The Interrogation of Perceptive Faith

Abstract

Merleau-Ponty’s last work, posthumously published unfinished manuscripts, was supposed to be, according to his editor Claude Lefort, only the introductory part of a larger, rather comprehensive work entitled Le Visible et l’Invisible. As the working notes from this last period testify, the author had the intention of building a new ontology which would encompass the results of the phenomenological research of his previous writings, primarily those of Phenomenology of Perception. This ontology would as its leading principle accept the primacy of perception, the fundamental predication of his thought, and with that all those deep consequences which proceed therefrom. The main point is the preorientation of philosophical interest toward the ontological implications of an interrogation of the life-world (Lebenswelt) that goes beyond scientific dogmas and the blind reign of cultural formations in general, seeking the sphere of original experience, where corporeity, temporality, intersubjectivity, etc. appear as philosophically relevant themes. However, it should be pointed out that this “continuity” in Merleau-Ponty’s thought — namely, the position that ontology should be loyal to its own birthplace, so that phenomenology may of itself be completed — implies all that the radicalism of turning phenomenology into ontology involves. In other words, a radical shift in this searcher’s position did take place and is not to be denied by the insight that he became more and more concerned with a deeper penetration into the hidden foundations and development of the main theses of his previous writings, and was not undertaking their refutation.¹