The Landscape of Merleau-Pontyan Thought

Abstract

Merleau-Ponty wrote prolifically throughout his life on psychology, aesthetics, and politics, on pedagogy, physics, and painting. Between his appointment to the Université de Lyon in 1945 and his sudden death in Paris in 1961—a copy of Descartes’ Dioptrique on the desk in front of him—the survey of courses he taught is dizzying in scope. For all its promise, however, the interdisciplinary nature of Merleau-Ponty’s work, and the abruptness of its end, raises the question of how these projects connect. The question is encouraged by Merleau-Ponty’s own notes, which indicate that the book he was working on at the time of his death was meant to return to problems left “insoluble” in Phenomenology of Perception (VI 200). Did he hope this work would supersede the Phenomenology? to correct for its false start? to press on in the same direction?

1 Introduction

Merleau-Ponty wrote prolifically throughout his life on psychology, aesthetics, and politics, on pedagogy, physics, and painting. Between his appointment to the Université de Lyon in 1945 and his sudden death in Paris in 1961—a copy of Descartes’ Dioptrique on the desk in front of him—the survey of courses he taught is dizzying in scope. For all its promise, however, the interdisciplinary nature of Merleau-Ponty’s work, and the abruptness of its end, raises the question of how these projects connect. The question is encouraged by Merleau-Ponty’s own notes, which indicate that the book he was working on at the time of his death was meant to return to problems left “insoluble” in Phenomenology of Perception (VI 200). Did he hope for this work to supersede the Phenomenology? to correct for its false start? to press on in the same direction?

That his career would be punctuated by this kind of ambiguity is fitting. Merleau-Ponty is, as de Waehlhens noted, a “philosoph[er] of the ambiguous” (SB xviii). We emerge from his first major text, The Structure of Behavior, having undermined, rather than clarified, productive oppositions between stimulus and response, cause and effect, form and content, and Phenomenology of Perception blurs the boundaries that separate conscious subjects from the world of objects that cannot think or perceive. “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty’s last complete philosophical work, seamlessly weaves Cartesian vision science and the metaphysics of painting. From an interpretive standpoint, moreover, it would go against the spirit of Merleau-Ponty’s work to resolve these ambiguities: Though he does not name it until the 1950s, Merleau-Ponty strives to resist what he calls “bad dialectic”—that is, any dialectical argument that culminates in a “final synthesis” (VI 143). In this sense, he comes to see phenomenology as an ongoing interrogative process that never arrives at a positive answer.

An effect of this method is, of course, that it introduces considerable difficulty: Researchers hoping to find their footing by locating Merleau-Ponty in the history of phenomenology will discover that he resists doing the kind of exegetical work or textual commentary that would make clear how he views the tradition of which he is a part, and without careful attention to the rhythms of the dialectic, it is easy to mistake the views he means to undermine for his own. Moreover, since Merleau-Ponty’s task lies as much in muddying as in clarifying the scientific and philosophical problems within his own core areas of interest, we discover that certain key terms—the body, perception, habit, movement, consciousness, nature—do not exactly have the same sense by the time Merleau-Ponty has finished with them. An effect is that otherwise opposing camps have been able to conscript Merleau-Ponty to their side. Can we ‘naturalize’ Merleau-Pontyan phenomenology and so revolutionize the sciences of mind,¹ or is his concept of nature incompatible with contemporary natural or cognitive science?² Is Merleau-Ponty an idealist, perhaps even of a straightforwardly Kantian sort,³ or a realist?⁴ The ripple effects of these ambiguities are evident in a scholarship now so fractious that we are sometimes left with the impression that there is no single Merleau-Ponty, perhaps not even in the space of a single text.⁵

My aim here is to offer a way out of these difficulties. Taking seriously a remark Merleau-Ponty made in a 1946 interview—that his philosophy seeks to “escape idealism without falling back into the naïveté of realism” (CPM 85)—I will argue that everything from Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of nature to his interest in the psychology of perception, from his aesthetics to his critique of Liberal politics, contributes to this aim. The method by which he arrives there, however, owes a profound indebtedness, not only to Husserl and Heidegger, but—crucially—to the humanized, Marx-inflected Hegel of the French tradition, who came to Merleau-Ponty through Jean Hyppolite and Alexandre Kojève. Understood through this lens, we discover that Merleau-Ponty does not mean to endorse either the classical realism of the natural sciences or an idealism of the transcendental or absolute sort, but to show how the phenomena philosophy tries to lay hold of will always resist or escape clarification in the abstract concepts handed down by the history of philosophy and science. The result is a uniquely ‘aesthetic’ phenomenology, involving a process Merleau-Ponty calls, in The Visible and the Invisible, “vertical history” (VI 186). Properly practiced, a vertical history does not map out the linear progression of events or ideas, but demands that we return to the things themselves—to embodied perception, the political subject, nature, organic life—again and again, the way we might return to an enigmatic poem or to a painting to catch it in a new light.

I want to approach this chapter in that Merleau-Pontyan spirit, returning to Merleau-Ponty’s texts to center their ambiguity. I begin in §2 by addressing the question of method, positioning Merleau-Ponty in the landscape of classical phenomenology by focusing on his modification of Husserl. I then show, in §3, how this modification could open up so many different interpretive possibilities, inspiring radically different modes of interdisciplinary uptake in contemporary scholarship. I then return to Merleau-Ponty’s own thought. In §4, I reconstruct the basic architecture of his dialectical method and show where the transcendental status of ambiguity uncovered by that method urges, for Merleau-Ponty, a fundamental rethinking of the traditional categories of philosophy and science. I conclude, in §5, by considering the ‘unthought-of” in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, sketching where the idea of a transcendental ambiguity could point toward new, and more radical possibilities for phenomenology.

2 Approaching Merleau-Ponty: The Problem of Method

In the Preface to Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty writes that the aim of phenomenology is not to explain or analyze conscious experience, but to describe it, with the goal of understanding what Husserl called “the natural attitude.” From outside the phenomenological tradition, this approach seems peculiar. What does it mean to understand something through description and not through analysis? And to what extent does this involve, as Merleau-Ponty argues, a “disavowal of science” (PP lxxi)? This is perhaps an odd demand for a philosopher who draws from sciences ranging from physics to empirical psychology.

Initially, Merleau-Ponty avails himself of a Husserlian answer: Phenomenologists should suspend or “bracket” any judgments about the objects of experience, facilitating a rigorous re-description of conscious experience that is, ostensibly, ‘theory’-free. This move disavows science, then, only in the sense that it is a refusal to pre-endorse the scientists’ account of the ‘reality’ of the objects of experience. However, Merleau-Ponty also stresses the dependence of science on phenomenology—a point he expresses by repurposing Husserl’s method of “reduction.” Whereas the suspension of judgment, for Husserl, is supposed to identify the transcendental pre-conditions of the natural attitude through a momentary reduction to “pure” consciousness, Merleau-Ponty argues that it is always in the perceived world that any kind of “understanding’ arises, including, he argues, Husserl’s understanding of “pure” consciousness. On this view, a ‘reduction’ to the plane of pure consciousness, far from helping to illuminate the conditions of possibility of experience, would require us to artificially bifurcate those conditions by excising perceiving consciousness both from the material body and from the world.

In proposing this objection, it should be stressed that Merleau-Ponty is making two claims. First, he is identifying the world of lived perception as the ground of any conceptual or cognitive understanding of the structures of conscious experience and therefore as the world of which science—including a science of consciousness—“always speaks” (PP lxxii). The rigorous descriptions phenomenologists pursue, he argues, should therefore be of the “perceived world” in which we are always already inserted—a prescription that loosely aligns Merleau-Ponty with Husserl’s “existential dissidents” (PP lxxvii), most notably Heidegger and Sartre. Second, however, he is noting that this does not entail a repudiation of Husserl. To the contrary, locating the source of our idea of pure consciousness in embodied, innerworldly perception highlights the “most important lesson of the reduction” (PP lxxvii), which is that if we bracket not just our judgments about the metaphysical status of intentional objects, but also the world of lived perception from within which phenomenology is practiced, we bracket too much. Merleau-Ponty concludes from this that the reduction—indispensable though it may be as a tool of the phenomenological method—is, despite Husserl’s intentions, “impossible” to “complete” (ibid.).

There is considerable debate as to where the convergence of these points locates Merleau-Ponty in the history of phenomenology. For some commenters (e.g., Dreyfus, 2005; Carman, 2008), Merleau-Ponty’s embrace of an existential method of phenomenology represents a sharp break from the transcendental strategy pursued by Husserl. For others (e.g., Heinämaa, 2013; Morris, 2013), it is a modified continuation of it.⁶ Before I return to this difference below, however, I want to isolate two conclusions we might be tempted to draw from Merleau-Ponty’s own method of “reduction.”

