This study uses new arguments to reinvestigate the relation between aesthetics and politics in the contemporary debates on democratic theory and radical democracy. -/- First, Carl Schmitt and Claude Lefort help delineate the contours of an aesthetico-political understanding of democracy, which is developed further by studying Merleau-Ponty, Rancière, and Arendt. -/- The ideas of Merleau-Ponty serve to establish a general "ontological" framework that aims to contest the dominant currents in contemporary democratic theory. It is argued that (...) class='Hi'>Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, and Rancière share a general understanding of the political as the contingently contested spaces and times of appearances. However, the articulation of their thought leads to reconsider and explore under-theorized as well as controversial dimensions of their work. -/- This search for new connections between the political and the aesthetic thought of Arendt and Merleau-Ponty on one hand and the current widespread interest in Rancière's aesthetic politics on the other make this book a unique study that will appeal to anyone who is interested in political theory and contemporary continental philosophy. (shrink)

Although Merleau-Ponty’s early phenomenology of perception and his essays on art, politics, and language already showed an affinity between the aesthetic phenomena of expression and style and the political and cultural dynamics of society at large, this paper specifically focuses on his late theorizing of the notion of flesh and its relevance to his late understanding of politics and democracy. The emergence of flesh as a concept was contemporary to Merleau-Ponty’s break with Marxism as a philosophical model and (...) with revolutionary dialectics as a political project. It is by showing that such a break was consistently grounded on his theorizing of the being flesh of both the body and of society that this paper shows Merleau-Ponty’s unique contribution to democratic theory and to contemporary political philosophy. In the course of this analysis, it will become clear that in philosophically breaking with the position of a “no that is a yes”—i.e. the model of the revolution, which implies a total negation of the given that becomes a total affirmation of the new order (dictatorship) once in power—he would politically embrace the Weberian “heroic liberalism”—or his “non-communist left”—of parliamentary democracy. (shrink)

This paper explores the ethical insights provided by Anne Truitt's minimalist sculptures, as viewed through the phenomenological lenses of Hannah Arendt's investigations into the co-constitution of reality and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's investigations into perception. Artworks in their material presence can lay out new ways of relating and perceiving. Truitt's works accomplish this task by revealing the interactive motion of our embodied relations and how material objects can actually help to ground our reality and hence human potentiality. Merleau-Ponty shows how (...) our prereflective bodies allow incompossible perceptions to coexist. Yet this same capacity of bodies to gather multiple perceptions together also lends itself to the illusion that we see from only one perspective. If an ethical perspective becomes reified into one position, it then becomes detached from reality, and the ethical potential is actually lost. At the same time, phenomenologically understood, the real world does not exist in terms of static matter, but is instead a web of contextual relations and meanings. An ethics that does not take embodied relations into account—that allows for only one perspective—ultimately loses its capacity for flexibility, and for being part of a common and shared reality. (shrink)

An increasing number of scholars at the intersection of feminist philosophy and critical disability studies have turned to Merleau-Ponty to develop phenomenologies of disability or of what, following Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, I call "non-normate" embodiment. These studies buck the historical trend of philosophers employing disability as an example of deficiency or harm, a mere litmus test for normative theories, or an umbrella term for aphenotypical bodily variation. While a Merleau-Pontian-inspired phenomenology is a promising starting point for thinking about embodied (...) experiences of all sorts, I here draw a cautionary tale about how ableist assumptions can easily undermine accounts of non-normate experience. I first argue that the omission or misguided treatment of disability within the history of philosophy in general and the phenomenological tradition in particular is due to the inheritance of what I call “the ableist conflation” of disability with pain, suffering, and disadvantage. I then show that Merleau-Ponty’s famous reading of the blind man’s cane is problematic insofar as it omits the social dimensions of disabled experiences, misconstrues the radicality of blindness as a world-creating disability, and operates via an able-bodied simulation that confuses object annexation or extension with incorporation. In closing, I contend that if phenomenology is to overcome the errors of traditional philosophy, as Merleau-Ponty once hoped, it must heed the insights of “crip” or non-normate phenomenology, which takes the lived experience of disability as its point of departure. [French translation forthcoming in Pour une phénoménologie critique, ed. Donald A. Landes, Quebec City, Les Presses de l'Université Laval/Paris, J.Vrin]. (shrink)

Although the fact that Merleau-Ponty has a dialectical approach in Phenomenology of Perception has been discussed in recent Anglophone readings, there has not been an explicit clarification as to how his varying usages of the term hang together. Given his repeated references to Hegel and to dialectics, coupled with the fact that dialectics are not part of the Husserlian phenomenology or Heideggerean existentialism from which Merleau-Ponty draws so much, the question of just what he does with the idea (...) of dialectics presents itself. In this paper I argue that, in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau- Ponty saw Hegel as providing a model for the conception of rationality and meaning that must underpin the existentialist response to the problems bequeathed him by Husserlian phenomenology: namely, the problems of embodiment, perception and the constitution of the world. In connection with this, I suggest an interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s “existential dialectics” that focuses on his three principal uses of the term: 1) a “dialectic of objective thought,” 2) a set of existential-dialectical categories intended to capture the ontological structure of the “body-subject” as “being-in-the-world,” and 3) a dialectic at the cultural level concerning others and history. (shrink)

