Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty: Is a Cosmic Flesh of the World Feigned or Disclosed by Imagination?

Dufourcq, Annabelle

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-21792-5_4

Annabelle Dufourcq⁶

Part of the book series: Analecta Husserliana ((ANHU,volume 119))

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Abstract

Both Merleau-Ponty and Bachelard brought about a revolution in the traditional conception of imagination by demonstrating that this subjective faculty is essentially deeply rooted within an imaginary field that precedes it, inspires it, but possesses its own autonomy. According to both of them, such an imaginary dimension appears to stem from elements, matter, and the world itself. Consequently, it can be seriously argued that the world imagines and gives itself to us as a companion, a source of meaning and of inspiration. Merleau-Ponty goes further and claims that things, matter and living beings—humans included—belong to the same fundamental Flesh. My article will develop arguments justifying such an ontology. However, if Bachelard admires the imagination’s capacity to install us within a cosmos, he remains nonetheless hesitant about the cognitive and epistemological value of such a process. Imagination’s function, he claims, is mainly ethical: elemental reveries create a salutary fictitious cosmos. According to Bachelard, this representation of a harmonious and spiritual realm helps us to better live in the world, but leaves aside the dimension of resistance and of violence which is also a crucial part of harsh reality. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy gives us grounds to challenge Bachelard’s thesis. My contention is that cosmos must be imaginary, which means, no less necessarily, that the world imagines the cosmos through us. As a result such a cosmos cannot be a perfect and finished order but actually exists under the only genuine form that it can take: as the world’s imagination.

I want to thank Louise Molly Westling, who is Professor Emerita of English and Environmental Study at the University of Oregon, for her great help in correcting my English as well as for her encouragements and illuminating comments. I am fully responsible for all the mistakes that remain in the text.