The first is this: that, despite Merleau-Ponty’s explicitly positioning his project as an “escape” from idealism, it nevertheless remains idealist, as Searle puts it, “in a rather traditional sense” (Searle, 2008, 125); after all, Merleau-Ponty ‘recasts’ the reduction as a demand for a certain kind of self-critical perspective that is, qua perspective, still pursued from within perceptual experience itself. As we expect, Merleau-Ponty will be adamant in resisting this charge. “To return to the things themselves,” he writes, taking up the Husserlian slogan, “is absolutely distinct from the idealist return to consciousness” (PP lxxii). His reasoning is that, if there is to be some kind of unifying act on the part of the ‘subject’ (say, in a perceptual judgment), there must already be the “spectacle” of a world demanding to be unified—a spectacle, Merleau-Ponty argues, that always overflows our judgments about it (PP lxxiii). He concludes that the world disclosed in perception cannot be the construction of an insulated consciousness, but is material and real, comprising stones and rivers, works of art and cups of coffee, all of which “motivate” me to take them up, in perception or action, in multiple ways.

As I will suggest below, efforts to assess how successful Merleau-Ponty is in wielding this discovery against the charge of idealism require us to first puzzle through the issue of how, precisely, Merleau-Ponty and his critics are using that term. But Merleau-Ponty’s own defense already invites a second temptation. For, as Merleau-Ponty argues, this spectacle of the real is present to the perceiver thanks in part to the ‘medium’ of the body. This emphasis makes it tempting to see phenomenological description as useful chiefly as an adjunct or even a corrective to traditional accounts of consciousness precisely because it enables us to properly highlight the role of the body in perceptual and intellectual life.

Merleau-Ponty’s work on embodiment has indeed been put to productive use in this way—including, most recently, in 4-E research programs in cognitive science.⁷ In fact, Varela et al.’s seminal introduction to enactivist psychology positions itself as a “modern continuation of the research program … founded by Merleau-Ponty” (Varela et al., 1991: xv). But this framing, I think, risks missing that, even if the body is ‘infused’ with mindedness, or if “mind” is “rooted in” the body, the body is not, for Merleau-Ponty, the Cartesian extended thing, encased in skin, any more than “I” am an isolated “cabinet of consciousness” separable from my body. Whatever we make of Merleau-Ponty’s uptake by cognitive science, in other words, it is important to stress, first, that embodiment for Merleau-Ponty chiefly describes the way in which the perceiving ‘subject’ is enmeshed in a world and that it is, second, in embodied experience that she learns what and where her body is. Since embodied perception always overflows the idea I have of my body, we cannot ground a new science on the phenomenological discovery of the body unless we first account for the way in which the body emerges as a body in my experience of a material world. With the conjunction of these points, we arrive at the central tension—and, I argue, the crucial methodological insight—of Merleau-Ponty’s thought.

Let us begin from the side of the tension: On the one hand, Merleau-Ponty has argued that the world is present to—is present thanks to—the perceiving body. On the other hand, he has argued that the world always transcends what is immediately given. The objects in my milieu withhold their backsides from my view, even when they “show” themselves to objects located elsewhere (PP 71); “my body as given to me by sight is broken at the height of the shoulders” even though “I am told that an object is visible for others in this lacuna in which my head is located” (SB 213); my life is bookended by a birth I cannot remember and a death I could never live through. It appears, in other words, as if a “contradiction” is inserted “at the center of philosophy” (PP 382). Merleau-Ponty formulates this contradiction as a question: “How,” he asks, “can I be open to phenomena that transcend me” if these phenomena “only exist to the extent that I take them up and live them” (PP 381)? Rather than responding to this question, however, he takes it as a demand for phenomenology: If perceptual experience ultimately discloses a fundamental—Merleau-Ponty here uses the term “transcendental” (ibid.)—ambiguity, this is a point we can appreciate only if we turn the phenomenological method on phenomenology itself. “To phenomenology understood as a direct description, a phenomenology of phenomenology” must therefore “be added” (PP 382).

What, exactly, does a phenomenology of phenomenology entail? It is sometimes lamented that Merleau-Ponty does not fully develop this idea. It seems, nevertheless, that the phenomenology of phenomenology functions throughout his work as a kind of hermeneutic principle that asks of the phenomenologist not only that she suspend judgment about the objects of experience but also suspend the judgment that the concepts deployed in the phenomenological attitude could ever be wholly adequate to the experience they seek to describe. In this light, Merleau-Ponty’s point about the incompleteness of the reduction takes on a different valence. What it urges is not just a refusal to pre-endorse the explanations of conscious experience furnished by the sciences and by so-called “common sense,” but also resistance to the finality or completeness of phenomenological description. Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of Husserl emerges in this light as ambivalent: He charges Husserl both with going too far in the reduction, and with not going far enough.⁸ Too far, that is, in supposing we could ever arrive at a plane of pure consciousness. Yet because Husserl fails to ‘bracket’ precisely that presupposition when interrogating perceptual experience, he does not go far enough.

We can return with this ambivalence in mind to the idea of phenomenology as a disavowal and continuation of science. As Merleau-Ponty writes in an evocative analogy, what the phenomenologist uniquely grasps is that the world of knowledge and ideas is dependent on the world of lived experience, much as “geography” is related to “the landscape in which we first learn what a forest, a meadow, or a river is” (PP lxxii). As he reads it, this dependence demands two things: first that we be rigorous in ensuring that any science—indeed any body of knowledge—recognize where it remains tethered to the perceived world out of which its organizing concepts are abstracted, and second that we resist ever concluding that our bodies of knowledge could wholly capture what can be said or known of that world. Merleau-Ponty’s method here emerges as essentially “open”: Just as the landscape is expressible as geography, so is it expressible in other ways—as a painting, for instance, or in a poem. This principle of openness, moreover, applies just as much to the world of perception as to the history of phenomenology: much as we return to Husserl’s Ideas or to Heidegger’s Being and Time and find something new there on each reading, the phenomenologist should return again and again to the “original text” of “perception itself” (PP 22), not—importantly—to find out what it “really says,” but to grasp what in it lends itself to a multiplicity of descriptions. It is this principle of openness, I think, that is the definitive insight of Merleau-Ponty’s career.

3 Surveying the Scholarly Terrain

As we have seen, Merleau-Ponty transformation of the phenomenological method signals his recognition of the ongoing, interrogative nature of phenomenology. But it also presents an interpretive challenge: If Merleau-Ponty resists “final answers,” how exactly can we make use of his insights?

That this is a significant challenge is evidenced first of all by the fractious and often contradictory state of the philosophical scholarship on Merleau-Ponty, second by the replication of those fractures in the interdisciplinary engagement with his thought. For instance, Merleau-Ponty’s work has attracted interest in fields as wide-ranging as architectural theory (Locke & McCann, 2016) and animal studies (Westling, 2014; Lestel et al., 2014); environmental thought (Abram, 1997; Cataldi & Hamrick, 2007; Toadvine, 2009) and archaeology (Malafouris, 2013); physics (Wiltsche & Berghofer, 2020) and psychopathology (Fernandez, 2018; Sheets-Johnstone, 2019), yet these fields often draw on very different, and sometimes seemingly incompatible aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s work. They are encouraged, moreover, by a scholarship that finds radically different arguments within the primary texts. My presentation so far has been intended to smooth over some of these differences. But an important question concerning the aim and the unity of Merleau-Ponty’s method—Is there a turn in his thinking, and if so, where?—now emerges as essential for justifying the pluralism of Merleau-Ponty’s legacy on philosophical grounds.

From the outset, it must be stressed that the question of a turn in Merleau-Ponty does not receive a simple “Yes” or “No” answer. Some scholars (e.g., Barbaras, 2005) emphasize apparent philosophical or methodological shifts that occur between the completion of The Structure of Behavior in 1938, and the publication of Phenomenology of Perception in 1945. Others (e.g., Evans & Lawlor, 2000) locate an even sharper turn, perhaps away from the “humanism” of phenomenology, in Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology. Against these discontinuous presentations, we find scholars who emphasize—as I will—the unity of Merleau-Ponty’s thought. For some, however (e.g., Foti, 2013; Landes, 2013), this is a thematic unity that may demand a new start through the later, more explicitly metaphysical works, and for others (e.g., Dillon, 1997; Morris, 2018), Merleau-Ponty’s work is both metaphysical and phenomenological from beginning to end. What these otherwise divergent readings share, I take it, are two points: that the “early” and “later” Merleau-Ponty are distinguished by sharp differences in style, and that the question of Merleau-Ponty’s relation to other thinkers is complicated both by those differences and by the openness of his method.

