Merleau-Ponty and the Myth of Human Incarnation Bryan Smyth

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Volume 30, Number 3, 2016, pp. 382-394 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/628668

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Bryan Smyth university of mississippi

abstract: In this article I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s initial reinterpretation of Husserlian phenomenology is premised methodologically on a certain mythic understanding of human embodiment—what I term “the myth of human incarnation.” This is not an objection but a clarification of how Merleau-Ponty resolved the problem of the external horizonality of phenomenological experience on an intuitional (rather than speculative) basis. This methodological priority of myth is implicated in the epistemic status of phenomenological claims concerning prereflective phenomena such as “bodily” intentionality and thus has important consequences for questions concerning the “naturalization” of phenomenology. keywords: Merleau-Ponty, embodiment, bodily intentionality, myth, phenomenological methodology

In this article I will argue that Merleau-Ponty’s reinterpretation of Husserlian phenomenology—in particular as this was initially worked out in Phenomenology of Perception1—is premised methodologically on a certain mythic view of nature and of human embodiment in particular. I will claim, in other words, that the corporeal turn that is central to the philosophical attractiveness of Merleau-Pontian phenomenology rests upon a myth. journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 30, no. 3 , 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA merleau-ponty and the myth of human incarnation 383

Within the constraints of this short article, I will explain how and why this is so and consider some of the consequences that result. This argument is intended as a provocative contribution to scholarly discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s work.2 But it is not intended as a devastating objection to it. Indeed, it is not intended as an objection at all. To the contrary, I am sympathetic to this aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological project. My intention is to clarify some of the difficult methodological commitments that, although they undergird the distinctive features of his position, are typically unnoticed or disregarded. In particular, in bringing to light the epistemic reliance of Merleau-Ponty’s project on a certain form of mythic consciousness, I wish to problematize current efforts, found primarily (but not exclusively) within the context of cognitive science, to “naturalize” his phenomenological account of human corporeality—and this especially with regard to the notion of prereflective “bodily” intentionality. The point of my argument is not to show—as is typically the case when one claims that so-and-so’s position “rests on a myth”—that Merleau- Pontian phenomenology suffers from a weakness or defect that vitiates its philosophical value but,3 rather, that the grounding in corporeality that Merleau-Ponty sought for transcendental phenomenology necessitates the methodological recourse to myth that I shall indicate and that the specific conception of embodiment thereby implied renders the results of his work inassimilable to the framework of philosophical naturalism as this is now- adays standardly understood. Merleau-Ponty’s work is not, however, opposed to naturalism tout court, and as I shall briefly suggest, it can be taken as pointing toward an alternative framework of critical or phenomenological naturalism. My broader point, then, is not to oppose Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to cognitive science but, rather, to affirm the (increasingly widely held) idea that the latter might be developed most successfully on the basis of the conception of embodiment that is implicated in the former—only now with a clear recognition and appreciation of the fact that in epistemic and evidential terms this project ultimately rests upon a certain form of mythic consciousness and that its theoretical value is high in part because of and not despite this fact. The discussion will unfold across three steps. I will first sketch the basic methodological problem, the resolution of which represents the essential core of Merleau-Ponty’s reinterpretation of Husserlian phenomenology. I will then briefly outline Merleau-Ponty’s general conception of mythic 384 bryan smyth consciousness as this is found in Phenomenology of Perception and show that it is precisely an instance of myth so construed—specifically, what Merleau- Ponty called the myth of “man” but which I shall denote more precisely as “the myth of human incarnation”—that functions as the pivotal ingredient in his resolution of that methodological problem. This article is brief, but it will nonetheless emerge clearly that in a fundamental and philosophically positive way Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology rests on a myth. By way of conclusion, I shall briefly indicate some of the broader consequences of this situation, in particular with regard to the status of phenomenological claims concerning bodily intentionality.

