Abstract
Several commentators have argued that with his concept of anonymity Merleau-Ponty breaks away from classical Husserlian phenomenology that is methodologically tied to the first person perspective. Many contemporary commentators see Merleau-Ponty’s discourse on anonymity as a break away from Husserl’s framework that is seen as hopelessly subjectivistic and solipsistic. Some judge and reproach it as a disastrous misunderstanding that leads to a confusion of philosophical and empirical concerns. Both parties agree that Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of anonymity mark a divergence from classical Husserlian phenomenology. I will question this view and demonstrate that Merleau-Ponty’s discourse on anonymity remains Husserlian in two important senses: (1) it analyses senses in terms of constituting selves and communities of such selves, and (2) it accounts for the formation of experience by the temporal sedimentation of intentional activity. The argument proceeds in four steps. The first section argues against the widely spread notion according to which Merleau-Ponty’s anonymous subject is collective. In the second section, I offer an alternative reading by demonstrating that Merleau-Ponty uses the term “anonymous” primarily to characterize the lived body of a personal subject. In section three, I introduce Merleau-Ponty’s idea of trace and show that for him both the perceived thing and the perceiving body are traces and as such refer to earlier constitutive acts of alien subjects. I then argue that Husserl’s concepts of sedimentation are crucial for the understanding of this idea. Finally, in section four, I show how Husserl’s theory of depresentation informs Merleau-Ponty’s discourse on anonymity.
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Notes
Madison (1981).
Barbaras (1991, p. 468, p. 52, 2004, pp. 34–35).
Some of these formulations conflate Bergsonian concepts with Deleuzian ones.
Husserl uses the concept of anonymity in two different contexts. On the one hand, he characterizes the absolute constituting (operating) self as “anonymous” (nahmenlose) and says that, exactly speaking, it should not be called “self” or anything at all, since naming compromises the fully active character of the ego. On the other hand, Husserl also argues that an infinity of anonymous others, “an open intersubjectivity”, is implicated in the very givenness of the perceptual thing. In addition to these Husserlian contexts of use, a third one is established by Eugen Fink in his Sixth Cartesian Meditation (1995, original 1988) the constituting self and its acts are constituted in inner time-consciousness and this constituting ground is called “anonymous” in the sense that it is pre-egoic. The Husserlian and the Finkian usages of the term “anonymous” must not identified with the Heideggerian idea of das Man as an inauthentic “neuter” mode of human life, introduced in paragraph §27 of Being and Time (1992, original 1927). Husserl’s constituting ego is independent of the determiner “human being” and his idea of open intersubjectivity includes all possible perceivers, not just humans, but the Heideggerian das Man refers to the generality of an unspecified human community.
Many contemporary commentators of Merleau-Ponty emphasize those aspects of his philosophy that bring it close to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. Thus the Cartesian starting points of Merleau-Ponty’s early phenomenology are often seen simply as problems (e.g. Barbaras 1991, pp. 25–26, 108, 2004, pp. 7–8, 86). The anti-Cartesian assumption is shared equally by Continental and analytical commentators, see e.g. Leder (1990), Bergo (2002), Lawlor (2002); Carman and Hansen (2005, pp. 5–8). Among commentators, Bernhard Waldenfels is an exception in pointing to important links between Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and Descartes’ radicalism. See, e.g. Waldenfels (2000a, b), cf. Butler (2005, pp. 181–205). I have argued elsewhere that Merleau-Ponty’s relation to the philosophical heritage of Cartesianism is not as simple as often assumed. Instead of following Heidegger’s anti-Cartesian critique, Merleau-Ponty aims at “recovering” Cartesianism; he rejects a certain traditional interpretation of Descartes (“Gueroult’s Descartes”) and develops instead another in the line with Malebranch and Husserl. For Merleau-Ponty’s Cartesianism, see Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 1993, pp. 54–60, 1995, pp. 42–49; [1963] 1964, 1989a, 1964, pp. 242, 288, 295–296, 1975, pp. 188, 234, 242); cf. (Heinämaa 2003, pp. 23–48).
Zahavi (2002, pp. 75–89).
Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 1993, pp. 408–409, 1995, pp. 355–356, translation modified). In a long footnote in the chapter on “Space”, Merleau-Ponty writes: “If consciousness is multiplicity, who is to gather together this multiplicity in order to experience it as such, and if consciousness is fusion, how shall it come to know the multiplicity of the moments which it fuses together? (…) What for us is primordial consciousness is not a transcendental I [Je] freely positing before itself a multiplicity of in-itself, and constituting it completely, it is an I [Je] which dominates diversity only with the help of time, and for whom freedom itself is destiny, such that I am never conscious of being the absolute creator of time, of composing the movement through which I life” ([1945] 1993, p. 319, 1995, p. 276, translation modified, emphasis added).
Sylvia Stoller emphasizes the mereological fact that the personal and the anonymous form a pair in Merleau-Ponty’s discourse (2000, pp. 175–176).
Compare to Wittgenstein’s analysis of the difference between the first person pronoun “I” and the third person pronouns “he”, “she” and “they” (for this, see, Heinämaa 2011, pp. 234–249). I will not take a stand on the question if the “on” in Merleau-Ponty’s discourse bears normative implications, comparable to but not identical with the implications of Heidegger’s “das Man” (cf. Crowell). This normative reading was suggested to me by Till Grohman, and I find it promising, but it is beyond the limits of this paper.
Merleau-Ponty uses a variety of preposition to characterize the relation between the anonymous and the personal: he resorts to the French terms “en”, “avec”, and “au-desson.” On the one hand, these spatial metaphors suggest distinction and separation but on the other hand they also suggest dependency and conditionality.
The French phrase “en marge” is translated into English as “on the fringe”, but this is terminologically (but not conceptually) misleading, since the term “fringe” has a technical usage in Husserlian phenomenology. In The Crisis, Husserl explains that his concept of horizon is a transcendental-phenomenological reinterpretation of William James’ concept of fringe: “W. James was alone, as far as I know, in becoming aware of the phenomenon of horizon—under the title of ‘fringes’—but how could he inquiry into it without the phenomenologically acquired understanding of intentional objectivity and of implication” (Husserl 1954, p. 267, 1988, p. 264, cf. James [1892] 2001, p. 85ff.).
In my understanding, Merleau-Ponty argues that the mere concepts of function—Aristotelian, early modern, or contemporary—are inadequate and also potentially misleading for the analysis of perception. He characterizes human eyes, hands, head, and genitals as rudimentary actors or agents because experientially these organs are independent from our personal goals and projects and because they are not given to us merely as tools or instruments but also as sensory-motor systems (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1993, pp. 92, 107, 166–167, 246–247, 1995, pp. 77–78, 91, 142–143, 212–213). The movements of our eyes, for example, are not subject to our interests even if they support our interests and serve the realization of our goals at large. The example of the experience of grief in Phenomenology of Perception illuminates this divergence of personal and anonymous teleologies: “While I am overcome by some grief and wholly given over to my distress, my eyes already stray in front of me, and are drawn, despite everything, to some shining object” (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1993, p. 100, 1995, p. 84).
Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 1993, p. 101, 1995, p. 85). In Remembrance of the Things Past, Marcel Proust describes the bodily nature of perceptual memory and its constitution of the manifold memories of the different body parts in an illuminative way: “My body, still too heavy with sleep to move, would make an effort to construe the form which its tiredness took as an orientation of its various members, so as to induce from that where the wall lay and the furniture stood, to piece together and to give a name to the house in which it must be living. Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, knees, and shoulder-blades offered it a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept; while the unseen walls kept changing, adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirling madly through the darkness. And even before my brain, lingering in consideration of when things had happened and of what they had looked like, had collected sufficient impressions to enable it to identify the room, it, my body, would recall from each room in succession what the bed was like, where the doors were, how daylight came in at the windows, whether there was a passage outside, what I had had in my mind when I went to sleep, and had found there when I awoke” (Proust [1871] 1988, pp. 52–53, 1981, p. 10, emphasis added).