It has recently been suggested that Merleau-Ponty’s position in Phenomenology of Perception is a unique form of transcendental idealism. The general claim is that in spite of his critique of “Kantianism,” Merleau-Ponty’s position comes out as a form of transcendental idealism that takes the perceptual processes of the lived body as the transcendental constituting condition for the possibility of experience. In this article I critically appraise this claim. I argue that if the term “idealist” is intended in a (...) sufficiently similar sense to Kant’s usage of the term in naming his position as a “transcendental idealism” then it is a misrepresentation to subsume Merleau-Ponty’s position under that term. This is because Merleau-Ponty rejects the transcendental metaphysics of the reflecting subject that underpins transcendental idealism. In its place he advocates a methodological transcendentalism that, whilst being anti-realist, is not idealist. Thus to call his position “a new kind of transcendental idealism,” as Sebastian Gardner has, is to misunderstand the significance of his existentialist break with what he sees as the “intellectualism” of this position. (shrink)

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

In this paper, I will discuss Deleuze’s account of the reversal of Platonism in chapter one of Difference and Repetition, tying it together with Merleau-Ponty’s work on perception. In Difference and Repetition, there are only two references to Merleau-Ponty – one in the note on Heidegger that was added at the insistence of his examiners, and one brief mention in a footnote. Nonetheless, as we shall see, many of the discussions of the origin of representation, as well as (...) the relation of the determinate to the indeterminate in the structure of difference, and the nature of depth, draw heavily on Merleau-Ponty’s work. While there has been some recognition of this influence, I want to draw out some specific points where Deleuze draws on Merleau-Ponty within chapter one of Difference and Repetition. On the other side, as far as I am aware, there is no sustained discussion of Plato in Merleau-Ponty’s work. In showing how Deleuze takes up Merleau-Ponty in his explicit project of reversing Plato, I want to show that the move to a philosophy of the simulacrum is synonymous with Merleau-Ponty’s thesis of the primacy of perception. I will begin by talking about Plato and representation, which ends the chapter, before returning to the beginning of the chapter to look at the nature of difference, then turning to the question of how representation covers over difference. I want to conclude by looking at what Deleuze considers to be the limitations of Merleau-Ponty’s account. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a selective, systematic rather than historical account of Merleau-Ponty’s highly complex relation to classical German philosophy, focussing on issues which bear on the question of his relation to transcendentalism and naturalism. I argue that the concerns which define his project in Phenomenology of Perception are fundamentally those of transcendental philosophy, and that Merleau-Ponty’s disagreements with Kant, and the position he arrives at in The Visible and the Invisible, are helpfully viewed in light of (...) issues which Merleau-Ponty identifies as raised by Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement, and Schelling’s conversion of Kantian idealism into a Real-Idealismus. Finally I address the question of whether, and on what basis, Merleau-Ponty’s claim to have surpassed systematic philosophy can be defended. (shrink)

This paper will seek firstly to understand Deleuze’s main challenges to phenomenology, particularly as they are expressed in The Logic of Sense and What is Philosophy?, although reference will also be made to Pure Immanence and Difference and Repetition. We will then turn to a discussion of one of the few passages in which Deleuze directly engages with Merleau-Ponty, which occurs in the chapter on art in What is Philosophy? In this text, he and Guattari offer a critique of (...) what they call the “final avatar” of phenomenology – that is, the “fleshism” that Merleau-Ponty proposes in his unfinished but justly famous work, The Visible and the Invisible. It will be argued that both Deleuze’s basic criticisms of phenomenology, as well as he and Guattari’s problems with the concept of the flesh, do not adequately come to grips with Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy. Merleau-Ponty is not obviously partisan to what Deleuze finds problematic in this tradition, despite continuing to identify himself as a phenomenologist, and is working within a surprisingly similar framework in certain key respects. In fact, in the more positive part of this paper, we will compare Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh, and Deleuze’s equally infamous univocity of being, as a means to consider the broader question of the ways in which the two philosophers consider ontological thought, its meaning and its conditions. It is our belief that through properly understanding both positions, a rapprochement, or at least the foundation for one, can be established between these two important thinkers. (shrink)

This study aims to corroborate Merleau-Ponty’s interpretations of fundamental ideas from Saussure’s linguistics by linking them to works that were independently elaborated by Jan Mukařovský, Czech structuralist aesthetician and literary theorist. I provide a comparative analysis of the two authors’ theories of language and their interpretations of thought as fundamentally determined by language. On this basis, I investigate how they conceive linguistic innovation and its translation into changes in the constituted language and other social codes and institutions. I explain (...) how they elaborate on Saussure’s idea of language as a system of oppositions by interpreting cultural innovation as a systematic variation of pre-established social norms and, similarly, linguistic innovation as gesturing within language. Connectedly, I show how Mukařovský’s works help clarify Merleau-Ponty’s focus on the gestural dimension of language. By discussing the two thinkers’ arguments in favour of linguistic innovation, I explore what could be called phenomenological limits of structuralism. (shrink)

