Abstract
The ‘problem of the other’ pervades Merleau-Ponty’s writings. He concluded The Structure of Behaviour with a brief discussion of how we make sense of the action of others.1 The analysis of the perceived world in the Phenomenology of Perception culminated with an account of Others and the Human World’.2 He devoted a course at the Sorbonne to ‘The Child’s Relations with Others’ and spent part of his course on ‘Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language’ reviewing the discussion of the other in Husserl and Scheler.3 The penultimate chapter of The Prose of the World dealt with ‘Dialogue and the Perception of the Other’.4 The problematic status of ‘Being-for-others’ played a major role in the critique of Sartre in Adventures of the Dialectic.5 The problem of the other likewise occupied a prominent place in his last courses at the Collège de France.6 And finally, one of the more fecund working notes for The Visible and the Invisible argued that a successful resolution of dilemmas surrounding the problem of others ‘requires a complete reconstruction of philosophy’.7
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Notes
For other discussions of Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Sartre’s analysis of the other, see Margaret Whitford, Merleau-Ponty’s Critique of Sartre s Philosophy (Lexington: French Forum, 1982) pp. 98–114, and Francois H. Lapointe, ‘The Existence of Alter Egos: Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’, Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 6 (1975–6) pp. 209–16.1 should also note my own earlier discussion ‘Lordship and Bondage in Merleau-Ponty and Sartre’, Political Theory, 7:2 (1979) pp. 201–27, which has been modified in a number of ways in the chapter which follows.
See, for example, the brief sketch in A. J. Ayer, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (New York: Random House, 1982) which comes to the rather surprising conclusion that ‘Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of freedom adds nothing to Sartre’s’ (p. 232).
Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. H. E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956) pp. 439–85, with PP, p. xix; cf. Sartre, ‘No Exit’, in No Exit and Three Other Plays, trans. S. Gilbert (New York: Vintage, 1949) p. 47, with PrP, p. 25.
VI, pp. 69, 170–1, 175–6; for a discussion of the degree to which Merleau-Ponty is criticising himself as well as Sartre, see John Sallis, Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1973) pp. 64–9.
Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Merleau-Ponty et le Pseudo-Sartrisme’, Les Temps Modernes, 10:114–5 (1955) pp. 2072–122; for a discussion of the article, largely sympathetic to de Beauvoir and Sartre, see James F. Sheridan, On Ontology and Politics: A Polemic’, Dialogue, 7 (1968) pp. 449–60. For a more balanced account, see Whitford, pp. 41–51.
Paul Valéry, Collected Works, vol.6: Monsieur Teste, trans. J. Mathews (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973) p. 121.
For a concise critique of the argument from analogy, see Norman Malcolm, ‘Knowledge of Other Minds’, Journal of Philosophy, 55 (1958) pp. 969–78. For a defence of the argument, see A. J. Ayer, The Problem of Knowledge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956) pp. 214–22; Ayer has contrasted his own position to that of Merleau-Ponty in Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, pp. 219–22.
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977) pp. l 11–19.
For Kojève’s impact, see Descombes, pp. 9–16, 27–48; Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Modern France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975) pp. 8–18, 32–5; George L. Kline, ‘The Existentialist Rediscovery of Hegel and Marx’, in E. Lee and M. Mandelbaum (eds), Phenomenology and Existentialism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967) pp. l 14–21; and Jean Hyppolite, ‘La “Phénoménologie” de Hegel et la pensée française contemporaine’, in Figures de la pensée philosophique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971) vol.l, pp. 231–41. For a comprehensive discussion of Kojève’s writings, see Patrick Riley, ‘Introduction to the Reading of Alexandre Kojève’, Political Theory, 9:1 (1981) pp. 5–48.
The synopsis in this paragraph and the next is drawn from the article Kojève published in Mesures in 1939, reprinted in Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. J. H. Nichols, Jr (New York: Basic Books, 1969) pp. 3–30.
Ibid, p. 20. For a critique of Kojève’s account of Hegel’s argument, see Mikel Dufrenne, ‘Actualitie de Hegel’, in Jalons (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966) pp. 72–6; Jean Wahl, ‘A Propos de l’introduction a la Phénoménologie de Hegel par A. Kojève’, Deucalion, 5 (1955) pp. 77–99; Tran-Duc-Thao, ‘The Phenomenology of Mind and its Real Content’, trans. R. D’Amico, Telos, 8 (1971) pp. 91–110; George Armstrong Kelly, Hegel’s Retreat from Eleusis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) pp. 29–54; and my ‘Lordship and Bondage in Merleau-Ponty and Sartre’, pp. 202–5.
For discussions of Kojève’s influence on Merleau-Ponty, see Rabil, pp. 76–84; Barry Cooper, ‘Hegel and the Genesis of Merleau-Ponty’s Atheism’, Studies in Religion, 6 (1976–7) pp. 665–71; and Cooper, Merleau-Ponty and Marxism, pp. 14–16, 38–40, 114–15, 136–7. For examples of his use of the motif of Lordship and Bondage in his political writings, see SNS, p. 142, S, p. 215, H&T, pp. 37, 102–3, 109–11, 155.
Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, pp. 89–151. The Cartesian Meditations were held back from publication by Husserl, at least in part because of dissatisfaction with the account of the other, a dissatisfaction which would seem to post-date the Formal and Transcendental Logic which describes the forthcoming discussion of the other in the Cartesian Meditations as ‘short’ (p. 243). For commentaries on the Fifth Meditation, see Paul Ricoeur, Husserl, pp. 115–42; Carr, Phenomenology and the Problem of History, pp. 84–99; Alfred Schutz, ‘The Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity in Husserl’, Collected Papers, vol. Ill, pp. 51–84; and Frederick A. Elliston, ‘Husserl’s Phenomenology of Empathy’, in F. A. Elliston and P. McCormick (eds), Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977) pp. 213–31. On the more general problem of the other in Husserl, see Michael Theunissen, The Other, trans. C. Macann (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984) pp. 13–163.
Suzanne Bachelard, A Study of Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. L. E. Embree (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968) p. 108; Cartesian Meditations, p. 98. See also Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of a parallel argument in Ideen II, in S, pp. 173–4.
Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick (New York: Noonday Press, 1957) pp. 37–8, 41–2.
Schutz concedes Sartre’s argument; see Collected Papers, I, pp. 183–4, 197. For a defence of Husserl, see Frederick A. Elliston, ‘Sartre and Husserl on Interpersonal Relationships’, in H. J. Silverman and F. A. Elliston (eds), Jean-Paul Sartre: Contemporary Approaches to His Philosophy (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1980) pp. 157–67.
Wolfgang Köhler, The Mentality of Apes, trans. E. Winte (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1925) pp. 317–24; Paul Guillaume, Imitation in Children, trans. E. P. Halperin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971) pp. 150–4; and Henri Wallon, Les origines du charactere chez Γenfant (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1949) pp. 218–34 (first published as ‘Comment se dévéloppee chez l’enfant la notion du corps proper’, Journal de Psychologie (1931) pp. 705–48).
Ibid; Lacan makes his debts to Kojève most explicit in a lecture from 1946, ‘Propos sur la causalité psychique’, included in the French edition of Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966) but not in the English translation; see pp. 172, 181. For a discussion of the relationship between Kojève’s reading of Hegel and Lacan’s discussion of the mirror stage, see Anthony Wilden, ‘Lacan and the Discourse of the Other’, in Lacan, The Language of the Self( New York: Delta, 1968) pp. 192–6.
Jacques Lacan, ‘Maurice Merleau-Ponty’, Les Temps Modernes, 17:184–5 (1961) pp. 245–54.
For a differing assessment of the impact of Freud on Merleau-Ponty, see André Green, ‘Du Comportement a la chair: itinéraire de Merleau-Ponty’, Critique, no.211 (1964) pp. 1017–46.
S, p. 229. See also, TFL, pp. 129–30; his exchange with Lacan in La Psychoanalyse et son enseignement, Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie, 52 (1957) pp. 98–9; and the summary of his response to papers by Stein, Laplanche and Leclaire in Henry Ey (ed.), L’Inconscient, Vie Colloque de Bonneval (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1966) p. 143.
See Madison, p. 164; J.-B. Pontalis, ‘Note sur le problème de l’inconscient chez Merleau-Ponty’, Les Temps Modernes, 17:184–5 (1961) pp. 287–303; J.-B. Pontalis, ‘Présence, entre les signes, absence’, L’Arc, no.46 (1971) pp. 56–66; and the more general discussion in Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, trans. D. Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970) pp. 375–418.
Jacques Lacan, ‘Discours de Jacques Lacan’, Actes du Congrès de Rome, La Psychanalyse, I (1956) p. 210, as quoted in Anthony Wilden’s notes to Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self, p. 100 ft; see also Écrits, pp. 44, 49, 89–90.
For a discussion of the events, see Alexander Werth, France 1940–1955 (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1956) pp. 575–80.
Sartre, The Communists and Peace with A Reply to Claude Lefort, trans. M. H. Fletcher, J. R. Kleinschmidt, and P. R. Bert (New York: George Braziller, 1968).
See also Dick Howard, ‘A Marxist Ontology?’, Cultural Hermeneutics, 1 (1973) pp. 251–2. In a 1975 interview Sartre confessed ‘what is particularly bad in L’Etre et le Néant is the specifically social chapter, on the “we”, compared to the chapters on the “you” and “other” ’: Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, p. 13.
For a parallel argument, see Sartre ‘Materialism and Revolution’, in Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. A. Michelson (New York: Collier, 1962) pp. 238–9.
5, p. 223; cf. Machiavelli, The Prince, VIII, and Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960) pp. 220–24.
M. C. Dillon, ‘Sartre on the Phenomenal Body and Merleau-Ponty’s Critiqu Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 5:2 (May 1974) p. 154; see also the discussion in Marjorie Grene, ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Renewal of Ontology’, pp. 618–20, and Grene, Sartre, pp. 167–9.
Descartes, La Dioptrique, in Oeuvres de Descartes, vol.VI, ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery (Paris: Vrin, 1965) pp. 79–228. There is a partial English translation by N. K. Smith in his edition of Descartes: Philosophical Writings; it will be cited in parentheses after the citation to Adam and Tannery.
Paul Valéry, ‘Descartes’, in Masters and Friends, trans. M. Turnell, Collected Works, vol.9 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968) p. 17. Merleau-Ponty drew on this essay in his 1951 lecture ‘Man and Adversity’; see S, p. 228.
Marc Richir, ‘La défenestration’, L’Arc, no.46 (1971) pp. 31–42.
Marjorie Grene, ‘The Aesthetic Dialogue of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 1:2 (May 1970) p. 72.
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Schmidt, J. (1985). Others. In: Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Theoretical Traditions in the Social Sciences. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17869-8_3
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