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Merleau-Ponty’s Gordian knot: Transcendental phenomenology, science, and naturalism

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Abstract

In this paper I explore a series of fertile ambiguities that Merleau-Ponty’s work is premised upon. These ambiguities concern some of the central methodological commitments of his work, in particular his commitment (or otherwise) to transcendental phenomenology and how he transforms that tradition, and his relationship to science and philosophical naturalism and what they suggest about his philosophical methodology. Many engagements with Merleau-Ponty’s work that are more ‘analytic’ in orientation either deflate it of its transcendental heritage, or offer a “modest” rendering of its transcendental dimensions. This is also true, albeit perhaps to a lesser extent, of the work of the more empirically-minded phenomenological philosophers who engage very seriously with Merleau-Ponty—e.g. Hubert Dreyfus, Shaun Gallagher, Evan Thompson, Alva Noë, and others. At the same time, many other scholars contest these proto-scientific and more naturalistic uses of Merleau-Ponty’s work on hermeneutical and exegetical grounds, and they likewise criticise the deflated reading of his transcendental phenomenology that tends to support them. By working through some of the key passages and ideas, this paper establishes that the former view captures something pivotal to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. I also extend these interpretations by arguing that, at least around the time of Phenomenology of Perception, his philosophy might be reasonably regarded as a form of minimal methodological naturalism.

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Notes

  1. Ameriks (2006, p. 28).

  2. Smyth (2014, p. x).

  3. Some prefer to reserve the term for stronger positions that insist philosophy must deploy precisely the same methods as certain privileged natural sciences, or that contend that where there is conflict between philosophy and science the philosopher must always defer to the scientist. There are weaker versions of methodological naturalism, however, in which “results continuity” need not apply to the findings of current best science but are instead indexed to future epistemic practice, as we will see.

  4. Merleau-Ponty (1964a, p. 26).

  5. Merleau-Ponty (1994, p. xiii).

  6. Merleau-Ponty (1994, p. viii).

  7. Smyth (2014, introduction).

  8. Merleau-Ponty (1994, p. xiv).

  9. Merleau-Ponty (1994, p. xxi).

  10. Even this is not without some ambiguity, given that in other places he also exhibits a curious constructivism about "world". For this reason, Smyth maintains he is fundamentally Marxist even in Phenomenology of Perception, in that the "world" needs to be produced inter-subjectively and through praxis, and/or created even in a manner akin to artistic disclosures. Merleau-Ponty (1994, p. xx) says that the task of phenomenological philosophers is "not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being".

  11. Carman (2008, p. 41).

  12. Carman (2008, p. 39).

  13. Gallagher and Zahavi (2008a, p. 90–91).

  14. This is especially so if we agree with Carl Sachs that the Sellarsian critique of the “myth of the given” is not directed at the idea of non-inferential knowledge but at the possibility of presuppositionless knowledge. If so, the critique may apply to some aspects of Husserl’s oeuvre but not necessarily to Merleau-Pontyian phenomenology. See Sachs (2014).

  15. Smyth (2014, p. xii).

  16. Smyth (2014, p. x).

  17. An immanent critique is possible, however, in which they are revealed as reifications of one dimension or aspect of our experience to the detriment of others. But they are not strictly speaking false or "mistaken", but rather partial and one-sided.

