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Depth as Nemesis: Merleau-Ponty’s Concept of Depth in Phenomenology of Perception, Art and Politics

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“It will be worth our while to dwell for a moment upon this third dimension”.

Abstract

The concept of depth is central to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and informed not only his philosophy of perception but also his thinking about psychology, art and politics. This article traces the ways the notion of depth appears in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking in these fields, contrasting it with Husserl’s own phenomenological investigations. The article starts with a comparison of the function of perception in Husserl’s phenomenology and then proceeds with an analysis of how the issue of depth reappears in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, phenomenology of art and political philosophy. I argue that while Husserl’s approach to phenomenology led him to analyses of aesthetics stemming from works of art as random examples, and to non-participation in politics, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology leads to the opposite approach, inviting concrete criticism in art and active participation in politics. It is argued that Merleau-Ponty’s approach is more philosophically consistent. The choice of particular works of art, and the particular political engagements, can retrospectively clarify the transcendental phenomenological investigations themselves.

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Notes

  1. Merleau-Ponty (2007: 362 [EM]). For better orientation in the cited essays by Merleau-Ponty, I have referenced these, where appropriate, in square brackets with the following abbreviations: Cézanne’s Doubt = CD; Concerning Marxism = CM; Eye and Mind = EM; For the Sake of Truth = FST; Hegel’s Existentialism = HE; Marxism and Philosophy = MP; Marxism and Superstition = MS; On the Phenomenology of Language = OPL; Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man = PSM; Preface to Signs = PrS; The Future of the Revolution = FR; The Philosopher and His Shadow = PHS; The Philosopher and Sociology = PS; The U.S.S.R. and the Camps = UC; The War Has Taken Place = WHTP.

  2. Elsewhere Merleau-Ponty (1964c: 93 [PSM]) adds that “when they seek to define philosophical knowledge, we find them adopting dogmatic formulae which remind us of certain earlier statements of Husserl”. He assumes that their disclosure of essential structures of Being would be considered “naïve” by Husserl. Merleau-Ponty thus suggests that whereas Husserl grappled with issues of the world and consciousness again and anew, Heidegger and Scheler took an easier way out.

  3. See Merleau-Ponty (1964c: 76–78 [PSM]) and especially Merleau-Ponty (2010: 337–372) for a detailed elaboration of the parallels between phenomenology and Gestalt psychology, Goldstein’s conceptions of organism or the psychological investigations of Guillaume. The very word “phenomenology,” after all, was picked up by Husserl from Brentano (2002: 137) who used it as a synonym for “descriptive psychology”. Merleau-Ponty, however, sees in later Husserl a possibility to go beyond mere description to genesis, while it should be possible to involve the genetic investigations of contemporary psychology, too.

  4. These discussions of an “alien culture” (Merleau-Ponty 1964c: 90 [PSM]) led Husserl to the development of the transcendental distinction between a “home world” [Heimwelt] and an “alien world” [Fremdwelt]; the distinction is developed in detail by Steinbock (1995: 170–270).

  5. Merleau-Ponty (1964b: 110 [PS]), however, admits that Husserl would not have agreed with all the explicit definitions he derived from Husserlian phenomenology, and that he is, in a sense, trying to evoke the “unthought-of element in Husserl’s thought in the margin of some old pages” (Merleau-Ponty 1964b: 160 [PHS]).

  6. The “extra-thematic sphere, […] the sphere of passivity,” is nonetheless already equipped with “confused” intentionality (Husserl 1989b: 15; Husserl 1952 [Hua IV]: 13). Merleau-Ponty (1964b: 105 [PS]) speaks in this case of a “Logos of the aesthetic world”.

  7. The term “pre-empirical” is indeed slightly misleading here; “pre-predicative,” or Merleau-Ponty’s “pre-thetic,” is better. This pre-predicative sphere of perception is something Husserl will thoroughly work out much later as the life-world [Lebenswelt], with the primal ego [Ur-Ich] (Husserl 1970a: 284–286; Husserl 1976b [Hua VI]: 187–190) or Trieb-Ich (Husserl 2013 [Hua XLII]: 102) corresponding correlatively to this life-world.

