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ABSTRACT
In light of the central role scientific research plays in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, the question has arisen whether his phenomenology involves some sort of commitment to naturalism or whether it is better understood along transcendental lines. In order to make headway on this issue, I focus specifically on Merleau-Ponty’s method and its relationship to Kant’s transcendental method. On the one hand, I argue that Merleau-Ponty rejects Kant’s method, the ‘method-without-which’, which seeks the a priori conditions of the possibility of experience. On the other hand, I show that this does not amount to a methodological rejection of the transcendental altogether. To the contrary, I claim that Merleau-Ponty offers a new account of the transcendental and a priori that he takes to be the proper subject matter of his phenomenological method, the method of ‘radical reflection’. And I submit that this method has important affinities with aesthetic themes in Kant’s philosophy.
Notes
1 I use the following abbreviations for Merleau-Ponty's texts: Film: ‘Film and the New Psychology’; N: Nature; PhP: Phenomenology of Perception; PrP: Primacy of Perception; SB: Structure of Behavior. For Kant's texts: A/B: the Critique of Pure Reason, citations are to the A and B pagination of the first and second editions, and KU: the Critique of the Power of Judgment, citations are to the volume and page number of Kants gesammelte Schriften.
2 For discussions of the relationship between Kant’s transcendental philosophy and Merleau-Ponty’s, see Dillon ‘Apriority in Kant and Merleau-Ponty’; Smyth ‘Merleau-Ponty and the “Naturalization” of Phenomenology’, 90, 149–50; Gardner, ‘Merleau-Ponty’s Transcendental Theory of Perception’; Gardner, ‘Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology in the Light of Kant’s Third Critique and Schelling’s Real-Idealismus’; Matherne, ‘Kantian Themes in Merleau-Ponty’s Theory of Perception’; Summa, ‘Toward a Transcendental Account of Creativity’. For discussion of the relationship between Husserl’s transcendental philosophy and Merleau-Ponty’s, see Heinämaa, ‘Merleau-Ponty’s Modification of Phenomenology’; Zahavi, ‘Merleau-Ponty on Husserl’; Moran, ‘Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy and the Critique of Naturalism’; Smith, ‘The Flesh of Perception’.
3 In this paper, I thus set aside issues surrounding his use of scientific research and whether this implies naturalism.
4 For discussions of Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of Kant’s view of the subject, the world, and perception, see, e.g. Carman, ‘Sensation, Judgment, and the Phenomenal Field’; Carman, Merleau-Ponty, 53–60; Carman, ‘Between Empiricism and Intellectualism’; Rockmore, Kant and Phenomenology, Ch. 6; Romdenh-Romluc, Merleau-Ponty and Phenomenology of Perception, 24, 54–61. For discussions of Merleau-Ponty’s more positive appraisal and his appropriation of various aspects of Kant’s philosophy, e.g. Kant’s account of schematism (Carman, ‘The Body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’; Carman, Merleau-Ponty, 105–11; Matherne, ‘Kantian Themes in Merleau-Ponty’s Theory of Perception’); of imagination (Matherne, ‘The Kantian Roots of Merleau-Ponty's Account of Patholog’; Smyth, ‘The Primacy Question in Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology’; Lennon, Imagination and the Imaginary, Chs. 2–3); of reflective judgment in the third Critique (Coole, ‘The Aesthetic Realm and the Lifeworld’; Gardner ‘Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology in the light of Kant’s Third Critique and Schelling’s Real-Idealismus’, 11–13); and of creativity in the third Critique (Lennon, Imagination and the Imaginary: Ch. 3, Summa, ‘Toward a Transcendental Account of Creativity’).
5 Merleau-Ponty’s positive assessment of Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic owes a debt, in part, to Husserl’s reading of the Aesthetic as amenable to phenomenology at CM 146 and FTL 292 (see PhP 453).
6 Merleau-Ponty does acknowledge that in the Refutation of Idealism, Kant claims there is no empirical self-consciousness without an external world (PhP lxxxi). However, Merleau-Ponty argues that, for Kant, ‘the relations between subject and world are not strictly bilateral, for if they were … Kant could not speak of a “Copernican Revolution”’ (PhP lxxiii).
