In just over a
hundred pages, this elegant volume presents the reader with the text of seven
talks.  These were originally prepared
in short lecture form by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-61)
on the occasion of a series of broadcasts on French national radio, which were
delivered by the author in 1948.  In
addition, the lectures are preceded by an informative Foreword by
Stéphanie Ménasé and by an excellent as well as accessible Introduction
by Prof. Thomas Baldwin.  The former
places the text in its historical context while the latter contains a sketch of
Merleau-Ponty’s life and work and places each individual talk in its
philosophico-intellectual context.

First of all, a
few words concerning Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical method.  Philosophical inquiry is to a great extent
also a self-reflective inquiry, that is, an investigation into the kind of
methods whereby the philosopher carries out his/her intellectual
ruminations.  Merleau-Ponty’s
methodology is freely inspired by phenomenology, i.e., the philosophy
elaborated by the early twentieth-century German thinker Edmund Husserl, and by
existential or phenomenological ontology. 
The latter term refers to differently re-worked versions of Husserl’s
phenomenology.  Key-note thinkers who
separately and distinctly gave rise to phenomenological ontology are Martin
Heidegger, Husserl’s former student, and, in France, Jean-Paul Sartre, with
whom Merleau-Ponty collaborates in Les temps modernes, Sartre’s
influential political journal, until their ideological and personal break-up in
1950.    

Ontology is the
branch of philosophy which deals with theories of ‘Being’, or of what at a
fundamental level ‘there is’. 
‘Phenomenology’ is a specific manner of carrying out a philosophical
enquiry into what appears to consciousness, i.e., phenomena.  Phenomenological ontology sets out to probe
into ontological questions by inquiring into the ways in which reality appears
to conscious agents.  Roughly, the
philosopher’s task is twofold: firstly, he/she attempts accurately to describe
certain phenomena as they are given to consciousness.  This is a sophisticated procedure whose steps, significance and
accuracy are not equally or consistently maintained by the various
phenomenologists.  In any event, one
requirement seems to be unanimously considered as necessary by phenomenologists;
in Lecture One of the present volume, ‘The World of Perception and the World of
Science’, Merleau-Ponty elucidates the matter thus:  ‘The world of perception, or in other words the world which is
revealed to us by our senses and in everyday life, seems at first sight to be
the one we know best of all. … Yet this is a delusion. … the world of
perception is, to a great extent, unknown territory as long as we remain in
the… utilitarian attitude.’ (The World of Perception, p.39).  Thus, the fundamental attitude adopted by
the phenomenologist is a crucial first step, and this categorically excludes
any instrumental consideration from one’s field of observation; this, however,
is a demand made upon the phenomenologist, not necessarily upon the objects of
his/her descriptions, as it will become clear shortly.

The phenomena most
commonly chosen for description are kinds of human behaviour; this is so
because the ultimate object of study, what phenomenology aims at understanding
through elucidation of human behaviour, is conscious being itself, which
necessarily informs, or is intrinsically constitutive of, human behaviour as
such.  Existential phenomenologists like
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, each in their own distinctive manner, aim at bringing
to light the elements and structures of consciousness involved in contexts of
action rather than those underlying detached, reflective behaviour, e.g., a
café waiter serving customers in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, a
patient suffering from phantom limb disturbances or a painter drawing a
landscape in Merleau-Ponty’s studies of human perception.  The description of phenomena is then
followed by a transcendental question along Kantian lines: ‘What must
human consciousness be like for that kind of behaviour, or for certain ways of
appearing of phenomena, to be at all possible?’.  I accentuate ‘must’ here because the ultimate results of the
inquiry bear the necessity of an a priori, that is, a plane which is not
located within the contingent realm of sensible experience (i.e., the a
posteriori), but which is absolutely necessary for the latter to be at all
possible. 

As Baldwin puts it
in his prefatory intervention, the series of talks presented in this volume
‘provides the best possible introduction to [Merleau-Ponty’s] philosophy,
especially since this is dominated by a larger and more complex text published
in 1945 — Phenomenology of Perception [henceforth PP].  But these talks should also be valued in
their own right, for in many respects the contrasts with the past which
Merleau-Ponty draws and the anxieties which he articulates are still ours’
(pp.1-2).   

