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Abstract
In this article, I reconstruct and evaluate Merleau-Ponty’s main responses to philosophical skepticism in the relevant parts of his work. To begin with, I introduce the skeptical argument that Merleau-Ponty most often tried to refute, namely, the dream argument. Secondly, I show how Merleau-Ponty, in his initial works, excludes the skeptical problem by appealing to a general contact with the world guaranteed by perception. Finally, I analyze how in his last texts Merleau-Ponty considers at least some uses of the skeptical arguments as tools to make our opaque contact with being explicit.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Evan Keeling for helping me with the English, and the anonymous referees for some very insightful suggestions.
Notes
1 In this text, I limit myself to Merleau-Ponty’s direct considerations on DA. For an analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s possible answers to other skeptical arguments, particularly the evil demon Cartesian argument, see Hass (Citation1993).
2 The first one takes into account the partial errors of senses and the third one, the so-called evil demon argument, intends to cast all our beliefs in doubt (not only the sensory, but also those arising from the theoretical study of ‘simple’ entities such as quantity, shape, and so on).
3 The fact that dreams may be false is enough for Descartes to rule out that dreams could give any support to our sensory beliefs.
4 ‘Descartes’ first step was to abandon the extra-mental things which philosophical realism had introduced in order to return to an inventory, to a description of human experience without presupposing anything at first which explains it from the outside’ (SB, p. 195). One should note here that, despite this initial praise, Merleau-Ponty judges that ‘Descartes does not follow this path to the end’ (SB, p. 196), which would imply the acknowledgment that, from within, perceptual activity cannot be dealt with only as a kind of thought, because it involves a factual contact with the world. For a more detailed discussion about Merleau-Ponty’s criticisms to Cartesian methodic doubt in SB, see Délivoyatzis, Citation1987, pp. 74–7.
5 ‘The intellection which the cogito had found in the heart of perception does not exhaust its content; (...) perception opens out on an ‘other’ … it is the experience of an existence’ (SB, p. 197).
6 It is worth noticing that in PP, Merleau-Ponty maintains the distinction between skeptical doubt and the methodic doubt (see PP, p. 465).
7 As to this topic, see, for instance, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy I, §§ 50–51, 75 (Husserl, 1982), and even later texts such as The Crisis of European Sciences and the Transcendental Phenomenology, § 55 (Husserl, 1970).
8 ‘Our constant aim is to elucidate the primary function whereby we bring into existence, for ourselves, or take a hold upon, space, the object or the instrument, and to describe the body as the place where this appropriation occurs’ (PP, p. 178).
9 Merleau-Ponty explicitly extracts this conclusion in the following passage: ‘it is not a question of confining ourselves to phenomena, of imprisoning consciousness in its own states, while retaining the possibility of another being beyond apparent being, nor of treating our thought as one fact among many, but of defining being as that which appears, and consciousness as a universal fact’ (PP, p. 462).
10 ‘Insofar as we talk about illusion it is because we have identified illusions, and done so solely in the light of some perception which at the same time gave assurance of its own truth’ (PP, p. xviii).
11 There is an implied answer to skepticism in this description of the self-correcting mechanisms of perception: it would make no sense to put all perceptual episodes into doubt at once (as the skeptic intends to), because this would destroy the basic process whereby meaningful doubts regarding perception are possible at all. If all perceptual episodes were taken as equally doubtful, then the very notion of sensory error or illusion would lose its meaning, since doubts regarding one perceptual episode can only be raised in contrast with other more reliable episodes, which are then presupposed by any perceptual doubt. There is here a kind of appeal to the veridical experiences as transcendental conditions for recognizing perceptual errors. If skeptical doubt does not respect such a condition, then it can barely make sense. For a much more detailed explanation of the transcendental conditions as tools against skepticism, see Stern, Citation2000.
12 ‘The percept taken in its entirety, with the world horizon which announces both its possible disjunction and its possible replacement by another perception, certainly does not mislead us’ (PP, p. 401).
13 In later texts, Merleau-Ponty develops, regarding his analysis of skeptic doubt, such aspects of indetermination (or, as he will say, occultation) of the very being. But before discussing this development, let us to reconstruct in a more detailed way his direct criticism to skeptical doubt in PP.
14 There are excellent texts that explore the passage from PP to VI; for instance, Dillon (Citation1997), Barbaras (Citation1991, Citation1998), Saint Aubert (Citation2006), and Pietersma (Citation2002).
15 Here Merleau-Ponty seems to highlight the defeasible feature included in the notion of ‘faith’.
16 There are several texts that carefully discuss this idea; for instance, Barbaras’ excellent articles ‘Le dédoublement de l’originaire’ and ‘Métaphore et ontologie’, in Barbaras, Citation1998.
17 Here Merleau-Ponty treats the skeptical doubt as a kind of autonomous reflection that has been lasting for centuries, independently from its methodological use by Descartes. I shall show that this distinction is very important in another argument from VI that I intend to analyze next.
18 In PP, this thesis was tied to the idea of natural pact between perceptual capacities and the being of the world. In turn, in VI, Merleau-Ponty’s strategy is try to show that the skeptic has a unilateral understanding of this thesis, as we shall see.
19 There is a tendency, motivated by the proximity of the claims, to read premises 2 and 3 together with 1, as if all of them were a justification for 4. But this reading hardly makes sense. After all, it is not because DA makes use of the faith in the world that it assumes the world in itself, but it makes this assumption naively, despite taking advantage of this faith.
20 Clause 10 is an isolated justification of 9. It rephrases the general meaning of clause 5.
21 In this point, this argument is more complex and, I think, stronger than that presented in SB.
22 Regarding this point, B. Flynn comments: ‘Merleau-Ponty does not conceive of the “first universal” as a definitive overcoming of the problematic of scepticism. There is no question of founding a universal philosophy that would be based upon this dimension of “wild being” as a domain prior to all interrogation and ambiguity, that is, a ground of certainty’ (Flynn, Citation2009, p. 126).
23 As Flynn comments: ‘if our insertion into Being thwarts the reflective turn by which the world would become a correlate of consciousness, it also precludes the possibility of a radical scepticism in which we would only be imprisoned in phantasms’ (2009, p. 127).
24 And we have just seen that in VI Merleau-Ponty still holds that the skeptical doubt assumes this notion of reality in itself.
25 The methodic doubt ‘precisely in order to accomplish its will to radicalism, it would have to take as its theme the umbilical bond that binds it always to Being’ (VI, p. 107).