionimposes an external law and framework upon the content of experience.It is with this intuition of Being as absolute plenitude and absolute positivity,and with a view of nothingness purified of all the being we mix into it, thatSartre expects to account for our primordial access to the things…. From themoment that I conceive of myself as negativity and the world as positivity, thereis no longer any interaction…. We are and remain strictly opposed.([4.24], 52)The only ‘good dialectic’, on the other hand, is what he calls ‘the hyperdialectic’. A gooddialectic is a ‘dialectic without synthesis’ which must be constantly aware that everythesis is but an idealization, an abstraction from the lived world of experience. ‘What wecall hyperdialectic is a thought that…is capable of reaching truth because it envisageswithout restriction the plurality of the relationships and what has been calledambiguity’ ([4.24], 94). What Merleau-Ponty is working towards is ‘a dialecticaldefinition of being that can be neither the being for itself nor the being in itself…thatmust rediscover the being that lies before the cleavage operated by reflection, about it, onits horizon, not outside of us and not in us, but there where the two movements cross,there where “there is” something’ ([4.24], 95).Where the two movements cross, of course, is the body. The body is simultaneouslypart of the world of things and the thing that sees and feels things. The body (which isitself visible) can see things not because they are objects of consciousness, at a distancefrom it, but precisely because those things are the environment in which the seeing bodyexists. These two aspects of the body (seen and seer, visible and invisible) are inseparablyintertwined: ‘the experience of my body and the experience of the other are themselvesthe two sides of one same being’ ([4.24], 225). This intertwining at the most fundamentaland primordial level, this anonymous generality of the visible and myself, is whatMerleau-Ponty calls ‘the flesh’
(la chair).‘There is no name in traditional philosophy to designate it’ ([4.24], 139). The flesh isnot matter and it is not mind. It is not substance. In a manner that recalls Heidegger,Merleau-Ponty goes back to the pre-Socratic thinkers to try to express what he means:to designate it, we should need the old term ‘element’, in the sense it was usedto speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a
general thing,midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnateprinciple that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being. Theflesh is in this sense an ‘element’ of Being.(ibid.)To underline the oneness of this primordial element of Being, Merleau-Ponty names it the‘flesh of the world’: ‘My body is made of the same flesh as the world,…this flesh of mybody is shared by the world, the world
reflects it, encroaches upon it and it encroachesupon the world,…they are in a relation of transgression or of overlapping’ ([4.24], 248).Merleau-Ponty’s overriding concern, as it has been throughout his philosophical career, isto offer a phenomenological description of reality that gets beneath the spuriousdistinction between extension and thought, between the visible and the invisible. He isnot suggesting an identity of thought and extension; the key image is that ‘they are theobverse and the reverse of one another’ ([4.24], 152). But we are all part of the same‘flesh of the world’. We situate ourselves in ourselves
and in the things, in ourselves
andin the other, ‘at the point where, by a sort of
chiasm, we become the others and webecome world’ ([4.24], 160). The word ‘chiasm’
(le chiasme) recalls the intersection oflines in the manner of the Greek letter
chi (x), emphasizing the inextricable interlockingof the various aspects of Being, of the perceived and the perceiver, of the visible and theinvisible.One final theme must be mentioned in this brief examination of
The Visible and theInvisible and that is the important strategic role of language. ‘Language is a life, is ourlife and the life of the things’ ([4.24], 125). Parallel to the reverse/obverse relation of thevisible and the invisible, language is always considered by Merleau-Ponty against thebackground of silence: ‘language lives only from silence; everything we cast to the othershas germinated in this great mute land which we never leave’ ([4.24], 126). Because theyhave experienced within themselves ‘the birth of speech
[la parole] as bubbling up at thebottom of [their] mute experience’, no one knows better than philosophers ‘that what islived is lived-spoken
(vécu-parlé)’.Language is ‘the most valuable witness to Being’ (ibid.). Furthermore, language is awitness to Being that does not disrupt the unity of Being, since ‘the vision itself, thethought itself, are, as has been said [by Lacan], “structured as a language”, are
articulation before the letter, apparition of something where there was nothing orsomething else’ (ibid.). The speaking word
(la parole parlante), which brings to thesurface all the deep-rooted relations of the lived experience wherein it takes form, thelanguage of life and of action, and also the language of literature and of poetry, is thevery theme of philosophy. Of course, philosophy itself is ‘that language that can beknown only from within, through its exercise, is open upon the things, called forth by thevoices of silence, and continues an effort of articulation which is the Being of everybeing’ (ibid.).