In “The Child’s Relations with Others,” Merleau-Ponty argues that certain early experiences are jointly owned in that they are numerically single experiences that are nevertheless given to more than one subject (e.g., the infant and caregiver). Call this the “joint ownership thesis” (JT). Drawing upon both Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological analysis, as well as studies of exogenous attention and mutual affect regulation in developmental psychology, I motivate the plausibility of JT. I argue that the phenomenological structure of some early infant–caregiver (...) dyadic exchanges is best described as involving joint subjects. From birth, some experiences are constitutively social in that certain phenomenal states, such as the positive emotions that arise within these early exchanges, are jointly owned. Along the way, I consider a possible objection. I conclude by considering the explanatory significance of adopting JT. (shrink)

Stawarska considers the ambiguities surrounding the antagonism between the phenomenological and the structuralist traditions by pointing out that the supposed foundation of structuralism, the Course in General Linguistics, was ghostwritten posthumously by two editors who projected a dogmatic doctrine onto Saussure’s lectures, while the authentic materials related to Saussure’s linguistics are teeming with phenomenological references. She then narrows the focus to Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with Saussure’s linguistics and argues that it offers an unusual, if not an uncanny, reading of the (...) Course, in that it identifies a phenomenological dimension within the text, against the grain of the dominant structuralist claim. This phenomenological dimension is corroborated by the authentic sources of Saussure’s linguistics, even though the latter were beyond the philosopher’s own power to know. Merleau-Ponty’s unorthodox reading of the Course as being broadly compatible with the tradition of Husserlian phenomenology has been dismissed as an error and a contresens , but Stawarska proposes that such deviant appropriations of foundational texts are the ones to cherish the most, since they effectively dismantle the received dogmas and official doctrines stuffing the cabinets of canonical philosophy. She argues specifically that Merleau-Ponty’s contested distinction between “a synchronic linguistics of speech ” and “a diachronic linguistics of language ” , which gives primacy to la parole over la langue, and raises the possibility of a systematic study of la parole, contains a more faithful response to Saussure’s own project than the received structuralist view that la langue alone constitutes the proper object of linguistic study. (shrink)

This article aims to establish an understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s view of creative expression, and of its phenomenological function, setting out from the intriguing statement in his essay “Cézanne’s Doubt” that the painter (or writer or philosopher) finds himself in the situation of the first human being trying to express herself. Although the importance of primary or creative expression in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is well known, there is no consensus among commentators with respect to how this notion is to be (...) understood, and of its apparently paradoxical relation to experience in his philosophy. On the one hand, Merleau-Ponty seems to presuppose that there is an original meaning pre-given in experience; on the other hand, expression is described as a hazardous enterprise, because the meaning to be expressed does not exist before expression has succeeded. In order to resolve this tension, I explore the significance of the precariousness of creative expression, arguing that it must be related to its other side: the constituted, all too often petrified meaning that we must start out from. (shrink)

In recent discussions of two important issues in the philosophy of perception, viz. the problems of perceptual presence and perceptual constancy, Merleau-Ponty’s ideas have been garnering attention thanks to the work of Sean Kelly and Alva Noë. Although both Kelly’s normative approach and Noë’s enactive approach highlight important aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s view, I argue that neither does full justice to it because they overlook the central role that style plays in his solution to these problems. I show that (...) a closer look at the Phenomenology and several other texts from this period reveals that, on Merleau-Ponty’s account, we are able to perceive the absent features of objects as present, constant properties, and constant objects because we recognize that the objects we perceive have a unique style that persists through and unifies all their appearances. (shrink)

I develop an interpretation of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of motor intentionality, one that emerges out of a reading of his presentation of a now classic case study in neuropathology—patient Johann Schneider—in Phenomenology of Perception. I begin with Merleau-Ponty's prescriptions for how we should use the pathological as a guide to the normal, a method I call triangulation. I then turn to his presentation of Schneider's unusual case. I argue that we should treat all of Schneider's behaviors as pathological, (...) not only his abstract movements, as is commonly acknowledged in the secondary literature, but also crucially his concrete movements. Using these facts of Schneider's illness, I reconstruct a ‘fundamental function’ of consciousness, as Merleau-Ponty called it, in which there are two kinds of bodily agency: the power of the body to be solicited by a situation and the power of the body to project a situation. I propose that these powers became dissociated in Schneider's case, as evidenced by his abstract and concrete movements, while in the normal case, these powers comprise a dynamic unity, enacted as motor intentionality. I also discuss how my interpretation complements Merleau-Ponty's assertion that motor intentions exist between mind and matter. (shrink)

