MERLEAU-PONTY'S READING OF HUSSERL CONTRIBUTIONS TO PHENOMENOLOGY

IN COOPERATION WITH THE CENTER FOR ADVANCED RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY

Volume 45

Editor:

John J. Drummond, Fordham University

Editorial Board:

Elizabeth A. Behnke David Carr, Emory University Stephen Crowell, Rice University Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University J. Claude Evans, Washington University Burt Hopkins, Seattle University Jose Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University Joseph J. Kockelmans, The Pennsylvania State University William R. McKenna, Miami University Algis Mickunas, Ohio University J. N. Mohanty, Temple University Tom Nenon, The University of Memphis Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg-Universitat, Mainz Gail Soffer, New School for Social Research, New York Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University

Scope

The purpose of this series is to foster the development of phenomenological philosophy through creative research. Contemporary issues in philosophy, other disciplines and in culture generally, offer opportunities for the application of phenomenological methods that call for creative responses. Although the work of several generations of thinkers has provided phenomenology with many results with which to approach these challenges, a truly successful response to them will require building on this work with new analyses and methodological innovations. MERLEAU -PONTY' S READING OF HUSSERL

edited by TED TOADVINE Emporia State University, Emporia, KS, U.S.A.

and

LESTER EMBREE Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, U.S.A.

SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V. A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-90-481-5953-6 ISBN 978-94-015-9944-3 (eBook) DOl 10.1007/978-94-015-9944-3

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved © 2002 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2002 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2002 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, induding photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner. CONTENTS

Preface by Lester Embree vii

Introduction by Ted Toadvine xv

I. Merleau-Ponty as a Reader of Husserl

1. Merleau-Ponty on Husserl: A Reappraisal 3 Dan Zahavi

2. Merleau-Ponty's Ontological Reading of Constitution 31 in Phenomenofogie de fa perception Elizabeth A. Behnke

3. The Phenom~nological Movement: A Tradition 51 without Method? Merleau-Ponty and Husserl Thomas M Seebohm

II. Phenomenology and Method in Merleau-Ponty

4: Leaving Husserl' s Cave? The Philosopher's Shadow Revisited 71 Ted Toadvine

5. From Dialectic to Reversibility: A Critical Change 95 of Subject-Object Relation in Merleau-Ponty's Thought Hiroshi Kojima

6. What about the praxis of Reduction? Between Husserl 115 and Merleau-Ponty Natalie Depraz

7. From Decisions to Passions: Merleau-Ponty's Interpretation 127 of Husserl' s Reduction Sara Heinamaa

v ill. Legacy and Tradition

8. The Time of Half-Sleep: Merleau-Ponty between Husserl 149 and Proust Mauro Carbone

9. Eugen Fink and Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Philosophical 173 Lineage in Phenomenology Ronald Bruzina

10. The Legacy ofHusserl's "Vrsprung der Geometrie": 201 The Limits of Phenomenology in Merleau-Ponty and Derrida Leonard Lawlor

Appendix

11. Merleau-Ponty's Reading ofHusserl: 227 A Chronological Overview Ted Toadvine

Notes on Contributors 287

Index 291

VI PREFACE

All projects have stories behind them, and perhaps the one behind this volume is worth telling. I first read some Merleau-Ponty while working on my doctorate at the New School for Social Research in the 1960s. Later, in the mid-1970s and after I had transferred from my first teaching position at Northern Illinois University to my second at Duquesne University, I studied Merleau's oeuvre fairly thoroughly and taught several graduate courses on his thought. On the basis of those efforts, I wrote "Merleau-Ponty's Examination of Gestalt Psychology."! It seems a tacit norm in how I was trained that one express gratitude to a source from whom one has learned by writing at least one essay on her or him; I have also paid my philosophical debts to Cairns, Gurwitsch, Hume, Husserl, James, Sartre, and Schutz. While writing my Merleau-Ponty essay, I recognized the possibility of and need for a study of his interpretation of Husserl and even reserved the right to conduct it. I do hope that nobody took that claim seriously because my interests wandered elsewhere once I was no longer learning from Merleau-Ponty. But I also underestimated the task (more recently I thought similarly that I might survey Alfred Schutz's interpretation of Husserl only quickly to find that interpretation was far more extensive and complex than it had first seemed). A study of Merleau-Ponty on Husserl had apparently still not been done when, several years ago, Dr. Ted Toadvine came to serve for a year as the William F. Dietrich Fellow under my supervision here at Florida Atlantic University. I soon found him extremely knowledgeable about Merleau• Ponty, told him myoId idea for a study, and our collaboration began. Toadvine had reviewed practically all of the secondary literature on Merleau-Ponty when writing his dissertation, Contradiction, Expression, and Chiasm: The Development ofIntersubjectivity in Merleau-Ponty, at the University ofMemphis under Leonard Lawlor, and he confirmed that indeed practically nothing had been published on how it was that Merleau-Ponty understood what was for him the greatest figure in the previous generation. When he told me how much Merleau-Ponty had actually written about Husserl, we decided that he should prepare the chronicle that is included as the appendix to the present volume.

