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The primacy question in Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology

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Abstract

This paper takes up the question as to what has primacy within Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology as a way to provide insight into the relation between empirical science and transcendental philosophy within his account of embodiment. Contending that this primacy necessarily pertains to methodology, I show how Kurt Goldstein’s conception of biology provided Merleau-Ponty with a scientific model for approaching human existence holistically in which primacy pertains to the transcendental practice of productive imagination that generates the eidetic organismic Gestalt in terms of which sense is made of empirical facts. Considering the analogous role played by imagination in Merleau-Ponty’s account of perceptual synthesis in the form of what he called projection, I argue that his account of embodiment is, parallel to Goldstein, grounded methodologically on the projection of an organismic Gestalt, and that as a form of operative-intentional praxis projection is the site of primacy in his phenomenology overall. In terms of the relation between natural science and transcendental philosophy in Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment, while the theoretical dimension of the latter—the eidetic apriority of the organismic Gestalt—is coupled dialectically with empirical facts on an epistemically coeval basis, these are jointly subordinated to the normative commitments implied by the imaginative projection of that Gestalt. The primacy of the latter is transcendental but in a distinctly practical sense, such that any substantive discrepancy between natural science and Merleau-Pontian phenomenology reflects metaphilosophical, not theoretical, disagreement.

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Notes

  1. Although there is a seemingly obvious answer to the primacy question, viz., perception, as we shall see this tends to reflect the problematic ‘knottiness’ at issue—which, even if there is something positive to be said about it, should nonetheless be amenable to analysis, if it indeed has a serious claim on our philosophical attention.

  2. See Merleau-Ponty (1996).

  3. Ibid., p. 67.

  4. Ibid., p. 68; cf. Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. xi): perception is “defined for us as access to the truth”.

  5. Rationality is the “marvel [prodige] of the connection of experiences” (1945, p. xvi). “To say that there exists rationality is to say that perspectives overlap [se recoupent], perceptions confirm one another [se confirment], a meaning [sens] appears” (ibid., p. xv).

  6. Ibid., pp. 11, 62, 296, 316.

  7. Merleau-Ponty (1996, pp. 67–68, italics added).

  8. Merleau-Ponty (1947, pp. 103, xi).

  9. Ibid., p. 196.

  10. Merleau-Ponty (1996, p. 43).

  11. Ibid., p. 42.

  12. Ibid., p. 54.

  13. Ibid., pp. 56–58.

  14. E.g., ibid., p. 67.

  15. See Madison (1992).

  16. Merleau-Ponty (1945, pp. 53, 24).

  17. Ibid., p. 395.

  18. Ibid., p. 371, italics added.

  19. Ibid., p. 279.

  20. Cf. Geraets (1976). That it can’t make both an ontological and an epistemic claim seems to go without saying—it is a question of primacy, after all, which by its nature can’t be shared or apportioned in that way. It might be objected that Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception serves to break down the usual distinction between ontological and epistemological claims. As we shall see, something like this is in fact the case. It’s just that it will be in terms of the resulting view that originary perception can be understood, not the converse.

  21. See Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. 280); cf. Merleau-Ponty’s example of Earth’s origin: “Laplace’s nebula is not behind us, at our origin, but rather in front of us in the cultural world” (ibid., p. 494).

  22. This is not to confuse logical with temporal priority, but simply to recognize that even if something is held to be ontologically primordial in some sense, that is a separate issue from its having primacy. The point is simply that if (unlike perception in classical empiricism, for example) special means are required to access philosophically what is deemed primordial, then there is a stronger case to be made for locating primacy there, in the means and its ground, rather than in what it serves to reveal.

  23. This may well hold across philosophy generally, but I won’t make an argument to that effect here.

  24. See especially Herbenick (1973), although I do not follow his analysis.

  25. Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. ix).

  26. Ibid., p. 75. “Radical reflection is that which seizes me [me ressaisit] while I am in the process of forming and formulating the ideas of subject and object, it brings to light the source of these two ideas, it is reflection not only in an operative sense, but it is also conscious of itself in its operation” (ibid., p. 253).

  27. See especially Gendlin (1992).

  28. “The task of a radical reflection […] consists […] in recovering the unreflective experience of the world in order to put the attitude of verification and reflective operations back into it, and to make reflection appear as one of the possibilities of my being” (1945, p. 278, italics added).

  29. Merleau-Ponty (1997, p. 38).

  30. Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. 239).

  31. See ibid., p. xvi.

  32. Ibid., p. 237.

  33. Merleau-Ponty (1996, p. 68).

  34. Sheets-Johnstone’s idea of “the primacy of movement” (1999) is formally similar to views like that of Gendlin (1992) concerning “the primacy of the body” (1992), although it is based on a sharper critique of Merleau-Ponty. More broadly, these views are also formally similar to those which, with regard to Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, would locate primacy in intercorporeality (e.g., Adams 2007).

