Merleau-Ponty and the advent of meaning: From consummate reciprocity to ambiguous reversibility

Continental Philosophy Review

Volumn 34, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 203-224

  Adams, Harry ^a  

^a RICE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 52549112126     PISSN: 13872842     EISSN: 15731103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1017516805705     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. James Schmidt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Between Phenomenology and Structuralism (New York: St Martin's Press, 1985), p. 103. Hereafter cited as MMP.
2. And John O'Neill explores the development of Merleau-Ponty's thought in relation to these three themes in his Perception, Expression, and History: The Social Phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New Jersey: Routledge & Kegan Paul/Humanities Press, 1986), p. 321. Hereafter cited as PoP.
4. The text we have of The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1995)
5. hereafter cited as VI, is actually the introductory remnant of a work entitled The Origin of Truth, which Merleau-Ponty was never able to finish before his sudden death. This work was to be a highly original ontological account of 'the Flesh of the world,' of 'natural and wild Being,' and of the ways that truth may and may not be said to adhere and arise in such Being.
6. Merleau-Ponty took care in his last writings in VI to distinguish his multi-channeled conception of the dialectic, or "hyperdialectic," from the more binary dialectic of Hegel and Sartre. Cf. VI, pp. 89, 91-94.
7. But must we not say that, in certain asymmetrical relationships such as those between employers and employees, teachers and students, parents and children, or master and slave, the terms and meaning of the relationship are determined by the former party? Never totally: amidst authoritative or even authoritarian relations, some reciprocity is always present (cf. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, sx. 178-196).
8. PoP, 328. This linkage of the notions of being and a 'world-horizon of language' is in keeping with the rest of Merleau-Ponty's thought, and draws interesting parallels with Heidegger's later view of language as "the house of being."
9. See Roy Harris, Reading Saussure: A Critical Commentary on the Cours de linguistique générale (LaSalle, Ill: Open Court, 1987), pp. 21-25.
10. Ferdinand De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), p. 101 ff.
11. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-sense, trans. Hubert and Patricia Dreyfus (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1991), p. 87. Hereafter cited as SaNs.
12. Albert Rabil, Merleau-Ponty: Existentialist of the Social World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 200.
13. The synchronic and diachronic registers are used to illustrate the way meaning and beauty arise within the realm of art. "For Merleau-Ponty, 'the joy of art lies in showing how something takes on meaning' " (cf. SaNs, p. xiv ff.).
14. Along similar lines, Calvin Schrag suggests why we need to move past the realm of expression into the wider realm of history if we are to adequately understand the genealogy and structure of meaning within human experience: "Sociality is not restricted to the dialogue of face-to-face encounter. There is a dialogue of wider range and reach. There is a region of social reality which extends beyond the intersection of lived time and lived space in my direct encounter with the other. In the background of this encounter there is a world of predecessors and a world of successors." Cf. Schrag's Experience and Being: Prolegomena to a Future Ontology (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1980), p. 207 ff.
15. These kinds of historical dialogues reflect the interplay we saw obtaining between the synchronic and diachronic registers of language. Just as the synchronic of prior speech served as the sedimented reservoir of language that the diachronic of present speech arises out of, so, in a similar way, do our historical and cultural heritages serve as the sedimented milieus that we draw from to live presently meaningful lives. As Merleau-Ponty suggests, "The theory of signs, as developed in linguistics, perhaps implies a conception of historical meaning . . . The presence of the individual in the institution, and of the institution in the individual, is evident in the case of linguistic change. [And] Saussure, the modern linguist, could have sketched a new philosophy of history" (cf. In Praise of Philosophy, trans. John O'Neill, Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 197), p. 55 ff. Hereafter cited as IPoP).
16. Schrag also explains the development of this historical meaning in a way that extends Merleau-Ponty's perspective: "The meanings which reside in our historical presence are conditioned by the worlds of our predecessors. And ultimately, it is necessary to speak of 'world' in the plural. The cultural worlds of the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Anglo-Saxons continue to contribute meaning to our experience. Herein lies the existential basis for the science of history . . . Originative thinking and decisive action in the present can reopen the past and reveal new perspectives. The meaning of the past . . . is never fixed and final . . . The historical experiences is not mute in his confrontation with the world of yesterday. He addresses it, and is addressed by it, in a continual project of interpretation . . . Admittedly, historical distance can conceal meanings, but it can also release a new understanding of what happened and give birth to new perspectives of meaning. This makes the interpretation of the meaning of the historical past a task to be perpetually achieved in the historical present (Experience and Being, p. 208)."
17. Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1995), pp. 9-29. Hereafter cited as AD.
18. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (New York: Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1977), 146. This passage reveals that Merleau-Ponty's and Foucault's thoughts on history seem to be cut from a similar cloth. In another not uncommon 'Foucaultian' passage, Merleau-Ponty claims that "Our life has, in the astronomical sense of the word, an atmosphere: it is constantly enshrouded by those mists we call the sensible world or history, the one of the corporeal life and the one of the human life, the present and the past, as a pell-mell ensemble of bodies and minds, promiscuity of visages, words, actions, with, and between them all, that cohesion which cannot be denied them since they are all differences, extreme divergences of one same something (VI, p. 84)." This provides another illustration of, first, the way that philosophy, and culture itself, may be viewed as cross-temporal dialogues between thinkers and, second, the way that old meanings transform into new meanings - through various borrowings, repetitions, and amalgamations, but also misinterpretations, misunderstandings, etc. Considering the apparent compatibility between the thought of Merleau-Ponty and Foucault in passages like these, it would make a productive study to compare and contrast their views on history and genealogy, the body and sexuality, social control and freedom, etc.