  8. Merleau-Ponty (1964c: 60 [PSM]) puts it as “the connection of the image with our motor-affective life”.

  9. To a certain degree, there is a partial affinity with Carnap’s project of logical constructivism. Carnap himself acknowledges being inspired by Husserl (Carnap 2003: 9), and as the lowest constructional basis he indeed chooses the “autopsychological basis” purified by the phenomenological ἐποχή (Carnap 2003: 101); likewise, the content for lower levels of a constructional system is to be provided by a “phenomenology of perception” (Carnap 2003: 176). Husserl and Carnap differ markedly in their treatment of other crucial issues such as intentionality, which Carnap (2003: 262) denies in its Husserlian version; however, the idea that lower and higher strata of sense-formation align themselves structurally is an idea shared by both of them. For a detailed analysis of the links between Carnap and Husserl, see, for example, Ryckman (2007), Mayer (2016) and Damböck (2018). Merleau-Ponty (1964c: 55f. [PSM]) correctly notes, though, that at no point has Husserl submitted to the logical positivist project as such: “It is always between the Scylla of psychologism and the Charybdis of logicism that Husserl steers his course”.

  10. In the first German edition of Logical Investigations [A 323] the word “role” is qualified as “logical role”.

  11. Elsewhere Husserl (1983: 204; Husserl 1976a [Hua III/1]: 192) speaks in this regard about the sensuous ὕλη seeking intentive μορφή.

  12. The fulfillment of judgments by a lived-through adequate perception has been recently schematically developed by Berghofer (2018: 151–158) under the title the “phenomenological conception of experiential justification”. See also Berghofer (2020) for greater focus on the role of perception in experiential justification.

  13. An even earlier notion of a parallelism is found in Philosophy of Arithmetic (Husserl 2003: 241; Husserl 1970b  [Hua XII]: 228).

  14. We can thus distinguish between a kinaesthetic constitution and a practical constitution (Petit 1999: 228f.), but they are structurally parallel by virtue of the notion of motivation.

  15. A detailed account of this confrontation can be found, for example, in Welsh (2006, 2014) or Sheredos (2017).

  16. Elsewhere, Merleau-Ponty levels similar charges against Piaget’s research in child psychology. For Piaget, secondary circular reactions of an infant are “almost intentional” (Piaget 1965: 150), where “almost” implies an existence of sort of “ideal” intentionality—the adult one—against which the “incomplete” intentionality of an infant is measured. According to Merleau-Ponty, Piaget interprets infants as deficient adults. But contrary to this account, “the child’s consciousness is not identical to the adult’s in everything except for its incompleteness and imperfection. The child possesses another kind of equilibrium than the adult kind” (Merleau-Ponty 2010: 131). Merleau-Ponty (2010: 152) thus harshly concludes that “Piaget lacks an understanding of […] the world perceived by the child”. In child psychology, “we cannot dispense with the need for an appeal to lived experience, and it is clear that Piaget’s schema does not respond to the experience of the subject” (Merleau-Ponty 2010: 156).

  17. After all, the developments in current neuroscience show that it was wrong to speak of “normal” depth perception in case of strabismic person. Merleau-Ponty’s efforts to describe depth perception phenomenologically may also be seen retrospectively as systematic efforts to explain what is missing in such supplemental depth perception of the strabismic person; see Sacks (2006).

  18. The incorporation of knowledge from the empirical sciences was especially important for Merleau-Ponty in the case of phenomenology. Without understanding the genesis of even naturalistic prejudices the phenomenological project would remain incomplete. “The ultimate task of phenomenology as philosophy of consciousness is to understand its relationship to non-phenomenology” (Merleau-Ponty 1964b: 178 [PHS]).

  19. See Mazis (2010: 132–134) for further elaboration on this point.

  20. Casey (1991: 19) stresses that “depth and place, then, are not only connected. They are indissociable”.

  21. Fielding (1996: 183) further links the issue of depth perception to feminism and basically titles the very similar structure of situation and engagement as “experience and agency”.

  22. For an analysis of movement in relation to depth in all its facets, see Johnson (2013: 491, 508–510). “Truth in art and life are about movement, growth, and becoming” (Johnson, 2013: 493). For Merleau-Ponty such multifaceted movement is primordial, while Husserl will “begin with the object in rest as opposed to the object in motion in descriptions of spatiality and kinaesthesis” (Steinbock 1995: 44), and so on.

  23. For a concise summary of the notion, importance and function of “intuition” in Husserl’s phenomenology, see Berghofer (2018: 145–151).