In Aspiration, Agnes Callard examines the phenomenon of aspiration, the process by which one acquires values and becomes a certain kind of person. Aspiring to become a certain type of person involves more than wanting to act in certain ways. We want to come to see the world in a certain way and to develop the dispositions, attributes, and skills that allow us to seamlessly and effectively respond to situations. The skilled athlete or musician, for example, has developed the muscle (...) memory and the perceptual equivalent to naturally see what a situation requires and to respond well, whether playing a Rachmaninoff concerto or returning a tennis volley. -/- I use Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception to flesh out the process of becoming, through which aspired-to values, skills, and characteristics become part of one’s embodied being-in-the-world. Although some rightly focus on Merleau-Ponty’s efforts to avoid over-intellectualizing skillful action, without appreciating his distinction between habitual actions and human (or personal) acts, we overlook an important aspect of robust human agency—the way “a human act becomes dormant and is continued absent-mindedly as a reflex” (90). Merleau-Ponty’s account of habit and its relation to personal acts offers a rich and phenomenologically sensitive picture of aspiration. (shrink)

This paper provides an interpretation of the existential conception of selfhood that follows from Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception. On this view, people relate to themselves not by “looking within” in acts of introspection but, first, by “looking without” at the field of solicitations in which they are immersed and, eventually, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, by “making explicit” the “melodic unity” or “immanent sense” of their behavior. To make sense of this, I draw out a distinction latent in Merleau-Ponty’s (...) view between a pre-reflective sense of self and a reflective self-interpretation. The former is a suite of abilities and dispositions in light of which a person is aware of and drawn to act in a situation. This sense of self undergoes transitions over time, is constitutively susceptible to moments of disorientation, and tends toward but never achieves full coherence. Reflective self-interpretation is an activity whereby someone—provisionally and defeasibly—clarifies, articulates, and gets a better “grip” on how they are prereflectively drawn to act. I ground this interpretation in a detailed reading of Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of romantic love and I corroborate it by examining his account of the emergence of class-consciousness in the self-interpretation of a worker. (shrink)

I argue that we find the articulation of a problem concerning bodily agency in the early works of the Merleau-Ponty which he explicates as analogous to what he explicitly calls the problem of perception. The problem of perception is the problem of seeing how we can have the object given in person through it perspectival appearances. The problem concerning bodily agency is the problem of seeing how our bodily movements can be the direct manifestation of a person’s intentions in (...) the world. In both cases what, according to Merleau-Ponty, obscures a recognition of the phenomenon in question is a conception of our bodily capacities, i.e. our sensibility and our motility, which reduces these to the workings of mechanisms that are blind to meaning. I argue that both the problem concerning perception and the problem concerning bodily agency can be properly called transcendental. The problem of perception is transcendental because it concerns the very intelligibility of appearances and judgements with empirical content. The problem of bodily agency is transcendental in the sense that it concerns the very intelligibility of our bodily capacity to carry out intentions and by implication the intelligibility of our intentions as such. (shrink)

What would the Merleau-Ponty of Phenomenology of Perception have thought of the use of his phenomenology in the cognitive sciences? This question raises the issue of Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the relationship between the sciences and philosophy, and of what he took the philosophical significance of his phenomenology to be. In this article I suggest an answer to this question through a discussion of certain claims made in connection to the “post-cognitivist” approach to cognitive science by Hubert Dreyfus, Shaun (...) Gallagher and Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch. I suggest that these claims are indicative of an appropriation of Merleau-Ponty’s thought that he would have welcomed as innovative science. Despite this, I argue that he would have viewed this use of his work as potentially occluding the full philosophical significance that he believed his phenomenological investigations to contain. (shrink)

This paper clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between speaking and spoken speech, and the relation between the two, in his Phenomenology of Perception. Against a common interpretation, I argue on exegetical and philosophical grounds that the distinction should not be understood as one between two kinds of speech, but rather between two internally related dimensions present in all speech. This suggests an interdependence between speaking and spoken aspects of speech, and some commentators have critiqued Merleau-Ponty for claiming a priority of (...) speaking over spoken speech. However, there is a sense in which Merleau-Ponty is right to emphasize the priority, namely, in terms of the ontological priority of the speaking subject with respect to language understood as a constituted cultural ideality. The latter only maintains its ontological status insofar as it is taken up by a language community. I favorably contrast Merleau-Ponty’s views on this question to those of the late Heidegger and de Saussure, and suggest potential applications of this clarified position for contemporary discussions in philosophy of language. (shrink)

This is a concordance of page numbers in the following editions of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: English editions prior to the Routledge Classics 2002; Routledge Classics edition, with the new pagination; the French edition from Gallimard, prior to 2005; the 2e edition from Gallimard, 2005, with new pagination.

Over the course of its history, feminist standpoint theory has encountered a number of problems which reveal divisions among its supporters over certain fundamental philosophical commitments. This chapter sketches a phenomenological account of perception that can begin to address these problems, drawn largely from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. Merleau-Ponty can help us resolve these issues by providing an account of perspectival perception wherein a multiplicity of different perceptual standpoints all nonetheless put us in touch with a single (...) external world, and in which some standpoints may be better than others when it comes to accessing certain features of this world. For Merleau-Ponty, the proliferation of standpoints need not lead us into an unacceptably relativistic framework, as long as we are able to conceive of each of these standpoints as giving whoever occupies it access to some particular aspect of a singular, real, shared world. (shrink)