CONCLUDING REMARKSAs we come to the close of this brief survey of Merleau-Ponty’s
oeuvre, we must takestock. In my view, Merleau-Ponty is one of the great figures of twentieth-centuryphilosophy, a pivotal figure in mid-century: drawing deeply on and creativelyreappropriating earlier masters such as Saussure, Husserl and Heidegger, while hisformidable presence is evident (albeit indirectly) in the structuralist, poststructuralist anddeconstructionist thinkers in the generation that came immediately behind him.Merleau-Ponty himself always loudly proclaimed his allegiance to Husserl, especiallythe Husserl of the
Crisis and the theme of the life-world. Now, Merleau-Ponty’sphenomenology was undoubtedly originally inspired by Husserl. And Husserl (asuniquely and creatively interpreted by Merleau-Ponty) remained a living presencethroughout his work. But it is arguable that there is more Heidegger than Husserl inMerleau-Ponty’s philosophy. First, there is the centrality of time: for Merleau-Ponty asfor Heidegger, human existence is essentially temporal existence. Second, there is theprivileging of language in both cases, as was illustrated in the last section. In the famoussaying in
The Letter on Humanism, Heidegger proclaims that ‘language is the house ofBeing’ (‘die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins’). In
The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty writes that language is ‘the most valuable witness to Being’ ([4.24], 126). Third,there is Merleau-Ponty’s intention—like Heidegger—to offer a comprehensivedescription of Being. It has to be said, however, that while Heidegger’s Being
(Sein) isontologically distinct from beings
(Seiendes), Merleau-Ponty’s Being is inclusive of both
Sein and
Seiendes.Some of Merleau-Ponty’s recurring themes also prefigure subsequent dominant trendsin continental philosophy. It is not incidental that his first book was entitled
The Structureof Behavior. He carried out a detailed study of both the
Gestalt psychologists andSaussure’s structural linguistics and lectured on Saussure in 1949. To the last book hepublished he gave the title
Signs. Merleau-Ponty was clearly at the centre of the emergingphilosophical schools known as structuralism and semiotics. His continual and deepeningpolemic against Sartre’s privileging of the choosing subject reflected the growingdecentring of the subject in his own work, a theme which in turn becomes central to thelater deconstructionist approach to philosophy. (For an interesting discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s move ‘from philosophy to non-philosophy’, see [4.103], 123–51).So what was Merleau-Ponty’s main contribution to the continental philosophy of thiscentury? Perhaps more than any other philosopher, Merleau-Ponty was determined toovercome the dualism between mind and matter, between subject and object, which haddominated European philosophy since Descartes. The contemporary representative
parexcellence of the Cartesian tradition was, of course, Merleau-Ponty’s friend/ foe Sartre.We have seen above how Merleau-Ponty constantly pitched his own philosophicalapproach against Sartre’s radical dualism between the thinking and choosing for-itselfand the in-itself that is the object of thought. Merleau-Ponty was always aphenomenologist. His fundamental philosophical impulse was always to describe ‘thethings themselves’; and he opposed dualism simply because it did not offer an adequatedescription of the phenomena.It has been suggested that Merleau-Ponty’s late philosophy represents a radical breakwith his earlier phenomenology of perception. I do not agree with this view. Despite thenew terminology he developed in the 1950s, his philosophical work is all of a piece; andhis later search for a new fundamental ontology can be seen in germ (and sometimes inmore than germ) in the
Phenomenology of Perception, for example in the chapter on the
cogito. While it is true that he was concerned in his final years that the basic terminologyof the
Phenomenology of Perception (perceiver and perceived) retained remnants of theold dualism, the fact that he was determined to go further and ground the phenomenologyof perception in ‘the flesh of the world’ in no way implies a rejection of the basic thrustand the achievement (as far as it goes) of the earlier work.Rather, as he expressed it in a working note of January 1959, Merleau-Ponty’s concernwas to ‘deepen’ his first two books within the perspective of an ontology which wouldfinally dissolve the subject/ object polarity. This implies only that those first two booksconstitute the indispensable starting point of his philosophical project and not itsterminus. His abiding concern was to provide a full description of the world. His newontology would go beyond his earlier phenomenology and provide the radical newfoundations for such a description. He makes it clear in