J. Research in Phenomenology IO (1980): 89-121.

Vll viii LESTER EMBREE

I am responsible for the word "reading" in our title, although Ted did not resist it. Let me explain that choice. I do oppose all attempts to model as texts objects that are not texts and to construe all experiences as literary experiences. In the first place, I deny that we do literally read the items that we are most interested in, which is to say other animate beings; I may read my lover's letters but I do not read my lover's face. Not only do most objects not convey significations, as words do, but most of those that represent, e.g., smiles, are indicative or signaling.2 I even doubt that thinking is an ingredient in all experiencing. It may seem harmless to say that a subsistence hunter or farmer "reads" signs of animals or the weather, but are the woods or the sky texts? Does such a model fundamentally help or hinder an understanding of how such people encounter their surroundings? Is not better and more literal terminology needed? Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that Merleau-Ponty's access to Husserl's thought was fundamentally through the reading of texts. He never met Husserl, and he seems to have heard Husserllecture only once. To be sure, he must have learned something about phenomenology in dialog with Husserl's students, Eugen Fink and Aron Gurwitsch, but those are secondary sources. And, as Toadvine's chronicle and some testimony included below show, Merleau-Ponty's reading ofHusserl was highly selective. He was not an Husserl scholar by any stretch of the imagination. Rather, he simply took inspiration from his main source. Before we decided to include Toadvine's chronicle in this volume, we called it a "prompting text" and sent it to the people we invited for our research symposium. They were equally amazed and used it to greater or lesser degrees in preparing their chapters. Even so, these chapters show that we have only begun to understand Merleau-Ponty's reading of Husserl. Toadvine's chronicle will be useful to others in years to come. The main event in preparation for this volume was the research sympo• sium held in Delray Beach in November 1999. This was the ninth such meeting organized by myself with colleagues and with support from the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc. as well the William F. Dietrich Eminent Scholar Chair at Florida Atlantic University and

2. Cf. Aron Gurwitsch, "The Phenomenology of Signals and Significations," iri Aron Gurwitsch, Marginal Consciousness, ed. Lester Embree (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985),83-106; and Lester Embree, "The Phenomenology of Representational Awareness," Human Studies 15 (1992): 301-11. PREFACE IX

published in the Contributions to Phenomenology series that c.A.R.P. Inc. sponsors at Kluwer Academic Publishers. The technique involved is simple, and others are welcome to imitate it. Once one has the resources, a theme and a collaborator need to be decided upon. Then a list of perhaps fifteen possible participants is developed and ranked with some consideration given to matters of gender, generation, and geographical areas. Such considerations are necessary since the phenomenological tradition has always been receptive to women, since cultivating the next generation cannot be forgotten, and since it is a world• wide tradition.3 Each group of participants should look as much like phenomenology as possible. Toadvine and I recruited an appropriate number of people from North America, East Asia, and Western Europe to come to Delray Beach for mutual criticism of drafts that would be revised into chapters for this volume; in future meetings, colleagues from Eastern Europe and Latin America will also be included. We were also guided in this process by the senses that we had ofwho might be more sympathetic with which of the two philosophers chiefly in question. The major error in our recruitment effort, for which we have neither explanation nor excuse, concerned the influence of Eugen Fink on Merleau-Ponty's reading of Husser1. 4 This omission became clear during the symposium. Fortunately, Ronald Bruzina was just the expert needed for that aspect, and he has the character not to resent our oversight; his is Chapter 9 below. The editors and readers of this volume must be particularly grateful to him. What ofthe influence of Aron Gurwitsch? According to some notes I kept from a conversation with Gurwitsch on November 13, 1971, "I suggested that he had taught M-P his phenomenology. He said he did not think so, that rather Aron, Levinas, and Cavailles had done that." (Although there are several perfunctory footnotes, there are no discussions of Fink in Gurwitsch's work; in addition, Gurwitsch never mentions Levinas in print, although there is an early MS. on Levinas in his Nachlass.) Nevertheless,

3. Cf. Lester Embree and J. N. Mohanty, "Introduction," in The Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, ed. Lester Embree et al. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), 1-10.

4. Cf. Fred Kersten, "Notes from the Underground: Merleau-Ponty and Husserl's Sixth Cartesian Meditation," in The Prism ofthe Self Philosophical Essays in Memory ofMaurice Natanson, ed. Steven Galt Crowell (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995),43-58. x LESTER EMBREE

some people have thought otherwise, but an adequate textual basis has not been available for it to be studied. With Gurwitsch's Esquisse de la phenomenologie constitutive in press, however, this situation is about to change. Let me repeat the external facts about their contacts that are also mentioned in my Introduction to that work.5 Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Aron Gurwitsch were introduced during a reception at the home of Gabriel Marcel in Paris in the Fall of 1933. The younger man asked ifthe older was related to the author ofPhiinomenologie der Thematik und des reinen Ich and Gurwitsch acknowledged his doctoral dissertation.6 Merleau-Ponty began attending his courses of lectures at L'Institut d'Histoire des Sciences (Sorbonne), beginning with the first one, which was published as "Quelques aspects et quelques d6veloppements de la psychologie de la forme."7 He corrected the French on that long essay and also on the long critical study of the papers of a conference that was also published as Psychologie du langage. 8 And Father van Breda told me that when Merleau-Ponty visited the recently established Husserl Archives at Louvain in April 1939 he told him at length about Gurwitsch's course of 1937, which is what the Esquisse was developed from. Later Gurwitsch wrote as follows to Alfred Schutz:

I have checked Merleau-Ponty's Structure du comportement out of the library. It seems to be a very competent work. I took a look at his sections dealing with

5. Aron Gurwitsch, Esquisse de la phenomenologie constitutive, ed. Jose Huertas-Jourda (Paris: Librairie Vrin, forthcoming). 6. Psychologische Forschung 12 (1929): 279-381, English translation by Fred Kersten in Aron Gurwitsch, Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966). Since this dissertation was cited neither in La Structure du comportement (1942) nor Phenomenologie de la perception (1945), Gurwitsch was quite pleased when I showed him the citation of it in Merleau-Ponty's "La Nature de la perception" (1934), published in Theodore F. Geraets, Vers une nouvelle ph ilosophie transcendantale: La Genese de la philosophie de Maurice Merleau-Ponty jusqu 'il la Phenomenologie de la perception (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 191; "The Nature of Perception: Two Proposals," trans. Forrest Williams, in Merleau-Ponty, Texts and Dialogues, ed. Hugh J. Silverman and James Barry, Jr. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1992),74-84.

7. Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique 35 (1936): 413-70, English translation by Richard M. Zaner in Gurwitsch's Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology.

8. Aron Gurwitsch, "XIe Congres international de psychologie," Revue de mitaphysique et de morale 50 (1938): 145-60. PREFACE xi

Goldstein's work. He used a great deal that I have said about that in print as well as in lectures. (December 15, 1946)

I am currently reading Merleau-Ponty's Perception . ... I hear an enormous amount from my lectures in the book. He has learned a lot from me and taken over a great deal. Not only in details, where he has carried many things further. I doubt that he would have had the idea of interpreting the psycho-pathological material phenomenologically without my influence. My reaction to the reading is a mixture ofpleasure and melancholy. Honest pleasure over the excellent book, which is truly a fme achievement; also pleasure over the fact that my influence in a sense was the godfather. And the melancholy refers to the modus prateritus. Here I will never have such a fme influence. (August 11, 1947)9

After the war, Gurwitsch reviewed both the French original of Phe• nomenofogie de fa perception and later its English translation. His chief objection concerned the omission of the concept of no em a from that work. One can indeed wonder how phenomenological an extensive research product without that concept can be. \0 Merleau-Ponty cites Gurwitsch twice in his Sorbonne Lectures,ll and his critique of Gurwitsch's Theorie du champ de fa conscience has recently been published. 12 What is written above addresses how the idea of this volume emerged for me and was then developed in collaboration with Ted Toadvine, but it does not address the source of my interest. My motivation was from the beginning not that Merleau-Ponty's reading was simply another nice topic

9. Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch, Philosophers in Exile: The Correspondence ofAlfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch 1939-1959, ed. Richard Grathoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989),88 and 93. Gurwitsch told me that when he departed France he left his copy ofSchutz'sDer sinnhafteAufbau der socialen Welt (1932) with Merleau-Ponty, but there seems no further sign of this.

10. Cf. Lester Embree, "Gurwitsch's Critique of Merleau-Ponty," The Journal ofthe British Society for Phenomenology 12 (1981): 151-63.

11. Both published references are in Merieau-Ponty's 1950-51 course, "Psycho-Sociologie de I'enfant," in Merleau-Ponty ala Sorbonne: resume de cours 1949-1952 (Paris: Cynara, 1988),262,272.

12. Merleau-Ponty, "Notes de lecture et commentaires sur Theorie du champ de la conscience de Aron Gurwitsch," ed. Stephanie Menase, Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale 3 (1997): 321-42; "Reading Notes and Comments on Aron Gurwitsch's The Field ofConsciousness," trans. Elizabeth Locey and Ted Toadvine, Husserl Studies 17, n. 3 (2000): 173-93. xii LESTER EMBREE

for some scholarship. Rather it goes back to the consternation I felt when I started going to meetings ofthe Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in 1969 and began actually hearing certain objections to Husserl from people who were partisan to Merleau-Ponty. I had been trained in constitutive phenomenology by Dorion Cairns and Aron Gurwitsch in the golden era of the New School and hadllittle doubt about what Husserl's positions were on most matters. It is even now amazing to remember hearing it said that Husserl was a solipsist, that consciousness for him was disembodied, that he was an intellectualist, that he had no account of history, that there was for him only one transcendental ego (Were they talking about A verroes?), and that he had abandoned transcendental phenomenology in Die Krisis der europaischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phaenomenologie of 1936 and became an existentialist in the end. Even now I cannot say which of these claims strikes me as the most preposterous. I will not attach names and footnotes to the expressions of such opinions, not only because it does not seem worth my current assistant's time to search the pertinent literature from the 1950s and '60s for confirmations, but also because I do not see a benefit in embarrassing colleagues most of whom have very probably recognized and corrected their errors in the meantime. Myths, however, can live on. It was also part ofthe division oflabor between Ted and me that he would write the Introduction to this volume and I would write this Preface. But just what belongs in which part was not made clear in all respects. There are two general remarks that I now seize the opportunity to make. First of all, while I hope I have become somewhat notorious for constantly urging that soi disant phenomenologists engage in phenomenological investigations of the matters themselves rather than more and more dubious scholarship on texts, the present project calls for scholarship on what Merleau-Ponty's texts contain in the way of interpretation of Husser!' Let me make it clear that I am not opposed to scholarship as such, but rather to the mixing of genres that corrupts both as well as the continuing shortage of new phenomenology strictly so called. Is it not more important to contribute to the primary than to the secondary literature? Texts of course arise in contexts. Husserl's phenomenology is arguably the first context for Merleau-Ponty's oeuvre. Perhaps the chapters here will stimulate the scholarly exploration of yet other contexts. No doubt the Heidegger-Merleau-Ponty connection has been explored, but it was a matter PREFACE xiii

of course before the rise of hermeneutical phenomenology that there were not two but three major sources ofphenomenology: Husserl, Heidegger, and Scheler. With the publication of Jean-Paul Sartre's Cahiers pour une morale, \3 the influence of Max Scheler on him is the more clear. Probably there was an influence of Scheler on Simone de Beauvoir. The secondary literature on Merleau-Ponty would be stronger ifthere was either a study of Scheler's influence on Merleau-Ponty or a comparative study of their two philosophies. In her chapter in this volume, Elizabeth Behnke links Scheler with Edith Stein in affecting Merleau-Ponty's perspective on Husserl. Merleau-Ponty's first publication is on Scheler even though he seems to confuse him with Husserl in it. 14 In the second place, the question of Merleau-Ponty's method is raised in some of the chapters here and was also discussed to some extent at the research symposium. Afterwards, I recalled a passage that may shed some light on this aspect of Merleau-Ponty's work, and that Toadvine has translated for us.

