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The “Later” Thought of Merleau-Ponty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2010

J. F. Bannan
J. F. Bannan
Affiliation:
Loyola University, Chicago
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Extract

In about 1958, Merleau-Ponty told Sartre that he would write a book on nature. The news does not seem to have surprised Sartre, but one wonders why it didn't. After all, Merleau-Ponty had already had his say on this issue: both The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception, his first two books and certainly his best known efforts, make up a single prolonged study of the relationship of consciousness and nature. It concludes to that philosophical primacy of the union of these in perception which has been Merleau-Ponty's “trademark” ever since. It was completed by 1945. Shortly afterward, he promised that he would describe the passage from perception to explicit, conceptualized knowledge in a book which he would call l'Origine de la Vérité. Meanwhile, he turned from the relations of consciousness with nature to those of consciousness with consciousness and worked at a phenomenology of history (in the period, roughly, from 1945 to 1955), a phenomenology of language (from 1950 to 1953), and even a phenomenology of philosophy (from 1953 to 1956).

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , December 1966 , pp. 383 - 403
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1966

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References

1 Sartre, J. P., “Merleau-Ponty Vivant,” Les Temps Modernes, No 184–185 (Numéro Special, 1961), p. 363: “‘I am going to write on Nature …,’ he told me.”Google Scholar

2 This can be found in l'Humanisme et Terreur (Paris: Gallimard, 1947)Google Scholar; in Les Aventures de la Dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1955)Google Scholar; and In certain essays which are included in Sens et Non-Sens (Paris: Nagel, 1948)Google Scholar and in Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960)Google Scholar.

3 In such essays as “Sur la Phénoménologie de Langage” which was published along with papers by other philosophers in Problémes Actuels de la Phénomenélogie (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1952)Google Scholar; and “Le Langage Indirect et les Voix du Silence,” first published as a pair of articles in Les Temps Modernes, No 80, 06 1952 and No 81, July 1952. Both essays are included in the collection SignesGoogle Scholar.

4 In Éloge de la Philosophie (Paris: Gallimard, 1953)Google Scholar and in the various introductory sections which he wrote for the anthology Les Philosophes Célèbres (Paris: Mazenod, 1956) of which he was editor. The latter are also included in SignesGoogle Scholar.

5 Merleau-Ponty, M., Le Visible et l'Invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 360Google Scholar. We shall refer to this work as V.I.

6 The reference to Phénomenélogie de la Perception is Merleau-Ponty's.

7 This article—“Le Philosophe et son Ombre”—first appeared in Edmund Husserl 1859–1959 (La Haye: Nijhoff, 1959), anthology commemorating the 100th anniversary of Husserl's birth. It was later included in Signes and is now available in English thanks to Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy which published in 1964 a translation by Richard C. McCleary under the title SignsGoogle Scholar.

8 Merleau-Ponty, M., “l'œil et l'Esprit,” Art de France, 1961, No 1Google Scholar. This article was also included in Les Temps Modernes, No 184–185 (Numéro Special,1961Google Scholar.

9 “The manuscript of Le Visible et l'Invisible had been worked over at length, as numerous erasures and corrections reveal. It cannot be maintained that it had reached its definitive state, however. Had it done so, certain passages which are repeated would undoubtedly have been eliminated …” V. I., 12.

10 Merleau-Ponty, M., Phénoménologie de la Perception (Paris: GallimardCrossRefGoogle Scholar, Smith, Colin has done a skillful translation: Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1962). We shall draw our quotations from the latter and refer to it henceforth as P.PGoogle Scholar.

11 “…if we rediscover time beneath the subject, and if we relate to the paradox of time those of the body, the world, the thing and other people, we shall understand that beyond these there is nothing to understand…”

12 Merleau-Ponty, M., “La Métaphysique dans l'Homme,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (52) 1947.Google Scholar This article is included in Sens et Non-Sens, a translation of which—Sense and Nonsense—has been published by the Northwestern University Press (1964)Google Scholar. Hubert L. and Patricia A. Dreyfus are the translators, and the remark quoted above appears on p. 94 of this volume.

13 “We shall have to follow more closely the passage from the mute to the spoken world. For the moment, we only wish to indicate that it is neither a matter of destruction or the conservation of silence.” V.I., 202. Cf. also V.I., 191 and 200.

14 Èloge de la Philosophie was his inaugural address as a member of the Collège de France, delivered in January, 1953. We shall refer to it as Éloge. Wild, John and Edie, James have published a translation under the title In Praise of Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1963)Google Scholar.

15 “Truth is another name for sedimentation …” Signs, 96.

16 Les Aventures de la Dialectique, 33.

17 Les Philosophes Célébres is an anthology of essays on famous philosophers. In his role as editor, Merleau-Ponty contributes brief but carefully thought out essays on the meaning of philosophy, oriental philosophy, Christianity and philosophy, rationalism, the modern discovery of subjectivity and on existence and dialectic as characteristics of twentieth century philosophy. These essays are included in Signs, from which we will cite them.

18 We shall quote this from Les Temps Modernes, No 184–185, and refer to it as O.E.

19 Section One, for example, re-states his attitude toward the sciences; Section III discusses Descartes' conception of vision, re-stating the intellectualist position on sensation, though with special emphasis on vision. Sections II and IV conduct phenomenologies of vision, painting and the visible.

20 Merleau-Ponty accepts the description of philosophy as circular:… there is a circular thinking (une pensée en cercle) where the condition and what it conditions, reflection and unreflective consciousness, are in a reciprocal if not symmetrical relation and where the end is as much in the beginning as the beginning is in the end. (V.I., 56–57)