1. The Methodological Problem

The main methodological problem facing transcendental phenomenology pertains to a phenomenological reduction, and specifically the possibility of achieving a special kind of “reduced” experience, upon the singular evi- dentiary value of which the philosophical status of phenomenology entirely depends. Contrary to what many staunch critics of phenomenology might claim, however, the problem is not that attaining such experience is impossible to begin with. At least in many cases, achieving a privileged kind of phenomenological insight does not seem particularly controversial, even to those with no particular commitment to phenomenology. The real problem concerns whether such insight can be strictly upheld as philosophical insight. For if it is indeed the case that experience in general—including phenomenologically reduced experience—is horizonal, that is, that the experience of x is always conditioned by the background horizons against which it is experienced, and if grasping x philosophically therefore implies a critical apprehension of those horizons as well, then phenomenology is potentially faced with a vicious regress. For even if one can in general achieve such an apprehension through regressive intentional analysis, the resulting experience itself will of necessity imply a further set of horizons, and so on. It would thus not seem possible ever to grasp any object x in a way that does not remain philosophically naive with regard to its horizonality. So while there may be some contentious issues regarding the basic mechanics of the reduction, it is this larger problem concerning what Eugen Fink called the “outer horizon” of phenomenologically reduced experience that poses a potentially fatal objection to phenomenology.4 And it was through Fink that merleau-ponty and the myth of human incarnation 385 this problem impressed itself on Merleau-Ponty while he was composing Phenomenology of Perception.5 The question, then, concerns how we may come to terms with the totality within which phenomenological experience occurs. What is clear is that this cannot be on the basis of intuitional givenness, that is, the intuition of cognizable content. For since givenness implies horizonality, in that to be given means to be given within a certain horizon, an outer horizon as such can in principle never be given. The problem is thus unsolvable as long as one insists upon Husserl’s “principle of all principles.” But nor can it be sidestepped or deferred. For the outer horizon of experience has epistemic priority. This is easily overlooked because, acknowledging it as the most general level, it might seem reasonable to suppose that phenomenology could at least begin soundly on an intuitional basis at subordinate levels. But the crucial point is that all experience is conditioned by its outer horizon. Representing the “worldhood” of the world, so to speak, it is, strictly speaking, here that phenomenology properly begins. Bare intuition is thus always naive, and a critical apprehension of the nongiven outer horizon of experience must be made in some other way, which would, consequently, represent the methodological Ur-gesture of phenomenology, the key that opens up the reduction itself. Yet what would this look like? For his part, Fink proposed a reinterpretation of phenomenology that situated it within the tradition of systematic (especially Hegelian) metaphysics—what he called “constructive” phenomenology.6 Briefly, the idea is to construe phenomenology in terms of an “absolute science” that would aim to cognize the outer horizon of experience—the world as a totality—through gestures of speculative hermeneutics. Here the problem of the nongivenness of this horizon is solved on the basis of the assumption that it does obtain in a fully determinate way and that the philosophical task (as with any intermediate horizon) is just a matter of disclosing it and its constitutive genesis through regressive analysis—it is just that here such analysis must be undertaken from a speculative standpoint. This assumption (if not the specific analytic task) is shared with objective scientific approaches in general, and this has made Fink’s constructive solution attractive to some contemporary phenomenologists.7 But is this solution phenomenologically sound? It may be granted that phenomenological analysis cannot in all strictness begin entirely without presuppositions. But is it defensible or appropriate to assume the determinate existence of the world as totality, even if it is granted that its constitutive 386 bryan smyth origins are, at least initially, shrouded in mystery? For his part, this is precisely what Merleau-Ponty dismissed in basing his own methodological approach on the rejection of what he termed le préjugé du monde—the naive assumption of the pregivenness of an objectively determinate world.8 For Merleau-Ponty, there is no valid basis for making this assumption, even in the qualified way that Fink (among others) does. To be clear, that the world is pregiven is not in question—what the rejection of the assumption in question affirms is that the world is pregiven as indeterminate. It is much more consistent with the basic approach of phenomenology to restrict oneself to what is given in experience along with disclosable intermediate horizons and thus to recognize as phenomenologically primordial not the pregiven existence of an objectively determinate world totality but, rather, the pregivenness of the world in a state of open, unfinished, and hence indeterminate historical becoming. In this way it becomes clear that the constructive solution remains naive on account of its failure to fully bracket out assumptions concerning the objective determinateness of the world itself. Rejecting le préjugé du monde, then, the philosophical alternative to speculative construction that emerges involves relating to the indeterminacy of outer horizonality through generative gestures of normative deter- mination. Such is the nature of Merleau-Ponty’s “militant” solution to the problem at hand,9 a solution that sees the historical totality of the world as a process of realizing an increasingly comprehensive and inclusive universality of which a fully determinate world is a possible contingent outcome.10 I say sees because for Merleau-Ponty this is a matter of the perception of history,11 specifically theprecognitive perception of history, and it was on this ground that he sought, contra Fink, to coherently maintain the intuitional basis of phenomenology. But prima facie this is obviously problematic: How can we perceive the world in its historical totality if it is not (and cannot be) given? How can we come even precognitively to see the world as the “horizon of all horizons” that forms the background for subordinate levels of perception? It is with regard to this methodological problem that Merleau-Ponty invoked mythic consciousness within his reinterpretation of phenomenology, and it is to this that I shall now turn. It merits emphasizing, though, that this is not meant as any sort of flaky Romantic or misological alternative to an objective scientific approach but, rather, as the most rationally defensible philosophical position given that even the most rigorous objective approach merleau-ponty and the myth of human incarnation 387 will necessarily remain unacceptably naive vis-à-vis the outer horizon of experience if historicality is indeed a feature of the world.

