Abstract
Scholars such as Renaud Barbara and Bernhard Waldenfels and Regula Giuliani have emphasized time’s central role in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, and Michael Kelly has shown how the Phenomenology’s “Temporality” chapter already broaches his later ontological concerns. I deepen our understanding of this temporal–ontological nexus by showing how Merleau-Ponty’s temporal ontology in fact erupts even earlier in the Phenomenology, as an underlying theme that unifies part two, on “The Perceived World,” as leading into the “Temporality” chapter. I do this via a close study of the chapter, “The Thing and the Natural World,” first explicating some profound but easily overlooked points about time implied in Merleau-Ponty’s initial remarks on the constancy of form and size. I then closely analyze his study of color constancy in relation to his central source, David Katz’s The World of Colour, to show how color leads him to conceptualize things as what I call “time-things”—and more generally to conceptualize things, the world, and nature, as being in such a way that temporality is ingredient in their being. This leads to some implications for his temporal ontology.
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Notes
Waldenfels and Giuliani (2005). Crucially, this would be a “non-temporal of this world,” versus a non-temporal located in a “shadow realm of eternal ideas.”
One exception is chapter two of Sallis’s Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings (1973). Sallis’s careful analysis, which draws on the “Thing” and “Sensing” chapters in part two, shows how Merleau-Ponty displaces perceptual synthesis from an activity solely inside us, to a joint operation of ourselves and the world, which cannot begin from our own agency, but implies a very different beginning of philosophy. Part two is thus integral to the Phenomenology as returning philosophy to an open beginning. Kristensen (2003) similarly finds a key to issues of expression in Merleau-Ponty via the “Thing” chapter. Lapointe (1972) gathers material from the “Thing,” showing how it makes time crucial to perceptual synthesis, but confines this to a body subject. I show how the “Thing” opens perception into time and ontology.
Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie includes a detailed table of contents that in effect organizes his chapters into sections and subsections. This is helpful for following his argument. Landes’s translation provides a facing page translation of Merleau-Ponty’s table of contents, and a numbering system for sections and subsections. Landes also integrates these section headings into chapters at likely division points. Here I refer to sections by Landes’s numbering and division.
Here I am also drawing on a contrast in contemporary physics between block-time and time as real. Block-time conceptualizes time as a fully given, determinate and present dimension, whereas time as real involves real changes that cannot be given according to any advance key. My concept of time-things is similarly meant to conceptualize things not as entities already fully given, but as themselves “made of time.”
This method of accessing things only in and via our bodily being is not only crucial to PhP’s method of radical reflection, but insofar as it leads, as I claim, to ontological insights, it anticipates his later “indirect ontology,” see Saint Aubert (2006) and Hamrick and van der Venken (2011), 69–72.
Hamrick and van der Venken (2011) show how Whitehead’s process philosophy would provide materials for taking Merleau-Ponty’s ontology forward; I am trying to show how PhP already moves in this direction (also see Kelly (2015)). Bannon (2014) implies similar points about time and openness although not in the way articulated here. Chouraqui (2011) and Vanzago (2010) trace complementary issues, but again not in terms of PhP.
This point and emphasis is needed to address a potential Husserlian concern that the time of time-things is, after all, just time as revealed in temporal synthesis, as correlative to intentional acts—so there would be no such ontological implications. There is no doubt that the classic Husserlian example of hearing a melody would first of all indicate a time and temporal flow that is correlative to the very encounter of determinate, temporally protracted notes as intended objects hanging together in a temporally protracted melody. This level of analysis, however, puts aside questions of how we are open to content that motivates synthesis of it as notes, melody and so on, questions that Husserl himself will pursue in terms of passivity, passive synthesis, transition synthesis and so on. The focus here, though, is Merleau-Ponty, and what needs to be emphasized is that the Phenomenology constantly pushes perception down to its roots in operative versus act intentionality, where Merleau-Ponty finds that issues of passivity, transition synthesis, movement, and so on, radicalize the operation of operative intentionality, in ways that keep pointing to the openness of time as the “pre-reflective fund” of operative intentionality. Indeed, it is precisely because he is pushing at this point that Merleau-Ponty, I think, takes color as key to ontology, since color involves us moving in the world, such that issues of bodies and intentionality operating through something prior to it are prominent—whereas melody might (on first, glance, and mistakenly) appear to be a sort of solely inside affair that would let us focus on intentionality as an inner act.
As Kelly (2015, 2016) and others would show, these points about time culminate in Merleau-Ponty’s “Temporality” chapter as pushing beyond Husserl’s account of temporality and moving closer to Heidegger’s ontological themes—even as Merleau-Ponty accomplishes this by advancing Husserl’s own emphasis on passivity, transition synthesis, and so on. (Also see note 12 below). Indeed, Steinbock’s (2017) studies of limits and “limit phenomena” in Husserl compellingly show how these lead Husserl himself to recognize that, e.g., natality, death, and genesis are intrinsic to phenomenology—a different version of the point that phenomenology intrinsically opens to a time beyond what appears in inner time consciousness. Here we can usefully frame Merleau-Ponty’s study of color as probing limit conditions on color phenomena (the need for movement, and so on), where these limitations similarly reveal a time beyond time consciousness. (Thanks to the anonymous reviewer for raising this question).