In reality, [Merleau-Ponty] did not carry out detailed pioneer work, but rather picked out passages and formulas that electrified his own meditation. He was not and did not want to be a scholiast nor even an historian of philosophy. He approached Husserl with ulterior motives, knowing by divination what he would

13.Jean-Paul Sartre, Cahiers pour une morale (Paris: Gallimard, 1983); Notebooks/or an Ethics, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

14. Merleau-Ponty, "Christianisme et ressentiment," La Vie intellectuelle 36 (1935): 98-109; "Christianity and Ressentiment," trans. Gerald G. Wening, in Texts and Dialogues, 85-100. Perhaps an amusing adventure in scholarship is worth a comment. I first read Scheler in the French translation of his Formalismus. I still have my copy, but the covers of this French paperback are long gone. I remember firmly, even now, reading a statement on the back cover that struck me in its style as written by Merleau-Ponty, who was, with Sartre, an editor ofthe series in which that Scheler translation appeared. So I have searched for a copy of this book with the covers intact. It is a first edition. The statement on the back of the second edition is different from what I remember, used booksellers in the U.S. and France could not find a first edition for me, it is not held in the Library of Congress, none of the people in the present project or in Scheler studies or among the circles offriends whom I consulted had the book. I wrote to the publisher, Gallimard, and received a nice letter back that did not convince me that the first edition was looked at. It would be a delight that only a scholar would appreciate if somebody found that edition so that it could be decided if the blurb was written by Merleau-Ponty and, if so, then his concise assessment around 1950 was appreciated. But perhaps my memory is misleading me. xiv LESTER EMBREE

find there, as he had read the others, for example Goldstein, whom he has very falsely been accused of having plagiarized. His reading was selective yet attentive. When a text struck him, he picked up his pen and wrote a kind of free commentary, grafting his thought onto that of others, and put his own mark upon it. One can show that many pages of the Phenomenoiogie resemble concentrated glosses, that they make up autonomous developments on a suggestion, a launching ramp offered by a theme whose inventor had not quite perceived all of its implications. I take these details about Merleau-Ponty's work habits from a conversation long ago with Professor Gerhard Funke at Mainz, who was then, in 1938, lecturer-tutor at the Rue d'U1m alongside his French colleagueY

The editors thank the participants in this volume for their excellent contributions. The reader should know, however, that none ofus believe that we have more than opened some of the issues that fall under the heading of "Merleau-Ponty's reading of Husserl."

Lester Embree Delray Beach, February 2001

15. Xavier Tilliette, Merleau-Panty au la mesure de l 'hamme (Paris: Editions Seghers, 1970), 21. INTRODUCTION

In recent years, academic philosophy's tendency toward pedantic specializa• tion and superfluous textual analysis has been the target of considerable criticism, especially by academic philosophers themselves. The title of the present work, Merleau-Panty 's Reading afHusserl, is apt to raise suspicions along these lines. First of all, beyond the small group of scholars specializ• ing in Husserl or Merleau-Ponty, or the still smaller group with an interest in both, who, indeed, would take an interest in such a topic? And, second, the very idea of an entire collection with the structure "X's reading ofY's reading of Z" seems likely to inspire the kind of meta-referential vertigo associated with recent fads in literary criticism. Yet, while such criticisms may at times be justified, they would be unfounded in the case of the present work. In fact, it would not be overstating to assert that this volume addresses an issue central to the future of philosophy that carries repercussions extending across disciplinary boundaries. For a start, it is worth pointing out that phenomenology, broadly understood, has inspired nothing less than a world-wide revolution in philosophical thinking during its first century, as well as extending its influence far beyond the academic discipline of philosophy to establish phenomenological branches in such disciplines as anthropology, architec• ture, geography, law, nursing, psychology, and sociology. 1 Even so, the importance of phenomenology for academic philosophy has been difficult to assess, especially in the United States, where the term "phenomenology" has often been used loosely as a methodological equivalent for the geographical designation "continental philosophy."2 Certainly recent movements treated as part of "continental" theory-e.g., structuralism, post• structuralism, or critical theory-cannot be considered part of the phenomenological tradition strictly speaking, and in many cases the proponents of these theoretical movements take their point of departure precisely in a criticism and rejection of phenomenology's central method-

I. For entries on phenomenology in these disciplines and the influence of phenomenology throughout the world, see the Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, ed. Lester Embree et. at. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997).

