Abstract
Invocations of Merleau-Ponty’s claim concerning the incompleteness that accompanies the phenomenological reduction have had a long and somewhat contentious history. In this paper I will further explore the implications of Merleau-Ponty’s claim and the itinerary from which it emerges. From the Structure of Behaviour onward, he argued that consciousness is not a transcendental presupposition but an achievement that emerges from and transforms the labor of our rational practices (1963: 162, 176). Phenomenological theory rightly argued for the centrality of the experience of the reduction, albeit too often by mistakenly bestowing immanence upon it. Statically regarded, the reduction may involve an ‘act’ but it is also a Stiftung, and thus a performative, one that Merleau-Ponty claims involves an institution and an acquisition: as he puts it quite simply, it is learned (s’apprenent) (1964: 179). The reduction involves intuition but it is also a conceptual practice involving “a multitude of operations”, a symbolic matrix always articulated through internal transformations. Finally the reduction is an experience but it is always a sequence “gradually effected” and thus an embodied history (1968: 173). It results then not in the Spinozist Habemus ideam verum, but as “The Philosopher and His Shadow” rightly concludes, an “artifact” (1964: 180). For Merleau-Ponty, all this forced the recognition of the “internal difficulty” (interne difficulté) in the reduction theorized through the concept of a constituting consciousness. Moreover, this not an anthropological claim about a faculty or finitude, but a claim about the rationality, the “metamorphosis” and “coherent deformation” of its experience, an “ordered sequence of steps” that “could not possibly reach completion in the intellectual possession of a noema” (1964: 165). It is not simply en presence, in the static relation of presence that phenomenology achieves justification. For Merleau-Ponty, its experience is not unrevisable, nor immanently completable: instead it is only through the ordered steps of its history that it acquires sufficiency.
The most important lesson of the reduction is the impossibility of a complete reduction (Merleau-Ponty 2012, lxxvii). (Unless otherwise noted all references in the text are to the works of Merleau-Ponty.)
The passage to intersubjectivity is contradictory only with regard to an insufficient reduction, Husserl was right to say. But a sufficient reduction leads beyond the alleged transcendental ‘immanence’ … (1968, 172).
The incompleteness (l’incomplétude) of the reduction … is not an obstacle to the reduction, it is the recovery of vertical being (1968, 178).
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
See Hegel (1969), 400 ff.
- 3.
See my “Cancellations: Hegel, Husserl and the Remains of the Dialectic”, in Watson (2009).
- 4.
See Husserl (1970b), 374.
- 5.
See Husserl (1981, Chap. 17).
- 6.
In an early formulation Merleau-Ponty connected the accounts of Spinozist eternity and Husserl’s “originary doxa,” citing Experience and Judgement: “We do not criticize intellectualism for making use of this decisive act that fulfills, within time, the function of a Spinozist eternity, of this “originary doxa,” we criticize it for making use of it tacitly” (2012, 43). As will become further apparent, while the Phenomenology is ambiguous about whether Husserl thought had recognized or entailed this, Signs argues that Husserl knew better, claiming that constituting consciousness is the result of an Erwirkung, “the artifact the teleology of intentional life ends up at – and not the Spinozist attribute of Thought” (1964, 180). Still, this opposition may also be abstract: as Veronique Foti has commented, Spinoza’s methodology of generative definition, itself articulated in opposition to Descartes’ foundational commitments, also remains proximate to Husserl’s later genetic account.
- 7.
The Phenomenology had insisted, explicitly against Cassirer, that we must acknowledge expressive experiences prior to acts of signification, expressive sense (Ausdrucks-Sinn) prior to significantive sense (Zeichen-Sinn) and symbolic pregnancy of form in content prior to subsumption of content under form (2012, 304). Moreover, this anteriority could not simply be dissolved or overcome by what Cassirer called pure expression or logical or causal representation. See Cassirer (1957), 68–9. In so doing, Merleau-Ponty felt compelled to explicitly confront the issue of psychologism (2012, 305). He responded to this issue, still echoing Husserl’s inner time consciousness, by invoking a different “phenomenology of spirit” articulated through the horizons of possible objectification within the flow (flux) of subjectivity (ibid). As has become apparent, the later Merleau-Ponty has augmented this account of ‘anteriority’ by further removing it from the philosophy of immanence and insisting on the ‘codetermining’ (and moreover circular) account of historical genesis within the flux itself.
- 8.