  24. With regard to the influence of Merleau-Ponty on Dufrenne, Casey (1973: xxviii) comments that it has been “profound,” to the degree that one may even say that Dufrenne’s work “represents the extension of Merleau-Ponty’s thesis concerning the ‘primacy of perception’ to the domain of aesthetic experience”.

  25. One can think here of Heidegger’s (2002: 42–44) “preservers” [die Bewahrenden].

  26. See Mazis (2012: 265–272) for an analysis of precisely those artworks chosen by Merleau-Ponty.

  27. Ingarden (1966: 267), a prominent author in field of phenomenological aesthetics following the Husserlian approach, claims expressly that any random artwork is a good starting point for a phenomenological analysis. While Ingarden understood Husserl’s phenomenology as a methodology which one can use to inquire into the ontologies of various objects—artworks being ones of them—for Merleau-Ponty, gradually, artworks became gateways to explain or elucidate the intuitions, insights and conceptual frameworks of Husserl’s phenomenology.

  28. Therefore, Husserl chooses examples in order to best demonstrate, for example, the distinctions between the image as a physical thing [physisches Bildding], the image object [Bildobjekt] and the image subject [Bildsujet] (Husserl 2005: 20; Husserl 1980 [Hua XXIII]: 19), the image consciousness as consciousness of a sustained conflict [Widerstreit] (Husserl 2005: 50; Husserl 1980 [Hua XXIII]: 46), or the structural transitions between the positional and neutral/aesthetic attitudes (Husserl 2005: 614f.; Husserl 1980 [Hua XXIII]: 513f.). This certainly presupposes a certain engagement with works of art; and yet, nowhere does Husserl use examples to “demonstrate” the correlations between the depiction of depth, the depth of a work of art and the depth of a person. This is not even a correlation that can be demonstrated universally once and for all; rather, what is required—and what Merleau-Ponty therefore does—is that the particular work of art is chosen, and the recipient then recognizes the reason why this particular choice was made. But while Husserl’s demonstrations can be understood if one understands the argument, there is no similar guarantee that the reasons for Merleau-Ponty’s choices will be recognized.

  29. Merleau-Ponty’s (2007: 353 [EM]) description of music as “too far on the hither side of the world and of the designatable to depict anything but certain sketches of Being—its ebb and flow, its growth, its upheavals, its turbulence,” is an example of such a risky description which does not bear closer scrutiny.

  30. The term used by Depraz (1995: 3), whereby she opposes it to “political phenomenology”. The difference is that while the former refers to politics guided by phenomenological philosophy, the latter refers to the use of phenomenology for particular political ends. Husserl rejected “political phenomenology” in this latter sense.

  31. An example of such an engagement on Husserl’s part, aside from Krisis, is the fifth Kaizo article, see Husserl 1989a [Hua XXVII]: 59–94.

  32. Goto partially suggests such a reading. Taking seriously Husserl’s passing remark about the organization of the scientific and philosophical community being akin to the “communist unity of will” [kommunistische Willenseinheit] (Husserl 1989a [Hua XXVII]: 53), as opposed to an imperialist organization, Goto (2004: 154) proceeds to claim that “in the background there is surely the avant-garde thought of Marxist Communism. In this regard one must think about the patriotic Husserl’s bitter experience with the collapse of German hegemony in the First World War and at the same time about the revolutionary movement in Kiel”. Furthermore, he presents Husserl as a reader of Kautsky’s Erfurt Program (Goto 2004: 273) and quotes a claim from Husserl’s correspondence that capitalism “prevents a ‘truly selfless devotion to “the ideas”.’ […] Phenomenology in this sense is the ‘mortal enemy’ [Todfeind] of ‘all capitalism’” (Goto 2004: 274). Nonetheless, Goto concludes that Husserl’s thoughts are vastly underdeveloped in this direction, and, for example, his notion of the state as necessary for the protection of the private property will not allow one to interpret Husserl as being in support of a socialist revolution.

  33. Thus “Husserl himself never obtained one sole Wesenschau that he did not subsequently take up again and rework, not to disown it, but in order to make it say what at first it had not quite said” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 115f.).