2. Merleau-Ponty’s Mythic Solution

I will begin with a brief statement concerning Merleau-Ponty’s view of mythic consciousness as discussed in Phenomenology of Perception.12 Strictly speaking, though, this is tangential to my main claim, in the sense that there is no necessary connection between Merleau-Ponty including some view of mythic consciousness within his account of phenomenology and his implicating therein some view of it methodologically. The first certainly does not imply the second, and even if the latter occurs, the view in question need not coincide with the first. But the fact that these views do coincide is significant with regard to the question as to whether Merleau-Ponty can be regarded as having engaged self-consciously in the recourse to myth that I shall claim. The central idea in Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of myth has to do with the immediate wholeness that is primordial within experience—the unity of subjectivity and objectivity, the indistinction between object and background, the oneness of “man and the world,” that is subsequently repressed in ordinary experience. A response to the indeterminateness of the pregiven world, mythic consciousness involves what he described as a “projection of existence and an expression of the human condition,”13 and in this way it generates for experience a pre-objectively intuitable outer horizon. It is a matter of a symbolic expressivity whereby horizons immanent within certain phenomena give significant form to the world itself as a historical totality. There is no cognition involved, and inasmuch as it comprises the intentional content of mythic consciousness, myth is neither true nor false. But it can have a certain epistemic value inasmuch as it is grasped philosophically as an elementary stage in what Merleau-Ponty, with an obvious allusion to Hegel, called a “phenomenology of spirit.” As has been occasionally remarked, this view drew upon and has many important affinities with Cassirer’s discussion of mythic thought inthe second volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms.14 As with nearly all of Merleau-Ponty’s important sources, however, there is ultimately an important disagreement.15 For while Cassirer held that qua “symbolic form” mythic consciousness was an unselfconscious stage of thought that was ultimately 388 bryan smyth surpassed through a self-negating dialectic pointing teleologically to the highest stage of enlightened theoretical reason, reflecting his acceptance of the traditional assumption that logos emerges from a decisive break from mythos, Merleau-Ponty was committed to no such claim. He did not primitivize myth in that inferiorizing way at all. True, he famously called attention to the enthusiastic letter that Husserl had sent to Lucien Lévy- Bruhl in 1935 concerning his work on la mentalité primitive.16 But Husserl aside, what interested Merleau-Ponty was not the incommensurably “pre- logical” nature of mythic thought as described by Lévy-Bruhl but, rather, how the latter had insisted that mythic thought was irreducibly different from enlightened reason and how it might therefore continue to exist and operate unsurpassed in modern thought and not necessarily be incompatible with a critical transparency vis-à-vis its symbolic-expressive function. Thus, in qualified agreement with Cassirer’s symbolic construal of mythic thought, but rejecting his stipulation that it is necessarily naive with regard to its own spontaneity, Merleau-Ponty was actually much closer to Roger Caillois and others in the interwar milieu of post-Durkheimian “sacred sociology,” who sought in various ways to rehabilitate myth and mythopoesis as a privileged means of establishing performatively a renewed social totality.17 My principal claim is that mythic consciousness as described by Merleau-Ponty provided him with a solution to the problem of phenomenology’s outer horizon, thereby enabling him to secure the methodological self-referentiality whereby phenomenology (as he cited Husserl) “provides its own foundation.”18 Specifically, this was done through the deployment of a certain humanist myth of “man”—which, for clarity’s sake, I prefer to denote as the myth of human incarnation. The sense of this myth concerns the historicity of human corporeality, the guiding idea being that if humans are historical beings, then this applies equally to our bodies—hence Merleau-Ponty’s significant assertion that “man is a historical idea, not a natural species.” 