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APPENDIX

Appendix

Merleau-Ponty's Reading of Husserl: A Chronological Overview

Ted Toadvine Emporia State University

More pages of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's corpus are devoted to discussion of Edmund Husserl than is the case with any other, possibly excepting JeanPaul Sartre, and Husserl arguably represents the strongest philosophical influence on Merleau-Ponty' s work. In the interests of setting the stage for a philosophical discussion ofMerleau-Ponty' s interpretation ofHusserl, this essay will serve as an overview of Merleau-Ponty's references to and writings on his primary philosophical source. It will proceed historically and concentrate on addressing the questions of when Merleau-Ponty was reading which texts ofHusserl, what topics and issues he was finding of interest, and how these interpretations contribute to and are guided by Merleau-Ponty's more general interpretation ofHusserl 's philosophical project and development at any particular stage of Merle au-Ponty' s own writings. Since the task of evaluating Merleau-Ponty's interpretation of Husserl is left to this volume's contributors, this essay will strive to avoid such evaluation as far as this is possible. Therefore, it will not include any direct comparison between Merleau-Ponty' sand Husserl' s philosophies or methodologies, nor any discussion ofthe validity or justifiability ofMerleau-Ponty' s appropriations of Husserl's thought. Further, although Merleau-Ponty's discussions of other figures within the phenomenological movement and of traditional phenomenological themes may shed light on his interpretation of Husserl even in cases where Husserl has not been referred to explicitly, such discussions have not been brought within the compass ofthis essay, both in the interest of avoiding the necessarily hermeneutic aspects of applying Merleau-Ponty' s discussion to his reading ofHusserl (a task better left to the contributors), and in order to set feasible parameters for this overview.

An initial chronological survey of Merleau-Ponty's texts on Husserl reveals that they divide roughly into three groups of investigations, directing the division of the present essay into three corresponding sections. The first encompasses Merleau-Ponty's work prior to his appointment to the Sorbonne in 1949, including La Structure du comportement, Phenomenologie de la perception, and the essays collected in Sens et non-

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T. Toadvine and L. Embree (eds.), Merleau-Ponty's Reading of Husserl, 227-286. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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sens. The second group of materials, including numerous lecture texts, several essays collected in Signes, and an unfinished manuscript, La Prose du monde, originate from the three years Merleau-Ponty taught at the Sorbonne. The final period, dating from Merleau-Ponty's appointment atthe College de France in 1953, again includes numerous course notes, "Le Philosophe et son ombre" (collected in Signes), and the unfinished manuscript ofLe Visible et I 'invisible. Merleau-Ponty's attention to Husserl increases rather than diminishes over the course of this progression, demonstrating both that he has grown more and more familiar with an increasingly wide range of texts and that he is reading these texts with increasing rigor and subtlety. While the earlier stages ofMerleau-Ponty's reading of Husserl can be discussed in more detail since his references to Husserl are fewer, the profusion of references in the later works will unfortunately make it necessary for the present study to rely increasingly on summarizations and general overviews. This limitation will hopefully be balanced by the essay's main goal of providing a concise chronological record ofMerleau-Ponty's appropriations of Husserl's thought.

I. Merleau-Ponty's Early Reading of Husserl (1933-1947)

Simone de Beauvoir relates the story, now well-known, of the conversations between Raymond Aron and Jean-Paul Sartre in 1933 that first directed the latter to purchase a copy of Levinas's book on HusserP and pack his bags for Berlin.2 According to Merleau-Ponty, Sartre was responsible for disseminating Husserl' s work to his Parisian friends upon his subsequent return from study in Berlin.3 Nevertheless, it is likely that Merleau-Ponty's interest in Husserl developed independently of Sartre, as the latter himself

1. Emmanuel Levinas, Theorie de I'intuition dans la phenomenologie de Husserl (Paris: Alcan, 1930). A second edition was published by Vrin in 1963 from which the English translation, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology, trans. Andre Orianne (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973; 2nd. ed., 1995), was made.

2. Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, trans. Peter Green (New York: Paragon House, 1992), 112.

3. Merleau-Ponty, "La Philosophie de l'existence," Dialogue 5, no. 3 (1966),315; "The Philosophy of Existence," trans. Allen S. Weiss, in Merleau-Ponty, Texts and Dialogues, ed. Hugh Silverman and James Barry, Jr. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1992), 134.

MERLEAU-PONTY'S READING OF HUSSERL 229

suggested.4 As Theodore Geraets documented in his study of MerleauPonty's early work, it is likely that Merleau-Ponty attended the lectures on Husserl, Lask, and Heidegger given at the Sorbonne by Georges Gurvitch starting in 1928.5 Merleau-Ponty also attended Husserl's "Paris Lectures" in February of 1929, despite the fact that he did not know German at the time.6

The first evidence of a particular interest in Husserl is found in MerleauPonty's 1934 application to the Caisse National des Sciences for a renewal of his grant to study the nature of perception. The original grant from the previous year makes no mention of HusserP In the intervening year, however, Merleau-Ponty had made the acquaintance of Aron Gurwitsch, whom he assisted with the publication of several articles on the convergence of phenomenology and Gestalt psychology. 8 The brief discussion ofHusserl in the 1934 grant proposal refers to Husserl's Ideen I, as well as to several essays by Fink and to the dissertation of Gurwitsch. A marginal note also

4. J.-P. Sartre, "Merleau-Ponty," in Situations, trans. Benita Eisler (New York: George Braziller, 1965),230.

5. Theodore F. Geraets, Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendantale: La genese de la philosophie de Maurice Mer!eau-Ponty jusqu 'a la Phenomenologie de la perception (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971),6-7, and n. 17.

6. Geraets, Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendantale, 7 and n. 18. The text of the Paris lectures can be found in Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vortriige, Husserliana, vol. 1, ed. Stephen Strasser (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), 1-39; The Paris Lectures, trans. Peter Koestenbaum (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970).

7. Merleau-Ponty, "La Nature de la perception," appendix to Geraets, Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendantale, 188-99; "The Nature of Perception: Two Proposals," trans. Forrest Williams, in Texts and Dialogues, 74-84 [cited hereafter as NP, with French preceding English pagination].

8. On the influence of Gurwitsch, see my "Phenomenological Method in Merleau-Ponty's Critique of Gurwitsch," Husser! Studies 17, no. 3 (2000); Lester Embree, "Gurwitsch's Critique of Merleau-Ponty," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 12 (May 1981), 151; Embree, "Biographical Sketch of Aron Gurwitsch," in Life-World and Consciousness, ed. Lester Embree (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), xxiv; James Edie, Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy of Language: Structuralism and Dialectics (Washington, D.C.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Presses of America, 1987), 98-100; Forrest Williams, "Merleau-Ponty's Early Study Project Concerning Perception," in Texts and Dialogues, 147; and Geraets, Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendantale, 13. See also Embree's Preface to the present volume, ix-xi.

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mentions Levinas's Theorie de ['intuition dans fa phenomenofogie de Husserl, his translation (with Gabrielle Pfeiffer) of the Cartesianische Meditationen,9 the publication of Georges Gurvitch's Sorbonne lectures on Husser!,10 and Jean Hering's book on phenomenology and religious philosophy, which has been identified as the first book dealing with phenomenology published in France. I I In his brief discussion, Mer!eauPonty makes use of Fink's Kantstudien article l2 to claim that Husserlian phenomenology "gives rise to a theory of knowledge absolutely distinct from that of critical thought" (NP 190177).13 The majority of the discussion is devoted however to explaining the relationship between phenomenological philosophy and psychology. On the one hand, Husser!

maintains his earlier criticisms of "psychologism" and continues to insist on the "reduction" whereby one passes from the natural attitude, which is that of psychology as of all the positive sciences, to the transcendental attitude, which is that of phenomenological philosophy. This difference of attitude suffices to establish a very definite line between phenomenological analyses of perception, for example, and psychological analyses dealing with the same theme. (NP 190-1177)

9. Meditations cartesienIJes, trans. Gabrielle Pfeiffer and Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Armand Collin, 1931; reprint, Paris: 1. Yrin, 1996). This text is a revised and expanded version of the Paris lectures, which Merleau-Ponty had attended. The German text is published as Cartesianische Meditationen ulld Pariser Vortrdge, Husserliana, vol. I, ed. Stephen Strasser (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950; 2nd. ed., 1963),41-193; Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970).

10. Georges Gurvitch, "La Phenomenologie de Husserl," Revue de nuftaphysique (1928).

II. Jean Hering, PhenolJuinologie et philosophie religieuse (Paris: Alcan, 1925). This is identified as the first French work dealing with phenomenology in Levinas, Theory of Intuition, liii, n. I.

12. Eugen Fink, "Die phanomenologische philosophie Edmund Husserls in der gegenwartigen Kritik," Kantstudien 38 (1933): 319-83; "The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husser! and Contemporary Criticism," in The Phenomenology of Husserl: Selected Critical Readings, ed. R. O. Elveton (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), 73-147.

13. Where possible, [ have made use of existing English translations of both French and German texts, although, when necessary, such translations have been altered for consistency or accuracy without further note. All translations of texts for which published translations do not exist are my own unless otherwise noted.

MERLEA U-PONTY'S READING OF HUSSERL 231

There is no question, then, of finding in HusserI the attempt to replace psychology with philosophy or to deny psychology its own sphere of inquiry. On the other hand, this sharp distinction in no way implies that investigations into the philosophical domain have nothing to offer psychology. MerIeau-Ponty refers to Ideen I in pointing out that "HusserI explicitly compares ... the relations of phenomenology and psychology to those of mathematics and physics, and looks to the development of his philosophy for a renewal ofthe principles of psychology" (NP 191177). That phenomenology can work in conjunction with psychology is demonstrated by reference to the works of Fink, Linke, Gurwitsch, and Pradines, the latter demonstrating a "psychological application of the theme of 'the intentionality of consciousness' advanced by HusserI" (NP 192178). MerIeau-Ponty's application for renewal of this grant was denied, and no further record of these investigations exists.

The points made about HusserI in this brief study are repeated in MerIeauPonty's reviews of Max Scheler's Ressentiment in 193514 and Sartre's L 'Imagination in 1936. 15 With reference to Ideen I and Gurvitch's publication ofthe collected and revised Sorbonne lectures, 16 MerIeau-Ponty argues that "it will be necessary for us to describe consciousness without prejudice as it immediately appears: the 'phenomenon' of consciousness in its original, manifold diversity" (CR 288/91). The transcendental epoche, he insists, is more than merely a new form of introspection and should be understood as "truly an introduction to a new mode of knowledge which moreover manifests the worId as well as the self' (CR 289/91). This phenomenological approach can be used to distinguish several regions of values, "and it is impossible to reduce the one to the other, because they are apprehended with an evidence which, from the phenomenological viewpoint, is the final argument" (CR 290/91).

14. "Christianisme et ressentiment," La Vie intellectuelle 36 (1935); "Christianity and Ressentiment," trans. Gerald G. Wening, in Texts and Dialogues, 85-100 [cited hereafter as CR, with French preceding English pagination).

15. "L'Imagination," Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique 33, no. 9-10 (1936); "On Sartre's Imagination," trans. Michael B. Smith, in Texts and Dialogues, 108-14 [cited hereafter as SI, with French preceding English pagination).

16. Georges Gurvitch, Les Tendallces actuelles de la philosophie allemande (Paris: J. Vrin, 1930).

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The Sartre review underscores Sartre' s appropriation ofHusserl' s "eidetic psychology," and defends the latter against its interpretation by psychologists as a "new metaphysical flight from reality" by insisting that "[ t ]he truth can only be reached via the abandonment ofthe natural attitude, the realism of knowledge common to all the sciences, in favor of a transcendental viewpoint from which all things become meanings" (SI 759-60/112). Invoking once again the relation between mathematics and physics, Merleau-Ponty commends Sartre's tum toward eidetics since "there is nothing optional about having recourse to the analysis of essences or even to the transcendental viewpoint" (SI 760/112). This tum does not eliminate the need for empirical psychology, but is necessary if such factual inquiry is to be understood as meaningful. Merleau-Ponty also offers some critical remarks on Sartre's work that are telling in light of his own later projects: first, the Bergsonian "image," as discussed in Matiere et memoire, may be interpreted as an anticipation of the Husserlian noema; and, secondly, Sartre is "too quick to grant Husserl his distinction between hyl e and morphB----one of the points of his teaching that has been challenged in Germany itself, and that does in fact present the most difficulties" (SI 7611113-4)Y

In a discussion ofthe philosophy agregation held in 1938, Merleau-Ponty recommended redressing the Kantian emphasis within the Lycees by providing a place for post-Kantian philosophy, namely "Hegel and his posterity: Marx, Nietzsche, or even Husserl."18 In this same year, he completed his first maj or work, La Structure du comportement, although this text would not be published until 1942.19 While this work contains virtually no discussion ofHusserl, it includes a number of passing references to him, occasionally including short quotations or appropriated technical terms. Merleau-Ponty quotes Ideen I in discussing form as an object of perception

17. Embree recognizes in this remark an allusion to the work of Gurwitsch. See Embree, "Merleau-Ponty's Examination of Gestalt Psychology," in Merleau-Ponty: Perception, Structure, Language, ed. John Sallis (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981), 119 n. 11.

18. "L'Agregation de philosophie," Bulletin de la Societefranr;aise de la Philosophie 38 (1939), 132. The session is from March 7, 1938.

19. La Structure du comportement (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942); The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden Fisher (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1983) [cited hereafter as SB, with French preceding English pagination]. On the date of the text's completion, see Geraets, Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendantale, 12.


rather than a physical reality (SB 155/143), the "use-objects" introduced by human work (SB 176/162), the analysis of the perceived world into discontinuous regions that correspond to distinct types of conscious acts (SB 186/172), the Abschattungen or "profiles" of the perceived object (SB 2011186), and the intentional "motivations" underlying the existential index of perceived objects (SB 234-5/218). Brief reference is also made to Cartesianische Meditationen (SB 175/162) and Vorlesungen zur Phiinomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusztseins (SB 213/198). From Formale und transzendentale Logik, Merleau-Ponty extracts the distinction between "original passivity" and "secondary passivity," to which he will return on many later occasions, raising it here in connection with the distinction between the "natural" and "cultural" body (SB 227 n. 1/249 n. 50). More importantly, Merleau-Ponty offers in the course of the text a definition of the sense of the "phenomenological reduction" in Husserl' slater writings:20

The philosophy of perception is not ready-made in life: we have just seen that it is natural for consciousness to misunderstand itself precisely because it is consciousness of things. The classical discussions centering around perception are a sufficient testimony to this natural error. The constituted world is confronted with the perceptual experience of the world and one either tries to engender perception from the world, as realism does, or else to see in it only a commencement of the science of the world, as critical thought does. To return to perception as to a type of original experience in which the real world is constituted in its specificity is to impose upon oneself an inversion of the natural movement of consciousness. (SB 236/219-20)

Finally, this new characterization of the reduction is placed by MerleauPonty in the service of contributing to a redefinition of transcendental philosophy "in such a way as to integrate with it the very phenomenon of the real":

The natural "thing," the organism, the behavior of others and my own behavior exist only by their meaning; but this meaning which springs forth in them is not yet a Kantian object; the intentional life which constitutes them is not yet a representation; and the "comprehension" which gives access to them is not yet an intellection. (SB 2411224)

20. This is Merleau-Ponty's characterization of the following passage, as described in his own note at SB 236 n. 1/249 n. 56.

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Husserl died in the same year that Merleau-Ponty completed La Structure du comportement, and a special issue of the Revue internationale de philosophie dedicated to Husserl and published in January of 1939 came to Merleau-Ponty's attention soon thereafter.21 This volume, containing a version of "Ursprung der Geometrie" edited and introduced by Fink,22 as well as other important articles by Dessoir, Fink, Landgrebe, Landsberg, Banfi, Berger, Pos, and Hering, apparently played a decisive role in sparking Merleau-Ponty's interest in Husserl's later manuscripts and inspiring him to visit the Husserl Archive in Louvain. In a letter to Father Van Breda from March of 1939 inquiring about the possibility of visiting the Archive (and in which Fink's essay in the Revue internationale de philosophie is mentioned), Merleau-Ponty specifically requests information concerning the availability of Landgrebe's recently published Urfahrung und Urteil, and unpublished manuscripts from Ideen II and part III of Die Krisis. As reasons for his visit, he cites both his researches for Phenomenologie de la perception and an article in homage to Husserl he had been asked to write by Alexandre Koyre for a forthcoming volume of Recherches philosophiques.23 Merleau-Ponty arrived in Louvain on the first of April, 1939, becoming the first visitor from outside Louvain to visit the Husserl Archive. According to Father Van Breda,24 over the course of MerleauPonty's five-day stay at Louvain he examined Ludwig Landgrebe's volume of Urfahrungund Urteil, Landgrebe's typed transcriptions of Edith Stein's

21. See Geraets, Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendentale, 28-9.

22. "Die Frage nach dem Ursprung der Geometrie als intentional-historisches Problem." Revue internationale de philosophie 1 (1939),203-25. Geraets notes that this version differs substantially from that later published as an Appendix to Die Krisis and appearing in French and English translations (see Vers une nouvelle ph ilosophie transcendantale, 29 n. 129). In his essay in this volume, Ronald Bruzina attributes these differences to the reconstructive work of Fink. See Bruzina, "Eugen Fink and Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Philosophical Lineage in Phenomenology," 176 n. 9.

23. This issue never appeared, cf. Geraets, Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendantale, 29 n. 137.

24. The details of Merleau-Ponty's visits and interaction with the Archive on this and later occasions may be found in H. L. Van Breda, "Maurice Merleau-Ponty et les Archives-Husserl a Louvain," Revue de metaphysique et de morale 67, no. 4 (1962): 410-30; "Merleau-Ponty and the Husserl Archives at Louvain," trans. Stephen Michelman, in Texts and Dialogues, 150-61 [cited hereafter as "Archives," with French preceding English pagination).


edition of Ideen Ips and of the text bearing Husserl's title "Umsturz der Kopemikanischen Lehre in der gewohnlichen weltanshaulichen Interpretation. Die Ur-Arche Erde bewegt sich nicht ... ",26 and a transcription by Eugen Fink of sections 28 to 73 of Die Krisis (from Part 111).27 MerleauPonty also had the opportunity to discuss Husserl' s work with Fink, through Van Breda's mediation as translator. Following this first contact, MerleauPonty continued to interact with the Husserl Archive throughout his career. In 1942, while working to establish an archive in Paris for copies of Husserl's manuscripts, Merleau-Ponty received from Van Breda a copy of the latter's dissertation on Husserl that included a ninety-page appendix of Husserl's unpublished writings. 28 This appendix, which Merleau-Ponty kept until 1944, included the following items: the "Phenomenology" article from the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, a detailed table of contents from the second part of Husserl' s Studien zur Struktur des

25. This manuscript was used as the basis for the 1954 Husserliana volume edited by Marly Biemel.

26. This text (manuscript D 17), edited by Alfred Schutz, later appeared in two parts. The first, entitled "Grundlegende Untersuchungen zum phanomenologischen Ursprung der Raumlichkeit der Natur," appeared in Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, ed. Marvin Farber (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940),307-25; "Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature," trans. Fred Kersten, in Husserl: Shorter Works, ed. R. McCormick and F. Elliston (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981),222-33. The second part of this text appeared as "Notizen zur Raumkonstitution," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1 (1940): 21-37,217-26. In a footnote to his summary of the 1959-1960 course at the College de France entitled "Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology," Merleau-Ponty indicates that he received a copy of this text from Aron Gurwitsch in 1939. See Merleau-Ponty, Resumes de cours (College de France, 1952-1960) (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 168 n. 3; "Themes from the Lectures at the College de France, 1952-1960," trans. John O'Neill, in In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 189 n. 6 [cited hereafter as RC, with French preceding English pagination]. See also note 94.

27. Note that Merleau-Ponty mistakenly identifies these sections as belonging to Parts II and III of Die Krisis in the bibliography of Phenomenologie de la perception. As Van Breda points out, Part II had already appeared in Philosophia in 1936. Cf. "Archives," 415/153.

28. Since the dissertation itself was written in Dutch, Merleau-Ponty could not read it. For details concerning these materials, see "Archives," 420-11156.

