Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy

Notes

Notes Introduction to Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy 1. Recent important single-author books on Merleau-Ponty in (or translated into) English include: Renaud Barbaras, The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology (Evanston, 2004); Mauro Carbone, Thinking of the Sensible: MerleauPonty ’s A-Philosophy (Evanston, 2004); and Leonard Lawlor, Thinking Through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question (Bloomington, 2003). Many important essays on Merleau-Ponty are published in the international journal Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning Merleau-Ponty’s Thought, ed. Barbaras, Carbone, and Lawlor; but others appear in edited collections that having been appearing with considerable frequency. Some recent examples are: Carman and Hansen, eds., The Cambridge Companion to MerleauPonty (Cambridge, 2004); Evans and Lawlor, eds., Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh (Albany, 2000); and Hass and Olkowski, eds., Rereading MerleauPonty : Essays Beyond the Continental-Analytic Divide (Amherst, 2000). 2. The most extraordinary example of a new text by Merleau-Ponty is Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France (Evanston, 2003). Also of exceptional interest are Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, ed. Lawlor and Bergo (Evanston, 2002); The World of Perception (New York, 2004); and The Incarnate Subject: Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson on the Union of Body and Soul, ed. Bjelland and Burke (Amherst, 2001). This is only a first wave of these new publications : several other texts (including lectures and other texts) have already been published in France. 3. Merleau-Ponty’s name and clear influence is emerging with some frequency in current research in the philosophy of mind, for example: Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (Cambridge, Mass., 1999); Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York, 1999); and Cole, About Face (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). This connection is also explored with considerable frequency in the important journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, ed. Shaun Gallagher. Merleau-Ponty’s continuing influence upon philosophers of art can be seen, for example,in Johnson , ed., The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader (Evanston, 1993). 4. The Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Daniel Dennett, can be seen online at: www.blackwellpublishing.com/lexicon/. 5. It has eluded many commentators, but not every commentator by any means. M. C. Dillon’s landmark study, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology (Evanston, 1997), explores expression in treating Merleau-Ponty’s theory of truth and philosophy of language. Henry Pietersma also elucidates the relation of expression to epistemology in Phenomenological Epistemology (Oxford, 1999). Recent important work on the subject of expression has also been done by Leonard Lawlor in “The End of Phenomenology: Expressionism in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze,” in Lawlor , Thinking Through French Philosophy (Bloomington, 2003); and Stephen Noble in “Entre le silence des choses et la parole philosophique: Merleau-Ponty, Fink et les paradoxes du langage,” in Chiasmi International no. 6 (2005), pp. 111–144. Also see Remy C. Kwant’s earlier study, The Phenomenology of Expression (Pittsburgh, 1967). 6. Heidegger expresses phenomenology as “saying to show” in many places, but an extended discussion of this formulation is found in his “The Nature of Language,” in On the Way to Language (New York, 1971), pp. 57–108. As Heidegger puts it there: “‘to say,’ related to the Old Norse ‘saga’ means to show: to make appear, set free, that is, to offer and extend what we call World” (p. 93). 7. There is no question that much more could be said about Husserl’s formative role in the phenomenological movement and his own efforts to escape from subjectivism . Indeed, Merleau-Ponty himself is careful to acknowledge these complexities and tensions in Husserl’s thought. Nonetheless, in chap. 6 I will make an argument about a fundamental and irresolvable difference between the thinkers—and it will be the difference between a genuine philosophy of the world and one that is caught in subjective idealism. Even so, the scholarship on the complex relationship between Merleau-Ponty and Husserl has been superb. For a look at the current state of the discussion, see Toadvine and Embree, eds., Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl (Dordrecht, 2002). Also see Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology (Evanston, 1997); Galen A. Johnson, “Merleau-Ponty and Husserl: History, Language , and Truth,” in Merleau-Ponty: Critical Essays, ed. Pietersma (Washington , D.C., 1989), pp. 197–217; and Joseph Margolis, “Phenomenology and Metaphysics : Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty,” in Merleau-Ponty Vivant, ed. Dillon (Albany, 1991), pp. 153–182. Still very useful is Herbert Spiegelberg’s discussion in...