Dr. Douglas Low

The relationship between perception and language in Merleau-Ponty’s works will here be explored in detail, leading to the conclusion that he integrates them and does not exclusively feature one over the other, as is frequently claimed. We will see that the issue of the relationship between perception and language is connected to the relationship between science and (phenomenological) philosophy, which in turn, is connected to Merleau-Ponty’s use of the phenomenological reduction. While, on the one hand, he seeks to return to lived through perceptual experience (without the projections of linguistic and cultural bias), on the other hand, he realizes that he must use language to do so. His use of the phenomenological reduction suspends the scientific use of language as referencing things as pure objects, as things-in-themselves (basically the reification of its abstract models), and seeks to use the scientific language (or create the appropriate language) to express our lived through perceptual openness upon the world. In the end, even though critical of the sciences, Merleau-Ponty seeks to integrate them with his phenomenological philosophy, along with his integration of perception and language.

(This is an unpublished essay composed of some sections of other published and unpublished essays, some rewritten, some simply placed in a different context, and many that are new.)
We have seen in “Merleau-Ponty’s Lectures on Heidegger” that Merleau-Ponty argues that we need a new ontology, with categories that are different from what we find in classical and modernist metaphysics, different from “substance, accident, potentiality, act, object, subject, in-itself, for-itself.”1 We need a new ontology because what has been inherited in our tradition does not adequately explain the world that we encounter. We need an indirect ontology, one that does not simply use a language of nouns pointing to discrete objects (or concepts) in the world but that seeks to express a field of perceptually lived through gestalt connections and patterns, one that does not reduce everything to an essence (a fixed essence as a thing or concept), but that fuses the essence of what a thing is with its existence, which is temporal and unfolding in time. We need a language that uses verbal wesen, that is, verbal essences to express the active, on-going essence/existence of things. We need an indirect language that expresses an indirect ontology rather than a direct one. The present essay will attempt to clarify Merleau-Ponty’s use of the word “indirect” as he applies it to perception, ontology and language, and as he understands the relationship between them.

Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty each consider what was taken to be the decline of Western thought. The works of Husserl and Heidegger will be briefly considered, along with Merleau-Ponty’s evaluation of his two great predecessors, while Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy will be featured here in some detail. The case will be made that Merleau-Ponty challenges the veracity of Western thought but finds in it the seeds of a new form of rationality. What Merleau-Ponty regards as a rationality that focused exclusively on abstract rational principles to the extent that specific circumstances were ignored is rejected for a new form of rationality, one that is rooted in the body’s perceptual engagement with the world. How Merleau-Ponty defines this new form of rationality will be explored.

Somewhat surprisingly, a number of scholars have recently claimed to find an implied theology in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. This surprising because the author does not state anywhere in the body of his work that he seeks to align his philosophy with a theology, in fact he states just the opposite, as we shall see. While it is true that Merleau-Ponty does dialogue with certain views of Christianity, and while it is true that he does argue for a religion that treats the divine as “horizontal” rather than “vertical,” that is, as part of human life rather than beyond it, the sympathetic goal of his reflection here is to suggest a Christianity that is more humane and less dogmatically hierarchical, that is more centered in human experience rather than an absolute other. His goal here is certainly not to claim this theology as an essential part of his philosophy. As he says, the role of the philosopher should not be to prove or disprove the existence of God but to consider what God means to human beings in the movement of history. A number of Merleau-Ponty’s own texts will be consider here in some detail along with a variety of texts that claim that his works harbor a hidden theology.

In this essay I will offer a response to a Ted Talk delivered by Steven Pinker (with some reference to his scholarly publications) from the point of view of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. In this Ted Talk, Pinker lauds the use of Age of Enlightenment reason and the exercise of sympathy to solve human problems. It is well-known that Merleau-Ponty is critical of Western intellectual tradition (which includes the Enlightenment and its progeny philosophical Modernism), but it is also known that he does not completely break with the philosophical tradition that seeks rational explanations and that values the contributions of science. In addition, insofar as he develops an ethics, sympathy, empathy, and the recognition of the human other plays an important part in it. We will thus see that Merleau-Ponty’s point view has some things in common with Pinker’s but that it also disagrees with it, for Merleau-Ponty criticizes Enlightenment, Modernist rationality while Pinker seems to fully embrace it.

Merleau-Ponty’s late lecture course on Heidegger is primarily concerned with probing the possibility of a phenomenological ontology. Merleau-Ponty’s lectures provide a rather straightforward presentation of Heidegger’s later thought, without elaborate commentary or criticism. However, Merleau-Ponty does favor Heidegger’s later move toward an indirect expression of Being but does not think that he consistently maintains this view. By the time that we reach the end of Merleau-Ponty’s lecture course, we begin to see a number of differences between the two philosophers come into play, with Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy solving more problems than that of his German counterpart.