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Bewusstseins,29 the complete list of section titles (from 1 to 73) of Die Krisis along with the complete text of sections 38 and 53, and a copy of Husserl's letter to Lucien Levy-Briih1.30 In the same year, Merleau-Ponty mentioned in a letter to Van Breda that he had consulted Fink's VI Cartesianische Meditation with Gaston Berger.31 Two years later, in April of 1944, a collection ofHusserl's manuscripts were entrusted to the care of Tran Duc Thao and Merleau-Ponty in Paris. This collection consisted of a copy of the German text of the Cartesianische Meditationen, a complete transcription of Part III of Die Krisis, Die Idee der Phiinomenofogie, and 42 shorter dossiers from group C (dealing mainly with problems of temporality). All but the dossiers from group C were returned to Louvain in December of 1946, while the latter were held in Paris until the end of 1948 at Thao' s request.

Given Merleau-Ponty's access to this considerable quantity of materials, it is not surprising that his Phenomenofogie de fa perception, published in 1945, is laced with references to Husserl's published and unpublished works. But the only extended discussion ofHusserl appears in the "Preface," added later to the main text to satisfy Brunschvicg's request that MerleauPonty explain what he meant by "phenomenology."32 This preface has the character of a defense of phenomenology against criticisms both implicit and explicit, e.g., those of Sartre and Jean Wahl, and this defense is carried out in four stages: first, by distinguishing the descriptive method of the

29. This text, written by Landgrebe in 1925 on the basis ofHusserl' s materials, was probably incorporated into Die Krisis or Er/ahrung und Urteil. See "Archives," 420-11156, and the translator's note at 181 n. 26.

30. From March II, 1935. This letter has since been published in French in Gradhiva 4 (1988): 63-72.

31. Merleau-Ponty cites this text by Fink on the first page of the "Preface" to Phenomenologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), i; Phenomenology o/Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962; rev. 1981), vii [cited hereafter as PhP, with French preceding English pagination]. Unfortunately, the English translation renders "redigee" as "edited" rather than "composed," giving the misleading impression that Merleau-Ponty believed the text to be authored by Husserl rather than Fink. On this point, see Bruzina, "Eugen Fink and Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Philosophical Lineage in Phenomenology," in the present volume, esp. 178 and n. 16. The VI. Cartesianische Meditation is not listed in the bibliography of Phenomenologie de la perception.

32. See Geraets, Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendantale, 3 n. 6.


phenomenological "return to the things themselves" from scientific explanation and critical reflexive analysis; second, by explicating the meaning of the phenomenological reduction, which Merleau-Ponty adopts as the central methodological -insight of phenomenology;33 third, by understanding the phenomenological concern with essences within the context of a "phenomenological positivism" that founds the essential on the factual; and, lastly, by interpreting intentionality as an attempt to grasp the "existential structure" of reality. In addition to this extended discussion in the "Preface," the main text of Phenomenologie is strewn with passing comments and footnotes that clarify Merleau-Ponty's genetic interpretation of Husserl's oeuvre and introduce themes that are developed more fully in his later appropriations ofHusserl' s thought. 34 These comments also help us to gauge the degree to which Merleau-Ponty already separates the letter of Husserl's philosophy from the spirit in which this philosophy is taken up by Merleau-Ponty himself.

The contrast Merleau-Ponty offers between phenomenological description and scientific explanation echoes his earlier discussion of phenomenology and empirical psychology:

Scientific points of view, according to which my existence is a moment of the world's, are always both naive and at the same time dishonest, because they take for granted, without explicitly mentioning it, the other point of view, namely that of consciousness, through which from the outset a world forms itself round me and begins to exist for me. To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific determination is abstract, significative, and dependent, as is geography in relation to the countryside in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie, or a river is. (PhP iiilix)

33. In so doing, Merleau-Ponty is implicitly distinguishing his interpretation of phenomenology from that of Sartre, who, by making the notion of intentionality central, is inevitably led to reject the possibility of the reduction. See the "Translators' Introduction" to Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: Noonday Press, 1957), 22-7. Sartre may well be the target of Mer!eau-Ponty's comment that intentionality is "too often cited as the main discovery of phenomenology, whereas it is understandable only through the reduction" (PhP xii/xvii).

34. Since the many references cannot each be discussed here, only those that either contribute to Merleau-Ponty's overall interpretation of Husser! or discuss an important theme in Merleau-Ponty's ongoing appropriation of Husser! will be mentioned.

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This description of the relation emphasizes the primordial character of the phenomenological level of description, which is underscored by MerleauPonty's emphasis on the "I" as the "absolute source" from which all scientific explanations must derive their validity. While Cartesian and Kantian thought improve on this approach by treating consciousness as "the absolute certainty of my existence for myself, as the condition for there being anything at all; and the act of relating as the basis of relatedness," their prioritization swings too far toward the side of the subject, eliminating the bilateral relationship between consciousness and world (PhP iii-ivlix). Merleau-Ponty's suggestion is that Husserl's emphasis on noematic description reinstates this "fundamental unity." The world is not the construct of my analyses but pre-exists my reflective activity:

When I begin to reflect, my reflection bears upon an unreflective experience; moreover my reflection cannot be unaware of itself as an event, and so it appears to itself in the light of a truly creative act, of a changed structure of consciousness, and yet it has to recognize, as having priority over its own operations, the world which is given to the subject because the subject is given to himself. (PhP iv/x)

The world as correlative with the acts of consciousness neither determines consciousness nor is simply constructed by it. It is rather "the background from which all acts stand out, and is presupposed by them" (PhP v/xi).

Turning to the phenomenological reduction, Merleau-Ponty first indicates that initially, and even in recent texts, Husserl present this as "the return to a transcendental consciousness before which the world is spread out and completely transparent" (phP v/xi). Under this conception, perception

would be the apprehension of a certain hyle, as indicating a phenomenon of a higher degree, the Sinngebung, or active meaning-giving operation which may be said to defme consciousness, so that the world is nothing but "world-asmeaning," and the phenomenological reduction is idealistic. (PhP vi/xi)

The consequence ofthis idealistic tum, on Merleau-Ponty's reading, is that the world is treated as an "indivisible unity of value" implanted in each individual as the accomplishment of "pre-personal forms of consciousness" between which no failure of communication could be conceived:


A logically consistent transcendental idealism rids the world of its opacity and its transcendence. The world is precisely that thing of which we form a representation, not as men or as empirical subjects, but in so far as we are all one light and participate in the One without destroying its unity. (PhP vi/xi-xiii)

Precisely because Husserl finds the constitution ofthe Alter Ego problematical, his analyses point beyond his explicit characterizations of the reduction. According to Merlt<au-Ponty,

I must be the exterior that I present to others, and the body of the other must be the other himself. This paradox and the dialectic of the Ego and the Alter are possible only provided that the Ego and the Alter Ego are defmed by their situation and are not freed from all inherence; that is, provided that philosophy does not culminate in a return to the self, and that I discover by reflection not only my presence to myself, but also the possibility of an 'outside spectator'; that is, again, provided that at the very moment when I experience my existence-at the ultimate extremity of reflection-I fall short of the ultimate density that would place me outside time, and that I discover within myself a kind of internal weakness standing in the way of my being totally individualized .... (PhP vii/xii)

The implication of our embodiment that the constitution of the other person brings to the fore is that consciousness remains essentially tied to a concrete situation. It is only on this condition, Merleau-Ponty claims, that "transcendental subjectivity can, as Husserl puts it, be an intersubjectivity" (PhP viilxiii).35

Once again, Merleau-Ponty has emphasized the attachment of consciousness to a world that cannot be collapsed into a mere meaning for consciousness. But it is precisely this attachment, he argues, that makes possible a new non-idealistic interpretation of the reduction:

Reflection does not withdraw from the world towards the unity of consciousness as the world's basis; it steps back to watch the forms of transcendence fly up like sparks from a fIre; it slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world

35. Although here and elsewhere MerIeau-Ponty attributes this quotation to HusserI's Krisis (part III), Spiegelberg has noted that such a passage does not actuaIIy appear in this work. See H. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978),517. Concerning other possible sources in HusserI's texts for this citation, see Dan Zahavi, "MerIeau-Ponty on Husserl: A Reappraisal," in the present volume, 24-5.

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and thus brings them to our notice; it alone is consciousness of the world because it reveals that world as strange and paradoxical. (PhP viii/xiii)

In keeping with his earlier formulations of the reduction, Merleau-Ponty portrays it here as a radicalized means of neutralizing our naturalizing prejudices. Rather than a denial of our attachments to a real world, this methodological procedure is in the service of bringing the assumed and implicit positing of the world to explicit attention. The misinterpretation of the reduction by Husserl' s interpreters-and even by himself-arises from the fact that

in order to see the world and grasp it as paradoxical, we must break with our familiar acceptance of it and, also, from the fact that from this break we can learn nothing but the unmotivated upsurge of the world. The most important lesson which the reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction. (PhP viii/xiv)

As evidence of Husserl' s own implicit recognition of this fact, MerleauPonty points to his continual reexamination of the very possibility of the reduction and his definition of the philosopher as a "perpetual beginner." This state of continual beginning, of the need for continual reexamination of the paradoxical foundations of a reflection that attempts to grasp its own unreflective origins, could be considered the orienting theme of MerleauPonty's own phenomenological method. The quote from Husserl's Cartesianische Meditationen which Merleau-Ponty cites in this preface and repeats throughout his career is clearly interpreted along these lines: "It is that as yet dumb experience ... which we are concerned to lead to the pure expression of its own meaning" (PhP xJXV).36

Merleau-Ponty explains the necessity of the eidetic reduction by recourse to the same methodological considerations: that, in order to reflect on our involvement with the world, which is ultimately the goal of our reflections, we must do so hy way of a detour through ideality:

36. Cf. PhP 253-41219. The quotation is from Cartesianische Meditationen, 77/Cartesian Meditations, 38-9lMMitations cartesiennes, 33. For the importance of this phrase for Merleau-Ponty's work, see Geraets, Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendantale, 7; and especially Jacques Taminiaux, Dialectic and Difference, ed. Robert Crease and James T. Decker (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1985), 131 ff.


The need to proceed by way of essences does not mean that philosophy takes them as its object, but, on the contrary, that our existence is too tightly held in the world to be able to know itself as such at the moment of its involvement, and that it requires the field of ideality in order to become acquainted with and to prevail over its facticity. (PhP ix/xiv-xv)

That the ascertainment of essences by means of eidetic variation is undergirded by the world as primordially experienced protects us from the skeptical doubt that would cast all of our attempts at knowledge into question. The distinction between illusory and veridical perception is operative in our perceptual experience from the first, and "[t]o seek the essence of perception is to declare that perception is not presumed true, but defined for us as access to the truth" (phP xi/xvi). Hence, the eidetic method contributes to a "phenomenological positivism," since it "bases the possible on the real" (PhP xii/xvii).

Merleau-Ponty finds in Husserl's notion of operative intentionality the basic insight that sets his conception of consciousness apart from Critical philosophy. As this intentionality is responsible for "the natural and antepredicative unity ofthe world and our life," the phenomenologist must now broaden his horizon of concerns to include much more than the "true and immutable natures" posited in explicit intellectual acts:

Whether we are concerned with a thing perceived, a historical event or a doctrine, to "understand" is to take in the total intention-not only what these things are for representation ... but the unique mode of existing expressed in the properties of the pebble, the glass or the piece of wax, in all the events ofa revolution, in all the thoughts of a philosopher. (PhP xiii/xviii)

The goal of this broadened conception of intentionality, once applied to human events, is to grasp the "structure of being" manifest through all possible relationships by which the events may be explained: economic, psychological, ideological, etc. At the intersection of each partial approach to explanation, on Merleau-Ponty's view, lies a "unique core of existential meaning" (PhP xiv/xix). The transmutation of the contingent into the rational in the tracing of the "genesis of meaning" of historical events is now the wider goal set for phenomenology. In this transmutation ofthe facticity of the world into a meaning and the contingencies of human events into a rational history accessible to reflection, Merleau-Ponty finds the union of

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"extreme subjectivism and extreme objectivism" that is the "most important acquisition" of phenomenology (PhP xv/xix).

Remembering that the "Preface" was written after the main text of the Phenomenologie, we can find indications in the notes and comments within the text of how Merleau-Ponty saw these views presaged in Husser!' The sharp distinction between Husserlian and Critical philosophy, drawn from Fink's Kantstudien article, is implicit throughout and explicit at several points.37 The contact with the world that is lived prior to being captured in reflection is associated with the Urdoxa and Urglaube of Erfahrung und Urteil (phP 50/40, 395/343, 419 n/365 n) and with the "logos of the aesthetic world" of Formale und transzendentale Logik (phP 490/429). Citations from Ideen II concern the incomplete nature of the constitution of the body, along with the argument that the incomplete nature of this constitution rules out a constituting subject (PhP 108/92,465/406). The selfreflexivity of the body, the relationship of "touching-touched" that becomes central in Merleau-Ponty's later reflections, is attributed here to Cartesianische Meditationen (phP 109/93).38 Merleau-Ponty also places a great deal of emphasis throughout on Husserl' s tum toward genetic phenomenology and his later concern for problems of history , which the "Preface" links with the broadening of the notion of intentionality. This broadening of intentionality is indicated when Merleau-Ponty writes that "Husserl's originality lies beyond the notion of intentionality; it is to be found in the elaboration ofthis notion and in the discovery, beneath the intentionality of representations, of a deeper intentionality, which others have called existence" (PhP 141 n/121 n). Later, "operative intentionality," attributed to the Vorlesungen zur Phiinomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins and Formale und transzendentale Logik, is equated with Heidegger's "transcendence" (PhP 478/418), and the "passive synthesis" or "transition synthesis" (PhP 479/419) involved in the synthesis of time or movement can be contrasted with a Kantian synthesis, at times also adopted by Husserl, which "presupposes, at least ideally, a real multiplicity which consciousness

37. Fink's essay is cited at PhP viii nlxiii n, 40 nl31 n, 342 nl295 n.

38. Cf. PhP 404/352. The parallel section of the English translation occurs in Section 44 (97). Concerning the accuracy of the quotation, see the translator's note to Xavier Tilliette, "Husserl's Concept of Nature (Merleau-Ponty's 1957-58 Lectures)," in Texts and Dialogues, 185 n. 29.


has to surmount" (phP 320 nl276 n).39 The subject of this passive synthesis is a "relative and prepersonal I," not a "Transcendental Ego" (phP 320 nl276 n).

These individual points contribute to Merleau-Ponty's over-arching interpretation ofHusserl' s position and the periods through which it passed. The Ideen and the "Nachwort" are part of a transitional period, on MerleauPonty's reading, a "second" period between Husserl' s earlier "logicism" and his later "existentialism" (PhP 317 nl274 n). The Sinngebung of Ideen, understood as a meaning-giving act, is a typical manifestation of idealism (PhP 490/428), as is the "classical conception" of intentionality proposed there (PhP 2811243). Discussing Husserl' s critique of Gestalt psychology, Merleau-Ponty finds the "Nachwort" representative ofa stage ofHusserl's thought in which "he was still distinguishing fact and essence, when he had not yet arrived at the idea of historical constitution, and when, consequently, he was stressing the break, rather than the parallelism, between psychology and phenomenology" (PhP 63 niSI n).40 Yet this period is transitional nonetheless, since the later period is the culmination of concepts already introduced here, e.g., "motivation":

It was not until his last period that HusserI himself became fully aware of what the return to phenomena meant, and tacitly broke with the philosophy of essences. He was in this way merely explicitly laying down analytic procedures which he

39. Merleau-Ponty's only significant reference to Husserl in his presentation of the thesis of Phenomenologie de la perception to the Societe franc;aise de philosophie in November, 1946, concerns "transition" synthesis. See "Le Primat de la perception et ses consequences philosophiques," Bulletin de la Societefran9aise de la philosophie 41 (1947), 123 and 127; "The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences," trans. James Edie, in The Primacy of Perception (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 15 and 19. On this "transition synthesis," see also Xavier Tilliette, "Husserl et la notion de Nature (Notes prises au cours de Maurice Merleau-Ponty)," Revue de meta physique et de morale 70, no. 3 (1965), 260; "Husserl's Concept of Nature (Merieau-Ponty's 1957-58 Lectures)," trans. Drew Leder, in Texts and Dialogues. 164, 184-5 n. 21 [cited hereafter as HNN, with French preceding English pagination]. Note that the year of this course, 1956-57, has been incorrectly designated in the title of the English translation. See pp. 266 f. below.

40. Here the suggested antidote to HusserI's thought on these points is Fink's "Vergegenwiirtigung und Bild," Jahrbuch for Philosophie und phiinomenologische Forschung 11 (1930). This essay appeared in the same issue of the Jahrbuch as HusserI's "Nachwort."

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had long been applying, as is precisely shown by the notion of motivation to be found already in the Ideen. (PhP 61 n149 n)

On the one hand, Merleau-Ponty attributes to the later Husserl a full understanding of the "return to phenomena," and yet the "break" with the earlier "philosophy of essences" remains tacit. The methodological attachments that Merleau-Ponty finds mistaken continue to reappear throughout Husserl' s last writings, e.g., in the case of Husserl' s presentations of the reduction. Even there, Husserl writes as if the reduction would "recognize only one true subject, the thinking Ego ... , would leave nothing implicit or tacitly accepted in my knowledge .... [and] would enable me to take complete possession of my experience and realize the adequation of reflecting to reflected" (PhP 60/73). Yet despite these "throwbacks," Merleau-Ponty still sees Husserl moving in a favorable direction:

Husserl in his last period concedes that all reflection should in the first place return to the description of the world of living experience (Lebenswelt). But he adds that, by means of a second 'reduction,' the structures of the world of experience must be reinstated in the transcendental flux of a universal constitution in which all the world's obscurities are elucidated. It is clear, however, that we are faced with a dilemma: either the constitution makes the world transparent, in which case it is not obvious why reflection needs to pass through the lived world, or else it retains something ofthat world, and neverrids it of its opacity. Husserl' s thought moves increasingly in the second direction, despite many throwbacks to the logicist period-as is seen when he makes a problem of rationality, when he allows significances which are in the last resort 'fluid' ... , when he bases knowledge on a basic 06~&. (PhP 419 n1365 n)

The indications that Husserl is moving in a new direction in the last phase of his writing include his "favorite word" Stiftung (PhP 148 nl127 n), the theory of expression in "Ursprung der Geometrie" (PhP 208-9/179), and the "transition synthesis" of the Vorlesungen zur Phiinomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (PhP 178 nl152 n, 307/265, 320 nl276 n, 475-88/416-26). Ultimately, Merleau-Ponty sees these indications as pointing toward a single fundamental insight: that transcendental thought must stop short of an idealism that would replace the world by its meaning. "I am not a constituting thought, and my 'I think' is not an 'I am,' unless by thought I can equal the world's concrete richness, and re-absorb facticity into it" (PhP 431 nl376 n). Manifestly, Merleau-Ponty's view is that I cannot.


Merleau-Ponty makes reference to Husserl on two occasions not long after the publication of Phenomenologie de la perception, discussing him for several pages in "Marxisme et philo sophie" (1946t1 and briefly again in "Le Metaphysique dans l'homme" (1947).42 These are his last published references to Husserl prior to his appointment to the chair of Child Psychology and Pedagogy at the Sorbonne in 1949. The essay on Marxism and philosophy finds Merleau-Ponty defending Husserl against an attack, in the name of dialectical materialism, by Paul Herve.43 Here, in contrast to the "philosophy of essences, philosophy as a strict or absolute science, consciousness as a transcendental and constituting activity" objected to by Herve, Merleau-Ponty--even while admitting that Husserl maintains these formulas to the end of his career-paints the picture of Husserl as a contributor to the "Hegel revival":

He kept getting a clearer and clearer picture of the residue left behind by all reflexive philosophy and of the fundamental fact that we exist before we reflect; so that, precisely to attain complete clarity about our situation, he ended by assigning, as the primary task of phenomenology, the description of the lived world (Lebenswelt), where Cartesian distinctions have not yet been made. Thus it was that, just because he began by seeking absolute evidence, he arrived at the program of a philosophy which describes the subject thrown into a natural and historical world, the horizon of all his thoughts. Thus it was that, having started with a "static phenomenology," he ended with a "genetic phenomenology" and a theory of "intentional history"-in other words, a logic of history. (SNS 164/134-5)

But while this passage leans strongly toward the "existential," or perhaps "dialectical," interpretation of Husserl's last period, attributing to him a position with which Merleau-Ponty is clearly in sympathy, the footnote

41. "Marxisme et philosophie" first appeared in Revue international de philosophie 1, no. 6 (June-July 1946), and was later collected in Sens et non-sens (paris: Nagel, 1948; reprint, Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 152-66; "Marxism and Philosophy," in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert and Patricia Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 125-36 [cited hereafter as SNS, with French preceding English pagination].

