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Merleau-Ponty’s Hermeneutic Reflections on Certainty and Place: Science and Art

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Place, Space and Hermeneutics

Part of the book series: Contributions to Hermeneutics ((CONT HERMEN,volume 5))

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Abstract

From behaviour to perception, including the artist’s consciousness of his art and its truth, of language and literature, signs and symbols, including his writings on the topic scientific truth but no less the question of humanism thought together with the question of terror, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s style of hermeneutic pheno-menology articulates a scientific reflection on space, perception, but also bodily creativity that is simultaneously meditation, musing, poetising, reverie. Merleau-Ponty thus carries the Husserlian project of phenomenology through incarnate experience in time, attuned to levels of awareness and sense and a lived-world viscerality.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See, informatively here, Stengel 2003 and Cassou-Noguès 2009.

  2. 2.

    Moore 1939. If one connects Wittgenstein with Merleau-Ponty on the haptic or tactile access to the world, readings are often liable to the limitations of analytic philosophy. By contrast, Wittgenstein’s speaks of “life” in a fashion that corresponds to certain themes in more properly continental phenomenology: “7. My life shows that I know or am certain that there is a chair over there, or a door, and so on.—I tell a friend e.g. ‘Take that chair over there’, ‘Shut the door’, etc. etc.” Wittgenstein 1969: 2.

  3. 3.

    See Merleau-Ponty in this locus for context and citation reference.

  4. 4.

    Patrick Aidan Heelan 1983 has drawn attention to Merleau-Ponty’s concern with perspective but see too Prendeville 1999 as well as the analytic and historical overview in Gilmore 2004, especially pp. 297ff, and van de Vall 2005.

  5. 5.

    Both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty channel and echo, even without citing, as it can with reason be argued that both are deeply influenced by Beauvoir. See, among other recent readings, the range of contributions to O’Brien and Embree 2013.

  6. 6.

    See in addition Compton 1992 and more recently Marratto 2012, as well as albeit without insight into the term ‘phenomenology’ despite its presence in the title (this is an analytic reading), Baldwin 2013.

  7. 7.

    There is a wide range here from Gary Gutting and Joseph Rouse to Dorothea Olkowski but see more straightforwardly drawing on conventional style philosophy and offering a useful reading between Descartes and the Husserlian ‘natural attitude’ with a focus on moral judgment Godway 2007.

  8. 8.

    For a valuable discussion related to the present context, see Taminaux 1991.

  9. 9.

    One can for this go back to no one less significant for the history of phenomenology than Waelhens 1962, as well as more broadly Kaelin 1962, in addition to Place 1973. See too, if also from an analytically minded point of departure, Crowther 2013 as well as Rajiv Kaushik’s more literary review (Kaushik 2011) and Johnson 2009. In addition, see, classically, Michel Haar’s “Painting, Perception, Affectivity” (Haar 1996) as well as Fóti’s own earlier essay, “Painting and the Re-orientation of Philosophical Thought in Merleau-Ponty” (Fóti 1980), in addition to Babich 2014.

  10. 10.

    Here, of course, Merleau-Ponty’s view of science accords with both Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s philosophies, to invoke Rom Harré’s plural usage here, of science.

  11. 11.

    See Babich 2007 for an overview including Merleau-Ponty.

  12. 12.

    I echo a point Alexander Nehamas makes (Nehamas 2007) and I further explore some of the complexities and some of the limitations of this eroticism in Babich 2014.

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  1. Fordham University, New York City, NY, USA

    Babette Babich

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida, USA

    Bruce B. Janz

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Babich, B. (2017). Merleau-Ponty’s Hermeneutic Reflections on Certainty and Place: Science and Art. In: Janz, B. (eds) Place, Space and Hermeneutics. Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52214-2_15

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