To appreciate these complications, let us first consider the question of Merleau-Ponty’s place within classical phenomenology. One debate in this area, which generally takes place at the intersections of phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science, is how far Merleau-Ponty is from Husserl. Does he mean to include Husserl under the targeted heading of “intellectualism”—a family of views that broadly correlate perception and judgment and which is painstakingly critiqued throughout Phenomenology of Perception? If so, does he misread Husserl? These questions do not only touch on the fate of Husserl in Merleau-Ponty’s work. They speak directly to the originality of Merleau-Ponty himself, since many commentators who would include Husserl as a target of the critique of intellectualism (Hubert Dreyfus, Francisco Varela) find gestures in Merleau-Ponty that point toward a radical new form of cognitive science the seeds of which others (Zahavi, Thompson) already see in Husserl.⁹

One approach to resolving this question is historical. Part of Merleau-Ponty’s charge of intellectualism is the failure to recognize the rootedness of thinking in the body. Since Husserl makes the lived body a part of his thinking as early as 1907, the extent to which Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on embodiment is unHusserlian is therefore resolvable with close attention to these aspects of Husserl’s work and to what Merleau-Ponty says of them.¹⁰ This approach requires attention to biography and context. For instance, we know that Merleau-Ponty formed his appraisal of Husserl in part on the basis of unpublished manuscripts housed in Louvain, where Merleau-Ponty conducted research beginning in 1939 (Van Breda, 1992). Thus, as Zahavi (2002) has argued, scholars who compare Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl only to the “published” Husserl risk being misled.¹¹ But the greater challenge for this approach is that it requires getting clear on Merleau-Ponty’s actual appraisal of Husserl’s thought. And this task is frustrated by Merleau-Ponty’s refusal to mine philosophical texts for evidence of what they “really” say—that is, to engage in what he dismisses as “philology” (PP lxxi). For just as we do not want to say definitively that the text of the perceived world is limited to our propositional judgments about it, neither, Merleau-Ponty argues, can we reduce the history of phenomenology to a pile of books. By consequence, even in his more direct engagements with fellow phenomenologists, such as his compelling re-reading of Husserl in “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” Merleau-Ponty centers his efforts less on commentary than on unearthing the “unthought-of element” in their thought (S 160). Embracing this point, it might be offered that the very idea of a positive answer to the question of the Husserl/Merleau-Ponty relation runs against the grain of Merleau-Ponty’s conception of phenomenology.

Initially, it appears as if we can sidestep this problem by narrowing the focus to Merleau-Ponty’s place in the field of existential phenomenology. After all, as many scholars note, there are clear affinities between Merleau-Ponty and other existentialist thinkers, including Heidegger and Sartre. Each figure, for instance, shares in the view that our orientation toward practical value takes precedence over detached theoretical contemplation or deliberative reasoning and so each offers sharp critiques, not just of classical psychology, but of the internalist orientation of much of contemporary analytic philosophy of mind.¹² These criticisms are powerful regardless of whether or not they also target Husserl.

Stressing this shared line of criticism has been enormously fruitful. Pursuing a Merleau-Pontyan alternative in the direction of embodied action, for instance, has been instrumental in breaking down a number of boundaries between so-called “analytic” and “Continental thought”¹³ and has inspired new research programs in embodied and enactivist psychology. But this strategy comes up against a different problem. For Merleau-Ponty also advances sharp criticisms of his fellow “existential dissidents,” affording a central place to certain phenomena—perception, life, embodiment—that are conspicuously left out of the formal analysis of Being in Being and Time¹⁴; in Phenomenology of Perception, he repudiates Sartre for overemphasizing human freedom, for failing to grasp, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, that “I do not choose myself continuously from nothing” (PP 478). (More damningly, The Visible and the Invisible includes an entire chapter charging Sartre with a dualism Merleau-Ponty seeks to overcome [VI chap. 2].) Indeed, we see on closer inspection that whether we stress Merleau-Ponty’s proximity to Heidegger and Sartre, on the one hand, or his distance from them, on the other, we are pulled in contradictory directions. Does Merleau-Ponty defend a non-conceptualist, pragmatic conception of embodied action, or do we instead find resources in his early writings that gesture in a more conceptualist direction?¹⁵

Strikingly, Merleau-Ponty’s refusal to give positive answers may light a way out of the problem: as I will show in a moment, Merleau-Ponty ultimately means to argue that any opposition between bodily habit and thought, between conceptual and non-conceptual contents, between form and content, existence and essence, matter and idea, must derive from a deeper ambiguity. If this is right, Merleau-Ponty’s most impactful contribution may well be that he enables us to move beyond this kind of debate. But it is also here that the impression of disunity, and the diversity of style in Merleau-Ponty, present an interpretive roadblock. His interest in ambiguity, for instance, leads him to experiment with philosophical methods (including the attribution of philosophical work to painting and poetry) and to introduce new ontological categories (including the quasi-Romantic conception of a sense-generating nature) that are, on the surface, a poor fit for uptake in the analytic philosophy of mind. An effect is that the scholarship on Merleau-Ponty largely continues to re-entrench certain intra-disciplinary boundaries. It is common, for instance, to see Merleau-Ponty compared, approvingly, to thinkers as wide-ranging as Wittgenstein and Deleuze, Peirce and Derrida, but rarely in the space of a single work.

With respect to Merleau-Ponty’s interdisciplinary applications, these boundaries are especially unfortunate. In the posthumous The Visible and the Invisible, for instance, Merleau-Ponty names the deeper ambiguity he discovers “flesh.” This text therefore affords a metaphysical status to an ambiguous “element,” “partway between matter and idea,” that produces the supposedly opposing terms that structure much of the history of thought. At the same time, the currents of criticism in that work, which run throughout his writings on aesthetics and ontology and are directed, inter alia, against the phenomenological strategies of Husserl and Sartre, make it tempting to see these later projects, and so Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of ambiguity as a metaphysical category, as separable from the project of Phenomenology of Perception. Noting this, it is common among philosophers of mind to take on board Merleau-Ponty’s embodied and existential phenomenological strategy without attention to the broader metaphysical implications of this thought. The effects of this reverberate in other fields that have found productive use for Merleau-Ponty’s embodied method of phenomenology.

Let me offer one example: I suggested above that Merleau-Ponty’s modification of phenomenology has inspired a variety of new approaches to thinking about the “embodied mind,” which has in turn transformed disciplines ranging from archaeology (Boivin, 2008; Malafouris, 2013) to theater studies (Tribble, 2011). In the case of archaeology for instance, Merleau-Ponty offers an alternative to ‘idealist’ research programs, which generally seek to reconstruct the intentions and values of past human societies by analyzing symbolic or representational meanings preserved in ‘inert’ matter, without this entailing a return to their positivist antithesis, which had focused on the observable record. This can impact, for one, how the archaeologist conceives of her role: As Moyes demonstrates, an archaeological method that centers the embodied practices of the archaeologist—wandering the landscape, conjuring a field of sensory experience—can make newly accessible a living past that overflows its material record (Moyes, this volume). It can also impact how we think about the meaning of the record. For instance, as Malafouris and others have argued—drawing from Merleau-Ponty and other phenomenological efforts to rethink the boundaries between minds and the material world at the level of action—a cognitive archaeology that looks ‘beyond’ the dualism of activity and passivity, of matter and idea, can open new avenues in thinking about the evolutionary history of mind by stressing the constitutive role of matter in shaping human cognition (see, e.g., Malafouris, 2018). Considered in this context, we are urged to reconceptualize a material artefact not as the reservoir of symbolic meanings and values, as if meaning were stamped onto matter like words on a page, but as the effect of a bi-directional coordination between ‘mind’ and world’—a coordination in which the environment considered in its materiality both constrains and motivates its own use within human beings’ collective symbolic and practical activity.

But here is the concern: If cultural meanings and values are to be understood as both motivated and constrained by non-human matter—if there is, in other words, a kind of inchoate meaningfulness discernible in matter that is not, as Merleau-Ponty argues, “posited by thought” (N 3)—are there certain claims about the metaphysics of meaning we have to take on board? What does it mean, for instance, from a developmental perspective, to say that matter can actively “press back” on the mind in its organic and social development?¹⁶ Does a material engagement framework enable us to preserve the distinction between perceivers and the sensible world, or does Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of flesh—an category meant to express the originary mutual imbrication of mind and body and world—entail, perhaps, some form of panpsychism?¹⁷

If we see Merleau-Ponty’s embodied methods as detachable from his ontology, these kinds of questions about the metaphysics of meaning can remain unasked. That is, they can remain beyond the scope of research for those for whom phenomenology is a practical apparatus above all else. Perhaps this is not to the obvious detriment of those fields. Even without consideration of ontology, for example, we see in archeology where the phenomenological framework brings to the foreground certain aspects of the archaeological record—hesitation marks in knapped stone (Malafouris, 2018), the color or texture of soil (Boivin, 2008)—that had not been previously incorporated into our understanding of our cognitive pre-history. Yet to proceed without raising these questions is to avoid probing a connection on which Merleau-Ponty himself insists. Asked, for instance, whether his descriptions of perceptual activity in Phenomenology of Perception—the basis for much of his enduring impact on the phenomenology of mind—“entail the philosophical conclusion on ‘the being of sense’ which [he] … developed after it,” Merleau-Ponty answers: “Yes” (Pr.P 116). Merleau-Ponty himself, in other words, rejected any separation between his philosophy of perception and action, on the one hand, and his later considerations on the metaphysics of meaning, on the other.