42. "Le Metaphysique dans I 'homme" first appeared in Revue de meta physique et de morale 52 (1947), and was collected in Sens et non-sens, 102-19; "The Metaphysical in Man," in Sense and Non-Sense, 83-98.

43. Merleau-Ponty cites Herve's "Conscience et connaissance," Cahiers d'Action 1: 5-6.

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mentioning Husserl in "Le Metaphysique dans I 'homme" once again reacts against his treatment of "transcendence in immanence." Whereas Phenomenofogie de fa perception had cited with approval a passage from Die Krisis linking presence to oneself (Urprasenz) and de-presentation (Entgegenwartigung),44 Merleau-Ponty now finds the constitution of a transcendent within the immanent sphere of transcendental consciousness to be an elimination, rather than a taking-up, of the "fertile contradiction of human consciousness" (SNS 118 n/96 n).

II. Merleau-Ponty at the Sorbonne (1949-1952)

While at the Sorbonne, Merleau-Ponty's writings on Husserl consisted of collected notes from his lecture courses, two essays from this period published later in Signes, and a few passing remarks in his abandoned book manuscript, La Prose du monde. 45 "La Conscience et l'acquisition du langage,"46 a lecture course given in 1949-1950, includes a discussion ofthe theoretical problem of intersubjectivity in which Merleau-Ponty contrasts HusserI's approach to this problematic in CartesianischeMeditationen with Scheler's presentation in Wesen und Formen der Sympathie.47 Among the

44. PhP 417/363. The passage Mer1eau-Ponty had in mind (he cites only Krisis, III) is perhaps found in § 54, section b. See Husser!, Die Krisis der europiiischen Wissenschaflen und die transzendentale Phiinomenologie, 2nd ed., Husserliana, vol. 6, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 189 [cited hereafter as Hua VI]; The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 185 [cited hereafter as Crisis l

45. La Prose du monde, ed. Claude Lefort (Paris: Gallimard, 1969); The Prose of the World, trans. John O'Neill.(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973) [cited hereafter as PM, with French preceding English pagination l

46. "La Conscience et l'acquisition du langage," in Merleau-Ponty a ta Sorbonne: Resume de cours 1949-1952 (Paris: Cynara, 1988), 9-87 [cited hereafter as Sorbonne]; Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, trans. Hugh Silvennan (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973) [cited hereafter as CALl These materials consist of student notes collected and published with Merleau-Ponty's approval.

47. Max Scheler, Wesen und Formen der Sympathie (Bonn: Cohen, 1923); The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954).


courses for the following year, "Les Relations avec autrui chez l'enfant"48 includes merely a reference to the "Intentional transgression" and bodily "coupling" from the Meditationen, while a significant portion of the course entitled "Les Sciences de l'homme et la phenomenologie"49 discusses the relation between Hussed' s phenomenology and psychology, linguistics, and history as human scientific disciplines. The two essays from Signes were both completed in 1951: "Sur la phenomenologie du langage"50 and "Le Philosophe et la sociologie."51 The extant portion of La Prose du monde, also thought to have been composed mainly in 1951,52 contains a few

48. The course entitled "Les Relations avec autrui chez l'enfant" has been published in French in two forms. The first, which consists of a complete collection of course notes taken by students and published with Merleau-Ponty's approval, appeared in Bulletin de psychologie and has been collected in Merleau-Ponty a la Sorbonne: resume de cours 1949-1952, 303-96. The second version only includes material from the first half of the course, but was written out more fully by Merleau-Ponty himself (Paris: Centre de Documentation Universitaire, 1951; reprint, 1975). The latter is translated by William Cobb as "The Child's Relations with Others," in The Primacy of Perception, 96-155 [the latter version and English translation will be cited hereafter as CRO, with French preceding English pagination]. Citations will be to the second version, since the themes under discussion here receive fuller treatment in this version.

49. "Les Sciences de l'homme et la phenomenologie." As with the previous course, two different versions of materials from this course have also been published in French. The complete set of schematic student notes is found in Merleau-Ponty ala Sorbonne, 397-464. Minor references to Husser! occur in the latter portion of these course notes, which are not included with the shorter version, but these do not warrant discussion in our synopsis (cf. 433, 449, 450). The fuller version of the first half of the course was again completed by Merleau-Ponty himself (Paris: Centre de Documentation Universitaire, 1975). This version is translated by John Wild as "Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man," in The Primacy of Perception, 43-95 [the latter French version and English translation are cited hereafter as PSM, with French preceding English pagination].

50. "Sur la phenomenologie du langage" was first presented in April, 1951, at the First International Colloquium of Phenomenology in Brussels and published in the conference proceedings, Problemes actuels de la phenomenologie (Paris: Desclee-De Brouwer, 1952): 89-109. It is collected in Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 105-22; "On the Phenomenology of Language" in Signs, trans. Richard McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964),84-97 [Signes/Signs is cited hereafter as S, with French preceding English pagination].

51. "Le Philosophe et la sociologie" first appeared in Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 6 (1951): 50-69, and is collected in S 123-42/98-113.

52. See Lefort, "Editor's Preface," in PM vi/xv.

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references to Husserl's work.53 Merleau-Ponty hardly mentions Husserl's work during the five years that followed the completion of this group of writings. The breaking of this silence did not occur until after his appointment to the College de France. 54

The 1949-1950 course on the child's acquisition oflanguage introduces Husserl's work within the context of a discussion of language as imitation and the more general problematic of the child's imitation of others' behavior. In order to clarify the philosophical issues at stake in this discussion of imitation, Merleau-Ponty introduces the theoretical problem of the experience of others as discussed by Husserl and Scheler. The theoretical problem, as Merleau-Ponty presents it here on the basis of the Cartesianische Meditationen,55 echoes the discussion of others from Phenomenologie de la perception:

It is repugnant to the other, by definition, to be only the consciousness that I have of him, since he is for himself [pour soil what I am for me [pour moil, and for this reason I cannot have access to him. Since others are not for me what they are for themselves, I have no experience of others. Even if I wanted, by a kind of spiritual sacrifice, to renounce my cogito in order to posit that of others, it would still be from me that he would have this existence, and by which he would still be my phenomenon. (Sorbonne, 38/CAL 41)

From the theoretical perspective, a true experience of the other person appears impossible, since consciousness is defined by self-contact. Self and other are mutually exclusive. At the same time, Merleau-Ponty points out, the experience of other people is undeniable. Since, from a practical standpoint, the existence of others must be admitted, what appears to be a logical impossibility must nevertheless be accepted. Merleau-Ponty's solution, then, is to "transform this relation of exclusion into a living

53. References to Husserl in La Prose du monde concern "coupling" (21/13), language (24/16, 37-8/25-6, 44/30-1), style (79/56), and Stiftung (95-6/68). The version of Chapter 3, "Le Langage indirect," that appeared in Les Temps modernes as "Le Langage indirect et les voix du silence" (collected in S 49-104/39-83), eliminates the reference to Husserl in the passage introducing "style" (S 65/52), though the reference to Stiftung remains (S 73-4/59).

54. See Section III below.

55. The Husserliana edition of Cartesianische Meditationen was published in 1950, while this course was in progress.


relation" (Sorbonne, 391CAL 41). Even so, MerIeau-Ponty adopts from HusserI the claim that "a certain solipsism is insurmountable," interpreted to mean that, while only the cogito is indubitably present to itself, others may be granted a certain "indirect presence" (Sorbonne, 391CAL 41).

MerIeau-Ponty identifies four aspects of the constitution of the other in HusserI's fifth meditation as salient. First, others are perceived laterally, rather than frontally as is the case with objects. This entails that others always have a certain "orientation"; they imply a reference to or reflection of the self, which is precisely why they are alter egos. Therefore, "[0 ]thers draw their origin, in a certain sense, from me" (Sorbonne, 391CAL 42). Secondly, in the case of "lacunary" perception, the other appears as a "forbidden zone" in our experience since, unlike objects, his presence includes an aspect that can never, in principle, be verified. These two forms of perception are not sufficient to posit a true other. Third, in the perception of the behavior of others, "my corporeality becomes a comprehending power oftheir corporeality .... [B]ecause the style of my gestures and the gestures of others is the same, this amounts to the fact that what is true for me is also true for others" (Sorbonne, 39-401CAL 42-3). Fourth, this perception of style in behavior must be supplemented with an "intentional transfer" or "pairing":56

a body encountering its counterpart in another body which itself realizes its own intentions and suggests new intentions to the self [moi]. The perception of others is the assumption of one organism by another. HusserI gives a number of names to this vital operation which gives us the experience of others while transcending our own self. He calls it "intentional transfer" or "apperceptive transfer" while

56. In a translator's note (CAL 43 n), Silverman suggests that transgression intentionelle ("intentional transfer") may be a translation of intentionale Modifikation ("intentional modification") in § 52 of Cartesianische Meditationen. Accouplement ("pairing") translates Paarung. Later in the section, Merleau-Ponty attributes to Husserl the term transposition apperceptive, which Silverman equates with Husserl's apperzeptive Obertragung ("apperceptive transfer") from § 50. The first attribution is complicated by Merleau-Ponty's later claim that empietement intentionelle ("intentional encroachment") translates HusserI's intentionale Oberschreiten from Cartesianische Meditationen (S 214/169), and the interchangeable use Merleau-Ponty makes of empietement and transgression (cf. "Possibilite de la philosophie," RC 1511175). I have not succeeded in finding the phrase intention ale Oberschreiten in the Husserliana edition of Cartesianische Meditationen.

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always insisting on the fact that it is not a logical operation that is in question (kein Schluss, kein Denkakt), but rather a vital one. (Sorbonne, 40lCAL 43)57

The 1950-1951 course on "Les Relations avec autrui chez l'enfant" takes up this theme of "intentional transfer" or "intentional transgression" in similar fashion:

since ... the other who is to be perceived is not himself a "psyche" closed in on himself but rather a conduct, a system of behavior that aims at the world, he offers himself to the grasp of my motor intentions and to that "intentional transgression" (Husserl) by which I animate and transport myself into him. Husserl said that the perception of others is like a "phenomenon of coupling" [accouplement]. The term is anything but a metaphor. In perceiving the other, my body and his are coupled, resulting in a sort of action a deux. This conduct which I am able only to see, I live somehow from a distance. I make it mine; I take it up or comprehend it. ... It is this transfer of my intentions to the other's body and of his intentions to my own, this alienation ofthe other by me and of me by him, that makes possible the perception of others. (CRO 32/118)

Despite these analyses, Merleau-Ponty finds Husserl unable to account for the experience of others due to the Cartesian conception of the cogito to which he remains committed. Nevertheless, in pointing out that the problem of others is poorly posed, Husserl implies that one might approach the entire problematic from a starting point other than that of the undubitable cogito. Merleau-Ponty therefore sees Husserl pulled in two directions:

(a) the attempts to gain access to others by starting with the cogito, with the "sphere of ownness";

(b) the denial of this problem and an orientation toward "intersubjectivity," that is, the possibility of starting without positing the primordial cogito, starting with a consciousness which is neither self nor others.

But while envisaging this second possibility, Husserl effectively shows that, even though it would be satisfactory, it does not hide the difficulties of the problem which remain intact for him. Thus at the frontier of an intersubjective conception, Husserl finally maintains an integral transcendental subjectivity. (Sorbonne, 411CAL 44-5)

57. Silvennan notes (CAL 43 n) that the Gennan phrase may be found in § 50 of Cartesianische Meditationen and is rendered by Cairns as "apperception is not inference, not a thinking act."


Husserl's later, unpublished writings reach the point of affirming both requirements simultaneously, Merleau-Ponty claims, citing once again as support the notion that "transcendental subjectivity is intersubjectivity," with the gloss that "the experience that other people have of me validly teaches me that which I am" (Sorbonne, 411CAL 45). In the final analysis, though, Husserl is unable to reconcile the two contradictory demands of the logical problem of intersubjectivity.58

Although these courses contain Merleau-Ponty's first explicit discussion of Husserl' s treatment of intersubjectivity in the Cartesianische Meditationen, he was clearly familiar with this account earlier.59 There is no indication in these lectures that Merleau-Ponty was examining new themes in Husserl' s work or had examined new texts by Husser!' The themes treated in Merleau-Ponty's other course from 1950-1951, "Les Sciences de l'homme et la phenomenologie," do correspond to manuscripts MerleauPonty borrowed from Louvain in January, 1950, dealing with "problems related to ideation and with the relationship between phenomenology and psychology."6o This loan consisted of transcriptions of Die Idee der Phiinomen%gie, written in Gottingen in 1909 (F I 17), EinjUhrung in die Phiinomen%gie from the 1912 course at Gottingen (F I 4), and large sections from the 1926-27 course at Freiburg-im-Brisgau on the possibility

58. Merleau-Ponty does offer his own "existential" resolution of the dilemma, by considering Scheler and Husserl as opposite poles of the insurmountable theoretical problem. See Sorbonne, 44-5/CAL 48-9.

59. The dialectical relation between Husserl's and Scheler's conceptions of inter sUbjectivity suggested by Merleau-Ponty here also motivates the analysis of intersubjectivity in Phenomenofogie de fa perception. See T. Toadvine, "The Cogito in Merleau-Ponty's Theory of Intersubjectivity," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 31 (May, 2000): 197-202.

60. The following list is drawn from Van Breda's account, according to which these transcriptions by Stephen Strasser were loaned to Merleau-Ponty for use at his home in Paris, not being returned by him until January, 1955. See "Archives," 426/159.

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of intentional psychology (F I 33).61 According to Van Breda, these were the last unpublished manuscripts consulted by Merleau-Ponty prior to 1959.

The first half of the 1950-1951 course on "Les Sciences de l'homme et la phenomenologie" offers a sustained investigation into the relation between phenomenology and psychology, along with brief discussions of linguistics and history, and focuses mainly on Husserl, while including discussion of Sartre, Heidegger, and Scheler.62 The problematic to be addressed by the course is introduced as the crisis of philosophy, science, and the human sciences:

To the extent that it was really advancing, research in [the fields of psychology, sociology, and history] tended to show that all opinion, and in particular, all philosophy, was the result of external psychological, social, and historical conditions working in combination .... But in the process they were undermining their own foundations. If, indeed, the guiding thoughts and principles of the mind at each moment are only the result of external causes which act upon it, then the reasons for my affIrmation are not the true reasons for this affIrmation. (PSM 1-2/43-4)

Husserl's task is then described by Merleau-Ponty as that of showing how all three-natural science, the human sciences, and philosophy-can exist together, each with its own proper sphere of application. It is this question that, on Merleau-Ponty's reading, spans Husserl's oeuvre as a guiding concern from his first published writings on the Phi!osophie der Arithmetik to Die Krisis.

But Merleau-Ponty's methodological statements carefully guard against taking this examination as a simple historical report of the views of either phenomenologists (discussed in the first half of the course), or psychologists (discussed in the second). Merleau-Ponty proposes, on the contrary, to undertake an historical analysis, but one directed by a "dialectical history":

61. This course is included as an appendix in Husserl, Phiinomenologische Psychologie. Vorlesungen Sommersomeser 1925. Husserliana, vol. 9, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968). Although this course is not included in the English translation, see John Scanlon's "Translator's Introduction" in Husserl, Phenomenological Psychology, trans. John Scanlon (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), ix-x.

62. 1950 also marks the date of Paul Ricoeur's translation into French of Husserl's Ideen I, published in the Gallimard series directed by Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, and from which Merleau-Ponty quotes several times throughout the course.


we shall not develop the ideas of the phenomenologists merely according to the texts but according to their intentions. It is a question here not of an empirical history ... , but rather of an "intentional history," as HusserI called it, which in a given assemblage of texts and works tries to discover their legitimate sense. We shall not restrain ourselves from explaining the phenomenological texts by considerations which are not found there in writing. (PSM 4/45)

As justification for this methodological approach, Merleau-Ponty points out that "the history of philosophy cannot be separated from philosophy," as the activity of interpreting any philosopher's writings inevitably involves the reader or interpreter in the task of separating the essential from the inessential-a task that, while going beyond the mere reporting of facts, is nonetheless far from arbitrary. Hence, in Merleau-Ponty's words, "we do not exceed the ordinary rights of the historian if we distinguish what our author has said from what we think he should have said" (PSM 5/46). This proviso must be borne in mind in considering Merleau-Ponty's interpretation of Husserl in this course, and perhaps elsewhere as well.

On Merleau-Ponty' s interpretation, Husserl' s phenomenological reduction and eidetic method allow us to "think at the same time of the externality which is the principle of the sciences of man and of the internality which is the condition of philosophy" (PSM 14/52). While too great an emphasis on the contingent "determinations" of thought leads to irrationalism and skepticism, the over-emphasis on autonomous rationality labeled "logicism" denies the roots of reflection in an implicit Weltthesis, the physical, cultural, and social situation that precedes and grounds reflection. The phenomenological reduction, according to Merleau-Ponty, splits the horns of this dilemma by recognizing our inherence in a physical and human world while, at the same moment, suspending the affirmations this inherence entails in order to bring them to consciousness and reflect upon them. Husserl's method discloses omni-temporal truths rather than the eternal truths sought by logicism, and need not therefore deny the perspectival and historically contingent nature of our access to truth. Since the laws of human thought are grounded in actual human experience, their justification lies in the fact that they are coextensive with our possible experience: "In order to be sure that a certain thought is a rule for all men and for all being, it is sufficient if I find that it concerns something truly essential, something which cannot be separated from me even in thought" (PSM 12/50). To make this determination, I need not have access to any truths beyond those that

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may be extracted from my own possible experience. This conception, then, leads once again to a "phenomenological positivism" that "refuses to found rationality, the agreement of minds, and universal logic on any right that is prior to fact" (PSM 12/50). This conception of philosophy as the search for laws of thought through descriptive analysis of our actual experience is essentially open-ended, an Idea in the Kantian sense, since our individuated and situated perspectives make intersubjective corroboration and future reexamination an essential component of the emergence of truth.

The phenomenological approach so understood bears fruitful comparison, Merleau-Ponty suggests, with Hegel's Phiinomenologie des Geistes, in that it relies upon the spontaneous emergence of order and meaning within the events of life and history, a meaning that is not the result of the imposition of form onto disorganized matter by consciousness:

For a conception of this kind one comes to the spirit only by "the spirit of the phenomenon"-that is, the visible spirit before us, not just the internal spirit which we grasp by reflection or by the cogito. This spirit is not only in us but spread far and wide in the events of history and in the human milieu. (PSM 15/52)63

Access to this spontaneous order, as important to psychology as philosophy, is by means of Husserl's Wesenschau, the intuition of essences. Since the intuition of essences manifests the dual character of concreteness and universality, it provides a way of knowing that is neither deductive nor purely empirical. For example, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as an object of consciousness is neither an eternal essence nor reducible to the experience of a particular performance. "Intentionality" is precisely the orientation of consciousness toward such "intentional objects" that are open to "eidetic intuition," that is, to a descriptive analysis that separates essential from nonessential characteristics. The possibility of such a determination of the essential rests simply on distinguishing the fact that we are experiencing something from what it is that we are experiencing. Insofar as my experience confronts me with a repeatable and intelligible structure, a new form of knowledge ignored by both psychologism and logicism is opened to me:

63. The claim that Husserl's phenomenology rejoins that of Hegel is made again in the discussion of history at the end of the phenomenology segment of the course (Sorbonne, 71IPSM 92).


in so far as I grasp something through this experience which is more than a contingent fact, an intelligible structure that imposes itself on me whenever I think of the intentional object in question, I gain another kind of knowledge. I am then not enclosed in the particularity of my individual life, and I attain an insight which holds for all men. (PSM 19/54-5)

On the basis of this reconciliation of concreteness and universality, MerleauPonty argues, a reconciliation of phenomenological philosophy with the sciences of man becomes possible. It is this position that the main body of Merleau-Ponty's course defends.

On Merleau-Ponty's reading, prior to the formulation of the phenomenological reduction at the time of Ideen I, Husserl's views on consciousness alternated between psychologism and logicism. The Philosophie der Arithmetik, by treating psychological acts as the basis for arithmetical operations, merely reduced consciousness to one region of the world and failed to recognize the intentional correlation of consciousness with its object. Later these limitations led Husserl toward the opposite pole: consciousness is "the source from which all being can receive its sense and its value of being for us" (PSM 20/55). Since consciousness as thus conceived is coextensive with all knowable being, this philosophy skirts idealism. The "phenomenological reduction" of Ideen I breaks through this alternation of psychologism and logicism since it places in suspense without denying the spontaneous affirmations of our lives. Here Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the distinction between the empirical ego of psychologism and the transcendental ego as that "pure source of all the meanings which constitute the world around me and my empirical self' (PSM 21/56).

