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ABSTRACT
Despite the significant amount of debate that Merleau-Ponty’s work has seen over the years, it remains an unresolved issue whether his phenomenology offers what he announces as a ‘new definition of the a priori’. In this paper, I make a case in favor of his claim by clarifying his commitments to the a priori against two dominant lines of interpretation, naturalist and Kantian. I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s view that the sciences themselves rely on the a priori method of Wesensschau establishes his basic commitment to apriority. At the same time, Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of the a priori differs in important respects from the Kantian a priori and its transcendental idealist ramifications because, on his view, the subject is not the unique ground of constitution. Having tackled these obstacles to understanding Merleau-Ponty’s commitments to the a priori, I argue in light of his conception of ‘radical reflection’ that rather than being a static element of experience, the a priori stands in a dynamic relation with the a posteriori as a distinctive way of articulating structures of lived experience.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer as well as C. Skirke, J. Kiverstein, and J. Bendik-Keymer for their thoughtful remarks on this paper.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 For Kant, necessity and universality are criteria any judgment must satisfy if it is to count as a priori (CPR B4; Allison Citation2004, 94). This triad – a priori, necessary and universal – plays a sustained role in transcendental phenomenology even if the meaning of each term is modified in light of the contexts in which it is embedded.
2 It can be argued that the a priori, necessity and the transcendental do not stand or fall together so that Merleau-Ponty’s rejection of one of the terms does not entail a rejection of the transcendental. Here, with respect to necessity and the a priori, commentators may appeal to ‘contingent a prioris’ or to the fact that necessity in Merleau-Ponty is contingent – ‘provisional […] open to modification in light of what shows itself’ (Landes Citation2013, 13, 147; Dillon Citation1991, xvi). The suggestion that Merleau-Ponty’s claim to contingency neutralized or replaces necessity, however, is unwarranted (as in Inkpin Citation2017, 49). For Merleau-Ponty, the transcendental a priori is both necessary and contingent. It is necessary insofar as it structures experiences, but this necessity is itself indexed to contingency, to the openness of the phenomenal field and to the facticity of lived experience. Though indexed in various ways, transcendental claims for Merleau-Ponty are a priori and necessary (see below penultimate section and conclusion).
3 Rouse (Citation2004) makes a related point when he argues that, for Merleau-Ponty, scientific theorizing has an existential component, irreducible to empirical observation and generalization. This existential component, Rouse (Citation2004, 280) says, is a ‘repertoire of skills’ that the scientist brings to bear on latent possibilities of the observational situation. In the (less Heideggerian) perspective of my paper, these skills include the scientist’s ability to work out from primary experiences what is essential or invariant in her observations.
4 The early Husserl introduces the concept of phenomenological essence, or eidos, in the second of his Logical Investigations by arguing that empirical abstraction (Locke) and association (Mill) attain generality only because they are derived from a priori insight into phenomenological essence. This discussion may be seen as a forerunner to Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of induction in the natural sciences.
5 Romdenh-Romluc (Citation2018) similarly argues that the sciences and phenomenology both pursue the same goal, that of discovering the essences of phenomena. However, her account does not specifically bring into sharp relief what this might mean for Merleau-Ponty’s commitments to the empirical or the a priori.
6 Referring to Kant’s precritical perspective on space, Peter Woelert (Citation2007) argues that in these works embodied experience, and in particular orientation, is deemed constitutive for abstractions, such as those of geometry, i.e. the points of geometric space presuppose embodied orientation. As he points out the centrality of the body is absent in Kant’s critical work. Nevertheless, the distinctions my paper draws between Kant and Merleau-Ponty do not rule out areas of convergence on other counts.
7 Gardner quotes from the 1962 translation of Phenomenology of Perception. The 2012 translation has ‘purely physical’ instead (93).
8 ‘Factual situations can only affect me if I am first of such a nature that there can be factual situations for me’ (Merleau-Ponty Citation2012, 93) in the 2012 translation.
9 While the first argument targets the empiricist idea that we derive space from our experiences, the second argument targets rationalist accounts of space according to which space is not a form representation but transcendentally real.