We return to our challenge: How can we pursue this connection when there is so little scholarly agreement as to what Merleau-Ponty ‘actually’ thought? What consequences follow from the idea of a consistency—beneath differences of style—to Merleau-Ponty’s work? And last, how can we demonstrate the range of radical new possibilities that follow from this idea? To answer these questions, let me engage in a bit of “vertical history” returning to the question of Merleau-Ponty’s methodology. My hope is that a reconstruction of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking here that presents it in a single voice can make headway in breaking down the intra- and interdisciplinary boundaries that fracture the field.

4 The Architecture of the Dialectic

Let us recall at this point Merleau-Ponty’s stated aim, which is to escape idealism without falling back into realism. So far, these terms have been loosely defined. This is no less the case in Merleau-Ponty, for whom they are sufficiently capacious as to cover a range of thinkers from Skinner to Kohler, from Spinoza to Kant. This diversity of representatives suggests, I think, that we should think of these terms less as isolating specific positions than as capturing two ways to express the relationship of a conscious subject and the environing world. “Realism,” in this context, encompasses a range of views on which it is the “world”—however conceived—that acts on the subject; “idealism” emphasizes the construction by the subject of that world. A desire to move “beyond” realism and idealism—whether this movement occurs within philosophy or in contemporary science—is a desire to think beyond the dualistic language of activity and passivity, construction and impact through which these positions are presented as alternatives.

Initially, the aim of thinking beyond realism and idealism closely aligns Merleau-Ponty with other thinkers of his generation, who, in their own way, saw those alternatives as precluding any genuine understanding of the relationship of consciousness and world. We find this kind of framing, for instance, in Being and Nothingness, where Sartre characterizes the challenge facing phenomenologists as the challenge of finding “another solution” when, having “ruled out a realist conception of the phenomenon’s relation with consciousness” as well as the “idealist solution … , [w]e seem to have closed every door” (Sartre 2018, 25). In his own career, however, Merleau-Ponty begins this movement not within phenomenology itself, but by identifying a problem that conscious experience poses for natural science. The need for a phenomenological methodology arises in this context out of the discovery that the frameworks of “realism” and “idealism” are wholly inadequate to the human behaviors they seek to explain—an inadequacy that is evident only when close attention is paid to the lived dimensions of conscious experience. As we will see, Merleau-Ponty’s deployment of this method affords a unique place in experience to the ‘natural’, ‘material’ world. In attending to materiality, for instance, he discovers that we must think of the natural world not in terms of the “matter” of physical science, but as the ambiguity of flesh—an expression that is meant to capture the way in which material reality could be both the repository and the “Ur-sprung” of sense. It is the conjunction of these points that unifies Merleau-Ponty’s otherwise scattered criticisms of his fellow phenomenological thinkers, from Husserl to Sartre: Each of these figures, he argues, has failed in different ways to see how phenomenology emerges from a specific exploration “at the margins of science” (CPM 85).

There is any number of ways we could reconstruct the movement beyond realism and idealism and so uncover Merleau-Ponty’s critical thought. In the spirit of a vertical history, however, I want to begin, not (as Merleau-Ponty does) in the narrower context of early twentieth century natural science, but with an experience that continues to animate philosophy today: the tingling of skeptical anxiety as it arises in visual perception. Beginning here, I argue, lets us track throughout the history of philosophy and perceptual psychology a series of competing explanations for that anxiety whose shortcomings point, not toward a new or better explanation for it, but toward a common way of misunderstanding its significance. I will then show how Merleau-Ponty deploys this objection in order to unearth the ground from which realism and idealism, activity and passivity appear for us as opposing terms in the first place.

4.1 The Prejudices of Naïve Consciousness

Let us begin by adopting the position of “naïve consciousness,” which is roughly synonymous for Merleau-Ponty with the “natural attitude.” In the case of visual perception, what is distinctive of this attitude, for Merleau-Ponty, is the effortless way in which my gaze alights upon objects and finds them “where they are” (SB 185). If I open my eyes and glance around my room, for instance, I will see, with no special effort, the desk and the computer in front of me, or my pitbull, Marlowe, who is curled up on the rug with a view of the hillside through my window. “I see,” as Merleau-Ponty says—alluding to Husserl—“the things themselves” (VI 3).

If I like, I can next put this visual perception into words. As I do so, I will feel as if I am recording the contents of a genuine reality. But then the tip of a tree branch disperses and takes flight; I realize it was not a tree branch, but a gathering of black birds. Whereas at first, I had such a vivid and immediate experience of closeness with the world, I am now confronted with a question: If I can manage to get things ‘wrong’ in this way, how can I know that my experience is of things as they are? Much like the experience of illness dissolves the otherwise tight connection I feel with my body, this question threatens to unravel the perceptual threads that in my everyday experience connect me to the world.

This feeling of untethering is important for Merleau-Ponty for two reasons. First, unlike the everyday perceiver, who might shrug her shoulders, content to let this peculiar experience recede into memory, the philosopher feels the tug of anxiety: Without a theory of perception, she worries, how can I avoid entrapping myself in a skeptical paradox? This is a worry for the philosopher, moreover, because, second, when I try to put this feeling of unravelling, this shaking of my “perceptual faith” (VI 3) into words, I discover those words are rife with ambiguities: When I say, for instance, that “My eyes deceive me,” do I really mean to impute that deception to my eyes—that is, to my perceptual system as a physical complex—or to my mind? If I say that “I was misled,” do I mean with this peculiar grammatical construction to signal a passive undergoing, or do I take myself to have performed some active miscalculation? This problem constitutes, for Merleau-Ponty, the distinctive predicament of the philosopher, whose “distinguishing trait” is to possess “inseparably the taste for evidence and the feeling for ambiguity” (IPP 17). The philosopher, in other words, craves certitude precisely because she feels where it continually evades her.

This characterization of philosophy underlies Merleau-Ponty’s reconstruction of the history of perceptual psychology. That history, he argues, flees continually in the direction of “certainty”, pursuing that certainty as a series of competing attempts to ‘correct’ the reports of “naïve consciousness” by resolving its ambiguities: Perhaps error really arises at the point of bodily receptivity, as when catastrophic injury affects the transmission of the sensory stimulus to perceptual consciousness. Or perhaps the error is internal to perceptual consciousness, in which case there is a range of views attributing that error to the process of assembling associated sensations or to the infinite scope of the will. If this is right, of course, then what we find in this history is not, on Merleau-Ponty’s view, the work of genuine philosophy—which would be marked, as he distinguishes it, by a willingness to make ambiguity “a theme”—but instead the misleading efforts of a range of thinkers who are “menace[d]” by ambiguity and strive to eradicate it (IPP 17). This framing thus helps isolate what, for Merleau-Ponty, is the failure of the history of psychology: it offers us a series of competing solutions to the problem of skeptical anxiety, which are misleading, not because they are wrong, but because they are solutions.

This is, admittedly, a peculiar objection, so let us look closer. For it is essential to appreciating its force that we isolate what was genuinely “naïve,” for Merleau-Ponty, on the part of naïve consciousness.

One tempting answer is to say that everyday perception is realistic, without being realist. That is to say, the naïve perceiver is naïve in the sense that she has no need for an underlying theory of perception at all. This kind of naïveté would explain, then, why the everyday perceiver shrugs at an experience that sends the psychologist in pursuit of a theory: to the former, the world displays itself to her consciousness as if impacting her without any effort on her part—a feeling that persists without her needing to explain or account for the nature of that impact. The psychologist is not satisfied without such an account. But Merleau-Ponty wants to preserve the perceiver’s “naïveté” in light of a deeper worry. The reason the perceiving subject does not have to choose among competing theories in her everyday attitude is not that she remains naïvely uncommitted. She does not have to choose, he argues, because each available explanation shares the same presupposition: that, whatever misfiring of perception we discover, it arises from me and not the world. Merleau-Ponty calls this shared presupposition “le préjujé du monde” (PP 5). When he urges our return to the natural attitude so that we might replace the “naïveté of realism” with the rigor of phenomenological description, it is this prejudice, this unquestioned belief in a world to which the mind will adequate itself, that he hopes to dislodge.

Let me take a moment to underline here that “le préjujé du monde” is a key expression in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, rendered by Smith as the “prejudice in favor of the objective world” and by Landes as “the unquestioned belief in the world.” Each of these translations preserves (and each erases) different subtleties. I first want to urge, then, that what is initially at issue for Merleau-Ponty is a prejudice in favor of, or an unquestioned belief in the world and not a thesis about the world. This is not because that belief has no metaphysical implications, but because those who endorse it are not forced to make it explicit and so may not recognize it as a thesis at all. Second, the expression captures what is, historically, a belief in the world or a prejudice in favor of an objective world in the sense that that belief concerns something—“the world”—understood to be distinct from the “subjective” distortions of a perceiving mind. Merleau-Ponty calls this certitude about the objective world “objectivism.” It is this implicit and uncritical endorsement of a shared objectivist framework that underlies, for Merleau-Ponty, the range of available positions—from the most realist to the most idealist—in the history of perceptual psychology.