7 Ameriks points to passages in which Kant defines experience as ‘empirical knowledge’ [Erkenntnis, ‘cognition’ in the Guyer/Wood] (B147, 161).
8 One significant difference is that whereas Ameriks is concerned with showing that Kant’s primary interest is not refuting all skepticism, skeptical concerns do not play a central role in Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of Kant in the Phenomenology. There is a case to be made that skeptical concerns play a more central role in The Visible and Invisible, which I will not pursue.
9 For example, he says, ‘Kant himself said with insight, what is given is experience’ (PhP 228, see also 229, VI 34).
10 Although I cannot discuss the details, Merleau-Ponty thinks Kant is motivated to endorse this conception of experience because he adheres to a pattern of thinking that Merleau-Ponty calls ‘objective thought’ (PhP 50, 74).
11 See, e.g. the sections titled, ‘Reality and incompleteness of the world: the world is open’ and ‘The world as the nucleus of time’ in the chapter ‘The Thing and the Natural World’ (PhP 345–349).
12 Although I here highlight the sense in which the founded term (reflection) depends on the founding term (the unreflected), Merleau-Ponty is clear that Fundierung is a ‘two-way relationship’ and he claims that the founding term depends on the founded one ‘since it is only through the founded that the founding appears’ (PhP 415). For a broader discussion of this reciprocity and how it plays out in Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of mathematics and natural science, see Rouse, ‘Merleau-Ponty's Existential Conception of Science’; Matherne, ‘Merleau-Ponty on Abstract Thought in Mathematics and Natural Science’; and Romdenh-Romluc, ‘Science in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology’.
13 Reynolds, ‘Merleau-Ponty’s Gordian Knot’, e.g. offers a ‘deflationary’ reading, according to which Merleau-Ponty’s transcendental philosophy involves a commitment to ‘minimal methodological naturalism,’ i.e. the view that ‘philosophical results ought to be broadly continuous with those of the sciences’ (82–83). The topic of Merleau-Ponty’s use of scientific results is a topic I have here set aside.
14 This notion echoes Husserl’s ‘field of transcendental experience’ and the ‘transcendental field of experience’ (CM 26, 31, 100).
15 For discussions of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the a priori, see Hall, ‘The A Priori and the Empirical in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception’; Dillon, ‘Apriority in Kant and Merleau-Ponty’; Smyth, ‘Merleau-Ponty and the “Naturalization” of Phenomenology’, 157–9; Low, ‘Merleau-Ponty and Transcendental Philosophy’, 281–2; Inkpin, ‘Was Merleau-Ponty a “Transcendental” Phenomenologist?', 40, 42.
16 As Hall, ‘The A Priori and the Empirical in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception’ points out, although Merleau-Ponty’s language can sometimes invite the identity interpretation (e.g. ‘Thus every truth of fact is a truth of reason, and every truth of reason is a truth of fact’ (PhP 414)), this is not a relationship of identity, rather a relationship of foundation (304).
17 Kant uses this phrase in the Schematism chapter to describe the imagination’s activities as a ‘hidden art in the depths of the human soul’ (A141/B180). For a discussion of the relationship between Kant’s account of schematism and Merleau-Ponty’s account of the body schema, see Matherne, ‘Kantian Themes in Merleau-Ponty’s Theory of Perception’.
18 My interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s view of universality thus differs from the more future-directed, practical account offered by Smyth, ‘Merleau-Ponty and the “Naturalization” of Phenomenology’, 158–9.
19 For other discussions of Merleau-Ponty’s use of Kant’s aesthetics, see Coole, ‘The Aesthetic Realm and the Lifeworld’, Gardner,‘Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology in the light of Kant’s Third Critique and Schelling’s Real-Idealismus’, §4, Summa, ‘Toward a Transcendental Account of Creativity’.
20 I would like to thank two anonymous referees and Michael Beaney for their helpful feedback.