At this stage, Husserl distinguishes psychology and phenomenology by insisting on the need for a break with the natural attitude and the limitations of a purely empirical psychology. Even Gestalt psychology, despite its break with atomism and emphasis on consciousness as an integrated totality, remains tied to a naturalistic interpretation of this consciousness by ultimate recourse to causal, physiological explanation. Further, the cataloging of psychological facts cannot be elevated to the status of a true science without the philosophical correction added by an analysis of . essences.

To psychology is allotted the investigation of facts, and the relations of these facts. But the ultimate meaning of these facts and relations will be worked out

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only by an eidetic phenomenology in which I derive the sense or the essence of perception, of image, and of consciousness. (PSM 25/59)

The resulting method, illustrated with analyses from Sartre's first works on imagination and emotion, "gathers together the lived facts ... and tries to subsume them under one essential meaning" (PSM 29/62), a method, Merleau-Ponty notes, that leads toward an "analysis of existence" in that "the essence of an experience is always a certain modality of our relation to the world" (PSM 29 n/62 n). The relation between psychology and phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty notes once again, parallels that between physics and geometry, with the former requiring the latter as its foundation without being reducible to it. In any factual investigation, the separation of essential from accidental and the definition of central concepts (e.g., the concept of "man" in psychology) requires eidetic and not merely factual analysis.

This view of the relationship between psychology and phenomenology gives rise to two criticisms. The first, that phenomenology is no more than introspection, is easily refuted by noting that the transcendental level of inquiry is neutral with respect to the distinction between internal and external perception and the division between self and other. The second, more penetrating objection, that Husserl' s division oflabor reduces the role of psychology to a mere study of details within a framework constructed wholly by phenomenology, indicates the need for reformulation of the psychology/phenomenologyrelationship. Merleau-Pontynotes that, in other texts, Husserl conceived the role of psychology as concerned with the laws of fact that apply to consciousness once naturalized through its embodiment. On either view, the Wesenschau fails to perform the function of reconciling the concrete with the universal, fact with essence, in an acceptable fashion. Merleau-Ponty finds Husserl' s work after Ideen I pointing in directions that eliminate these difficulties. Indications of this new direction include the possibility of a genetic phenomenology, indicating that psychological genesis is no longer immediately relegated to secondary status, and the recognition that essences within the psychological realm are morphological by way of contrast with the exact essences of mathematics and physics. Further, all empirical research entails an understanding of essences at least implicitly, and the Wesenschau itself is involved in a Fundierung relation with a concrete perception:


[I]nsight into essence is an intellectual taking over, a making explicit and clarifying of something concretely experienced, and a recognition that it comes after something else, from which it starts, is essential to its nature. It also knows itself to be retrospective. The idea that it succeeds a more direct contact with the thing itself is enclosed within its very meaning. (PSM 38/68)

The introduction of these more complex relations between factual and eidetic investigation point toward what Merleau-Ponty terms a "double envelopment" between the two levels. This envelopment is made more explicit by conceiving Wesenschau as a form of "induction" on the basis of imaginary "free variation" from a single concrete case. While empirical induction operates on the basis of actual cases, the distance between the two is only one of degree, since even empirical induction requires interpolation. Although Husserl continues to speak of a parallelism between psychology and phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty sees an "inevitable dialectic of the concept of essence" that leads to a "reciprocal envelopment" between the two. Thus, there cannot be any basic discord between the point of view of psychology and that of phenomenology" (pSM 45/73).

This interpenetration of eidetic intuition with empirical investigation separates the former from the word-games of scholasticism. The validity of an essence cannot be determined a priori, which would leave open the possibility that what appears essential is merely a prejudice or habit rooted in the use of language. This possibility is avoided by confronting an intuition of essence with the known facts. It is therefore necessary to correct eidetic phenomenology with the findings of empirical investigation. On this basis, MerIeau-Ponty argues that Gestalt theory, once stripped of its physiological hypotheses, can extend HusserI' s attempt to avoid psychologism and logicism. The "notion of an order of meaning that does not result from the application of spiritual activity to an external matter" but rather from a "spontaneous organization beyond the distinction between activity and passivity" (PSM 51177) fulfills the demand of the Wesenschau to disclose essences while remaining in contact with the concrete facts of experience.

The remainder of Merleau-Ponty's discussion of Husserl in this course concerns the development of his thought in linguistics and history. In both cases, Merleau-Ponty finds a progression parallel to that demonstrated in the case of psychology: a rigid logicism gives way to a spontaneous organization of the rational within the sensible. In linguistics, Merleau-Ponty cites the call for the construction of an apriori universal grammar in Logische

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Untersuchungen as evidence of the logicist phase. For evidence ofHusserl' s later tum away from the logicist approach to language, Merleau-Ponty relies on Pos's "Phenomenologie et linguistique,"64 which attributes to Husserl's last writings a call for the return to the speaking subject "who has no access to any truth nor to any thought with a claim to universality except through the practice of his language in a definite linguistic situation" (PSM 57/82). Further, the notion that a verbal intention fuses with rather than precedes the word, as expressed in Formale und transzendentale Logik, and the inextricable relation between mind and body demonstrated by the discussion of intersubjectivity in Cartesianische Meditationen-here taken as an analogue for the relation between signifier and sense-both point toward the elimination oflogicism. The reversal is shown to be complete by Husserl's final remarks in writings like "Ursprung der Geometrie," in which putatively eternal ideas are sustained in their existence by their own instruments of expression.65

There is no longer any question of starting with a universal language which would furnish the invariable plan of any possible mode of speech, and of then proceeding to the analysis of particular languages. It is exactly the reverse .... It is in our experience of the speaking subject that we must find the germ of universality which will enable us to understand other languages. (PSM 60/84)

This reversal of procedure is evidence, on Merleau-Ponty's interpretation, of a convergence between the later Husserl and Saussure-a further instance of phenomenology's convergence with the human sciences.

The same progression is traced with respect to Husserl's account of history, which begins with an insistence that factual history take a "phenomenology of history" arrived at within the "ideal sphere" as the guide

64. In Revue internationale de philosophie (1939), the issue we have noted previously for its influence on Merleau-Ponty's introduction to the later Husserl (see p. 234).

65. Jacques Derrida takes issue with precisely this claim by Merleau-Ponty, i.e., that "Ursprung der Geometrie" introduces a radically different view oflanguage and writing than that Husserl had presented in Logical Investigations. See Derrida, Introduction a HL 'Origine de la geometrie" de Husser! (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), 71 ff.; Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1978),77 ff. As noted above, Merleau-Ponty discusses the version of this text edited by Fink rather than that later included in the Krisis (Hua VI) on which Derrida's own translation is based (cf. note 22 above).


for its empirical research. But Husserl's discussion of Dilthey's Weltanschauung philosophy in "Philo sophie als strenge Wissenschaft" indicates that a perennial philosophy must equally be a philosophy of the present, that despite philosophy's attempt to supersede the limitations of a present perspective, it cannot do so by immediately installing itself in an infinite perspective. To Merleau-Ponty, Husserl's later interest in historicity, Sinngenesis, and the role of sedimentation in the constitution of ideality .all point toward a "coefficient of contingency" within the ideal essence itself. The development of an "intentional history" -a phrase that Merleau-Ponty considers synonymous with "dialectic"-requires the acceptance of an "intemallink" between ourselves and the past culture we seek to comprehend. This link, Merleau-Ponty suggests, is the "living present": "the present in which the whole past, everything foreign, and the whole of the thinkable future are reanimated" (PSM 68/90). In Husserl's letter to Levy-Bruhl, Merleau-Ponty finds Husserl calling into question the autonomy of imaginative variation, since actual contact with and reanimation ofthe sense of another factual culture may be required to recognize the limitations of one's own cultural commitments, in this case a cultural commitment to the very notion of history that Levy-Bruhl finds lacking in certain "primitive" societies. While philosophical inquiry remains essential to the classification, evaluation, and interpretation of facts, it can proceed only on the basis of the lived experiences from which these facts derive their originary sense.

Through the examples of psychology, linguistics, and history, MerleauPonty finds Husserl' s philosophy maturing in a single direction that carries it beyond the attempts of either Scheler or Heidegger:

We must ... become aware of this paradox-that we never free ourselves from the particular except by taking over a situation that is all at once, and inseparably, both limitation and access to the universal. . . . [T]he most profound reflection consists in rediscovering a basic faith, or opinion [Urglaube, Urdoxa ]-that is, a reason which is already incorporated in sensible phenomena. (PSM 57/82)

On the basis of this autochthonous logos of the factual or sensible realm, reflection can proceed to extract the sense or essence proper to the philosophical level of analysis. Hence, with respect to the question orienting the course from the outset, Merleau-Ponty can conclude the following with respect to the development of Husserl's thought:

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[W]e can say that the problem with which we were concerned at the beginning-must we be for fact or for essence, for time or eternity, for the positive science of man or for philosophy?-was bypassed in the later thought of Husserl. Here he no longer considers essence as separated from fact, eternity from time, or philosophic thought from history. (PSM 74/93)

Two essays dating from 1951 and published in Signes, "Sur la phenomenologie du langage" and "Le Philosophe et la sociologie," extend the analyses of this lecture course on phenomenology and the human sciences. Merleau-Ponty begins his essay on language with a brief review of the stages ofHusserl's thought as previously catalogued: the call for an eidetics of language culminating in a universal grammar as set out in Logische Untersuchungen is superseded by the analyses ofF ormale und transzendentale Logik and "Ursprung der Geometrie," which treat language as "an original way of intending certain objects" or even "as the operation through which thoughts ... acquire intersubjective value and, ultimately, ideal existence" (S 106/84-5). Pos's emphasis on the speaking subject serves to introduce a discussion of the relation between the phenomenological approach to language and recent work in linguistics. Returning to Husserl at the end of his essay, Merleau-Ponty raises the question of the relation between phenomenology and philosophy, i.e., metaphysics. Phenomenological description, he argues, cannot be limited to a merely propaedeutic role in relationship to philosophy more broadly conceived, nor can it be treated merely as a psychological description resulting from the de facto embodiment of a consciousness that is, de jure, radically autonomous. The signifying power of speech brought to light by phenomenology parallels the body's role as mediator of our relationship with the world, and this "phenomenon of incarnation" has metaphysical import.

As example, Merleau-Ponty turns once more to the problem of intersubjectivity, which, he again argues, remains theoretically insoluble from the starting point of consciousness:

To be conscious is to constitute, so that I cannot be conscious of another person, since that would involve constituting him as constituting, and as constituting in respect to the very act through which I constitute him. This difficulty of principle, posited as a limit at the beginning of the fifth Cartesian Meditation, is nowhere eliminated. HusserI disregards it: since I have the idea of others, it follows that in some way the difficulty mentioned has in fact been overcome. (S 117/93-4)


The subject that perceives others does so by living the "radical contradiction" that the theoretical examination cannot resolve "as the very definition of the presence of others" (S 117/94). This subject is none other than my body, which opens itself to the other by way of "pairing" and "intentional transgression" and makes possible a paradoxical reversal of intentionality. Speech, Merleau-Ponty continues, is an example ofthe bodily conduct that allows for such an intentional reversal. The implication is that incarnation requires a complete overhaul ofthe notion of "consciousness"; situatedness and incarnation must be treated as essential aspects of the cogito. In like manner, Husserl' s descriptions oflanguage lead inevitably toward a "circuit of reflection" within which what at first appears as a non-localized, atemporal ideality shows itself ultimately to depend on the document, that is, the site of an "intentional transgression" that institutes a '" Logos' of the cultural world" (S 121/97).

"Le Philosophe et la sociologie," which immediately follows the essay on language in Signes, repeats the same points while adhering more closely to the theme of the lecture course on the human sciences. Husserl's efforts not only to eliminate the segregation of philosophy and science but even to insist on their mutual interdependency are taken as exemplary. Imaginative variation is required to extract the essential import from sociological facts, just as Galileo, in Husserl' s example, instituted the eidetics of the physical object. Again, the discussion presents a developmental view according to which Husserl's analyses gradually point in a direction at variance with his methodological claims: "We know that he began by affirming, and continued to maintain, a rigorous distinction between [philosophy and effective knowledge]. Nevertheless, it seems to us that his idea of a psychophenomenological parallelism ... leads him in truth to the idea of reciprocal envelopment" (S 128/102). The essay is devoted to explicating this progression in Husserl' s thought, making use of almost exactly the same examples and citations that appear in the lecture course and the previous essay, and to examining the implications of the final view for the relation between philosophy and science. The first stage ofHusserl' s thought is once again associated with the call for a pure grammar in the fourth of the Logische Untersuchungen and the critique of Weltanschauung philosophy in "Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft." The concern with history and the speaking subject of language in Husserl's second stage indicate that "[r]eflection is no longer the passage to a different order which reabsorbs the order of present things; it is first and foremost a more acute conscious-

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ness of our rootedness in them" (S 1311105). Stressing the continuity of Husserl's thought, Merleau-Ponty finds the later writings on the Lebenswelt already portended in the treatment of phenomenology as an "experience" in Ideen I:

It is just that the ascending movement was not stressed .... When the recognition of the life-world, and thus too of language as we live it, becomes characteristic of phenomenology (as it does in the last writings), this is only a more resolute way of saying that philosophy does not possess the truth about language and the world from the start, but is rather the recuperation and reformulation of a Logos scattered out in our world and our life and bound to their concrete structures-that "Logos of the aesthetic world" already spoken of in the F ormale und transzendentale Logik. (S 132/105)

To stress the continuity further, Merleau-Ponty argues that, even in "Philo sophie als strenge Wissenschaft," Husserl's analysis indicates an overlapping of the natural and transcendental attitudes, since historical analysis must begin with the "confused intuitions" found within the empirical facts of history. It is only a small step, he suggests, from this admission to Die Krisis's claim that transcendental subjectivity is an intersubjectivity. The culmination ofthis development is again found in the Sinngenesis of the unpublished manuscripts and the limitations of imaginative variation noted in Husserl's letter to Levy-Bruhl.

The remainder of the essay on sociology develops a definition of philosophy as "consciousness of rationality in contingency" (S 1401111) on the basis of the position attributed to the later Husserl-though MerleauPonty is careful to note that Husserl would have resisted this definition, since he continued to view the return to the Lebenswelt as a "preparatory step which should be followed by the properly philosophical task of universal constitution" (S 138-9/110). On Merleau-Ponty's reading, the implication of Husserl' s work is to call into question both the attempt to derive meaning from pure fact, and the correlative relativism that devalues as subjective any knowledge originating within the bounds of a particular cultural situation. "Superficially considered, our inherence destroys all truth; considered radically, it founds a new idea of truth" (S 13711 09). Philosophy's autonomy with respect to science is maintained through its nonobjective disclosure of the social fact as "a variant ofa single life of which ours is also a part" and of every other as "another ourself for us" (S 1411112). At this stage of his career, the guiding motif of Merleau-Ponty's


reading of Husserl is the development of this new idea of truth linking the universal with the particular, the essential with the contingent-an idea of truth that Merleau-Ponty extracts from the spirit, ifnot quite the letter, of Husserl's own phenomenological investigations.

III. Merleau-Ponty at the College de France (1952-1961)

The material on Husserl from Merleau-Ponty' s last years presents particular problems of interpretation, since many of these materials include course notes and writings that had not been polished for publication. Apart from a passing reference in the summary of his 1954-1955 course on "L"Institution' dans 1 'histoire personelle et publique,"66 Merleau-Ponty next discusses Husserl in 1956. Published in this year, Merleau-Ponty's preface to Les Philosophes celebres, a collection of essays on major figures in the history of philosophy, devotes several pages to Husser1.67 1956 also marks the beginning of a series of courses that allot considerable attention to Husserl: "Le Concept du nature, I" (1956-1957),68 "Possibilite de la philosophie" (1958-1959),69 and "Husserl aux limites de la phenomenologie" (1959-

66. This reference is at RC 5911 07.

67. Merleau-Ponty, ed., Les Philosophes celebres (Paris: Lucien Mazenod, 1956). Our citations are from an edited version of Merleau-Ponty's preface reprinted in S 158-2001126-58.

68. Sources that document the material covered in this course include the following: First, Merleau-Ponty's summary ofthe course appears inResumesdecours (RC 91-121/130-55). Second, Xavier Tilliette has published an essay reconstructing notes from the segment of this course that discusses Husserl, cited previously as HNN (see note 39 above). Lastly, a complete set of student notes from the course appears in Merleau-Ponty, La Nature, notes, cours du College de France, ed. Dominique Seglard (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1995), 19-165 [cited hereafter as N). I would like to thank Robert Vallier for making available to me a draft of his translation of the latter work, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press, although the published version has not appeared in time for cross-references to be included.

69. Sources for the material covered in this course include the following: First, a summary ofthe course is included in Resumes de cours (RC 141-56/167-80). Second, Merleau-Ponty's notes for this course appear in Merleau-Ponty, Notes de cours, 1959-1961, ed. Stephanie Menase (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 33-157 [cited hereafter as NC]. Concerning the title ofthis course, see note 82 below.

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1960).70 The sole essay devoted to Husserl during this period, "Le Philosophe et son ombre," appeared in a collection commemorating the centennial anniversary of Husser 1 , s birth in 1959.71 Merleau-Ponty' s reading notes on Aron Gurwitsch's The Field o/Consciousness, probably drafted in 1959-60, include numerous references to Husserl,n and significant references and discussion occur throughout the text and working notes of Merleau-Ponty's final incomplete manuscript, published posthumously as Le Visible et I 'invisible, on which he worked from 1959 to 1961.73

The brief references to Husserl in Merleau-Ponty's preface to Les Philosophes celebres, partially reprinted in Signes as "Partout et nulle part," occur in the sections devoted to "L'Orient et la philosophie" and "Existence et dialectique." The first invokes Husserl's Krisis as an antidote to Hegel's philosophy of history, within which "Oriental" thought is best conceived as

70. Sources for the material covered in this course include the following: First, MerleauPonty's summary ofthis course appears in Resumes de cours (RC 159-701181-91). Second, Merleau-Ponty's notes for this course have been published as Merleau-Ponty, "Notes de cours sur L 'Origine de la geometrie de Husserl," transcribed by Franck Robert, in Notes de cours sur L'Origine de 1a geometrie de Husserl suivi de Recherches sur la phenomenologie de Mer!eau-Ponty, ed. Renaud Barbaras (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998),5-92. An English translation incorporating corrections to the text is forthcoming as Husser! at the Limits of Phenomenology, trans. Leonard Lawlor with Bettina Bergo (Evanston: Northwestern University Press). I would like to thank Professor Lawlor for making a draft of this translation available to me, although the published version has not appeared in time for cross-references to be included.

Some minor references to Husserl also occur in the student notes from Merleau-Ponty's 1959-1960 course, "Le Concept de nature-Nature et logos: Le Corps humain" collected in La Nature (N 263-352). These references are to Husserl' s discussions of "pre-being" (268), Einfiihlung (288), and "rays of the world" (291).

71. "Le Philosophe et son ombre" first appeared in Edmund Husser!, 1859-1959, Phaenomenologica 4 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff), 195-220. We will cite the version collected in Signes (S 201-281159-81).

72. Merleau-Ponty, "Notes de lecture et commentaires sur Theorie du champ de la conscience de Aron Gurwitsch," ed. Stephanie Menase, Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, no. 3 (1997): 321-42; "Reading Notes and Comments on Aron Gurwitsch's The Field of Consciousness," trans. Elizabeth Locey and Ted Toadvine, Husser! Studies 17, no. 3 (2000): 173-93 [cited hereafter as NG, with French preceding English pagination].

73. Le Visible et ['invisible, ed. Claude Lefort (Paris: Gallimard, 1964); The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968) [cited hereafter as VI, with French preceding English pagination].