Admittedly, the idea that this otherwise varied history is animated by a single presupposition is surprising. But consider, as one example, the opposition between empiricist and “intellectualist” accounts of the epistemology of perception, whose confrontation Merleau-Ponty stages in the Introduction to Phenomenology of Perception. As is well known, these are diametrically opposing accounts of the source of the ideas implicated in conscious perception, at least on a traditional presentation. Do the ideas that help structure experience come from nature via the medium of the body, thus retaining their link to the sensible world, or are they there innately thanks, as Descartes argues in the third Meditation, to nature or to God, in which case they first arise in us without the mediation of the body? The consequences of this dispute at first seem massive for the epistemology of perception. If they come from nature via the body, for instance, then perceptual error has to arise somewhere upstream of that transmission, in my process of association, maybe, or in the projection of memories (PP chap. 2). But if they are there innately, the gap in our experience would arise from the gap between the operations of judgment and the contents delivered by sensibility (PP chap. 3). Merleau-Ponty argues, however, that those who hold these opposing views do not actually disagree on the infrastructure out of which perceptual experience is built. In other words, both empiricism and intellectualism construct competing ‘solutions’ from precisely the same components, whose contours, whose appropriateness to the task, are never in question. It is for this reason—and not because they are wrong—that Merleau-Ponty finds fault with both of them.

So, what are these components? As I read Merleau-Ponty, he discerns in objectivism four points. First, the conceptual resources from which objectivist theories are built are in each case the same: they are consciousness and nature, passive body and active mind. Second, each objectivist theory takes perception to be analyzable into sensation, on the one hand (considered generally as the atomic content of experience), and idea, on the other (considered as the form of, or the form given to, some relation of sensations). Third, each objectivist theory locates Nature at the ground floor of perception, where—at both the empiricist and the intellectualist extremes—it serves as a causally impactful external world of which the bodies and the ideas that structure our perceptual judgments are the effect. Fourth, and finally, each competing account shares the very same idea of nature: ‘Nature” is “a given nature” (PP 41) that is opposed—conceptually, ontologically—to consciousness or to mind. These commonalities bring into view for Merleau-Ponty the overarching limitation of objective thought: that, as he puts it, it “knows only dichotomies” (PP 50).

Armed with this discovery, we can now see why Merleau-Ponty returns to assess the natural attitude and finds in it a kind of crisis. No theory pursued within objectivist limits can resolve the skeptical anxiety, because those limits dissolve theoretical differences into a shared belief that is itself betrayed by the experience those theories are supposed to ‘explain’. Objectivism, in other words, holds apart what naïve consciousness experiences as a basic, ambiguously expressible contact with the world and so leaves that contact perpetually out of our conceptual reach.

This discovery now sets us at the threshold of phenomenology. On the one hand, in grasping that the original reports of naïve consciousness, in their ambiguous fusion of active and passive, body and mind, get us closer to understanding lived perception than any theory of perception that would resolve those ambiguities on one side or the other, we have arrested that flight toward certainty that characterizes the history of science. Yet we do not thereby give up our “taste for evidence,” which the philosopher, Merleau-Ponty argues, must possess “inseparably” from her feeling for ambiguity. The demand therefore emerges for a new, no less rigorous methodology that will not only allow us to remain attentive to lived experience, but will also equip us to make ambiguity “a theme” (IPP 17).

4.2 The Naturalist Thesis, the Idealist Antithesis, and Their Synthesis in Phenomenological Ontology

We have set ourselves a specific task: to dislodge from the natural attitude any uncritical belief in a “given nature” considered as the objective world external to and independent of consciousness. If we are able to expose and overcome that prejudice, the ambiguous reports of naïve consciousness will appear less as problems in need of resolution than as calling for attention on their own terms. As Merleau-Ponty shows in his early work, this turns out to be transformative for any science that hopes to account for experience, since it means, as we will see, that that science must be able to ground experience in neither matter nor mind, neither nature nor consciousness, but in something ambiguous between these. On Merleau-Ponty’s view, however, the centering of this ambiguity will not pull phenomenology wholly apart from science, even as it undermines the implicit assumptions that have driven the history of science. Instead, it is emblematic of what he calls “good ambiguity”: that is, of an ambiguity that “contributes to establishing certitudes” (IPP 17) without confusing these certitudes for final answers.

How do we arrive at this “good ambiguity”? The path, for Merleau-Ponty, involves first of all ‘clearing’ away solutions to the problem of the relation of consciousness and nature that are offered by realism—under the heading of “naturalism”—in the natural sciences and by the Critical idealism of neo-Kantian philosophy of science. The interpretive challenge is then that this clearing is accomplished not through direct criticism from a classically phenomenological posture, but through a dialectical confrontation between those competing positions: his first goal is to show how naturalism gives way to its idealist antithesis; the second is to demonstrate where, in absorbing the ‘truth’ of naturalism, we are led, not to idealism itself but to a phenomenological synthesis. In centering this dialectical strategy, we see that the ‘phenomenological’ heritage Merleau-Ponty calls upon is quite diverse. He unifies under that heading not just Husserl and Heidegger, but a range of thinkers—Hegel and Marx, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard—whom he sees as urging us to think beyond the choice of realism and idealism considered as an either/or.

To see why this broader heritage is significant, let us begin by looking more closely at the first move. So far, we have come to see Merleau-Ponty’s desire to avoid “falling back” into the “naïveté” of realism as an attempt to avoid the pull of the objectivist prejudice. From the perspective of certain natural and physical sciences, however, the pull toward the ‘objective world’ is straightforwardly appealing. It is appealing in the case of a science of perception, for instance, because it enables us to trace each perceptual judgment back to the certain reality of a law-governed nature, whether nature is present in the ‘law’ that structures the basic operations of rational consciousness (as in contemporary cognitivism) or as a residue in every sensation (as we find in empiricist philosophy of mind). In this context, the furthest empiricist extreme is represented by behaviorism, a framework that brackets “naïve” consciousness entirely, counting as relevant only the observable effects of ‘conscious’ perceptions in the motions of the body. This is where Merleau-Ponty opens his first major text, The Structure of Behavior.

From the behaviorists’ perspective, the decision to bracket consciousness has an obvious advantage. By blocking appeals to consciousness, the scientist is purportedly granted access to a “bare” transaction in nature, enabling her to render ‘perception’ as it ‘really is’: a reaction of the body to sensory stimuli. Notice, however, what is distinctive about the behaviorist strategy here: that it raises the prejudice in favor of the objective world to an explicit principle. That is, it supposes it is possible to purge from science any “feeling for ambiguity,” allowing the scientist to ‘explain’ perceptually guided behaviors without having to correct for the subjective distortions of perceiving consciousness. In precisely this supposition, Merleau-Ponty argues that the behaviorist betrays her own strategy: Any description—say, a description of the motions of bodies—is necessarily of the object as disclosed to perceptual consciousness. In presuming, then, that ‘natural’ events are “objectively” describable in themselves, the behaviorist misses that her bracketing of consciousness could never be “complete.”

I am framing the objection in this way in order to bring out one interpretive thread, which is that Merleau-Ponty’s assessment of behaviorism mirrors a criticism he later lodges against Husserl: Just as Husserl had presumed, on Merleau-Ponty’s reconstruction, that we could gain access to “pure” consciousness by suspending a thesis about the reality of its intentional object, the behaviorist proceeds as if she could avail herself only of what is accessible in her object of study considered physiologically—as if she could gain access to events of nature, in other words, by suspending any contribution on the part of consciousness. In both cases, Merleau-Ponty argues, it is impossible to complete this task. For instance, it is precisely in supposing that her object—bodily behavior—could reduce to a series of causal transactions observable within physical nature that the behaviorist reveals she has not gone so far as to suspend her judgment about the nature of the object itself. Perhaps because of this parallel, Merleau-Ponty does not shore up this line of criticism by juxtaposing behaviorism to a phenomenology considered under that name, but by bringing into view certain behaviors that are inexpressible in behaviorist terms.

Let me offer an example. Consider the seemingly reflexive pain reaction that is produced when I take a sip of scalding coffee and recoil. Were we to adopt the behaviorist’s interpretive framework, we would have to insist that this ‘instinctive’ behavior consists in a bodily reaction. That is, it is causally provoked by certain physical properties expressible, say, in the quantitative model of a Fahrenheit scale, which properties belong to the stimulus considered independently of its impact on my body. Merleau-Ponty would counter, however, that my reaction is equally impacted by my expectation of what those properties will be. My expectation, for instance, that the coffee will have cooled since I poured it precedes my reaction and shapes it—even if there is no ‘real’ change in the temperature of the stimulus. What is especially striking about this expectation is that it does not come to behavior in the form of a propositional belief; it is carried by the body—as a certain tension in my lips, for instance, and in the position of my tongue. Merleau-Ponty reasons from this that the role of bodily anticipation in determining how the stimulus will show itself to me undermines any description of the behavior as purely a reaction. At the same time, it supports the behaviorists’ idea that behavior must be analyzed through the movement of the body. This discovery urges him to reorient the study of behavior in such a way that we can bring into view the entire “intentional arc” that dynamically links the perceiving body to the perceived environment.

