In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

CHAPTER 5 “In Praise of Philosophy”: A Hermeneutical Rereading JEAN GREISCH The back cover of the French edition of Signs, Merleau-Ponty’s last collection of articles, states: “Signes, c’est-à-dire non pas un alphabet complet, et pas même un discours suivi. Mais plutôt de ces signaux, soudains comme un regard, que nous recevons des événements, des livres et des choses.”1 Could philosophical hermeneutics, which is the theory of the operations of understanding implied in the reading and interpretation of texts, subscribe to these lines? It all depends on one’s idea of hermeneutics. Those who see the sign as a coherent discourse, made up of elaborate messages, will find it difficult to cope with the disruptive and heterogenous character of Merleau-Ponty’s “signals,” preferring instead to speak immediately of symbols. Nevertheless, because of how philosophy has developed in the second half of this century, we must adopt the task of trying to recontextualise Merleau-Ponty’s “philosophy of ambiguity” with respect to some topics of hermeneutical philosophy. In other words, supposing that the emergence of a new figure of reason, “hermeneutical reason,” is one of the typical features of twentieth-century philosophy, how can we situate Merleau-Ponty’s position regarding this trend? I will try to sketch a possible answer to this question through a “hermeneutical rereading” of the famous “Inaugural Lecture” “In Praise of Philosophy,” delivered on 15 January 1953 at the Collège de France. One should be well aware of the difficulties that such an attempt at a “hermeneutical” rereading of this famous text entails. In fact, Merleau-Ponty would not seem to be concerned at all with the two really fruitful periods, which shaped the intellectual profile of twentieth-century hermeneutical philosophy . The first took place during the twenties. In his early Freiburg lectures, Heidegger sketched the program of an “hermeneutics of factical” life, which eventually was converted into the existential analytic of Sein und Zeit. In order to describe the relation both intimate and accidental between hermeneutics and 103 104 JEAN GREISCH Husserlian phenomenology, Ricoeur frequently uses the metaphor of a “graft.” Using the same metaphor, one might say that Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity “grafts” Dilthey’s notion of “understanding” onto Husserl’s notion of intuition. The offspring of this graft—a stillborn bastard for some orthodox phenomenologists—is the notion of a “hermeneutical intuition,” which appears as early as 1919 in Heidegger’s teachings. We should add to this discussion of Heidegger that recent research has shown very clearly that, in Heidegger’s eyes, this first hermeneutical foundation of phenomenology under the form of a hermeneutics of factical life (author’s term) was intended to be a phenomenological reply to the then current philosophy of life, with Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Bergson as the main proponents. But focusing the whole discussion on Heidegger’s contribution to this first phase would be an error. However widespread this error may be, one must also take into account the original way Georg Misch attempts to take up Dilthey’s project at the beginning of the thirties. The 1994 publication of his monumental attempt to ground logic on the basis of a philosophy of life2 is an important intellectual event, which perhaps we are not yet able to evaluate correctly. Regarding the development of hermeneutical philosophy, the second fruitful period is the sixties with the publication of important works such as Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method in Germany, Ricoeur’s Symbolique du Mal, De L’interprétation, and Le Conflit des Interprétations in France, Luigi Pareyson’s Verità e interpretazione in Italy, and others. In the background , the Castelli Conferences in Rome played an important role in the internationalization of a strain of thinking that, in most countries and most notably in France, could not rely upon a long previous intellectual tradition, in contrast to the German tradition. No wonder then if, for Merleau-Ponty, as well as for almost any other French philosopher, hermeneutics was a terra incognita. Concerning the first period, only recently have we been able to read Heidegger “from the start”3 and thereby discover the genealogical importance of his hermeneutics of facticity. None of the texts regarding this period was accessible during MerleauPonty ’s lifetime. As for the second period, his untimely death in 1961 prevented him from taking part in a philosophical discussion, the progression of which he could, of course, not have foreseen. Does this mean...

Share