"a distant approximation of conceptual understanding" and can only be incorporated into "the true development of mind" as "aberrant or atypical thought" (S 172/137). While Husserl' s Krisis also suggests that Chinese and Indian thought be treated as "anthropological specimens,"74 Merleau-Ponty argues that, for Husserl, "all philosophies are' anthropological specimens,' and none has any special rights" (S 173/137). Western thought has a certain priority, but this is not a priority of right; it is due only to the fact that "the West has invented an idea of truth which requires and authorizes it to understand other cultures" (S 173/138). The West's presumption and goal of universality is itself rooted in a particular historicallifeworld-though this contextualization and relativization does not necessarily imply the abandonment or futility of the Western enterprise. To fulfill the intention that defines it, Western thought must comprehend other "lifeworlds," and thereby "bear witness to itself beyond 'anthropological specimens'" (S 173-41138). Western thought retains a certain exemplary status, but can do so only by relativizing its own foundations:

So the idea of philosophy as a "rigorous science"-or as absolute knowledge-does reappear here, but from this point on with a question mark. Husserl said in his last years: "Philosophy as a rigorous science? The dream is all dreamed OUt."75 The philosopher can no longer avail himself of an absolutely radical way of thinking or presumptuously claim for himself intellectual possession of the world and conceptual rigor. His task is still to test himself and all things, but he is never done with it; because from now on he must pursue it through the

74. Merleau-Ponty cites the French translation of the first part of Krisis, "La Crise des sciences europeenes et la phenomenologie transcendantale.-Une Introduction a la philosophie phenomenologique," translated by Edmond Gerrer from the Philosophia version ofthe text (Les Etudes philosophiques 4, no. 2 [April-June, 1949]), 140). This passage occurs in § 6 (Hua VI 14/Crisis, 16). It should be noted that the first Husserliana edition of the Krisis had appeared in 1954.

75. This is the first appearance in Merleau-Ponty's oeuvre of this famous quotation, from Beilage XXVIII in Husserl's Krisis entitled "Bestreitung der wissenschaftlichen Philosophie-Notwendigkeit der Besinnung-die Besinnung historisch-wie bedarf es dar Geschichte?" ("Denial of Scientific Philosophy. Necessity of Reflection. The Reflection [must be] Historical. How is History Required?"). Merleau-Ponty cites the Husserliana version, providing a quotation from the German (Hua VI 508). The English may be found at Crisis, 389. Note David Carr's discussion of the appropriation of this quotation in his "Translator's Introduction" to Crisis, xxxi, n. 21.

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phenomenal field, which no formal a priori assures him mastery of in advance. (S 174/138)

Husserl implicitly develops a philosophy of history according to which the crisis of western reason and the recognition that no absolute boundary can be drawn between philosophy and non-philosophy are linked. In the "Existence et dialectique" section of his preface, Merleau-Ponty makes a more general claim about the concordance of Husserl's thought with the general current of the first half of the Twentieth Century: on the one hand, a reaction against the "narcissism of self-consciousness" in favor of "existence" (S 195/155), and, on the other hand, a demonstration of dialectic at work-Husserl's own reservations notwithstanding-through the very development of the latter's oeuvre (S 1961156).

In the 1956-1957 course on nature,76 the first in a series on this topic, Husserl's thought is placed at the culmination of a historical development (including Kant, Schelling, and Bergson), before Merleau-Ponty turns to the elaboration ofthe idea of nature in modem science. Merleau-Ponty finds in Husserl an oscillation between breaking contact with nature, reducing nature to the status of a noema through a phenomenological reduction ofthe natural attitude, and recognizing a continuity with the natural and pre-reflexive as the foundation for scientific and philosophical thought-a foundation that it would be philosophy's task to explicate, rather than to leave behind. To MerIeau-Ponty, HusserI is increasingly conscious of an identity between these two directions, as evidenced by certain passages from Ideen II that are the focus of this course. But denying that coherent explication ofthis text is possible, MerIeau-Ponty does not claim to follow the letter of Husserl's discussion; rather, the task is to bring to light Husserl's "strabismus," supporting this reading of Ideen II also with the more recent fragment, "Umsturz der Kopernikanischen Lehre ... " (N 104).

Initially Husserl treats nature in terms of the blosse Sachen, as a collection of "objective" things purified of value predicates, that have as their correlate a·purely theoretical subjectivity.77 This conception seems to

76. According to Tilliette's notes, the two sessions devoted to Husser! were held on March 14 and 25, 1957 (HNN 257/162).

77. Starting from this segment ofthe course, Tilliette's notes (HNN) provide excellent crossreferences to the applicable passages from Ideen II, as well as to other relevant passages in both Husser! and Mer!eau-Ponty.


be the inevitable result of the attempt to separate the true from the apparent and is grounded in the very structure of human perception. But the legitimacy of this development is open to question once we see that it is not inevitable, as evidenced by the equally natural personalistic attitude. The naturalistic world refers back to a more primordial universe of experience that provides its foundation. The "reference" to this pre-theoretical, corporeally-given universe is inscribed in the very notion of the "pure thing" adopted by Cartesian thought. Following these references requires a genetic reconstruction of the constitution of the "objective" natural world, considering the role of both the body and others in this constitution. Considering the body, it must first be recognized as an "incarnate subject, the Subjectleib, organ ofthe I can" (HNN 260/164). Experienced as a power rather than as a pure consciousness, the peculiar subjectivity of the body organizes a "transition synthesis" according to which the thing appears "as a moment of the carnal unity of my body" (N 107). The peculiar reflexivity manifest in the example of the two hands touching "realizes a sort of reflection, of cogito" (N 107), but this reflection occupies space and is therefore co-present with things. Finally, the body is a standard or measure, the "zero of orientation" providing the background for perception. By way of its teleological directedness toward optimal form "the idea of a Rechtgrund is established in us, starting from which all knowledge would be formed" (N 108). The very notion of a norm, necessary even for the distinction of true from apparent, thus has its foundation in bodily subjectivity. But my body alone is insufficient for the production of objectivity, since it leaves me within the egocentrism of solitary experience. The corporeal operation of Einjiihlung, understood along the same lines as the two hands touching, originally grasps another sensibility, not another soul or mind, which occurs secondarily. Once my placement within a group of perceivers becomes possible, I am enclosed within the space and time of my body; I become a spatial thing, enclosed in the homogeneous universe of things. Thus, "[t]he blosse Sachen are possible, but as the correlative of an ideal community of embodied subjects, of an intercorporea1ity" (RC 115/150).

While Ideen II emphasizes the subjective side of the reformulation made possible by an "archeology" of the pure thing, the fragment entitled "Umsturz der Kopernikanischen Lehre ... " emphasizes the correlative reconception of the "object" side. In this text, the earth is considered prior to its constitution as one planetary body, in its originary state as ground of all experience-on this side of rest or movement, as the Offenheit that

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provides an "ontological relief' distinct from the "infinity" of science (HNN 264-51166). As Husserl's example of space travel shows, this Boden may enlarge but cannot ultimately split into two.

In responding to the possible objection that the extinction of life on the planet would not affect the factual existence of the earth as a thing, Husserl distinguishes his own project from that of Kant: the founding of physical reality on a more primordial carnal relation appears paradoxical only within a certain conception of subjectivity and of the transcendental (N 111). On the basis of Husserl' s remarks, one may take up as another direction the rehabilitation of nature on the basis of the perceived world.

Thus a philosophy which seemed, more than any other, bent upon understanding natural being as the object and pure correlate of consciousness rediscovers through the very exercise of reflexive rigor a natural stratum in which the spirit is virtually buried in the concordant functioning of bodies at the level of brute being. (Re 116/151)

But Husserl himself resisted moving in this direction. Once the reciprocity between noesis and noema is no longer linear, more complex solutions must be sought, for instance in the distinction between act and operative intentionality. But if, as a result, the explicit activity of constituting consciousness is ultimately prioritized, what is fecund in this analysis is lost in the return to transcendental idealism (HNN 268/168). Husserl himself gives such indications in Ideen II by treating the foregoing analyses as preparatory, requiring a phenomenological explication that avoids the naivete of the natural attitude (N 112). In response, Merleau-Ponty insists that

the task of reflective philosophy is impossible, because it brings with it all that is umeflected. The natural attitude is not false, and through it philosophy begins. Husserl's hesitations only underline the necessity and difficulty a philosophy of nature presents for the school of transcendental idealism. (HNN 268-9/168)

In April of 1957, the month following Merleau-Ponty's presentation of the above lectures, he attended the Third Philosophical Colloquium of


Royaumont dedicated to "UEuvre et la pensee de Husserl."78 Van Breda reports that it was at this conference on Husserl that plans for the Center for Husserl Archives at the Sorbonne were resumed, with Merleau-Ponty playing a leading role and agreeing to be on the center's directorial committee. As a result, over one hundred of Husserl's unpublished manuscripts were sent to Paris a few months later and were made available to researchers in May of 1958 ("Archives," 4261159). At the colloquium on Husserl, Merleau-Ponty's remarks opening the discussion of de Waelhens commentary on Die Idee der Phanomen%gie illuminate his view of the natural attitude and the role of the reduction. According to de Waelhens, on Merleau-Ponty's summarization, "the reduction loses nothing for us, nothing becomes interior, the contact with the world simply becomes indirect discourse ... everything is preserved, nothing is lost, and all goes well" (H 157). In contrast to this "slightly quietist position," for MerleauPonty, "what seems ... to be lasting, interesting, fecund, living even now, are the places where Husserl himself has rightly underlined the tension between the natural attitude and the results of reflection" (H 157). Citing CartesianischeMeditationen from memory,79 he stresses the "difficulty and tension" that necessarily accompanies the passage from "the silence of things" to "philosophical speech" (H 158). The difficulties, for instance owing to the fact that every transcendental reduction is necessarily eidetic, serve to distinguish Husserl from the efforts ofpre-Husserlian transcendental idealism. It is necessary to account for the paradoxical, enigmatic character of the reduction:

It is not simply a question of a difficulty in fact; it is a problem in principle. From whence comes this resistance of the non-reflective to reflection? One cannot simply consider this resistance as an adversity without name; it is the index of an experience that is not the experience of reduced consciousness, that has value and truth in itself and of which it would also therefore be necessary to take account. (H 158)

78. The proceedings from this colIoquium are published as Husser!. Cahiers de Royaumont, Philosophie N° III (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1959) [cited hereafter as H]. MerleauPonty's only intervention occurs on pages 157-9.

79. The passage cited is that referred to in note 36 above.

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For Merleau-Ponty, the limits of the reduction are further emphasized by the development of texts like Ideen II, which begin with long analyses in the natural attitude before turning to a transcendental analysis. The methodological necessity of these introductory analyses signify that transcendental consciousness is "the termination of an historical process of the growth of consciousness. And it is not, consequently, a position in which one can find a solution properly speaking" (H 159).

These remarks are amplified by the discussion of Husserl in the only published essay devoted to him by Merleau-Ponty during this period, "Le Philosophe et son ombre," which appeared in 1959. It has also been noted that certain passages from this essay closely parallel the lecture course from 1957.80 Here, as elsewhere, Merleau-Ponty prefaces his remarks by differentiating them from either "objective" reporting or arbitrary interpretation: "there must be a middle-ground on which the philosopher we are speaking about and the philosopher who is speaking are present together, although it is not possible even in principle to decide at any given moment just what belongs to each" (S 202/159). The dilemma is a false one, since thoughts are not objects to be revealed, but rather the occasion for new thinking-especially for thinking the "unthought-of element" that, in Husserl, "is wholly his, and yet opens out on something else" (S 202/160). Faithfulness to Husserl' s thought, therefore, does not entail repetition of things said, but rather a new thinking of "certain articulations between things said" (S 202/160). Here Merleau-Ponty focuses on three areas in which Husserl' s "unthought" becomes manifest, devoting a section of the essay to each: the phenomenological reduction, the body and intersubjectivity, and constitution.

Merleau-Ponty again asserts that the problems of the reduction become coextensive with phenomenology, for Husserl, since the very meaning of the philosopher's task is the location of obstacles, the disclosure of problems and paradoxes. Through the phenomenological reduction, Merleau-Ponty maintains, Husserl rejoins the Hegelian notion of an identity between leaving oneself and retiring into oneself. This inverse movement characterizes the reflection that denies itself in principle the means to attain its goal, i.e. the capture of the unreflective as such, while at the same time is cognizant that this goal must in some sense already have been reached in

80. Tilliette notes thatthe "correspondence [is] sometimes literal" (HNN 258/163), and this similarity is also noted by the editor of La Nature (N 104 n. 1).


order to have been posited as a goal. Husserl's contradictory fonnulations of the reduction are not accidental, as is seen in the case of the relationship with the natural attitude. On the one hand, reduced consciousness concerns the "opposite of nature," since for it nature "becomes once more the noema it has always been" (S 2041162); on the other hand, the natural world is maintained, including its very sense as transcendent. After the time of Ideen II, on Merleau-Ponty's interpretation, the reduction must cut deeper than the segregation of subject and object typical of the naturalistic attitude, returning to a "third dimension" that founds the theoretical attitude-both for naturalistic thought and, mutatis mutandis, transcendental idealism. The "natural attitude," as distinct from the theoretical attitude of naturalism, is "prior to any thesis," the "primordial faith" that gives us "not a representation of the world but the world itself' (S 2071163). There is no passing beyond this realm of existence in favor of reflection, since "its rights of priority are definitive, and reduced consciousness must take them into account" (S 2071164). But, returning to the Hegelian fonnulation to complicate the relationship further, Merleau-Ponty suggests that the relationship between the natural and reduced attitudes is not sequential but reciprocal:

There is a preparation for phenomenology in the natural attitude. It is the natural attitude which, by reiterating its own procedures, seesaws in phenomenology. It is the natural attitude itself which goes beyond itself in phenomenology-and so it does not go beyond itself. Reciprocally, the transcendental attitude is still and in spite of everything "natural" (naturlich). (S 207/164)

This "archeology" of the natural attitude has ontological implications that require a revision of the basic phenomenological concepts, e.g., noesis, noema, and intentionality. But Husserl' s own remarks provide no more than hints in this direction, invitations to think the unthought, e.g., the notion of "pre-theoretical constitution" and operative intentionality, both of which aim at those "pre-givens" about which one might say that "consciousness is always behind or ahead of them, never contemporaneous" (S 208-91165).

In the interest of examining such "pre-givens," Merleau-Ponty turns his attention toward the body, intersubjective relations, and the sensible world, drawing extensively on Ideen II, but also on Ideen III. From the latter he cites again Husserl's example of the locomotive, as a contrast with the body's "I can" and its role as standard or measure. As a power in the visible world, the body "is a thing, but a thing I dwell in. It is, if you wish, on the

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side of the subject; but it is not a stranger to the locality of things" (S 210/166). The "sort of reflection" accomplished by one hand touching another is indicative of the body's role as a "perceiving thing," a "subjectobject" (S 210/166). This blurring of the distinction between subject and object in my body leads to an "ontological rehabilitation of the sensible," since a correlative blurring must occur in the thing-and, Merleau-Ponty notes, between noesis and noema (S 210-111167). It is in this context that Merleau-Ponty introduces his famous technical term for this new ontological medium, suggesting that Husserl' s "in the flesh" [leibhaft] be taken literally to signify "the flesh of the sensible" (S 2111167). In this milieu, "intentionality" can be relegated neither to "the mind's grasping of an aspect of sensible matter as the exemplification of an essence" nor to a teleology of nature "which works in us without us" (S 211/167).

Between this "solipsistic" world and the constitution of the thing in itself lies the constitution of others, modeled on the "sort of reflection" found in the body itself. Prior to my perception of the other as another man, he appears in my world as another sensibility:

The reason why I have evidence of the other man's being-there [etre-fa] when I shake his hand is that his hand is substituted for my left hand, and my body annexes the body of another person in that "sort of reflection" which it is paradoxically the seat of. My two hands "coexist" or are "compresent" because they are one single body's hands. The other person appears through an extension of that compresence; he and I are like organs of one single intercorporeality. (S 212/168)

The objection that this compresence of sensibilities does not yet produce another mind is not to the point for three reasons: first, the other's mind is never given to me in the same sense as my own; second, the constituting "agent" is as yet not itself a mind; and, most importantly, the constitution at issue here is not "of a mind for a mind, but of a man for a man," and therefore grants to the other all the possibilities of my own incarnate sensibility (S 213/169). Theories of analogy and introjection, by operating on the level of thought, presuppose the certainty of the other's appearance that they seek to explain. At the level of sensibility, "my perceptual opening to the world . . . claims no monopoly of being and institutes no death struggle of consciousnesses" (S 215/170), since "[ w ]hen a comportement is sketched out in this world which already goes beyond me, this is only one more dimension in primordial being, which comprises them all" (S


2151170). Like the problem of incarnation, that of Einfiihlung returns us to the "meditation of the sensible" and demonstrates the "dual direction" of Hussed's thought. The analysis of essences cannot ignore an "analytics of essences," since "it is from the 'fundamental and original presence' of sensible being that the obviousness and universality which are conveyed by these relationships of essences come" (S 2161171). Even absolute mind, if we are to have any recognition of it, requires corporeal incarnation. Incarnation and intercorporeality are therefore examples of Hussed's disclosure of "brute being" (S 217/172).

These analyses call for a new notion of constitution, one that resembles the Fundierung relationship Hussed applied in other connections:

The pre-objective order is not primary, since it is established (and to tell the truth fully begins to exist) only by being fulfilled in the founding oflogical objectivity. Yet logical objectivity is not self-sufficient; it is limited to consecrating the labors of the pre-objective layer, existing only as the outcome of the "Logos of the esthetic world" and having value only under its supervision. (S 218/173)

The motor of this ,tdialectical" constitution is Selbstvergessenheit, the selfforgetfulness of carnal intersubjectivity that makes logical objectivity possible, and that reappears at each level of constitution-from body to thing, self to other, and solipsist thing to blosse Sachen. The "primacy" of the founding term, e.g., solus ipse or "solipsist" thing, cannot truly be primary in either the genetic or the logical sense, since neither term can be isolated de Jacto or de jure. The solus ipse is no more than a thoughtexperiment, a fiction, since no ego exists at the level of intercorporeity:

The "layer" or "sphere" which is called solipsist is without ego and without ipse. The solitude from which we emerge to intersubjective life is not that of the monad. It is only the haze of an anonymous life that separates us from being; and the barrier between us and others is impalpable. If there is a break, it is not between me and the other person; it is between a primordial generality we are intermingled in and the precise system, myself-the others. (S 2201174)

To reinstate pronouns in describing such a "solipsism," e.g., by insisting that it is still my pre-personal life which is in question, is to fall prey to a retrospective interpretation of the pre-objective in terms of categories foreign to it. The "primordial 'we' [On]" that continues to undergird "the

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greatest passions of our adult life," has its own authenticity that can only be brought to light through a complication of the constitutional structure.

Priority, genetic or logical, must henceforth be replaced by "simultaneity," not only of self and other, but equally of body and nature. The "originary" and its "modification" are given together, incompossible but compresent "variations" based in carnal existence. The relation between "layers" of constitution is neither continuous nor discontinuous, following rather a Hegelian model of internalization: "From its position, each layer takes up the preceding ones again and encroaches upon those that follow; each is prior and posterior to the others, and thus to itself' (S 2221176). Such an expanded view of constitution need not trouble Husserl, Merleau-Ponty suggests, if we follow certain indications that "experience," rather than thought, counts as the ultimate court of appeal, since "experience" names a transcendental field broad enough to encompass both thought and nature.

Following Husserl's impense leads Merleau-Ponty, by this path, to reinterpret phenomenology's ultimate task. The "phenomenology of phenomenology," rather than a propaedeutic to concrete analysis, becomes the philosopher's central office, since only such a phenomenology discloses the relationship with non-phenomenology, the "barbarous" source that resists phenomenological analysis (S 2251178). The reduction to a transcendental ego, however necessary as a stage of thought, must be recognized as a philosophical stage persona with which the concrete human being that the philosopher ultimately knows herself to be has never managed to truly coincide. A true "phenomenology of phenomenology" is just as much a phenomenology of non-phenomenology, of that "which responds to our reconstitution from (if these words have a meaning) the other side of things" (S 226/179).81 It is "the means of unveiling a back side of things that we have not constituted" (S 2271180). But this tum toward that which resists constitutive analysis, on Merleau-Ponty's view, is not a return to prephenomenological naivete: "This senseless effort to submit everything to the properties of 'consciousness' ... was necessary-the picture of a wellbehaved world left to us by classical philosophy had to be pushed to the

81. This reversibility or bi-directionality of intentionality is also explicitly linked with a Hegelian interpretation of Husser/'s thought in Merleau-Ponty's 1960-61 course, "Philosophie et non-philosophie depuis Hegel" (NC 298); "Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel," trans. Hugh Silverman, in Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since MerleauPonty (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997),32-3.


limit-in order to reveal all that was left over" (S 227/180). An analysis of what resists phenomenology reveals, by contrast with the docile being of classical philosophy, a "savage" world and mind, e.g., the Earth ofHusserl 's "Umsturz ... " and that "brute mind which, untamed by any culture, is asked to create culture anew" (S 228/181).