2. This is adequately shown by the diverse philosophical methodologies represented at the annual meetings of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), which has been described as the largest annual meeting of "continental philosophers" in the world.

xv XVI TED TOADVINE

ological tenets. But this reaction against phenomenology is also a certain debt to it, in that those schools of thought included under the rubric of "continental" philosophy have in general defined themselves either as beginning from or against phenomenology, that ofHusserl in particular.3 If this is so, we are justified in seeing phenomenology as the shared central core of continental philosophy throughout the last century, and Husserl is analogously the shared central core of phenomenology: he is, to use my co• editor's expression, the "trunk" of the Continental "tree." Even though analytic philosophy remains the dominant tendency in certain parts of the world (especially in English-speaking countries), there are many indications that even here philosophy is heading toward a more pluralistic future, one in which the sharp factional boundaries of the past few generations are no longer as easily drawn. There are good reasons to believe, then, that the success phenomenology has achieved in other disciplines and countries will have a growing effect on philosophy in these more anglophone areas. Our future is clearly bound, therefore, to Husserl's legacy, and the recognition of this fact may account for the growing international revival of interest in "classical" phenomenology.4 Even so, the question remains of what phenomenology will make of itself in this open future: what will future generations of "phenomenologists," in philosophy as well as other disciplines, mean by the term "phenomenol• ogy"? It is here that the issues raised in Merleau-Ponty's reading ofHusserl have their decisive force. As has been recognized many times (and most recently in the Preface above), Merleau-Ponty was certainly not a Husserl scholar in any strict sense of the term. Yet if he were no more than a commentator on Husserl, such attention to his reading of Husserl would be both unnecessarily redundant, since we could simply return to the primary

3. Lester Embree has developed this line of thinking in some detail in his as yet unpublished manuscript, "Husserl as Trunk of the American Continental Tree." It is also worth re• emphasizing here, l1s Embree has noted, the extent to which such figures of recent interest as Derrida and Levinas, while often treated as post-phenomenological, insist on the necessary role of phenomenology in their own thinking.

4. I am using this expression, as I have elsewhere, not to imply the relegation of this tradition to a merely historical importance but, on the contrary, to suggest that it has become a "classic" in Merleau-Ponty's sense ofthe term, i.e., that it institutes a tradition ofthought that retains and rewards perennial attention. See Merleau-Ponty, Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 16-7; Signs, trans. Richard McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 10--1. INTRODUCTION xvii

source himself, and ofquestionable value for anything more than intellectual history. I do not mean to denigrate the importance of examining the history of philosophy (quite the contrary, as my essay in this volume attests), but there is little call for commentary on commentators, and for good reason. If Merleau-Ponty's reading of Husserl demands a properly philosophical examination, this is so precisely because it marks the confrontation of two original thinkers. And the topic of this confrontation is nothing other than the question that faces us squarely today: what is the proper scope, method, and future of phenomenology? It is probably unnecessary to admit at the outset that the present volume will not answer this question, and it may well be that questions of this form do not admit of straightforward answers. There is admittedly considerable difficulty involved in clarifying the question itself. Since the time when we first began collaboration on this project, my co-editor and I have returned often to debate on this very topic, e.g., whether necessary conditions for phenomenology as a deep historical tradition can be specified (cf. his remarks on noema in the above Preface). Of course, the difficulty of defining phenomenology is also already noted by Merleau-Ponty in his famous Preface to Phenomenologie de la perception, written to answer the very question, "What is Phenomenology?" Admitting straightaway that this question "has by no means been answered," Merleau-Ponty writes the following:

the opinion of the responsible philosopher must be that phenomenology can be practiced and identified as a manner or style of thinking, that it existed as a movement before arriving at complete awareness of itself as a philosophy. 5

While this characterization may be appropriate for its time, it does no more for us today than make the issue more pressing: has phenomenology arrived, in the meantime, at "complete awareness of itself as a philosophy"? Should it be striving to do so? Is any such "complete awareness" even possible within the limits of phenomenological investigation, as espoused by either Husserl or Merleau-Ponty? Itis to such significant questions that each ofthe essays in this volume points, more or less explicitly, and we could well have

5. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), ii; Phenomenology o/Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962; rev. 1981), viii. The emphasis is Merleau-Ponty's. xviii TED TOAD VINE

sub-titled this volume "What is Phenomenology?" The absence of a final consensus in answering such questions, and even on the form of the questions themselves, will perhaps be understandable to our reader. Nevertheless, the dialogue crystallized in this volume is certainly a new stage in phenomenology's self-understanding, for the simple fact that the question of Merleau-Ponty's reading of Husserl has been raised explicitly for its first extended consideration. The willingness of our contributors to wade into this troubling confluence of ideas, and their open-minded consideration of issues that might, in other contexts, arouse partisan responses, certainly deserves appreciation. As editors, it has been our key goal to encourage just such open dialogue among the wider audience of scholars inspired by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, to urge them to reject the caricatures that pepper contemporary literature in favor of closer examina• tion both of texts and of other matters themselves. The future of phenomenological philosophy lies, we believe, in this direction. * * * The essays in the volume are divided topically into three groups, the first of which, "Merleau-Ponty as a Reader of Husserl," deals with the general issues raised by Merleau-Ponty's Husserl-interpretation, i.e., whether this interpretation is true to Husserl's text and to the "spirit" of Husserl's philosophy. To begin the volume, Dan Zahavi's essay, "Merleau-Ponty on Husserl: A Reappraisal," starts from the surprising fact of the rejection of Merleau-Ponty's Husserl-interpretation by many Merleau-Ponty scholars. While Merleau-Ponty himself finds in Husserl a philosophical approach compatible on many key points with his own, the general consensus has been that Merleau-Ponty's reading ofHusserl is more creative than faithful. Zahavi, by contrast, believes Merleau-Ponty's reading of Husserl to be ahead of its time and largely borne out by posthumously published material and still unpublished manuscripts. To make his case, Zahavi draws on material from throughout Husserl's oeuvre to portray a Husserl startlingly close to that championed by Merleau-Ponty himself, concentrating on certain key themes: the nature of the reduction, reciprocity and reversibility in the constitution ofnature and incarnated subjectivity, the constitutive role of embodiment, the significance of operative intentionality, and the claim that transcendental subjectivity gives way to transcendental intersubjec• tivity. While not denying significant differences between the two philoso- INTRODUCTION XIX