19 More specifically, the idea is that the pre-personal dimension of human embodiment—what I call the “habituated organism”—is fully a product of its historical time, such that through processes of sedimentation and repression it stands as the concrete locus of historical apriority, the a pri- ori conditions governing action.20 This is the meaning of “incarnation” in this context: human embodiment incarnates its social conditions with no residual biological factors—“there is a logic of the world to which my merleau-ponty and the myth of human incarnation 389 entire body corresponds.”21 For Merleau-Ponty circa 1945, this means that structures of universal social recognition are latent within the habituated organism and that phenomenology consequently forms part of a larger project, the task of which is to realize or actualize these structures in intercorporeal coexistence. Merleau-Ponty motivates this perspective by taking the habituated organism as dynamically symbolizing the historical totality. In this way the perception of history can occur as a precognitive mythic intuition of the outer horizon of experience through an experience that is itself— exceptionally—not horizonal: in the phenomena of the habituated organism as such, an indistinction between object and historical horizons obtains inasmuch as the latter are immanent within and, so to speak, secreted by the very activity of the habituated organism22—something evinced most clearly and strikingly by what Merleau-Ponty called “contemporary heroism.”23 In thus establishing a horizon of universal history, this mythic view gives specific normative form to the Urdoxa of “perceptual faith,” and it can be seen—as it surely was by Merleau-Ponty—as expressing a humanis- tic generalization of the Marxist conception of the proletariat as occupying concretely the standpoint of human universality. The myth of human incarnation thus belongs to the philosophy of history, broadly construed, in which regard it would not be incorrect to describe its operative content—namely, the mythic intuition of the world as the progressive historical realization of human universality—as an unproven and perhaps utterly unwarranted assumption. But this would overlook what is most important: to wit, that this mythic view represents the practical commitment to disambiguate the indeterminacy of the historical world in order thereby to establish an outer horizon of meaning within which questions concerning truth and warrantability can be addressed in the first place. The larger point is that some hold on such horizonality is unavoidable and that therefore everyone—including those professing mainstream naturalism— engages in some form of “unwarranted” generative mythopoesis—the question now being whether this is done self-consciously and responsibly or else in a state of irresponsible naïveté or obliviousness that is liable to reintroduce traditional mythemes such as those of biological essentialism, ethnic particularism, or transcendent eschatology. As for Merleau-Ponty’s myth of human incarnation, inasmuch as this would prioritize the universal content of perceptual experience and make possible meaningful- ness coextensive with human intercorporeal involvement as such, it was 390 bryan smyth certainly meant to have progressive and desacralizing implications that are fully congruent with reason and rational discourse—ideally, the myth to end all myths.24

