Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Logic of Ambiguity

Abstract

Merleau-Ponty never ceased to look into and assess the links between reflection and the perceptive unreflected depth where it originates and finds its grounding. Those links tend to be covered up and forgotten by any reflection which does not call in question its own activity. It is necessary therefore to bring them out into the open and to probe into the roots of reflection, that is to say: to develop a reflection on reflection itself. This is precisely the type of “radical reflection” advocated by Merleau-Ponty in Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945), a work which finds two of its prime impulses in Husserl’s phenomenology and in a critique of the intellectualist and empiricist perspectives. In order to “seize things themselves” there is bound to be some effort towards the radicalization of reflection in the phenomenal world. Only by dipping reflection (“s’enfoncer”) well into its world can one come to discover such unreflected depth as usually lies hidden and neglected. In fact, traditional reflection does not attend to its own birth and keeps a bird’s eye, cursory view on its own route (“survol”).