  35. The question here is whether the reduction is understood as an active and deliberate effort, an act of freedom, however conditioned, or else as an event that happens to or befalls someone. Concerning Merleau-Ponty, Heinämma argues for the latter: “the epochē is not our accomplishment but something that happens to us” (2007, p. 146). This view, however, overstates the influence that Eugen Fink had on Merleau-Ponty (see Smyth 2011).

  36. Although Geraets (1971, p. 12) noted that “the major event in the development of [Merleau-Ponty’s] research was his reading of Goldstein’s book, Der Aufbau des Organismus,” little has been written on this connection. But see Pintos (2005) and Noble (2014, pp. 7–52). On Goldstein’s connection with phenomenology, see Goldstein (1967, pp. 162–163; 1971a, p. 11); Harrington (1996, pp. 146, 157f); but cf. Spiegelberg (1972, pp. 301–318).

  37. See Goldstein (1967, p. 161; 1995, pp. 384–385); also Jonas (1959); Sacks (1995); Noppeney (2000; 2001).

  38. Goldstein (1995, p. 306); “I […] deny that biological phenomena, particularly human existence, can be understood by application of the method of natural sciences” (1971a, p. 11).

  39. Goldstein (1995, p. 306; 1971c, p. 440).

  40. Goldstein (1940, pp. 23–24; 1995, pp. 312–314, 386f).

  41. Gurwitsch (1940, p. 265) suggested—misleadingly, I think—that there was a latent Platonism in Goldstein’s thought.

  42. Especially Cassirer’s work, including his Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, parts of which were based upon his interpretation of Goldstein’s results (the two were cousins).

  43. Goldstein (1995, p. 307; see also 1940, p. 24).

  44. E.g., Goldstein (1940, p. 24; 1995, pp. 307, 315f, 386f; 1971b). Cf. Gurwitsch (1940, pp. 249, 259); Ulrich (1968); Harrington (1996, pp. 162–163).

  45. It would take us too far afield to get into the details of the alternative that Goethe posed to the Newtonian model of science. For an overview, see Heitler (1998), Zajonc (1998), Wahl (2005), and Ebach (2005). On some affinities between Goethe and phenomenology, see Simms (2005).

  46. Goldstein (1940, p. 23, italics added).

  47. Goldstein (1971c, p. 441). It could be argued that, anti-Newtonian connotations aside, Goldstein’s allusions to Goethe are incidental in that philosophically this perspective and the role of imagination within it has ultimately more to do with Kant. Something like this is certainly true—consider Riese’s comment that “Goldstein’s work could be considered a broad empirical verification of the Kantian idea of the organism” (1938, p. 96)—but it is too large an issue to explore here (although I shall make brief reference to Kant below).

  48. Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. xii; cf. 1964, p. 50).

  49. Goldstein (1940, p. 30; 1971c, p. 441; 1995, pp. 313, 340, 387); Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. xvi).

  50. Goldstein (1995, pp. 17–18). And Merleau-Ponty shared this view. In a letter to Goldstein (30 April 1950) concerning the French translation of Der Aufbau des Organismus, which appeared, following Ricœur’s translation of Husserl’s Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, as the second volume in the Bibliothèque de Philosophie series co-edited by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, the latter claimed that this ordering was intended to show “the fruitfulness of combining ‘pure’ philosophy with ‘positive’ knowledge” (cited in Harrington 1996, pp. 158, 257n79). As the publisher’s blurb (approved if not written by Merleau-Ponty) put it, “here one will see what could be—rigorously applied to positive knowledge—a ‘phenomenological’ method that is more often celebrated than practiced.”

  51. Goldstein (1995, pp. 306–308).

  52. Goldstein (1940, pp. 43–68; 1995, pp. 44–45); Goldstein and Scheerer (1941). The terms I shall use for these capacities are Gestaltung and Umgestaltung, although the meaning of the latter can be rolled into the former.

  53. It merits emphasizing that the abstract attitude in no way corresponds to mind as opposed to body (and conversely for the ‘concrete attitude’), but is rather a feature of the organism as a whole, something shown clearly in the pathological case studies on which Goldstein and his collaborators based their claims about the abstract attitude, where its diminishment was self-evidently occasioned by (but irreducible to) physical injury (e.g., brain lesion).

  54. Goldstein (1995, pp. 307–308); “Subject matter and method are interrelated” (1995, p.29).

  55. Goldstein (1940, p. 24; 1995, p. 308); cf. Harrington (1996, p. 163).

  56. Goldstein (1971c, p. 441, italics added). Likewise, “[m]edicine […] is a kind of artistic enterprise and so mirrors the nature of man” (1971a, p. 153).

