Abstract
The different chapters of the fragmentary text of The Visible and the Invisible we have are structured into a polemic against empiricist operational thought, reflexive analysis, negativist, dialectical and intuitionist modes of thought; the work sets out to define an essentially, intrinsically, interrogative mode of cognition - a “question-knowing.”1 And throughout this work, Merleau-Ponty keeps up a polemic against every kind of positivism - the positivism of empiricism; but also that of reflective philosophy (with “all the positivist bric-a-brac of ‘concepts,’ ‘judgments,’ ‘relations’...”2), the positivism of being in itself which is, in Sartre, the counterpart of the negativist conception of mind proper to dialectical thought; the positive essences presupposed by phenomenological intuitionism; and the positive intuition of immediate existence in Bergsonism. The ontology it was preparing proposes that being itself is not to be positively conceived, that “the existing world exists in the interrogative mode,”3 “in a sort of gliding, beneath the yes and the no.”4 What could it mean to conceive being itself in the interrogative mode? What could be the purpose of such a project?
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Notes
The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), p. 129.
Ibid., p. 235.
Ibid., p. 103.
Ibid., p. 102.
“The problem then becomes one… of making explicit our primordial knowledge of the ‘real,’ of describing our perception of the world as that upon which our idea of truth is for ever based. We must not, therefore, wonder whether we really perceive a world, we must instead say: the world is what we perceive.” Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Humanities, 1962), p. xvi.
The Visible and the Invisible, p. 41.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 42.
David Hume, An Inquiry concerning Human Understanding ( Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955 ), p. 160.
Ibid., pp. 161–62.
The Visible and the Invisible, p. 8.
Ibid., p. 15.
Ibid., p. 6.
Ibid.
“We must presuppose nothing - neither the naive idea of being in itself, therefore, nor the correlative idea of a being of representation, of a being for consciousness, of a being for man; these, along with the being of the world, are all notions that we have to rethink with regard to our experience of the world” Ibid.
Ibid., p. 103.
“From the point of view of Being and Nothingness the openness upon being means that I visit it in itself: if it remains distant, this is because nothingness, the anonymous one in me that sees, pushes before itself a zone of void where being no longer only is, but is seen.” Ibid., p. 99.
Ibid., pp. 101–102.
Phenomenology of Perception, p. 343.
The Visible and the Invisible, p. 28.
Phenomenology of Perception, p. 342.
Ibid., pp. x–xi. Cf. The Visible and the Invisible, p. 239: “One does not get out of the rationalism-irrationalism dilemma as long as one thinks ‘consciousness’ and ‘acts’ - The decisive step is to recognize that in fact a consciousness is intentionality without acts, fungierende, that the ‘objects’ of consciousness themselves are not something positive in front of us, but nuclei of signification about which the transcendental life pivots, specified voids.”
The true is posited in “express acts which enable me to posit before myself an object at its distance, standing in a definite relation to other objects, and having specific characteristics which can be observed…” Phenomenology of Perception, p. 343.
Ibid., p. x.
The Visible and the Invisible, p. 41.
Ibid., p. 3.
Ibid., p. 8.
Ibid.; Phenomenology of Perception, p. 343.
Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 230–35; The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 7–8.
“This indefatigable ranging over the things, which is our life, is also a continual interrogation. It is not only philosophy, it is first the look that questions the things.” The Visible and the Invisible, p. 103.
Ibid., p. 102. “If we are ourselves in question in the very unfolding of our life, it is not because a central non-being threatens to revoke our consent to being at each instant; it is because we are one sole continued question, a perpetual enterprise of taking our bearings on the constellations of the world, and of taking the bearings of the things on our dimensions.” Ibid., p. 103.
Ibid., p. 121.
Ibid., p. 103.
Ibid., p. 129.
Ibid., p. 100.
Ibid., p. 77.
Ibid., p. 105.
Ibid., p. 100.
Ibid., p. 120.
“The visible can thus fill me and occupy me only because I who see it do not see it from the depths of nothingness, but from the midst of itself; I the seer am also visible. What makes the weight, the thickness, the flesh of each color, of each sound, of each tactile texture, of the present, and of the world is that he who grasps them feels himself emerge from them by a sort of coiling up or redoubling, fundamentally homogeneous with them; he feels that he is the sensible itself coming to itself…” feels that he is the sensible itself coming to itself… (Ibid., p. 113–14) In the constructive chapter “The Intertwining - the Chiasm” this becomes the central focus of Merleau-Ponty’s revised phenomenology of perception - for, as he says, the principle fault of his Phenomenology of Perception was that it founded the analysis of perceptual experience on the concept of subjectivity, and not on the concept of implantation in the field of being. Cf. The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 183, 238–39.
Ibid., p. 103.
Ibid. “The decisive step is to recognize that… the ‘objects’ of consciousness themselves are not something positive in front of us, but nuclei of signification about which the transcendental life pivots, specified voids… the transcendent, the thing, the ‘quale’ [having] become ‘level’ or dimension…” Ibid., pp. 238–39.
Ibid., p. 197.
Ibid. “With the first vision, the first contact, the first pleasure, there is initiation, that is, not the positing of a content, but the opening of a dimension that can never again be closed, the establishment of a level in terms of which every other experience will henceforth be situated.” (Ibid., p. 151) “The concept, the signification are the singular dimensionalized, the formulated structure, and there is no vision of this invisible hinge; nominalism is right: the significations are only defined separations (écarts) -” (Ibid., pp. 237–38).
Ibid., p. 235.
Ibid., p. 103.
Ibid., p. 5.
Ibid., p. 136.
“Sartre and Ultrabolshevism” in Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 68, 236–37.
Ibid., p. 195.
Ibid., p. 193.
Ibid., pp. 264-66.
Ibid., p. 131.
Ibid., p. 132.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 136.
Ibid., pp. 132, 192.
Ibid., p. 135.
Ibid., p. 214.
Ibid., p. 129.
Ibid., pp. 100–101.
Ibid., p. 125.
Ibid., p. 4.
Ibid., Paris 1969.
Ibid., p. 15.
Ibid., p. 130.
Ibid., pp. 184–85, 225–26.
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© 1986 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht
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Lingis, A. (1986). Being in the Interrogative Mood. In: Phenomenological Explanations. Phaenomenologica, vol 96. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9610-2_3
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