The Visible and the Invisible thatthe basic philosophical stance is one of ‘interrogation’. Merleau-Ponty’s profoundphilosophical questions have not yet received an adequate answer.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHYPrimary texts4.1
La Structure du comportement, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942.4.2
Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris: Gallimard, 1945.4.3
Humanisme et terreur: Essai sur le problème communiste, Paris: Gallimard, 19474.4 ‘Le Primat de la perception et ses conséquences philosophiques’,
Bulletin de laSociété Française de Philosophie, 41 (1947):119–135 and discussion 135–53.4.5
Sens et non-sens, Paris: Nagel, 1948.4.6
Eloge de la philosophie, Paris: Gallimard, 1953.4.7
Les Aventures de la dialectique, Paris: Gallimard, 1955.4.8
Signes, Paris: Gallimard, 1960.4.9 ‘Préface’ to A.Hesnard,
L’OEuvre de Freud et son importance pour le mondemoderne, Paris: Payot, 1960, 5–10.4.10 ‘Un Inédit de Maurice Merleau-Ponty’ [1952],
Revue de métaphysique et de morale,67 (1962):401–9.4.11
Le Visible et l’Invisible, suivi de notes de travail [1959–61], ed. C.Lefort, Paris,Gallimard, 1964.4.12
L’OEil et l’esprit [1961], Paris, Gallimard, 1964.4.13 ‘Pages d’ “Introduction à la prose du monde”’ [1950–1], ed. C.Lefort,
Revue demétaphysique et de morale, 72 (1967):137–53.4.14
Résumés de cours, Collège de France, 1952–1960, ed. C.Lefort, Paris: Gallimard,1968.4.15
L’Union de l’âme et du corps chez Malebranche, Biran et Bergson: prises au coursà l’Ecole Normale Supérieure (1947–48), ed. J.Deprun, Paris: Vrin, 1968.4.16
La Prose du monde [1950–1], ed. C.Lefort, Paris: Gallimard, 1969.4.17 ‘Philosophie et non-philosophie depuis Hegel’ [spring 1961], ed. C.Lefort,
Textures,8–9 (1974):83–129 and 10–11 (1975):145–73.
Translations4.18
Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C.Smith, London: Routledge & Kegan Pauland Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1962.4.19
In Praise of Philosophy, trans. J.Wild and J.M.Edie, Evanston: NorthwesternUniversity Press, 1963.4.20
The Structure of Behavior, trans. A.L.Fisher, Boston: Beacon Press, 1963.4.21
The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, thePhilosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. J.M.Edie, Evanston: NorthwesternUniversity Press, 1964. Includes (pp. 3–11) ‘An Unpublished Text by MauriceMerleau-Ponty: A Prospectus of his Work’, trans. A.B.Dallery, a translation of [4.10]above; and (pp. 159–90) ‘Eye and Mind’, trans. C.Dallery, a translation of [4.12]above.4.22
Sense and Non-Sense, trans. H.L.Dreyfus and P.Allen Dreyfus, Evanston:Northwestern University Press, 1964.4.23
Signs, trans. R.C.McCleary, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964.4.24
The Visible and the Invisible, followed by Working Notes, ed. C.Lefort, trans.A.Lingis, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968.4.25 ‘Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis: Preface to Hesnard’s
L’OEuvre de Freud’,trans. A.L.Fisher, in A.L.Fisher (ed.),
The Essential Writings of Merleau-Ponty, NewYork: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969, pp. 81–7.4.26
Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem, trans. with notes byJ.O’Neill, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.4.27
Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France 1952–1960, trans. J. O’Neill,Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970.4.28
The Prose of the World, trans. J.O’Neill, Evanston: Northwestern University Press,1973.4.29
Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. J.Bien, Evanston: Northwestern University Press,1973.4.30
Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, trans. H.J.Silverman, Evanston:Northwestern University Press, 1973.4.31
Phenomenology, Language and Sociology: Selected essays of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ed. J.O’Neill, London: Heinemann, 1974. (Contains articles already availableelsewhere.)4.32 ‘Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Hegel’, trans. H.J.Silverman,
Telos, 29(1976):39–105; reprinted in H.J.Silverman (ed.),
Philosophy and Non-Philosophy sinceMerleau-Ponty, New York and London: Routledge, 1988, pp. 9–83.
