Ideality and Necessity in Merleau-Ponty's Reading Of

Forgetfulness of Experience: Ideality and Necessity in Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry”

Diego D’Angelo

Whereas Jacques Derrida’s Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry has enjoyed a wide reception in today’s phenomenological discourse,1 the same has not held true for Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s reading of the same Husserlian text. This is partly due to the style of Merleau-Ponty’s observations: Husserl’s Appendix on the origin of geometry (the third Appendix from his Crisis of the European Sciences2) is interpreted by Merleau-Ponty in an ensemble of scat- tered notations used as the basis for a course offered at the Collège de France in 1959 and 1960. The often cryptic style of the notes renders the text particularly difficult and challenging. These notes are an ideal follow up to Merleau-Ponty’s essay about Husserl entitled The Philosopher and His Shadow,3 but their genesis dates back to Merleau-Ponty’s stay at the Husserl Archives of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 1939. At the time, he was mostly interested in Husserl’s late philosophy. This can also be seen in the fact that Husserl’s third appendix to the Crisis is mentioned in the Phenomenology of Perception4 although it does not play a major role in the book. Although difficult to read, these notes allow an in-depth grasp of Husserl’s own thought as interpreted by Merleau-Ponty, but most importantly, they allow us to better understand the importance of a confrontation that influ- ences Merleau-Ponty’s entire path of thinking. Merleau-Ponty is particularly

1 Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978). 2 Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phän- omenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976); Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970). 3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univer- sity Press, 1964). 4 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Rout- ledge, 2005), 208.

100 D’Angelo interested, in these course notes, in understanding Husserl’s text within the overall context of transcendental phenomenology. He discusses some of Hus- serl’s key concepts in the light of the question of language. He does this by explicitly linking Husserl’s reflections to Heidegger’s late text on Language (Die Sprache), which had been published a few years before in On the Way to Language.5 In order to limit the scope of my analysis, I will follow a particular concep- tual path. In general, I intend to analyze the connection of ideality and necessity and examine the role that the two concepts play in the origins of reason in Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl’s text. According to Merleau-Ponty, our experience is settled at the threshold between ideality, necessity, and rationality. The main claim of my interpretation is that rationality is bound to a forgetfulness of the experiential, empirical roots of ideality. More specifically, I will address the following points: I will give (1) a general introduction to Merleau-Ponty’s text on Husserl, highlighting the main differences between it and Derrida’s interpretation of the same text.6 I will primarily focus on the concept of “Stiftung” or institution of ideal meaning, which is a key aspect of rationality in Husserl’s view.7 In order to elucidate this origin of the European “style” (as Merleau-Ponty puts it) of thinking, I will (2) address two fundamental concepts in this text: ideality and necessity,8 describing how they relate to each other. For Husserl,

5 Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. P.D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row 1982). 6 On this, see Leonard Lawlor, “The Legacy of Husserl’s ‘Ursprung der Geometrie’: The Limits of Phenomenology in Merleau-Ponty and Derrida,” in Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl, ed. Ted Toadvine and Lester Embree (New York: Springer, 2002), 201–225. 7 The term “institution” is taken by Merleau-Ponty from Husserl. In a more systematic vain— or perhaps simply more in harmony with other works by Merleau-Ponty—we could argue that the birth of scientific meaning is a bodily act of expression and creation. On this, also in relation to contemporary issues in the philosophy of mathematics, see Marjorie Hass and Lawrence Hass, “Merleau-Ponty and the Origin of Geometry,” in Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, ed. Leonard Lawlor and Fred Evans (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000). The authors claim that Merleau-Ponty’s account of geometry and Husserl’s are “radically differ- ent” (Hass and Hass, “Merleau-Ponty and the Origin of Geometry,” 184). It seems that this is due to a misunderstanding of Husserl’s position (reduced to an analytic understanding of mathematics, see Hass and Hass, “Merleau-Ponty and the Origins of Geometry,” 185) which is quite untenable from a phenomenological standpoint and to overlooking the importance of Husserl’s Origin of Geometry for Merleau-Ponty’s own thought. 8 Leonard Lawlor too stresses the role of necessity in Merleau-Ponty’s reading, but he argues that this relates mostly to the necessity of writing and is also to be found in Derrida (Lawlor, “Legacy,” 207). The concept of necessity I’m working with in the following is not (only) the necessity of writing, but mostly the necessity of negation, which does not play a central role