The concept of symbolic matrix, initially conceptualized in terms of the work art became paradigmatic, “an analogue” for “productive” philosophy as early as The Prose of the World. Like Kant’s aesthetic ideas, Merleau-Ponty claims that the work of art generates a “matrix of ideas” that provides us “with symbols whose meaning we shall never finish developing” (1973, 90). See: Kant (1987), 215. Doubtless all of this should be understood less restrictedly in terms of aesthetic rationality and more in terms of a generative matrix or flux that belies determining judgment, one that also intersects his interpretation of Husserl’s account of historical Stiftung.
- 9.
Lacan (1978), 71.
- 10.
This claim occurs throughout his work and as early as the Logical Investigations where it provides the theoretical framework for “analytic phenomenology”. See Husserl (1970b), 321–2.
- 11.
The Phenomenology had equally criticized the notion of synthesis in Kant “and certain of Husserl’s Kantian texts,” preferring (like the Kantian judgment of perception), the notion of synopsis instead. It talked still of an I that “dominates (domine)” multiplicity albeit only “thanks to time, such that I never have the consciousness of being the absolute author of time” (2012, 543n60).
- 12.
See Fink (1981).
- 13.
Fink (1970), 127.
- 14.
Indeed the claim ultimately was not that language is simply founding, like a system or a cause, but that it involved a praxis of “simultaneity” of history and articulation or implication: “The bidirectional Fundierung becomes ‘simultaneity’ (2002, 53–4).
- 15.
Fink (1981), 65.
- 16.
Ibid., 67.
- 17.
See Fink (1995), 84 ff. Compare Husserl’s response to this tack included in the editorial notes (93n): “It is also not permissible to speak of a reduction of language.”
- 18.
Ibid., 77.
- 19.
- 20.
Schlegel (1991), 28.
- 21.
- 22.
Recalling the logic at issue thus helps to clarify a criticism of Jacques Taminiaux’s handling of the phenomenological reduction in his work, The Metamorphosis of Phenomenological Reduction. Taminiaux follows Merleau-Ponty’s account of the reduction as an incompletable adventure, characterizing it as “a constellation of flexible approaches.” (Taminiaux 2004, 27). As noted at the outset, this is a somewhat contested view. Like other critics of Merleau-Ponty, Dermot Moran, for example, insisting on the historical and conceptual link between the reduction and the transcendental consciousness of immanence, questioned Taminiaux’s rendering of its interrogative and indeterminate status. See: Moran (2006), 290–291. This antinomy surely reflects their difference over Merleau-Ponty’s own internal criticism and transformation of Husserl. On the other hand, Taminiaux begins by claiming that, while metamorphosis is a term that belongs to ordinary language, the reduction is technical (Taminiaux 2004, 7). I am arguing that in Merleau-Ponty’s work, and tactitly in Taminiaux’s appropriation of it, this contrast has disappeared; the rationality inherent in the metamorphosis of the reduction has achieved theoretical status, interpreted precisely as a sequence of rational transformations. To quote Merleau-Ponty: “It is not simply a metamorphosis in the fairy tale sense of a miracle or magic violence, or aggression … not an absolute creation in an absolute solitude;” instead it “also infuses a new meaning in what called for and anticipated it” – in short a Stiftung (1973, 68). This is surely echoed in Taminiaux’s conclusions regarding Husserl and Heidegger: “I hope these remarks are enough to suggest that the adventure of the reduction in the work of the two founders of phenomenology entailed in their wake ever renewed metamorphoses” (Taminiaux 2004, 56).
- 23.
See Husserl (1970a), 131.
- 24.
“The break up and the destruction of the first appearance do not authorize me to define henceforth the real as only probable, since they are only another name for the new apparition, which must therefore figure in our analysis of the dis-illusion. The dis-illusion is the loss of one evidence only because it is the acquisition of another evidence. There is no Schein without an Erscheinung … every Schein is the counterpart of an Erscheinung.” (1968, 40–1).
- 25.
Perhaps no one explored the complex and plural relation between reduction, intuition and symbolic institution than the late Marc Richir to whom I am thankful to have been introduced by Jacques Taminiaux four decades ago – and whose work the latter influenced doubtless as much as these analyses here. See for example, Richir (1988).
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Watson, S. (2017). On the Metamorphoses of Transcendental Reduction: Merleau-Ponty and “the Adventures of Constitutive Analysis.”. In: Fóti, V., Kontos, P. (eds) Phenomenology and the Primacy of the Political. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 89. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56160-8_7
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