The present volume
offers vivid descriptions of mainly activity-oriented perceptual
consciousness.  Carried out in the
spirit of the phenomenological attitude, hence in the spirit of freedom from
utilitarian concerns and the habitual, sedimented patterns the latter engender,
these descriptions succeed in evoking fresh perspectives and meanings on
everyday experience.  The domains of
human experience which the reader is encouraged to rediscover with the
phenomenologist’s eyes include space (Lecture Two), sensory objects (Lecture
Three), animal life (Lecture Four), man as experienced from an outside
perspective (Lecture Five), and finally the experience of art, from the
perspective of both the creator and the spectator of various art forms and
creative activities, e.g., painting, music, cinema, etc. 

The author’s
position is argued for and reinforced throughout the lectures by means of a
critique of what in the text is referred to as ‘classical world’, that is, the
fundamental attitude underlying ordinary human experience and action as well as
the fields of science, art and philosophy which has in the Enlightenment,
especially as it is epitomised by Descartes in philosophy and by Newton in
physics, its highest developed historical manifestation.  In the last, concluding lecture by the title
‘Classical World, Modern World’, Merleau-Ponty summarises the main lines of his
discourse by closely comparing the classical world to what he calls ‘modern
world’, that is, the world which is contemporary to the author (and presumably
to us), whose contours his phenomenological inquiries have both contributed to
bring to light and philosophically grounded. 
This core theme of the contrast between classical and modern world is
effectively condensed in the following lines: 
‘On the one hand [in the classical world] we have the self-assurance of
a system of thought which is unfailingly convinced of its mission both to know
nature through and through and to purge its knowledge of man of all
mystery.  In modernity, on the other
hand, this rational universe which is open in principle to human endeavours to
know it and act within it, is replaced by a kind of knowledge and art that is
characterised by difficulty and reserve, one full of restrictions.  In modernity, we have a representation of
the world which excludes neither fissures nor lacunae, a form of action which
is unsure of itself, or, at any rate, no longer blithely assumes it can obtain
universal assent’. (pp.105-6).

It might be
opportune, at this point, to express a reservation regarding Baldwin’s reading
both of the lectures contained in this volume and of PP.  This focuses on the role played by the
‘transcendental’, or ‘a priori’, in Merleau-Ponty’s theoretical framework,
which is recognised but downplayed by Baldwin (pp.9-12).  By so doing, Baldwin paves the way to his
criticism of Merleau-Ponty as the latter considers his ontological findings not
just a ‘modern truth’, but a ‘truth of all time’, that is, a ‘truth which
captures the human condition as such’ (p.32). 
In other words, according to Baldwin, the main philosophical shortcoming
of these lectures consists in Merleau-Ponty refraining from taking the ultimate
plunge from modernity to post-modernity.