Through examples like this, Merleau-Ponty unearths new and distinctive phenomena that are inexpressible in traditional natural scientific terms. It is here, for instance, that we find his earliest gestures toward the concept of motor-intentionality and his first accounts of the ‘enactive’ role played by the body in the constitution of its intentional object. These concepts have become central for enactivist, embodied, extended, and ecological theories of mind, and through them for considerations of embodied action from the philosophy of technology (Ihde, 1990) to the phenomenology of dance (Bergonzoni, 2017). Yet it is equally important that these phenomena are also inexpressible in the language of idealist philosophy of science. Merleau-Ponty’s primary goal is not to augment existing scientific or philosophical frameworks through the simple addition of new concepts, but to show that those frameworks as they are traditionally understood preclude the addition of the relevant concepts, and preclude it in precisely the same way. For Merleau-Ponty, the clearest way into this double critique is by staging a dialectical confrontation between these competing frameworks and to show that this confrontation resolves, not on one side or the other, but into a synthesis that is ambiguous between them. This confrontation requires Merleau-Ponty to take up the neo-Kantian position in an instrumental way.

What does this look like? As Merleau-Ponty reconstructs it, the relevant objection posed within neo-Kantian philosophy of science concerns the possibility of a science pursued “without consciousness.” As the neo-Kantians argue, any assumption on which behavior would be reducible to causal transactions within nature does not, in the end, serve to exclude or bracket consciousness, but in fact to swallow nature within it. “What we call nature,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “is already consciousness of nature,” just as “what we call life is already consciousness of life” (SB 184). The idealist finds confirmation of this point already lurking in the realists’ own theories—returning to the clash between empiricism and intellectualism, for instance, she sees that what unified these theories was precisely the same idea of nature. While Merleau-Ponty takes on board the spirit of this objection, however, he argues that the idealist way of cashing it out will not work. What naturalism objectifies in fact, idealism objectifies as an idea (N 96). In other words, idealism explicitly says that we do not have access to nature considered independently of human consciousness, yet it shares with naturalism the assumption that consciousness and its ‘inner’ active operations are conceptually opposed to the idea of external nature comprising causal forces and physical laws. Their apparently massive methodological disagreement, Merleau-Ponty notices, now dissolves into a dispute regarding which side of this dualism—the side of consciousness or of causal nature—an ‘objective’ science must prioritize. When Merleau-Ponty says that he wants to escape idealism without falling back into the naïveté of realism, he means that he wants a way out of this dispute. And we could just as easily frame his objective in the inverse way: The aim is to resist the gravitational pull of realism without this meaning we must go so far as endorsing idealism.

Before I look more closely at this point, let me pause to note three things. First, Merleau-Ponty explicitly stages this dispute as one between naturalism in the sciences and idealism in the philosophy of science. Yet contemporary philosophers of science rarely subscribe to the kind of neo-Kantian position that plays the role of “idealism” in The Structure of Behavior. It should be emphasized, for this reason, that Merleau-Ponty’s target, as we just saw, is not any specific formulation of idealism so much as the division of nature as the “realm of law” from an autonomous sphere of consciousness to which is attributed the work of imposing “order” or “meaning.” As Rouse (2006) points out, the view from which he wants to “escape” therefore includes not only transcendental idealism, but any constructivist position, including those that attribute the imposition of form or meaning on matter to history or culture. While it is originally presented as a confrontation between empirical science and the idealist philosophy of science, the dialectic Merleau-Ponty stages here applies equally to any discipline shipwrecked by disputes between realist or materialist and idealist or constructivist frameworks. Indeed, throughout the 1940s and ‘50s, Merleau-Ponty reapplies this same strategy to disputes in anthropology, child development, politics, even literary theory.

Second, while I have argued that we should hear the terms “realism” and “idealism” in the loosest sense—that is, as designating two different ways to organize the relation of consciousness and its (natural or phenomenal) object—it should be clear that the choice of behaviorism as the stand-in for realism in The Structure of Behavior is not arbitrary. Just as the goal is to show, nourished by idealist criticisms, that considerations of behavior cannot proceed without consciousness, a ‘science’ of consciousness that proceeds without consideration of the natural, material world also fails. We discover this through a psychology that analyzes ‘experience’ in terms of the material body. It is only in those moments that escape behaviorist description that we discover a dimension of “consciousness” in which its distinction from any ‘object’—and therefore in which the boundary between mind and world—is “obscured” (CPM 86). The force of this point is easy to miss, given the humanist and existentialist directions of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, but a philosophy that begins from the assumption that the reduction cannot go so far as to sever the perceiver from her world has now emerged as one that also considers that world at least partly in naturalistic, material terms.

If we mean to take this point seriously, then, last, the dialectical structure of Merleau-Ponty’s strategy is especially significant. As a point about method, his argument is reasonably described as indifferent to questions of ontology: Does it matter whether we take the dualisms he undercuts—cause and effect, stimulus and response, matter and idea—to be merely conceptual or whether we really take those concepts to fail because they do not carve the world at its joints? What the Hegelian legacy suggests, however, is that, for Merleau-Ponty, the purpose of any dialectical process is not to find more data in experience so that we might resolve philosophical conflicts on one side or another, but to reveal why those conflicting options have appeared to us as the only alternatives. On his view, they appear to us as alternatives because, remaining uncritically within the grips of objective thought, we know “only dichotomies”; freed from that grip, we are no longer compelled to flee ambiguity. What this means for science is then that we can absorb what is “true” in both realism and idealism and think beyond their apparent contradictions.

We have already encountered these truths. First, phenomenology must absorb a “truth” from idealism: that we are always already ensnared by consciousness. Merleau-Ponty argues, however, that the consciousness that ensnares us is a natural, historical consciousness. This is because we must also absorb a truth from naturalism: that our ideas necessarily trace back to their origin in nature itself. Absorbing both of these truths, Merleau-Ponty argues, requires a different ontology: the consciousness from whose perspective we cannot escape must be an embodied consciousness that resonates not just to values and ideas but to material meanings, or sense. Conversely, the nature to which embodied perception connects and out of which the body is formed cannot be the objective nature of externally impactful and causally interacting things partes extra partes, but a nature in which sense—that is, “the idea in its nascent state” (SB 206)—already inheres. A phenomenology that embraces these truths will center on the living body, then, precisely because it is, for Merleau-Ponty ambiguous between matter and idea. The very idea we have of the body as bounded thing is a product that emerges from our dynamic bodily interactions with the material world from which that body is formed.

If we take a step back here, I think, we are now in a position to glimpse the general trajectory of Merleau-Ponty’s career: Establishing the phenomenological method and bringing out how it must be centered on the body is a crucial task of The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception.¹⁸ Merleau-Ponty then reanimates the question of method in his “late ontology” in order to uncover the status of nature as the “auto-production of meaning” (N 3). This angle also enables us to appreciate Merleau-Ponty’s interest in both empirical science and in poetry and painting. As I have said, Merleau-Ponty’s concern is always to return to the experience that empirical science attempts to explain, with the goal of re-describing it. We have just seen that this means re-describing it without presuming that the terms of our description, the ontological categories at our disposal, or even the aspects of the experience those descriptions will have to try to capture, are limited to those pre-endorsed by the history of philosophy or science. Indeed, what Merleau-Ponty discovers is ultimately that any term is outstripped by what is there in the experience itself. Since this overflowing of experience, this refusal of the world to obey conceptual boundaries, is a central concern of poetic metaphor and expressivist painting, he will come to see these as alternative ways of demonstrating the dependence of our organizing concepts on a ‘real’ that always transcends them.¹⁹ It is this feature of Merleau-Ponty’s thought that leads the philosopher Émile Bréhier, in attendance at Merleau-Ponty’s 1946 lectures on the Primacy of Perception, to note, somewhat ambivalently, that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology appears less as philosophy than it “results in a novel” (Bréhier to Merleau-Ponty, PP 30).

To assess the significance of this comment, let us return once more to the perceptual scenario with which we began and re-describe it, centering the moments of ambiguity Merleau-Ponty picks out.

4.3 Back to the Things Themselves

We are back in my office. I am trying to capture to the best of my descriptive capacities what it is like to perceive. To do this, I settle in my chair, lift my hands off the keys and focus on the computer screen in front of me. I find that I can trace with my eyes the various items in my perceptual field, carving them out one by one. There is my screen, rimmed by the solid metal frame of my laptop, there is the desk it is resting on, lined with books set against the white plaster wall. As I continue surveying the scene, I discover layer upon layer of complexity all the way out to the fuzzy outer boundaries where I am sensing… something, a blur of color that is no color in particular, a hazy horizonal limit I cannot name. Something moves there. I turn my head. It was a flick of Marlowe’s tail. I realize that no matter where I turn, my visual field is always limned by a horizon where determinable perceptual objects seem to bleed at their edges and evaporate away. This is not a limit in the sense of a hard line I cannot cross, so much as a rich outer zone always potentially filled with things I could access with a turn of my head. I realize, now, that I encounter this limit even if I close my eyes to try to isolate the pure sensation of color; I only ‘see’ the point of color against the un-bordered blackness of my eyelids. In the direction of complexity and of simplicity, I come up against the indeterminacy of perception at the edges of the perceptual field.