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Notes

1.
Gaston Bachelard, L’eau et les rêves Essai sur l’imagination de la matière (hereafter ER) (Paris, José Corti, 1942, Le Livre de poche, « biblio essais »), p. 72, English translation by Edith R. Farrell, Dallas Institute Publications, 1999. Bachelard quotes Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.
2.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty Le visible et l’invisible (hereafter VI) (Paris, Gallimard, 1964, collection « Tel »), English translation by Alphonso Lingis, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1968, p. 313/264 (the first number refers to the page in the French edition the second to the English edition).
3.
VI p. 180/138 for instance.
4.
VI p. 298/250.
5.
Merleau-Ponty, L’Œil et l’esprit (Paris, Gallimard, 1961, « Folio essais »), p. 87, English trans. Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception, ed. J. M. Edie, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Revised by M. Smith in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston, Northwestern Univ. Press, 1993), p. 147.
6.
See for instance Michel Haar, « Proximité et distance vis-à-vis de Heidegger chez le dernier Merleau-Ponty », in Notes de Cours sur L’origine de la géométrie de Husserl. Suivi de Recherches sur la phénoménologie de Merleau-Ponty, ed. Renaud Barbaras (Paris, P.U.F., 1998), p. 144. Sartre was even so bold as to develop a psychological interpretation of the merleau-pontian notion of flesh in a rather awkward posthumous homage (« Merleau-Ponty vivant » in Situations IV. Portraits, Paris, Gallimard, 1964). He evoked Merleau-Ponty’s overwhelming pain after his mother’s death and his consistent nostalgia for his childhood and interpreted these feelings as key motifs in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of nature (see for instance Situations IV, p. 197 and p. 274).
7.
VI p. 154/117.
8.
Ibid.
9.
Merleau-Ponty, Notes de Cours sur L’origine de la géométrie de Husserl, p. 37.
10.
Bachelard, La poétique de la rêverie (PR) (1960, Paris, P.U.F. « Quadrige »), p. 135, English tr. D. Russell, (Boston, Beacon Press, 1971), p. 157.
11.
PR p. 131/152.
12.
PR p. 140/162.
13.
Bachelard, La poétique de la rêverie, Chapter V.
14.
VI p. 320/272 « the flesh as the place of emergence of a vision, a passivity that bears an activity ».
15.
I am following here Jacob Von Uexküll’s analyses in Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen. Bedeutungslehere (Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1956), English tr. J. D. O’Neil (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
16.
VI p. 191/147.
17.
Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (PP) (Paris, Gallimard, 1945, collection « Tel »), p. 12, English tr. Colin smith (New York, Routledge, 1962), p. 6. See also VI, p. 294/25.
18.
VI p. 303/255.
19.
PP p. 248/249.
20.
Plato, Timaeus, tr. Robin Waterfield (Oxford University Press, New York, 2008), 92c7–d3: Our world « a visible living being, encompassing within itself those creatures that are visible. »
21.
See, for instance, Democritus, to whom is classically attributed the word « microcosm »: Aristotle, Physics, VIII, 2, 252b 26.
22.
Jean-Pierre Vernant, Les origines de la pensée grecque (Paris: P.U.F. Quadrige, 2007) and Mythe et pensée chez les grecs (Paris, Maspero, 1971), Myth and though among the Greeks (London, Boston, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), Part Three: “The Organisation of Space,” especially pp. 187–9.
23.
Aristotle, On the Heavens 295b10, Vernant, Myth and Thought among the Greeks, p. 192.
24.
Plato, Gorgias, 507e–508a.
25.
See Eye and Mind, Part III.
26.
Descartes, Principes de la philosophie, §39, Eng. Tr. by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch in Philosophical Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), vol. 1.
27.
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 6th Meditation, Adam and Tannery, VII 83 and IX 66.
28.
Merleau-Ponty thus asserts in La Nature. Notes de cours au Collège de France, Paris, seuil, « traces écrites », 1995, that “We can neither say that our space is Riemannian nor that itis non-Riemannian (…) Perceptual space is polymorphous”, p.144, Eng tr by R. Vallier, Evanston , Northwestern, 2003, p. 105.
29.
See E. Panofsky, Die Perspektive als symbolische Form, in Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg 1924-1925, Leipzig, 1927. Merleau-Ponty mentions his work several times for instance L’institution. La passivité. Notes de cours au Collège de France (1954-1955) (IP) Paris, Belin, 2003, p.81-85, p.137-142 and L’OEil et l’esprit, p. 49.
30.
Emmanuel de Saint-Aubert, Du lien des êtres aux éléments de l’être. Merleau-Ponty au tournant des années 1945-1951 (Paris: Vrin, 2004), pp. 211–218.
31.
Merleau-Ponty, Causeries 1948 (Paris, Seuil, « Traces écrites », 2002), p. 53; La Prose du monde (Paris, Gallimard, 1969, « Tel »), p. 211.
32.
See for instance the crucial concepts of “dehiscence” (VI 155/117, p. 168/128) or of “the fission of Being” (L’Œil et l’esprit, p. 81/147).
33.
See for instance Husserl, 6th Logical Research, Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band, Zweiter Teil : Elemente einer phänomenologischen Aufklärung der Erkennnis, 1901, Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen, 7 Auflage, 1993, §37 p.117. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie (Husserliana III), La Haye, M. Nijhoff, 1950, §41–44, and Merleau-Ponty, La structure du comportement, Paris, P.U.F., 1942, « Quadrige », 1990, p. 201.