phers, nor that there are other tendencies within Husserl' s thought that Merleau-Ponty does not pursue, Zahavi concludes that Merleau-Ponty's reading avoids many still common misconceptions of Husserl' s enterprise and demonstrates a closer congruence between his and Husserl' s thought than is found in other post-Husserlian phenomenologists. Elizabeth A. Behnke's essay "Merleau-Ponty's Ontological Reading of Constitution in Phenomenologie de la perception," is less sanguine about the congruence ofMerleau-Ponty' s project with that ofHusserl. After taking note of the interpretative context (shaped in part by the earlier work of Scheler, Stein, and Fink) and the general strategies that inform Merleau• Ponty's appropriation of the concept of constitution, Behnke charts the dialectical stages ofthis appropriation in Merleau-Ponty' s Phenomenologie de la perception. To Kant and the early Husserl, Merleau-Ponty attributes a negative, "intellectualist" conception of constitution, portraying it as the meaning-giving activity of an absolute consciousness before which the world is transparently displayed. As an alternative, Merleau-Ponty offers a positive account of constitution as a creative and dynamic event that takes its impetus not from the experiencing agent but rather from the "spontane• ous upsurge of the world." But this latter, positive version of constitution always implies a certain pre-given ontological stratum, and Merleau-Ponty uses this account of constitution as a springboard to turn toward interpretive questions of fundamental ontology. Behnke expresses concern that, whatever its value for Merleau-Ponty's purposes, his treatment fails to appreciate the essential methodological role that constitution plays in Husserl's descriptive phenomenological analyses-analyses upon which Merleau-Ponty's own work relies. This disparagement of constitutive phenomenology in favor of interpretive ontological speculation has, in Behnke's view, encouraged the emphasis on text interpretation that characterizes our current philosophical climate. As antidote, she recom• mends a return to the consultation and description of experiential evidence as advocated by Husserlian philosophical practice. Although it could just as easily have been included in the following section on method, Thomas M. Seebohm's essay, "The Phenomenological Movement: A Tradition without Method? Merleau-Ponty and Husserl," is included here for its value as an introduction to the general problematic that Merleau-Ponty's reading of Husserl raises. For Seebohm, borrowing from Spiegelberg, phenomenology in the strict sense is characterized by a concern with the how of givenness, while phenomenology in the broad sense, the xx TED TOADVINE

camp into which Merleau-Ponty's work is seen to fall, satisfies itself with a consideration ofthe what of givenness alone. After setting out preliminary distinctions of methodological hermeneutics, Seebohm examines Merleau• Ponty's reconstruction ofHusserl' s project in terms of distinct developmen• tal periods. To justify this reconstruction, Merleau-Ponty relies on the traditional topos of separating the "letter" of Husserl' s philosophy from its "spirit," claiming to find a tacit sanction for his own position in Husserl's later reformulations. In Seebohm's view, such a claim of sanction is mythical and lacks any basis in Husserl' s texts, as he demonstrates through an analysis ofMerle au-Ponty' s specific claims about the phenomenological reduction, the eidetic reduction, and the structure ofintentionality. Although Merleau-Ponty's rejection of the how of givenness, and thus of questions of method, may stem from his recognition of the difficulties that Husserl' s metaphysical self-interpretation introduces, these difficulties do not apply to a properly methodological conception of Husserlian phenomenology. Seebohm concludes that we are justified in excluding Merleau-Ponty' s work from phenomenology in the strict sense on the basis of his rejection ofthe phenomenological method and the absence in his work of the development of a substantive methodological alternative. Yet, given his primary concern with the what of human existence, we are justified in treating him as a phenomenologist in the broad signification of the term. The essays in Part II continue these reflections on the question of method and the nature ofphenomenology as Merleau-Ponty has appropriated it. This section opens with my essay, "Leaving Husserl's Cave? The Philosopher's Shadow Revisited," which explores the intentions behind Merleau-Ponty's final essay on Husserl, "Le Philosophe et son ombre." Merleau-Ponty' slater appropriation ofHusserl is motivated not by a rejection ofphenomenology'S transcendental starting point, I contend, but by the attempt to develop a phenomenological account of the limits of phenomenology, an account that necessarily radicalizes his earlier understanding of the phenomenological reduction. Taking his cue from Husserl, Merleau-Ponty is increasingly concerned with the historical telos of philosophy and consequently with rethinking the nature of the reduction by way of an archeological retrieval of the history of philosophy. While his interpretation of the reduction at the time of Phenomen%gie de la perception was modeled on a radicalized Cartesian doubt, this model ofthe reduction lacks resources for understand• ing the contingency and resistance ofthe world. In his later work, Merleau• Ponty seeks a transformation of phenomenology that will provide it with INTRODUCTION xxi

