Abstract
Andrew Kirkpatrick looks to the ways in which both Whitehead and Maurice Merleau-Ponty reject the “fallacy of simple location” as the atomization of space and time into simply located instants. Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty were both influenced by Bergson, and they also extend his critique and arrived at independent, but complimentary, conceptions of epochal time. In particular, Kirkpatrick argues that while Whitehead provides a metaphysical account of epochal time, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, with his revised conception of intentionality, phenomenological reduction, and being-in-the-world, provides a means of comprehending epochal time in terms of embodiment. Clarifying the “atomic” nature of epochal time, Kirkpatrick considers Whitehead’s eternal objects together with Merleau-Ponty’s adoption of Gestalt psychology, and argues that epochal time can be characterized as a “bracketed” time in particular ways.
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Notes
- 1.
As Whitehead famously notes: “The safest characterisation of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 39).
- 2.
- 3.
As Köhler puts it: “forms in time behave just like shapes in space: a melody, for instance, may be given in different keys, and yet remains the same qua melody” (Köhler, 1992, p. 198).
- 4.
“[A]mbiguity is essential to human existence, and everything that we live or think always has several senses” (Merleau-Ponty, 2014, p. 172).
- 5.
As Landes notes: “Merleau-Ponty sees Cézanne as enacting a phenomenology in painting.” Similarly, Johnson notes that in “Eye and Mind” Merleau-Ponty goes “so far as to accord to the painter a unique privilege above the philosopher, the scientist, and the writer.” See: Landes (2013, p. 35); Johnson (2010, p. 16).
- 6.
That the landscape is taken as “an emerging organism” coincides with Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, in which nature is depicted as a passage that is “always moving on” (Whitehead, 2004, p. 54).
- 7.
Telling in this regard is Merleau-Ponty’s late claim that “any theory of painting is a metaphysics” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a, p. 171).
- 8.
- 9.
Merleau-Ponty primarily cites Bergson’s Matter and Memory and Mind Energy in his Phenomenology of Perception, with Creative Evolution cited frequently in his later nature lectures. Whitehead is less reliable in terms of citation. However, he consistently refers to Bergson in virtually all of his major works, going so far as to claim that he is “greatly indebted” to Bergson in the preface to Process and Reality. Moreover, and as Auxier has shown, “two of Whitehead’s most important critical ideas,” namely those considered here in terms of simple location and misplaced concreteness, arise almost directly from Whitehead’s reading of and engagement with Bergson’s philosophy. See: Merleau-Ponty, 2014, pp. 502, 577; 2003, pp. 293–294.; Whitehead, 1978, p. xii.; Auxier, 1999, p. 306.
- 10.
“Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call … reference to a content, direction toward an object … or immanent objectivity” (Brentano, 1995, p. 68).
- 11.
See “Intend” on the Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/intend?ref=etymonline_crossreference
- 12.
Following Brentano, Husserl writes: “It belongs as a general feature to the essence of every actual cogito to be a consciousness of something.” In this regard, and as Frede notes: “Husserl had adopted Brentano’s conception of intentionality (“directedness toward”) of all mental acts in order to give a comprehensive depiction of all phenomena as objects of – or more precisely, the contents of – different types of acts of consciousness” (Husserl 2012, p. 67; Frede, 1993, p. 52).
- 13.
“Objective thought cuts the ties that unite the thing and the embodied subject” (Merleau-Ponty, 2014, p. 334).
- 14.
As Merleau-Ponty notes, being-in-the-world “only appears against the background of the phenomenological reduction” (Merleau-Ponty, 2014, p. xxviii).
- 15.
As with Schneider’s work tools, we can understand that an escaping tortoise “calls for a certain mode of resolution.”
- 16.
“When [Schneider] complains about the weather, he is asked if he feels better during the winter. He responds: “I can’t say now … for the moment, I can’t say anything.”” (Merleau-Ponty, 2014, p. 137, emphasis mine).
- 17.