  34. Depraz (1995: 11) argues that Husserl’s “non-participant onlooker […] is not Merleau-Ponty’s abstract and disembodied cosmotheoros”. When Merleau-Ponty favored depth policy, however, unambiguously active participation was simply the only option for him.

  35. With regard to Marxism, Merleau-Ponty was also inspired by Kojève, whose seminars he attended in the 1930s, alongside figures such as Bataille, Lacan and Queneau, and occasionally also Aron, Weil, Breton, Levinas, Koyré, Marjolin (Kleinberg 2005: 66).

  36. Westerman recently gave an account of Lukács’ thinking in History and Class Consciousness as itself influenced, inter alia, by Husserl’s phenomenology. In this regard, Westerman convincingly demonstrates that “the standpoint of proletariat” thus should not be read as some sort of an exoteric vantage point, and it is certainly not true that, as, for example, Heinrich (2004: 79) alleges, Lukács here “overlooked the fact that workers (just like capitalists) in their spontaneous consciousness are also subject to the delusions of the commodity fetish”. Lukács is very much aware that the proletariat is embedded within the economic reality of capitalist production, and its political superstructure, as much as the bourgeoisie, that is, “as any other individual exchanging commodities. But, for Lukács, the sale of labour power differs from that of any other commodity because it involves […] a central phenomenological dimension of subjectivity—time, in the sense that the commodity sold is labour time. […] For the proletarian, this very temporality is the commodity they sell and integrate into society as a value. […] The increase or decrease of labour time is […] both an increase or a decrease in the quantity of the commodity sold, and also a direct deprivation of the subject’s experiential being. […] The worker’s social being is unavoidably linked to their experience in a way that is simply not the case for the capitalist” (Westerman 2019: 214).

  37. Elsewhere, Merleau-Ponty (1964b: 96 [OPL]) writes that “truth […] is theoretically impossible” and “is known only through the praxis which creates it”. The praxis mentioned here concerns speech, especially philosophical expression. The same would hold, however, for political action and truth in politics.

  38. And thus, for example, “despite their cultural, moral, vocational, and ideological differences, the Russian peasants of 1917 join the workers’ struggle in Petrograd and Moscow because they sense that their lot is the same; class is lived concretely prior to being the object of a deliberate will” (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 380).

  39. Of course, the Korean War was only the final straw; Merleau-Ponty (1964b: 263–265 [UC]) knew about the gulags; he also noted the prosecution of Lukács in Hungary during Stalinism (Merleau-Ponty 1964b: 261f. [MS]), or the very fact that the “managerial layer,” further exploiting the working class under Stakhanovite ideology, arose, and the Party elite itself had in socialist countries become disassociated from the proletarian base (Merleau-Ponty 1964b: 291 [FR]). The justification of Moscow Trials itself was always on slippery ground. The Korean War was, however, the breaking point. Earlier, Merleau-Ponty (1964a: 155 [FST]) had claimed that the Soviet Union was not an imperialist power; but when Korean War broke out, he felt he could no longer maintain such position.

  40. Note, as a good example of confronting Husserlian roots, the way Merleau-Ponty opposes “mythical time characterized by ‘depth’” (Kelly 2010: 105) against Husserlian time-consciousness—claiming a separation [l’écart] within time-consciousness.

  41. Despite a certain allure, contemporary phenomenology should reject Latour’s invitation to cease its dependence on “human sources of agency” and extend its “descriptive vocabulary […] to ‘non-intentional’ entities” (Latour 2005: 61). While Latour’s (2005: 258–262) political intentions seemingly align with Husserl’s quest for radical self-clarification, Latour’s requirement would amount to eschewing its rootedness in transcendental subjectivity. It is this rootedness which makes particular phenomenological descriptions fruitful. If sticking to the notion of transcendental subjectivity in the end means maintaining “the revolutionary idea par excellence, the idea that revolution is possible,” where this idea strikes Latour (1993: 47f.) as “exaggerated,” then this is a price that must be paid.

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This work was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under the Contract No. APVV-15–0682.

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  1. Institute of Philosophy of Slovak Academy of Sciences, Klemensova 19, 813 64, Bratislava, Slovakia

    Michal Lipták

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Correspondence to Michal Lipták.

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Lipták, M. Depth as Nemesis: Merleau-Ponty’s Concept of Depth in Phenomenology of Perception, Art and Politics. Hum Stud 44, 255–281 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-021-09574-7

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