3. Concluding Remarks

The reinterpretation of phenomenology that Merleau-Ponty presented in Phenomenology of Perception is embedded methodologically within a conception of outer horizonality that is grounded epistemically in the myth of incarnation—in Merleau-Ponty’s account, it is the mythic consciousness of the habituated organism as symbolic of the world qua historical totality that ultimately secures the methodological coherence of phenomenology. This need not be taken as indicating any sort of flaw, however, if it is accepted that myth is not antithetical to reason, that some such recourse to myth is inescapable when one is dealing with the limits of cognition, and that its self-conscious deployment could play a genuinely critical role in such cases. Perhaps the most important consequence of this analysis is that within Merleau-Ponty’s reinterpretation of phenomenology, history has logical priority over corporeality. This is not to discount the significance of corporeality but simply to highlight the condition under which transcendental philosophy could possibly be based upon it. This priority has numerous ramifications, not the least of which is that all phenomenological evidence pertaining to the anonymous and pre-personal dimension of human embodiment is ultimately conditioned by the normative sense of history. Concerning bodily intentionality, then, it follows, significantly, that within Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, prereflective corporeal phenomena are per- ceivable as instantiating intentional states only in virtue of the myth of incarnation. Strictly speaking, one could not encounter the “symbolic” significance that forms the intentional “aboutness” of gesture in general, or especially the “directedness” toward others and toward the world that is fundamental to bodily intentionality, but for the telic sens implicit in the outer horizonality established precognitively by the incarnational myth. Although certainly not reducible to that horizonality, the bodily intentionalities described by Merleau-Ponty are not real facts but, rather (like all vital phenomena), mat- ters of living form considered from a certain generative standpoint within which their disclosure is methodologically embedded. In other words, as with transcendental-phenomenological claims in general, Merleau-Ponty’s merleau-ponty and the myth of human incarnation 391 disclosure of prereflective life is conditioned by the specific manner of the reduction performed—the rejection of le préjugé du monde is eo ipso the projection of a historically dynamic sense of nature as the outer horizon of experience, the purposive orientation toward human disalienation of which derives from the myth of human incarnation. Without getting into details, I will simply assert that this standpoint is at variance with standard contemporary views of philosophical naturalism, for which reason Merleau-Ponty’s claims concerning prereflective intentionality, among other things, cannot legitimately be transplanted or assim- ilated directly into that framework. To be clear, this is not because it relies upon myth but because it relies upon a different and incompatible myth. Yet Merleau-Ponty’s position can certainly be taken as implying a critical sort of naturalism. To say, then, that his claims cannot be “naturalized” is misleading and unfair, in the sense that they are already fully natural, just in terms of a different—and possibly more compelling—sense of nature. It is important to recognize that debates over the “naturalization” of phenomenology are based in disagreements over competing conceptions of nature: meaningless and disenchanted, for example, versus expressive and normative. There are different considerations that may speak in favor of either of these characterizations.25 Considering Merleau-Ponty’s early reinterpretation of Husserl’s project, I submit that from the angle of methodological coherence, phenomenology points to the latter conception, even if this does foreground the mythic dimension.26 For on pain of naïveté, phenomenology cannot countenance a meaningless or indeterminate outer horizon. But the sense of this horizonality must be established precognitively and prior to any subject-object distinction—hence Merleau-Ponty’s viewing it as a projective expression of the primordial experience of the habituated organism, intuitional awareness of which could only be a matter of mythic consciousness as described above. Concomitantly, a phenomenological approach anchored in corporeality will fail to yield philosophical results unless it historicizes that corporeality in a way that inscribes some sort of normative teleological impetus within it. Myth is thus an integral aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of intentional life in general, and it follows from this account that bodily intentionality cannot be as different from reflective intentionality as is typically assumed—in terms of being nonrepresentational, for example, or excluding any “aboutness” distinct from its “directedness.”27 Lest we intro- duce a mind-body dualism into our intentional relatedness to the world, 392 bryan smyth then, we must recognize that the philosophical status of phenomenological claims concerning corporeality in general and bodily intentionality in particular are symbolically mediated and that—as the lesser of two evils, if you like—this requires granting epistemic priority to a certain form of mythic consciousness. notes

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). All translations are my own. 2. Some commentators have criticized Merleau-Ponty’s work for having a myth-based epistemology, including Edward Ballard, “On Cognition of the Pre- cognitive,” Philosophical Quarterly 11 (1961): 238–44; and Xavier Monasterio, “Paradoxes et mythes de la phénoménologie,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 74 (1969): 268–80. But while they contain some valid insights, such criticisms tend to be oblivious to the basic sense of Merleau-Ponty’s project. For more sympathetic views, see Steve Sapontzis, “Merleau-Ponty: Myth-Maker or Philosopher?” Philosophical Studies 26 (1979): 41–55; and Ernest Sherman, “Merleau-Ponty and the Trickster: Philosophy as the Mytho-logos of Ambiguity,” Dialectical Anthropology 18 (1993): 103–20. My own view is very different from these. 3. It should be noted that Merleau-Ponty typically did use the term myth (as opposed to “mythic consciousness”) in a negative or pejorative sense. 4. See Eugen Fink, VI. Cartesianische Meditation, Teil 1. Die Idee Einer Transzendentalen Methodenlehre, ed. H. Ebeling, J. Holl, and G. van Kerckhoven (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988). 5. On the connection between Fink and Merleau-Ponty, see Ronald Bruzina, “Eugen Fink and Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Philosophical Lineage in Phenomenology,” in Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl, ed. Lester Embree and Ted Toadvine (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), 173–200; but cf. Bryan Smyth, “The Meontic and the Militant: On Merleau-Ponty’s Relation to Fink,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 19 (2011): 669–99. 6. See Fink, VI. Cartesianische Meditation; Ronald Bruzina, Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology, 1928–1938 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Smyth, “The Meontic and the Militant.” 7. Ronald Bruzina, “Construction in Phenomenology,” in The Reach of Reflection: Issues for Phenomenology’s Second Century, ed. S. Crowell, L. Embree, and S. J. Julian (n.p.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, 2001), 46–71; Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999), 223–72. 8. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, 11, 62, 296, 316. merleau-ponty and the myth of human incarnation 393

