Patrick L. Bourgeois

Pragmatism and phenomenology : a philosophic encounter

In the philosophic world today, pragmatism and phenomenology can be found standing at a crossroad. Though each has arrived there via divergent paths and for very different reasons, the direction that each takes in the future may be significantly influenced by the suggestions the other has to offer. The intention of this book is to parallel the two positions in such a way that basic points of convergence and divergence are noted and accounted for in terms of their systematic significance. Each position is presented in such a manner that philosophers engrossed in one movement can enter into the other in a way which allows a real encounter to develop.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Philosophy as Phenomenology

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), one of the first authors in the French philosophical tradition to publish a systematic work with the word phenomenology in its main title (Phenomenologie de la perception), has gone further than most other French philosophers, including Sartre, in identifying phenomenology with philosophy as such. This fact seems to require the inclusion of his entire philosophy within the European movement of phenomenology or, more specifically, of existential phenomenology.

Phenomenology and Pragmatism: A Recent Encounter

Although phenomenology and pragmatism have developed as entirely independent philosophical traditions, in recent decades a philosophical encounter between these two philosophies has emerged, overcoming to some extent a longstanding mutual exclusion. The early mutual exclusion that was especially pronounced in the United States was based on misunderstandings on the part of members in each tradition. According to its typical misunderstandings, the phenomenological tradition has little to contribute to pragmatism and, similarly, pragmatism is precisely the kind of philosophy that phenomenology rejects. Pragmatists, focusing on the concepts of intuition, essence, and constitution in phenomenology, have misinterpreted these as leading to idealism, to subjectivism, or to mysticism. Misunderstandings of the nature of the pragmatic focus on science have led phenomenologists to view pragmatism as reductionistic, psychologistic, and naively realistic in its interpretation of the findings of modern physics. In this way both phenomenologists and pragmatists have alleged that the other’s framework retains elements of past traditions rejected by their own contemporary philosophy. Hence, pragmatism and phenomenology are even today still considered primarily in terms of their disparate traditions.

Contemporary Perspectives and the Functioning of Trace

The notion of trace has taken on a central role in contemporary philosophy and religious thought, bringing it to the fore in the understanding of both the living present and language. Traces are constitutive of signs in the same way that the protentions and retentions as traces are constitutive of the living present. And the different understandings by various thinkers of the role of traces in the living present demand different understandings of the role of trace in signs. Thus Derrida’s view of trace in relation to the living present and to sign will be found to differ essentially from the shared view presented by Mead’s pragmatic and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological perspective, in accordance with their different understandings of the constitution of the living present. In clarifying this relation, however, it will prove beneficial for the sake of clarity to procede, at least initially, from trace in signs to trace in the living present which governs the former.

Mead and Merleau-Ponty: Meaning, Perception, and Behavior

Mead’s pragmatic focus on habit as the foundation of meaning is usually viewed in sharp contrast with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological examination of meaning within experience. The explicit focus of each philosopher’s position, however, is latent within that of the other. And, nowhere is this more manifest than in their similar understandings of the relation between the meanings which inform human perception and the structure of human behavior. The ensuing discussion will take up first Mead’s understanding of this relation.