Abstract
Philosophy, in Merleau-Ponty’s view, always comprises a return “to an intersubjectivity which, ever more closely, binds us to the whole of history” (S 141). Accordingly, history is a subject with which Merleau-Ponty is concerned again and again throughout his works, from the earliest up to the very last writings. Across these texts, he is concerned to argue that history provides intersubjectivity with temporal depth by (i) furnishing a dimension of historicity to an individual consciousness, by (ii) anchoring our incarnate freedom in an established order of sedimented meanings, and finally by (iii) elaborating our relationships with others in the creation of truth, meaning, and rationality.
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Notes
Thus Alfred Schutz, elaborating on the Phenomenology of Perception: “Man finds himself at any moment of his daily life in a biographically determined situation, that is, in a physical and socio-cultural environment as defined by him, within which he has his position, not merely his position in terms of physical space and outer time or of his status and role within the social system but also his moral and ideological position. To say that this definition of the situation is biographically determined is to say that it has its history; it is the sedimentation of all man’s previous experiences, organized in the habitual possessions of his stock of knowledge at hand, and as such his unique possession, given to him and to him alone.” Collected Papers,ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), I, p. 9. (Footnotes from the above passage have been omitted.)
Schutz, p. 10.
For further particulars on this subject, see William S. Hamrick, “Language and Abnormal Behavior: Merleau-Ponty, Hart, and Laing,” Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, Volume XVIII, Nos. 1, 2, & 3, 1982–83 (but actually published in 1985 ), pp. 181–203.
It does not appear in either La Prose du monde,the Résumés de Cours,or in Signes,but it finally does come out in L’oeil et l’esprit (at p. 90), that Merleau-Ponty derives this concept of indirect problem solving from Erwin Panofsky. See also below in Chapter III where this model of problem solving is discussed in terms of the process of making moral decisions.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. See especially Chapters IX, “The Nature and Necessity of Scientific Revolutions,” and X, “Revolutions as Changes of World View.”
There is really a double transcendence here in that the paradigm shift allowed one to see as causation what had not been thought to be such. As Kuhn points out, in the early stages of the shift to the Newtonian paradigm, one refused even to label as causation what Newton was describing.
It is fair to observe that today the same very probably may be true of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy itself.
Préface“ to L’oeuvre de Freud et son importance pour le monde moderne,Dr. A. Hesnard (Paris: Payot, 1960), pp. 5–10.
Merleau-Ponty in Hesnard, p. 7.
Merleau-Ponty in Hesnard, p. 9.
Merleau-Ponty: Existentialist of the Social World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 290, n. 20 (emphasis mine). See also the article to which Rabil refers in the same place, “Note sur le problème de l’inconscient chez Merleau-Ponty,” J.-B. Pontalis, Les Temps Modernes XVII (1961), pp. 287–303.
For a fresh perspective on this subject, see Jean-Paul Sartre, “Merleau-Ponty [I],” trans. William S. Hamrick, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Volume XV, Number iWo, May 1984, pp. 134–35.
Le Primat de la perception et ses conséquences philosophiques,“ Bulletin de la Société Francaise de Philosophie,XLI, 1947 (séance du 23 novembre 1946), p. 120.
Le Primat de la perception et ses conséquences philosophiques,“ p. 120.
Relative to the preceding note as well as to the sentence referenced by the present one, consider the following statements from a lecture which Merleau-Ponty gave at the Collège de France just a little over two weeks (on 17 April 1961) before he died: “How does philosophy develop a bad ambiguity? Like `overview’ thinking,” exhaustive, possessing the thing ‘in thought,’ philosophy wanting to be all, is nothing; it does not inhabit the things it discusses.... It lacks everything, both the particular and the universal. By contrast, it must have both. This thought will not have the character of an overview, the pretense of living at a distance, of seeing, haunting, contemplating.... By contrast, what is needed is a manner of thinking which is at the same time concrete and universal.“ ”Philosophie et non-philosophie depuis Hegel,“ notes de cours, texte établi et présenté par Claude Lefort, Textures,Nos. 10–11 (1975), pp. 145–173. Cited in the English translation, ”Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel,“ trans. Hugh J. Silverman, Telos,No. 29, Fall 1976, pp. 43–105, at p. 97. See also here James L. Marsh, ”Phenomenology as Ideology Critique,“ Philosophy Today,Fall 1980, pp. 272–84.
Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth,“ in Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1910), p. 201.
James, p. 200.
William James, “What Pragmatism Means,” cited in Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking,p. 53. Cf. John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (New York: Capricorn Books, 1960). See especially Chapter II, “Philosophy’s Search for the Immutable,” and below at Chapter III, n. 20.
Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, édition critique, préparée par Tullio de Mauro (Paris: Payot, 1976 ), p. 128.
Laurie Spurling, Phenomenology and the Social World ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977 ), p. 59.
Paul Ricoeur, “New Developments in Phenomenology in France: the Phenomenology of Language,” Social Research,Vol. 34 (1967), p. 16, cited in Spurling, p. 187.
James M. Edie, foreward to Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language,trans. Hugh J. Silverman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. xxx-xxxi.
de Saussure, p. 33.
de Saussure, pp. 37–38.
See note 2 above.
de Saussure, p. 128.
Merleau-Ponty employs here the word “sens” which enjoys the double meaning of “sense” (or “meaning”) and “direction.” It is a word which he also profitably exploits when concerned with the connection of motor-intentionality and the constitution of meaning.
One should note at least in passing the affinities of Merleau-Ponty’s view with that of Karl Popper in his The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1959), Chapters VI and VII. In the same vein, Merleau-Ponty borrows appreciatively from Max Weber the notion that we are constantly faced with “a tableau of diverse, complex possibilities, always bound to local circumstances, engraved with a co-efficient of facticity, and of which we cannot say that one would be more true than the other, although we could say that one is more false, more artificial, and has less of an opening on a less rich future” (RC 65). For this reason, “truth is not adequation, but anticipation” (PM 180–81).
See Gary Brent Madison, The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (Athens, Ohio: University of Ohio Press, 1981), p. 264. Speaking to Merleau-Ponty’s view of history in later works such as Signs,he writes: “Thus for Merleau-Ponty there is a logic in history since history is the `inscription of Being,’ but this logic does not override man and does not do away with contingency and human freedom. It is man in his freedom and creativity who makes history and is responsible for it by letting Being be.... Thus if Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is not a quietism before an overpowering force or transcendence, neither is it a form of Promethean humanism.”
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Hamrick, W.S. (1987). History and the Origin of Meaning. In: An Existential Phenomenology of Law: Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phaenomenologica, vol 104. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0707-7_3
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