The Philosophy
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s magnum opus, Phenomenology of Perception, was his second dissertation, and the most well-known of his writings. The other key text for Merleau-Ponty is The Visible and the Invisible which, although incomplete at the time of his death, was published posthumously. This summary will focus solely on PoP simply because I haven’t read The Visible and the Invisible yet.
Phenomenology of Perception, like the texts of all the other key phenomenologists, is incredibly dense and difficult to read. Nevertheless (also like the texts of the other key phenomenologists), it is extremely rewarding for those who manage to persevere to the end. Merleau-Ponty carries on the phenomenological project begun by Edmund Husserl, although his ideas have more in common with those of Husserl’s student, Martin Heidegger. The influence of Henri Bergson, although seldom emphasised by commentators is also very much apparent all throughout PoP. The way Merleau-Ponty consistently weaves a middle path between idealism and intellectualism, the central role he gives to action, the idea that subjectivity is a making explicit of what is originally implicit, the focus on the whole over the parts, the ultimate grounding of everything in temporality; all of these are core elements in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, and they were all espoused in detail by Bergson. Of course, I’m not suggesting that Merleau-Ponty stole these ideas, or attempted to take undeserved credit for them. On the contrary, he builds on them and contributes much that is highly original. I’m just pointing out the significant influence Bergson had on Merleau-Ponty; one that is seldom noted.
Although he didn’t place so much emphasis on the more typically existential themes like anguish, death, freedom, authenticity, and the absurd, Merleau-Ponty is often associated with existentialism (indeed, you’re reading this in the existentialism section of my website). Nevertheless, the fact that his philosophy is thoroughly centred on the individual, and actual, lived experience, this classification is more than defensible. Another designation that is probably even more appropriate for Merleau-Ponty though, is that of phenomenologist. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is, like Husserl and Heidegger, and unlike Bergson, thoroughly imbued with a phenomenological methodology. Taking his cues from experience, Merleau-Ponty offers brilliantly penetrating insights into the nature of that experience from the lived perspective of human beings, as opposed to the abstract, idealised concepts that philosophy and science all too often construct in its place. In my opinion, this rigorous phenomenological approach lets him down a little at the end of PoP, but I’ll discuss this more in the relevant section below.
Note: This diagram as well as a more detailed one can be downloaded as a Word file from the 'Summaries' section above
The Phenomenal Field
Objective reality is the world as science describes it; a world populated by physical objects comprised of matter, governed by laws of nature, and describable by the physicist’s equations. But this isn’t the world we live in. It’s the world we imagine to ourselves when we reflect on the world we truly inhabit, a world stripped of all significance and meaning. Merleau-Ponty wants to dig beneath this sterile world full of lifeless clumps of matter to uncover the one in which we truly dwell. This ‘world’ is precisely what Merleau-Ponty calls the phenomenal field, and the intellectual shift in perspective we must enact to see it he calls the first reduction.
The first thing one should say about the phenomenal field is that it isn’t mystical or metaphysical in any way. This isn’t a peering behind the veil of the physical to a hidden realm of energy currents and etheric realities. The intellectual ‘shift’ I referred to above is nothing more than a change in attitude, from one that views things from a scientific perspective (independent, meaningless lumps of matter) to one that attempts to see things the way we originally, authentically see them.
So, what is this phenomenal field? When I look at the cup on my desk, I don’t see (or even cognise) a collection of atoms arranged in a certain shape, reflecting electromagnetic light of a certain frequency and wavelength that my brain interprets as a certain colour, etc. Rather, I see actions solidified in a corporeal form, a nexus of a myriad of referential relations. Only secondarily, derivatively do I see the cup as science sees it. The phenomenal field is then an imaginary zone extending outwards from me in which objects and people first appear as the objects and people they are for me.
A few points about the phenomenal field:
- It ensures that things always already have a sense for us. It is the lived reality that we originally experience, so if we want a phenomenological description of human existence, it is to the phenomenal field, not to an objective, scientific account, that we should turn.
- As that which first enables things to appear for us, it is necessarily hidden. The phenomenal field doesn’t appear before us as a cognisable object precisely because it is that in which all objects appear. This means we must make an effort to discern it. This is exactly what Merleau-Ponty means by the first reduction.
