Abstract
“It is the experience... still mute which we are concerned with leading to the pure expression of its own meaning” (PP vx; PP x, VI 129; VI 171, etc.). This passage, which is derived from Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, 2 is found here and there in Merleau-Ponty’s works. As far as we know, there are probably few, if any, passages which he quoted more repeatedly. Even from this fact, we can see how important is the role this passage plays in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. Indeed, one can regard it as the most accurate expression of his philosophical intention. We must not forget that the essence of his philosophy consists in its practice itself. The course of his philosophy is a ceaseless effort to express “the experience still mute”.
... Je ne puis pas ... faire voir ce qui est au fond d’un cabinet, à des gens qui ne veulent pas entrer dedans pour le regarder.1
— Descartes
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Notes
Descartes to Mersenne, 21 january 1641, OEuvres de Descartes, III, ed. Adan and Tannery ( Paris: J. Vrin, 1975 ), p. 285.
Husserl, Cartesian Meditations,trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: 1960), pp. 38–39.
See for instance G. B. Madison, The Phenomenology of Merleau-Panty (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1981), p. 327 (note 12).
See for instance M. C. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology ( Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988 ), p. 85.
But it seems that his attitude toward “the immediate” had never changed. See the following passage: “A lost immediate, arduous to restore, will, if we do restore it, bear within itself the sediment of the critical procedures through which we will have found it anew; it will therefore not be the immediate. If it is to be the immediate, if it is to retain no trace of the operations through which we approach it, if it is Being itself, this means that there is no route from us to it and that it is inaccessible by principle” (VI 122; VI 162–163).
See, for example, the following: “We could not begin, however, our psychological description without suggesting that once purged of all psychologism it can become a philosophical method. In order to revive perceptual experience buried under its own results, it would not have been enough to present descriptions of them which might possibly not have been understood, we had to establish by philosophical references and anticipations the point of view from which they might appear true. Thus we could begin neither without psychology nor with psychology alone” (PP 63; PP 77).
Concerning the difference between “causality” and “motivation”, see, for example, PP 48–50; PP 60–62.
Another example follows: “The psychologists who practice the description of phenomena are not normally aware of the philosophical implications of their method. They do not see that the return to perceptual experience, in so far as it is a consequential and radical reform, puts out of court all forms of realism, that is to say, all philosophies which leave consciousness and take as given one of its results — that the real sin of intellectualism lies precisely in having taken as given the determinate universe of science, that this reproach applies a fortiori to psychological thinking, since it places perceptual consciousness in the midst of a ready-made world, and that the attack on the constancy hypothesis carried to its logical conclusion assumes the value of a genuine ‘phenomenological reduction”’ (PP 47; PP 58).
For example, Tilliette doubts that Merleau-Ponty’s auto-criticism against the “tacit cogito” is accurate. See X. Tilliette, Merleau-Ponty ou la mesure de l’homme ( Paris: Seghers, 1970 ), p. 91.
G. B. Madison, op. cit.,p. 190.
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Ihara, K. (1998). On Merleau-Ponty’s “Turn”. In: Tymieniecka, AT., Matsuba, S. (eds) Immersing in the Concrete. Analecta Husserliana, vol 58. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1830-1_6
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