McDowell and Merleau-Ponty share a critical attitude towards a certain Cartesian picture of the mind. According to the picture in question nothing which properly belongs to subjectivity can be hidden to the subject herself. Nevertheless there is a striking asymmetry in how the two philosophers portray the problematic consequences of such a picture. They can seem to offer exact opposite views of these consequences, which, given the almost identical characterization of the transparency claim, is puzzling. I argue that a (...) closer look at the prima facie puzzling asymmetry dissolves the apparent disagreement and reveals a deeper agreement concerning both the nature and the origin of the problems haunting the Cartesian picture in question. Both McDowell and Merleau-Ponty argue that on the picture of the relation of between mind and world in question, we lose our grip on the very idea of a perceptual appearance. Furthermore, the two authors regard a certain conception of nature as conceived in the image of science, as one of the crucial elements in making the picture of the mind in question look attractive. (shrink)

[In Czech] Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of the pathology of perception show “objective” and “subjective” events have sense for the living body only in relation to its whole equilibrium, that is, to how it organises itself overall and how it thus “meets” those events. If we apply this conception to Husserl’s example of two mutually-touching hands of one body we must then state not that we perceive here a coincidence of certain subjective sensations with certain objective qualities, but rather that my (...) body, in the sense of an object, results from the restructuralisation of the whole field of the body accomplished by the the body as the performer of perceptual intentions. The body-object, and for the same reasons also the body-subject, is therefore the product of the analysis of the body in the sense of a field of structuralisation or polarisation, not its original phenomenological “stratum”, as in Husserl. If the body understands itself as perceptible only by a change of its own structure, inasmuch as it is a certain field of structuralisation, then the "external” thing, which is likewise a pole of such grasping, must belong to the same ontological “field” as the body. Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh”, that is the circularity between questioning of perception and answering of the perceived, is thus a phenomenon appearing beyond the boundary of the body as a singular being. This fact allows the concept of flesh to be extended and to be understood as an “element”, that is, as a dimension in which individual beings appear. [In Czech language.]. (shrink)

Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s “Eye and Mind” and Bergson’s Matière et mémoire and “La perception du changement,” I ask what resources are available in vision for interrupting objectifying habits of seeing. While both Bergson and Merleau-Ponty locate the possibility of seeing differently in the figure of the painter, I develop by means of their texts, and in dialogue with Iris Marion Young’s work, a more general phenomenology of hesitation that grounds what I am calling “critical-ethical vision.” Hesitation, I argue, (...) stems from affect and leads to critical memory. In hesitation, the seeming coincidence between my habits of seeing and the visible is decentered, revealing these habits and their social reference as the constitutive horizon of my field of vision. Hesitation, then, provides the phenomenological moment within which vision may become at once critically watchful, destabilizing its objectifying habits, and ethically responsive, recollecting its affective grounds. The critical and the ethical are here inseparable. Critically, this vision is an awareness of the structures of invisibility, diacritical and habitual, social and historical, to which my vision owes—dimensions which institute particular ways of seeing and being as norm while eliding others. Ethically, this is the recognition of how seeing is already seeing with others—others whose affective influence is operative within vision, even as their existence is reductively represented or denied. (shrink)

The paper discusses a posthuman reading of Merleau-Ponty’s later works and an application of the concept of flesh to the digital dimension. Whereas, in the Phenomenology of Perception, the world and other beings are seen from an egological and human perspective, in The Visible and the Invisible this perspective is reshaped. Human body is made of the same stuff of other bodies, and they constitute a common being, the flesh of the world. Merleau-Ponty sets out a path through (...) flat ontology and posthumanism, opposing human perspective as a privileged one. His posthuman turn passes through the concepts of reversibility and divergence. Humans are made of the same stuff as non-humans, so they reverse into one another, but, on the other hand, they are not reduced to an undifferentiated entity, because of their divergence. Merleau-Ponty’s problematizing perspective is here actualized and applied to the hybridization between human bodies and digital protheses. (shrink)

The phenomenological point of view of the body is usually appreciated for having introduced the notion of the ‘lived’ body. We cannot merely analyze and explain the body as one of the elements of the world of objects. We must also describe it, for example, as the center of our perspective on the world, the place where our sensing is ‘localized’, the agens which directly executes our intentions. However, in Husserl, the idea of the body as lived primarily complements his (...) objectivism: the body (Leib) is an objective and mental reality, a ‘double unity’, as he writes. In contrast, Merleau-Ponty’s later considerations of the body in Phenomenology of Perception tend to the idea of a circular relationship between the objective and subjective dimensions of the body – between the objective and the lived. One of the means to overcome the idea of the body as a site of the correlation between two opposite and complementary realms is, for Merleau-Ponty, the philosophical interpretation of an early neurological notion of ‘body schema’. Body schema is neither an idea nor a physiological-physical fact, it is rather a practical diagram of our relationships with the world, an action-based norm in reference to which things make sense. In the recently published preparatory notes for his 1953 courses, Merleau-Ponty dedicates much effort to further developing the notion of body schema, and interprets fresh sources that he did not use in Phenomenology of Perception. Notably, he studies various possibilities of how this practical ‘diagram’ can be de-differentiated (pathology) or further refined (cognitive and cultural superstructures, symbolic systems), which shows the fundamentally dynamic unity of the body. This paper summarizes the basic elements of Merleau-Ponty’s 1953 renewed philosophical interpretation of the notion of body schema, while contrasting it to the more traditional understanding of the body in phenomenology and in recent philosophical texts dealing with body schema. (shrink)