- In the phenomenal field, sign and signification merge. We don’t perceive a thing first and then intellectually connect it with what it means for us. The object, in appearing as an object in the first place, is already imbued with its significations. This is just what it means to be an object.
- The structure of the phenomenal field is that of a figure on a background. Merleau-Ponty also calls this the object-horizon framework. Things always appear for us as figures standing out on a background, which means the background is just as important as the figure itself.
- It is necessarily ambiguous and uncertain. This is because the phenomenal field isn’t a scientific one. Science is quantitative and rigorously mathematical because it explicitly removes the source of ambiguity and quality, the subject, from the picture. The phenomenal field, on the other hand, doesn’t admit of black and white distinctions and unambiguous certainties because, as the ground of a lived, human experience, it necessarily embodies the uncertainties and vagaries intrinsic to human life.
The Body / Action
Without doubt, Merleau-Ponty’s insights into the body are the most important contribution he made to phenomenology. The body has typically been viewed as either a hindrance or an obstacle to be overcome (Plato, Christianity), or largely irrelevant and inferior in comparison to the mind (Descartes, Kant). For Merleau-Ponty, the body is absolutely central, not just because we all need one to live, but because of the way it actively conditions, informs, and even helps establish the phenomenal field.
A key concept in PoP is that of the body schema, which refers to the way we know our bodies. We don’t know our bodies the same way we know other things in the world; i.e. as physical objects. This attitude emerges out of a scientific mode of thought, which treats the body first and foremost as a physical object like other physical objects (albeit a more complex one than most). Nor is Merleau-Ponty talking about knowledge of our bodies ‘from the inside’ in a Schopenhauerian sense. Rather, I know my body, first and foremost, as a locus of action. It refers to objects around it and is fundamentally embedded in a situation; that is to say, confronted by tasks. The difference here is one between positional spatiality and situational spatiality. The former is how we know physical objects; i.e. through coordinates and external relations with other objects. The latter is the way we know our bodies; i.e. in the midst of a situation.
Nor do we relate to our bodies as instruments that we manipulate. This attitude emerges from the philosophical position that sees the mind and the body as separate entities. We are fundamentally embodied, which doesn’t mean we can only exist in a body; rather, it means we are bodies. I don’t control my body, precisely because I am by body. Merleau-Ponty describes the way my body appears to me, not as something separate from me that I move in space, but as “a posture toward a certain task, actual or possible.” In the same way that the cup we spoke of earlier was originally a locus of action; i.e. not a discrete, physical object describable in physics terms, the body also, before I conceptualise it as a biological object composed of blood, bones, muscle, etc., appears to me, not as a thing, but as a power; that is, as a means for action. This is the second concept: motricity, which essentially captures the importance of action for Merleau-Ponty, who calls it “original intentionality.” Fundamentally, we are engaged in the world, not with, but as a body.
The Thing and the Natural World
We have already seen how things are physical objects only after we have stripped them of their original significance in the phenomenal field. However, this original, lived engagement is only one aspect of the thing for Merleau-Ponty. It is the thing considered as an object pole to my subject pole. As the subject for whom the thing is an object, it appears immediately “burdened with anthropological predicates”; that is to say, it appears immediately and directly imbued with meanings relative to my intentions and tasks. However, the thing has another aspect; that of the in-itself. In this light, the thing is still not a scientific, third person object, but nor does it exist for me. It is a locus, not just for my powers and intentions, but for any power and all intentions. This is an aspect of the thing that we usually don’t see, precisely because my phenomenal field, being mine, occludes these other perspectives. Merleau-Ponty describes this aspect of the thing as “insurmountable plenitude.” At the same time that the thing is what it is for me, it is also an infinite number of things for other people, or even other things. In this sense, the thing far surpasses whatever hold I manage to have of it.
Science attempts to understand the thing by dissecting it into its constituent parts; the idea being that we will eventually get to a part that can’t be dissected anymore. At this point, the belief is that we will have finally gotten to the truth of the thing. The problem with this approach is that it remains on the level of the objective, treating the thing as a physical object, or a collection of atoms, or a mass of strings vibrating in ten dimensions. There is nothing inside the thing except other smaller things. This belies a deeper truth for Merleau-Ponty. The ‘solution’ to the thing (a complete understanding of it) cannot be found through objectivity. The thing is what it is only for a subjectivity, but at the same time, it transcends and escapes that subjectivity on all sides. The thing, it turns out, is not just a mystery, it’s an absolute mystery.