10 Here it might be useful to point out that even in extreme cases of sensory deprivation, e.g. a sense deprivation tank, the body nevertheless remains situated as a locus of experience – a foreground – against a diffuse background. In the absence of perceptual objects, it could be said that the body experiences itself as the figure/foreground against the background of the tank. To this extent, even sensory deprivation tanks are not outside situatedness and associated perceptual structures, i.e. they offer the body a situation. For similar examples, see Hass (Citation2008, 30–31).
11 Merleau-Ponty describes the world in a similar register, as originally unified and as ‘the cradle of significations’, ‘the sense of all senses’, ‘the ground of all thoughts’, ‘the primordial unity of all of our experiences on the horizon of our life’ and ‘the unique term of all of our projects’ (Citation2012, 454).
12 The reciprocity between the body and the world does not entail that the world and the body are indistinguishable. The body has an outline and a threshold: ‘The contour of my body is a border that ordinary spatial relations do not cross’ (Merleau-Ponty Citation2012, 100). Experiences of objects and one’s own body are distinct. The reciprocity between the body and the world does not entail identity, since reciprocity requires distinction.
13 See Matherne (Citation2019, 387). The locus classicus for the existential perspective on apriority and facticity is Heidegger (Citation1962, 82), and his subsequent discussion of Being-in-the-world.
14 The English translation of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations renders the passage thus: ‘the pure – and, so to speak, still mute – mental [psychische] experience, which now must be made to utter its own sense with no adulteration’ (Husserl Citation1988, 38–39). It remains contentious how it is that radical reflection captures unreflected experience in a way that leaves it ‘unadulterated’ – without reflection inflecting or modifying it.
15 Kant’s ambivalence about experience is also beholden to how he relates thought and experience. In ‘The Primacy of Perception’, Merleau-Ponty describes this relation in the following way: ‘“If a world is to be possible,” he [Kant] says sometimes, as if he were thinking before the origin of the world, as if he were assisting at its genesis and could pose its a priori conditions [when] we can only think the world because we have already experienced it’ (Citation1964a, 16–17). In other words, Kantian transcendental reflection takes thought to establish the a priori conditions of experience, when thought, in fact, presupposes experience and, therefore, is not its ground.
16 It is important to note that the term fact or facticity should not be equated with its empirical/empiricist cognates. Borrowed from Heidegger, the term facticity refers to our ineluctable being in the world (Heidegger Citation1962, 174). Facticity points to our ‘enmesh[ment] in the world’ – that we do not ‘encounter existence in some detached or abstracted form’ (Malpas Citation2008, 52).
17 Inkpin (Citation2017, 39–40, fn 62) insists that the modalities of transcendental and empirical claims are ‘mutually exclusive’ – the necessary/a priori belongs on one side of what he sees as an absolute divide and the contingent/a posteriori on the other. Inkpin contends that Merleau-Ponty’s ‘conditioned necessity’ – that certain structures of experience are necessary given the kind of beings we are, for instance, the body schema, the figure background distinction etc. – violates the modality of transcendental claims. However, the relationship between the contingent and the necessary even in Kant’s transcendental philosophy is more complicated than the strict bifurcation Inkpin presents. Take, for instance, the fact that even Kant argues for conditioned necessity: transcendental conditions are not necessary in an absolute sense, but necessary for the discursive intellect and not, for example, the divine intellect. (Kant refers to intellectual intuition as a capacity of intellects that are not discursive in the following passages: Citation1998, 191-192, 361, 376; B72, B309, A279/B335.)
18 Compare Rouse (Citation2004, 266).
19 See in this connection Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the unity and the diversity of the senses (e.g. Citation2012, 229–230).
20 See, for example, Merleau-Ponty's discussion of the necessities that obtain in this world (2012, 229) and Husserl’s discussion in Ideas 1, §48, Citation1973, 108. There Husserl explains that any experience of the world that I could make intelligible ultimately rests on shared a prioris. Without these a prioris, I would not recognize radically different experiences as experiences.
21 Acknowledgements. . .