Abstract
For Merleau-Ponty, the social or cultural world—for the most part, these expressions are used interchangeably—takes shape in and through the cooperative and competitive efforts of society’s members as they both constitute the sense of their lives and take up the fabric of meanings laid down by others in the institution of laws, customs, traditions, mores, and the like. This being so, an adequate comprehension of the social world demands first that one understand the intersubjectivity that precedes it (logically, not temporally) and makes it possible. Accordingly, the present chapter will sketch the main structures of intersubjectivity, but largely abstracted from its temporal thickness. Since the latter will entail a reference to history and institution, that part of the discussion will be left for the following chapter.
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Notes
For reasons given below in the text, I think Merleau-Ponty’s view of the body-subject does in fact differ substantially from the pour-soi of Sartre’s early writings. In the long run, how much a distinction is possible from Sartre’s later writings is debatable and turns on how consistent texts such as La Critique de la raison dialectique and the posthumously published Cahiers pour une morle and Les carnets de la drôle de guerre: Novembre 1939-Mars 1940 can be with, say, L’Être et le néant. And it will be even more interesting to make comparisons and contrasts with all of Sartre’s unpublished writings once they finally appear.
The ascription of this statement to Husserl also appears in the Phénoménologie de la perception and in Les sciences de l’homme et la phénoménologie,cited in Bulletin de Psychologie,n ° 236 (novembre 1964), p. 143. But as Herbert Spiegelberg has pointed out, such a quotation has never been found. See The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction,3rd Edition (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), pp. 580–81, n.2.
Alphonse de Waelhens, “Une Philosophie de l’ambiguité,” the Preface to Merleau-Ponty’s La Structure du comportement (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942), p. v.
It is a bit misleading, therefore, to say, as Albert Rabil, Jr., does, that “the social world is also primordial. It is already there, given, prior to my attempts to account for reciprocity. The human world, like the natural world, leads us back to the lived or existential world.” Merleau-Ponty: Existentialist of the Social World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), pp. 36–37. This sense of “primordial,” that is, being given in experience, is different from, but related to, the one under discussion here and which is invoked by de Waelhens above (note 3).
This claim about the inevitable futility of introspection should be considered together with Sartre’s contentions that, for years, Merleau-Ponty engaged in serious and disciplined introspection, plumbing the depths of his own experiences and memories in an (unsuccessful) attempt to recapture the immediacy of his own childhood. See his “Merleau-Ponty [I]”, trans. William S Hamrick, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. XV, No. 2, May 1984, p. 130.
For a more detailed and extremely lucid account of the way Merleau-Ponty attempts to account for intersubjectivity, see Gary Brent Madison, The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty ( Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1981 ), pp. 37–45.
Laurie Spurling, Phenomenology and the Social World ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977 ), p. 52.
James M. Edie, “Merleau-Ponty: The Triumph of Dialectics over Structuralism,” Man and World 17: 299–312 (1984) at p. 304. Reprinted (and cited) in J.N. Mohanty, ed. Phenomenology and the Human Sciences ( Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985 ), p. 64.
Le Primat de la perception et ses conséquences philosophiques,“ Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie,XLI, 1947 (séance du 23 novembre 1946), p. 125.
Le Primat de la perception et ses conséquences philosophiques,“ pp. 124–25.
Sartre also complained with some bitterness, and considerable sarcasm, of the idealistic basis of their common philosophical training— with particular reference to the idealism of their teacher, Léon Brunschvicg. For Sartre’s critique of the latter’s “sinister and cozy idealism,” see “Merleau-Ponty [I],” pp. 128–29.
This claim is culture-bound to the degree that it is largely true in Western capitalistic societies. For instance, one of the gloomiest statements in the English language is “I only work here.” (One would not say of one’s family home, “I only live here” unless that particular family had already lost a good share of its community.) But on the other hand, this claim is not nearly as true of cultures such as that of Japan. Perhaps in some way its truth or falsity depends on whether it is a question of guilt cultures, like those of the West, or of shame cultures, like those of the East—and also of the original Americans. See William S. Hamrick, “Redeeming the Earth: Tragic Wisdom and the Plains Indians,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. XVI, Number 1, January 1985, pp. 36–54.
The Latin word “socius,” from which we derive “society” and “la société,” originally meant “companion.”
There is perhaps no better example of this danger, and of the moral dilemmas it poses, than the play, Pack of Lies. This particular piece of theatre should be required viewing for all members of intelligence-gathering communities (not in Tönnies’ sense!) of freedom-loving, democratic societies.
See de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale,édition critique, préparé par Tullio de Mauro (Paris: Payot, 1976), especially pp. 23–38.
De Saussure, p. 33.
De Saussure, p. 30.
Edie, p. 63, citing the English translation, “An Unpublished Text,” in The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays, ed. James M. Edie ( Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964 ), p. 8.
Edie, p. 62.
Edie, p. 67.
Edie, p. 69.
Edie, p. 65. He also notes that, “since Merleau-Ponty will never fully agree to the structuralist requirement that the laws of language are foundational and universally valid for any and every natural language, he states that his method is only a ‘methodological’ rationalism which must not be confused with a ‘dogmatic rationalism.’” (pp. 64–65, citing “An Unpublished Text” at p. 10.)
Edie, p. 66.
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Hamrick, W.S. (1987). Intersubjectivity. In: An Existential Phenomenology of Law: Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phaenomenologica, vol 104. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0707-7_2
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