The first thing to isolate through this description is what Merleau-Ponty identifies, following Gestalt theory, as the figure/ground structure of experience. This is a central concept for the entirety of his thought, and in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty uses it to undercut the basic building block of empiricism and intellectualism: the atomic sensation. Since sensation, he argues, “corresponds to nothing in experience” (PP 3–4), any theory that depends upon sensation rests on a postulate we cannot use to recompose the experience it purportedly explains. He also recognizes, with Gestalt theory, that the background against which the sensible datum appears as a datum is always edged by a hazy and indeterminate border zone. I cannot perceive the background, then, without its thereby constituting a bounded figure and so ceasing to be the background.

For Merleau-Ponty, these reveal two things: First, returning to the experience I have been focused on, if I were to engage in any kind of deliberate aspect shift that could bring the background into focus (say, the plaster wall instead of the figure of the books), I could do this only by making that background the figure of another ground whose borders would then evade my perceptual grasp. Second, these shifts are not only initiated by deliberate thought: Like rack focus in cinema, lived perception finds things come into relief and retreat into a blurry indeterminacy in accordance with dynamic environmental demands and ongoing practical aims. As I sit here trying to capture the character of visual perception, for instance, that aim brings into focus the visible faces of things. But the feeling of hunger or a glimpse at the title of a book on my desk might suddenly disclose to me aspects of the environment I did not originally intend.

For Merleau-Ponty, these insights take us beyond the discovery of the structure of experience and point to an ineradicable ambiguity at its center. As we have just seen, what belongs to the background of any given experience may shift, but there is always some background, and thus something indeterminate that is left “out of view.” He counter-poses this point to Gestalt theory: It is possible to bring the figure/ground structure into view as the “essential” structure of perception, only by backgrounding the material support in which the idea of form originally inheres. Or more plainly: We can have the idea that structure is constitutive of meaningful perception only if that idea (viz., structure, form) is an ideal that has been abstracted from a range of material grounds. The promise of a genuinely “self-critical” phenomenology—one that never forgets the rootedness of ideas in the world on which they depend—now becomes the promise to see the “structure” of perception as one expression of the original unity of matter and form.

Merleau-Ponty reaches for different terms to express the original fusion—what he calls the “transcendental ambiguity”—of form and content over the course of his career: “Actual structure,” “sense,” “lived body,” “flesh.” In each case, Merleau-Ponty sees his emphasis on ambiguity as distinguishing his approach, not just from Gestalt theory, but also from those pursued, on some readings, in Husserlian transcendental phenomenology and Heideggerian fundamental ontology. Yet the insight is relevant beyond plotting the diversity of phenomenological research. When I turn this point against my original description, for instance, I discover that the ambiguities uncovered in visual perception left me barely cognizant of other ambiguities as ambiguities: the fuzzy connection where I end and the chair begins, which is not given to me until I feel a pain emanating from my tailbone, the fact that this object holding down my papers does not appear as a water glass until the tickle of thirst is in my throat, the admixture of chance and circumstance that place me here, at this desk, in this room, in Los Angeles—even the peculiar intertwining of vision and other sense modalities that I express, perhaps inadvertently, when I say, glancing at the window, that it looks as if it is warm out. What I now realize is that I am not capturing perception in itself here so much as I am mining an experience for what in it is relevant to the phenomenon—in this case, visual experience—I am trying to describe. Whatever I do, that phenomenon always outstrips my descriptions.

This is a point about phenomenology, as we have seen, but also about the idea of interdisciplinarity: different disciplinary engagements with the same phenomenon will necessarily carve it out from the background in different ways. It makes no more sense to rank their results in terms of their access to the “real,” than to say that my desk’s woodiness is more real than its being the desk from my childhood bedroom. Recognizing this, the apparent contradictions in Merleau-Ponty scholarship appear, perhaps, less as contradictions than as different ways of carving figures from the ambiguities Merleau-Ponty unearths in his work.

5 Returning to the Landscape of Merleau-Pontyan Thought

In an unpublished text, Merleau-Ponty speculates that the “insolubility” of certain problems in Phenomenology of Perception likely stems from a failure to appreciate what he calls the ambiguity of sense. The worry, he says, is that “the study of perception could only teach us ‘bad ambiguities’,” which he understands, roughly, as an equivocation between opposites. The later ontology, by contrast, will strive to found these in a “good ambiguity”: a foundation that “gathers” oppositions—mind and body, “past and present, nature and culture” together “in a single whole” (Pr.P 11). In this last section, I want to point toward some of the possibilities opened up by a return to the question of the figure/ground structure in Phenomenology of Perception in light of this concern.

Let’s go back one final time to our description. Since we are closer at this point to the material dimension of the experience, one thing I might grasp, which I had not centered before, is that I cannot fully understand the interplay of figure and background except in a framework that includes the active body: The indeterminacy of the perceptual field, after all, does not mean that aspects of that field are indeterminable, but the perceptual determination of a figure always involves, at a minimum, a movement of the body—the turn of my head toward the flash of color, the darting of my eyes along the borders of the computer screen, which carves it out from the background of the plaster wall. Even the fact that I am sitting at my desk and not on the couch by the window means that items in my visual field show this face to me and not others—presentations that would change were I to lean ever so slightly in this or that direction.

From the intention of developing a “theory” of perception, this simple centering of the active body makes clear the gap between perception and judgment: As I move my head to the left or right, for instance, the coffee mug will cease to be perceived as a coffee mug before it will slip out of view. One thing that has been especially productive in Merleau-Ponty’s work, then, is that his objections to intellectualism also stress what belongs to that “gap.” Specifically, intellectualism misses that, before I can perceptually determine an object as this or that thing, I must first participate in a process that makes it perceptually available. In the language of phenomenological biology, I “enact” it. Let us follow this thread.

We encountered enaction earlier as an ongoing interchange of body and world, as an ambiguous concept partway between activity and passivity. In that context, enaction was introduced in order to undercut the behaviorist reduction of behavior to reaction. It is equally important that there is nothing ‘unnatural’ about it. Consider the case of an animal’s perceptual responsiveness to the environment. As we have seen, the behaviorist would want to characterize this responsiveness as the reaction of the animal body to a causal impact from the outside. But the animal’s perceptual system had to evolve to be naturally responsive to those environmental ‘stimuli’ and not others. If we want to say that the animal remains ‘passively’ responsive to external impacts, then, we must also admit that the animal’s responsiveness is shaped by the evolutionary history of the species, which molds its perceptual system through a process of development that unfolds from the ‘inside’. As Merleau-Ponty argues, the animal’s responsiveness is thus equally describable through the lens of activity—as the organism “selecting” its stimuli in accordance with its evolutionary role. With this admixture of activity and passivity, inside and outside—with this nesting of the organism within a situation within a developmental phase within the natural history of a species—the organism evades considerations as either robotic performer of a biological law or as the continuous production of pure freedom. And we are not limited to finding the “good ambiguity” of active productive and passive reception, of freedom and constraint, in the body of the organism. There are traces of it everywhere, from the Chartres Cathedral (Boivin, 2008, 156ff.) to the quantum world (Barad, 2007).

In his early work, Merleau-Ponty names the ambiguous fusion of freedom and law normativity. Moving beyond the context of animal behavior and into the so-called ‘human order,” he then shows, in Phenomenology of Perception, where perception, considered as ambiguously ‘enactive’, infuses both the perceiving body and the perceived world with normativity in such a way that when I perceive an ‘object’ in my visual field, I do not only find what in it is relevant to my biological being, but perceive it through the lens of “what one does” with things. When the dryness of my throat motivates me to lift my hands from the keys and respond to my thirst, for instance, what is illuminated by this intention is the glass of water to my right and not the puddle of rainwater on the patio. This is a kind of cultural ‘knowledge’ I carry in my body; I do not have to choose the tap water over the rain puddle, I simply reach for the glass. (There are, as many readers note, close connections here between Merleau-Ponty’s interest in practical value and the central considerations of American pragmatism.²⁰).

Merleau-Ponty’s fusion of body and mind, of freedom and determinism, re-centers normativity in the psychology of perception and the science of behavior. But what is left out here? One answer is that Merleau-Ponty does not seem to appreciate the diversity of lived experience among human bodies, especially those we can describe, following Garland-Thompson (1996), as “non-normate”: How, for instance, does the ‘disabled’ body experience a world that does not afford it the same bodily opportunities?²¹ Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the body also seems indifferent to the race or gender of those bodies. Young points out, for instance, that Merleau-Ponty has little to say directly about how gender could inform one’s sense of the body as situated in space (cf. Young 1980). And what might it mean at the level of lived experience to be persistently seen as an object and not the subject of experience?²² For someone so concerned with materiality, is there not a peculiar blindness in Merleau-Ponty to the material differences among bodies?