Bibliographies4.33 Lanigan, R.L. ‘Maurice Merleau-Ponty Bibliography’,
Man and World, 3(1970):289–319.4.34 Métraux, A. ‘Bibliographie de Maurice Merleau-Ponty’, in X.Tilliette [4.109below], 173–86.4.35 Geraets, T.F. [4.60 below], 200–9.4.36 Lanigan, R.L. ‘Bibliography’ [annotated], in [4.82 below], 210–43.4.37 Lapointe, F.H. ‘The Phenomenological Psychology of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty: ABibliographical Essay’,
Dialogos, 8 (1972):161–82.4.38 Lapointe, F. and Lapointe, C.C.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his Critics: AnInternational Bibliography (1942–1976), New York: Garland, 1976.4.39 Whiteside, K. ‘The Merleau-Ponty Bibliography: Additions and Corrections’,
Journal of the History of Philosophy, 21 (1983):195–201.
Criticism: General studies4.40 Alquié, F. ‘Une philosophie de l’ambiguïté: L’existentialisme de Maurice Merleau-Ponty’,
Fontaine, 59 (1947):47–70.4.41 Ballard, E.G. ‘The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty’,
Tulane Studies in Philosophy, 9(1960):165–87.4.42 Bannan, J.F. ‘The “Later” Thought of Merleau-Ponty’,
Dialogue, 5 (1966): 383–403.4.43 Bannan, J.F. ‘Merleau-Ponty on God’,
International Philosophical Quarterly, 6(1966):341–65.4.44 Bannan, J.F.
The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, New York: Harcourt, Brace &World, 1967.4.45 Barral, M.R.
Merleau-Ponty: The Role of the Body-Subject in InterpersonalRelations, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1965.4.46 Bayer, R.
Merleau-Ponty’s Existentialism, Buffalo: University of Buffalo Press,1951.4.47 Caillois, R. ‘De la perception à l’histoire: la philosophie de Maurice MerleauPonty’,
Deucalion, 2 (1947):57–85.4.48 Carr, D. ‘Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Incarnate Consciousness’, in G.A.Schrader, Jr(ed.)
Existential Philosophers: Kierkegaard to Merleau-Ponty, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967, pp. 369–429.4.49 Cullen, B. ‘“Repression” and “Fixation” in Merleau-Ponty’s Account of Time’,
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, forthcoming.4.50 Daly, J. ‘Merleau-Ponty’s Concept of Phenomenology’,
Philosophical Studies(Ireland), 16 (1967):137–64.4.51 Daly, J. ‘Merleau-Ponty: A Bridge between Phenomenology and Structuralism’,
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 2 (1971):53–8.4.52 de Waehlens, A.
Une philosophie de l’ambiguïté: L’existentialisme de MauriceMerleau-Ponty, Louvain: Publications Universitaires de Louvain, 1951.4.53 Dillon, M.C.
Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1988.4.54 Dufrenne, M. ‘Maurice Merleau-Ponty’,
Les études philosophiques, 36 (1962): 81–92.4.55 Edie, J.M.
Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Language: Structuralism and Dialectics,Lanham: University Press of America, 1987.4.56 Fressin, A.
La Perception chez Bergson et chez Merleau-Ponty, Paris: Sociétéd’éditions d’enseignement supérieur, 1967.4.57 Friedman, R.M. ‘The Formation of Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy’,
PhilosophyToday, 17 (1973):272–8.4.58 Friedman, R.M. ‘Merleau-Ponty’s Theory of Intersubjectivity’,
Philosophy Today,19 (1975):228–42.4.59 Gans, S. ‘Schematism and Embodiment’,
Journal of the British Society forPhenomenology, 13 (1982):237–45.4.60 Geraets, T.F.
Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendantale: La Genèse de laphilosophie de Maurice Merleau-Ponty jusqu’à la Phénoménologie de la perception, TheHague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971.4.61 Gerber, R.J. ‘Merleau-Ponty: The Dialectic of Consciousness and World’,
Man andWorld, 2 (1969):83–107.4.62 Gill, J.H.
Merleau-Ponty and Metaphor, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press,1991.4.63 Gillan, G. (ed.)
The Horizons of the Flesh: Critical Perspectives on the Thought ofMerleau-Ponty, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press,1973.4.64 Grene, M. ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Renewal of Ontology’,
Review of Metaphysics,29 (1976):605–25.4.65 Hadreas, P.J.
In Place of the Flawed Diamond: An Investigation of MerleauPonty’sPhilosophy, New York: Lang, 1986.4.66 Halda, B.
Merleau-Ponty ou la philosophie de l’ambiguïté, Paris: Les LettresModernes, 1966.4.67 Hall, H. ‘The Continuity of Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Perception’,
Man andWorld, 10 (1977):435–47.4.68 Heidsieck, F.
L’Ontologie de Merleau-Ponty, Paris: Presses Universitaires deFrance, 1971.4.69 Hyppolite, J.
Sens et existence dans la philosophie de Maurice Merleau-Ponty,Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1963.4.70 Johnson, G.A. (ed.)
Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, Evanston:Northwestern University Press, 1991.4.71 Jolivet, R. ‘The Problem of God in the Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty’,
PhilosophyToday, 7 (1963):150–64.4.72 Kaelin, E.F.
An Existential Aesthetic: The Theories of Sartre and MerleauPonty,Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1962.4.73 Kaelin, E.F. ‘Merleau-Ponty, Fundamental Ontologist’,
Man and World, 3(1970):102–15.4.74 Kearney, R. ‘Maurice Merleau-Ponty’, in
Modern Movements in EuropeanPhilosophy, Manchester and Dover, NH: Manchester University Press, 1986, pp. 73–90.4.75 Kockelmans, J.J. ‘Merleau-Ponty on Sexuality’,
Journal of Existentialism, 6(1965):9–30.4.76 Krell, D.F. ‘Merleau-Ponty on “eros” and “logos”’,
Man and World, 7 (1974):37–51.4.77 Kwant, R.C.
The Phenomenological Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Pittsburgh:Duquesne University Press, 1963.4.78 Kwant, R.C.
From Phenomenology to Metaphysics: An Inquiry into the Last Periodof Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophical Life, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1966.4.79 Lacan, J. ‘Maurice Merleau-Ponty’,
Les Temps modernes, 184–85 (October1961):245–54.4.80 Langan, T.
Merleau-Ponty’s Critique of Reason, New Haven and London: YaleUniversity Press, 1966.4.81 Langer, M.M.
Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception: A Guide andCommentary, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989.4.82 Lanigan, R.L.
Speaking and Semiology: Maurice Merleau-Ponty’sPhenomenological Theory of Existential Communication, The Hague and Paris:Mouton, 1972.4.83 Lefort, C. ‘Maurice Merleau-Ponty’, in R.Klibansky (ed.),
ContemporaryPhilosophy: A Survey, vol. 3,
Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Language and Structure,Firenze: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1969, pp. 206–14.4.84 Levine, S.K. ‘Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Art’,
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