Abstract
This essay takes up Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl as it is expressed in the essay Le philosophe et son ombre and his 1958–1959 course at the Collège de France, La philosophie aujourd’hui, in dialogue with Levinas’s 1948 essay, La réalité et son ombre. I argue that it is a Levinasian sense of the shadow that must be heard in Merleau-Ponty’s text, “the event of being’s darkening,” and that, correlatively, Husserl’s work must not be treated as a luminous canon, as a set of scriptures bereft of all darkness, but that the brilliance of the founder of phenomenology lies in his multiplicity: that Husserl was always otherwise than himself, haunted by his shadows. In this way, we can say with thinkers like Derrida, that at the point where Husserl was a thinker of strenge Wissenschaft he was also a thinker of that which resists reduction, “what resists phenomenology within us.”
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- 1.
As Zahavi has noted, some of these readings come from Merleau-Ponty scholars, Madison and Dillon in particular, who tend to view Husserl unfairly as a solipsist, and he persuasively argues against reading Merleau-Ponty’s relationship to Husserl as overly critical. Others have claimed that Merleau-Ponty’s reading is largely cherry-picking, and that Merleau-Ponty finds an existential philosopher where there has only ever been a transcendental one. See the essays collected in Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl, especially Zahavi, “Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: A Reappraisal” and Toadvine, “Leaving Husserl’s Cave: The Philosopher and His Shadow Revisited.”
- 2.
According to Geraets, Merleau-Ponty attended the lectures Husserl gave at the Sorbonne in 1929, later to be published as the Cartesian Meditations, and that Merleau-Ponty even helped with the organization, though he also notes that these lectures were given in German, a language Merleau-Ponty understood only poorly at the time. See Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendantale.
- 3.
Embree, Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl, “Preface,” viii.
- 4.
The various essays that compose Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl collectively constitute a thorough textual analysis of Merleau-Ponty and Husserl and a careful reconstruction of the former’s interpretation from a variety of perspectives.
- 5.
Levinas, Les Temps Modernes, 38 (1948), 771–89.
- 6.
Qu’est-ce que la littérature? was published in its entirety in 1948, but the individual essays that constitute it had appeared earlier. The first installment appears in Les temps modernes in 1947. L’imaginaire was published in 1940.
- 7.
Merleau-Ponty’s own response to Qu’est-ce que la littérature? begins as La prose du monde, which he abandoned and then published later in part as “Le langage indirect et les voix du silence” in Signes.
- 8.
Merleau-Ponty, Signes, 290/178. All references to this text will be abbreviated as S using the French followed by the English translation; Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon, 9.
- 9.
Plato, 514b.
- 10.
Heidegger, The Essence of Truth, 66 ff.
- 11.
Plato, 595b.
- 12.
Heidegger, The Essence of Truth, 104 ff.
- 13.
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 21.
- 14.
Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” 132. Abbreviated RS henceforth.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Plato, 533e4-534d5.
- 19.
RS, Ibid.
- 20.
Ibid., 133.
- 21.
Ibid., 135.
- 22.
This is of course an allusion to Levinas’s Otherwise Than Being and what both Levinas and Merleau-Ponty preferred to call “transcendence.” Levinas seems to find something like this in Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on Husserl in Le philosophe et son ombre, which he read as we know from a small text called “On Intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty.” At the end of this reflection, Levinas says: “In its excellence, which is probably that of love, the laws of being and its unity do simply continue to rule. The spirituality of the social would seem to signify precisely an ‘otherwise than being’” (80).
- 23.
Ibid. This is clearly an allusion to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
- 24.
Ibid.
- 25.
Ibid., 139, trans. modified.
- 26.
For a more developed account of the themes of lateness and delay in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, see my The Philosophy of Ontological Lateness: Merleau-Ponty and the Tasks of Thinking.
- 27.
S 260-261/160. Translation modified.
- 28.
Ibid., 259/159.
- 29.
For his part, Levinas, in his note on Merleau-Ponty, seems to have approved of the reading of Husserl offered by Merleau-Ponty in Le philosophe et son ombre: “It is difficult for me to find terms adequate to express my admiration for the subtle beauty of the analyses in Merleau-Ponty’s work of that original incarnation of mind [esprit] in which Nature reveals its meaning in movements of the human body that are essentially signifying, i.e., expressive, i.e., cultural; from gesture to language, to art, to poetry and science: that original incarnation in which Nature reveals its meaning (or its soul?) in Culture. The French philosopher’s own quest doubtless permitted him to say the non-said (or at least the non-published) of Husserl’s thought, a thought whose ‘possibilities’ require an attentive ear throughout, despite the apparent immobility or restating of the main theses” (“On Intersubjectivity, 77).
- 30.
See Husserl, Ideen I, especially the first chapter of part II, “The Positing Which Belongs to the Natural Attidude and Its Exclusion.”
- 31.
The course, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, would be offered the following academic year of 1959–1960.
- 32.
Merleau-Ponty, Notes de cours, 66. Translations of this text by the author. This will be abbreviated as NC henceforth. In a footnote here Merleau-Ponty remarks: “Husserl seems to have ignored Nietzsche and all irrationalism.”
- 33.
See, for example, the documents he submitted as part of his candidacy to the Collège de France, “Un inédit de Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” as well as the lecture given at the Société française philosophique, Primat de la perception. Both of these are translated in the volume, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays.
- 34.
NC, 68.
- 35.
Ibid, 68.
- 36.
Ibid.
- 37.
Ibid.
- 38.
In a draft of the chapter of The Visible and the Invisible published under the title, “Interrogation and Reflection,” a brouillon d’une rédaction, Merleau-Ponty notes: “too late for knowing the naive world which was before it and too early for knowing everything precisely as initiative, optional operation, critical enterprise, and cultural second” (NC, 358).
- 39.
Husserl, Ideen II, 56/61.
- 40.
Ibid., 60/65.
- 41.
Ibid., 62/67. Santonin is an old drug used to eliminate parasites, a side-effect of which is “yellow vision.”
- 42.
Ibid., 96/101.
- 43.
S 287/178.
- 44.
Ibid., 263/161.
- 45.
Husserl, Ideen II, 106/128. Italics Husserl.
- 46.
See Aristotle, Physics, 200b.
- 47.
S 288/179.
- 48.
Ibid., 289/178.
- 49.
Ibid., 290/178.
- 50.
NC, 39.
- 51.
Ibid., 156–57.
- 52.
Ibid., 275. For commentary on this text and Merleau-Ponty’s later thought, see Carbone.
- 53.
The Preface to the Second Edition.
- 54.
NC 278.
- 55.
I have developed this motif more elsewhere. See Whitmoyer, “The Sense of the Transcendental: Ψυχή in Heraclitus, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty.” Chiasmi International, Mimesis/Vrin/Penn State, 2016.
- 56.
Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon, 13.
- 57.
Derrida, On Touching: Jean Luc Nancy, 19.
- 58.
This phrase is now invariably associated with Deleuze and Difference and Repetition. What we have tried to indicate under the name “shadow” here Deleuze names “encounter,” and I place this here as a provocation: “Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter…. It is not an aistheton but an aistheteon. It is not a quality but a sign. It is not a sensible being but the being of the sensible. It is not the given but that by which the given is given” (Deleuze, 140).
- 59.
Toadvine, 94.
- 60.
RS, 139.
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Whitmoyer, K. (2020). Husserl and His Shadows: Phenomenology After Merleau-Ponty. In: Apostolescu, I. (eds) The Subject(s) of Phenomenology. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 108. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29357-4_17
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