Recall the way I described the structure of the phenomenal field as comprised of a figure on a background, or the object-horizon model. The natural world for Merleau-Ponty is basically the horizon of all horizons. It is the ever-present background upon which everything else appears. Although ever-present, it is always invisible; that is to say, it never appears as an object for me, precisely because if it could, it would no longer be the background. This is important because it suggests that the natural world (or the totality of everything) can only ever be lived, not explicitly thought in any meaningful sense. Of course, we can intellectually think of the totality of everything as an abstract concept, but if we try to make sense of this, we inevitably run into antinomies, as Kant showed, precisely because the concept of a figure without a background violates our basic way of thinking.
Exactly like the thing, the natural world is not an object, nor is it a sum of objects. A complete understanding of the world doesn’t lie on the objective level. The world is only what it is as the background for a subject, but at the same time, precisely because it is a background, it completely transcends the individual. There is nothing beyond the horizon except other horizons. The natural world, like the thing, is also an absolute mystery.
The Cogito
Merleau-Ponty works through a complex discussion of the self in PoP, but the general idea follows what we have already seen regarding the other elements of the phenomenal field. I am not a standalone, independent consciousness surveying a world distinct from myself. Rather, I am first and foremost a body that is fundamentally and essentially embedded in a world. This has dramatic implications for the usual way we think about our selves.
It is fairly uncontroversial to claim that while I can’t be certain of the object I perceive, I can be certain that I think I perceive it. Merleau-Ponty disagrees with this. The reason is that it immediately falls into the error of seeing the self as a disengaged, impartial, observer-consciousness, looking in on a world from which it is fundamentally distinct. If I am in the world the way the phenomenal field suggests, this statement actually has it backwards. I can be certain of the object I perceive, but I can’t be certain that I think I perceive it.
When I perceive an object, I am actively engaged with it, responding to it as a nexus of action through my body. In short, I am living my perception, not reflecting on it. In this moment, the moment, I act with certainty precisely because I am completely, and unthinkingly, enmeshed in the world, literally outside myself in the things I am holding, turning, opening, using. It is only when I stop living the object, and start reflecting on it, thinking it, that doubt creeps in. Then I objectify the thing. I attempt to dismantle it into smaller bits to make sense of it, unwittingly drifting ever further from the (subjective) truth the deeper I go. Thinking I perceive the object is precisely what generates uncertainty.
The same holds for my thoughts and feelings. We typically hold nothing to be more certain for us than our inner, mental lives, but again, and in the same way as we just saw, Merleau-Ponty will question this. My thoughts and feelings are certain only to the extent that I live them. When I think about my feelings, I find they are not at all certain. Do I really love that person? How can I be sure? Do I really feel this way, or am I just going through the motions, playing the role that society has dictated? And when I reflect on the origin of my thoughts, I disconcertingly notice that I don’t actually piece them together. They just appear fully-formed in my mind.
This leads us to a question: How can I be constituting my thoughts in general while never actually creating any one thought? To actually create my thoughts would be the same as saying I think my thoughts before I think them. To resolve this, Merleau-Ponty draws our attention to the unnoticed fact that there are, in fact, two cogitos.
The first ‘self’ Merleau-Ponty calls the spoken cogito. This cogito is a concept, an idea, what I cognise myself to be. This is the “I think” that Descartes identified in his famous proclamation, but since this is an impersonal, abstracted concept, it would have been more accurate if he had said, “One thinks, therefore one is.” The second ‘self’ is the silent, or tacit, cogito. This is who I am when I am fundamentally, authentically engaged in the world through my phenomenal field, when I am living my life, not thinking about it. This self has a fleeting, ambiguous hold on the world characteristic of phenomenal experience, but one which, as we saw above, is nevertheless certain.
As a silent cogito, we are no longer in an abstracted, reflective world divided into subjects which are distinct from objects; instead, we are now a perspective in a field, inextricably intertwined both with a body that grounds this perspective, and a world that offers it a chance to actualise the possibilities it carries within it. We now see that there is no longer a question of me ‘creating’ my thoughts because there is no ‘me’ hiding behind the scenes, pulling on invisible strings. I still have thoughts for sure, but rather than thinking them, I live them.