resources for exploring its own limits, its relation with non-philosophy, and this leads him to an examination of the ancient Greek origins of reflective philosophy, specifically the grounding of Western philosophy's telos in Platonism. This shift of emphasis is apparent in "Le Philosophe et son ombre," which should be read, I suggest, as a re-interpretation of the transcendental reduction that takes as its paradigm Plato's myth of the cave. According to this reinterpretation, the chiaroscuro of the cave serves as allegory for the relation between phenomenology and the resistance and contingency that mark its limits. In conclusion, I propose that the incorpora• tion of the depths of the cave within the progression towards truth offers new resources for exploring phenomenology's "shadow." Hiroshi Kojima's essay, "From Dialectic to Reversibility: A Critical Change in the Subject-Object Relation in Merleau-Ponty's Thought," contrasts Merleau-Ponty's treatment of the subject-object relation in his three major theoretical works, with an eye toward the implications of this shift for his relation with Husserlian phenomenology. In La Structure du comportement, Merleau-Ponty's appropriation of Gestalt theory guides his analyses of subject-object relations toward resolution in a synthetic coincidence, the lower order (e.g., the body) being maintained as a subordinate structure within the higher order (e.g., the mind). But, according to Kojima, the transcendence of human consciousness and of the alter ego lead Merleau-Ponty, in Phenomenologie de la perception, to seek a philosophical grounding for Gestalt theory in Husserlian phenomenology, despite his difference from Husserl on the nature of transcendental subjectivity. While Merleau-Ponty continues to offer examples of subject• object coincidence in his second book, his denial of objectivity to "subjec• tified objects," e.g., instruments incorporated into the corporeal schema, often obscures this coincidence. On Kojima's reading, this marks the beginning of a retreat away from the dialectical synthesis of subject and object, a shift also apparent in Merleau-Ponty's reorganization of the relations between personal, social, and organic existence. This reorganiza• tion leads to the emphasis on reversibility in Le Visible et I 'invisible, which, for Kojima, is linked with Merleau-Ponty's redefinition of Gestalt in terms of deviation and his development of a notion of hyperdialectic that lacks synthesis. The denial of coincidence between subject and object implied by this emphasis on antithetical reversibility is problematical, Kojima contends, as it undercuts the proper description of the human body's corporeal schema. Concluding with a brief summary of the implications to be drawn xxii TED TOAD VINE

from Merleau-Ponty's ontology of "flesh," Kojima questions whether such a notion can truly provide the basis for "continuous practical human agency," given its denial of the subject-object synthesis that makes such agency possible. In her essay, "What about the praxis of Reduction? Between Husserl and Merleau-Ponty," Natalie Depraz seeks a middle ground between Merleau• Ponty's and Husserl's views of the reduction by describing its concrete practice. Although both Merleau-Ponty and Husserl discuss the "possibility" of the reduction, Depraz shows that for Merleau-Ponty this is a possibility for activity within the world, and is therefore subject to the limitations of our incarnate existence. For Husserl, on the other hand, the in-principle possibility of the reduction concerns the radical putting out of play of the world, although his multiplication of the attempts at formal theoretical description of the reduction run the risk of a methodologism that cuts us off from its concrete act. For both Merleau-Ponty and Husserl, the emphasis lies with the "claim" of the reduction, a claim that lends itself to being understood either as essentially incomplete due to our finitude or as a Kantian regulative ideal, and this emphasis encourages us to understand reduction as something that can never be actualized. According to Depraz, Merleau-Ponty's rejection of the thematization of the reduction is concor• dant with his general privileging of operative intentionality and pre• reflective experience, but he does admit the existence of an "operative" reduction already at work in phenomenological description-a possibility that might not be opposed to Husserl' s own view of reduction. Rej ecting the oppositions between thematization and operativity and between immanent praxis and transcendental theory, Depraz develops an "intermediate" conception of the reduction by elaborating its three principle phases-suspension, conversion, and letting-go--and describing the relations between these phases and the motivations that set the process going. This structured description of the reduction in terms of concrete eide aims to overcome the limitations of both the Husserlian and Merleau• Pontian accounts, providing a "priming" for continued intersubjective description and confirmation. Bringing this section to a close, Sara Heinamaa's essay, "From Decisions to Passions: Merleau-Ponty's Interpretation of Husserl's Reduction," explores the link between Merleau-Ponty's claim that a complete reduction is not possible and his characterization of the reduction, following Fink, as "wonder in the face of the world." Dismissing the common claims that INTRODUCTION xxiii

Merleau-Ponty rejects either the transcendental or the eidetic reduction, Heinamaa contends that his methodological conception of the reduction extends below the level of theoretical activity and will to also bracket the non-thetic affective dimension of our perceptions. The key to this level of reduction lies in the notion of wonder, borrowed not so much from the Greeks as from Descartes, whose account ofthe mind-body compound plays a decisive role as precursor to the phenomenological description ofthe lived body. For Descartes, wonder precedes the evaluation of its object, thereby serving a different role than that of the other passions, i.e., maintaining and serving the well-being of the mind-body compound. Rather than pursuing the useful or the pleasurable, wonder is an interruption in our normal routine, a break that makes a change of direction or orientation possible. Under this interpretation, wonder plays the crucial role of disengaging us from our natural affective orientation toward the world, turning us instead toward its face, its unified and expressive style. It follows, according to Heinamaa, that the reduction can never be completed, for Merleau-Ponty, because of the type of event that it is: not an activity, an accomplishment of will, but precisely a passion, what I must await to befall me. Even so, I can prepare myself for this experience by "cultivating the openness to the unexpected," an approach to the philosophical task that Merleau-Ponty continues to share with Husserl. The third section of our volume looks specifically at Merleau-Ponty's relation to three other figures, past and present, who are intertwined in different ways with his reading of Husserl: Proust, Fink, and Derrida. In "The Time of Half-Sleep: Merleau-Ponty between Husserl and Proust," Mauro Carbone finds Merleau-Ponty's gradual break with Husserl's analysis of temporality and the ontology undergirding it to be inspired by motifs borrowed from Proust's A fa recherche du temps perdu. As Carbone shows, Proust's descriptions of corporeal experience, e.g., those of memory in the state of half-sleep, inform Merleau-Ponty's analysis of temporality in Phenomenofogie de fa perception, where he eschews the traditional interpretation of time as a series of now-points in favor of a description of its originary experience. Bringing together Husserl' s notion of operative intentionality and a Heideggerian conception of transcendence, this earlier work emphasizes the continuity and circularity ofthe relation between past, present, and future in our corporeal experience, treating "time as the subject and the subject as time." But in his later work, Carbone asserts, Merleau• Ponty has cause to revisit this analysis of time, relying once again on the xxiv TED TOAD VINE