The redefinition of phenomenology as an interrogation of its own possibility and limits becomes increasingly central to Merleau-Ponty's interpretation of Husserl. The 1958-1959 course at the College de France, originally announced as a continuation of the previous two courses on nature, was instead devoted to an examination of the state of contemporary philosophy.82 After a brief canvassing of the age of non-philosophy following Hegel,83 Merleau-Ponty turns to Husserl and Heidegger as two examples of philosophy defined "as the interrogation of its very own meaning and possibility" (RC 1471172). Even in Husserl' s early philosophy, essences are considered "as they are experienced by us, as they emerge from our intentional life" (RC 1491173), and this grounding in our experience should have been the guiding motif of the reduction and phenomenological idealism of his middle period.

But, under closer examination, the reduction appears paradoxical: First, the analyses of Ideen II, as we have just seen from the course on nature, attempt a return to constituting consciousness even after disclosing the

82. The topic for the course was changed to allow Merleau-Ponty more time to work on the manuscript of Le Visible et I 'invisible, cf. the translator's note in Resumes de cours (RC 167 n. 2). The original topic for the course was announced as "Symbolism and the Human Body," and was presumably retitled "Nature and Logos: The Human Body" when taught the following year. Since the resulting course had no official title, Claude Lefort entitled it "Possibilite de la philosophie" in the French edition of Resumes de cours, while it is entitled "Philosophy as Interrogation" in the English translation. The editor of Notes de cours, 1959-1961 indudesMerieau-Ponty's own notes for the course under the title "LaPhilosophie aujourd'hui" (NC 33).

83. While the summary ofthis section ofthe course that appears in Resumes de cours focuses mainly on Nietzsche and Marx, Merleau-Ponty's own notes devote significantly more coverage to the arts (literature, painting, and music), as well as to the study of nature, technology, and psychoanalysis.

It should also be mentioned that my summary of this course in particular does little justice to Merleau-Ponty's own extensive notes, due to their quantity and detail, as well as to their often fragmentary and incomplete character. Especially noteworthy are Merleau-Ponty's many references to the supplementary Krisis materials, induding a translation of and commentary on Beilage XXIII. See NC 66-91 and 379-89.

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"brute" relation with things and others as the pre-reflective order that founds theorizing consciousness. Second, the discussion of intersubjectivity in Cartesianische Meditationen requires that the reduction be treated "less of a method defined once and for all than the index of a multitude of problems" (Re 1501174). The philosopher, in speaking of the consciousness and the intentionality in general, makes implicit reference to an "intersubjective universe" with respect to which he remains in naive faith. But the attempt to articulate the constitution of this other from the standpoint oftranscendental consciousness runs aground, since such an approach "would be tantamount to constituting the other person as constituting, and, through him, to reduce myself to the status of the one constituted" (Re 1501175). Furthermore, can the distinction between the transcendental and mundane ego be drawn in his case by me or in my case by him? On Merleau-Ponty' s reading, the Cartesianische Meditationen attempts to hold onto both horns of the dilemma:

there is an indeclinable subjectivity, an insurmountable solipsism-and yet, for this very subjectivity, there is an intentional "transgression" or "encroachment" which enables everything it knows of itself to pass into the other person. (RC 151/175)

But the recourse to "levels" or "stages" of constitution to resolve these problems reaches a head in Husserl's Krisis, demanding a "fresh mutation in the doctrine of the reduction" by which the initial phase of reduction becomes coextensive with phenomenology itself (Re 1511175). Phenomenology's task is redefined once its primary theme becomes the return to the Lebenswelt as the primordial being that, from the beginning, serves as the ultimate source. The former antinomies cease to be insurmountable:

the inherence of the selfto the world or of the world to the self, of the self to the other and of the other to the self, what Husserl calls the Ineinander, is silently inscribed in an all-embracing experience which composes these incompossibles, and philosophy becomes the enterprise of describing, beyond the logic and vocabulary at hand, the universe of living paradoxes. The reduction is no longer a return to ideal being, but brings us back to the soul of Heraclitus, to an interweaving of horizons, to an open Being. (RC 152/176)

With this revaluation of the Lebenswelt and the psyche, the transcendental is no longer conceived as "consciousness constituting everything, -it is just


as well the converse: everything comes to consciousness in man; man as microcosm" (NC 89).

This course, listed for 1958-59, actually began in January of 1959, and was the only course taught by Merleau-Ponty during this year.84 Van Breda reports having received a letter from Merleau-Ponty dated February 15 of that year asking "whether, in the unpublishedForschungsmanuskripte, there are other texts on the Lebenswelt as the basis [soutien] of historicity; on the Lebenswelt insofar as it receives the Gebilde of culture and even of philosophy, as soon as they become 'sedimented'; and on language" ("Archives," 427 n. 11182 n. 38). Van Breda's response indicated that the relevant manuscripts85 should be available in the Paris holdings. In a letter of June 14, 1959, Merleau-Ponty reported plans for a course to begin in January 1960:

I envisage for January a seminar devoted to interpretation and commentary upon the texts of Husserl's late philosophy. Naturally, I think the public would be particularly responsive to unpublished manuscripts (I would, moreover, have recourse to the Krisis, of which I have translated and interpreted several fragments this year. ("Archives," 427/159)

Further, Merleau-Ponty requested copies of a number of transcripts that were not available in Paris at that time.86 Although these manuscripts were in the process of being transferred to microfilm, they were not available until the end of 1960.87

84. See the editor's note preceding this course at NC 31.

85. Van Breda recommended A V, A VlI, E III, and K lII. See "Archives," 427 n. 11182 n. 38.

86. These manuscripts, from the A V, A VlI, and K III groups, are individually identified by Van Breda, who also speculates on the manuscripts Merlcau-Ponty may have consulted in Paris at this time. See "Archives," 428-911 60.

87. As Van Breda notes, they were not prepared in time for Merleau-Ponty's 1959-1960 course, entitled "Husserl aux Iimites de la phCnomenologie" (see pp. 280 ff. below).

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Merleau-Ponty's recently published reading notes on Aron Gurwitsch's The Field of Consciousness,88 probably written in the spring of 1959,89 reveal a growing dissatisfaction with the eidetic method, identified by Merleau-Ponty here as the source of Husserl's intellectualism. Whereas, under Fink's influence, Merleau-Ponty had insisted earlier on the distinction between the Husserlian and Kantian versions of transcendental idealism, his reading of Gurwitsch convinces him that both approaches fall prey to a similar strain of intellectualism:90 the infinite process of the Idea in the Kantian sense functions as a counter-abstraction to the perceived thing qua open inexhaustibility. These correlative abstractions reinstate the dualism of subjectivism and objectivism they sought to overcome, e.g., in Husserls' distinction of the noema from the existent thing, and in the positivism of consciousness at work in the eidetic method. Associating Gurwitsch's own phenomenological approach with these intellectualist aspects ofHusserl's thought, Merleau-Ponty identifies those motifs of Husserl's thinking, particularly in Erfahrung und Urteil, that undercut this intellectualist tendency: the leibhaft of the essence, passive synthesis, the "constitution" oftime, the Lebenswelt, and especially the notion of "horizon." It is absurd, Merleau-Ponty insists "to want to analyze a horizon in terms of noesis and noema, consciousness of ... and object. ... The horizon is to my here and now what my birth or my death is to my life: it is the total being where differentiation arises and dedifferentiation falls back-Take seriously this idea that the world is around me, not in front of me " (NG 332-3/182). Even the notion of a "correlation" between noesis and noema must be rejected, since "[b ]efore the 'correlation' disclosed by the eidetic consciousness, there is ... an inherence which founds it, and which is the belonging of the two series to Being" (NG 334/183). The ultimate level of ontological analysis, therefore, cannot be elucidated with the help of eidetic analysis, since doing so would reverse the order of priority:

88. Gurwitsch, The Field o/Consciousness (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1964); Theorie du champ de la conscience, trans. M. Butor (Bruges: Desc1ee de Brouwer, 1957). The English original ofthis work, completed in 1953, was published after the French translation.

89. Concerning the date of Merleau-Ponty's reading of and commentary on Gurwitsch, see the editor's introduction to NG 325-6/176-7.

90. In this respect, these notes lay the groundwork for Merleau-Ponty's criticisms of transcendental philosophy in the "Interrogation et intuition" chapter of Le Visible et I'invisible, drafted in the fall of 1960.


This world as Being, the experience and the In der Welt Sein as foundation of the idealization "world," is the Lebenswelt, which thus is not constituted, which is the source of the eidos world. The question: does phenomenology entail the reversal from what is primary for us (Lebenswelt) to what is primary in itself (in the essences, namely: the constitution of the sense "world")? This would be the very negation of phenomenology. There is no sense in constituting the Lebenswelt: it is to destroy it. (NG 338/186)

Merleau-Ponty's notes close by contrasting the "purity" of consciousness central to Ideen I with the "undivided coexistence of all" and "inherence to being" revealed in Ideen II (NG 341-21189).

Meanwhile, during the spring of1959, Merleau-Ponty began work on the manuscript that would eventually be published as Le Visible et I'invisible. Based on the manuscript dates reported by Claude Lefort, the first two published chapters were begun in March and completed in the summer of 1959. Husserl's name hardly appears in this portion of the main text,91 although he is discussed extensively in working notes dated throughout 1959 and 1960. The first of the published working notes, penned in January of 1959, indicates Merleau-Ponty's intentions to "draw up a picture of wild being" by "prolonging the analyses" from "Le Philosophe et son ombre" (VI 2191165). In February, Merleau-Ponty writes:

My whole fIrst part to be conceived in a very direct, contemporary manner, like the Krisis ofHusserl: show our non-philosophy, then seek its origin in a historical Selbstbessinung and in a Selbstbessinung on our culture which is science: in it will be sought the Winke. (VI 237/183)

Other working notes from the first half of 1959 discuss Husserl' s notion of the "soul" or "spiritual" side of human bodies (VI 221-2/168), distinguish the later reduction from transcendental immanence (VI 233/170) and

91. References to HusserI in the portion completed in 1959 can be found at VI 65/41 (the discovery of an illusion as the "crossing out" of one reality in favor of another), 70/45 (every transcendental reduction is an eidetic reduction), and 74 nl49 n, a long and interesting marginal note calling for a paragraph on "reflection as HusserI understands it" that is "not installed in an active constituting agent."

In keeping with the goal for the present essay, we will not consider the many uses of Husserlian terminology and discussions of HusserIian themes in Le Visible et I'invisible in which HusserI's name is not explicitly mentioned, although these undoubtedly have implications for MerIeau-Ponty's interpretation of the phenomenologist.

280 TED TOAD VINE

Offenheit from the "human representation" of Kant and Descartes (VI 238-9/185), and examine Husserl's writings on the constitution oftime (VI 244-9/190-6).92

Although the working notes run throughout 1959 and 1960, MerleauPonty did not begin work again on the main text (the last two published chapters) until fall of 1960. His course entitled "Husserl aux limites de la phenomenologie" was held during the interim, in the spring of 1960.93 After a methodological discussion parallel to that which prefaces "Le Philosophe et son ombre," Merleau-Ponty's course involved a translation of and commentary on two texts: "Ursprung der Geometrie,"94 and "Umsturz der Kopemikanischen Lehre ... ".95 In his commentary on the first, MerleauPonty identifies the "common source" of ideality and historicity in "a third dimension," that of "history in depth or of ideality in genesis" (Re 1831161). "The development, the Beweglichkeit of geometry only coincides with its ideal sense for the reason that the latter is the perception of a field, a beginning or an opening which requires an endless production and reproduction" (Re 1621184). Ideality rests upon acts, yet is linked through them to a sedimented past and future possibilities.

But this "reverberation of the past and this prepossession [Vorhabe] of a future ofthought in the present thought" (Re 1631185) requires explanation: what mediation is possible between the spatio-temporal event within a

92. These analyses are returned to in January, 1960 (VI 2841231), and in April, 1960 (VI 297-8/243-4).

93. For the textual materials now available for this course, see note 70 above.

94. This text was included as an appendix in Krisis (as Beilage III in Hua VI, 365-86; Crisis, 353-78). When commenting on this text in a working note to Le Visible et I'invisible, Merleau-Ponty refers to it as "Text of Ursprung given by Fink, which was not taken up by Louvain" (VI 288/235). This might be a reference either to differences between the Husserliana version and Fink's version (cf. notes 22 and 65 above), or to the fact that the appendix was not included in the main text of Krisis (cf. David Carr's translator's note, Crisis, 353 n. 1).

95. Merleau-Ponty lists this work as unpublished and indicates that he had received a copy from Aron Gurwitsch in 1939 (See RC 168 n. 3/189 n. 6). This might imply that MerleauPonty was unaware that the text had been published in 1940 (see citation in note 26 above). However, the 1940 publication information for the first part of this text appears in a bibliographical listing for Merleau-Ponty's 1958-59 course as initially advertised. See NC 400.


particular psyche and the constitution of an ideal being? Language is the first requirement: "A signification leaves its 'place in consciousness' when it has been said" (Re 164/185). But language only makes significations available to all in the way it makes worldly things "public," and the ideality of geometry is not such an object-not even an "objective," i.e., universally recognized, one. Therefore, language alone is insufficient for the constitution of ideality. But more is to be said, MerIeau-Ponty notes, concerning the power of speech: just as my own thoughts "encroach" on one another to make memory of the "same" object possible, communication between consciousnesses is made possible by an "encroachment" or co-production. While ideal being is clearly autonomous with respect to actual speech, it is not thereby outside of speech; rather, it "obliges us to introduce an essential mutation in speech, namely, the appearance of writing" (Re 1661187). Yet while writing "sublimates the solidity of things" to evoke a "total speech," it also introduces the possibility of petrified meaning cut off from any possibility of reactivation (Re 1661187-8): "The sedimentation which makes it possible for us to go further is also responsible for us being threatened by hollow thoughts and for the sense of origins becoming void" (Re 1671188). In extending the analysis further, Merleau-Ponty has recourse to Fink's indications concerning HusserI's later period:96

Passivity and activity, the spontaneous "I" and sensible time, cannot remain mutually external since I function as thinker identical through time and intersubjectivity is also in play. There is thus a sort of "simultaneity" of the one and the other, an Urgegenwart which has no locus between the before and after, an Ur-Ich anterior to the plurality of monads which cannot be said to be singular either, because it precedes both unity and plurality-true "negativity," "diremption," a being prior to the distinction between essence and existence. (RC 167/188)

Yet, MerIeau-Ponty cautions, for HusserI "this speculative vocabulary was only an aid to description, a means of outlining the operation of the transcendental life which he always sought to catch in the act, analytically" (Re 1681189).

96. Fink, "Die Spatphilosophie HusserI in der Freiburger Zeit," in Edmund Husserl, 1859-1959,99-115. MerIeau-Ponty's "Le Philosophe et son ombre" first appeared in this same volume.

282 TED TOADVINE

Merleau-Ponty notes a continuity between the notions of "openness" and "horizon" introduced in the examination of ideal being and the discussion of "base" or "ground" in "Umsturz der kopernikanischen Lehre." The Earth and the body are both Bodens, on this side of both space and movement. The crisis of sciences of the infinite, which follow the Copernican constitution of the world and all terrestrial bodies as pure objects, calls for the recognition of "implantation" as a legitimate mode of being. This more originary mode of being

envelops a view of space and temporality, a view of natural causation, of our "territory." It envelops an Urhistorie which binds all existing or possible societies insofar as they all inhabit the same "earthly" space, in the broadest sense, and [mally it contains a philosophy of the world as Offenheit der Umwelt, in opposition to the "represented" infmite of the classical sciences of nature. (RC 1701190-1)

Merleau-Ponty's working notes from Le Visible et I'invisible that run concurrently with this course give an indication of his immersion in the manuscripts archived at the Sorbonne. He discusses Husserl' s "Die Welt der lebendigen Gegenwart ... " in December of 1959 (VI 2781224),97 and in January comments on "Universal Teleology"98 and other "unpublished texts at the Sorbonne" dealing with the "unicity of the world, like of God" (VI 281-21228).99 In a note from February of 1960 entitled "Husserl: the Entwirken of Thought and historicity/' Vertical' conception of Thought," Merleau-Ponty registers disapproval of certain themes from "Ursprung der Geometrie":

97. Husserl, "Die Welt der lebendigen Gegenwart und die Konstitution der ausserleiblichen Umwelt," ed. Alfred Schutz, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 6, no. 3 (March 1946): 323--43; "The World of the Living Present and the Constitution of the Surrounding World External to the Organism," trans. Frederick Elliston and Lenore Langsdorf, in Husser!: Shorter Works, 238-50.

98. Cf. VI 279-81/226-7. Merleau-Ponty refers to "the unpublished text on teleology and the phenomenological absolute," which most likely refers to manuscript E III 5. This manuscript was published as an appendix to Enzo Paci, Tempo e verita nellafenomenologia di Husserl (Bari, 1961), 256-69; "Universal Teleology," trans. Marly Biemel, in Husserl: Shorter Works,335-7.

99. Claude Lefort suggests in an editor's note that this reference is to manuscript E III 4 (1930).

MERLEAU-PONTY'sREADING OF HUSSERL 283

the consciousness I have of producing my thoughts, my significations, is identical with my consciousness of their "human" origin ... I rejoin man precisely in my absolute non-being ... .

I don't like that ... it presupposes an activity-passivity split which Husser! himself knows does not exist since there is a secondary passivity, since every Vollzug is a Nachvollzug (even the first: language and its reference to a Vollzug before every Vollzug), since sedimentation is the sole mode of being of ideality-- ...

But what is fme is the idea of taking literally the Erwirken of thought: it is really empty, is of the invisible . ... (VI 288-9/235)

In this same month, another working note contrasts the foundational status of representational acts in Logische Untersuchungen with the view presented in the unpublished manuscripts, e.g., "Universal Teleology," in which "sexual instinct is presented 'from the transcendental point of view"':

Does that not mean that non-representational "acts" (?) have an ontological function? But how could they, with the same rights as cognition, since they do not give "objects" and are fungierende rather than acts? (like time) In fact, the solution of the L.U. is provisional, bound to the omnipotence of the eidetic method, that is, of reflexivity--It corresponds to a period when Husser! calmly distinguishes the reflected and the unreflected .... If one remained with that, the intervention of "non-objectifying acts," their ontological function would be purely and simply the overthrow of the consciousness, irrationalism. (VI 291-21238)

Other brief references during the time period of the course include a reference to "L'Esprit collectif' (VI 296/242)100 and to "Umsturz der kopemikanischen Lehre" (VI 3121259).101 The final working note on Husserl, dating from November, 1960, corresponds to the time period when he resumed work on the manuscript. Here, in criticism ofHusserl' s Ideen II, Merleau-Ponty writes:

In Ideen II, Husser!, "disentangle" "unravel" what is entangled

100. According to Lefort's note (VI 296 nl242 n. 74), this text is a manuscript appearing in Cahiers internationaux de soci%gie, 27 (July-Dec., 1959).

101. Passing references not discussed here occur at VI 289/236, 293/239, and 293-5/240-1.

284 TED TOADVINE

The idea of chiasm and Ineinander is on the contrary the idea that every analysis that disentangles renders unintelligible- -This bound to the very meaning of questioning which is not to call for a response in the indicative- - (VI 321-2/268)

These critical remarks help to gauge the extent to which Merleau-Ponty saw his ultimate philosophical direction diverging from the sympathetic reading of Husserl adopted up to this point.