The distinction between a projective stance associated with “grasping” and an objective stance associated with “pointing” is especially relevant when it comes to perception. As Merleau-Ponty notes: “when it comes to perception, rather than sticking closely to it … Both [intellectualism and empiricism qua objective thought] keep their distance ” (Merleau-Ponty, 2014, p. 28, emphasis mine).
- 18.
It is Schneider’s operative intentionality that enables him to achieve fluidity in his movements. However, in contrast to Schneider, the normal subject could not only sew wallets, but could also pretend to sew wallets even in the absence of leather, scissors, needles and thread.
- 19.
In contrast to this sense of projection, Zeno’s Achilles is aimless. As Van Haeften points out, missing for Zeno’s Achilles is anticipation, or “an object in the guise of an aim” (Van Haeften, 2001, p. 74).
- 20.
As Bannon puts it: “[T]he water itself is not … “in” space because space is not a container … the water is not in the pool; its position is determined by the relation between the event of the tiles, the event of the reflection, and the event of the pool. To determine the place of the water as “in the pool” would be to make the mistake of confusing objects for events” (Bannon, 2014, p. 140).
- 21.
See “Epoch,” Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/epoch
- 22.
As Whitehead notes, due to the “deficiencies of language,” words and phrases “must be stretched towards a generality that is foreign to their ordinary usage” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 4).
- 23.
In saying that an “eternal object” is like a Platonic Form, we must not take this is an exact comparison. In light of Whitehead’s approach to language, the comparison between an “eternal object” and a “Platonic Form” must be understood to stretch the meaning of the latter. See: Whitehead, 1978, pp. 23, 44, 85, 149.
- 24.
As Whitehead puts it: “the simple minded way in which traditional philosophy … has treated universals is the root of all evils.” Moreover “the traditional doctrine of the absolute isolation of universals is as great … [an] error, as the isolation of primary substances” (Whitehead, 1989, p. 199; 1978, p. 346).
- 25.
Indeed, Whitehead blames his “usual faults of exposition” for the misinterpretation of his doctrine (Whitehead, 1989, p. 199).
- 26.
Atomos itself is derived from the root word “tomos” meaning “to cut.” See: “Atom,” Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/atom#etymonline_v_18022
- 27.
Duration “is not a quantity, and as soon as we try to measure it, we unwittingly replace it by space” (Bergson, 2001, p. 106).
- 28.
Notably, this is the same argument that Merleau-Ponty makes against Heideggerian “historical time” (Merleau-Ponty, 2014, p. 451).
- 29.
Such a critique is certainly not foreign to an ontology of flesh or a philosophy of organism. As Barbaras notes, Merleau-Ponty’s ontology amounts to a “positive” anthropomorphism or biomorphism. Likewise, and as Robert Spaemann notes, insofar as “he maintains that nature is a unity … Whitehead’s philosophy is not biocentric, but biomorphic” (Barbaras, 2002, p. 25; Spaemann, 1990, p. 153; Bannon, 2011, p. 352).
- 30.
- 31.
Debaise, Nature as Event, 18.
- 32.
Whether this involves seeing “clearly and distinctly” or indeed being blinded by the light of Being.
- 33.
Originally coined by Paul Claudel, the notion of co-naissance has an important double meaning for Merleau-Ponty. Naissance is French for “birth,” while connaissance comes from the verb connaître, meaning “to know” or “to understand.” Hence, to have “co-naissance” is to have both an “understanding” and a “co-birth.” See: Hamrick & Van der Veken, 2011, p. 26; Kirkpatrick, 2017, pp. 325–329.
- 34.
- 35.
Insofar as it “arouse[s] more thoughts than those that are “contained” in it,” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 199).
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Kirkpatrick, A. (2022). Grasping Epochal Time: A Process Phenomenological Approach. In: Davis, A.M., Teixeira, MT., Schwartz, W.A. (eds) Process Cosmology. Palgrave Perspectives on Process Philosophy . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81396-3_14
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