  18. Smyth (2010, p. 157).

  19. Merleau-Ponty (1964a, p. 24).

  20. Watson (2007, p. 526).

  21. Merleau-Ponty (1994, fn).

  22. Merleau-Ponty (1964a, p. 72.).

  23. Heinämaa (2010, np.).

  24. Heinämaa (2010).

  25. Zahavi (2013, p. 23–42). Also see Zahavi (2001, p. 9, 108, 127).

  26. Heinämaa (2010).

  27. See DeCaro and Macarthur (2011).

  28. Merleau-Ponty (1994, p. 150).

  29. Merleau-Ponty (1994, p. 129).

  30. Watson (2007, p. 544).

  31. Thompson (2007, p. 28).

  32. See Steinbock (1995).

  33. Merleau-Ponty (1994, p. 63).

  34. Merleau-Ponty (1994, p. 365).

  35. Gardner (2015).

  36. Smyth (2014, p. 144).

  37. Smyth (2014, p. 146).

  38. Merleau-Ponty (1964a, p. 29).

  39. Merleau-Ponty (1963, p. 107).

  40. See Reynolds and Roffe (2006).

  41. At least, if we understand that as synonymous with what he later calls a “hyper-dialectic”, which enables us to challenge dimensions of the natural attitude, albeit not all at once. We might also argue that there is an obstinacy about the first-person perspective and phenomenological inquiry that resists attempts at reduction and elimination that is “transcendental”, but the justification for such claims cannot rest on transcendental phenomenology alone. This is, also the sense, in which at least some left Sellarsians are prepared to use the term ‘transcendental’. Jay Garfield, for example, notes that “the scientific image cannot dispose of the manifest image because it presupposes it. Science aims at knowledge, and knowledge is justified true belief (plus or minus a bit of Gettier). Justification is a norm-governed activity; belief is a meaningful, personal state. Science itself is an intensely norm-governed activity, and its deliverances are theories, which, if they are to explain, must be both justified and meaningful. It is hence a transcendental condition of the possibility of the activity of science, and hence of the vindication of the scientific image itself that the manifest image be in place as the context for scientific endeavor” (Garfield 2012, 107).

  42. Merleau-Ponty (1994, p. 63). My italics.

  43. Merleau-Ponty (1994, p. 47, 49).

  44. Gallagher (2012, p. 7). Gallagher also cites passages from Child Psychology and Pedagogy, recently published course notes, such as when Merleau-Ponty says, "there will be no difference between psychology and philosophy. Psychology is always an implicit, beginning philosophy and philosophy has never finished its contact with facts". See http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/28385-child-psychology-and-pedagogy-the-sorbonne-lectures-1949-1952/.

  45. See Smyth (2010, p. 157),Heinämaa (2010), Gardner (2015, p. 318).

  46. Merleau-Ponty (1994, p. 63).

  47. Smyth (2010, p. 157).

  48. Merleau-Ponty (1994, p. 51).

  49. Merleau-Ponty (1994, p. 58).

  50. Rowlands (2010).

  51. Merleau-Ponty (1994, p. 63).

  52. Gardner (2015, p. 300).

  53. Gardner (2015, p. 319).

  54. Baldwin (2013). Baldwin says Gibson's 1960s sensory psychology already shows how dated Merleau-Ponty's work was. But Ginson soon came to hand the book out to his students and told his students “that to understand what he was doing, one had to understand Merleau-Ponty”! (Gallagher 2007, quoting Anthony Chemero’s private correspondence).

  55. Merleau-Ponty (1994, p. viii).

  56. Ritchie (2005).

  57. Gardner (2015, p. 319).

  58. Smyth (2010, p. 159).

  59. Merleau-Ponty (1994, p. 456). Merleau-Ponty makes a related claim in "The Philosopher and His Shadow": "the ultimate task of phenomenology as philosophy of consciousness is to understand its relationship to non-phenomenology. What resists phenomenology within us—natural being, the barbarous source Schelling spoke of—cannot remain outside of phenomenology…" (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 178).

  60. Smyth (2010, p. 157).

  61. Merleau-Ponty (1964a, p. 24). My italics. Noah Moss Brender (2013) quotes another important statement of this view in Merleau-Ponty's oeuvre. In “Titres et Travaux”, Merleau-Ponty says: “Thus, on the one hand it is necessary to follow the spontaneous development of the positive sciences by asking whether man is really reduced to the status of an object here, and on the other hand we must reconsider the reflexive and philosophical attitude by investigating whether it really gives us the right to de-fine ourselves as unconditioned and timeless subjects. It is possible that these converging investigations will finally lead us to see a milieu which is common to philosophy and the positive sciences, and that something like a third dimension opens up, this side of the pure subject and the pure object, where our activity and our passivity, our autonomy and our dependence no longer contradict one another” (Merleau-Ponty 2001, p. 13).

  62. Merleau-Ponty (1964a, p. 24).

  63. Watson (2007, p. 543).

  64. Sellars (1963).

  65. Baldwin laments the absence of consideration of evolutionary biology in regards to perception in Merleau-Ponty (2013, p. 196), but Merleau-Ponty considers this at length elsewhere, including The Visible and the Invisible, Nature, and Structure of Behaviour.

  66. Nolan (2015).

  67. I hence think it an exaggeration to claim, as Glendinning (2007, p. 13) does, that Merleau-Ponty is not engaged in "empirical investigation”.

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    Jack Reynolds

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Reynolds, J. Merleau-Ponty’s Gordian knot: Transcendental phenomenology, science, and naturalism. Cont Philos Rev 50, 81–104 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-016-9395-z

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