These are important questions, though it is equally important that they are not Merleau-Ponty’s. His approach explicitly re-formulates the traditional concept of intentionality as essentially bodily—something only appears as a figure against the background of a world disclosed to a bodily ‘subject’—but the importance of the cultural and historical meaning of the body across social categories is not part of that approach.²³ This is a strange lacuna, since Merleau-Ponty also argues that in order to theorize intentionality as the unity of subject and object, I must first grasp the origin of those categories in both individual and cultural history. Yet precisely that concern for origins, when coupled with Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the figure/ground structure, may point toward radical possibilities for an answer to the question Merleau-Ponty does not pose. Let me turn to that now.

Consider first that in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty unearths the origins of the subject-object categories in perception itself. When I make contact with the environing world, for instance—when I pick up the water glass or shake another’s hand—it is these points of contact that ‘teach’ me the boundaries of my body. On this view, the lived body is the condition of possibility for my awareness of my body as sheathed in skin. If we broaden our phenomenological scope beyond this immediate moment of contact, however—a moment already richly discussed in the literature on habit and the body-schema²⁴—we recognize that even the body sheathed in skin is not purely a physical thing. It is, as Merleau-Ponty puts it in The Structure of Behavior, the “acquired dialectical soil” (SB 210) on which an intertwining of nature and culture is preserved. If the object is only an object against the background of bodily subjectivity, in other words, the bodily subject is only a body against the background of a nature intertwined with human history.

If we take Merleau-Ponty’s ontological commitments seriously, he is already trying to show how our conceptual categories bear traces of this material history. This must reasonably include categories—of race or gender, sexuality or ability—consigned to the background of that history. Working in this spirit, and at the outermost horizons of phenomenology, Spillers (1987) has argued that what Merleau-Ponty would call “the flesh of history”—though she does not explicitly reference Merleau-Ponty—functions as a “zero-degree of social conceptualization” (Spillers, 1987: 67) in which a dominant culture marks out some bodies as subjects and conceals others under other (racial, gendered) categories.

Yet we do not have to take up this broad historical perspective to bring this point out. Consider that, when I grasp a water glass or the hand of the other and I feel the faint line, that centripetal limit, that distinguishes what is me from what is not me, it is this limit that Merleau-Ponty argues I idealize as the “subject”-“object” distinction. Yet this is only an idealization, he tells us, since the line ‘separating’ what is me from not me can shift. Just as my hand held in front of me can function as the perceivable object, and so occupies the objective pole of my perceptual field, so can the car I am driving, the pen I am holding, recoil “on the side of the subject” (Pr. P 5). In this context, we discover both that embodied experience is the origin of the subject-object distinction and an experience within which the clarity of the language of “subject” and “object” begins to break down.

There are two points about the figure-ground structure to be detangled here. One lesson Merleau-Ponty underlines is that the subject/object structure is reversible. Much in the same way that my body can become an object for me—when, for instance I hold my hand out to count the bones that appear as so many ridges under my skin—so can material things (a pen, a notebook) be taken up into the sphere of subjectivity; there are resonances in this reversal, as commenters have noted, of a theory of “extended mind.”²⁵ Yet it is equally important that this reversibility is figured against a far more stubborn background. When I hold my hand in front of me, try as I might to spread my body between the subjective and objective poles to their breaking point, nothing I do can make it so that I not perceive that hand as belonging to me in a way that other objects in the perceptual field do not. In the perpetual slippage between my body as the subjective and objective aspects of a unitary experience, what cannot be ‘reduced’ away is my always being located somewhere. Merleau-Ponty thus describes embodiment as an original opening or perspective necessarily limned by the indeterminate sphere of “situational spatiality” (PP 102). This space, he argues, functions like a “vague reserve of power” for every perspective my body could take up: It is “the darkness of the theater required for the clarity of the performance, … the zone of non-being in front of which precise beings, figures, and points can appear” (PP 104.). It is the constitutive background. So, what would it mean to bring this background into view?

In one sense, the “vague reserve of power” in Merleau-Ponty’s own work remains underthought. When he refers to it, it is often to say how forcefully it is kept out of view. As he writes in “Film and The New Psychology,” for instance, “the idea we have of the world would be overturned if we could succeed in seeing the intervals between things—the space between the trees on the boulevard—as objects and, inversely, if we saw the things themselves—the trees—as the ground” (SNS 48–9). But he does not reject the possibility of this “overturning.” His interest in Cézanne’s expressivist landscape painting, for instance, is an interest precisely in the fact that Cézanne paints these intervals and reawakens “wonder” at the world.

Perhaps this movement from phenomenology toward painting is too hasty, too evasive of the political dimension of “overturning” the “idea we have of the world.” This is a point Sara Ahmed (2006) explicitly takes up: returning to descriptions of experience in Merleau-Ponty and other classical phenomenological thinkers, for instance, she uncovers where their work is dependent on a background that can remain ‘invisible’ to them only because of the (gendered, racialized) labor performed to keep it out of view. What they do not see, she argues, is, moreover, the way in which that background is a reserve of sedimented values that guide behavior by orienting bodies in “the right way.” Playing around with the phenomenological concept of “orientation,” she finds radical opportunities here for “queering” phenomenology.

In a different spirit, Fanon writes in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) of his experience existing in that stubborn background—that “zone of non-being”—using phenomenological resources to describe the “extraordinarily sterile and arid region” to which Black existence is historically consigned (Fanon, 1952: xii). Picking up on this language, the frameworks of Afro-pessimism and Black nihilism offer radical opportunities to think racial identity through the lens of constitutive exclusion²⁶—that is, in terms of bodies and ways of being that, thanks to the force of violence and history, are held in the background, in the “reserve of power” of dominant bodily subjects. To return to Merleau-Ponty here, perhaps what he has left unthought is not just the status of “non-normate” bodies, but also how anything like a variable “reserve of power” belongs, as a reserve, only to certain kinds of historically and culturally constituted subjectivities. If Merleau-Ponty’s method is “open” in the way that I have argued, a critical interrogation of the cultural and historical “background”—in the past as well as the present—should be understood as inseparable from the practice of phenomenology itself.

6 Conclusion

In this essay, I have chiefly presented Merleau-Ponty as a thinker of ambiguity. The goal has not been simply to translate his work into a more ‘approachable’ idiom, but to understand the philosophical motivations for its difficulty: In order to overcome the roadblocks in any discipline—politics, linguistics, anthropology, physics—it is necessary first to break free from the objectivist prejudice that resolves both the object of inquiry and the process of inquiring onto on one side or another of a dichotomy.

There are countless dichotomies Merleau-Ponty confronts over the course of his work: stimulus and response, cause and effect, body and mind, matter and idea, essence and existence, nature and history. These terms function like puzzle pieces out of which most of philosophy and the natural and human sciences have been constructed. The concern for phenomenology is then that the various positions into which these have been constructed have never been fully adequate to experience itself because the world of experience—whatever its metaphysical status—always escapes or spills over the boundaries that separate those concepts. In one sense, this desire to think beyond dualisms puts Merleau-Ponty in conversation with certain obvious methodological cousins, from the pragmatists to Bergson and Deleuze. But it has also led him beyond the traditional limits of philosophy itself. Expressivist painting, for instance, does not strive to reproduce the sharp lines that separate categories or other abstract concepts but to express their ambiguity. It is important to underline that this is not, for Merleau-Ponty, a way to turn away from a more rigorous philosophy. The philosopher must possess both a feeling for ambiguity and a taste for evidence and possess them “inseparably” (IPP 17).

The approach, of course, has certain limitations. It forces us to recognize, for instance, that in carving up experience in any way, I cut it off from a background—perceptual, historical, personal—that partly constitutes it. A perspective that is not narrowed in some way or another is impossible. But what his dialectical strategy uncovers bit by bit is an ontological category inexpressible in the dualistic conceptual framework of either traditional philosophy or science, one “partway between matter and idea,” accessible only to a method—phenomenology—that gives ultimate status to neither.

Appreciating this last point will prove useful, I hope, in two ways. It is useful, first, for navigating the sometimes overwhelming landscape of Merleau-Pontyan thought. I have drawn out his method, for instance, through the contrast of phenomenology and science, but I have also suggested that we find the same argumentative structure repeated elsewhere: The autonomous subject of classical Liberal politics is an abstract ideal that forgets the materiality of the body that gave rise to it. The adult who conceives of herself as wholly independent misses how she is wrested from her bodily intertwining with the body of the mother only via a developmental process that inserts her into the fabric of culture and history. Even phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty reminds us, cannot be reduced to what Husserl or Heidegger have said of it without reducing its history to a paradox. Second, it helps us appreciate Merleau-Ponty’s commitment to phenomenology, considered as an ongoing process that can return to those phenomena again. Its project is unfinished, and so invites its own critical turn, not because of Merleau-Ponty’s untimely death, but because of the nature of phenomenology itself.