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 Access provided by University Of South Florida Libraries (29 Apr 2017 04:33 GMT) jsp Merleau-Ponty and the Myth of Human Incarnation 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 under- standing 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 epis- temic 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, phenomenologi- cal 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 con- trary, I am sympathetic to this aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenologi- cal 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” intention- ality. 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 alter- native 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 conscious- ness 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 impos- sible 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 phenom- enologically 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 expe- rience 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 total- ity 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 hori- zon. 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 total- ity—through gestures of speculative hermeneutics. Here the problem of the nongivenness of this horizon is solved on the basis of the assump- tion that it does obtain in a fully determinate way and that the philosoph- ical 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 scien- tific approaches in general, and this has made Fink’s constructive solution attractive to some contemporary phenomenologists.7 But