Baldwin's Argument against Merleau-Ponty's Critique of the Natural Sciences

Introduction

While Maurice Merleau-Ponty thought that the natural sciences could offer partial explanations of the world, he maintained that they were incomplete and further understanding required an existential analysis or a study of the pre-theoretical and pre-reflective structures that are the conditions of the possibility of experience (Heinämaa 52). He offered a series of arguments against both the possibility of the sciences explaining the world in general and their ability to explain the phenomenon of perception in particular.

In his paper, "Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenological Critique of Natural Science," Thomas Baldwin pushes back on both of these positions, arguing that Merleau-Ponty offered insufficient proof of his assertion that the sciences cannot explain the natural world or that perception is not a natural phenomenon.

Baldwin's paper focuses on shifting the burden of proof away from a naturalistic viewpoint back onto Merleau-Ponty's position. According to Baldwin, Merleau-Ponty's arguments are too weak to dissuade a reader who is sympathetic to a naturalistic view. This paper will show how Baldwin's critiques are insufficient by pointing out the flaws in his argumentation and by reinforcing the critiques that Merleau-Ponty leveled at the sciences.

The first section of the paper will provide a brief sketch of Merleau-Ponty's position. In the second section, I will go through Baldwin's responses to Merleau-Ponty's four major arguments and address each of them in turn, leading to the conclusion that Baldwin's arguments are insufficient to the task of showing the plausibility of a scientific explanation of perception, and of the world more generally, in light of Merleau-Ponty's criticism.

Merleau-Ponty's Critique of the Natural Sciences

In this section, I will sketch out the four basic reasons that Merleau-Ponty finds the sciences to be unable to explain perception, which Baldwin argues against. They are (1) the sciences involve an act of abstraction that cannot fully capture perception; (2) any given scientific explanation will already presuppose perception; (3) the sciences deal with causal relations to which perception cannot be reduced; and finally (4) perception is a meaningful experience, which cannot be explained within a scientific framework.

Baldwin claims that science, for Merleau-Ponty, is "primarily a systematic extension of common sense which aims to capture general causal relationships between the objects and properties encountered in experience" (Baldwin 191). In other words, the sciences operate in the natural attitude where one has a "naïve and uncritical enjoyment of the natural certitude" (Merleau-Ponty, Nature 85). In the natural attitude, the everyday experience of the perceptual world is simply accepted as real, and things are experienced as interrelated (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology 34). The sciences take that everyday experience of relations and extend it into a systematic study that can be used to explain why certain events occur and why certain objects have certain properties. The systematic study ends up finding sufficient, external conditions necessary for effects to take place, which Merleau-Ponty considers to be the causation (Morriston 562).

The act of systematically extending everyday causal intuitions involves finding discrete objects and events and linking them to other discrete objects and events. This leads to individual objects, events, and their relationships being pulled out of the context in which they were perceived, presented, and studied as singular occurrences, and then regarded as patterns and forms of singular occurrences. Thus, the doing of science, or carrying out the methodologies of the sciences, abstracts a particular part of an experience away from the experience as a whole and categorizes it with similarly abstracted experiences. General forms of how reality functions are created from the systematization of these abstractions.

The abstraction away from the individual toward the universal leads the sciences to claim objectivity. Since they moved from individual relations to ones that are, in theory, universal, they can make the claim that the theories they posit are not mere descriptions of phenomenal appearance, but instead universally true laws independent of any observers. Through the methodologies of the sciences, one can move beyond the embodied perceptual [End Page...