Journal of the History of Philosophy

In this insightful and important book, Talia Welsh critically examines Merleau-Ponty’s understanding, in his Sorbonne lectures of 1949–52, of early childhood experience as meaningfully organized and interactively engaged, and as having far-reaching phenomenological importance. This validation of early childhood perceptual organization problematizes the normative distinctions that oppose infant to adult, and animal to human. Both distinctions, but perhaps particularly the latter, call for more intensive phenomenological scrutiny.

Merleau-Ponty, foreshadowing his late emphasis on a “surpassing in place” that interlinks high-level idealizations (such as mathematics) with an inaugural perceptual articulation in a unity of “style,” seeks to show, in the context of child development, how “the ability for symbolization arises from nascent perception” (9). Welsh offers illuminating discussions of how Merleau-Ponty, who characteristically integrates phenomenology and the history of philosophy with the human and natural sciences, draws on Gestalt psychology and Freudian psychoanalysis. She critically examines his postulation of a “syncretic sociability,” or a primary interconnectedness with others and with the world, that is not based on any sense of one’s distinct or delimited self, as being characteristic of early infancy. Within this early mode of “anonymous existence,” the senses are synaesthetically interlinked and suffused with affect. Although syncretic sociability is not utterly abandoned in adulthood but remains an undercurrent of adult experience, the passage to the formation of a genuine sense of self requires the advent of the mirror stage, as theorized by Henri Wallon and Jacques Lacan.

Welsh confronts Merleau-Ponty’s analysis with contemporary research on infantile imitation, which largely invalidates the postulation of an initial syncretic sociability by showing the availability, to very young infants, of proprioceptive awareness and of at least a primitive body image (rather than merely a body schema). In response, she draws particularly on the work of Shaun Gallagher and of Beata Stawarska in her quest for an alternative theory that will recognize that early childhood experience possesses its own structural articulation and styles of interaction (revealed in particular by children’s drawings), and is not merely a defective approximation to its adult counterpart.

In her fascinating penultimate chapter on “Culture, Development, and Gender,” Welsh considers that any theory of development must do justice to our situated freedom “in between the force of natural physicality and the force of cultural determination” (128). She explores, in this context, the advent of menstruation in female maturation and, in particular, the experience of pregnant embodiment (together with childbirth and lactation). Merleau-Ponty, to his credit, did not ignore these issues (see 137–38); but they had to await recent and contemporary feminist analysis for an in-depth and experientially based phenomenological investigation. It is not, as Welsh acknowledges, productive to explore embodied experience outside of its historical and socio-political context (of which, of course, Merleau-Ponty remains aware); and phenomenology is, Welsh reflects, “ideally disposed [End Page 167] toward a more historical, and politically progressive, analysis” (145). She seeks therefore to map gendered experience on this wider screen, in an effort both to acknowledge the singular and to invest it with general relevance. On this score, some questions may remain in search of an answer, but significantly they are raised (and of course Heidegger insightfully stressed the pre-eminence of the question over an answer).

Welsh’s excellent study of Merleau-Ponty’s previously neglected phenomenological investigation of child psychology and development, and her concluding reflections on its continuity with his late ontologically oriented thought (a continuity to be explored in subsequent work) make her book as timely as it is intrinsically valuable. [End Page 168]