Abstract
Merleau-Ponty’s criticisms of the philosophical tradition — according to which the task of the philosopher is the reflection of a pre-existent truth — are ubiquitous in his writings. Because traditional philosophies hold both that Being is already completed and thus atemporal, and that reason is transparent to itself, they also conceive of truth as a timeless adequation between thought and reality. Of course, Merleau-Ponty will attack these positions at every step of the way, and his new definition of what philosophy is marks a radical departure from the past. Since he thematizes in a distinct manner the issues concerning the thing in the world, the subject, reason, consciousness, and temporality, the traditional notion of truth becomes untenable. Although he does not explicitly deal with the problem of truth in the Phenomenology of Perception, it does remain an important background concern, occasionally migrating to the surface. In this paper I would like to approach Merleau-Ponty’s conception of truth through his distinctive reflections on being. I will begin by briefly discussing his rejection of the traditional view concerning being and truth. Then I will present his own conception of “phenomenalization” as he bases it upon his thesis of the “primacy of perception and phenomena”. This new perspective on ontology will necessitate, in turn, an alternative notion of truth, which I will approach through the contexts of Merleau-Ponty’s conceptions of the cogito and language.
Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being.
(M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception)
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Notes
Cf. M. C. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), especially pp. 9–35. Hereafter this work is referred to as “Dillon (1988)”.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 295. Hereafter referred to as “PP” followed by page number(s).
PP, p. 51n1, cited in Joseph Duchêne, “The Structure of Phenomenalization in the `Phenomenology of Perception’ of Merleau-Ponty,” in Merleau-Ponty: Critical Essays, ed. Henry Pietersma (Washington, D. C.: The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology with the University Press of America, Inc., 1989), pp. 45–75. Hereafter referred to as “Duchêne”.
Duchêne, p. 46.
Ibid. For the purposes of my paper, I will be focusing primarily on the opacity and temporality intrinsic to being. Because the four dimensions of phenomenality condition one another, I take it that concentrating on one or two in particular at the expense of the others will not be too harmful for my conclusions concerning truth.
PP, p. 219.
Cf. Duchêne, p. 47.
Cf. Duchene, p. 50.
PP, p. 376.
Dillon (1988), p. 102.
Cf. Duchêne, p. 50; PP, p. 364.
Cf. PP, p. 174, where Merleau-Ponty makes the distinction between “having” and “being”.
PP, p. 408.
PP, p. 377.
There is one human act which at one stroke cuts through all possible doubts to reach complete truth: this act is perception, in the wide sense of knowledge of existence“. PP, p. 40, as cited in M. C. Dillon, ”A Phenomenological Conception of Truth,“ Man and World 10: (1977), pp. 382–392, p. 391n1. Hereafter referred to as ”Dillon (1977)“.
Cf. Dillon (1977), p. 383.
Cf. Dillon (1977), pp. 383–384.
PP, p. 194.
PP, p. 177.
Merleau-Ponty uses the example of the smile. Although a smile is significant in different ways depending upon the cultural context, it does not follow that it is merely or purely conventional. Thus, one could never indicate weight or color with a smile. Everything is both manufactured and natural in man, as it were, in the sense that there is not a word, not a form of behaviour which does not owe something to purely biological being — and which at the same time does not elude the simplicity of animal life, and cause forms of vital behaviour to deviate from their pre-ordained direction, through a sort of leakage and through a genius for ambiguity which might serve to define man (PP, p. 189).
PP, p. 186.
PP, p. 189.
PP, p. 187.
Ibid.
PP, p. 377.
languages or constituted systems of vocabulary and syntax, empirically existing `means of expression,’ are both the repository and residue of acts of speech, in which unformulated significance not only finds the means of being conveyed outwardly, but moreover acquires existence for itself, and is genuinely created as significance“ (PP, pp. 196–197).
The sensible gives back to me what I lent to it, but this is only what I took from it in the first place“ (PP, p. 214). Dillon schematizes the Fundierung of language, providing a useful diagram of the process. Cf. Dillon (1988), p. 194.
PP, p. 398.
PP, p. 396.
PP, p. 395.
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Bowles, B.E. (2000). Bringing Truth into Being. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Paideia. Analecta Husserliana, vol 68. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2525-5_26
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