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(This is an unpublished essay composed of some sections of other published and unpublished essays, some rewritten, some simply placed in a different context, and many that are new.)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.

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 treats metaphysics as an explicit theme of investigation in a number of places, especially in an early essay entitled “The Metaphysical in Man”1 and a late summary of lectures published as “Philosophy as Interrogation.”2 The latter title however is a very brief summary of lectures that he gave toward the end of his life entitled “Philosophy in the face of non-philosophy. (a.) Husserl: philosophy as a problem. (b.) Heidegger: philosophy as a problem,” which have yet to be transited into English.3 Of course, it is well-known that Merleau-Ponty’s posthumously published The Visible and Invisible4 began to set out a new ontology/metaphysics of the flesh. Yet, the present essay will mention the posthumous text only briefly (where and when it is appropriate to do so) but will focus on his less studied essay and his late lectures, especially the full-length lectures that have yet to be translated.