  57. Merleau-Ponty (1996, p. 68).

  58. Ibid., p. 49.

  59. Ibid.

  60. This is the sense in which, for Merleau-Ponty, matter is “pregnant with its form” (1945, p. 337; Merleau-Ponty 1996, p. 48).

  61. Singer (1981, p. 159); cf. Merleau-Ponty’s ‘wood’ example (1945, p. 514).

  62. Merleau-Ponty (1996, p. 49).

  63. Singer (1981, pp. 160–162).

  64. Cf. Meacham (2010).

  65. This point relies on the role played by the productive imagination in the first and third Critiques (Kant 1998, 2000), a detailed discussion of which must be reserved for another occasion.

  66. See especially Coole (1984).

  67. See Kant (1998, p. A141/B180f): “This schematism of our understanding with regard to appearances and their mere form is a hidden art in the depths of the human soul [eine verborgene Kunst in den Tiefen der menschlichen Seele], whose true operations we can divine from nature and lay unveiled before our eyes only with difficulty”.

  68. Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. xii; cf. p. 65).

  69. Merleau-Ponty (1996, pp. 99–100).

  70. This point merits closer attention, inasmuch as it is widely held within Merleau-Ponty scholarship that his view of bodily intentionality excludes aboutness (Reuter 1999, pp. 75–76), that “it is impossible to distinguish the content of motor intentional activity from the attitude directed toward that content” (Kelly 2002, p. 387). Recognizing the role of productive imagination in perception suggests to the contrary that these aspects of bodily intentionality can be distinguished, and that the difference with reflective intentionality, if there is one, lies elsewhere.

  71. Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. 395, italics added).

  72. Ibid., p. 130.

  73. Ibid. Merleau-Ponty underlined his “as if by magic” comment by saying that this projective function could also be conceived in terms of evocation “in the sense in which the medium evokes something absent and makes it appear”.

  74. Ibid., p. 153.

  75. Ibid, pp. 130, 153. See Smyth (2013, pp. 93–98) for a fuller discussion of ‘human productivity’.

  76. See Matherne (2014) for a discussion of Cassirer’s role in this.

  77. Merleau-Ponty (1996, pp. 58, 56).

  78. Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. 237).

  79. Ibid., p. 175. “It is a knot [noeud] of living significations, not the law for a certain number of covariant terms” (ibid., p. 177).

  80. Ibid., p. 176.

  81. See in particular Goldstein and Gelb (1918) and Goldstein (1940, 1995). But cf. Jung (1949), Bay et al (1949), Goldenberg (2003) and Marrotta and Behrmann (2004).

  82. I must reserve for another occasion a critical discussion of recent accounts of Merleau-Ponty’s use of the case of Schn. (e.g., Jensen 2009; Mooney 2011).

  83. Goldstein (1940, p. 35–38).

  84. Goldstein (1967, p. 153).

  85. Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. 104).

  86. This is in effect what Merleau-Ponty had in mind in referring to Goldstein’s magnum opus in terms of its important “epistemological lesson” (1956, p. 438).

  87. Merleau-Ponty (1964, p. 72).

  88. Merleau-Ponty (1964, pp. 53–54, 72; cf. 1945, pp. ix–x).

  89. Merleau-Ponty (1964, p. 72).

  90. Ibid., pp. 53–55.

  91. Merleau-Ponty (1964, pp. 72–73; see also 1948, p. 171; 1996, p. 66).

  92. Ibid., p. 73, emphasis altered.

  93. Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. 327).

  94. Recall Merleau-Ponty’s repeated affirmation to the effect that philosophy “realizes itself by destroying itself as separate philosophy” (ibid., p. 520, italics added; see also 1948, pp. 136, 235).

  95. Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. 519, italics added).

  96. Merleau-Ponty (1964, p. 73, italics added).

  97. This is clear enough from his work, but it was also a major part of the contemporary French context, which was marked by a sharp separation between science and philosophy along the lines of Cartesian dualism.

  98. Alluding back to The Structure of Behavior (1942), Merleau-Ponty claimed that “our goal was to understand the relations between consciousness and nature […] to connect the idealist perspective, according to which nothing exists except as an object for consciousness, and the realist perspective, according to which consciousnesses are inserted into the tissue of the objective world and events in themselves” (1945, p. 490).

  99. Harrington (1996, p. 142).

  100. Ludwig (2012, p. 52, italics in original).

  101. See Frisch (2014) and Whitehead (2015).

  102. See, for example, Flanagan (2006).

  103. Merleau-Ponty (1996, p. 66).

  104. Merleau-Ponty (1948, p. 171, italics added; see also 1964, pp. 72–73).

  105. See Compton (1992, p. 191).

  106. Ibid., p. 193.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Jack Reynolds, Andrew Inkpin, and Ian Angus for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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Smyth, B. The primacy question in Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology. Cont Philos Rev 50, 127–149 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-016-9389-x

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