9. The term militant derives from the Catholic theological trichotomy among (a) “the Church triumphant,” denoting Christians in heaven; (b) “the Church suffering,” denoting Christians in purgatory; and (c) “the Church militant,” denoting Christians living on Earth working, or militating, to establish the kingdom of God. Cognizance of this reference is important, as Merleau-Ponty’s notion of incarnation likewise retains some of its original theological sense. 10. This view amounts roughly to what Jean-Luc Nancy has called la mondialisation, or “the creation of the world”—see his La création du monde ou la mondialisation (Paris: Galilée, 2002). 11. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et terreur: Essai sur le problème communiste (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 105. 12. This discussion is drawn mainly from part 2, chapter 2, although parts of chapter 3 are also relevant. 13. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, 338; italics added. 14. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, Mythical Thought, trans. R. Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955). 15. What follows stems from Merleau-Ponty’s general criticism that Cassirer did not provide a fully existential account of the symbolic function grounded in corporeality. 16. Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel, vol. 7, Wissenschaftlerkorrespondenz, Husserliana Dokumente, ed. K. Schuhmann (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), 161–64. See also Javier San Martín, “Husserl and Cultural Anthropology: Commentary on Husserl’s Letter to Lévy-Bruhl,” Recherches husserliennes 7 (1997): 87–116; and Robert Bernasconi, “Lévy-Bruhl Among the Phenomenologists: Exoticisation and the Logic of ‘the Primitive,’” Social Identities 11 (2005): 229–45. 17. See Michèle Richman, Sacred Revolutions: Durkheim and the Collège de Sociologie (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); and Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Rethinking the Political: The Sacred, Aesthetic Politics, and the Collège de Sociologie (Kingston, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011). Concerning Roger Caillois in particular, see his Le Mythe et l’homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), 209–22. 18. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, xvi. 19. Ibid., 199. 20. See Bryan Smyth, Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 63–64, 145–46. 21. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, 377; cf. 274. 22. In the sense in which Merleau-Ponty claimed that in and through its movements of perceptual synthesis “my body . . . secretes time” by projecting a “historical orientation” around experienced events—“my body . . . brings into existence a past and a future for a present. . . . [I]t makes time instead of suffering it” (ibid., 277; italics added). 394 bryan smyth

23. See Bryan Smyth, “Heroism and History in Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology,” Continental Philosophy Review 43 (2010): 167–91. 24. At least formally there is a parallel between this view and the way Wilfrid Sellars opposed “the myth of Jones” to “the myth of the Given”—i.e., how he “used a myth to kill a myth.” See his Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 25. See Steven Crowell, “The Mythical and the Meaningless: Husserl and the Two Faces of Nature,” in Issues in Husserl’s “Ideas II,” ed. T. Nenon and L. Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996), 80–105. 26. There is an important point of contact with Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s claim that “enlightenment reverts to mythology” (Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. G. S. Noerr, trans. E. Jephcott [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000], xviii). But whereas they—like Ernst Cassirer in The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946)—saw the commingling of reason and myth in negative and pessimistic terms, as a threat to reason and freedom, Merleau-Ponty regarded it more positively, inasmuch as he saw it as an inescapable feature of conscious experience and hence as something to be embraced critically so as to avoid the bad myth of a mythless rationality. 27. There is something correct about Lilly-Marlene Russow’s claim that bodily intentionality is a myth in the sense that it “does not represent a radical break with the traditional concept [of intentionality],” on the grounds that the content of bodily-intentional states is symbolic. See her “Merleau-Ponty and the Myth of Bodily Intentionality,” Noûs 22 (1988): 35–47, at 44. There is a closer connection between reflective intentionality and bodily intentionality than is typically assumed. In particular, it is not the case that Merleau-Ponty’s view of bodily intentionality excludes “aboutness” (Martina Reuter, “Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Pre-reflective Intentionality,” Synthese 118 [1999]: 75–76) or that “it is impossible to distinguish the content of motor intentional activity from the attitude directed toward that content” (Sean Kelly, “Merleau-Ponty on the Body,” Ratio 15 [2002]: 387). But pace Russow, this is not because it remains conceptually representational. Rather, the “symbolic” nature of bodily-intentional states should be understood in terms of the prediscursive horizonal generativity of mythic consciousness.