This paper argues that the concept of the Earth plays a pivotal role in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking in two ways. First, the concept assumes a special importance in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s relation to Husserl via the fragment known as “The Earth Does Not Move.” Two, from this fragment, the Earth marks a key theme around which Merleau-Ponty’s late philosophy revolves. In particular, it is with the concept of the Earth that Merleau-Ponty will develop his archaeologically oriented phenomenology. (...) To defend this claim, the paper unfolds in three stages. First, I provide a preliminary reading of Husserl’s fragment, focusing in particular on the co-constitution of body and Earth. Two, I turn to Merleau-Ponty’s interpretations of this fragment, especially in the lectures on nature and then in the later lectures on Husserl. From these varying interpretations, the germs of Merleau-Ponty’s archaeological phenomenology are conceived. Accordingly, in the final part of the paper, I claim that Merleau-Ponty’s account of the Earth is Husserlian insofar as it reinforces the primordial “ground (sol) of experience” but at the same time marks a departure from Husserl insofar as the Earth registers a brute or wild layer that resists phenomenology. (shrink)

Movies have a striking aesthetic power: they can draw us in and induce a peculiar mode of involvement in their images – they absorb us. While absorbed in a movie, we lose track both of the passage of time and of the fact that we are sitting in a dark room with other people watching the play of light upon a screen. What is the source of the power of movies? Noël Carroll, who cites Maurice Merleau-Ponty as an influence (...) on his account of the power of movies, agrees with Merleau-Ponty that our perceptual experience of movies draws on many of the capacities at work in our perceptual experience of everyday situations. Yet Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception shows that Carroll’s emphasis on intellectual inference and the entertaining of unasserted thoughts is a distortion of the phenomenology of cinematic absorption. According to Merleau-Ponty, such intellectual operations come into play in cases of breakdown but should not be read back into the primary absorbed experience as being implicitly operative.. (shrink)

[In Czech] Merleau-Ponty holds that Husserl’s descriptions of the body go beyond the conceptual framework of subject-object ontology to which his philosophy is usually thought to conform. Merleau-Ponty says of his own philosophy that it is founded on the circularity in the body; that is, on the fact that from the ontological point of view, perception and availability to be perceived, are one and the same in the body. The inseparability of these two aspects of the body he (...) calls "flesh" (chair). According to Husserl, I perceive my body such that in a certain perceived object I also co-perceive sensations roused by the perception of that object – I observe the “consequential parallel” between two series of objective and subjective phenomena. Husserl argues that the unity of the body should be descrived as a double unity, and the body as a subject-object. In this article I analyse Husserl’s example of two hands of the same body touching mutually and, following Merleau-Ponty, I attempt to show that the body can appear to itself as an object only on the basis of a differentiation of the body as a particular field of perceiving. The body as a double unity of subject and object is therefore grounded in the body as a pre-objective and pre-subjective field; that is, in flesh as Merleau-Ponty understands it. This is also the point of departure for an original conception of ontology as we find it in his later philosophy. [In Czech language.]. (shrink)

Against David Schenck's interpretation, I argue that it is not absolutely clear that Merleau-Ponty ever meant to replace what Schenck refers to as the "unity of meanings" interpretation of "structure" with a "material meanings" interpretation. A particular problem-setting -- for example, an attempt to understand the "truth in naturalism" or the "truth in dualism" -- may very well require a particular mode of expression. I argue that the mode of expression chosen by Merleau-Ponty for these purposes, while unfortunate (...) in some of its apparent implications, need not be interpreted as recommitting him to the doctrine he spent his life working to renounce. I have argued that this would have been clearer had he been able to avail himself of James J. Gibson's notion of affordances, which capture perfectly what he was reaching for. (shrink)

One of the more striking aspects of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945) is his use of psychological case studies in pathology. For Merleau-Ponty, a philosophical interpretation of phenomena like aphasia and psychic blindness promises to shed light not just on the nature of pathology, but on the nature of human existence more generally. In this paper, I show that although Merleau-Ponty is surely a pioneer in this use of pathology, his work is deeply indebted to an (...) earlier philosophical study of pathology offered by the German Neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer in the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1929). More specifically, I argue that Merleau-Ponty, in fact, follows Cassirer in placing Kant's notion of the productive imagination at the centre of his account of pathology and the features of existence it illuminates. Recognizing the debt Merleau-Ponty's account of pathology has to the Kantian tradition not only acts as a corrective to more recent interpretation of Merleau-Ponty's views of pathology (Dreyfus, Romdenh-Romluc), but also recommends we resist the prevailing tendency to treat Merleau-Ponty's philosophy as anti-Kantian. Instead, my interpretation seeks to restore Merleau-Ponty's place within the Kantian tradition. (shrink)