Other People
How do I know other people exist? I see them move. I hear them talk. They respond to my ministrations. But couldn’t this all be an illusion, a dream? I can’t doubt that I exist, but the existence of others is nothing more than an assumption, isn’t it?
This is certainly true if one accepts Descartes’ account of reality in which we are each separate consciousnesses locked up in our own mental worlds, merely producing representations of everything and everyone we (believe that we) encounter. But everything we have talked about in this summary has rejected this position. Other people, as we saw with things, are originally known, not through an intellect which conceptualises them, but through my body and the interactions I share with them. In fact, Merleau-Ponty asserts that, rather than thinking of the other and myself as separate ‘spheres’ of mental activity, it is more correct to think of the other’s body and mine forming a syncretic system, as he terms it in his essay The Child’s Relation with Others. The relation we designate with the pronoun ‘we,’ far from being a conceptual abstraction, is actually a lived connection uniting us wholly with the other.
Merleau-Ponty’s focus on the body here is important because, as we noted above, we are not consciousnesses inhabiting a body; instead, we are fundamentally embodied. I don’t have a body; I am my body. When I interact with other bodies then, I am not vicariously glimpsing a consciousness lurking somewhere in a transcendent background; rather, I am directly engaging with the other. Of course, lest we drift too far off the rails, Merleau-Ponty isn’t denying that there is nevertheless an actual solipsism we can never transcend. My concern for my own welfare will never be the same as my concern for another’s. He’s simply noting two things. First, the other is more immediately accessible than we typically believe. Second, solipsism as a disbelief in the existence of the other, cannot be reasonably maintained. Because other people are so fundamentally central to our lives, to deny their existence could only be “rigorously true of someone who succeeded in tacitly observing his existence without being anything and without doing anything, which is surely impossible, since to exist is to be in the world…”
The Transcendental Field
Thus far, we have looked at the main elements of life in the context of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenal field, bringing them down from the objective, intellectualised realm in which we normally think them to a more original, lived one, in which these elements (self, others, things) have meaning, and in truth, exist, only to the extent that I take them up in a lived engagement. But, at the same time, we’ve found that these elements each transcend me: the thoughts I think and the feelings I have are all greater than the I who thinks them; other people, although closer than we usually think are still separated from us; and the insurmountable plenitude of things and the horizon of the world forever escape my grasp. This presents a paradox Merleau-Ponty calls the problem of transcendence, which can be stated in the following way: How can I be open to phenomena that transcend me and that, nevertheless, only exist to the extent that I take them up and live them?
This is the prompt for Merleau-Ponty’s second reduction, which will take us to the transcendental field. Again, as with the phenomenal field, this has absolutely nothing to do with mysticism or spiritualism. The goal of the phenomenal field (the first reduction) was to uncover the foundation for the objective world, explaining how all of the objects and people around us cohere into a meaningful whole. The goal of the transcendental field (the second reduction), is to ground the phenomenal field, to explain how those phenomenal elements (self, others, things) cohere in light of the problem of transcendence we have stumbled into. This doesn’t open into an infinite regress because we aren’t looking for a metaphysical ‘cause’ of anything. The transcendental field doesn’t ‘cause’ the phenomenal field anymore than the phenomenal field ‘causes’ the objective world. Merleau-Ponty is aiming to keep himself firmly on a phenomenological footing; that is to say, describing the world as it appears for human experience, rather than seeking a cause or an ultimate explanation for anything. (In my opinion, he only partially succeeds with this aim, as we’ll see shortly)
Time
Merleau-Ponty’s entire philosophical project cashes out in time (as it did for Bergson, and also for the Heidegger of Being and Time), which we will soon see functions like the glue that holds our phenomenological experience together. Before we get to that though, we have some preliminary ground to cover.