In the description of such specific forms of bodily experience, Merleau-Ponty is indebted to Sartre who depicts such processes in illuminative ways in Being and Nothingness: “My eyes are hurting but I should finish reading a philosophical work this evening. I am reading. The object of my consciousness is the book and across the book the truths which it points out. The body is in no way grasped for itself [le corps n’est nullement saisi pour lui-même] (…) Yet at the very moment that I am reading my eyes hurt (…) It is with more difficulty that the words are detached from the undifferentiated ground which they constitute; they may tremble, quiver, their meaning may be derived only with effort, the sentences which I have just read twice, three times may be given as ‘not understood’, as ‘to be re-read’” (Sartre [1943] 1998), pp. 371–379, 1956, pp. 436–437). Sartre points out that in the activity of reading “my body is given only implicitly”, and then continues: “the movements of my eyes belongs only to an observer’s glance” ([1943] 1998, p. 371, 1956, p. 436). This, however, is changed when pain distracts my reading: the implicit body and its movements now come to the fore, and what was only given to the observer is now given to me and lived by me.
Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 1993, p. 399, 1995, p. 347). Merleau-Ponty also describes the prepersonal aspect of experience by the psychoanalytical concepts of trauma, complex, and repression (e.g. Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1993, pp. 92–93, 98–99, 189, 1995, pp. 77–78, 82–84, 162). This inflicts the task of explaining how a Husserlian approach—or any approach operating with the concepts of consciousness and intentionality—could possibly deal with the phenomena of unconsciousness. The task cannot be undertaken with in the limits of this paper, but I want to mention three factors that are crucial for any adequate discussion of the matter. First, in The Crisis and related works, Husserl sketches an argument to the effect that psychoanalysis can and must be reconceptualized on the basis of his new approach to consciousness (e.g. Husserl 1954, pp. 191–192, 240–241, 473–474, 1988, pp. 188, 237–238, 386–387). Second, in Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty does not reject this suggestion but, on the contrary, uses the phenomenological concepts of abstraction, formation, and memory to articulate the phenomena of repression. He writes, for example, as follows: “All repression is, then, the transition from first person existence to a sort of abstraction of that existence, which lives on a former experience, or rather on the memory of having had the memory, and so on, until finally only the essential form remains” ([1945] 1993, p. 98, 1995, p. 83). Finally, inquiries into Husserl’s manuscripts have contributed to the development of a Husserlian discourse of drive-intentionality. For this, see, e.g. Lee (1993), Hart (1998, pp. 101–123), Depraz (2001), Bernet (2006, pp. 38–53), Biceaga (2010), Smith (2010).
In The Visible and the invisible, Merleau-Ponty writes: “The body unites us directly with the things through its own ontogenesis, by soldering together the two outlines of which it is made, its two lips: the sensing mass that it is and the mass of the sensible wherein it is born by segregation and upon which, as seen, it remains open” (1964, p. 179, 1975, p. 136).
In The Visible, Merleau-Ponty explicitly rejects the notion that the historical depths of perception would compromise or annual its personal form: “There is an experience of the visible thing as pre-existing my vision, but this experience is not a fusion, a coincidence (…) When I find again the actual world such as it is, under my hands, under my eyes, up against my body, I find much more than an object: (…) a visibility older than my operations or my acts. But this does not mean that there was a fusion or coincidence of me with it: on the contrary, this occurs because a sort of dehiscence opens my body in two, and because between my body looked at and my body looking, my body touched and my body touching, there is overlapping or encroament, so that we must say that the things pass into us as well as we into the things” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, p. 165, 1975, p. 123).
Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 1993, p. 514, cf. pp. 409–412, 496, 505, 1995, p. 451, cf. pp. 356–359, 442, 434, see also [1960] 1998, pp. 219–220, [1964] 1987, p. 174), cf. Husserl (1952, pp. 81, 297–300, 1993, pp. 86, 311–313). This rephrases Husserl’s idea of the absolute constituting subject as anonymous: “In this sense it [the I] is not a ‘being’, but the counterpart of all that is, not an object [Gegenstand] but the proto-stand [Urstand] for all objectivity. The I ought not to be called the I, it ought not to be called anything at all, since it would then already have become an object. It is the nameless [Nahmenlose] above everything graspable, not standing above everything, not floating, not existing, but rather ‘functioning’ or ‘operating’, as apprehending, valuing.” (Husserl 2001, pp. 277–278).
Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 1993, p. 275, 1995, p. 238, cf. 1964, p. 86, 1975, p. 59). This idea stems from Husserl’s discourse on the otherness or “open intersubjectivity” implicated in the perceptual thing. For Husserl’s use of the concept of anonymity, see Husserl (1954, pp. 272–285, 1968, p. 478, 1973b, pp. 28–29; 1973c, pp. 192, 497, 1988, p. 468, 2001, pp. 277–278, cf. Mohanty 2005, pp. 13–15, Zahavi 2002, pp. 79–80, 2003, pp. 90–93, 115–120).
Merleau-Ponty read Husserl’s works in original German editions and in French translations, but he also his studied Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts in the Husserl archives in Louvain in (1939). These included the manuscripts of Experience and Judgment, the second volume of Ideas and the third part of Crisis. For this connection, see Toadvine (2003, p. 234).
For Husserl’s use of these concepts, see, e.g. Husserl (1954, pp. 272–285, 1988, pp. 361–377, [1939] 1999, pp. 334–339, 1973a, pp. 278–284), cf. Merleau-Ponty (1998). For Merleau-Ponty’s use of these genetic concepts, see, Meacham (2008). In Experience and Judgment, Husserl’s main interest is in the temporal relation between predicative categorical acts and pre-predicative sensory perception. He develops a phenomenological account of the experiential origin of predication and judgments more generally, aiming to provide a phenomenological genealogy of logical forms. In The Crisis, Husserl uses the concepts of sedimentation to explain the development and unity of science. The development of the scientific mode of thinking is exemplified by the disciplines of geometry and theoretical physics, but the concepts are developed to account for any theoretical practice and ultimately also for phenomenology itself.
For Husserl’s explication of the main tasks of genetic phenomenology, see his Formal and Transcendental Logic ([1929] 1981, pp. 276–279, 1978, pp. 316–319). For an illuminative account of the static and genetic aspects of Husserl’s analyses of the constitution of other selves in empathy, see Lee (2002, pp. 105–123).
In The Crisis, the concepts of sedimentation are used in three different contexts: First, they describe the theoretical or logical-mathematical process in which new theorems are produced on the basis of already established theorems and axioms (e.g. Husserl 1954, pp. 52, 364–386, 1988, pp. 52, 353–378). Second, they are used in the account of the establishments of cultural objectivities more generally, not just theorems but also practical instruments and constructs (e.g. Husserl 1954, p. 323, 1988, pp. 277–288). Finally, they are also used in the description of creative activities (e.g. Husserl 1954, pp. 280–281, 512–513, 1988, pp. 303, 394–395). These three cases or examples of sedimentation suggest different models for the tasks of reactivation or reawakening: logical-analytical, archeological, and inspirational.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 1993, p. 417, 1995, p. 363). Compare this to Husserl’s original text: “Thus the actual ego performs an accomplishment through which it constitutes a variational mode of itself as being (in the mode of passed). Starting from this we can trace how the actual ego, which is constantly present in the flow, constitutes itself in self-temporalization as the ego which endures through ‘its’ past. In the same way, the actual ego, already enduring in the enduring primordial sphere, constitutes in itself another as other. Self-temporalization through depresentation [Ent-Gegenwärtingung] (through recollection), so to speak, has its analogue in my self-alienation [Ent-Fremdung] (empathy as a depresentation of a higher level—depresentation of my primal presence [Urpräsenz] into a merely presentified [vergägenwärtigte] primal presence). Thus in me, ‘another ego’ comes to ontic validity, as co-present, with his own ways of being self-evidently verified, which are obviously quite different from those of a ‘sense’-perception” (Husserl 1954, p. 189, 1988, p. 185, translation modified).
For a full account of the idea of generative phenomenology, see, Steinbock (1995).
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Heinämaa, S. Anonymity and personhood: Merleau-Ponty’s account of the subject of perception. Cont Philos Rev 48, 123–142 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-015-9329-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-015-9329-1