Merleau-Ponty began work again on the body of the text for Le Visible et I 'invisible in October, 1960, when he wrote the first draft of Chapter Three, "Interrogation et intuition."lo2 The second draft, included in the published text, was started in November. Husserl is only mentioned in passing in this chapter, including a few lines on Wesenschau and eidetic variation as methodological means of passing beyond the fact/essence distinction (VI 155-61116). The second reference concerns the fact that perceptions can only be shown false by being replaced by other perceptions (VI 1701128), a point on which Husserl had been quoted earlier in the text (VI 65/41-2) and is cited again in the following chapter (VI 1841140). The last chapter of the main text, "L'Entrelacs-Le Chiasme" approvingly cites the notion of "horizon" in Husserl, no doubt with the reading of "Umsturz der kopernikanischen Lehre" in mind (VI 1951148). And Merleau-Ponty is led to close both chapters by returning once again to the guiding vision he had borrowed from his philosophical mentor. "Interrogation et Intuition" closes with Merleau-Ponty's last return to the quote from Cartesianische Meditationen that had guided so many of his reflections: "It is the experience . . . still mute which we are concerned with leading to the pure expression of its own meaning."lo3

One of Merleau-Ponty's last interviews, appearing in the December 31, 1960, issue of Le Monde,104 underscores the continuity of his interest in Husserl and demonstrates how the notion of "flesh" extends this earlier

102. This first draft is now available as an appendix to Notes de cours, 1959-1961 (NC 355-78).

103. See note 36 above.

104. Jean-Paul Weber, "Un Entretien avec Maurice Merleau-Ponty. La Philo sophie et la politique sont solidaires," Le Monde (December 31, 1960) [cited hereafter as "Entretien"]'


interest. Asked how his latest book, Signes, relates to his work as a whole, Merleau-Ponty responds in these words:

My investigations of perception [in my doctoral theses] connected me with a philosophical movement known as phenomenology. Started by the German HusserI, this movement tries to describe the worId, others, and ourselves such as we live them, or rather, such as they offer themselves to a universal consciousness: thus to each act of consciousness necessarily corresponds an object of consciousness distinct from it. I have been influenced by HusserI' s ideas for quite a long time. ("Entretien")

The interviewer continues by asking Merleau-Ponty when he broke with this philosophy. His response is illuminating and worth quoting at length:

- Oh! It started from the beginning. (For that matter, is it a break? HusserI changed a lot ... ). I have always been struck by the fact that, when dealing with the body, HusserI no longer speaks the same language. One cannot study the body as one studies any other object in the worId. The body is at once visible and viewing [voyant]. Here there is no longer a duality but an indissoluble unity. It is the same body that is seen and that sees. I have wished to start with this.

-Thus, a philosophy of the body?

-No philosophy can avoid a description of the body. But one cannot cut the body into two, saying "Here is thought," consciousness; there is matter, "the object." There is a profound circularity in the body. This is what I call: theflesh. From that point, the world, where these bodies are lodged, takes on another sense.

-These are the new views that you develop in your book?

-Yes and no. I am currently working on a book on Le Visible et I 'invisible. The frrstvolume will examine "mute being" and the second volume "speaking being." Signes offers many preliminary glimpses of it. ("Entretien")

On the closing page of "L'Entrelacs-Le Chiasme," in the last lines Merleau-Ponty composed of Le Visible et I 'invisible, he once again emphasizes this continuity of his thought with that ofHusserl, whom he had first heard speak in Paris over thirty years before:

In a sense, the whole of philosophy, as HusserI says, consists in restoring a power to signify, a birth of meaning, or a wild meaning, an expression of experience by

286 TED TOAD VINE

experience, which in particular clarifies the special domain of language. And in a sense, as Valery said, language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of the things, the waves, and the forests. And what we have to understand is that there is no dialectical reversal from one of these views to the other; we do not have to reassemble them into a synthesis; they are two aspects of the reversibility which is the ultimate truth. (VI 203--4/155)

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

ELIZABETH A. BEHNKE is Coordinator and Senior Research Fellow of the Study Project in Phenomenology of the Body, now located in Ferndale, Washington. She has published in the areas of phenomenology of the body; music and the arts; and interspecies phenomenology. Her current research is focused on descriptive phenomenological research in the HusserIian tradition, on the themes of transcendental (inter )corporeality and kinesthetic consciousness, and on the concrete application of phenomenological research in transformative somatic practices.

RONALD BRUZINA, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, has been concentrating on the fuller aspects of phenomenology in Edmund HusserI's final years, 1928-1938, by linking HusserI's late manuscripts with Eugen Fink's complete research notes from that period. The two largest projects of this effort are: Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink, Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology, 1928-1938 (in process at Yale University Press); and Die letzte phiinomenologische Werkstaat Freiburg: Eugen Finks Mitarbeit bei Edmund Husserl, Manuskripte und Dokumente, 4 Vols., in process at Alber VerIag.

MAURO CARBONE received his Ph.D. at the Catholic University of Louvain with a dissertation awarded by the Royal Academy of Belgium. He now teaches Aesthetics at the State University of Milan (Italy). He is the author of Ai confini dell'esprimibile (Milan: Guerini, 1990), II sensibile e l'eccedente (Milan: Guerini, 1996), Di alcuni motivi in Marcel Proust (Milan: Cortina, 1998), and La Visibilite de I 'invisible. Merleau-Ponty entre Cezanne et Proust (Hildesheim: Olms, 2001). His publications about MerIeau-Ponty include also the new Italian edition of Le Visible et I 'invisible, the Italian translations and editions of Resumes de cours and of Philosophie et non-philosophie depuis Hegel, and the Italian edition of La Nature. He is a member of the Board of Directors ofthejoumal Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies concerning Merleau-Ponty 's Thought.

NATALIE DEPRAZ is Maitre de Conferences at the Universite de Paris VI (Sorbonne), Directrice de Programme at the College Internationale de Philosophie (Paris), and Chercheur associe at the Archives-HusserI (Ulm ENS, Paris). Her major publications include Transcendence et incarnation. Le Statut de l'intersubjectivite comme alterite a soi chez Husserl (Vrin, 1995), Luddite du corps. De I 'empirisme transcendental en phenomenologie

288 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

(Kluwer, 2001), and On Becoming Aware. Steps towards an experiential pragmatics, in collaboration with F. J. Varela and P. Vermersch (Benj amin Press, 2001). Her current interests include re-conceiving the phenomenology of the lived body through an investigation of 1) the Eastern Church's theology of the heart-prayer, 2) the Rain-body problematic in Tibetan Buddhism, and 3) the recent developments in neurobiology and cognitive psychology concerning the emergence of consciousness from its neural and empirical psychic bases.

LESTER EMBREE is William F. Dietrich Eminent Scholar in Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University and President of the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc. He received his Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research in 1972, and has written, translated, and edited books and essays chiefly in constitutive phenomenology. His current interests are in the history and philosophy of science (cultural sciences specifically, archeology in particular), technology, and environmental philosophy.

SARA HEINAMAA, Docent of Theoretical Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, University of Helsinki, Finland, and Professor of Humanist Women's Studies at the Center for Kvinneforskining, University of Oslo, Norway, is the author of two studies in the phenomenology of the body, Ele, tyyli ja sukupuoli (Gesture, style, and sex) (1996), and Ihmetys ja rakkaus (Wonder and love) (2000). She has also published articles on intentionality and Descartes's theory of the passions, as well as on Merleau-Ponty's and Beauvoir's phenomenologies of the body. Currently, she is completing a book on the phenomenology of the body and sexuality that studies the connections between Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Beauvoir.

IDROSID KOJIMA (born 1925) received the degree of Lit. D. (Doctor of Literature) from Kyushu University in 1992. He taught Philosophy and Philosophical Anthropology at Kanto-gakuin University and Niigata University from 1967 to 1991. He is the editor of Phiinomenologie der Praxis im Dialog zwischen Japan und dem Westen (Wiirzburg: Konigshausen und Neumann, 1989), co-editor of Japanese and Western Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993), and author of Monad and Thou (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000). He has also translated several of Martin Buber's works into Japanese. His current interest is the problem of

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 289

the body as the convergent point of phenomenology, existential philosophy, and dialectical philosophy.

LEONARD LAWLOR, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, is the author of Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (Indiana, forthcoming) and Imagination and Chance: The Difference between the Thought ofDerrida and Ricoeur (SUNY, 1992). He is translator of Merleau-Ponty's Husser! at the Limits of Phenomenology (Northwestern, forthcoming), co-translator of Renaud Barbaras' s De I' etre du phenomene (Humanity Books, forthcoming), and co-translator of Jean Hyppolite' s Logic and Existence (SUNY, 1997). He is co-editor ofChiasms: Merleau-Ponty's Notion of the Flesh (SUNY, 2000), and co-editor of the annual journal, Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning the Thought of Merleau-Ponty. He has written many articles on Twentieth Century French philosophy. Currently, he has two books in progress, The Being of the Question: Essays in Philosophical Archeology and The Challenge of Bergson ism: Phenomenology, Ontology, Ethics.

THOMAS M. SEEBOHM, Dr. phil. Mainz 1962, venia legendi Mainz 1969, is Emeritus Professor at the Johannes Gutenberg-UniversiHit in Mainz. He was Professor of Philosophy at The Pennsylvania State University from 1973 to 1984. His publications include Die Bedingungen der Moglichkeit der Transzendental-philosophie (1962), Zur Kritik der hermeneutischen Vernunft (1972), Ratio und Charisma (1977), Philosophie der Logik(1984), and many articles in English and German on Kant, German Idealism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics.

TED TOADVINE, Associate Chair of Philosophy at Emporia State University, received his Ph.D. from the University of Memphis in 1996. He held the William F. Dietrich Research Fellowship at Florida Atlantic University in 1996-97 and was Visiting Professor at Kalamazoo College in 1997-98. He is co-editor of Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself (SUNY Press, forthcoming) and The Merleau-Ponty Reader (Northwestern, forthcoming), and co-translator of Renaud Barbaras's De ['etre du phenomene (Humanity Books, forthcoming). He has authored articles and translations in contemporary continental philosophy and ecological philosophy. Currently, he is completing a monograph entitled Limits of the Flesh: An Essay in Ecological Phenomenology.

290 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

DAN ZAHA VI (born 1967), currently a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, has carried out studies and research in Copenhagen, Wuupertal, Leuven, Boston, Paris, and New York. He received his M.A. in philosophy from the University of Copenhagen in 1991, his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 1994, and his Dr. phil. from the University of Copenhagen in 1999. His publications include four authored books: Intentionalitiit und Konstitution (1992), Husser! und die transzendentale Intersubjektivitiit (1996), Self-Awareness and Alterity (1999), and Husserl's Phenomenology (forthcoming). He has also edited/co-edited 5 volumes and published more than 50 articles.

affectivity, 22, 133-4, 144. See also emotions; passions

Agamben, Giorgio, 171n. 42 Alanen, Lilli, 135n. 16 anonymity, 8, 21-2, 99,106. See also

existence, generalized Aquinas, Thomas of, 53 Aristotle, 64, 88, 131-2 Aron, Raymond, ix, 228 archeology, 86, 92, 164,267,271 art, 144n. 35, 159n. 16, 275n. 83 Athanasius the Great, 54n. 4 attention, 124 attitl,lde, 143; natural, 116, 143, 184,

193-4,255,262,268-71; naturalistic, 271; personalistic, 138-9,267; theoretical, 131, 145,271; transcendental, 262

AufJassung-Inhalt scheme, 43 awareness, self-, lin. 17, 16, 18,21 Banfi, Antonio, 234 Barbaras, Renaud, 131 n. II, 145n. 36,

167n.31,203n.8 Baudelaire, Charles, 1 nn. 43 Beaufret, Jean, 199n. 61 Beauvoir, Simone de, xiii, 228 Behnke, Elizabeth, xiii, xix, 36n, 48n.

30, 143n.27 being: brute, 82, 268, 273; determinate,

40,42; "hollow" in, 168-9,213-4; indeterminate, 35,42; natural, 129; problem of in phenomenology, 196-7; question of, 34-5, 47, 48,68, 221

Benjamin, Walter, Inn. 43 Berger, Gaston, 77n. 12, 176-7, 195n.

56,234,236 Bergson, Henri, 154, 162, 166-7, 169,

178,188,220-1,232,266 Bernet, Rudolf, 13n. 20, 153n, 161-2n.

24 Beyssade, Jean-Marie, 141 blosse Sachen, 266-7, 273 body, 15-8, 100-13, 130, 133, 137-9,

149-51,170,208,267,270-4,279, 282,285; lived, 20, 35, 43, 45, 138; objective, 104, 109, 113; operative,

INDEX

192; phenomenal, 97, 104, 106, 108-9,113. See also Descartes: mind-body compound; embodiment; schema corporel

Brand, Gerd, 26n. 41 Brehier, Emile, 87 Brunschvicg, Leon, 236 Bruzina, Ronald, ix, xxiv-xxv, 176n. 9,

182n, 185n.27, 186n.28, 189n.37, 192a47, 193n.51, 194n.53, 196n, 234n.22,236n.31

Burke, Patrick, 152n. 6 Buytendijk, Frederik J. J., 178 Cairns, Dorion, xii Capalbo, Creusa, 160n. 20 Carbone, Mauro, xxiii-xxiv, 144n. 35,

168n.34,lnn.43 Carr, David, 265n. 75 CavaiW:s, Jean, ix, 58n. 12 Celms, Theodor, 61 n. 17 chiasm, 104, 109-10, 112,205,283-5 Claudel, Paul, 152n. 4 cog ito, 75-6, 78, 84; Cartesian, 250;

perceptual, 80; tacit, 84, 86, 113 coincidence, 167 Conrad-Martius, Hedwig, 48n. 31 consciousness, 97-8, 100, 121, 162-3,

168,171,180,238-9,241,260,279; constituting, 268; self-, 110 (see also awareness, self-); transcendental, 81, 246,270

constitution, xix, 8, 12-4,270,273-4; fundamental, 192, 195; genetic, 41-4; incompletely constituted, 35-6; intellectualist sense of, 37-41; metaphysical interpretation of, 83; methodological sense of, 48-9, 83; mundane sense of, 32; ontic-ontologically constitutive condition, 180n. 21; world-, 186

corporeal schema. See schema corporel de Waelhens, Alphonse, 175n. 5, 199n.

62,269 death, 210-1,215,217,219,222 dehiscence, 113 Dcleuze, Gilles, 221 Delius, Harald, 48n. 31

292

Depraz, Natalie, xxii, 28n. 43, 50n. 35, 122n

Derrida, Jacques, xxv, 53, 54n. 7, 201-23, 258n. 65; community of the question, 222; difJeranee, 203, 205; the metaphysics of presence, 223; promise, 222; refinition, 220

Descartes, Rene, xxiii, 53, 76, 78, 86, 88-9,132,135-41,145,157,196, 238,245,280; metaphysical dualism of, 135; mind-body compound, 135-40; Les Passions de l'iime, 132, 135-6. See also cogito: Cartesian; solipsism: Cartesian

Dessoir, Max, 234 diacriticity, 159-61 dialectic, 89-91,93,96, 104, 106, III,

245,259,266,286; hyper-, III; sexual,96

Dillon, Martin, 4-7, 128, 137n. 18 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 259 divergence. See eeart Droysen, 1. Gustav, 52n. 3 dualism, 36, 37, 40. See also under

Descartes Duchene, Jacq ues, 161 n. 22 Dwyer, Philip, 4-5 earth, 94, 267-8, 275,282 eeart, 109, III, 165,201,205 Edie, James, 229n. 8 ego, 100-1; alter, 113,239,249 (see

also intersubjectivity); empirical, 255,276; personal, 99 (see also existence, personal); prepersonal, 243; transcendental, 6, 12, 76, 100,243, 255,276

Elizabeth, Princess, 139 embodiment, 8, 239, 260. See also body Embree, Lester, vii n, viii n, xi n. 10, xv

n. l,xvin.3,7In,229n. 8, 232n. 17 emotions, 135, 140. See also affectivity;

passions epoche, 9-10, 75, 77,116,117,118,

120-2,128,131-2,143,146,231; and intuitive evidence, 122; motivations for, 123; phases of, 122-4. See also reduction

INDEX

essences, 130,237,241,244,255,273; exact, 63, 256; morphological, 63, 256; separated from fact, 63

ethics, 222 etre au monde, 45-6 existence, 99, 266; generalized, 100,

105, 107; personal, 105-7, 113 (see also ego); social, 107-8

existentialism, 74, 81, 86-7, 97, 99, 243,245. See also phenomenology: existential

experience, 274; bodily, 119; kinesthetic, 16, 19n. 29, 20; ontological, 197; transcendental, 118

expression, 138-9,213,217,258 exteriority, 17 facticity, 81 faith, 133n, 216, 218-20, 222, 271;

Urglaube, 242, 259 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 54, 59 Fink, Eugen, viii-ix, xix, xxii,

xxiv-xxv, 12,34-5, 42n. 19, 47n. 28,49,119-20, 127, 141-3, 173-200, 229, 231, 234-5, 243n. 40, 258n. 65, 278, 280n. 94, 281; VI. Cartesianisehe Meditation, 45n. 25, 174,180, 182n, 186-7, 194, 196, 236; contributions to Husserl's phenomenology, 182; Entgegenwiirtigung, 189n. 37; as Husserl's assistant, 58n. 12, 59, 182; Kantstudien article, 78n, 176, 230, 242; meontie, 195-6; Weltbefangenheit, 181n, 188, 194-5

Fisher, Linda, 29n. 44 Fisher, Philip, 131 n. 13 flesh, 46n, 94, 111-3,272,284-5 Florival, Ghislaine, 150n. I, 155 Franck, Didier, 20n. 33 Freud, Sigmund, 159n. 16, 169-70 Fundierung relation, 44n. 23, 203, 256,

273 Funke, Gerhard, xiv Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 58-9 Galileo, 261 Gambazzi, Paolo, 158-9n. 16, 170n. 38 Gasche, Rodolphe, 143n. 30

generativity, 25-6 Geraets, Theodore, 87n. 32, 174nn. I,

2, 176n. 9, 178n. 17, 188n. 33, 229, 232n. 19, 234nn. 21-3, 236n. 32, 240n. 36

Gestalt, 95-7, 99-100,110-2,162, 213. See also psychology: Gestalt.

ghosts, 219 givenness: how of, 52, 66-7; what of,

52,66 Goldstein, Kurt, xi, xiv, 178 Grimme, Adolf, 6-7 grimoire, 209-10, 215 Gurvitch, Georges, 229-31 Gurwitsch, Aron, viii-xii, 77n. 12, 178,

229, 231, 232n. 17, 235n. 26, 280n. 95; The Field of Consciousness, xi, 128,264,278-9

habitualities: acquisition of, 102; origi-native, 186-7; reactivatable, 186

Hadreas, Peter, 33n. 4 Hammond, Michael, 142n. 26 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 37n.