The debate between instrumentalist and technological determinist positions on the nature of technology characterised the early history of the philosophy of technology. In recent years however technological determinism has ceased to be viewed as a credible philosophical position within the field. This paper uses Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to reconsider the technological determinist outlook in phenomenological terms as an experiential response to the encounter with the phenomenon of modern technology. Recasting the instrumentalist-determinist debate in a phenomenological manner enables one to reconcile (...) the apparent dualism of the instrumentalist and determinist positions through Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh. This ontology has recently been used to ground accounts of virtual embodiment. We argue that in addition to explaining away the classical form of technological determinism, it can also phenomenologically ground a novel understanding of technological determinism. Namely, a technological determinism of virtual embodiment. (shrink)

This paper provides suggestions for educators who have a desire to learn about, or are already committed to, challenging ableism and disablism. As philosophy teachers, we have the opportunity to facilitate student reflection regarding disability, which puts students in a position to make decisions about whether to retain their habitual ways of comporting themselves toward disabled people or to begin the process of forming new perceptual practices. I contend that existential phenomenology, as formulated by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Linda Martín (...) Alcoff, provides insights regarding the habitual formation of perceptual practices that are useful for thinking about ways that perception may be informed by ableism and disablism. Jessica Cadwallader demonstrates how their insights can be usefully applied to thinking about perceptions of disability. Through analysis of past encounters with people with disabilities, Cadwallader suggests that students change their habitual ways of responding to people with disabilities. While such reflections may be valuable for making habitual perceptual practices explicit, I would suggest that this is only a condition for the possibility of changing ablist perceptual practices rather than the change itself. Students are likely to enter the classroom lacking the insight that they are even engaging in perceptual practices informed by cultural narratives rather than simply perceiving people with impairments as they are. I argue that an approach to teaching on disability that thematizes perceptual practices regarding disability, and takes experiences of disabled people into account, would be more effective than the one Cadwallader describes. Understanding the ways that people with disabilities experience being constructed as a problem through ableist perceptual practices could help students recognize their own potential to impact others in positive and negative ways. (shrink)

The overall aim of this paper is to defend the value of the arts as uniquely instructive regarding philosophical questions. Specifically, I aim to achieve two things: firstly, to show that through the phenomenological challenge to dualist and monist ontologies the key debate in aesthetics regarding subjective response and objective judgment is reconfigured and resolved. I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s analyses complement and complete Kant’s project. Secondly, I propose that through Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological interrogations of the creative process the broader (...) issue of the viability of his relational nondualist ontology is defended against accusations that it has not gone beyond dualism or that it has collapsed into a monism. (shrink)

The prevailing judgement concerning Merleau-Ponty’s encounter with Saussure’s linguistics is that, although important for the evolution of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of language, it was based on a mistaken or at least highly idiosyncratic interpretation of Saussure’s ideas. Significantly, the rendering of Saussure that has been common both in Merleau-Ponty scholarship and in linguistics hinges on the structuralist development of the Genevan linguist’s ideas. This article argues that another reading of Saussure, in the light of certain passages of the (...) Course of General Linguistics forgotten by the structuralists, and of the manuscripts related to the published works, shows to the contrary that Merleau-Ponty’s account was sustainable. An understanding of Saussure’s ideas that does not flinch from their paradoxical features can elucidate the French phenomenologist’s views on language and expression. Moreover, the “linguistic turn” in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical development, identified by James Edie for example, does not seem to have been so clear-cut as has previously been believed; the influence of Saussure’s thought had certainly begun before Merleau-Ponty wrote Phenomenology of Perception -/- En français: « La rencontre de Merleau-Ponty avec la linguistique saussurienne : lecture fautive, réinterpretation ou prolongement ? » Inspirée de la linguistique Saussurienne, la philosophie du langage de Merleau-Ponty a souvent été considérée comme une interprétation erronée des idées de Ferdinand de Saussure ou tout du moins comme une traduction singulière de son œuvre. On remarque cependant que la relecture critique du linguiste genevois, qu’elle soit effectuée à partir de l’œuvre merleau-pontienne ou, plus généralement, dans le champ de la linguistique, repose en grande partie sur les modes d’analyse structuralistes. À la lumière de certains passages du Cours de linguistique générale négligés par les structuralistes, et des manuscrits qui se rapportent aux œuvres publiées, cet article défendra l’idée que l’interprétation de la pensée saussurienne par Merleau-Ponty reste à bien des égards pertinente, pour autant qu’elle ne recule pas devant les traits paradoxaux résultant de la pensée saussurienne. Un questionnement de la pensée de Saussure ne reculant pas devant ses traits paradoxaux peut contribuer à accroître notre compréhension des notions de langage et d’expression chez le phénoménologue français. Dans ce cadre, le « tournant linguistique » merleau-pontien, décrit par James Edie, ne paraît pas aussi net que l’on l’a soutenu auparavant : l’influence de la pensée de Saussure s’est certainement faite sentir avant l’écriture de Phénoménologie de la perception. (shrink)