Merleau-Ponty’s first stop on the road to describing time is to look at how we experience it. For this, he will adopt Husserl’s protention/retention model. We typically imagine ourselves to be in a present moment surrounded by a past and a future. Only the present is real. The past is mere memory, the future mere expectation; neither are real. But is this how we experience time? Do we really live our lives as if the present moment is all there is? Of course, our experiences always take place in the present, but if we look carefully, we see that this is hardly a present isolated from the other ecstasies (the word Merleau-Ponty uses, following Heidegger, to describe past, present, and future). On the contrary, it is a present into which the shadows of the past constantly intrude and over which the spectres of the future constantly loom. Rather than living our lives on the thinnest of slivers between the past and the future (a proposition which, if we carry it to its logical conclusion, will see the present evaporate into nothingness), we actually straddle this imaginary boundary. If this weren’t the case, we could never enjoy a melody. All we would hear would be single, isolated notes. What makes the melody ‘flow’ is the memory we have of earlier notes and the expectation of the notes to come. Note however, that this is not an intellectual, reflective act. We don’t actively, rationally piece together the melody; instead (to re-use an expression you are probably sick of by now), we live it. Given the priority placed on ‘experiencing’ here, the words ‘memory’ and ‘expectation’ are too intellectual. Hence, Merleau-Ponty substitutes them with ‘retention’ and ‘protention,’ which it might be helpful to think of as ‘lived memory’ and ‘lived expectation,’ respectively.
The above preamble was important because in addressing the question of time itself, we need to bear in mind that it must retain this capacity for facilitating a lived experience. This lets us immediately rule on what time isn’t. It isn’t a letter in the physicist’s equations. This is time objectified and turned into a thing; a structural feature of the ‘block’ that is space-time. Nor is it a series of discrete instants strung together. This again fails to capture what is uniquely temporal about time; the fact that it flows and opens us to retentive, protentive experience.
This leads us to the first positive observation we can make concerning time. It is fundamentally a movement. Anything that presents time as composed of pieces will be attempting to generate movement out of static parts; an exercise in futility, as Zeno of Elea demonstrated over two thousand years ago. Secondly, and what is essentially a consequence of this, time must be considered as a whole, a totality, but a whole that is constantly changing; better, that is constant change. Merleau-Ponty’s example here is that of a fountain. The fountain is a whole. We can pause the playback and isolate individual jets of water within the stream, but in doing so, we lose the phenomenon we were originally intent on studying; i.e. the fountain itself. Moreover, even though it is a whole, it is never complete and fixed; rather, it is unceasingly changing. Any single jet of water is propelled forward by the one behind it even as it surges into the place the one before it held just a moment ago; a never-ending stream of change.
If time is fundamentally a whole, a totality, imagining time as composed of instants (which we do when we conceptualise it), could only be coherent if we were to understand each instant as connected in some way to all the other instants. Indeed, this is exactly what Merleau-Ponty claims when he says that time is ek-static. This Heideggerian term literally means ‘standing outside,’ and with it Merleau-Ponty is arguing that time can be conceived of as comprised of instants, but only if each instant is outside itself, reaching out through every other instant in the whole fountain of time.
Furthermore, when we imagine time in this way, what we are actually doing is making explicit what is originally implicit. The implicit is time as a whole; implicit because it is a reality we never fully grasp simply because it doesn’t, it can’t, appear as an object for us; i.e. as a figure on a background. It is that which is always background. The explicit, the reflected image of this totality which we can grasp, are the three ecstasies; i.e. the past, present, and the future, which present themselves before us on the background of time itself. The mistake we make is thinking that we can simply add these dissected elements together as they are, in order to understand the whole.
For sure, none of this explains time as such (where it comes from, how it flows, etc.), but this is where Merleau-Ponty would remind you he is doing phenomenology, not metaphysics. The hint is in 66.66% of the words in the title: Phenomenology of Perception. Nevertheless, in my opinion, Merleau-Ponty is essentially making metaphysical claims in this section. As I read him, it feels like he is trying to get enough metaphysics to ground his philosophy in the transcendental field, but he doesn’t want to get into the weeds surrounding speculation on the nature of reality.
Time and Subjectivity
Subjectivity is the word which Merleau-Ponty uses to mean the whole experience of a subject in the world. It functions as shorthand for all of those elements we have been speaking of in this introduction; self, others, things. Now it turns out that there is a curious overlap between what we have just said about time, and this notion of subjectivity.