In PhP, the openness of the subject to the world and time is already flagged in remarks in the preface about the world not being a project of the perceiver, but the perceiver being a project of the world. Compare the rather extraordinary note, “Personne,” from October 1959, where he writes that “Subjectivity is truly no one… [it] is this foam at the mouth of the world.” (In Toadvine and Lawlor (2007), 426).
Morris (2018).
Here we have the nucleus of Barbaras’s analysis and derivation of phenomenality and the being of the phenomenon, and Waldenfels and Giuliani’s point about the timeless appearing in time.
This strategy also accesses real, determinate properties of a thing, via their surfacing in apparent appearings, that are indeterminate and arbitrary vis-à-vis the thing (given that the real-apparent relation is conceptualized via a canonical view exterior to the thing). Apparent appearings lose their anchorage in things, so it is no longer clear what role they have or why they matter.
This is why Merleau-Ponty concludes “Things” with the extraordinary move of verifying his results through a study of hallucinations: if hallucinations are really hallucinatory, they cannot be our own projections, or delusions we activate yet conceal from ourselves. Hallucinations must genuinely open us to variations of our time with things.
This is another way into the point that the time in question is not an intentional object, compare note 7 above.
Perhaps the best studies of the complex and dynamic tension in PhP between lighting and object color constancy are Mallin (1979) and Kelly (2005). Thompson (1995) is a very helpful complement, as are sensory-motor approaches to color, e.g., Noë (2012)—but these do not venture into the sort of radical ontology we find in Merleau-Ponty.
A methodological note: Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of size implies that things open to time. Nonetheless, size, might still incline us in a Cartesian direction. After all, don’t things, really have a size? Aren’t they susceptible of a purely geometrical analysis that leapfrogs their secondary qualities, just as Descartes claimed? Color, in contrast, resists bottoming out in any equivalent sort of “geometrical” underpinning, color more directly shows how objects open into time. Color is thus a phenomena that itself affirms a result Merleau-Ponty previously elaborated through a more reflective analysis—this confirmation of reflection through the phenomena is a typical methodological move of Merleau-Ponty.
Or having those looks call up a color memory that gives the real, proper color.
PhP 359/352. Translation revised: given Katz’s insistence on the importance of movement to color, figées here likely has the sense of frozen, made rigid, i.e., with motion removed, versus congealed, which is Landes’s translation.
E.g., while Evan Thompson’s outstanding book (1995) on Colour Vision, does briefly mention film colors (40), his focus is on the phenomenal structure of color spaces, described independently of things and color modalities.
The standard translation and the one used in the English edition of Katz is film colors, not colored areas, as Landes translates it.
As Kelly (2005) shows.
No doubt this point would connect with Merleau-Ponty’s observations about synaesthesia, and his discussion of color in terms of depth in Eye and Mind, see note 24 below.
To be precise, color constancy recedes during short exposure times when we are looking at a scene that is poorly lit, or lacking in complex organization. With well-lit, complex street scenes, shortening the exposure does not lead to recession of constancy, but instead the sense that the scene is a photograph. Katz argues that the visual articulations of complex scenes invite virtual moving engagement, whereas the simple or obscure scene does not. This opens an interesting connection to passivity/activity issues.
See, e.g., Merleau-Ponty’s points, via Katz, that “For the lighting/object-illuminated structure to be given, there must thus be at least two surfaces with different reflecting powers,” and that “By acknowledging that these structures depend upon the organization of the field, we immediately understand all of the empirical laws of the phenomenon of constancy” (362/355). These lead to claims about the importance of kinesthetic operations, and adapted norms, and thence to the point that “Our settling into a certain colored milieu, along with the transpositions of all color relations that it entails, is a bodily operation; I can only accomplish this by entering into this new atmosphere because my body is my general power of inhabiting all of the world’s milieus….. Thus, lighting is merely one moment in a complex structure whose other moments are the organization of the field such as our body accomplishes it and the illuminated thing in its constancy.” (366/359).
Another paper could more fully spell out how his point regarding things leads to his remarks about the world and the natural world as not being there en bloc, but as time, a point central to subsection v, “The world as nucleus of time,” in section C on “The Natural World.” On this issue, also see Merleau-Ponty (2008a).
Abbreviations
- PhP:
-
Phenomenology of Perception. This is cited via the page number in the margins of Landes’s 2012 translation (Merleau-Ponty 2012), which uses the pagination of the 2008 Gallimard edition (Merleau-Ponty 2008b). I then give the page number in the original 1945 edition (Merleau-Ponty 1945)
- VI:
-
The Visible and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty 1964)
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Research for this paper has been supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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Morris, D. From “Block-Things” to “Time-Things”: Merleau-Ponty’s temporal ontology in part two of the phenomenology of perception. Cont Philos Rev 53, 1–19 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-019-09479-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-019-09479-4