11,60,66-7, 157n. 14,213-4,232, 245,264,270-1,273,275; Phiinomenologie des Geistes, 254

Heidegger, Martin, xii-xiii, 3, lIn. 17, 29, 34, 35n, 53,60,68, 87n. 31, 88n. 35,101, 152nn. 4, 5, 154n. 9, 155; 174n. 2, 180n. 21,188, 216n. 20, 222, 229,252, 259,275; concept of negativity in, 212-4, 220-1; concept of transcendence in, 154, 242

Heinamaa, Sara, xxii-xxiii, 141n. 25 Hepburn, Ronald, 131n. 13, 144n. 36 Heraclitus, 276 Hering, Jean, 230, 234 hermeneutics: higher, 52-3; method-

ological, 51-4; style, 53 Herr, Lucien, 157n. 14 Herve, Paul, 29, 245 Himanka, Juha, 143n. 30 historicity, 3,25,259,277,280 history, 241, 257-9; dialectical, 252;

intentional, 89,245,253,259; methodology of historical reconstruction, 52,252-3; philosophy of, 264-6

INDEX

Howarth, Jane, 142n. 26 horizon, 278-9, 282, 284 human order, 97

293

Husserl, Edmund: Bernau manuscripts, 183n. 24, 191; Cartesianische Meditatiollen, 62, 75, 84, 236, 240, 242,246-9,251,258,260,269,276, 284; Erfahrung llnd Urteil, 57, 242, 278; Formale lind transzendentale Logik, 57, 233, 242, 258, 260; fdeen 1,56,231-2, 252n. 62, 255-6, 279; fdeen IJ, 73, 82-4, 138-9, 175, 192, 235,242,266-8,271,275-6,279, 283-4; Die Krisis, 58, 88, 186, 192, 235-6,264-5, 275n. 83,276-7,279; Logische Untersuchungen, 56, 260-1,283; Paris Lectures, 229; periodization of, 32n. 3,243-4, 260, 275; unpublished manuscripts of, 6-7,12,100,191-2,234-5,251, 269,277,282; "Ursprung der Geometrie," 176, 201-23,234,244, 258, 260,280,282-3

hyle, 232, 238 Hyppolite, Jean, 80n. 17 idealism, 7, 12,29,40,56,60,66,238,

243-4,255,275; transcendental, 4, 81,98,239,268-9,271,278

ideality, 218, 240-1, 280-1; teleology of, 118; virtual, 209, 217. See also objects: ideal; virtuality

imagination, 113,256 individuation, problem of, 192 Ineichen, Hans, 52n. 3 infinity, idea of, 76-7 institution. See Stijiung instruments (utensils), 97, 103-4, 106,

112. See also object, subjectified intellectualism, 278 intentionality, 62, 65-6, 93, 103n. 5,

223,241-3,254,271-2; act, 181, 188; operative, 42n. 19, 119, 154, 164,166,181,188-90,241-3,271; reversal of, 261

interiority, 17 interpretation, 35, 47, 48-9

294

interrogation, 87n. 31, 92, 218, 221, 275

intersubjectivity, 8, 14, 18,23-4,28, 57,77,98,107,121,203,213,218, 239,246,248-51,258,260-2,267, 270--3,276; Einfiihlung, 267, 273; intentional transgression, 247, 261 ; pairing, 249-50, 261. See also ego: alter; solipsism

intuition, eidetic, 55, 57, 241, 254-7; imaginative variation, 257, 261; methodology of, 64, 278, 283-4. See also essences; reduction: eidetic

invisibility, 98, 113, 202 Irigaray, Luce, 141 n. 24 James, Susan, 13ln. 13, 135n. 17 Janssen, Paul, 58n. 12 Kant, Immanuel, xix, 37, 39n. 16,54,

59,98,180n.21,233,238,242,266, 268, 278, 280; Ideas in the Kantian sense (regulative ideas), 118,214-5, 219-20,223,254,278

Kaufmann, Pierre, 160n. 19 Keat, Russell, 142n. 26 Kersten, Fred, ix n. 4, 200n Kingswell, Mark, 131 n. 13 Kisiel, Theodore, 174n. 2 knowledge, 139; apodictic, 118; scien-

tific, 140 Kojima, Hiroshi, xxi-xxii, lIOn Koyre, Alexandre, 234 Kwant, Remy, 129-30 Lacan, Jacques, 158n. 16 Lachieze-Rey, Pierre-Albert, 40n Landgrebe, Ludwig, 58n. 12,59,82-4,

153n, 175n. 5,190,234, 236n. 29 Landsberg, Paul-Louis, 234 language, 213,216,223,248, 260--1,

277,280-1. See also linguistics; speech; writing

Lask, Emil, 229 Lawlor, Leonard, vii, xxv, 201n. 3,

210n. 13, 264n. 70 Lebenswelt, 23, 27, 58, 80, 93, 99, 117,

133,244-5,262,265,276-9 Leder, Drew, 137n. 18 Lefort, Claude, 247n. 52, 279, 282n. 99

INDEX

Lenkowski, William, 146 Levin, David Michael, 13 7n. 18 Levinas, Emmanuel, ix, 119, 203n. 8,

219,228,230 Levy-Bruhl, Lucien, 236, 259, 262 lifewor!d. See Lebenswelt Lingis, Alphonso, 131 n. 11 linguistics, 257-60. See also language Lisciani-Petrini, Enrica, 167n. 31 Locey, Elizabeth, xxvi, 149 Locke, John, 52 logic, 57 logicism, 56-7, 62-3, 243-4, 253-5,

257-8 logos, 21 ~ 259 Louvain Circle, 58 Luft, Sebastian, 49n. 32 Lyotard, Jean-Frans:ois, 151 n. 3 Madison, Gary, 4-7,128-9, 166n. 30 Marcel, Gabriel, x, 73, 178, 188 Marrati-Guenoun, Paola, 21 On. 13 Marx, Karl, 232, 275n. 83; Marxism,

245 mathematics, 58, 136, 138-9 memory, 150, 153, 161-2,208,211,

281 Mer!eau-Ponty, Maurice:

"Christianisme et ressentiment," xiii n. 14, 231; "La Conscience et l'acquisition du langage," 246, 248-251; courses on Husser!, 263, 275-7; "La Nature de la perception," x n.6, 229-30; UEi! et I 'esprit, 137; Phenomenologie de la perception, xi, xvii, xix, 31-50, 75-81, 86, 95, 99-109,139,145,149-156, 173-200, 234, 236-44; "Le Philosophe et son ombre," 73-4, 82-4, 90, 92-4, 264, 270-5, 279; La Prose du monde, 246-8, "Les Relations avec autrui chez l'enfant," 247, 250-1; "Les Sciences de l'homme et la phenomenologie," 247, 251-60; Signes, 284-5; La Structure du comportement, x, 95-100, 103, 106-7,116,178,185,192-3,232-4;

Le Visible et I 'invisible, 82,109, 112,156-7,160-3,168-70,179, 195,197,212,264,279,282-5; visit to Louvain, x, 6, 174-6, 190, 234-5

metaphysics, 60, 62,68, 260; of presence,223

method or methodology of ph en omenology. See phenomenology, methodologyof

Mill, John Stuart, 52 Mishara, Aaron, 23n. 36 Mohanty, Jitendra, ix n. 3, 49n. 33,

142n.26 narcissism, 168 Natanson, Maurice, 84 natural attitude. See attitude, natural nature, 83, 97,105,113,157,191,

266-8,274, 275n. 83 necessity, 204, 208-9, 215; eidetic, 206 negativity, 211-7, 222, 281 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 232, 275n. 83 noema, xi, 80, 232, 266, 268, 271,278;

noematic description, 238; noematization, 189n. 34

non-presence, 215, 217 normality, 25-6 normativity, 267 object, 95,107; ideal, 205-7, 210, 215

(see also ideality; virtuality); nonposited, 103; subjectified, 102-4, 112. See also subject: subject-object relation

objectivity, 77, 267 ontology, 11,81,112,127,129,156,

159,161,194,196,220,222,271, 278; Cartesian, 76-7, 80; formal, 57, 64; ontological rehabilitation of the sensible, 157, 159,272; of sense, 80-1. See also experience: ontological

organism, 105-8 originative process, elusiveness of, 196 other, the. See intersubjectivity. passions, 127, 131-3, 137, 140-1. See

also affectivity; emotions; wonder passive synthesis, 57, 61, 65-6

INDEX

passivity, 8, 22, 145-6, 166, 169, 217-8,283

past, never-present, 46-7, 49 Patocka, Jan, 199 pensee en survol, 218-20 perception, 57, 65, 79-80,100, Ill,

295

113, 132-4, 137, 143-5,233,241, 256,267-8,284

phenomenological positivism, 74-5, 80-1,85-6,220-1,237,241,254

phenomenology, ix, xii, xv-xviii, 51-3, 58,72-3,93,99-100,112,116, 173-5,179,182,188,196,236,242, 256; Cartesian approach to, 75; constitutive, xii, 34, 48; existential, 48, 71; genetic, 57,119,242,245,256; hermeneutical, xiii, 35, 48; as intuitionism, 221; limits of, 75, 81, 85-6,92-4,202,274-5; lineage in, 173, 198-200,223; methodology of, 54,60,81,99,116,118,127,134, 138,142-3,181-4,193-5,198,237, 240, 244, 270; open-endedness of, 178, 183, 195,240; phenomenological reduction (see reduction, phenomenological); phenomenology of, 274; practice of, 185; problem of being in, 196-7; realistic, 34,48; regression in, 184; "system" -character of, 182-3, 185, 187, 193; tradition of, 72, 173, 198-200; transcendental, 11,76,129,174,178; "zigzag" principle of, 183n. 25

philosophy, 130, 136, 138, 146, 173; continental, xv-xvi; crisis of, 252; existential, 71, 81, 87; modem, 62; and non-philosophy, 81, 94, 266; "oriental," 264-5; reflective, 81 (see also reflection: philosophy of); as a rigorous science, 58-9, 88, 265; transcendental, 71, 74, 92, 98, 233, 268; western, 265

Plato, xxi, 54n. 6, 73-4, 82n. 21, 86-94,131-2

Plotinus, 87n. 32 Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, 163n. 27 Pos, Hendrik 1., 234, 258, 260

296

Poulet, Georges, 171n. 42 Pradines, Maurice, 2 I 3 Prasel1z/eld, 152, 162-3 pre-givenness, 43--4, 46-7, 271. See

also world: pregivenness of prejugedu l7lol1de, 41,46, 133, lSI,

194 Proust, Marcel, xxiii-xxiv, 149-51,

153n, 155, 157, 15Sn. 15, 159nn. 16, 17, 161n. 24, 162n. 25,169-71, l72n.43

psychoanalysis, 85, 157, 170, 275n. 83 psychologism, 254-5, 257 psychology, 117, 119,230-1,243,247,

252,255-7,259; eidetic, 232, 254; empirical, 120,237,255; Gestalt, 95, 97-9,229,243,255,257; psychophenomenological parallelism, 261

rationality, 89, 254; crisis of, 72, 74, 90, 92-3,266

reactivation, 218 reading, viii reduction, 8-11,47, 77, 79, 85, 92,

115-6,119-25,127,131,133-4, 141-5,239--40,244,269-71,275-6; as destruction, 142; eidetic, 62-4, I 17, 129-30,240,253,269; incompletenessof, 116-7, 146, 179-S0, 185-7, 240, 269-70; intersubjective, 120; phenomenological, 7, 55, 60-2, 64,98-9, liS, 142, 185,233,237-8, 253,255, 270; possibility of, 117; praxis of, 116, 119-25; priming of, 122-3; transcendental, 61, 75, SO, 84-5, I 17, 120, 130,269. See also epoche

reflection, 21-2, 6 I, 94, 118, 120-I, 269; corporeal (see sensation, double); philosophy of, 120, 188-9; total,92

Reinach, Adolph, 51 responsibility, 146,219-20 Reuter, Martina, 135n. 16 reversibility, 101,104,106-13,286.

See also sensation, double; time: reversibilityof

INDEX

Ricoeur, Paul, 73-4, 76-7, 80n. 16, 83n. 22, 154-5, 162n. 25, 171 n. 41

Ronchi, Rocco, 167n. 31 Sartre, Jean-Paul, xiii, 29, 73, I 03n. 5,

110, 168n.35, 174n. 1,212-3,227, 228,231-2,236, 237n. 33,252,256

Saussure, Ferdinand de, 111-2, 165, 258

Sawicki, Marianne, 34n. 8 Scanlon,John,252n.61 Scheler, Max, xiii, xix, 34n. 7,64,231,

246,248,251nn.58-9,252,259 Schelling, Friedrich W. 1., 266 schema corporel, 46n, IOJ, 105, 112-3 Schuhmann, Karl, 24n. 38 Schutz, Alfred, vii, xi n. 9, 25 science, 237, 252, 261, 266; natural, 63,

282 sedimentation, 170,207,259,277,281 Seebohm, Thomas M., xix-xx, 32n. 2,

48n.31,49n.32,52n.3,56n,84n. 25

sense, 159, 166, 197,206-8,220; equivocity of, 209; omnitemporality of, 211; originative dimension of, 187; univocity of, 208

sensation, double, 17-8, 108-9,242, 267,272

sexuality, 96, 283 Shaphiro, Lisa, 135n. 17 Silvennan, Hugh, 249n, 250n Simon, Anne, 151n. 3, 159n. 17, 17ln.

41 simultaneity. See time: simultaneity Sinngebung, 38, 39n. 16,43, 238, 243 sleep, 169, 171; half-, 149-50, 171 solipsism,S, 29, 249, 272-3; Cartesian,

117 space, 15; lived, ISO; optical and tactile,

192; spatializing-temporalizing vortex, 161

speech, 216-7, 260-1, 281; dialogical, 98; philosophical, 269

sphere of own ness, 250 Spiegelberg, Herbert, xix, 24, 51-3,

58n. 12,67, 142n.26, 152n.4,239n. 35

Stein, Edith, xiii, xix, 34, 234-5 Steinbock, Anthony, 28n. 43 Stijiung, 159, 161, 166,204-5,218,

244 Stroker, Elisabeth, 58n. 12 Stumpf, Carl, 65 subject (or subjectivity), 81, 95,111,

151, 155-7, 166,243,268; asfissure, 167-8; originative, 181; subject-object relation, 95-8, 101-13,188; transcendental, 5, 8, 10,14n.22,24,99,210-1,239,251, 262

sublime, the, 82 survival, 207, 211, 214-5 synthesis: passive, 242-3; transition,

242,244,267 Taminiaux, Jacques, 137n. 19, 165n.

29,166n.30,240n.36 temporality. See time thaumazein. See wonder TiIIiette, Xavier, xiii-xiv, 61n. 16,

242n. 38,243n. 39,263n. 68,266nn, 270n

time (or temporality), lIn. 17,20, 149-72, 191,242,278,280; circularity of, 155; continuity of, 154-5, 157,161; duration, 169; inner, 65; intratemporality, 156; lived, 149, 151,154; living present, 191,259; mythical, 157-8, 169-70; omnitemporality, 206-7, 211, 253; reversibility of, 155; simultaneity, 158-9,164,169,274; spatializingtemporalizing vortex, 161; temporalization, 156; time-consciousness, 19, 191. See also PriisenzJeld

Toadvine, Ted, vii, xi, xiii, xx-xxi, xxv-xxvi,5n.5,54-5,94n.45, 167n. 31,229n. 8,251n.59

topoi,53-5 touching-touched relation. See sensa-

tion, double. tradition, 90-2, 173 Tran Duc Thao, 236 transcendence, 154, 156, 164, 168,202,

242,246

INDEX

transcendental aesthetic, 42n. 19 transcendental realism, 76, 78 truth, 253-4,262-3,265,286 unconscious, the, 23, 85 Valery, Paul, 210, 286 Vallier, Robert, 263n. 68

297

Van Breda, Herman Leo, x, xxiv, 45n. 25, 58n. 12, 175, 177, 191n. 40,199, 234-6; conversations with Fink, 186; "Maurice Merleau-Ponty et les Archives-Husserl a Louvain," 6, 7n. 6,175,177,190,192n.49,234-6, 251n.60,252,269,277

Van Kerckhoven, Guy, 177n. 13 Varela, Francisco, 122 Verflechtung, 204 Vermersch, Pierre, 122 virtuality, 209, 211, 217 voice, 108. See also speech; language Wahl, Jean, 236 Waldenfels, Bernhard, 18n. 28, 145n.

38 Wesenschau. See intuition: eidetic Wiegand, Olav, 57n. 10 will, the, 142 Williams, Forrest, 229n. 8 writing, 202-3, 205-11, 215-6, 222,

281 Wolff, Christian, 184 wonder, 88,127,131-2,135,140-6; as

interruption, 141, 145 world, 13-5, 18,80,83-4, 127, 143,

181,238-42,271; constitution of, 186; cultural, 57,113; dubitability of, 78-9; embeddedness in, 180-1; general thesis of, 134; historical, 57; linkage with reason, 179-80; objective, 76, 101, 113, 133,267; perceived, 268; pregivenness of, 180, 186-8,193-4; pre-objective, 128; sensible, 271; style of, 144-5. See also Lebenswelt; prejuge du monde; Fink: WeltbeJangenheit;

Zahavi, Dan, xviii-xix, lIn. 17, 16n. 24,28n.42,33n.5,239n.35

Zaner, Richard, 47n. 28, 49n. 34

Contributions to Phenomenology IN COOPERATION WITH

THE CENTER FOR ADVANCED RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY

1. F. Kersten: Phenomenological Method. Theory and Practice. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0094-7

2. E. G. Ballard: Philosophy and the Liberal Arts. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0241-9

3. H. A. Durfee and D.F.T. Rodier (eds.): Phenomenology and Beyond. The Self and Its Language. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0511-6

4. J. J. Drummond: Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism. Noema and Object. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0651-1

5. A. Gurwitsch: Kants Theorie des Verstandes. Herausgegeben von T.M. Seebohm. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0696-1

6. D. Jervolino: The Cogito and Hermeneutics. The Question of the Subject in Ricceur. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0824-7

7. B.P. Dauenhauer: Elements of Responsible Politics. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1329-1

8. T.M. Seebohm, D. F~l1esdal andJ.N. Mohanty (eds.): Phenomenology and the Formal Sciences. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1499-9

9. L. Hardy and L. Embree (eds.): Phenomenology of Natural Science. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1541-3

10. J.J. Drummond and L. Embree (eds.): The Phenomenology of the Noema. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1980-X

11. B. C. Hopkins: Intentionality in Husserl and Heidegger. The Problem ofthe Original Method and Phenomenon of Phenomenology. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-2074-3

12. P. Blosser, E. Shimomisse, L. Embree and H. Kojima (eds.): Japanese and Western Phenomenology. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2075-1

13. F. M. Kirkland and P. D. Chattopadhyaya (eds.): Phenomenology: East and West. Essays in Honor of J. N. Mohanty. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2087-5

14. E. Marbach: Mental Representation and Consciousness. Towards a Phenomenolo-gical Theory of Representation and Reference. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2101-4

15. J.J. Kockelmans: Ideasfor a Hermeneutical Phenomenology of the Natural Sciences. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2364-5

16. M. Daniel and L. Embree (eds.): Phenomenology of the Cultural Disciplines. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2792-6

17. TJ. Stapleton (ed.): The Question of Hermeneutics. Essays in Honor of Joseph J. Kockelmans.1994 ISBN 0-7923-2911-2; Pb 0-7923-2964-3

Contributions to Phenomenology

IN COOPERATION WITH


18. L. Embree, E. Behnke, D. Carr, J.C. Evans, J. Huertas-Jourda, J.J. Kockelmans, W.R. McKenna, A. Mickunas, J.N. Mohanty, T.M. Seebohm and R.M. Zaner (eds.): Encyclopedia of Phenomenology. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-2956-2

19. S.G. Crowell (ed.): The Prism of the Self. Philosophical Essays in Honor of Maurice Natanson.1995 ISBN 0-7923-3546-5

20. W.R. McKenna and J.e. Evans (eds.): Derrida and Phenomenology. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3730-1

21. S.B. Mallin: Art Line Thought. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3774-3

22. R.D. Ellis: Eros in a Narcissistic Culture. An Analysis Anchored in the Life-World. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3982-7

23. J.J. Drummond and J.G. Hart (eds.): The Truthful and The Good. Essays in Honor of Robert Sokolowski. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-4134-1

24. T. Nenon and L. Embree (eds.): Issues in Husserl's Ideas II. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-4216-X

25. J.C. Evans and R.S. Stufflebeam (eds.): To Work at the Foundations. Essays in Memory of Aron Gurwitsch. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4317-4

26. B.e. Hopkins (ed.): Husserl in Contemporary Context. Prospects and Projects for Phenomenology. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4469-3

27. M.e. Baseheart, S.C.N.: Person in the World. Introduction to the Philosophy of Edith Stein. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4490-1

28. J.G. Hart and L. Embree (eds.): Phenomenology of Values and Valuing. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4491-X

29. F. Kersten: Galileo and the "Invention" of Opera. A Study in the Phenomenology of Consciousness. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4536-3

30. E. Straker: Husserlian Foundations of Science. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4743-9

31. L. Embree (ed.): Alfred Schutz's "Sociological Aspect of Literature". Construction and Complementary Essays. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-4847-8

32. M.e. Srajek: In the Margins of Deconstruction. Jewish Conceptions of Ethics in Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-4953-9

33. N. Rotenstreich: Synthesis and Intentional Objectivity. On Kant and Husserl. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-4956-3

34. D. Zahavi (ed.): Self-awareness, Temporality, and Alterity. Central Topics in Phe-nomenology.1998 ISBN 0-7923-5065-0

Contributions to Phenomenology IN COOPERATION WITH


35. R. Cristin: Heidegger and Leibniz. Reason and the Path. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-5137-1

36. B.C. Hopkins (ed.): Phenomenology: Japanese and American Perspectives. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-5336-6

37. L. Embree (ed.): Schutzian Social Science. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-6003-6

38. K. Thompson and L. Embree (eds.): Phenomenology of the Political. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6163-6

39. O.K. Wiegand, R.J. Dostal, L. Embree, J.J. Kockelmans and J.N. Mohanty (eds.): Phenomenology on Kant, German Idealism, Hermeneutics and Logic. Philosophical Essays in Honor of Thomas M. Seebohm. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6290-X

40. L. Fisher and L. Embree (eds.): Feminist Phenomenology. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6580-1

41. J.B. Brough and L. Embree (eds.): The Many Faces of Time. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6622-0

42. G.B. Madison: The Politics of Postmodemity. Essays in Applied Hermeneutics. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6859-2

43. W. O'Brien and L. Embree (eds.): The Existential Phenomenology of Simone de Beauvoir. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-7064-3

44. F. Schalow: Heidegger and the Quest for the Sacred. From Thought to the Sanctuary of Faith. 2001 ISBN 1-4020-0036-7

Further information about our publications on Phenomenology is available on request.

Kluwer Academic Publishers - Dordrecht / Boston / London

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