34.
See Germaine Guex, Névrose d’abandon (Paris, P.U.F., 1950) and Merleau-Ponty, Child psychology and Pedagogy: the Sorbonne Lectures, Talia Welsh, tr. (Evanston, Northwestern, 2010), p. 182.
35.
IP, p. 204 and 209.
36.
Merleau-Ponty, L’institution. La passivité. Notes de cours au Collège de France (1954-1955) (IP) Paris, Belin, 2003, Eng. Tr. by Len Lawlor and Heath Massey (Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2010) : « we wallow in Being without taking leave, we exploit bodily presence in the world in order to make a pseudo-world where subject and object are indistinct (…) all things are linked by their participation in my life », p. 209, English tr. p. 158.
37.
IP 204–205/155.
38.
VI p. 186/142.
39.
VI p. 234/180.
40.
VI p. 298/250.
41.
VI p. 118/85.
42.
L’imaginaire » is quite tricky to translate into English. In French the substantive « l’imaginaire » means a field of images, metaphors, associations and themes forming a huge moving system that influences individual imaginations. “The imaginary” is certainly not a clear-cut conceptual system, but it possesses a certain autonomy and is structured by relatively consistent melodic lines: some metaphors, some myths recur over and over again through various times and places, some associations are particularly stubborn, while others fail to convince. In the imaginary field, alcohol is liquid fire, fathers eat their children, standing waters are tears, animals turn into men and vice versa, a lake is a cosmic eye and dead people become ghosts. Thus what we have called “the cosmic imagery” would be called “l’imaginaire du cosmos” in French. « L’imaginaire » is a source of inspiration for art, reveries, legends, it haunts us rather than being made up according to our whim. The specific interest of this notion is that it unveils a pre-personal source for our fantasies and challenges the classical theory according to which images stem from a subjective faculty of the mind.
43.
See A. Dufourcq, « Institution et imaginaire: la réflexion merleau-pontyenne sur les illusions amoureuses », Chiasmi International (Vrin, Mimésis, Memphis U.P., Clinamen Press) n°6, 2005.
44.
P. Claudel, Art poétique (Paris, Mercure de France, 1929), p. 61, Merleau-Ponty, PP p. 94/92. See also the illuminating analyses of this concept in Saint-Aubert, p. 243 sqq. And in T. Toadvine, « Le passage du temps naturel », in Alter, n°16, 2008, p. 169.
45.
Bachelard PR p. 149/174.
46.
Bachelard ER p. 25/16.
47.
ER p. 8–9/2.
48.
ER, p. 18/11.
49.
PR167/191 Bachelard quotes H. Bosco, Malicroix (Paris, Gallimard, 1948), pp. 134–135.
50.
ER p. 181/168.
51.
PR p. 176/204, J. Audiberti, Carnage (Paris, Gallimard, 1942), p. 50 « “elle ressentait presque qu’elle était l’eau du lac. L’eau du lac se lève. Elle marche”. Mélusine revenant sur la terre, marchant sur la terre a gardé l’énergie de la nage. L’eau, en elle, est l’être d’une énergie. »
52.
PR p. 173/201.
53.
PR p. 179/207.
54.
The distancing process in which the world essentially consists is also our relative misfortune: it exposes us to the impression of isolation, to the hatred of others and of oneself, to the opacity and harshness of things. Thus, as T. Toadvine rightly pointed out in “Apocalyptic Imagination and the Silence of the Elements” in The Experience of Nature: Phenomenologies of the Earth, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch and Fernando Castrillon (Berlin, Springer, 2013), the imaginary of cosmos also includes fantasies of the decay and the end of the world, the terror of an anonymous and absurd “there is” such as described by Levinas in Existence and existents. To aim at limit-experiences of brute sensations, poverty of world and death (or as Levinas puts it, the sickening impossibility of death) at the very margin of the phenomenology of perception, is an integral part of our relationship with Being, beyond the world. Yet such references to limit-experiences are still part of a cosmic process. This point would deserve a much more detailed account, but let us sketch a path: the “there is” cannot be, in my opinion, purely terrifying: as discovered on the horizon of the quasi-disappearance of the subject, it still must be embodied in a dynamic structure of imagination and desire. And, indeed, the latter always goes together with anxiety and fright. Hence Bachelard’s reflection demonstrates that our playing with brute matter and raw sensations may take various intonations. Thus it is only apparently paradoxical that one may feel enriched and somehow enlivened – bewildered – by such a dissolution of forms and meanings. Precisely, Bachelard’s apprehension of the “there is” happens to be essentially cheerful.

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Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, U Krize 8, Prague, Czech Republic
Annabelle Dufourcq

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Dufourcq, A. (2016). Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty: Is a Cosmic Flesh of the World Feigned or Disclosed by Imagination?. In: Tymieniecka, AT., Trutty-Coohill, P. (eds) The Cosmos and the Creative Imagination. Analecta Husserliana, vol 119. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21792-5_4

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