We said above that time is ek-static. This is exactly how we have described the totality of subjective experience (although we didn’t explicitly use the word). Rather than an isolated, dispassionate consciousness surveying a world full of things and people before it, we saw that we are fundamentally immersed in the world, so much so that there is no meaningful distinction to be made between where I stop and the world starts. Indeed, what better way is there to describe this than to say that I am quite literally outside myself in the world; that is to say, subjectivity is ek-static?
We also said our reflective understanding of time is a making explicit of what is originally implicit. Have we not found exactly the same thing with subjectivity? Hasn’t the phenomenal field shown us that those individual elements of which we normally understand human experience to be composed are mere abstractions, explicit features of which we can get a conceptual hold? And to what end? To allow us to understand something which is fundamentally implicit; namely, the totality that is the subjective experience of an individual living in the world.
This is all Merleau-Ponty needs to draw the (very metaphysical) conclusion that time and subjectivity are the same thing. The way Merleau-Ponty explains this is by describing time as an “absolute flow” which “appears perspectivally to its own gaze as “a consciousness” (or as a man or an embodied subject) because it is a field of presence – presence to itself, to others, and to the world…” With this pronouncement, Merleau-Ponty has accomplished what he set out to do at the beginning of the book; that is, ground subjectivity and phenomenal experience in time. Time is fundamental reality, and it operates through yet another field; this one temporal in nature, which Merleau-Ponty calls the field of presence.
Self, World, and Others
Now we have all we need to see how the transcendental field as temporality/subjectivity manifesting in a field of presence grounds the three main elements that make up the phenomenal field in a coherent whole:
Self/Body – Our bodies ground us in the present where my being and my consciousness coincide because “to be conscious” is nothing other than “being toward”; i.e. being present before-- (a thing, or person).
World/Things – The world and subjectivity are inter-dependent in the sense that the former is only possible through the latter, and the latter is only possible in the former.
Others – Now that we understand subjectivities as temporalities; i.e. not isolated consciousnesses, and have a field (of presence) in which to place them, there is no problem understanding how multiple subjectivities can co-exist because, unlike consciousnesses, temporalities are mutually compatible.
This framework also gives us the means to resolve the problem of transcendence, which was, once more: How can I be open to phenomena that transcend me and that, nevertheless, only exist to the extent that I take them up and live them? The answer is that this is possible because subject and object (like every other ‘separate’ element we have encountered here) are only two abstract moments that come together in presence. The problem of transcendence was only a problem because the phenomenal field we were operating in was too ‘narrow’ to let us see the ‘wider’ whole in which everything coheres.
Freedom
Merleau-Ponty’s holistic approach to life also creates ‘space’ for genuine freedom. We saw that time was an absolute flow, a constant generation of the new. Since time is subjectivity, subjectivity is also only conceivable as a continual upspringing of the opportunity to embark on a new project. Freedom is built into the very foundations of who we are.
Of course, this is not the same thing as saying that we are completely unconditioned. That would be to betray the entirety of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy as I’ve outlined it here. We are inevitably caught up in the world, and this places certain boundaries around us. For one thing, I always find myself in an already established field which I didn’t create. I am born into a culture with certain behavioural norms, speaking a certain language, following certain traditions, and so on. In addition, and ironically, my own free actions create habits and preferences (what Merleau-Ponty calls the “sedimentation” of our lives) that make certain options more ‘attractive’ to me than others. If I have chosen to be a lawyer, I will be more likely to take the bar exam next year than open a surf shop, for example. Finally, none of us are blank slates. Merleau-Ponty expresses this by saying that along with our existence, we received a “style” which conditions our thoughts and actions. I think we can reasonably understand this as referring to things like genetic predispositions.
There are two points to make about the preceding. First, the notion that freedom must be absolutely unconstrained is wrong. In truth, genuine freedom requires boundaries and inertia within, and against, which to exert its freedom. Purely unconstrained freedom, far from being a genuinely meaningful freedom, is actually pure arbitrariness. If nothing depends on any earlier decision or pre-existing condition, on what grounds could one even make a decision? What reason could serve to motivate if all the options carry equally weight? Secondly, while all of the points above appear at first glance to be limitations curtailing our freedom, this is only true if one sees oneself as a disconnected, impartial, Cartesian mind. If I am, instead, an embodied and embedded temporal subjectivity, then it becomes clear that I am free not beneath or outside this structure, but through it. And this is the only freedom that is worthy of the name.