inspiration of Proust. Merleau-Ponty's shift away from a philosophy of consciousness toward a "diacritical" ontology leads him, Carbone maintains, to reject the continuity of time grounded on the intentional horizons of subjectivity. Instead, Merleau-Ponty's later work suggests a "simultaneity" of past, present, and future as dimensions of a self-differentiating Being. According to this ontological perspective, "operative intentionality" is best understood as an event within being, no longer governed by distinctions between continuity and discontinuity, subject and object, or active and passive. In developing this later position, according to Carbone, Merleau• Ponty borrows again from Proust for his guiding motifs, and these lead him to finally break with the vestiges of Husserlian intellectualism that had marked his earlier work Ronald Bruzina's essay, "Eugen Fink and Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Philosophical Lineage in Phenomenology," explores the historical interac• tion and philosophical convergence between these two like-minded disciples of Husserl. To explore this convergence, Bruzina pieces together the available facts about the historical interaction of the two men, especially the decisive moment of their meeting and discussions in Louvain in 1939, drawing on Van Breda's accounts, Merleau-Ponty's familiarity with Fink's work, Fink's own ongoing research, and unpublished materials, including Merleau-Ponty's letters, drawn from the Fink Nachlass. Fink's conception of transcendental phenomenology during this period shares "substantive philosophic continuities" with Merleau-Ponty's account inPhenom/mologie de la perception, according to Bruzina, and these continuities are particu• larly evident in Merleau-Ponty's claims concerning the unfinished nature of phenomenology, the relation between concrete and eidetic investigation, the pregivenness of the world, the constitutive role of our embeddedness in the world, and the emphasis on operative intentionality. Further evidence of philosophical convergence is found in Fink's own contributions to phenomenology, e.g., in his development of the "system" -character of the phenomenological method and in his re-interpretation of the radical nature of the phenomenological reduction confronted by the self-givenness of the world, as well as in the subject matter of his transcription work at Louvain. The convergence of these two conceptions of the phenomenological project are reflected, Bruzina suggests, in the parallel concepts of Weltbefangenheit and prejuge du monde, in their similar interpretations of phenomenology's open-endedness, and in their development of the dimension of "ontological experience" in human existence. While rejecting any simplistic understand- INTRODUCTION xxv

ing of Fink's "influence" on Merleau-Ponty, Bruzina asserts that the "coherency of sense" in the work of the two phenomenologists is evidence of Fink's place in the "lineage" of philosophical development from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty. In the final essay of this section, "The Legacy ofHusserl's 'Ursprung der Geometrie': The Limits of Phenomenology in Merleau-Ponty and Derrida," Leonard Lawlor finds a basic convergence between the later thought of Merleau-Ponty and the early work of Derrida, a convergence that comes to light by comparison oftheir respective readings of Husserl 's late fragment, "Ursprung der Geometrie." On the basis ofHusserl's comments here about the role of writing in the constitution of ideal objects, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida both assert a "double necessity," according to Lawlor. On the one hand, writing is necessary in order to go beyond subjective experience and achieve ideal objectivity; but, on the other hand, writing also answers to the necessity of opening ideality to subjective experience. Lawlor explores this double necessity by focusing on key images drawn from each author's reading ofHusserl: the grimoire for Merleau-Ponty and the "entombment" oflost intentions for Derrida. These two images converge in the ambiguous notion of "sur-vival," entailing the going-beyond or overcoming oflife (i.e., death), but equally the intensification oflife (i.e., the overcoming of death). The necessity of going beyond life is represented by "originary non• presentability" in Merleau-Ponty and "non-presence" in Derrida, but while, for Merleau-Ponty, this negativity is a content lacking form, for Derrida the form lacks and requires content. Turning next to the intensification of life, Lawlor finds that both Merleau-Ponty and Derrida rely on conceptions of faith and repetition, although for Merleau-Ponty this is the repetition of perpetual beginning, "recommencement," while for Derrida it is the indefinite iteration of the end, or "refinition." Exploring the continuity between these two thinkers in terms of their orientation toward phenomen• ology's basic problems and limits, Lawlor concludes that Merleau-Ponty's legacy survives in Derrida, while both remain faithful to the spirit of HusserI. My chronicle of Merleau-Ponty's writings on Husserl, the "prompting text" referred to by Professor Embree in his Preface, is included as the Appendix to the volume under the title "Merleau-Ponty's Reading of Husserl: A Chronological Overview." The aim of this chronicle is to bring together the historical and biographical information that is available about Merleau-Ponty's familiarity with Husserl's work and to provide a reason- xxvi TED TOADVINE ably concise survey of Merleau-Ponty's comments on Husserl throughout his career. In particular, I have attempted to identify the texts by Husserl to which Merleau-Ponty had access at different points, especially in the early years of his career, and to highlight those comments in his writings on Husserl that seem best to reflect his overall understanding of Husserl's project at any particular point. Of course, such a project cannot hope to be exhaustive, even in these many pages, but this chronicle may at least lead the interested reader to further sources for more detailed study. We are grateful to Samuel J. Julian for his assistance with the conference in Delray Beach where most of these essays were first presented, and to Elizabeth Locey for translating the essay by Mauro Carbone for its publication here. Along with Professor Embree, I would also like to express my thanks to those who have contributed to this volume, both for their fine work and for their cheerful patience.

Ted Toadvine