In the essay “Cézanne’s Doubt,” Merleau-Ponty explores the relationship between Paul Cézanne’s art and his embodiment. The doubt in question is ultimately about the meaning of his disabilities. Should Cézanne’s disabilities or impairments shape how we interpret his art or should they instead be treated as incidental, as mere biographical data? Although Merleau-Ponty's essay isn’t intended to be phenomenological, its line of questioning is as much about lived experience as it is about art criticism, art history, and aesthetics. (...) I here offer a reading of “Cézanne’s Doubt” as an exploration of one of the more fundamental issues for phenomenological methodology: the relationship between normality and the normate. I first defend this phenomenological and disability-centric or crip reading of the essay. I then argue that insofar as one takes oneself to be “normal” and insofar as doing so underwrites phenomenological inquiry, the problematic of the normate, not just that of normality, is central to phenomenology. (shrink)

In his late ‘A Plea for Excuses’, John L. Austin suggests labelling his philosophy ‘linguistic phenomenology’. This article examines which idea of phenomenology Austin had in mind when he coined this term and what light this sheds on his method. It is argued that the key to answering this question can be found in Merleau-Ponty’s 'Phenomenology of Perception', which Austin must have been familiar with. Merleau-Ponty presents phenomenology in a way Austin could embrace: it is a method, it (...) aims at description and uses reduction, it is a non-idealistic study of essence, and interprets intentionality as ‘operative’. In this light, Austin’s method can be appreciated more fully. (shrink)

This paper aims to find, in Merleau-Ponty’s late thinking, a definition of the virtual which aligns with the latest advancements in digital technology while avoiding a reduction to the digital realm or a stark opposition to reality. The virtual is considered as a crucial characteristic in Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology, especially in The Visible and the Invisible, where a “virtual focus” or “virtual center” of the flesh is introduced. The argument posits that Merleau-Ponty’s monism of the flesh results (...) in a dynamic view of virtuality, with significant ontological implications that reshape the relationship between the digital and the analogue. Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the virtual is defined by several key features: it applies to a monist perspective on reality, to a dynamic relationality between dialectic poles, and to the fabric of reality. This interpretation of the virtual implies a divergence from the digital, as virtuality belongs to the whole spectrum of reality. (shrink)

Although better known for his phenomenology of perception and the perceived world, Merleau-Ponty’s writings also contain the outlines of a rich and unique account of the imagination and the imaginary. In this paper, I explicate the phenomenology of the image that Merleau-Ponty develops throughout his work. I show how Merleau-Ponty develops this account of the image in critical response to Sartre and in a way that follows from his own descriptions of what painters do when they paint (...) and of what we experience when we look at their paintings. The investigation of the particular mode of being of images leads to a consideration of the body and Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology. (shrink)

This chapter presents an account of Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of the body schema as an operative intentionality that is not only opposed to, but also complexly intermingled with, the representation-like grasp of the world and one’s own body, or the body image. The chapter reconstructs Merleau-Ponty’s position primarily based on his preparatory notes for his 1953 lecture ‘The Sensible World and the World of Expression’. Here, Merleau-Ponty elaborates his earlier efforts to show that the body schema is a (...) perceptual ground against which the perceived world stands out as a complex of perceptual figures. The chapter clarifies how Merleau-Ponty’s renewed interpretation of the figure-ground structure makes it possible for him to describe the relationship between body schema and perceptual (body) image as a strictly systematic phenomenon. Subsequently, the chapter shows how Merleau-Ponty understands apraxia, sleep, and perceptual orientation as examples of dedifferentiation and subtler differentiation of the body-schematic system. The last section clarifies how such body-schematic differentiating processes give rise to relatively independent superstructures of vision and symbolic cognition which constitute our body image. It, moreover, explains how, according to Merleau-Ponty, the cognitive superstructures always need to be supported by praxic operative intentionality to maintain their full sense, even though, in some cases, they have the power to compensate for praxic deficiencies. (shrink)

Two of the most basic commitments of virtue ethics, both ancient and contemporary, are that virtue is knowledge and that this knowledge is a kind of moral sensitivity that is best understood on the model of perception. On this account, the virtuous agent perceives moral goodness and badness in something like the way we perceive that a smiling person is happy or that a raging bull is dangerous. This is opposed to the more widely held view of moral experience, according (...) to which perception informs us only of nonmoral states of affairs; the specifically moral content of the experience, on this view, comes either from distinct pro or con attitudes toward those states of affairs or from general principles that we apply... (shrink)

I argue that phenomenology should take seriously what Wilfrid Sellars calls “the Myth of the Given”. Phenomenologists have either ignored this idea or misunder-stood it. I argue that the Myth of the Given, if understood correctly, could be an objection to phenomenological method. Specifically I argue that Husserl’s static phenomenology is vulnerable to a Sellarsian criticism. However, I also show that Merleau-Ponty is not vulnerable to a Sellarsian criticism because of how he navigates the relationship between phenomenology and science. (...) This shows that the question as to whether phenomenology is vulnerable to the Sellarsian criticism is more complicated than has been assumed by phenomenologists or their critics. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the phenomenology of essence and appearance in Merleau Ponty.