Abstract
Despite the recent increase of interest in the work of Merleau-Ponty there is still a persistent tendency to overlook the uniqueness of the philosophical position he advances in Phenomenology of Perception. In this article I present a reading of Merleau-Ponty’s account of the phenomenological reduction that explains how it is original. I do this by contrasting his presentation of the reduction with that of the early Husserl, highlighting how his emphasis on the phenomenology of the ‘perceived world’ leads him to reject Husserl’s conception of phenomenology as a ‘philosophical science,’ and the Kantian language in which the this account is framed. I go on to critically discuss the interpretations of the reduction advanced by Stephen Priest and Joel Smith as examples of readings that fail to fully grasp Merleau-Ponty’s account of the ‘natural attitude’ as resting on the inherent objectivizing structure that is built into perception itself. The way that these authors misinterpret Merleau-Ponty helps to make maximally clear the profound philosophical significance that he places on the phenomenology of the ‘perceived world’.
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Notes
Merleau-Ponty also refers to this as ‘objectivism’ (Merleau-Ponty 2002: xxii). I use the two interchangeably.
e.g., ‘The word ‘here’ applied to my body does not refer to a determinate position in relation to other positions or to external coordinates, but the laying down of the first co-ordinates … the situation of the body in face of its tasks’ (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 115).
Although Heidegger’s ‘in-der-Welt-sein’ is also rendered as ‘being-in-the-world’ in the Macquarie and Robinson translation (Heidegger 1962), we should not automatically assume that Merleau-Ponty’s term is identical to Heidegger’s. In the original French Merleau-Ponty’s term is ‘être au monde’, and it is a translation of this term that is intended here. Donald A. Landes discusses this translation issue in Landes (2014: xlix).
As a result, Merleau-Ponty reconceives ‘eidetic reduction’ as a procedure that is only able to facilitate claims that are ultimately “contingent a priori” or “historical a priori” (see, e.g., Margolis 1991). Merleau-Ponty takes eidetic reduction to be a separate methodological procedure whose epistemic contribution is crucially derivative on the epoché and reduction. This is because they facilitate access to the ‘phenomenal field,’ which lays out the scope and limit of possible knowledge claims. I therefore view the interesting and important question of Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of ‘eidetic reduction’ as outside the scope of this article.
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Pollard, C. What is Original in Merleau-Ponty’s View of the Phenomenological Reduction?. Hum Stud 41, 395–413 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-018-9471-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-018-9471-y