Roughly, adoption
of a post-modern philosophical stance minimally implies denying the validity of
any possible legitimating or justificatory discourse, on the basis of which one
is enabled to claim that a certain theory, philosophical view, description of
‘how things are’, etc., is preferable to another.  Baldwin does not shirk from the ultimate implications of
post-modernism; by referring to the post-modern attitude to truth as
‘fallibilism’, he claims:  ‘A
fallibilist does not undermine his fallibilism by taking a fallibilist attitude
to it; for fallibilism is inconsistent with dogmatism, not confidence.  So we see Merleau-Ponty, at the end of these
lectures, poised to move beyond "modern" thought to post-modernism —
but not quite taking the step.’ (p.33). 
It is plausible to suggest here that being a fallibilist in epistemology
(i.e., in the theory of knowledge, including scientific knowledge), as
Merleau-Ponty most certainly is, does not necessarily imply being a fallibilist
tout court, and most importantly for the present purposes, a fallibilist
in one’s fundamental ontological claims. 
Although Baldwin claims that by not taking the step to post-modernity
Merleau-Ponty ‘betrays himself’, one is here more inclined to suggest that, had
Merleau-Ponty taken that step, he would have indeed betrayed himself.  Most crucially, Merleau-Ponty would have
lost the theoretical foothold which enables his phenomenology both to get off
the ground at all and to fulfil its proper scientific role:  phenomenology for its proponents is not a
philosophical exercise among others; rather, it is elaborated as a
philosophical account of the relationship between consciousness and the world,
or physical reality, which is to be preferred to other already available
accounts.  This preference is not a
question of mere taste or pragmatic considerations.  In particular, while phenomenology takes the relationship itself
in its hybrid ambiguity, that is, ‘being-, or man, -in-the-world’, as basic
unit of reality, traditional philosophical approaches have the ‘theoretical
defect’ of basing themselves on either one of the terms of the relationship:
they proceed either by taking a self-enclosed consciousness or a physical
reality equally sealed in itself as theoretical point of departure and then
constructing artificial bridges in order to explain how it is that, through
experience, somehow a relationship between the two terms is effected.  Such ontological concerns regarding the
fundamental relation between conscious existence and physical, embodied
reality, are not considered by Merleau-Ponty and other phenomenologists simply
as abstract intellectual exercises.  On
the contrary, they underpin scientific practices and scientifically informed
views of the world, which in their turn affect the way human beings ordinarily
look at the world and at themselves in everyday life.  That Merleau-Ponty’s position in PP aims at arguing its way into
the domain of scientific discourse by proposing his philosophical findings as a
theoretically sound ground upon which to construct a psychology of perception,
is confirmed, among other things, by the overall strategy he adopts in that
work.  This is not significantly
different from the way scientific practice is by and large theorised: he proceeds
by underlying the failures of traditional scientific approaches in explaining
some psycho-physiological phenomenon, usually a pathological one, e.g., phantom
limb, loss of speech and thought, etc., then pointing out how such failure is
due to a fundamentally mistaken theory of the subject of perception either in
terms of consciousness or in terms of mechanical physical body, and finally
showing how those shortcomings which he has just indicated are overcome, and
the phenomenon thus more exhaustively and comprehensively understood, by adopting
the view of embodied subjectivity that he proposes.  Finally, that his account is better equipped to ground scientific
studies of human psychology, is not by Merleau-Ponty regarded as being a matter
of personal preference, pragmatic convenience or linguistically constrained
interpretation.  Rather, and contra
post-modernism, it is a matter of (pre-linguistic, pre-experiential and
pre-interpreted) reality being in a certain way, that is, a matter of
fundamental ontological necessity.  

This should lead
us back to the importance of the transcendental or a priori dimension of
Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical position. 
Although the descriptions of phenomena reveal what the thinker calls the
‘ambiguity’ of the world, the open interpretability of the real, the unfinished
and fuzzy character of experience, etc., all of this is not to be intended in
the ‘post-modern’ sense as due to the necessarily linguistically mediated
character of the real beyond which human experience cannot penetrate, its
textuality and narrativity so to speak. 
Rather, for Merleau-Ponty, the ambiguity of experience and of language
itself is the phenomenal manifestation of, and itself made possible by, an
priori, hence pre-experiential or pre-phenomenal (i.e., outside of the realm of
what appears or can appear to consciousness), hence necessarily not
linguistically mediated, aspect of reality, namely, the inter-relational,
hybrid, embodied mode of being of conscious agency.  In other words, it is because the fundamental ontological unit a
priori is embodied-subjectivity-in-the-world, that every aspect of human
experience and world, including, or especially, linguistic expression or
speech, is open to multiple interpretations, provisionality, lack of definite
contours, etc. 

Finally, it is the
transcendental method which, when or if successful, allows Merleau-Ponty and
most phenomenologists to be justified in claiming that, by taking ordinary
experience as point of departure, the philosopher is enabled to grasp a ‘truth
of all time’.  By this it is meant a
truth which reveals the very a priori conditions for experience as such
to be at all possible, hence both necessarily outside the realm of experience,
i.e., the realm of human/historical temporality, and philosophically
‘guaranteed’ by the givenness or indubitable existence of that experience of
which each of us is aware. 

Perhaps the critic
might work on assessing the validity of the transcendental stance as an
integral component of phenomenological ontology, hence of phenomenological
ontology itself as a philosophical method. 
But this line of inquiry does not seem to be contemplated by Baldwin, at
least not in this context, as he refers to Merleau-Ponty’s lectures as a
‘sketch of a philosophy whose value is "solid and lasting"
(p.33). 

In sum,
Merleau-Ponty’s position with regard to the kind of truth expressed in the
findings of phenomenological ontology is internally coherent and theoretically
robust, hence hardly philosophically defective on that score. 

A ‘post-modern
phenomenological ontologist’ —  Is
Merleau-Ponty to blame for failing to be one? 
Hardly.  

© 2005 Maria Antonietta Perna.

Maria Antonietta Perna, Post-doctoral Research
Fellow, University College London; Part-time Lecturer in Political Thought,
Richmond University, London

Categories: Philosophical