Merleau-Ponty is known as a cautious and tentative Socratic philosopher. His writings are rich, expressive, evocative, and profound. Often his texts possess the textual sensibility of a constant probing wondering and questioning. The Preface to his influential study Phenomenology of Perception (1962, 2012) is one of the most lucid and evocatively written introductions to the question of the meaning of phenomenology. In this Preface, Merleau-Ponty does a sympathetic and creative reading of Husserl’s work. He interprets Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology with its emphasis on the investigation of consciousness and essences into an existential phenomenology that posits that the world is always already there. Merleau-Ponty’s orientation is existential in that he aims for phenomenology to put Husserl’s essences “back into existence” (1962, p. vii). Phenomenology engages a radical, primal, or hyper-reflection: it reflects on what is prior to reflection—lived experience. To do phenomenology one must always begin with lived experience. Merleau-Ponty often reflectively expressed himself in uncannily evocative metaphoric language.
Husserl’s essences are destined to bring back all the living relationships of experience, as the fisherman’s net draws up from the depths of the ocean quivering fish and seaweed. Jean Wahl is therefore wrong in saying that “Husserl separates essences from existence.” The separated essences are those of language. It is the office of language to cause essences to exist in a state of separation, which is in fact merely apparent, since through language they still rest upon the ante-predicative life of consciousness. In the silence of primary consciousness can be seen appearing not only what words mean but also what things mean: the core of primary meaning round which the acts of naming and expression take shape (1962, p. iv).
For Merleau-Ponty the original human relation to the world is a relation of perception. But this perception takes place at a primal, corporeal, and preconscious level. The body-subject is already interlaced with the flesh of the world before having reflective knowledge of it. Or, to say it differently, our knowledge of the world—of others and things—is corporeal, rather than intellectual. We know the world bodily and through our embodied actions. And in some sense this is a preknowing knowing: we know our world first of all through our embodied being rather than immediately in a disembodied intellectual manner. That is why Merleau-Ponty can say that we do not really know what we see. Most of the time, we act and do things apparently unthinkingly—it is as if the body already knows what to do and how to do it. And that is indeed the case.
Selected Readings:
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. (C. Smith, transl.) London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964a). The Primacy of Perception; and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964b). Signs. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964c). Sense and Non-Sense. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1973). The Prose of the World. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2003). Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France. (R. Vallier, transl.) Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2010a). Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949–1952. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2010b). Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954–1955). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of Perception. (D. A. Landes, transl.) London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.